What I have learned about complaining

I'm sick. The doctor says I have bronchitis but not pneumonia, and she expects it to get better over the next days, but if it lasts another week to come back. The good news is that I'm sick this week and not next week when I'll be taking my Comprehensive exam. The bad news is that I'm sick. This sucks.

Which is the perfect opening to my long-awaited (by me) post on complaining. I gave up complaining for Lent based on a somewhat silly conversation between me and my roommate Gina in which she reminded me how great my life is when I complained about stupid stuff. It's not that I even think complaining is an inherently bad thing. My giving up complaining for Lent called attention to a number of complaining-themed conversations among friends and friends-of-friends, and they all basically came back to the conclusion that there is a time and a place in which complaining is good, and there is a time and a place in which complaining is bad.

So let me oversimplify our realizations terribly.

Complaining = The Good

Complaining may have a purpose because it creates change for the better. Complaining may serve to build a sense of community among people with a shared problem. Complaining may let off steam. Complaining may be funny. Complaining may be ironic (example, allowing the complaint "oh my god, my friends keep calling I can't get anything done" to serve as a happy reminder to yourself that that's an awesome problem to have). Sometimes complaining just makes you feel better.

Complaining = The Bad

Complaining can become so habitual that it loses irony or humor or ability to make you or anyone else feel better or the ability to actually change things. Complaining can become the status quo and infuse a heavy dose of negativity into every aspect of life. Complaining can become the status quo in which you expect everything will always be bad and so lose the will to try and change things for the better. Complaining can make you lose track of what good is inherent in the things you are complaining about. Sometimes, complaining just makes you feel worse. And also those around you.

For me, that day when Gina laughingly reminded me of the good in my life (Me: All of these good things in my life are making my life complicated. Gina: You have such a hard life /Sarcasm. Me: I know, I'll shut up), it kind of hit me that complaining had moved from The Good to The Bad. I was not complaining to blow of steam, or figure out how to make things better, or to be funny or ironic or to bond with others with a shared problem. I was just bitching. And, kind of a lot. Gina and Michael are both kind enough to say they hadn't noticed an upswing in my negativity, but I could feel it. And it's no wonder. It has been a hard semester-- studying for Comps is hard. But I'm doing this because I love it. It is both a means (get my dissertation going, get my degree) and an end (learn lots of really awesome stuff that I'm interested in). And I have lots of other really great things going for me right now that I was not being sufficiently appreciative of (great husband, great roommate, great friends, great family, great job, great school, great apartment, great climate, great food, etc.). Complaining about the hard stuff had succeeded in focusing my attention only on the hard stuff.

And so I gave up complaining.

The funny thing is that when I'd tell people I'd given up complaining, they would usually take that as an opportunity to point out whenever I said anything negative (for roughly the first two conversations we had after my no complaining revelation-- then they'd forget and move on with their lives). But to me, that wasn't the point. Not to hold everything in. Not to never acknowledge sucky things. Not to act the persistently cheerful person. No, the point was to not dwell on the sucky things. To acknowledge and move on. To focus on the good things, or to find a solution to the things I wanted to complain about. The point was to redirect my attentions, and hopefully redirect my mood.

And it took about, oh, I don't know, a week or two. Early on into Lent, it stopped occurring to me to not complain (even in thought if not out loud) about things that suck. Pretty quickly, I just started doing that automatically. Pretty quickly, I started feeling more positive and better about my life in general. Pretty quickly, my complaining went back to The Good.

Meanwhile, Gina was reporting to me a large number of conversations she was having with people about complaining. Mostly because she was a member of a group of people bound together with a shared trial over which they had no control. I'll give this shared trial a clever euphemism. How about... Psyvelopmental Decology class? Yes, that has a nice ring to it. At any rate, I'm not in that class, but it's been hard going, and I have an enormous amount of respect for the people I know who have been fighting their way through this semester. One of their coping mechanisms has been shared complaining sessions, in which they complain for the purpose of 1) humor; 2) venting; 3) bonding over shared trial, and 4) venting.

These shared complaining sessions, I would argue as have they, are part of Complaining = The Good. It serves a purpose in that it makes them feel better and supports each other. But it has also given rise to plenty of conversations about Complaining = the Bad, including occasional worries that their shared complaining sessions might be dipping into the dark side of the complaining continuum. The overall outcome seems to be a heightened mindfulness about this social construct of complaining (did I mention we're all psychologists?) and what purposes it serves us, and when it serves no purpose, or poor purpose in our lives.

Gina related a story to me a few months ago that I think about pretty much every day. It hit me with such raw force and has really made me think a lot about having gratitude for the great things I have in my life. In a conversation about complaining, one of the Psyvelopmental Decology women related a story about hearing another woman complaining about her husband snoring, and about how she, a widow, would give her teeth to be able to hear her husband snore again. And my god, how is it that we can look at the great things in our lives, even when they're being annoying, and see only annoyances? Or perhaps more to the point, why can't we just acknowledge the annoyance but keep our focus on the greatness?

This is the line between Complaining = The Good and Complaining = The Bad.

So, I made a diagram some weeks ago. It was meant to be funny, but the more I look at it, the more I think it's actually kind of a handy little reminder about the purpose and usefulness of this construct called complaining. See below.

Also, my lungs feel like they're made of acid.