Person in Charge

There have been lots of times in my life where what I want simply doesn’t matter. This happens to everyone of course, but it happened to me a lot, about many things where what I want has to matter. Where it not mattering was repeatedly traumatic and never made okay. I have lost a lot of myself to that. Tuned my brain to just accept that I can’t have what I need or want and to not think about wanting anything other than what I have. I’m not okay, but I know that it doesn’t matter if I am okay, and that I won’t survive if being okay is a prerequisite for being responsible. It’s the thing that makes me so zen and ready to improvise and keep going even when all of life is chaos and panic. It’s the thing that makes people actually want my attention in any emergency.

And so I’m responsible every time things are hardest. When everyone else bows out and runs away and panics and gives up its up to me to be sure life keeps going. It doesn’t matter that I’m hurt or afraid or incapable I have to do it. I know for a fact no one else will. And I don’t want to make you, because I love you and I know it will be hard. So it’s me, by myself, trying endure and make due until some future point at which you can pick someone better to do it for you, or until you can feel safe doing it yourself. When we get there I’ll be long past burnt out. You’ll be resentful with me for having been in charge, even though you didn’t want to be. And I will have sacrificed another piece of myself to hold things together until I wasn’t needed anymore.

That’s my burden, figuring out how to stop feeling like what I want and need and feel isn’t important. How to stop being responsible just because no one else is. How to allow myself to care about being afraid or hurt any of a dozen other things I have learned to disregard. How to trust that someone will help me recover even if I lose control. How to believe that my loss of control ¹I was afraid to drink for a long time because I feared losing any control. That and my fear that any imperfection in my interactions with an authority (e.g. rules against drinking) would remove the moral high ground of my technical compliance that I hoped would protect me. I revisited that fear when I tried other drugs. And I have been hurt badly … Continue reading won’t be the thing that makes everyone abandon me.

But you ²Yes, you. More than a couple of you have had these interactions with me. Some of you have them on a regular basis. Please don’t imagine I’m talking past you to someone else. can help too. You can take the time to respond instead of reacting when I propose new ideas. Instead of being afraid of everything I suggest and pushing it from your mind to avoid feeling the fear, you could have your feels and communicate with me about them. You can be afraid. Often I’m already afraid. But we could still imagine things together. We could try things until you found one that you didn’t hate. We could do lots of that trying just by imagining, so there’s literally no risk. And I can help you with the way that it’s fearful or overwhelming or otherwise intolerable. But only if you’ll stay with me. Only if the mere suggestion of an idea or a change doesn’t trigger you. Only if you decide that imagining things with me is okay, and that my ideas don’t hurt you.

Because one of the ways I was asked to believe that what I want doesn’t matter, is by having people tell me that my inspiration or desire hurts them. Which is exactly what your triggered panic tells me. That the world was better before I told you what I wanted – that we not only can’t have what I want but that you knowing what it is makes the world a worse place. Makes you upset to know. That if only I had kept my mouth shut and not let you see what I hoped for or dreamed or or wanted or needed – if only I had not been so selfish as to want something – at least you wouldn’t have been so upset with me. So defensive and isolated and trapped. I don’t want you to feel trapped. And you could help me live in a world where I don’t either.

I also feel trapped when you insist reactively that any change would be worse than the status quo. This is a natural reaction when you’re in survival mode. When something is desperately important and you can’t risk it getting worse it always feels safer to imagine that nothing changes. Even if it might get better eventually, even if your pretty sure it will work, you can’t risk the extra work required to try a change. Can’t risk the attention to even imagine it. Certainly can’t bank on the idea that the time and effort you put into it would be a net benefit. Your survival brain is the worst sort of Conservative – the terrified kind. You know that for the last quarter of your life thing A has been good enough to keep you alive, and so doing anything different, even if it might be better, is right out. You’re going to just stick with what you’ve got and not think about anything else. At least not until later. Tonight or this weekend or next week or next winter or after I finish my degree or when I’m ready for a new job or after my partner is gone – that’s what I’ll look at changes. For now though, it’s not worth talking about. It’s dangerous to even think about. Please stop bringing it up – you’re hurting me.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.