When I Stopped Complaining

my husband asked if I had the flu

One of my favorite chapters in my new book LOVE, FINALLY is called Girlfriends—and it’s about friendships between women, specifically the messiness of them, the intense satisfaction of them and what happens when they go awry. In it, I tell the story of how my best friend of twenty years stopped talking to me when I returned from radiation treatment for breast cancer. I shared my heartbreak with Coco, the 87-year-old near-blind woman who would later become my mentor and whose guidance inspired me to begin writing the book.

Although it had happened six months before our conversation, I’d cried every day from the shock of losing my friend and from the shame of believing I was to blame. That something was wrong with me.

I expected Coco to be outraged. I expected her to say that my friend was brutal. Heartless. A waste of a human being.

Instead, Coco said, “Oh pooh,” as if I’d told her I’d just burned the meatloaf.

Pooh? Really? What kind of person says pooh to the heartbreak of a newly minted breast cancer survivor?

“That’s it?” I asked.

“No,” she answered. “You say you’ve been crying and that you are terribly sad and that you feel as if your friend was unfair. But I am going to ask you a question that you may not have considered until now—which is, what is the first lie you told yourself about your friendship?”

And with that question, my perspective shifted ever so slightly. I realized that the more I blamed my friend, the less I would see the patterns that I’d been acting out not just with her but in other relationships: my conviction that I was damaged, that I needed to hide my fear of being worthless, that I idealized others and diminished myself.

It’s not that the feelings of sadness ended; they didn’t. I didn’t glide easily from outrage and blame to curiosity and contemplation about my own self-conclusions. In fact, I bucked and brayed and continued to cry daily and feel like a victim. I was also furious at Coco for throwing the whole thing back on me, but her question began a process of questioning conclusions I’d made about almost everything beginning with myself that continues until this day and which I write about in LOVE, FINALLY. For now, though, I am going to separate a tiny part of it into my thoughts about blaming and complaining and what happened when I decided to stop both.

At first, I didn’t tell anyone about my decision (as I thought that might be complaining about not complaining). But within the first week of my resolve, my husband, flummoxed by my conversational restraint, asked if I had the flu. We were in the car, passing an old-growth redwood stand and talking about a friend who forgot a dinner date. And lamenting that the president had dismantled yet another environmental protection. I was about to launch into my well-worn expressions of outrage (a.k.a. complaints) of “Who DOES that?” when I stopped. I looked out the window. I noticed the trees and realized that I had not noticed their hushed magic in a long time, despite passing them every day. I took a long breath.

The musical refrain of my conversations with others repeated over and over: If we were in control we would have done it differently; what’s going on is horrible; there is reason to be afraid, very afraid. In addition to expressing our dismay about how the daily “it” was going and fanning the flames of fear and discontent, complaining was an easy way to connect with friends, family, community: “We’re the same, we’re good, they’re the Other. Ain’t it awful?” Complaining together is like the Jewish ritual of tearing a piece of black fabric when someone dies and pinning the torn fabric on our shirts. If species are dying and a wild man is in charge of the government, if a friend ghosts us or we’ve been rejected, we can tear at our hearts and wear it as a badge of caring.

Coco says that the universal paradigm is:

“There’s a way it should be;

“This isn’t it;

“Someone is to blame.”

When she first told me that—I think it was in response to one of my rants about social justice—I didn’t like it at all. (I didn’t understand that I was a perfect example of her just-mentioned paradigm by believing there was a way SHE should be and she wasn’t being it.)

But what, I asked her, am I supposed to replace blaming and complaining with?

“Allowing,” she said.

Sounds like spiritual mumbo-jumbo, I told her. I’m supposed to “allow” injustice, school shootings, wars? And she said, “You think you know the whole picture, don’t you? Why this is happening and how it should end. But you are looking at a moment in time. I’m not saying to shield your heart. I’m not saying to not feel your feelings. I’m saying that you are perpetually saying ‘No, this isn’t it’, and in that no, you are assuming that you know what IS it and what should be happening. But no one knows that, ever.”

Complaining, it’s true, is a way of being in a constant argument with what’s already happening without offering any way of changing it or doing it differently. My constant complaining is like living with barbed wire under my skin; it keeps my already hyper-vigilant-prone-to-apocalyptic-visions-nervous system in a constant state of irritation. It’s painful, makes me cranky, throws me into daily low-level fear and anxiety and does nothing to change the crisis.

Not complaining has been a fierce practice: When my credit card was stolen and I had to call the bank, close my account, call the credit card company and cancel the automatic payments, I didn’t complain. When I got a stomach virus, when it rained for twenty straight days, when my friend Marley forgot our dinner date, I didn’t complain. I began to realize there are only ever three things to do about a complaint-worthy situation: Accept it as it is (what Coco calls allowing), take action or leave.

As the non-complaining weeks have passed, there’s an unexpected lightness and sanity about the days. When I don’t allow myself to rant, I feel like a character in a Zen story: I’m not drinking tea on my way to the slew of complaints; I’m just drinking a cup of tea. There is more stillness, more appreciation of the underneath world when I am not always laying my dissatisfaction like wet grey felt on the ever-changing display of it all.

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