Extra-sensorial Extracurriculars, part one
an inaugural list of books tv and music i've relied on over the last year
I know you likely only know me for my ability to respond critically to one’s sense of smell, but I promise – I have useless degrees in both visual art and Modern literature. I want to offer this new series, extra-sensorial extracurriculars, as a way of giving paid subscribers a bit more intimate view into the works I’m consuming on a daily basis, and the things that will inevitably seep into how I see the world and write about the perfumes I smell within it. I am aware of the specific resonance of releasing content on this blog behind a financial barrier, but to be completely candid with you I now no longer have the luxury of being able to consistently write freelance for free. If you feel shut out by this policy, DM me on twitter and we can work things out. That said, this is my idea for a compromise between perfume articles – which on principle I intend to never paywall upon initial release. I had been developing this idea for a while now, and so most of these entries will be dated from a temporal range between last summer and the end of this winter. Thanks for understanding, and God bless.
DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, 2nd Edition, Marsha M. Linehan
This is the book they have you buy when you are admitted to the partial hospitalization program I started in August, and had written this entry in the off-hours between. I think DBT gets thrown around a lot of weird places for a relatively novel and experimental form of treating borderline personality disorder and in recent years, eating disorders and to a lesser extent ocd (those are me!) – but the core of the treatment is essentially replacing harmful behaviors with a set of photocopied worksheets designed to promote radical acceptance (not approval) of dialectical thinking. Having been propelled into the psych ward from grad school, I found it chillingly amusing to hear dialectics (incorrectly) invoked in therapy. That said, Marsha’s dialectics are a little less convoluted than Hegel’s. DBT revolves around accepting that two things, seemingly opposed, can both be true. The central mechanism of this therapy is essentially understanding that life is messy, weird, unfair, and ultimately completely your responsibility to cope with. Marsha herself – who I feel I have earned the right to call by her first name – was hospitalized for misdiagnosed borderline, schizophrenia, and chronic suicidality during roughly the same time in her life I now write to you from. she writes in the introduction:
This book is dedicated to all the [mental health] patients of the world who think that no one is thinking of them. I considered telling you that I would practice skills for you so you don’t have to practice them. But then I realized that if I did, you would not learn how to be skillful yourself. So, instead, I wish you skillful means, and I wish that you find these skills useful.
When I originally started that program, I thought DBT was somewhere between a woo-woo cult and a bodhisattva exaltation. Nearly half a year out, however, I think I have come a bit closer to achieving enlightenment myself. It isn’t about believing these things to be true, it’s about understanding the patterns that form in your life as logical outcomes to unreasonable often contradictory situations, and to understand the power you have – despite everything – to choose differently. In a sense, and I truly do apologize for doing this to a system Linehan herself intended to base off a kind of appropriative hodge-podge of Zen instructions – DBT is kind of Christ-like, because it holds empathy with the lowest of the low, understanding that people don’t hurt themselves for no reason – harmful and maladaptive behaviors are at their core, simply misguided ways of attempting to cope with the world around us. The center of healing is always mercy. Bad things will always happen to good people, and good people will always do bad things to themselves. There is no real way around addressing these difficult truths head on, there are only sets of worksheets you can use to apply yourself to accepting them with intelligence and grace.
The Crack-up, F. Scott Fitzgerald