Day 162: One last self-help book is all I need, and other wistful modern myths.

I need so much help.

For years, I refused to believe that. I considered myself a complete and tidy package – the warts, the beauty marks, the gifts and the glaring lacks all tied up together in an inviolate Naval Academy knot.

How can I be expected to do math? It simply isn’t in my make-up (despite a father who taught the subject). How can I be expected to have some fabulous professional career? A particular driving focus just isn’t mine. How can I be expected to be ruthlessly efficient? I got the laid-back gene, at least as far as outside appearances are concerned (we won’t discuss high blood pressure or auto-immune issues). How can I be expected to have big bucks? I secretly despise money-grubbers. How can I be expected to be athletic? I’m heavy and clumsy (and, it must be confessed, lazy).

I can’t change, thought I, so why bother trying?

This philosophy served me well for many years.

But, oh, the sixtieth birthday approaches, and with it the nagging sense that perhaps I’m not always Right about everything.

I hope Husband doesn’t read this. I’ve conditioned him to accept my Rightness. It’s too late in the marriage to introduce doubt.

It all started innocently enough. I started blogging. Then, I started reading blogs about how to run wildly successful blogs that make money hand over fist. That led to blogs about how to be a person who runs a wildly successful blog, which in turn led to blogs about trendy personal transformation. That led to webinars and articles upon articles and hacks and tips and insider tricks – all available for the price of your email address or a few hundred dollars here and there.

Wearying of on-line information written at the third-grade level that promised much and delivered little, I turned to the occasional self-help book. Trust the printed word to deliver the truth! Take The Book, for instance — especially those biblical commands to sell your daughters into slavery, stone anyone wearing cotton/polyester blends, and (my favorite passage and the essence of Christianity itself),

“Happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us – he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.” (Psalm 137:9)

But I digress.

Instead of hoping for a personal cure (of which I still despair), I began studying self-help books as a phenomenon, working my way through the literature.

I started with an early 1900s English text counseling men to be Clean and Manly and Forceful and God-Fearing and Strong and Pure. Segued into mid-century positive-thinking, thinly disguised self-hypnosis pushing sheep-like Protestantism. Skipped ahead to a few recent Law of Attraction religious-science get-rich-quick volumes, and then returned to bad-mushrooms revelatory stuff, where God speaks through self-appointed scribes and astral intermediaries.

• What good is being God if you can’t speak for yourself?
• Since when are astral beings public service clerks, trapped for all eternity at Earth’s Help Desk?
• If any of this stuff worked, we’d all be rolling in clover.

Yet hope is that thing with feathers that perches in the soul and cruises the self-help section at Barnes & Noble and now finds itself targeted by Amazon Prime with every whacko nut-job personal-improvement offering out there.

I will become the perfect Missy.

Or I will write the perfect self-help manual, and get rich even without help from those poor sods trapped in that astral plain. They can buy my book, too.

Photo courtesy Gratisography