Staaaaaahp...
The thing about my life right now is that even when I have a very good day, it's still a hard day.
Even when everything goes as good as possible I'm still getting human feces on me, I'm still having to consider my mother's genitalia enough to keep them clean and healthy, and I'm still accompanying her and my very weird cousin on his path to death.
See, the best case scenario in my life involves the death of four people. Two of them are already gone, and I've got two more to go. My function right now feels like it's taking the best care possible of myself so that I can be present with the remaining two for the duration.
Nobody expects this of me. Nobody told me to do it. Nobody dumped this on me.
This is all work that I choose every day based on my values and my resources. It is hard, often frustrating, often smelly work.
But I really do love hard work and I really do have strong convictions in my values around human dignity and How We Treat People. I don't expect others to share those values because they are all based in my lived experience and I do try to remember that other people probably don't have a lot of experience doing things like caring for someone who can't get out of bed, or who lives in an extreme reality tunnel.
I feel qualified to do this work, and I find it very rewarding.
I choose this.
Do you hear a but coming? I hear a but coming. Here's the but:
Even when it's a good day, it's still hard.
Having worked extensively on loading docks, I tend to think of my internal world as something very much like a loading dock. Organized, secure, clean, well lit, and all of the haz-mat is labeled properly and segregated. Much of my emotional baggage is crated rather than compartmentalized. These crates fit together and help make my dock stronger and more secure. When things feel crowded, I simply make the dock bigger and keep my lanes clear and all labels showing from the lanes.
I do things like grieving slowly. Over long periods of time I relax on my dock and uncrate a memory and sit with it while we commune with one another. Same for loving people. Same for working to understand my frustrations and angers. There is very much a time and a place for these things.
When I'm doing the daily work that I am doing now, it's like I'm taking in 200,000 lbs of freight, sorting it, and loading it back out on trucks every two hours for 18 hours a day. Sometimes that's a couple dozen nice neat crates. Sometimes it a gazillion boxes that need to be sorted and hand bombed into trailers. Or stacked on skids and shrink wrapped. I have neither the desire, nor the emotional energy to sit with my feelings and do them anything like the fair kindness they deserve.
I really do enjoy doing a job like this for a couple of years and simply throwing my whole spleen into the work and learning again how to pace myself and get enough sleep and eat right and put my mental health first even in moments of intense frustration and conflict. It's like a really focused period of education. Total immersion training.
This evening my Girlfriend asked me how I was doing. I had time so I typed my day out to her and she was like, “Whoa.” Yeah, I know, right? Then she got really brave and daring and decided to be tender and supportive of me? She offered to give me a bath or brush my hair?
I said, “What I really need and want right now is for you to find me a comfy chair with good reading light, my glasses, and a copy of Heinlein's Friday. Then you will establish and maintain a perimeter and ensure my solitude until I am done reading the book.”
She said, “Yeah. I can do that. I have a copy here. I will hold the perimeter.”
I relaxed about 8000% and nodded. This was good. This was kind. This was asking for what I needed and getting it in the form of acceptance of what I need (I can't have the real thing right now because of distance and responsibilities) and that acceptance of my need was everything.
And then she started offering me sweet, romantic, lovely things that were all really kind and honest and true about myself and my experience in this world. And it felt like I was covered in spiders and scorpions.
“Oh, god, oh, god, you're being kind at me. Please stop. It hurts. It burns us. Faaaaaaack. Give me some fucking humor to deflect this and let me pack it up and deal with it later because now is not the time for me to be feeling squishy and precious.”
I did not say that, but I was thinking it as my buttocks crawled farther away from my laptop.
Like, okay, stipulated: I am good, I am worthy, I am lovable, I am a valuable person regardless of how well I care for others or live by my own standards. Fantastic. We're going to put that on a post it note and keep it as a nice cognitive file and accept that it is true because it is obviously true about every other human I have ever met so it must also be true about me. Grand.
When I think about the kind of affirmations I want to get from others, I think of Farmer Hogget saying, “That'll do, Pig. That'll do.” That is like a harpoon to my heart. It drives past all of my defenses and touches me deeply without giving me any cognitive points to argue.
If you tell me that I'm kind, my brain says, “I choose to behave kindly. I am not inherently kind. if I were inherently kind, my kindness would mean very little. I would prefer to be killing all of you motherfuckers and then fucking the wounded survivors, but I choose to behave in a way that honors your inherent human dignity, cocksucker.”
(I might need a t-shirt that says, “I honor your inherent human dignity, cocksucker.” on it.)
If you tell me, “Well done.” or “I'm proud of you.” or even, “I'm happy to see you doing things that seem important to you.” I shall purr and wriggle around like a puppy. You have chosen to use language that frees up any cognitive arguments and stated your case plainly.
If you tell me that how I treat other people in person is so kind because I focus on the other person and care about where they are at and what they do, I will point out that my PTSD has granted me the ability to see every person I meet as a part of my survival team and I am interviewing them to see how we can best include them in our team. To meet their needs so that we can benefit from their skills.
Are both things true? Yes. I do care about those people. Also, I know that every single being is an asset to a survival team as long as they get what they need to be functional and they have a meaningful part to play in the survival work. Those two things are completely stuck together for me.
I care, and I'm figuring out what part you'll play in my platoon.
So... maybe say, “I like to watch how you engage with people.” and leave it at that.
Staaaaaaahp assigning motivations to my actions! My motivations are byzantine and I'm not always fond of them. Talk about what you can observe and how it makes you feel. Stop invading my cargo dock and pointing to things that I've got in crates for the moment and telling them how pretty I look when I wear them. Those things are in crates for a reason.
Engaging me in conversation and then diving into emotional places that I don't have the energy to traverse at the moment is cruel... and I have no idea how to recognize when that is happening in the moment and communicate clearly and kindly the level of my discomfort and desire to change the subject...
Huh. But now that I've articulated it, I can start looking for that and working on scripted phrases to change the topic when things begin to feel uncomfortable.
Oh, it's so lovely to be the kind of person whose emotions and cognition lead me to ideas like, “I'm really upset about something you said, but you did nothing wrong and it's something that I need to figure out, but if you do it again I'll hit you with a stick, and that will be my fault too, so I apologize in advance. Please move that stick farther away from me. Thank you.”
OKay. Breathe. It's all good. I got it all out on the keyboard and I didn't make things worse in the conversation. I know more about what is going on and characteristics of moments I can look for where I can choose differently than I have been doing. That's a good first step. That's a great first step.