Life Sucks: How to Deal with the Way Life Is, Was, and Always Will Be Unfair - Hardcover

Dr. Michael I. Bennett, educated at both Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, is a board-certified psychiatrist, Canadian, and Red Sox fan. Aside from writing two books of keenly-phrased advice with his daughter, Sarah Bennett, he also has a private practice in adult and child psychiatry that he's been running for over thirty years. He lives with his wife and two dogs in Boston and New Hampshire.

Sarah Bennett has written for the internet, television, a monthly sketch comedy show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York, and the arts section of her high school paper. She's also written two NYT best-selling books of advice with her father. Mostly, Sarah walks her dog, watches Red Sox games, and enjoys being too old to care that much about most things.

Bridget Gibson is a freelance illustrator, concept artist, comic artist based on the Jersey Shore (yes, that Jersey Shore).

­­­Introductions Suck: Julie Durrell
Five Facts About This Book
 
Whether we’re a preschooler or a young teen, a graduating college senior or a retired person, we human beings all want to know that we’re acceptable, that our being alive somehow makes a difference in the lives of others.
 
—Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember
 
Fact #1: This book contains no magical answers or the keys to self-help, happiness, flawless contouring, etc.
 
Our experience has taught us that no matter what so many self-help books and well-intentioned therapists, teachers, and counselors tell us, those answers don’t exist. And pushing yourself to find them instead of dealing with what you’ve got will make you more frustrated, miserable, and mad at yourself. So even if this book doesn’t hold the secrets to fixing all your problems, it will show you how to develop your own unique problem-management skills.
 
Fact #2: This book makes one promise—that life is hard, but never impossible.
 
The only guarantee we can make is that life is difficult and often painful. And so many of the major factors that influence our lives, from the way other people act to our own emotional responses to things, are completely out of our control. Instead of learning to blindly trust and act on our feelings when it comes to making important decisions, it’s better to look for guidance from facts, experience, and the pride that comes from achieving the least-crappy outcome in an altogether crappy, miserable situation. In other words, we’ve found that your heart is full of blood and your gut is literally full of crap, so it’s best to follow your brain instead.
 
Fact #3: This book will ask you to give up on wild expectations, but not to give up on yourself and on doing the right thing.
 
Giving up on false hope doesn’t mean giving up, period. It just means letting go of your unrealistic wishes for what you hoped would happen, figuring out what aspects of the problem you can control, and readjusting your goals accordingly. The only thing you’re actually giving up is endlessly punishing yourself and feeling like a failure for no good reason.
 
Fact #4: Although this book’s for not-yet-adults, it’s really for everyone.
 
In theory, this book is aimed at not-yet-adults. We wanted to write a book especially for them, in plain English, about how to deal with life’s biggest issues, if only to try to reach readers early enough in life to save them some misery in the future. In reality, however, solid advice isn’t limited to any one age group. That’s because many of the most painful problems in life—no matter your age—stem from feeling different and alone, and feeling like an isolated weirdo can make anyone see themselves as a failure.
 
Fact #5: Although this book will not necessarily make you feel better, it will make you better at dealing with life.
 
In fact, if this book does promise any keys to life’s difficulties, it’s one so simple and obvious that we have no problem sharing it before the book’s even officially started. And that is: When the problem tormenting you is unsolvable, at least for the foreseeable future, the best way to get through it is to stay focused on doing your best to be a good person, despite how crappy you feel and how hard things are.
 
Our advice will give you methods for managing problems when happiness is not an option. It will also help you rate yourself, not on how much you’ve achieved, but on how hard you tried to do the right thing when good results and happiness just weren’t possible. And at the end of the day, that’s all any of us, at any age, can truly hope for. Even if most people or books won’t admit it, especially in an introduction.
 
 
 
How This Book Works
 
Structure:
 
Each chapter of this book will cover a big thing in your life that can suck: friendship, school, cultural differences, bodies, homes, and sexuality. Feeling like you don’t measure up to others in these areas—like you have too few friends or look too different—can make you feel more isolated, miserable, and generally sucky than any one person should have to put up with. 
 
Then, instead of telling you how to feel better, or offering solutions you’ve already thought of, we challenge you to use your own experience and sense of right and wrong to fight all the undeserved and unfair negative feelings and find a way forward. That’s why each chapter begins with a simple quiz to help you determine what your own values are and whether you’re living up to them—despite what you hear from parents, teachers, guidance counselors, and others or from your own negative feelings—or whether there’s room to improve and change. 
 
The chapters are then broken down into sections. Each one will use examples to illustrate advice for specific problems, separating realistic goals from false hopes. We’ll also help you decide what feedback is worth paying attention to and what’s negative and unimportant, even if it’s coming from those who mean well and really want to help. We’ll then offer realistic suggestions, not to fix or solve, but to manage those issues and the powerful, crappy feelings they cause. The advice will be broken down along these lines:
 
·         Signs You May Be Misinterpreting Things
 
·         . . . And Signs You Aren’t
 
·         What Your Parents Say to Try to Help 
 
·         . . . And Why It Isn’t Helpful at All
 
·         What You Think You Need to Figure Out in Order to Fix It
 
·         Why Those Fixes Will Fail
 
·         What You Can Actually Do About IT
 
·         Red Flags to Look For in the Future
 
·         The Un-Sugarcoated Suckiness You Can Expect
 
·         The Untrue Suckiness You Must Reject
 
Each chapter also has sidebars offering advice that’s both funny and brutally honest. Two sidebars that appear in almost every chapter are:
 
Do My Friends or Parents Have a Point?
 
Parents get to have a say in all aspects of your life, from where you go to school to where you live to whether or not you might end up with the genes for obesity (thanks a lot, great-grandpa ironically known as “Tiny”). Friends, on the other hand, are expected to provide all manner of advice, on everything, all the time. That’s why, when the people close to you try to control or just weigh in on more personal matters, it can sometimes feel like they’re taking things one step too far. 
 
Unfortunately, as much as it may seem like parental control should be limited, it can’t be, because it’s fueled by unlimited worry. Parents know that their actual ability to preserve your safety, future, and general well-being, despite all their efforts, is fairly weak. And while reliance on friends seems like it should be boundless, your friends’ expertise is often as limited as your parents’ concern is limitless. So before you greet every parental opinion with rolled eyes and every friend’s opinion as gospel, read these breakdowns of what they’re probably trying to say, no matter how unfair or clueless their actual words sound. Then you can decide whether their worries and criticisms are worth paying attention to or whether they’re overreacting and you’re eye-rolling just the right amount. 
 
How to Be an Ally
 
There are a few safe, reliable ways to help those in need, and many ways that trying to help can actually do harm. Your best approach for helping others is to think carefully about what you can do without taking on unnecessary responsibility and risk. That said, if you see someone who’s hurting because of their differences, we list some things you can do, and some things you should avoid, if you want to help out. 
 
So let’s get on with discovering all the ways that life can suck, how you can accept it, and all the good things you can do about it from there.
 
 
 
Chapter One
 
Friendship Sucks
 
 
 
For most people, it’s hard to imagine getting through life without friends. They’re the ones we have the most fun with, who make us feel better when we’re down, and who have our backs when bad people or big problems have us feeling cornered. Having friends seems like an important part of being a normal, happy person.
 
But if you don’t have a lot of friends (or enough friends, or sometimes, any friends), your parents might worry that you’re shy and uncomfortable around people your age, and your peers might think that there’s something wrong with you.
 
Your peers might think that anyone who doesn’t have lots of friends, or any friends, or has friends they don’t approve of, is weird, or a loser, or a bunch of other negative, hurtful things that can make you feel even more friendless and alone.
 
If you have trouble making friends or want to be friends with people who don’t want to be friends with you, it’s easy to believe those negative, hurtful things. You might wonder if you’re doing something wrong that makes it impossible for you to be likable. Which then might make you think the solution is to change yourself in order to find friends and get your parents and peers to think you’re “normal.”
 
The truth is that there are lots of reasons for not having friends, which you—or anyone else—can’t control or change. You may be the sort of person who’s more interested in spending time alone and maybe isn’t worried about having friends right now. Or it could be that you just can’t find anyone you want to be friends with. And you might not feel great about that, but it’s okay.
 
Of course, you’ve probably watched lots of movies and TV shows where the “nerd” or “weirdo” gets a makeover or a magical best friend who impresses the cool kids and makes our nerdy hero into the king of the school. In real life, a new haircut just invites more teasing, and magical creatures are hard to find outside of fairy tales. Trying to fix the problem of friendlessness by changing yourself usually just makes you feel more helpless and lonely than you did to begin with.
 
That’s why you shouldn’t ever feel like making friends is what you’re supposed to do, at least not until you’ve asked yourself whether making friends is possible and really better than spending more time alone.
 
Remember, being alone doesn’t mean you have to be lonely, and it certainly doesn’t mean that you’re a loser. You’re just making the best of not having friends for the time being, even if it means feeling lonely sometimes and having to listen to adults asking why you don’t have friends. It means spending your time doing homework or reading or finding a hobby. And while you’re doing that, if your school is truly a friend desert, you can keep an eye out for places outside of school where you might make friends, which can be anywhere from the library to a sports club to the local comic book shop.
 
And being alone or lonely should never push you to hang out with bad people and do bad things. Settling for the wrong friends, either because you think you need friends or because you want to make your parents happy, is just going to make everyone miserable. The wrong friends can tear down your confidence by not accepting you for who you are, or by dumping you when you need their support the most, or by getting you into trouble, or all of the above.
 
So when you feel friendless, not-friended-enough, or like a loser who’s doomed to be alone, the answer isn’t making friends by any means necessary or by doing something that makes other people, but not you, happy. The answer is to go slowly, figure out what you really need in a friend, and make friends only when you think they’ll be good for you (while learning to spot bad friendship situations and stay away).
 
Don’t let loneliness get you down when you can’t help being lonely. Ignore the jerks at school, the doubting voice in your head, and even your worried parents, and be proud of yourself when you have good reasons for being friendless and aren’t letting a bad situation or a load of bad luck get you down.
 
And when you do have friends around, accept that you might not always get along. Getting through those rough patches is a good sign of how strong and worthwhile your friendship really is. Real friends stick with you, no matter how not-fun either one of you is to be around sometimes.
 
How to Figure Out for Yourself When a Friendship Sucks:
 
The answers to many friendship problems depend on your own ideas of what makes a good friend and what makes a friendship worth having. Teachers, parents, and TV shows from the 1990s all have their own ideas of what kinds of friends you should have. But ultimately, it’s up to you—not your PE teacher, your dad, or Ross and Rachel—to figure out your own standards of friendship. Here’s a quiz to help you think about the things you should expect from a friend and from yourself as a friend. It will help you determine whether those expectations are reasonable or likely to cause trouble.
 
 
 
1
 
You get so sick with some puketastic virus that you end up having to miss three days of school and have no contact with your friends. You expect your friends to:
 
A) Totally freak out and organize a prayer vigil outside your house until you can hold down solid food.
 
B) Get in touch after the second day to find out what’s going on and offer to come by to drop off homework or just say hi.
 
C) Not forget your name when you get back, but not much else.
 
 
 
2
 
You catch someone you considered a close friend telling your secrets to a bunch of kids who don’t really like you, and they all share a good laugh. You decide to:
 
A) Fight fire with fire. Wait until everyone hears about that humiliating thing that happened to her last summer!
 
B) Calmly confront her about it later and see what she says—and if she denies it, don’t fight, just give her space and stay guarded when she’s around.
 
C) Laugh it off, because if you show you care then your friend will crank up the secret sharing.
 
 
 
3
 
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