During grad school, I realized a pattern of behavior. When I was happy, I would do silly things. To say the least possible, I’d overindulge. I noticed that when I was angry, I’d also overindulge. I’d get reckless. Happy or mad. It didn’t matter. To me, they became two emotions with the same agenda. I learned that the elevated feeling of happiness was as dangerous as the heightened vigilance of anger.

Last week, I had a lot to be mad about. This week, I have much to be happy about, and that concerns me in a super-mature-I’ve-been-to-counseling way.

Often, I go to a book when I want to learn something. This might explain why I peruse shelves of libraries and bookstores and inadvertently or intentionally gander the self-help section, where I find a potpourri of non-fiction related to fixing a broken life.

Sometimes, I take them home; other times, I get the audiobooks through Libby and listen to them when I’m running. I can endure running but cannot always always endure the self-help books.

The methods are vast in the analog and digital self-help literature, and the results are not. Self-help books universally result in sales. By the end of the book, what help happened? Distraction? Help is not a method; help is a result of methods. How can there be self-help when the self is the problem?

It might be impossible for someone to truly help another person—or themself—because help is out of the helper’s control. Someone helpful is doing other things that may or may not result in help. Help is one of those words that needs further scrutiny.

That being said, self-help books tend to be about things going wrong and appeal to our desire to make things right. So, I’ve also noticed that not many (if any) self-help books are about things going right. Isn’t that weird? My needs do not cease but rather change when things go right. Shouldn’t we need as much help when things are going right as when things are wrong?

I ask these questions because things recently came together for me. After a decade of hardship, I landed a full-time, relevant, empowering, challenging job that will make a difference in people’s lives. I have long battled my poverties to achieve this. Things are finally going right, and the future looks substantially different—stronger and brighter.

But I have learned that when things go right, we are prone to certain dangers, hazards, self-destructions, oblivions. Former NFL player and actor Terry Crews said, “Success is the warmest place to hide.” I agree, and so would Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, who sang in the song “Uncle John’s Band“:

Well, the first days are the hardest days
Don't you worry anymore
'Cause when life looks like Easy Street
There is danger at your door

How could this be? How could things be on the verge of falling apart when things are coming together? The question answers itself: the antithetical state of togetherness is brokenness. Something cannot fall apart unless it is together, but self-help books hardly advise how to sustain togetherness but how to sustain brokenness. Self-help books are diet books for lifestyles.

And in fairness, some people can benefit from self-help books for some of the time. Yet, this also means that the self-help market relies on perpetual brokenness rather than lasting togetherness. If not, the self-help industry would be unnecessary and self-defeating.

I look at the anti-woke and anti-racism books. I glance at the volumes of society-help books that depend on the same brokenness to justify their publishing. I watch the immigration crisis in the United States and realize the profitability of a broken government system for airlines, buses, hotels, laundry services, food distributors, and landlords. In my city, San Antonio, I see that about a fifth of the local GDP is owed to the military’s economic impact. This economy thrives on the waging of conflicts vis-a-vis broken international relationships. I look at the administrative bloat created by DEI offices in colleges and universities. I glimpse the photo filters children, teens, and adults use to enhance their appearance, and I notice the billboards for permanent cosmetic surgeries. There is money to be made in cornering what was left out rather than what was left in. If things weren’t so broken, many people would wind up broke.

The self-help industry, driven by profit, depends on the readers’ cyclical brokenness. But no matter what the book’s front matter promises it will “do,” it cannot really result in help, much less the help I’m seeking when things come together. Self-help books surfeit our insidious appetites for annihilation with saccharin.

I’m still processing how things came together and are coming together in an uncompartmentalized manner. I am experiencing togetherness, and thus, I am more vulnerable. John Steinbeck said in The Winter of Our Discontent that it’s not the big things that get us—it’s erosion. How do I face the forces of slow decay? What kind of binding agent will bond togetherness beyond mere concatenation? Even the strongest polymers are degraded by sun, water, air, pollutants, and microorganisms. I can add an egg to falafel and aquafaba to muffin batter, but how do I hold together this job, marriage, life?

I need God.