Languishing

Who knew it was a thing?

I was on my way to the local activity center to swim. Swimming is my go to activity for physical and mental health. I pushed the FM button on my car radio and heard a familiar voice. It was Meghna Chakrabarti from On Point and she was speaking about languishing. I heard her say the term a couple of times, but I was quizzical because she was using it as a clinical diagnosis term, in the same way depression is used. It didn’t quite make sense to me…maybe because of the “ing” on the end of the word. As she spoke with Corey Keyes, a sociologist and professor who studies languishing, I began to realize that it is a real medical term and I identified with it heavily.

I have often said to doctors and mental health professionals: I’m not sad. I’m high functioning. I have interest in my life. I get out of bed every morning and do what I need to do. Sometimes I have trouble sleeping but overall manage that with melatonin. But something isn’t right, something is missing. Things feel harder than they should. I can’t find my purpose, especially since cancer. I’m most often dismissed. Anxiety seems to be the primary trait I’m ascribed. ADHD and OCD are sometimes discussed but never have I ever heard that there was something besides depression that might be lowering my mood and quality of life.

Professor Keyes shared that languishing is tricky, like many health related things. It can occur intermittently, even on a daily basis it can come and go throughout the day. It can happen along with depression and there are low, medium, and high levels of languishing that can occur. This is always in flux. As I lingered in my parked car, listening, I was dumbfounded. How is that I’ve never heard of this? Especially since this article addresses it and is apparently the most widely read article in 2021, not just nationally but globally! Maybe I missed it because I was languishing. ;)

I kept seeing other people park and get out of their vehicles with duffle bags. Did they have swim gear in them? I might not get a lane! I quickly googled Languishing with Prof Keyes and found the episode transcript and audio. I would finish it after my laps. As I entered the lobby a sign warned me that the pool water was cooler than usual. I didn’t mind. I've written about my love of cool water before. Underwater I could see the dead roly polys and small flashes of light slipping in and out of the water from the beaming sunlight that comes through the large glass pane windows. Little rainbow marble ripples dancing to a silent symphony. I began to get comfortable, maybe even delighted, with the distance from life above water.

Photo by ALi on Unsplash

But then I had to come up and hear the awkward echo of the radio announcer speaking too loudly. The bored lifeguard was working hard not to make eye contact. It’s not just this lifeguard, they all seem to have a pervasive fully embodied boredome. It seems to come with the job. Are they even breathing? It seems a perfect metaphor for languishing.

Important to note, languishing captured the attention of the public during the pandemic when people who would normally have had a lot of control and privelege over their life had less of it. Languishing has roots in positive psychology and has been critiqued for its individualistic stance. You can read a little more about it here. I am not interested in notions that lack societal acknowledgment or cultural relevance. However, I do feel this term gives me a name for something I have always needed to name. And my interest in this topic has nothing to do with the pandemic. As an extrovert, the pandemic was hard on me but langishing describes something I have been feeling off and on for most of my adult life.

Initially, after completing treatment, I hit a rock bottom that was a deep depression. All of 2022, maybe a little more, I was climbing out of that hole. From 2023 until now, I have been languishing and desperately wanting relief from the blah and lack of meaning I have felt in my life. I thought starting the PhD program might help but the hurried/stressed pace requirements of my scholarship award have been hard on my mental health, especially since I didn’t have a clarified reason for starting the program. I really didn’t want to be a full time student, I wanted meaningful work. But I took this opportunity on because I didn’t have another option and I wanted to believe that it would feel like a job to me. This makes logical sense, right? But somehow, it felt wrong/aawkward/off while simultaneously sensing that I was supposed to be there because all signs pointed that way. And the cohort, OMG the people I am learning with! How can one be in the wrong place and feel blah when the people are so stellar and nourishing to your humanness? And yet I did feel blah often.

Only now, in the last few weeks have I started to get relief because I am writing creatively, here on The Well. I didn’t do it knowing it would help. I didn’t even do it because I wanted to do it. I mentioned in my first post that I’m doing this for an assignment. I found myself backed into a corner and I had to create a solution. So I opened up my Substack and started poking around. It had been ignored for more than a year. There was a small amount of writing that I started but never finished, just some threads of ideas but it was something I could work with.

It was almost immediate, the distance I got from academic writing that had me in knots. It’s a highly stylized technique absent of creativity for good reason, I suppose. The pressure in multiple classes to create problem statements and condense my topic into tidy bite size chunks that anyone could understand lead me to writer’s block. I felt like I couldn’t even make a coherent paragraph anymore. I was saying: I hate writing, I don’t want to write at all anymore. And I really believed it. But this project has given me a sense of joy again. I find myself smiling more. I even feel like my cells are happy! I don’t hate writing, what a relief. I can’t say that this is my life’s purpose but it has given me something that was missing and I am so, so grateful.