The President is a pasta maker except instead of pasta it's cognitive distortions
So that's a thing we have to deal with.
Hello! I don’t know when this newsletter will be regularly arriving in your AWESOME NEWSLETTER folder. Maybe after new work commences it will arrive once a week on a certain day at a certain time. For now, I’m writing when I have something to say, which is often.
In psychology, there is a thing called cognitive distortion. It refers to the warped realities your brain makes that takes it to unhealthy thought patterns. Impostor syndrome, catastrophizing, all or nothing thinking, there are a ton of these distortions that people with depression and other disorders can easily fall into. You believe, for instance, that you are absolutely destined for success or absolutely doomed for failure and nothing you can do will change that destiny. That’s part of black-and-white thinking. It might seem wacky that part of a depressed person’s distortion might include inevitable success but it’s really all about the cessation of self, the idea that you are a passenger in your own car and not the driver. It’s about attempting to make a logical order out of what feels like, because of mental illness, a chaotic world and the willingness to trade agency in exchange for that illusion of order and certainty. The diminished self tells you that you can’t do anything about the world you live in.
Which often feels like this:
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) seeks to identify which distortions a patient is dealing with, where they come from, and how to reroute the thoughts to healthier, more realistic places. And it’s harder than it might seem. Logically, of course it makes sense that someone not returning your email does not mean they hate you, they’ve always hated you, and they’re part of a secret society based on hating you. There is no objective fact to support that proposition. But when you’re feeling it, when your brain is whispering that it’s true, it makes all the sense in the world. And the longer you buy into the distortions and the more you believe them, the more entrenched they become and thus they become harder to dislodge. The successful CBT patient can spot the distortion and consciously use facts and other tools to reroute the pattern.
Donald Trump generates cognitive distortions. He propagates them on a national level. He distorts, he lies, he projects a fake reality that shares a lot of the same words as actual reality but is not real. Because he is the president, we all have to live with the distortions, which become funhouse mirrors of the country we’re trying to live in.
These distortions can be more broadly dangerous than the ones coming out of any individual mind. So my personal distortion might tell me that because a check I was expecting in the mail hasn’t arrived, that means it will never arrive and no other checks ever will either. That messes me up and maybe messes up those in my immediate circle. But when a president does it, it ripples out to everyone in the country. My distortion messes up my day, his distortion got me laid off from my job and, more importantly, killed a lot of people.
He knew what COVID actually was and how it worked yet he presented a reality where it would magically go away last April. He presents a world where herd immunity is a great idea and not something that would kill millions. He offers a distortion wherein injecting bleach is a solution for something other than death. I could list other distortions related to Russia, immigration, the economy, and so on, but I would not rather be typing for hours and hours.
These national cognitive distortions are especially painful for people already prone to their own personal cognitive distortions. You can rewire your own brain through hard work and therapy but then look at the news and there are new fresh distortions screaming out and messing with your bearings. And there’s no way to both be aware of what’s happening in the world AND protect yourself from a fresh onslaught.
People with depression, anxiety, OCD, anxiety disorders, and other issues have gone to great effort to kick the distortions out of their frying pans, only to be dropped into the fire of the president’s.
And dealing with these things is exhausting. I wrote in my book that one reason people with depression might be tired a lot is that living with that disorder wears you out. Your brain is sorting through scenarios and distortions all day long, trying to find which path leads you to good health and which one leads you straight into a forest full of giant spiders. So of course you want to go lie in bed. Trump’s distortions do the same thing. You think, “No, of course there isn’t a caravan full of people coming up through Mexico to destroy my entire way of life,” but the point is that he made you have to stop and do that check-in. It took effort and it took some of the finite amount of energy you have available for a given day.
I’m tired every day but it’s because of work I have to do every day to keep things straight.
If political content on here bothers you, well, here’s your refund. But it’s not political content, really. It’s mental health. It’s how to try to live in this society.
I wrote a book called The Hilarious World of Depression. I think most people who would be reading this already know that.
Yesterday, I got a message from a woman I knew in college. Barely knew her. She was in my dorm freshman year, haven’t talked to her much since, well, freshman year. But she knew the podcast that the book was based on because her son had been listening to it. He had been struggling hard with some depression issues and the show proved very beneficial. Now he’s doing a lot better.
I’ve been getting messages like this for a while now and it still takes my breath away. I have never gotten over it. I hope I never do.
Talked to a friend the other day and told her that I have been called upon to be patient in regard to future podcast efforts. Because the thing is, a lot of plans are set but some obstacles remain that are unrelated to any of the actual creative efforts. Many people are working on these obstacles but it takes time and thus I require patience.
“But I’m terrible at patience,” I told her. “I’ve always been bad at patience.”
“Sounds like you’ve been very patient lately,” she said.
And is that what patience is? Is it feeling impatient but appearing patient? Is it a veneer of placidity when all you do below the surface is roil?
Personally, I’ve always been stuck trying to figure out when to be calm and gentile and when to go out and yell at someone. Because I want to be civil but I also want shit to get done.
Axl Rose sings a song called “Patience” and look how serene HE is:
Let’s see some more pictures of Axl looking patient.