How Learning To Make Small Talk Can Give You Better, More Enduring Sexual Relationships

I could give a shit about the weather.  Or sports.  And I’m not all that interested in hearing about someone’s favorite anime show, because I don’t much care for anime.  

I want big talk.  Let’s tussle over politics!  Let’s unpack our heart and dissect our deepest emotions!  Why are we discussing the rain in Spain when there’s genuinely interesting shit we could be talking about?  

But that’s what small talk is: discussing neutral, often plainly boring topics with people you don’t know all that well – and more importantly, may not care to know.  The big lie people tell you about small talk is that mastering the art of the bland discussion somehow turns you into a Level 20 Networker, swinging from connection to connection as you Seal the Deal and flip through your overstuffed Rolodex to call in favors from that woman you met who had the kid with the severe grass allergy.  

But no.  The truth is, a lot of small talks don’t lead anywhere.  They don’t remember you, you don’t remember them, because you were both making nicey-nice at the office cocktail hour and frankly, this talk was the tofu of conversation – acceptable in a pinch, but nobody really wanted it.

So that’s small talk: you endure five minutes of with the guy next to you in line at the airport, you don’t get their Facebook, and this conversation might as well never have happened.

Boy, this sure sounds like a skill you want to master, huh? 

But wait. 

There’s a far better reason to learn how to master small talk. 

Because in truth, a lot of small talk boils down to one main skill: taking interest in something you personally don’t care much about.  Because someone read the opening sentence of this essay right after checking to see whether that inbound pressure front was going to bring a storm by noon and went, “Hey!  I love talking about the weather!”  Somebody just finished placing a bet on the Cavs tonight and went, “Hey!  I love talking about sports!”

And God, anime.  Someone’s already got their itching fingers primed to type in suggestions, ready to explode because they’re sure I haven’t seen all ten seasons of NOVA BLEACH HARUKO.  

So much of “small talk” is “taking time to discuss things that don’t jazz your hands.”  The skill is not “engaging people in conversation,” because honestly, that’s a trivial skill – if someone’s really psyched to tell you about their trip to Italy, learning three variants on “So what happened next?” will get you half an hour of conversation.  

The true skill is not tuning out.  

The true skill is learning to sit back and actively participate in helping them partake in a pleasure that you don’t fully share in.  

Which means the true small talk master has to learn empathy.  Maybe you’re not interested in kids, but you can be interested in the way this stranger’s face brightens when they show you pictures of some random toddler.  Maybe you don’t know anything about basketball, but you can try to understand the artistry involved for this LeBron fellow to dribble a ball past professional-grade opposition and get it in a basket.  

What small talk teaches you is not to endure, but to find sources of pleasure in places that normally give you none. 

Now, that has one small benefit, but that’s not the big one I’m discussing – the truth is that sometimes, learning to find pleasure in odd places actually expands your pleasure center.  My daughter loooooves football, to the point where she tries to hide her tears of joy when the Patriots win, and years of listening to her squee “Did you see that play?” and having her dissect the skill involved has let me watch the Superbowl and occasionally appreciate a fine maneuver.  I’ll never actively tune into a football game, but now if a friend really wants to watch the game, it’s not like chewing tin foil.  Watching the Browns lose (for there is no other outcome) is a perfectly lovely way to spend an afternoon, even if it’s not my first choice.

But that’s not the real benefit.

The real benefit is that mastering small talk builds the skills that make you a better person to date.  Which means that lovers stick around for longer, marriages don’t dissolve as quickly, relationships stay fine-tuned and sleek as dolphins. 

Because that skill of “I’m not necessarily into this, but I’ll find ways to get pleasure out of it” is critical in long-term relationships.  If the only time you’ll willingly in an activity is when you’re getting unalloyed pleasure out of it, well, your relationships are likely to fall apart.  

Here’s real reasons I’ve seen marriages fall apart:

* Casey has picked up an exciting new hobby, a hobby that takes them to lots of conventions and get-togethers.  Glenn, however could give a shit about Casey’s hobby, and clearly tunes out whenever Casey’s is squeeing about the new thing they learned today.  Casey learns that they can’t talk to Glenn about a good 40% of their life, so they learn to wall off large portions of their internal emotions from Glenn, and eventually just stop telling Glenn things altogether. Then Casey meets a nice person at their hobby, one who’s caring and willing to listen to all the things Casey can no longer talk to Glenn about, and, well….

* Lou doesn’t really care much about the laundry being done. Pat, however, does.  And because Lou has that selfish streak of “I’ll only do this if there’s something for me in it,” Pat winds up doing all the laundry, always, with Lou never pitching in.  Eventually Pat feels underappreciated and overwhelmed, and starts to question whether they need to be with such a selfish jerk like Lou, and, well….

* Sam likes sex, but doesn’t see any reason to be physically affectionate unless sex is in the offing – no cuddles, no hand-holding, that stuff doesn’t interest them except as a prelude to intercourse.  Except Morgan does crave physical affection at all times, and feels isolated and alone, and eventually comes to cringe as they realize Sam’s affectionate ruffling of their hair means SEX NAO PLEASE – and Morgan doesn’t feel like being a sex dispenser upon demand when they’re not feeling desired elsewhere, and, well….

There’s lots of other marriage-ending situations like that, mostly boiling down to “This partner has never mastered the skill of generosity.”  If Lou had said, “I don’t care about the laundry, but I do like seeing your face light up when you realize you don’t have to do this thing alone, so lemme help,” Pat wouldn’t be overwhelmed.  If Sam learned to take pleasure in Morgan’s purring when they cuddled, Morgan wouldn’t reject their overtures as consistently.  If Glenn could take pride in Casey’s hobby even if they weren’t a die-hard hobbyist, then Casey wouldn’t have to wall their life off…

And the good news is, this is a skill you can learn!  Empathy is a muscle, which you can activate through steady practice.  And like a lot of exercise, the activity of empathy often feels weird and artificial and pointless at first. 

But trust me. I’ve seen too many folks who sniffed, “Why would I want to learn to talk about boring stuff with people I don’t care about?”  And they went on to have relationships where they never did boring stuff either, and those relationships shriveled like a microwaved spider after a few years because it turns out, “Doing boring stuff” is a mighty useful skill.  

Whereas the people who’ve said, “This is boring, but these people obviously care deeply about it, so can I make a game where I find a way to make their passions and mine intersect?”  Those people I’ve seen go on to often have more fruitful relationships, because assuming you don’t sublimate all your interests in the sense of uplifting someone else, you’ll find that “learning to take pleasure from your partner’s pleasure” is a quite necessary lubrication.  

And the easiest way to shoot womp rats in the Beggar’s Canyon of Compassion is to talk about the weather with lonely people in airports.  It probably won’t win you any lifelong friends, nor will it forge connections that will make you the CEO of a Detroit car company.  

But when you find someone who does light your fire, it’ll help you to keep their flame properly kindled.  

Trust me.  It’ll be worth it.  

So What If I Use Big Words In My Books?

I have friends who tell me that I should write simple prose.  I shouldn’t mention “flensing” to describe someone having their body removed, I shouldn’t say how someone’s skin “horripilated” when they’re facing an otherworldly horror, I should just say the magic item glows instead of describing its lambent dweomer. 

But those are beautiful words, man. 

Why should they sit by the wayside because you’re too lazy to infer meaning?  Or, in the worst case, crack open a dictionary? 

Look, anyone who’s read my books – and please do – knows that my writing style isn’t some Lovecraftian word-salad heap of purple prose.  I write tight and I write clean.  But I think there’s also value in placing pretty, arcane words into a context where they can enrich a text: Either you know the word and understand why it’s the perfect word for that situation, or you see a word like “gloaming” used to describe the light of a dusky sunset and come to form a new word association.  

How’s that not delightful either way?

Some people say it’s distracting, show-offy.  And to them, I say their lack of willingness to be entranced by a new word is cowering at the gates of a glorious world, staunchly refusing new forms of entertainment simply because you’d have to fill in a blank or two.  I mean, sure, you can write simpler and simpler, but eventually you’re pounding out novels like Up-Goer Five, describing rockets in only the most ten thousand commonly used words. 

No; declaring the proper use of a word like “imprudence” to be “show-offy” is basically saying, “I’m put off when people remind me that I have a smaller vocabulary than they do.”  And really, I think that speaks more as to the reader than the writer. 

It is, of course, necessary to follow such a bold statement with a host of caveats, assuming you know what “caveat” means: yes, of course it’s possible to string together so many arcane words that the text becomes unreadable.  Yes, having ordinary American characters describe the monster as “rugose” suggests you suck at dialogue.  Yes, there’s lots of terrible writers whose prose becomes – as I said – Lovecraftian.  And there’s always that good ol’ bugaboo, “personal taste” – there are writers with prose so dense I don’t personally enjoy chopping my way through it, and it’s fine if you don’t too.  

But honestly, man.  A lot of the fuss over big words boils down to “I didn’t know that one.”  I bet one or more of the three-dollar words in this essay are ones you knew, and you probably said, “Well, that’s no big deal, but if the author should haul out a word like ‘thigmophilic’ – well, that’s crazy!”  Whereas the truth is that every word over a certain grade average risks throwing the reader out. 

Or the reader can choose to jump in.  

There’s nothing wrong with writing with simple terms: many authors do it, and do it well.  But there’s *also* nothing wrong with putting in a beautiful word that summarizes the situation perfectly, if you know what it means, so long as the sentence isn’t unfathomable if you don’t know the word.  

Because for me?  Yes.  Those murky shadows are penumbral.  It’s a beautiful word.  It fits if you know what it means.  And it sounds pretty regardless. 

That’s a win/win for me.  

The Entenmann’s Voice: How A Chocolate Cake Saved Our Marriage

She told me that she loved me.  The rest of her body told me otherwise.  

I heard the strain in my wife’s voice whenever we had a discussion. Her words were never unkind – but our discussions were squeezed tight at the edges, her sentences chopped off at the end as neatly as a nailclipper clicking through a toenail. Every reassurance she gave me ended with an unspoken “for Christ’s sake” that hung in the air like bug spray, toxic and deadly.

The only time I knew she loved me – really adored me – was when she spoke of chocolate cake.

Now, let’s be honest.  She was right to be vexed with me.  This was during the worst part of our marriage, when neither of us had learned the self-discipline to be kind to each other.  I was a fool, insecure, and grasping – and worst of all, I knew what I was doing yet was unable (back then) to stop myself.  Half of our conversations went like this: 

“Do you love me?” 

“Yes.” 

“…are you sure you love me?” 

“Yes.”  

(A moment passes, during which her whole body braces for the next onslaught – and then) “Are you sure you love me?”  

“For God’s sake, I said yes!” 

“But you sound so angry!”  

Someone once told me that the reason dogs are so happy to see you when you come home is because they didn’t know that you were coming back. Dogs have no concept of extended time, so when you return it’s as if you’d just arisen from the grave, They jump, and lick, and frolic because they didn’t expect to ever see you again!

I was a dog. Every time Gini left the room, her love left with her. When she returned, her love was obviously gone; she had been a fool to marry a schlub like me, and she must have realized it in that twenty minutes, she must have.  I tried not to ask, I really did, but my thoughts rattled around inside me like a pellet in a spraypaint can until the words squirted out, unbidden. 

So I’d ask again. Do you love me? Do you still? How about now?

Her patience waned, and it didn’t help that Gini had grown up in a family where expressing honest emotion = death. She’d had to bury every trace of resentment to stay alive, and so her psyche was a mystery to her. She would deny being angry at me for days on end, then suddenly stop in mid-stride with a befuddled expression to snap, “You know, I am furious at you.”

Our marriage was dying, and neither of us knew how to stop this spiral.  

I didn’t even realize how bad it had gotten until we shopped for an Entenmann’s Marshmallow Cake.

Now, you might think that the biggest sacrifices I’d made in quitting my job and moving up to Alaska to be with my new bride would be leaving my support group of friends behind, or leaving behind my sexy job buying books – books! – for a job buying pencils in bulk for a corporation.  

But I’m a pudgepot.  So I missed Entenmann’s cake.  

Marshmallow Cake was a delicacy that I could not find in Alaska. Oh, they had Entenmann’s prepackaged food product in all sorts of styles – the donuts, the waxy chocolate icing, the pop-’ems – but never the creamy, vanilla-tinged Marshmallow topping. When I was depressed back home, I’d buy a cake and strip the icing off of my Entenmann’s methodically, eating it as if I were mowing a sugary lawn. 

It probably contributed to my eventual heart attack, but damn did it cheer me up.  

So when we moved back down to Cleveland, the one thing that gave me hope was finding Entenmann’s again.  My marriage may be disintegrating, this move seemed like a covert excuse to get me back into the States before dumping me, but hey!  Entenmann’s!

And on the second day in town, my hopes soared when I found a local Entenmann’s outlet – but I quickly discovered that even the factory outlet had no Marshmallow cakes. The local factory didn’t make them.

When I returned home, I was crestfallen, expecting Gini to snap at me for being so upset at something as trivial as a chocolate cake.  But for the first time in a long time, Gini sympathized with me. 

“There, there,” she said, stroking my head. Her voice was as warm as a hug. “We’ll find your cake. It’ll be okay.”

And I realized: Gini had grown up poor.  

To her, in a family that had had to squash their emotions to survive, whining about feelings was stupid.  

But being deprived of things?  That, she understood.  

“That’s it,” I said.

“What?”

“That’s how I need you to talk to me.”

From then on, the good voice became The Entenmann’s Voice.  And when I really needed reassurance, I asked her to use it. 

The Entenmann’s voice was a breakthrough for Gini, because she realized that simply reciting the words weren’t enough – she had to mean them. She thought that I couldn’t hear the unspoken “dumbass” at the end of her comforts – but I could hear her undertones more keenly than words. It took her awhile, but I think she realized that perhaps it was possible to comfort me, if she acted in the right way.

Sometimes, you have to adjust for your partner in subtle and strange ways.  And she worked, and worked hard, at stopping giving me these snippy reassurances and instead recalling the compassion she’d felt for me about a chocolate cake and redirecting that into calming my flurries of emotional distress.

As for me, I realized that if she could sound that way about Entenmann’s, perhaps it wasn’t all lost. There were still vast, untapped reserves of love within her – I was just drilling too deep, taking too many of her resources. 

I didn’t know how to stop my quavering fears, but that Entenmann’s voice told me that I had to before I lost that, too.

These were both tiny steps for us. The Entenmann’s voice didn’t magically fix everything, but they expanded our vocabulary and laid a groundwork that we could work with.

Eventually, I had to learn that relationships are based on objective results, not internal struggles.   Gini was being stressed because I was asking her Do you love me? Do you love me still? every three minutes, nobody fucking cared whether I had really tried hard not to ask at Minute 1 and Minute 2. My internal struggles didn’t matter – what mattered was that I didn’t ask at Minute 3, either. Eventually, I learned to go an hour without asking (though it was pure agony), and then four hours, and then eight hours.

Now, sometimes I can go a whole day. It’s been almost two decades since those tumultuous first days of our marriage, and I’d like to tell you my fears have disappeared, like a good storybook  – but truth is, old scars never completely heal. But they’re manageable now.

It’s an ugly truth, but it was there all along: If I wanted Gini to stop thinking less of  me for being weak, I had to stop being weak. All the words and redefinitions couldn’t change a character flaw.

But the other night, Gini was working on the computer and I walked into her room. She checked her email, and suddenly I was overwhelmed with fears of Anchorage. I had a worry about a really stupid issue – the kind that had been answered definitively years ago. Asking her for reassurance on this thoroughly-settled conflict would be the dumbest possible thing I could do because I knew she loved me, that I was an idiot for asking, that any sane person should just walk away and stuff this fear deep inside.

But the words came out, insulting in their pure distrust: Do you love me? Do you still? How about now?

Gini stopped in mid-typing, then stared at me with concern…. And her face broke open in the most wonderful smile I’ve ever seen, the most loving thing that I think I shall ever witness in my time upon this planet. She held her arms out to me and put my hands on her shoulders so that she could look into my eyes and tell me yes, yes I love you, and you’re not a fool for asking. You’re my hero, Ferrett.

That was the Entenmann’s voice.  

It was also the power of our love reignited after we learned to be good to each other.  Through cake.  

And so when people come to me because they can’t stop fighting, the first question I usually ask is, “So what’s your Entenmann’s cake voice?”  That voice is probably not cake-related (unless you are a pudgepot like me).  

But there is often a tone in your voice that your partner needs to hear when you’re upset.  Some people call it a “love language,” but that’s often nebulous, because it’s not really a language so much as it is finding the channel to compassion when you’re being inconvenienced.  

You may love them.  Speaking love in a way that they can hear it is a separate skill. 

But if you master that art, it is a sweet, sweet dessert indeed.  

Requiem For A Cow

If you’ll recall yesterday, while gaming, a cow saved my life. This brave cow followed me into a bandit camp and kicked the bandit leader to death.

This, thought I, was the kind of cow who sought out adventure.

So I made a vow: I would shepherd this cow along with me through the rest of the game. Me and my cow, in the snowy wastelands, fighting evil robots together. The dream team humanity has strived for since time immemorial, fusing the powers of mankind and a cow.

The cow was, it must be said, tricky to ride. He lurched in every direction, refusing to stop, and lowed sadly at every slope. Rocks I could jump up easily scared the cow, and if I went too fast then he’d gallop eagerly past whatever I was aiming at – so I had to trot everywhere, slowly, across the landscape.

Was this the sacrifice I must make for my mooing friend? So be it.

I named him Snowpoke.

Now, I was worried about protecting poor Snowpoke during battles. The upgraded enemies in the DLC pack were kicking my ass, and I was terrified of my cow becoming steak.

That was, as it turned out, the least of my worries.

Because during the second battle, against two epic fire-breathing monsters I ran into, it turns out that Snowpoke had a short memory. While I was dodging and firing arrows and drinking healing potions, Snowpoke… kinda forgot he was my friend. Apparently his friendship spell wears off if you don’t mount him for long enough, kind of like a bad marriage.

So I was fighting for my life when Snowpoke charged me, joining in the mayhem, with me screaming, “SNOWPOKE! NO! REMEMBER THE GOOD TIMES?!?” And that battle became twice as hard because I had to not only shoot at monsters but make sure not to kill an enraged Snowpoke.

Fortunately, Snowpoke had a mild form of bovine ADD, and while the two fire-monsters were hell-bent on my death, Snowpoke got bored mid-battle and wandered off to a slope to eat grass. So I re-befriended him again, and we rode together happily.

And while repairing another robot, I noticed that Snowpoke had his own character: one of his horns had been knocked off. It was an oddly jaunty look, which I loved, so I took a picture.

That poorly-snapped picture, my friends, turned out to be the only memory of Snowpoke I’ll ever have.

Because I wasn’t thinking. I should have Googled, I know. But it was muscle memory – I’d fast-travelled so many times before, skipping across the tedious landscape to just get to my next quest marker, and the horrid truth became apparent:

Cows don’t fast-travel.

I hunted through the camp, realizing with horror that I had left Snowpoke behind, then reloaded every last save I could find in an attempt to find Snowpoke – but Horizon Zero Dawn, alas, didn’t think Snowpoke was worthy enough to save.

Snowpoke was lost in the icy wildernesses, with one horn hanging off, probably to be murdered by asshole adventurers like me.

But no. Snowpoke was more than just materials to be scavenged. Snowpoke was a pet, with a personality – a fuzzy-memoried, ornery personality, to be sure, but he was my pet and I loved him.

Now he’s gone. And my memories are all I have left.

Oh, I’d like to think that he just wandered off, and found a herd, and settled back into his everyday life. But that’s just not Snowpoke. Snowpoke had kicked a bandit to death, man. Snowpoke was a *warrior*. And I know that Snowpoke is now stalking the mountainsides, sneaking up on bandits, who are all like “All right, we’re gonna ambush these villagers – what was that noise?”

Then an angry, angry “moo.”

Then bloodshed.

Then silence. The silence of a bovine ninja.

Rest in peace, Snowpoke. You earned it.

Rest In Peace, Snowpoke. This was a shitty picture, but… I thought we’d have more time together.

Feeling Twitchy About My Twitch-Stream

“I am actively grumpy that I cannot watch you fighting more robot dinosaurs,” said Fox.

This was after a visit where Fox had spent their evenings curled up by my side, watching me play Horizon Zero Dawn – which, to be fair, has a story so good I had to fill them in on what happened in the plot after they left.  And it was nice playing convivially – some of my fondest moments with my daughters have been spent kvetching as one of us plays the game and the other provides sarcastic color commentary.

So I set up a Twitch account and did a stream with Fox last night, which was epic in its own way – I befriended a robot cow just to demonstrate to Fox the newfound skills I’d gained in Fox’s absence, then got into a ridiculous boss battle where I was running through a bandit camp to get away from this mortar-lobbing motherfucker.

I darted through a doorway – and there was the cow.  Standing there idly, but perfectly positioned to block the boss’s entryway long enough for me to swig a few health potions.

“I love you, cow,” I muttered – but then it got better.

The bandit tried to follow me, and the cow kicked him.

I immediately stopped in wonder, watching the bandit try to match firepower with my cow – and Fox was like, “Why aren’t you firing at the bandit? He’s open!” and I was like, “GO, COW!  THIS IS YOUR MOMENT!  MAKE THE MAGIC HAPPEN!”  And I drove back the bandit until the cow kicked him to death.

As I said on Twitter last night, “A cow saved my life tonight in Horizon Zero Dawn. I’m now adopting this cow and riding it everywhere. It’s too noble to roam free and get murdered by assholes like me.”

So that was a moment, and I could see sharing that sort of fun with more people.  I’m mouthy, and animated, and I think I’m funny when I comment on games.

But I think it’d be fun at a small scale.

I’m not necessarily good at small scale.

See, I have two bits of wariness:

First, I know how awful it is for the professional Twitch streamers, the people who start chasing an audience, because by all accounts it becomes a soul-draining process.  “People like long streams,” the guides say.  “Plan to play for at least four hours!  Play the popular games!  Engage with your fans to become a star!”  And I honestly don’t know what sort of expectations people have for Twitch streamers, but it all sounds very gruelling.

Second, I say I’d stream just for my own private amusement, but long years of practice has shown this is something I am utter shit at.

“I’ll just dork around on LiveJournal” – years later, I’m blogging merrily for an audience of thousands.

“I’ll just retreat to FetLife and blog privately about my sex life” – years later, I’m discussing sex to an audience of thousands.

“I’ll just do silly stuff on Twitter” – years later, I’m Tweeting for an audience of thousands.

And in each of those circumstances, I’ve noted my own output becoming more performative as the audience accumulates – not unbearably so, because otherwise I’d quit, but every time I’ve seen that quiet calcification as I start pondering what my audience will think.  I start writing to wall off potential misunderstandings, close off portions of my life that I don’t want strangers dissecting, debate whether I feel like writing something that I know might become controversial. It’s not terrible, but it does change the experience.

I’m used to that with writing.

Gaming has been unalloyed until now.

And I wonder: If I start streaming on a semi-regular basis, will I eventually start to feel weird if I game without streaming?  How will the experience transform if I pick up enough regular watchers that it affects my habits?  Will I start playing during “prime-time” hours, or pick games that are more stream-friendly, or – as is most likely – alter my habits in ways I’ve never even considered before?

Will it make my life better?

Ideally, I’d just do what I see N.K. Jemisin and some other authors doing, which is “Hey, I’ve decided to play tonight, tune in if you want.”  But I’ve always been, perhaps, hypersensitive to the idea of being courteous to an audience, and I know that’s too deeply ingrained for that to change. I know I’d be like, “Well, I played for three hours on my own, they don’t know what’s happened, maybe I should catch them up – or maybe I should just play all the time…”

On the other hand, as mentioned, it was convivial. I like playing games. I like making snarky comments. I like swearing (and holy fuck, do I swear a lot when I’m gaming).  And, to be what’s apparently becoming a plus in the Twitch community, I would never break out the N-word while swearing.

So I guess what I’m debating – as I occasionally mull over in entries like this – is whether it’d be a good thing or a bad thing to start playing for an audience of any size > 1.

Because gaming’s fun.

And I’m not sure whether this would be more fun or less fun.

(You may note that I have not given out my Twitch handle, on account of I’m not sure whether I want to do this.  If you’re good enough friends with me that you know my email address and we’ve held a conversation somewhere, feel free to email me and ask for it.  And yes, whether you feel comfortable enough to email me is part of the equation here.)

So How Do YOU Self-Soothe During A Panic Spiral?

My therapist and I discovered that I have precisely one methodology for fixing my panic spirals: finding a problem and obsessively hammering solution after solution into it until I solve the problem.

I actually owe my career to this.

Because for me, writing has largely been my way of coping with stress. Am I breaking down because I’m breaking up? Well, here’s this story I’ve been thinking about writing, but the worldbuilding doesn’t hold together – so rather than worrying about the argument I’m having, I will instead retreat into engineering better imaginary worlds.

And I *will not stop*. My wife will tell you – if my book has a problem in the third act, I’ll sometimes spend a solid two weeks pacing the basement, unable to focus on anything else until that problem is fixed.

Which is, in its way, a superpower. Is there a bug in my program at work? I’ll sit in the tub, relentlessly going over the code logic, until I figure out what happened. Did we cross wires and get into an argument? I’ll analyze that conversation fifty times until I can figure out precisely where things went off the rails.

The Solution Spiral has become an axiom of my life. And it works. I mean, there are times when those two weeks spent crushing it in the basement have led to my best novel, and a new book contract. (That would be my time-travelling Wes-Anderson-Meets-The-Fifth-Element soup battle novel “The Sol Majestic,” available for preorder this fall, don’t miss it.)

But when a problem is so big that I can’t fix it, I enter into a panic spiral – and this one tool becomes a detriment.

Because often, there *are* no good solutions.

PROBLEM: This person you love dearly isn’t someone it’s healthy for you to date.
SOLUTION: Either break up with her, or break down.

I don’t like either solution, so I’ll enter into the Solution Spiral for days at a time because there must be a third option. (HINT: Sometimes, there is no third option.)

Or, more commonly:

PROBLEM: I said something stupid on the Internet again that I didn’t mean to say.
SOLUTION: Apologize and clarify as best you can, accept that some people you respect deeply will now dislike you.

Man, do I not like either solution, so I’ll enter into a tizzy of “THIS MUST BE FIXABLE” and spend sleepless nights envisioning the perfect essay that will repair my self-damaged reputation. (HINT: When you fuck up, there are often consequences you cannot undo, and sometimes the best way to become a better person is to remember that pain you caused yourself and others, and use that to forge a vow to do better.)

So basically, for small problems, I can retreat into fantasy worlds and use my obsession to plot better stories. (Yes, I know, that’s pretty much the entire concept behind my ‘Mancer series – escapist obsession turned to magic – did you think it wasn’t autobiographical?) And for mid-sized problems, I can actually fix them with obsession, given time.

But my therapist has pointed out that my one-fix tool leads me to break down when I’m facing problems with no easy solution. And she asked, “What other solutions can you devise?”

I’ve been thinking for a week, and got no good solutions. I’ve tried meditation on numerous occasions, but my thoughts are like a whirlwind when I’m in a panic spiral (though there’s the possibility that I haven’t been trained to meditate properly despite going to two Buddhist classes). Videogames help, but I don’t always have a game that I like enough. Cuddling helps a little, but it’s unfair to ask Gini to hold me all night for minimal gain.

Basically, I don’t have the tools necessary to calm a panic spiral. And so I ask: What have you found that worked?

I’ll make one caveat here: if you don’t have panic spirals, please don’t give your solution for a problem you don’t have. I want first-hand workable solutions from people who do experience this, not theories or “I had a friend”s. (But if you’re generous enough to point your friend here at this essay to ask ’em to weigh in, great!)

But yeah. I’m 48 and it’s time to find new solutions.

What helped you?