Dear reader,
How are you?
Happy New Year’s Eve-eve!
Instead of sharing an original story tonight, I want to share some thoughts about optimism, hope, and the upcoming year… from Michael J. Fox. (Justine’s story from California will come next week.) Here’s why —
A good friend from journalism school has been reading unemployed together and said this to me when I asked him for feedback: “Double down on optimism, and sprinkle in some servicey news-you-can-use.”
On his second point, I completely agree. “News-you-can-use” is half of my goal -- something I set out to do from the beginning, for the social media pages primarily.
I dwelled on his first point for a few days.
“Double down on optimism” sounds great, but is optimism a renewable energy? It sounds very close to toxic positivity?
I don’t know if you’re the kind of person who believes in signs, but I do.
As I was getting ready for a taping last week, I just happened to turn on Fresh Air with Terry Gross on NPR. Her guest was Michael J. Fox.
Michael J. Fox has experienced enormous suffering in his life and yet he is still an eternal optimist.
Below is an edited excerpt from their conversation.
He answered the question for me. Optimism and hope: They are in fact renewable sources of energy, when fueled by gratitude.
GROSS: You had a tumor wrapped around your spinal cord that was choking your spinal cord. And unless you got that tumor removed, you would've been paralyzed because it would have just kept strangling the spinal cord. And it was an incredibly complicated, delicate surgery. And it took a long time to recover from that, requiring a lot of physical therapy, relearning how to walk. And then you're finally done with the main part of the physical therapy. You're able to walk again. And then you fell. It was a day your - most of your family was out on Long Island in...
FOX: Martha's Vineyard.
GROSS: Yeah. They were in Martha's Vineyard, and you were home. And one of your daughters had come with you, but you basically sent her back to her home and said, I'm good; I can do this by myself. And then you fell, and no one was there, and it was a really bad fall.
FOX: It was a low point. When it happened - so as you say, my daughter came back with me from Martha's Vineyard. The rest of the family stayed there. She had to go to work the next day, so she asked me if she could stay and get me off to - I was going to do a cameo the next day on a film, on a Stefon Bristol film for Spike Lee on Netflix. And I was just going to do a one-day cameo, which I was really chuffed about. I was really happy about it - that, again, another symbol of independence and reclaiming my identity from this onslaught.
I told you that I was fine. I'd done it a thousand times. It was no problem. I woke up the next morning and strolled into the kitchen like a normal person. I stepped wrong, slipped on the tile and shattered my humerus, my left arm. And I crawled over to the phone. I summoned my assistant, who called an ambulance. And as I waited for the ambulance and I waited for my assistant to show up, I lie crumpled on the kitchen floor, just excoriating myself for being such a jerk.
And I felt for my daughter. I felt for - I knew what she was going to feel like. She was going to feel a tremendous amount of guilt for not having convinced me to let her stay. I felt bad for the surgeons who had done so much work, and I might possibly have undone it. I felt bad for my family who had treated me so well and cared for me so much while I was going to through this rehabilitation. And it just was - it was a time when I all of a sudden really - I said, you know, put a shiny face on this. Make this happy. Make this - where's the optimism here of this? These lemons you can't - I'm out of the lemonade business. I can't make this anything better than what it is, which was just terrible. And it was a real low point for me.
GROSS: You write at some point, you started to question the optimism that you tried to maintain over the years and the optimism you tried to convey to others and realized that you hadn't given equal weight to your failures. What do you mean by that?
FOX: I think I was so concentrated on what was going right that I hadn't - not that my failures were overwhelming but to just admit that there's another side to things that as much as I always say, see the positive side of everything, I had to learn how to become a realist and an optimist at the same time. To be a realist is not to say that you can't be an optimist, but you have to confront reality in order to really understand.
I liked to reflexively say, oh, it's going to be OK. It's going to be fine. Well, maybe it isn't. And maybe because I have such a platform and I have so many people that pay attention to what I say, I mean, am I responsible for, like, offering an optimisms panacea and the glig (ph) when - you know, it's one thing for me to talk about my situation. But to encourage people to compare it to theirs, come out with the same outlook that I have, maybe that was commodifying hope.
GROSS: If you're trying to adjust your optimism to recognize failure as well and not paint an unrealistic - an unrealistically rosy present or future, what's the narrative in your head now that you tell yourself?
FOX: Well, it kind of put together over events that transpired afterwards and also events prior - episodes in my life - culminating in the passing of my father-in-law, Stephen Pollan. He was a very important mentor to me and an important person in my life and in the lives of a lot of people. He was someone who was full of gratitude and positivity.
I talk in the book about the time I had a conversation with him about my feelings of guilt as relates to Tracy, my wife, and what she had - she hadn't bargained for this, that I was going to have this chronic illness so soon in our marriage. So I'd go to him and talk to him about it. And he'd always say, listen, kiddo, it gets better. It gets better. And I always take that with me. It gets better.
His secret was he found gratitude in everything - in every situation. And I realized, as I was writing and making notes and going through this experience, that gratitude makes optimism sustainable. With gratitude, you can find a way to be optimistic. If you have no gratitude, you can't recognize the hope in the circumstance.
There have been bright spots this year -- moments which produced optimism with ease: I started this news project, moved in with my significant other, and have been freelancing for a variety of outlets.
On the other hand, I slid into low points on what seemed like landslides: getting rejected from jobs I didn’t even want but applied to anyway, helplessly witnessing my mom struggle with depression and anxiety alone in her house.
But somehow, at every turn, I found gratitude.
I was grateful for my friends and designers who helped me unlock my voice, to get unemployed together off the ground. I was grateful for my own therapist who helped talk to my mom. Yes, I spent a great deal of this year doubling down on gratitude when I really didn’t dare to have hope or optimism.
My 2020 agenda book is on the kitchen table right now. I flipped back the other day and realized I stopped writing in it in early February. I won’t be buying one for next year.
I will, however, be buying spiral bound notebooks so I can write down everything that I’m grateful for, every day that I can.
Thank you for subscribing to and reading unemployed together.
I hope you have a happy and safe New Year.
Take care of yourself and others,
Hope
I've deeply pondered this post's topic for the 3w since and have started to remove politics from my life to create space to raise my career, notably by publishing direct advice to raise fellow full stack developers' well-being.
Yes it is! Thank you Hope! Wishing you a very happy and awesome new year!