The Tear

Perhaps one of the smartest, funniest, and creative minds of our generation- comedian Louis CK- spit some fire in a conversation with Conan O'Brien:

"Underneath everything in your life there's that thing, that empty-forever thing, that acknowledges that it's all for nothing. It dawns on you: life is tremendously sad. So when it hits us when we're driving, thats why we text and drive! I was in the car and a Bruce Springsteen song came on. When I heard it, it gave me a like fall-back-to-school depression that made me really sad. I reached for my phone. Then I said, you know what, don't. Just stand in the way of the sadness, and let it hit you like a truck. I pulled over and I just cried." 

As someone with a long emotional history, I've learned that to deal with sadness, you must embrace it. This is unavoidable. Unfortunately, it's often our first instinct to run away from sadness when we first sense it. The faster you run, the more it will poke at you. The more it will tease you. The more it will convince you the opposite of the truth. The character Mae in The Circle learns to run away from her sadness through the use of technology, social media, and other various distractors. The more she attempts to "sew the hole" within her, the larger it grows. We will examine both the ways in which she avoids her depression, and the environment that allowed for this problem to arise. 

Throughout various points of the novel, it is mentioned how a "tear" opens up within Mae. While Dave Eggers never fully explains what this tear means, we can infer it to be Mae's dissatisfaction with herself; her deep inner sadness. Eggers describes the tear as "growing within her, opening quickly, a fathomless blackness spreading under her" (336). Rather than facing her sadness head on, Mae engages in various distractions such as checking "to see if Mercer's site was still down," pouring herself "far too much [sake]," and other online and social media-related activities (336). Mae finds that "the tear" will disappear after it visits for a while, only to return stronger. This implies that the activities that Mae uses to run away from the tear only perpetuate it more. This is perhaps Dave Egger's subtle way of hinting to us that we can only live with sadness once we embrace it.

It is worth noting that this defense mechanism isn't unique to Mae. In fact, we all use it to some extent. As long as someone is aware of when they're running away from their sadness and makes an effort to deal with it, they should be well-off. However, the environment in which Mae resides facilitates the growth of the tear. Everyone around her uses technology, social media, and every state-of-the-art thing in existence. Thus, she has a myriad of ways to avoid the tear. This defense mechanism is less Mae's "fault" and more a product of her surroundings.

The approach to mental health problems often seem counterintuitive. In fact, you might be surprised to hear that a therapist treating a patient with a phobia will often recommend that the patient expose themselves to their phobia. In the end, however, it makes sense; if we can accept the way things are, they will not surprise us. Sadness has a harder time overtaking us if we know it's coming.