Smiling to death
As chronically suppressing difficult emotions is linked to a litany of health concerns, one writer – for whom the findings are hauntingly resonant – digs into the science to ask if her personality is making her sick
Take a look at the byline on this article. It’s unlikely to surprise you that I’ve attracted many a nickname in my time. Some stuck (the robotic sound when you put my four initials together – have a go); others were a flash in the lexical pan. ‘Mary J O’Blige’ was bestowed on me in an English class by a school friend with a gift for punning, after I’d said yes to doing something. Yet again. We laughed; we moved on. I didn’t think about it again until one Wednesday, last October, lying on a mattress on the floor of my flat. My voice had all but gone; my mouth, gums and throat felt like fire. Energy, emotion, will… there was next to nothing left. A pack of antibiotics – my third course of the year – lay on the floor beside me. My body was, in no uncertain terms, saying no.
Ironically, the voice of the man who popularised that phrase was playing through my headphones: Gabor Maté, Hungarian-Canadian GP turned author of bestselling volumes on some of the toughest elements of the human condition. With a career that encompasses palliative care units and a downtown Vancouver outreach centre – the latter treating those battling the toxic cocktail of addiction and mental illness – he’s witnessed people at their lowest ebb; people ravaged by the brutality of their circumstances and then, once more, by that with which they chose to blunt their pain. But the character at the heart of his latest tome – The Myth Of Normal: Trauma, Illness And Healing In A Toxic Culture (£25, Vermilion) – isn’t some tragic figure who’s addicted to heroin or fentanyl. It’s… the nice girl.
You know, the appeaser. The chameleonic adapter. The deft navigator of social dynamics who all too often melts herself down to grease the metal wheels others roll through life with. She (because this archetype is so often a she) who has an ‘automatic and compulsive concern for the emotional needs of others while ignoring one’s own’. And whose prospects for health and human flourishing look bleak. She’s disproportionately more likely to experience chronic health issues, such as multiple sclerosis and dementia. She’s also – and I groan out loud as this realisation lands – me. I don’t mean that I’m especially altruistic. But within this caricature of an unmoored, desperate-to-please woman, I’m confronted with my postpandemic self. One who’s stuffed down the emotional maelstrom caused by a myriad of personal upsets (the majority of which happened around me; details of which aren’t mine to share); one who, on that October morning, had become utterly alienated from what it is that she wants, un
