Do people who are bullied really turn into bullies?

There is a vicious, traumatizing and stigmatizing rumor going around about my son and kids like him on social media and even in the mainstream media.

I have run across the remarks and assumptions at least ten times in just the past two days, and I wasn’t looking for them or even aware that such a stereotype existed until very recently. This vicious, hateful and potentially deadly myth has it that people who were bullied as kids become bullies, anti-social adults and/or violent criminals.

A few real-life examples do exist and psychologists call them “bully-victims,” but they are far less common than the popular stereotype assumes.

Creative Commons image by Carolyn Langton

I have recently rejoined the world of social media after a nine-month hiatus prompted partly by a serious incident of online bullying (yes, it happens with adults too) and partly by the exhaustion of homeschooling kids with special needs during successive Covid lockdowns.

And this is what I found on my return. This vicious rumor against people like my son and like me, a stereotype painting people who were bullied as potentially violent and liable to lack empathy. It’s a myth often spread even by those who previously claimed to be allies.

Maybe the myth started with an incident or incidents of violence in which the gun lobby decided to make excuses about how the shooter was once called “wimpy face” as a child and thus the quick and easy availability of semi-automatic weapons had nothing to do with it. Or maybe it was just a way of blowing off steam about empathy-impaired people during the U.S. election. Either way, it is now a pervasive stereotype.

The comments are things like an acquaintance on Facebook posting under a story about a violent police officer, “No excuse for it! He was probably bullied as a kid and this is how he takes it out on others.” Someone else referring to white supremacists as “a$$holes who were bullied in high school." And a passing reference on the television news about the need for bullying intervention to prevent “victims” from becoming mass shooters.

The overall assumption is that a direct link exists between being a target of bullying and future perpetration of violence or cruelty. And that assumption is everywhere these days to the extent that admitting you were bullied as a kid is now more likely to result in distrustful glances than support and empathy.

My first reaction was hurt and irritation, when I heard about this myth. I was a target of bullying and social ostracism as a kid because of my vision impairment, my strange-looking eyes, my secondhand clothes and my family’s alternative spirituality and lifestyle. I had a lot of strikes against me. My son just has being a member of a locally high-profile racial minority, the only non-passing representative of such in his school. But that is plenty to get a kid knocked down and chanted at by groups of bullies.

I have overcome a lot of my past, but it is still hard to see my son going through it for something equally beyond his control. And now he’s saddled with yet one more stigma. Not only is he “a young brown male” and an ESL learner, he is now categorized as a potential perpetrator of violence and cruelty in the popular imagination because of something that was done TO him.

He’s ten and he’s at the tender and naturally open age where he reminds me to include our two cats when I tell someone how many “people” are in our family. Empathy isn’t something he’s lacking.

So, the comments hurt. But then my rational brain kicks in. OK, but maybe there is some significant statistical correlation between being a target and becoming a perpetrator. I sure have had enough rage at times to be able to relate. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge people who spread this stereotype. So, I go look up the stats.

The National Bullying Prevention Center has a page on bullying statistics. While the site says as many as one in every five kids is “bullied” at some point, there are a lot of things that they call bullying. Name calling and exclusion are considered bullying along side physical attacks. Those who experience pervasive and repeated bullying are a bit more rare, but still more common than most people like to think. Kids with disabilities and those who are identifiable as belonging to a minority race or religion at a given school experience much higher rates of bullying.

There is also a section on the effects of bullying. Unsurprisingly, kids who are bullied end up with increased risk of “depression, anxiety, sleep difficulties, lower academic achievement, and dropping out of school.” Kids who are both bullied and bully others are mentioned but only to note that they have increased risk of emotional and behavioral problems. So do kids who blame themselves for being bullied.

Another researcher, Tracy Vaillancourt, a professor at the University of Ottawa who focuses on “the bullying cycle,” claims that less than 10 percent of bullies can actually be considered bully-victims. Although she contributes to the stereotype somewhat by completely ignoring other bullying targets in her “cycle” theory, Vaillancourt, offers no guess, educated or otherwise, about what percent of targets actually turn into “bully-victims.”

The statistics don’t mention anything about being bullied making one more likely to bully others or more likely to become violent or anti-social in adulthood. In fact, despite a lengthy search, I could not find any study that hinted at this. Given the pervasive stereotype, the lack of any hard evidence makes me think the opposite is more likely true.

I do know from my own experience that being bullied has made me less likely to be a nice, quiet bystander who enables bullies. Hell hath no fury like getting a little light-hearted bullying in and then being hit crossways by a hurricane that was once an ostracized child.

But turn me to bully those even more vulnerable than myself? Not likely.

There was only one moment in my life where perhaps I stood on that precipice. I was huddled in an out of the way corner on a stairway during lunch in seventh grade when someone landed on top of me. I was bruised and my precious colored pencils were broken. I leapt up and grabbed the body of the intruder and started wailing away at his back with my fists. It turned out to be another bullied kid who had been thrown bodily down the stairway onto me.

I wish I could say that the two of us became friends and held out against the bullies together. I did let go of him and stop pounding on him when I heard the bullies laughing and I got a bit of a look at him. But he ran away and never went inside my short visual range again. It’s a story too often played out. Those who suffer from oppression and bullying are driven against one another to ensure that they remain powerless against their assailants.

But even in those worst years of terror and rage, I was never tempted to actually pick on someone else. There is an ingredient missing that I would have needed to make that even slightly appealing. One would have to feel that bringing someone else down or pushing them even further down would somehow raise you up. I know the theory, but none of the emotion behind it resonates. I never felt even a little tempted.

My son was in a tussle in preschool in which a friend grabbed a toy from him and he pushed the other boy. The boy lost his balance and fell over a bench and onto a pile of legos, which scraped his back. Because my son was the only child of color in the preschool and a member of a very controversial group in our area, some of the teachers and parents immediately labeled my son as a dangerous. There was even a petition to have him expelled, which failed without our intervention because there were also honest teachers who reported that my son was no more disruptive or violent than any of the other boys.

Since then, he has been the target of bullying by older boys in school, but otherwise he hasn’t been involved with fighting at school. I believe that after his experiences, he wouldn’t participate in bullying or harassing another kid.

I can’t be so sure that he would have the confidence to stand up to bullies on his own behalf or on behalf of another. Unlike me, my son has the temperament to be a follower or a bystander, but he also is the kind of kid to quickly empathize with another human or creature.

He is now in the period of childhood in which superheroes play a large role. He loves to fantasize about being a hero and stopping the bad guys. In our discussions and in our choices of bedtime reading, the topic is often real historical heroes who fought to protect the vulnerable.

I am not worried that my son may become a bully because he has been bullied. I do worry that he may follow others into unhealthy habits, including exclusion of others, because of his temperament and eager desire to make peace and be part of the group. But this is something that has been part of his nature since long before racist adults went after him in preschool.

Whether it is my tendency toward quick anger or his bent to go along with the crowd, neither of these are a result of. our experiences as targets of bullying, but rather natural characteristics which come from temperament. In the end, it is empathy that prevents people from becoming a bully and lack of empathy that may cause someone to become a bully.

There are actually life experiences which can impair a person’s empathy. Extreme rejection of a child by family, complete isolation from human contact and being raised in an institutional environment have all been linked to dysfunctions of empathy.

Even though I know some experiences can lead to disruption of empathy, I would not willingly participate in labeling those who have suffered such terrible abuse. Where there is real concern the focus must be on healing. The one thing science knows about redressing an actual dysfunction in empathy is that the only treatment is lots more empathy.

But there isn’t even a real concern when it comes to a link between targets of bullying and the perpetration of violence and bullying. There is no such link. Perpetuating such a stereotype is nothing more than piling on with the bullies to rain more blows down on vulnerable kids and the survivors they become.

Please stop it. Don’t make statements based on such an assumption. Don’t joke about it. Don’t speculate based on this stereotype. It does real harm.

Hair, identity, ageism and a pinch of joy

My mother tells me that she cut my long, wispy, ultra-tangly, white-blonde hair when I was five years old. Being a highly-opinionated and strong-willed child, I apparently screamed at her in a rage. She never did that again.

Eventually, I let her trim the split ends off of my wild mop of hair as a teenager, but I was highly sensitive to how much it was cut. I’m not sure where exactly I got this relationship to my hair.

I think part of it came from my family’s counterculture identity, which I clung to desperately. I was viciously rejected by kids in the small-town school I attended, because of my strange, wiggly, near-sighted eyes and my inability to adopt the subservient, non-centered role that might have won me pity rather than aggression. One of my reactions to that was to brandish my family’s counterculture identity like a shield, possibly as a way to beg the question: Was I really rejected because of something individual to me or was it a consequence of the clash of tribes?

This is me at a hippie-gathering c. 1979

And hair was part of that clash. The men in our family didn’t cut their hair when I was little as a statement of rebellion. My father and older brother both had long, lustrous locks, both thicker and much more easily brushed than mine. My father’s was a a rich, sun-streaked oak brown. My brother’s was golden as a cherub’s. My much thinner, flimsier and frizzier hair was bleached so nearly white that doctors speculated that my vision problems might be related to albinism, though I wasn’t a real albino.

The issue of girls’ hair was not nearly as culturally sensitive. Some girls in our circle did have short hair, often shorter than the boys. But somehow it stuck in my mind that long hair was part of family and clan unity, something I desperately needed.

That is why I had very long, very light hair as a young adult, a feature that stood out wherever I went, and particularly when I traveled in places where black hair was in the majority. It was, in fact, an ice breaker that gained me friendly hospitality in far flung places on more than one occasion.

One of my favorite memories is when I sat on the edge of a massive cliff in front of a Nepali village in the morning to brush my hair and thus attracted a gaggle of young women, who gathered around me with their own brushes and combed one another’s hair and my hair while the sun came up over the Himalayas in a dazzle of warm pastels.

By then, I knew that I had been right as a child. My long hair was an asset that I should never cut. It was finicky and difficult though. Brushing it was often a chore and washing it with the standard, commercial shampoos and conditioners I could afford was a recipe for pain, frustration and a lot of breakage.

I certainly never dyed it. Not only was its color firmly engrained in my identity as well, I was also afraid of what the harsh chemicals in hair dye would do to my already fragile and precarious hair.

Over the years, my white-blonde hair turned a bit darker, with dirty-looking streaks underneath. Sunlight still bleached the upper layer and no matter what hairstyle I tried, it always frizzed out around my face, making me look a bit like a mad scientist and acquiring terrible tangles. It looked best when left down in long, flowing locks, but given how fine and fly-away it was, the slightest breeze or any movement on my part resulted in a tangle that would take an hour or more to brush and leave me with fist-fulls of broken hair that progressively thinned what I had.

Eventually, I discovered through trial and error that the only brush that will handle my hair both gently and thoroughly is an afro pick. White people usually don’t know what exactly these are supposed to be for, so they just assume that’s what I like. Black people tend to give me confused (or sometimes amused) looks. My hair is about as different from African hair as it is possible to get, but that’s simply the only thing that works well.

Finally, in my late thirties my hair started going gray. As with the dark streaks it didn’t go gray in any decent way, just in unsightly patches. One year, I thought my hair was all going to fall out because even with the picks and expensive hair products, I ended up with ever larger fistfuls of fallen and broken hair when I brushed.

And that was around the time when I noticed that strangers started treating me differently. I’ve always gotten some strange looks from people on the street, especially if I don’t carry a white cane as explanation for my strange-looking eyes and my occasional odd way of walking or peering at objects. But this change was different.

When I was younger, everyone from officials to shop-keepers usually defaulted to kindness toward me, often condescendingly so, if they realized I was mostly blind. Still, in a wide variety of cultures, I had generally positive experiences with people I had never met before once I was out of the bullying ring of school. The issue of being actual friends with a blind person was always a different matter, but interactions were pleasant enough when they remained on an anonymous surface level.

Here’s my hair while I’m teaching ESL classes in a remote mountain cabin in the Czech Republic in 2016

That started to change in my late thirties. People in positions of authority are less likely to have mercy on me. Random strangers are less likely to stop and answer kindly if I ask for directions. Shop assistants are less likely to willingly help me. It feels as if I somehow lost a bit of my white privilege. That has made me wonder if I used to pass as abled a lot more than I thought. Maybe it is perceived abled privilege I lost. But I also see another possibility.

I think it’s ageism. The changes correlated exactly with the graying of my hair and the roughening of my face. And it tends to be a lot worse when I am not wearing a hat. So, there’s that.

Last year, when I was part of climate change protests and we had several of our own photographers taking thousands of pictures, I noted that although the core group was only about thirty people of which I was one of the most active, there was not one picture that showed my face in our database after several months. Every other person in the group was pictured many times.

Most of the people in the group were young. This is climate activism after all. But the few older men were seen in pictures. And two other women over forty were also in pictures, though not very often. Their hair was dyed and you couldn’t readily see their age.

But I was invisible. I was too busy to notice for many months until I was browsing the photo archives for an article, and the complete lack was striking enough to stand out.

That’s what I’ve been told happens to older women. After a certain age, you disappear.

I have never been very vain or hung up on appearances in general. My mother also says that when I was fourteen I told her I couldn’t believe people actually cared that much about visual first impressions. Since I couldn’t see such things and objective measures show first impressions to be misleading, I couldn’t imagine how it could be that important.

I did dress up for job interviews and wear professional clothing to work, but I saw this as more of a uniform than a ploy to make good first impressions. It was my positive attitude, skills and intellect I counted on to get me through doors. And for awhile, that worked.

I was fortunate enough to have a face that more fashion-conscious women told me didn’t desperately need makeup. I was young and healthy. and I did have that striking hair. So, until I started to age, doors were generally open to me.

That was another thing that closed down hard and fast in my mid-thirties. I can get tutoring jobs. I guess teachers are allowed to look old. I can get the occasional online writing gig where the image of my face is never considered. But I can’t get any other kind of job no matter how well my qualifications fit.

And networking to get ahead… Not a chance. That’s all about first impressions. I know that now.

Picking black berries in autumn color

A few years back I acquired a tutoring student who is a country manager at a major hair-care company. And she often commented on options for my hair and brought me samples of the company’s products. These helped to slow the shedding and breakage of my hair. And she introduced me to the idea of using natural henna and other herbs to dye my hair.

At first, the whole idea of dying my hair was disturbing. The color was almost as much a part of my identity. as the length. But somewhere, deep down, I had always had a desire for red hair, since the days when my idol was the cartoon of the Strawberry Shortcake doll and my primary imaginary friend in looked like her.

Then there was my long love-affair with Anne of Green Gables as a.teen in a household that only got educational television. One way or another, in my generation blonde was sort of considered “desirable” but at the same time blondes were ridiculed. Red-heads seemed to be somehow outside the rules of fashion and usually both strong and independent.

And of course, the main shade henna does is red.

But the hair-care manager insisted that this kind of natural hair dying could only be done at a salon with complicated methods and equipment. That was a step too far. Even if it weren’t an extravagant expense, I’m a DYI kind of girl. So, I still hesitated—until a red-headed friend from the Bohemian highlands told me that she colors the gray spots in her own hair with henna and that it is possible to do alone.

So, finally I found a source of a completely herbal hair dye and tried it. The first shade I used barely gave my hair a gold tint. So, I went for one that promised a much darker red than I initially wanted. The result was perfect, just the shade of strawberry blonde I had always wanted.

Here’s my new look.

I dyed my hair one sunny early autumn day when I was at home alone and waited to see what my husband would say about it. He was actually struck speechless for a moment and then showed uncertainty and concern. Had I done something rash again that would have negative social consequences? My son was equally disconcerted.

Finally, I found a few people online who liked my new color, but the response wasn’t unanimous, except from my ESL class of older women. They were all enthusiastic and their delight looked genuine enough.

But the thing that really let me know it is a good thing is that I can’t help smiling every time I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I haven’t enjoyed looking at myself at all in years, and I don’t think I ever actually felt good about my appearance. In some ways that’s enough for me.

So, I’ve learned that appearances do matter much more than reason dictates. I’ve found out what happens when people just don’t like the look of someone and what happens when a woman crosses the boundary into looking old.

I don’t like it and I see the dismissal of older women as a key component of our society’s patriarchal disease, but I have also accepted that it is our current reality. And I’ve realized a long-held, somewhat frivolous wish.

Am I buying in to the patriarchy by coloring my hair and hiding my gray? Some may think so. It causes me a twinge, but the joy I feel at having this one little bit of vanity for the first time outweighs it. I would have felt the same joy even if my hair wasn’t gray, but I didn’t know about or have access to a healthy hair dye in those years.

I hope you are likewise able to fulfill a wish every now and then (even one that is important to your heart). Fulfilling a wish beyond that necessary for survival gives joy in this time of Covid-19. Use these changes, whatever they may be in your circumstances to try something you always wanted to.

Keep your convictions strong. Keep openness and care for those who are cast out. After all, we are the ones who become the change..

Isolation is hard, but I already knew that

The past month of national coronavirus lockdown has been hard on my family.

We have a kid with serious behavioral, psychiatric and learning disabilities and another kid with dyslexia. We are coping with the excessive demands of insensitive and disengaged teachers. We’ve been learning to cook from scratch faster than ever before. There have been a few weeks in there where supplies were hard to come by and we had to get creative with our prepper techniques.

But I hear a very different kind of suffering echoing across the internet. Other people are suffering from social isolation, a loss of control in their lives and a complete disruption of their routines. Anxiety levels are skyrocketing and clinical emotional problems are exacerbated.

For awhile I was a bit mystified, at times even dismissive. How can all these people be so wimpy? Most of them don’t have kids with complex challenges and no one is emailing them with threats of failing grades for an assignment that was thirty minutes late due to internet problems. They’re just stuck at home, alone, resting!

I always did have sympathy for the people stuck with kids in small city apartments, but oddly those aren’t the complaints you hear most about. By and large, the loudest wails of distress are coming from the privileged suburbs. Those who I expected to be most vulnerable seem to be stoically silent.

At first, I wondered if this was because they didn’t have access to the internet. I contacted a friend who is a single mother in the inner city and asked in depth about their well-being. She assured me that they were coping well. She can still go to work and her ten-year-old has been semi-parenting and supervising homework for the eight-year-old and the seven-year-old for years already. Homeschooling them and herself isn’t that much more. They’re used to hard times.

I shook my head in wonder and went back to my own struggle, feeling decidedly inferior to the ten-year-old in the inner city.

But as the weeks have passed and I have observed the struggles of others (and read a certain amount of psychological analysis), I realized something significant.

That social distancing that is causing so much havoc for so many people… I know it well. I’ve lived it for years as a socially excluded person with a disability. The amount that I leave my house has only decreased slightly, despite the fact that we’re on national COVID-19 lockdown with only essential supply runs allowed.

Photo by Arie Farnam

My social contact has only been reduced a little, since there was very little of it to begin with. The only change in my daily routine is that my kids are home and I can’t do my work because they are so overwhelmingly needy and their teachers are insanely demanding.

That loss of control in people’s lives… I have always lived in a world where I had very little power in the outside world and I was forced to make harsh choices to build a life I love in the small area I can influence.

For years the decisions of others to exclude or include, to harm or to take have hit me like successive waves that I was powerless to deflect. My only power was always in how I took the waves and what I did with driftwood that washed up.

And that disruption of routine and the resulting rudderless confusion… I remember when I was in my twenties and I first left the shelter of structured education. It was terrifying for a few years. I spent almost every day alone. My work was independent and no one was giving me daily feedback. I had to create my own structure, my own schedule and routine. If I got any reward or consequence for my work or lack there of, it was in terms of months, rather than minute by minute or day to day.

And it was hard. I recall the months I spent struggling against depression, sitting among the boxes in a little room I rented at the time in a city where I had few friends and no family.

I knew that my life was in my own hands, that I had to get up and do the work despite the isolation, that no one else would do it for me and no one would help me. It was paralyzing and demotivating and such a heavy load.

As I start to realize these things, my empathy grows in bounds for the people experiencing this for the first time. Suddenly, the people who were out in the free world, who had a social life and regular jobs and culture and community have been thrown into a life that is much more like mine.

I remember the six years I spent almost entirely alone—often on two-week bouts of lockdown and enforced rest—while I struggled with intractable and medically unexplained infertility. I remember the many resolutions I made to study something, to use my open-ended time wisely, to be calm and to practice good grooming habits. Day after day, month after month, I started new schedules and forced myself into healthier routines.

Then as an inexperienced, new mother of traumatized children adopted from Eastern European orphanages, with no women friends to advise me, I spent the baby days battling the demons of despair, guilt, shame, depression and extreme loneliness. Without the ability to drive, it was nearly impossible to get to mommy-and-me classes for toddlers and when I made the mile-long trek into town, other mothers told me that my inability to make eye contact due to my disability made me unacceptable for their group.

So, I made my own music circle with my two kids. I put up colorful posters on the walls. I had an art project scheduled for every day. I tried to teach my preschoolers to cook. I started early reading programs with them and learned to garden.

But it took years! I’m not bragging. I’m aching for all the people facing isolation just now for the first time. If it feels really really hard. That’s because it is.

I’ve been there. And I didn’t overcome it in a few days or a few weeks. I did overcome it, but it took years.

In the end, I did learn a lot of great skills. I can now make my own schedule and I get up happily before dawn, meditate and go out to tend to my garden and animals all before the kids get up. But I didn’t start out that way. I was a wreck, a mess, like a lot of people report being a mess now.

It might help to listen to those people you know who have traditionally been somewhat isolated. Ask them how they stay sane and healthy. If you’re struggling with this, consider that while whole societies being at home in lockdown is unprecedented, you aren’t really the first people to experience it. And those of us who have known isolation and didn’t succumb to extreme depression, addiction or unhealthy living have skills that you can learn.

I have read several self-care articles out there on the web that try to teach these skills and I remember when such things sounded very unrealistic to me. They tell you to keep to a routine, to try to set a time to get up, to shower and get dressed as you used to when you had someplace to go. They tell you to eat regular meals and make sure they’re healthy. They tell you to limit your time staring at social media and scary news reports on TV. They tell you not to beat yourself up mentally when inevitably you fail at all of this.

So from experience,, are they right?

Yup, they’re right. Routine helps. A lot.

Regular bedtimes and waking times help. Personal hygiene isn’t just for the physical health concerns. It really helps the whole situation. It helps you feel purposeful and gives back some of that sense of control. Healthy eating and healthy sleeping both have major psychological effects. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve paid the unpleasant price for wasting half a day on social media.

But the thing I rarely find in these lists, the skill that I think I developed over time that has helped the most, is actually making a schedule for yourself with a purpose greater than daily survival in mind.

About ten years ago, I realized that my life was probably never going to change, that I was never going to be accepted and welcomed into the community and a wonderful group of friends. And somehow, against all the weight of years of depression and media programming that said friends are the sum total of a person’s worth, I decided to build a happy life anyway.

I started building it step by step, by deciding what I wanted in my life and scheduling it. I scheduled a daily spiritual practice and did it.

For the first few years, I didn’t manage to do it every day. Then there came a year that I did manage it every day, except once when I was really sick. For the next two years, it felt like an accomplishment. Then it became indispensable and something I would never voluntarily miss.

I’m close to that level on daily exercise, but not quite to the point where it is automatic. I have managed to get daily contact with nature, animals and gardening into my life. I’ve managed to make daily writing part of my life.

I now manage to keep a schedule for my kids schooling despite their vehement protests and natural disinclination. I manage to have regular and healthy meal times for the whole family. But it all started with scheduling a few things I wanted in my life, like spiritual practice and exercise.

If you’ve read this far, you are intrepid and I know you can do this. Focus on the essentials and on your core values.

Here is a method for developing a fulfilling life even when you’re in isolation:

1. Figure out a practical routine of waking, grooming, eating and sleeping that actually works for you in your given situation.

2. Set alarms and push yourself to stick to it.

3. When it falls apart, look at the routine and the clock and get back into it at that point. Don’t spend time and energy berating yourself for being lazy or lacking self-discipline. Like they say with meditation, just gently return to your focus.

4. Once those basics have been mastered, you will have somewhat more energy and less chaos around you. Use some of that mental space to think about your core values and what you really want in your life. If you have to work at the same time, consider your work to be one of the priorities.

5. Write down your daily routine with times when it works for you to fulfill it. How strict you are with those times depends on your personality and whether or not being relaxed about the times results in the routine being fulfilled or results in chaos. Learn from disasters and adjust the routine as necessary. There’s always another day to practice on.

6. Then choose one thing you really must reintegrate into your life. That could be the thing that provides income or it could be physical exercise. Both are essential. But choose just one for now, and write it into your time schedule. Try it for a few days.

7. Then choose the next most important thing and write that into the schedule.

8. As you add more priorities to your life, you’ll run into problems. Some things take longer than you think. You may start to experience real fatigue again and need to adjust your sleeping hours. Tackle each issue as it comes. There is nothing you can’t fix or at least improve.

9. When you have integrated the priorities you don’t want to live without, stop adding things to your schedule, at least for a while. Get the schedule down really well before adding optional extras. Then when you add something else, pay attention to the effect on your whole daily routine.

This is the basic method. Of course, it sounds easier than it is. If it was easy, everyone in quarantine would be fine. But I know from experience that it can be done. It can be done alone and it can be done with a spouse and kids. Each variation has its own challenges. The key is focusing on building a life that you enjoy, bit by bit.

A word about self-discipline: Yes, self-discipline helps. But society tends to view it as something you have or something you don’t have. Many people will fail at this routine again and again and think that means they lack self-discipline. The thing is that the discipline is the starting over every day. That’s the crux. Yes, there are people for whom sticking to the routine is easier and some for whom it is harder. Some of that is about tenacity but a lot of it is about whatever circumstances you find yourself in. The discipline part is failing and getting back at it again… and again… and again… and again.

A note about depression: Your propensity to sink into depression in isolation or due to failing at your routine is largely biochemical. You can’t entirely control whether you do or not. Healthy food, meditation, positive thinking techniques, contact with friends and (pleasant) family over the phone, exercise and sleep will all help ward off depression. Comparing yourself to other people with different biochemistry generally will not help.

A note about purpose: One of the greatest and least discussed antidotes to depression is purpose. You can’t feel purposeful very well unless you have mastered the basic routine, but once you have, it may help a great deal to choose something you want to accomplish during this quarantine time. It can be as simple as building some abs through a lot of exercise on your yoga mat in a small apartment, or it can be as grand as preparing applications for graduate school or writing that book you’ve always wanted to write.

If you are, like me, stuck in a situation where purpose is elusive because each day is still a massive struggle to get through even the basics, whether that is due to harsh physical conditions, crowded conditions or disabilities, you likely already know there aren’t a lot of simple answers. But keeping to a little bit of greater purpose still helps me.

Hang in there. Keep getting up, even when it feels hopeless and useless. The use is always in the fact that your life will be more enjoyable if you create your own routine and schedule, even if just vegging out may feel enjoyable in the short-term. You’ve probably done that enough by now to know it doesn’t actually pan out that way.

Stay in touch with those you love far away, stay awake inside yourself and build what you want your life to be like within the external conditions. These are the things I learned through isolation.