Your Own Personal Gene

 A friend called me the other week in the midst of a moral quandary. He had encountered an acquaintance of his who was in trouble. But when he tried to offer help, the latter had started asking for more than my friend could offer. I won't go into details, but the whole pattern suggested that my friend was dealing with an emotionally disturbed person—possibly someone suffering from borderline personality disorder. 

After hearing the circumstances described, my own fight-or-flight response kicked in on my friend's behalf. So I offered him all the usual worldly wisdom that people tend to dispense in these situations. I said: "You don't owe him anything; you barely know him." I said: "You have to take care of yourself first. Put on your own oxygen mask before assisting the person seated beside you," etc.

I even added in the old "it's in his best interests as well as yours" argument. I forget, though, why it is supposedly also in his best interests. I suppose the argument runs something like the old Billy Joel lyric: "If you're not good for you; then you're not good for anybody." 

My friend, however, seemed unconvinced. "Everyone says that," he replied. But he was troubled by the question: if this individual proved not to be my friend's responsibility—then whose responsibility was he? Would he simply be passed through the whole vicious system of society, because every person in the chain would say the same thing to themselves before abandoning him: "I have to protect myself first."

In short, my friend was asking himself: "Am I my brother's keeper?" And, if he was not, then—who was? The cynical version of the response to this question used to be "Not my problem." People used to say: "I have to look out for number one." Nowadays, we tend to gussy up the same sentiment in the pseudo-rationalizations of pop psychology. "I'm practicing self-care," we say. "I'm setting boundaries." 

My friend didn't want to be like those people. On the other hand, I told him, boundaries are actually important. 

I shared with him a poem by D.H. Lawrence that has always given me inspiration in similar moments of moral self-doubt. The poem depicts the author as beset upon all sides by the needs of other people, who have "pecked" his life away, bit by bit. As a result, the poet says, he has had to learn to say no to people. He has had to learn a healthy degree of selfishness, if only for the sake of self-preservation. 

And so he ends with the line: "I am trying now to learn never/ to give of my life to the dead,/ never, not the tiniest shred." 

I always found this a thrilling mantra. There is something distinctly liberating about it. Because, when phrased in terms of life and death, in this way—who can blame the poet for acting on his own behalf? Who would say—you should have stayed there beneath the beaks of the croaking vultures and expired, for their sake? Does he not have a right to live? Does he not have the right to defend himself? 

I offered the same advice to my friend: Do as D.H. Lawrence advises. Try not to give of your life to the dead. 

My friend—however—was still unconvinced. He said he felt like maybe D.H. Lawrence was entitled to this emotion, because he had actually allowed himself to get "sick" first. He had actually given of his body to the vultures for a time, before eventually shooing them off. My friend, however, felt like he had not made any of the same sacrifices. He had never given enough of himself to justify clawing it back now. 

Once again, I could see my friend's point. If it turns out the speaker of the poem hasn't actually given up all that much for the sake of the vultures, after all—and all he is really complaining about is a little bit of personal inconvenience—then the mantra of the poem's closing line ceases to be inspiring and starts to seem self-centered, self-dramatizing, and obnoxious. Like: 

"Honey, could you watch the kids for a minute while I take a phone call in the other room?" 

"Never! My life blood is ebbing away! I refuse to share any of my life with the dead! Never, not the tiniest shred!"

There is something of a meme along these lines in pop psychology at the moment—about avoiding so-called "emotional vampires." The idea is that there are certain people who, given half a chance, will suck you dry. They seek out giving and empathetic people and waste their capacity for love on a bottomless emotional pit. And so, the self-help literature advises—you must cut such people out of your life. 

Such advisers would presumably agree, then, with the Lawrence poem. 

And indeed, I think there are relationships in life that drain one needlessly of energy. Just as certainly, however, there are some inconveniences and frustrations that occur in any human relationship; and you can't end every friendship or commitment just because you find one day that it saps you of energy. If you did, you would very quickly find that you had no one left. 

And so, you somehow have to find a way to distinguish the truly vampiric relationships in life—the ones you truly do need to exit, for reasons of self-preservation—from the ones that are merely imperfect (which all relationships ultimately prove to be). This, then, was really my friend's question: was he nobly saving himself and protecting his life essence? Or was he just being selfish, by refusing someone aid? 

I was still prepared to plump for the Lawrence side of the argument; but I was reading George Saunders's classic short story collection, Pastoralia, this week, and I found there a story that skewers the whole Lawrence/self-help literature position so effectively that I find myself questioning everything. 

In the story, called "Winky," a man attends a self-help seminar in which he is given highly Lawrence-like advice. Instead of the imagery of vultures and croaking birds, the self-help guru uses an even more earthy metaphor—involving oatmeal and feces—but his essential argument is the same: someone in your life is draining you of energy. You must cut off the diseased member in order to live!

Lawrence speaks of the vultures who peck shreds of his life away as "bringing little gifts" as they do so. And there is a kind of echo of this in the self-help guru's teachings: "in real life people come up and crap in your oatmeal all the time—[...] and [... y]ou say, 'Thanks so much!' You say 'Crap away!' You say, and here my metaphor breaks down a bit, 'Is there some way I can help you crap in my oatmeal?'"

In the guru's own case—he says—the person who was befouling his oatmeal all his life, metaphorically, was his disabled brother Gene. The guru's tale of personal triumph is that he eventually worked up the courage to throw his own brother out of the house. To the question of whether he was his brother's keeper, then, the guru delivered a resounding "no." 

And now he tours the country trying to convince others to recognize and expel the Gene-equivalent in their life—their own "personal Gene" that is standing in the way of their life's happiness.

The self-help guru also offers a version of the "if you're not good for you/ then you're not good for anybody" argument. He tells people that by confronting the people who are causing them dissatisfaction in life, and telling them to get lost, they will actually be doing them (the Genes) a favor—because it is good for everyone to hear the truth, "the truth will set them free," etc. 

The protagonist, after listening to this spiel, identifies the source of his life's discontent as his dotty sister Winky, who has continued to live with him into middle age. He therefore decides, on the strength of the guru's advice, to storm home and tell Winky once and for all that it is time for her to get her own apartment and stop interfering with his life. 

As he builds up to this confrontation, he uses arguments in his mind that sound a great deal like those of Lawrence. "I love you, but you're killing me," he cries—imagining what he will say to his crestfallen sister. "I am a good person, a child of God, and don't deserve to die. I deserve to live, I demand to live," he goes on. In other words: he is learning "never to give of his life to the dead; never, not the tiniest shred." 

In the second half of the story, however, the focus shifts to Winky. And we learn from her that she has a very different conception of what one should do with emotional vampires and vultures and "personal Genes." Instead of cutting them out of one's life, she believes in assuming their burdens willingly. "[I]f you take on the worries and cares of others," she insists, "Lord Jesus will take on your cares and worries."

This is the opposite of the worldly wisdom. It is the opposite of the D.H. Lawrence wisdom. It is the opposite of what all the self-help gurus tell us to do in terms of warding off "emotional vampires." Here, Winky is telling us to invite the vampires in. She is making a case against "boundaries." Let the vampires come inside. She is making the argument against "self-care."

I have tried to live the Winky life and discovered I cannot do it. I respect and admire the Winky life; but I'm not up to it. I have too much of the worldly in me. I have too much Lawrence in me. 

I need to expel the emotional vampires. I am not willing to "give of my life to the dead." I still feel, with the protagonist of Saunders's story, that "I don't deserve to die; I deserve to live; I demand to live." And so I will not face emotional death for anyone's sake. 

And so, I still say to my friend—don't do it. Don't give more than you feel you are able to. Don't invite the emotional vampires over the threshold. For if you do it once, you may never be able to expel them again. They may be there to stay. 

But, if that is the choice we must make, let us at least not pretend it is noble. Let us acknowledge that we are picking the selfish option. We may be doing it out of a legitimate need for self-preservation. It may therefore be excusable; even justifiable. But we should not pretend we are doing it for anyone else's sake but ours. We should not try to persuade anyone that we are really doing it for them. 

Let us at least spare them, then, the "it's for your own good" argument. Let us skip the jargon about "self-care" and "boundaries." Instead, let us admit that we are doing this out of our own weakness; that the true moral ideal of life remains the Winky one—and that it is only our own failing flesh that prevents us from living up to it. 

This, I can respect; this, I can defend. We are indeed entitled to defend our lives from the emotional vampires—seeing as we only get one. But we should admit that doing so comes with a moral cost. And we should only resort to it when we truly have no other option—when we have become as "sick" as D.H. Lawrence describes in the poem—and we have no strength left to adopt the Winky approach. 

Our current self-help culture struggles with such a concept. We tend to think that if something is justified, it must also be perfect. But so much of life is a matter of weighing morally imperfect options—of practicing a form of moral triage, in which there are costs either way. Self-preservation can justify accepting a cost; but that does not mean the cost is not there. 

We like, these days, to emphasize the first part of the ancient saying: "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?" And yet, we tend to leave off the part that comes right after it: "But if I am for myself alone, then what am I?" To be our brother's keeper is part of being human. Even to be the keeper of our personal Gene. It is not a responsibility we can escape, simply by involving the magic words "self-care."