Unselfish Misery

With a quote from "Sense and Sensibility" by Jane Austen

Do you ever catch yourself wanting to bring others down to feel as miserable as you when you are going through a difficult time? I will pick a silly example. Sometimes when I am sick, I want to just be completely helpless, or at least to act completely helpless, so that others will just pamper me and take care of everything and remove all responsibility from me to do the normal things I should do. However, most sicknesses are not really that debilitating. With effort, I can usually do most of the same things I normally do even if I have a headache or the sniffles. Anything short of frequent vomiting is honestly something I can mostly ignore if I put in enough effort. But my selfish desires at those times can sometimes be to act helpless and get my wife to take care of everything.

Now you may think that is silly, but it is a real thing I have thought about. Should I not give every effort I can to continue to support my wife even if I am not feeling well? In my opinion in sickness and in health doesn’t mean when I am sick I can stop being helpful. I think that I should always do what I can to think about how my actions will affect others. In Jane Austen’s novel “Sense and Sensibility,” Elinor provides a good example of what this might look like when the man she is in love with leaves and she doesn’t know when she will see him next. Shortly before this, her sister Marianne was inconsolable when the man she thought she was going to marry left in a similar manner. She made life miserable for everyone around her with her dramatic wailings at her horrible misfortune. But Elinor reacted quite differently:

“Elinor sat down to her drawing-table as soon as he was out of the house, busily employed herself the whole day, neither sought nor avoided the mention of his name, appeared to interest herself almost as much as ever in the general concerns of the family, and if, by this conduct, she did not lessen her own grief, it was at least prevented from unnecessary increase, and her mother and sisters were spared much solicitude on her account.

Such behaviour as this, so exactly the reverse of her own, appeared no more meritorious to Marianne, than her own had seemed faulty to her. The business of self-command she settled very easily;—with strong affections it was impossible, with calm ones it could have no merit. That her sister’s affections were calm, she dared not deny, though she blushed to acknowledge it; and of the strength of her own, she gave a very striking proof, by still loving and respecting that sister, in spite of this mortifying conviction.

Without shutting herself up from her family, or leaving the house in determined solitude to avoid them, or lying awake the whole night to indulge meditation, Elinor found every day afforded her leisure enough to think of Edward, and of Edward’s behaviour, in every possible variety which the different state of her spirits at different times could produce,—with tenderness, pity, approbation, censure, and doubt. There were moments in abundance, when, if not by the absence of her mother and sisters, at least by the nature of their employments, conversation was forbidden among them, and every effect of solitude was produced. Her mind was inevitably at liberty; her thoughts could not be chained elsewhere; and the past and the future, on a subject so interesting, must be before her, must force her attention, and engross her memory, her reflection, and her fancy.”

Elinor was in fact not lacking in feeling as Marianne so ungraciously assumed. Instead, she was anxiously engaged in a good cause. She tried to fill her time with good things and found that, while that in and of itself didn’t remove her grief, it prevented it from increasing and from affecting her mother and sisters at the same time. In this very specific case, Elinor determined that there was no positive reason for her to wear her feelings on her sleeves as the saying goes. How can we know if it is a case where we should try to not heap our troubles onto others? I would say we can follow what Elinor does. Throughout the novel she is consistently thinking of how her actions will affect others, and on what she can handle without negatively impacting her loved ones. There is a time later in the novel where Elinor has an open conversation with Marianne and tells her of the difficult feelings she has gone through, but it is at a time and place when Marianne was open to it, and it helped Marianne and Elinor both to go through those difficulties together. I am not saying you should never need help. I am saying that all of us, myself included, could probably do better at avoiding loading our burdens onto the backs of others who are not always in any better position than we are to carry them. We can and should try to get through our misery in as unselfish a manner as possible.