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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
When I do December Days, often times there's at least one of the topics that's either heavier or significantly more negative than the other ones in the lot. Because my culture is at least a little triskadecaphobic, I usually reserve slot number thirteen for that topic. In some other space, it would be number four, or whichever part of the numerology that is the unlucky number.
This is the heavy topic, because this is a community that I wouldn't want to join, if i had the choice to avoid it without negative consequences. I suspect many of the other people in this group would not have chosen it, if they could have avoided the situation without negative consequences.
Many people chose to get semicolons as tattoos, as the semicolon in several typographies indicates the clause is finished but the sentence continues on. It is a testament to humans, individually and collectively, that we are extremely adaptive and can survive in all kinds of environments, natural and created. We can adjust to so many things, even when the things we are adjusting to are not actually healthy for our bodies or brains. Thus, the statement about how it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Or a profoundly sick relationship or workplace. And I hit both of them not that soon after starting to live on my own. The boss of the workplace did not understand how to manage me, and did not offer much in the way of trying to figure out how to manage me for my best productivity, and did not take much look at the things I was doing well in her zeal to get rid of someone that was working differently than what she expected. Some of my co-workers were trying to hasten my departure, I will believe. I was probably incompatible with them as much as I was with the boss, and I know that one complained a fair amount about me and what I was doing, especially the things that weren't intentional, to later managers, until she retired. For all I know, there are still some people I work with complaining about me. It does not make for a good workplace when interpersonal issues are being mediated through the manager first. (But for all I know, they've tried to work it out with me before and I resolutely keep doing the thing that's annoying them, because I haven't yet been told in a way that sticks that this is something that's annoying them, or they haven't asked how the best way to work with me is.)
At least, for the manager that tried to fire me, I survived. It has left me skittish about a lot of things, and the accumulated weights of complaints and stresses that come from not knowing whether or not the people around you actually want you there or want to work with you is responsible for at least one of my daily medications. Because when your body rebels against the stress with an anxiety attack, you have to find ways of getting the anxiety to drop. It was still miserable, trying to figure out what the actual cause of the issues were when examining what I said were the affected areas did not produce any physical entities that would have caused such things. Once it became clearer that it was anxiety, well, then we got it under control with the medication. The meditation courses and exercises helped, yes, but ultimately there was no toughing through it, and it was not something that was a spike and then a retreat back to normal. It is my new normal now, no matter how much I would like to instead be the person who had a better workplace for them to start with and who therefore doesn't have all of this accumulated anxiety that needs managing. Hooray for better living through chemistry, all the same. (And yes, I do have rescue medicine in case of breakthrough situations.)
My ex and that relationship didn't help my stresses. What my ex wanted was less of a partner and more of a pet, someone who would take care of her so she didn't have to put forward the same kind of effort that she had need to when taking care of her late husband. (Fuck cancer forever.) Unfortunately for her, I don't make the same kind of money her late husband did, and that pretty well set the stage for the major-most concern of things. A more sensible person might have recognized that things were not going according to plan, or that the partner who was making the money was making concerned noises about it, or even that when she was making concerned noises about the money that the partner that was making it was providing as their half of the expenses, that perhaps some adjustments were in order to make things happier and more harmonious. That didn't really happen.
There were other things, as well. The people who hung out with her kept hanging out with her and welcomed me in as best they could. The people who I had been hanging out with all eventually stopped hanging out with us, because they wanted to hang out with me and she didn't really like that, because, at least according to her, we should be able to do things together. Of course, part of wanting to hang out with me was to give me some independence, and also because my friends had formed some well-justified negative opinions of her. She might have picked up on that, and not wanted me to hang out with my friends because they might try to convince me to break up with her or otherwise try to change things from a way that suited her. The me of this era, and the friends and people I had of that era, could see the warning signs that I was ignoring because I was trying to make that relationship work, instead of admitting incompatibility and breaking it off. Because those signs were there from the beginning, and I brushed them off as inexperience or not actually knowing if this was expected or this was out of bounds. Depending on who I asked, even of those who were knowledgeable, I would have gotten very different answers and had no greater enlightenment. This inability to gain a firm foothold on what the shape of a relationship such as ours was supposed to look like, what kinds of boundaries needed to be established, made it harder to come to the determination that the relationship itself was good for her and bad for me. As did the usual parts where relationships are sometimes good, sometimes less good, and that you don't generally break up at the first sign of a fight or a disagreement. The perfectionist got in as well, because a breakup indicates a failure, and failures are things to be avoided.
It also wasn't until very far into the relationship that me ex revealed that she'd been operating on a completely different logic than I had, and hadn't bothered to explain to me what it was. Even with some of the distress signs that I was making, especially as they started overlapping and merging into a more constant state of distress at work issues, at relationship issues, at money issues, and all the rest. She told me, eventually, that she treated anything that wasn't a direct no as a "try to convince me of this thing." Whereas I had learned that direct no was rude and likely to make your partner upset with you if you used it that often. So I had to learn "No is a complete sentence" and start using it. I'm sure she had learned by that point that when I am couching and softening my no into things like "I don't think so," "Not right now," or "Maybe not," that it still meant "no," but she chose not to honor or respect that and instead pushed for what she wanted and tried to convince me of it. Which, for me, was not "you haven't said the magic last word," because how would I intuit that? It was "I'm saying that I want this, even though you've said no, and I'm insisting on my reasons," which made me rethink about it in light of this new priority statement. I had some limited success with the construction of "if that's what you want, I can get you some, but I'll pass on it for me," and then she didn't want to do it, because she wanted me to participate in those things as well, rather than be doing things for her and not for myself. Because if it was just for her, then it was harder to justify it.
Also, unsurprisingly, when I started using no more directly, since she had said that was the only thing that would work, she got mad at me for using a direct no with her. None of the polite forms would work, because she didn't consider them real no, and direct no was rude to her, because it was denying her what she wanted. I was in a situation where I could not assert myself as a partner, or as someone who might have some amount of authority in the relationship, or even at least as someone who needed to be humored when they were expressing concerns about the way things were going and trying to find a way to say "there have to be changes in the way things are if we want our situation to be stable." Because, ultimately, what got me out of the relationship is physical distance, which proved the whole "breaking up" thing wasn't just me saying it and then falling back into routine, and the likelihood that I was going to end up severely harming my finances, not so that the problem could then be fixed and worked through, but just to buy time and stave off the inevitable collapse and disaster. Earlier in the relationship, I had thought about the possibility of exchanging myself for what financial payouts would happen if I were inhumed, even though I also knew that if there was even the thought that it was self-inflicted, there would not be payout. I decided against it then, because I knew that it would not be a permanent fix to the problem, only something that would delay the inevitable. Also, because the math didn't math for being an effective stopgap, much less a permanent situation. And, terrible a thought as it might be, twisted as the logic was, I wasn't going to put her in that situation where she had only a bandage on the wound. Because I knew she couldn't manage the money well enough to actually get out of the situation we were in. So, as it turns out, even then I knew I had found the thing that I couldn't do for the relationship. I couldn't create a financial disaster for myself or for us. So, to stave off the greater failure, I ended up eating the smaller one. And because of that, and because of the new friends I had made, and at least one of them embarking on a campaign to save the person that they knew was hurting from the situation they were in, and finding out that my friends were still there for me and still wanted to stay my friends, I survived. (And just as well. If I had to survive the current pandemic with my ex, I don't think it would have gone over well, and I probably would be sitting on a lot more infections, or worse, than what my current tally is.)
I am a survivor, and someone can argue that membership in that community is chosen, but it is the kind of choosing that leaves permanent marks on you and fundamentally shifts the way that you experience and see the world. It is often the choice made when the alternative is unacceptable, whether for self-preservation, for spite and malice, because there are other people still there and you can't leave them behind, or because there's some other principle that has a deeper hold on you than the desire to find a way out of the situation by whatever means will make the hurting stop.
These are selfish tales of survival. These are stories of falling into holes that turned out not to be the grave, and then finding my way out of those holes that are not the grave, but not before contemplating whether this hole should be the grave. This is not a place of honor. No great deeds are immortalized here. Do not read strength or heroism into this story, it is not there. My survival is not necessarily a thing to be lionized. It is not necessarily a thing that gives me superhuman strength, endurance, or perspective. I am not forged in greater stuff because of it. That which did not kill me did nothing but give me trauma. ("That which does not kill me makes me stranger.") If you seek a narrative of "Nevertheless, they persisted," seek elsewhere, for this is a story chiefly of disappointment, self-blame, and negative self-worth. There is no happily ever after. If there is any virtue that comes from having experienced this, it is by accident, by the influence of chaos and randomness. My story is not done, but only because I survived. There is only a semicolon. The end of a clause, but not the end of the sentence.
When I do December Days, often times there's at least one of the topics that's either heavier or significantly more negative than the other ones in the lot. Because my culture is at least a little triskadecaphobic, I usually reserve slot number thirteen for that topic. In some other space, it would be number four, or whichever part of the numerology that is the unlucky number.
This is the heavy topic, because this is a community that I wouldn't want to join, if i had the choice to avoid it without negative consequences. I suspect many of the other people in this group would not have chosen it, if they could have avoided the situation without negative consequences.
Many people chose to get semicolons as tattoos, as the semicolon in several typographies indicates the clause is finished but the sentence continues on. It is a testament to humans, individually and collectively, that we are extremely adaptive and can survive in all kinds of environments, natural and created. We can adjust to so many things, even when the things we are adjusting to are not actually healthy for our bodies or brains. Thus, the statement about how it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Or a profoundly sick relationship or workplace. And I hit both of them not that soon after starting to live on my own. The boss of the workplace did not understand how to manage me, and did not offer much in the way of trying to figure out how to manage me for my best productivity, and did not take much look at the things I was doing well in her zeal to get rid of someone that was working differently than what she expected. Some of my co-workers were trying to hasten my departure, I will believe. I was probably incompatible with them as much as I was with the boss, and I know that one complained a fair amount about me and what I was doing, especially the things that weren't intentional, to later managers, until she retired. For all I know, there are still some people I work with complaining about me. It does not make for a good workplace when interpersonal issues are being mediated through the manager first. (But for all I know, they've tried to work it out with me before and I resolutely keep doing the thing that's annoying them, because I haven't yet been told in a way that sticks that this is something that's annoying them, or they haven't asked how the best way to work with me is.)
At least, for the manager that tried to fire me, I survived. It has left me skittish about a lot of things, and the accumulated weights of complaints and stresses that come from not knowing whether or not the people around you actually want you there or want to work with you is responsible for at least one of my daily medications. Because when your body rebels against the stress with an anxiety attack, you have to find ways of getting the anxiety to drop. It was still miserable, trying to figure out what the actual cause of the issues were when examining what I said were the affected areas did not produce any physical entities that would have caused such things. Once it became clearer that it was anxiety, well, then we got it under control with the medication. The meditation courses and exercises helped, yes, but ultimately there was no toughing through it, and it was not something that was a spike and then a retreat back to normal. It is my new normal now, no matter how much I would like to instead be the person who had a better workplace for them to start with and who therefore doesn't have all of this accumulated anxiety that needs managing. Hooray for better living through chemistry, all the same. (And yes, I do have rescue medicine in case of breakthrough situations.)
My ex and that relationship didn't help my stresses. What my ex wanted was less of a partner and more of a pet, someone who would take care of her so she didn't have to put forward the same kind of effort that she had need to when taking care of her late husband. (Fuck cancer forever.) Unfortunately for her, I don't make the same kind of money her late husband did, and that pretty well set the stage for the major-most concern of things. A more sensible person might have recognized that things were not going according to plan, or that the partner who was making the money was making concerned noises about it, or even that when she was making concerned noises about the money that the partner that was making it was providing as their half of the expenses, that perhaps some adjustments were in order to make things happier and more harmonious. That didn't really happen.
There were other things, as well. The people who hung out with her kept hanging out with her and welcomed me in as best they could. The people who I had been hanging out with all eventually stopped hanging out with us, because they wanted to hang out with me and she didn't really like that, because, at least according to her, we should be able to do things together. Of course, part of wanting to hang out with me was to give me some independence, and also because my friends had formed some well-justified negative opinions of her. She might have picked up on that, and not wanted me to hang out with my friends because they might try to convince me to break up with her or otherwise try to change things from a way that suited her. The me of this era, and the friends and people I had of that era, could see the warning signs that I was ignoring because I was trying to make that relationship work, instead of admitting incompatibility and breaking it off. Because those signs were there from the beginning, and I brushed them off as inexperience or not actually knowing if this was expected or this was out of bounds. Depending on who I asked, even of those who were knowledgeable, I would have gotten very different answers and had no greater enlightenment. This inability to gain a firm foothold on what the shape of a relationship such as ours was supposed to look like, what kinds of boundaries needed to be established, made it harder to come to the determination that the relationship itself was good for her and bad for me. As did the usual parts where relationships are sometimes good, sometimes less good, and that you don't generally break up at the first sign of a fight or a disagreement. The perfectionist got in as well, because a breakup indicates a failure, and failures are things to be avoided.
It also wasn't until very far into the relationship that me ex revealed that she'd been operating on a completely different logic than I had, and hadn't bothered to explain to me what it was. Even with some of the distress signs that I was making, especially as they started overlapping and merging into a more constant state of distress at work issues, at relationship issues, at money issues, and all the rest. She told me, eventually, that she treated anything that wasn't a direct no as a "try to convince me of this thing." Whereas I had learned that direct no was rude and likely to make your partner upset with you if you used it that often. So I had to learn "No is a complete sentence" and start using it. I'm sure she had learned by that point that when I am couching and softening my no into things like "I don't think so," "Not right now," or "Maybe not," that it still meant "no," but she chose not to honor or respect that and instead pushed for what she wanted and tried to convince me of it. Which, for me, was not "you haven't said the magic last word," because how would I intuit that? It was "I'm saying that I want this, even though you've said no, and I'm insisting on my reasons," which made me rethink about it in light of this new priority statement. I had some limited success with the construction of "if that's what you want, I can get you some, but I'll pass on it for me," and then she didn't want to do it, because she wanted me to participate in those things as well, rather than be doing things for her and not for myself. Because if it was just for her, then it was harder to justify it.
Also, unsurprisingly, when I started using no more directly, since she had said that was the only thing that would work, she got mad at me for using a direct no with her. None of the polite forms would work, because she didn't consider them real no, and direct no was rude to her, because it was denying her what she wanted. I was in a situation where I could not assert myself as a partner, or as someone who might have some amount of authority in the relationship, or even at least as someone who needed to be humored when they were expressing concerns about the way things were going and trying to find a way to say "there have to be changes in the way things are if we want our situation to be stable." Because, ultimately, what got me out of the relationship is physical distance, which proved the whole "breaking up" thing wasn't just me saying it and then falling back into routine, and the likelihood that I was going to end up severely harming my finances, not so that the problem could then be fixed and worked through, but just to buy time and stave off the inevitable collapse and disaster. Earlier in the relationship, I had thought about the possibility of exchanging myself for what financial payouts would happen if I were inhumed, even though I also knew that if there was even the thought that it was self-inflicted, there would not be payout. I decided against it then, because I knew that it would not be a permanent fix to the problem, only something that would delay the inevitable. Also, because the math didn't math for being an effective stopgap, much less a permanent situation. And, terrible a thought as it might be, twisted as the logic was, I wasn't going to put her in that situation where she had only a bandage on the wound. Because I knew she couldn't manage the money well enough to actually get out of the situation we were in. So, as it turns out, even then I knew I had found the thing that I couldn't do for the relationship. I couldn't create a financial disaster for myself or for us. So, to stave off the greater failure, I ended up eating the smaller one. And because of that, and because of the new friends I had made, and at least one of them embarking on a campaign to save the person that they knew was hurting from the situation they were in, and finding out that my friends were still there for me and still wanted to stay my friends, I survived. (And just as well. If I had to survive the current pandemic with my ex, I don't think it would have gone over well, and I probably would be sitting on a lot more infections, or worse, than what my current tally is.)
I am a survivor, and someone can argue that membership in that community is chosen, but it is the kind of choosing that leaves permanent marks on you and fundamentally shifts the way that you experience and see the world. It is often the choice made when the alternative is unacceptable, whether for self-preservation, for spite and malice, because there are other people still there and you can't leave them behind, or because there's some other principle that has a deeper hold on you than the desire to find a way out of the situation by whatever means will make the hurting stop.
These are selfish tales of survival. These are stories of falling into holes that turned out not to be the grave, and then finding my way out of those holes that are not the grave, but not before contemplating whether this hole should be the grave. This is not a place of honor. No great deeds are immortalized here. Do not read strength or heroism into this story, it is not there. My survival is not necessarily a thing to be lionized. It is not necessarily a thing that gives me superhuman strength, endurance, or perspective. I am not forged in greater stuff because of it. That which did not kill me did nothing but give me trauma. ("That which does not kill me makes me stranger.") If you seek a narrative of "Nevertheless, they persisted," seek elsewhere, for this is a story chiefly of disappointment, self-blame, and negative self-worth. There is no happily ever after. If there is any virtue that comes from having experienced this, it is by accident, by the influence of chaos and randomness. My story is not done, but only because I survived. There is only a semicolon. The end of a clause, but not the end of the sentence.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-14 09:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-14 04:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-14 03:35 pm (UTC)Same club, mostly "You're so resilient and strong" "Thanks, it was that or dead" vibes.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-14 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-16 06:49 pm (UTC)I think it is because we want to mythologise things. And people "cope" better with abuse and pain when they ascribe a meaning to it. But I don't think we should do that to other people.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-14 05:46 pm (UTC)Um, no..........
no subject
Date: 2024-12-14 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-16 06:50 pm (UTC)But oh, I do feel your statement. Like...of course we are. What's the alternative?