I just started reading A Thousand Names for Joy, a self-help book by a woman named Byron Katie. I think ol’ By and I are off to a bad start because I’m already turned off by her name. She says everyone calls her Katie, which I assumed was her last name. Odd, I thought, but not too bad considering how everyone currently names their daughters Madison or Morgan or some other last name of a dead president or industrial tycoon from the early 1900s. But then I noticed the copyright page lists her full name as Byron Kathleen Mitchell. So Katie is short for Kathleen? Which means this bitch is insisting everyone call her by her first name (the last name of a dead male poet) and an abbreviation of her middle name? As though these two names create an acceptable substitute for a normal first name and a surname? I wasn’t past the copyright page and I was already exhausted.
Katie is known for an earlier book called Loving What Is. In that book, she encouraged readers to let go of negative thinking by asking themselves a series of questions when negative thoughts arise:
1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?
She calls this process of asking and responding to these questions “The Work.” I was totally into these questions for a hot minute. I was even willing to see past the fact that she gave a four-question process a pretentious title and even capitalized it as though it was some ancient, mystic ritual. I was ready to sign up for her next workshop and have some kind of breakthrough while weeping on her shoulder about my broken relationship with my biological father. Then I went to her website and noticed that tuition at her nine day workshop in L.A. costs $3,000. Three thousand dollars? So I can sit in a room with 50 other people who can’t get over their ridiculous, depressing fixations and listen to them blubber and cry? “Well, it is nine whole days of that,” I thought. “Certainly she gets points for quantity.” But then I’d have to pay another $1500 for accommodations, and I don’t think the Hotel Byron will accept my Hampton Inn Rewards Club points. The registration page doesn’t even clarify whether or not $1500 includes a complimentary breakfast with make-your-own-Belgian-waffle station.
I made it to page seven this morning before wanting to slap Katie in the face with sock full of litter-encrusted cat poo. Here, she talks about how some people prefer Mozart over rap music and vice versa, and how this is indicative of a mind that can’t embrace the wonders of the universe in all their diverse forms. She states, “I don’t hear anything as noise. To me, a car alarm is as beautiful as a bird singing.”
This is precisely the problem with all of the self help books on the market that I’ve ever read. They emphasize that we can all end our own suffering by no longer labeling anything as good or bad and by realizing that we’re all connected. I’m you, you’re me, we’re all eternal, nothing is serious, the world as we know it is a fantasy cooked up by our bored, negative brains, and even terminal illness is a wondrous adventure to be savored and cherished. That’s great for Katie, who apparently loves to back that thang up as much as she loves a good concerto composed by the Viper’s full line of vehicle theft deterrents. But what about the rest of us?
Where is the book full of folksy wisdom and intelligent, practical counter arguments to the common thoughts we all have when we’re feeling blue? Am I just too low-brow for all these highfalutin’ self-help books? Is my real flaw that I haven’t accepted Chicken Soup for the Soul as my Lord and personal savior? Surely there’s a middle ground. There has to be a book that reminds me not to sweat the money I’ve lost on my condo because my future will be filled with opportunities to make money in ways I haven’t even thought of yet, right? Surely there’s something out there that emphasizes the value of looking on the bright side without expecting me to smile every time a car alarm goes off outside my window. But until I find it, it looks like I’m stuck with Lord Byron Kathleen “Katie” Mitchell and The Work. I guess it could be worse. I could be Jenny McCarthy and believe vaccinations make kids autistic and a few years of picking my nose on MTV’s Singled Out make me qualified to “produce” Katie Byron’s latest money-grabbing enterprise, Turn It Around. (Katie Byron would like to emphasize that her Turn It Around inspirational video is in no way affiliated with Megan Mullally, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, or the “Turn the Tub Around” ad campaign.)