Another Kind of Self-Help Book
Every semester that I teach freshman composition, I assign something I call ‘the juxtaposition essay’. I use the examples of light/dark and chaos/order, and we discuss first the typical assumptions about the terms in each pair, noting that dualisms usually carry normative values and are often situated hierarchically. I ask the students which side may need to be redeemed and how both sides can be deconstructed for more nuance. Then I encourage them to allow the paired terms to swap assumptions and write their essay as an argument for one side’s ‘new’ connotations. So if ‘order’ is mapped as ‘productive, peaceful, and civilised’, then they will write their essay on how chaos can also be productive. Now I plan to assign a chapter in Mariana Alessandri’s Night Vision as an incredible example of how empowering such an inquiry can be.
Alessandri’s book about redeeming the darkness and ‘seeing ourselves through dark moods’ is a book for everyone. Some will welcome the book as a much-needed self-help alternative to more light-centred books on the shelves. Others will gain insight into their friends, family members, colleagues, and students who may be in the first category, and learn how to ‘sit with them in the dark’. Night Vision is a book about dignity, shame, community, and compassion. While many people may find themselves uncomfortable with the expressions and realities of grief, anger, depression, anxiety and suffering in general, whether in their own lives or others, Alessandri argues that becoming experts in these areas increases everyone’s emotional intelligence. Telling someone to ‘cheer up’ may come from good intentions, but it can be read as dismissive and having a lack of empathy. Alessandri encourages us to not only think about the impact we have when others are hurting, but also to self-reflect and question whether we could do more growing in the dark.
One insight I felt myself immediately helped by was the two-level approach to anger. Drawing from various thinkers, such as Audre Lorde, who find uses for anger as being informative, Alessandri says that first-order anger is about communicating, that it is ‘meant to be heard and understood’. She understands anger as an epistemological tool, that when we feel it rising up within our bodies, it is a signal that is trying to get our attention. And instead of reacting, blowing up or blowing off (actually, the second level of anger), we should figure out what it has to say, and relay that message, if needed. Alessandri mentions that while many of us feel shame for anger (I have felt the need to apologise for ‘outbursts’ in the past), sometimes anger signals an injustice, that something externally demands correction. One example in the book is throwing almonds at her kids when they were fighting at the snack table. The anger was a teacher in this moment, productive and helpful because, after self-reflection, Alessandri realised she was burnt out, that she was taking on too much domestically with her family during the pandemic lockdown while still keeping up with her career. The problem with myself that I realised, is that I go immediately to the second-order of anger, which is ‘not about communicating anything. [. . .] You use it when first-order anger fails’. Raging, walking off, throwing our hands up might be a reasonable response, but only after we try to communicate with others why what they said or did had a negative impact on us. Alessandri refers to María Lugones’s perspective of second-order anger as ‘self-care’.
The other insight that I personally appreciate is Alessandri’s discussion of the chronic illness and depression that Gloria Anzaldua experienced. I remember reading Borderlands/La Frontera in graduate school and feeling inspired and moved by her powerful words, but I was not able to digest how much of that power came from her mastery of the darkness in such a material way until reading Alessandri’s book. When someone experiences chronic illness, the physical and mental intertwine, and everyday existence can feel painful. While some may wake up each day with 100 percent wellness, energy, and health, others are trying to do as much on 30 percent, with fewer days of the week to work with. This ‘lower productivity’ can translate to others as being lazy or not caring, even arrogance, which is not true at all. Alessandri quotes Anzaldua as stating ‘pain was a way of life, my normal way of life’, and ‘Dealing with my illness took all my energy.’ Alessandri tells of how Anzaldua did not just give herself over to her suffering, but how she accepted and embraced the forced rest, would ‘meditate on the darkness’, to explore and drink of the energies and knowledge of this other moonlight realm. I have experienced this as well in my own life. I have chronic sleep issues, along with mental health struggles, and have found as well that when you can find a way to work with the tiredness and the sickness, and the mental strain that comes with it, wisdom, creativity and compassion arise. People often talk about how their ‘dark night of the soul’ resulted in a spiritual awakening. It does seem that human beings can benefit from suffering, even if we wish such transformation and evolution could occur without it. Challenges prompt growth. They also prompt, along with various traditions such as Buddhism, compassion for others. I will add myself to the statistics: I became a much more empathic listener to my students when they would come to me with their own chronic illness, injuries, accidents, and depression after I experienced my own.
Empathy is essential to relational depth. It helps us hear each other, tune into each other’s frequencies so that intimacy and healing can manifest. When I encounter discussions of AI/artificial intelligence or transhumanism, this is the one area of hesitancy I have in considering how humans might choose to evolve or what other sentience we press ahead to create. Like Alessandri, I am not convinced that we will be satisfied with our spiritual and emotional growth without suffering. One day, we may be able to leave suffering, even our bodies, behind, but I believe that path might occur best by pushing through the mountain, not going around it. The mountain teaches us so much.
As someone who has been literally saved by practices of meditation, gratitude, and is a bit of a sun-worshipper (mostly to reset my circadian rhythm and because it seems to relieve my own depression), I wonder if there is not an ongoing dialectic needed, and if this book does enough to avoid diminishing the power of practices that might fall into what she sees as the more positive/light-centred side. In my class as well, I realise I should probably do more to point out that the end of their ‘reversal’ essays should not be the end of the conversation. Once we can redeem or shadow a particular concept to give it more nuance, we need to make sure the conversation doesn’t stop or rest for too long. I think Alessandri would agree with this, as she has mentioned in talks I have listened to, that she hopes one day her book is actually no longer needed because we will have learned the lessons and can go beyond the dualism itself. I hope her book will always be around and read by many because I’m not as optimistic that we can transcend past the need for it in our current state of evolution. But some readers might feel a bit called out if we are personally and quietly helped by gratitude journals, CBT, even manifestation (positive magical thinking can be a needed pendulum shift as well when habituated by decades of negative magical thinking), yoga, and using the term ‘gift’ for what we encounter as pain. It is of course not the responsibility of the text to celebrate what is already celebrated, and by selecting a focus to investigate, one is always going to be somewhat exclusive. Yet, if I felt any places were weak in the text, it was whenever Alessandri would tend toward moralising or when calling out certain practices. I felt reference to these could have been relegated to a footnote once for all. Yoga and meditation can be done in the moonlight and focus on shadow work as much as any dark practice. Calling ‘pain’ a ‘gift’ doesn’t mean we are forcing positivity or denying the debilitating effects of pain. But we simply see the other side of the coin, much like Anzaldua and others have done.
Elisabeth Schilling is a professor at Pikes Peak State College and an adjunct at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs (UCCS). Schilling teaches Literature, Ethics, and Religious Studies. She is also pursuing a B.A. in philosophy from UCCS. Schilling received her Ph.D. in Women's Studies in Religion from Claremont Graduate University in 2014.
