An Open Letter to a Struggling Friend

Hey you.

It looks like things aren’t going so well right now. In fact it looks like things suck balls right now. It looks like you’re terrified and hurting, and you don’t know how to let people help without giving up who you are and all your coping mechanisms.

Trust me, I understand. I understand what it’s like to know, deep down in your gut, that what you’re doing is right and that everyone else should piss right off because they don’t get it. I understand what it’s like to know that you can’t get through a day without doing those things that everyone else says are “bad” and “dangerous” and “self-destructive”, but you know that you wouldn’t even be alive right now if you couldn’t use them to cope.

I also know what it feels like to not want to be alive anymore. I don’t have any trite words of wisdom about how it gets better. Some days I’m still not convinced that I make the right decision by choosing life over and over again. Life is exhausting and thankless, and seems to be a hamster wheel of attempts at happiness. I don’t know what we get out of it, and I don’t know whether it’s worth it. What I do know is that I care about not hurting people, about being a compassionate, decent human being. I know you do too. And I know for a fact that hurting yourself will hurt many, many other people. Not a small, insignificant hurt either. The kind of hurt that lasts and lingers and comes out of nowhere when you least expect it.

You know that kind of hurt.

I know it comes across as unfair and guilting when other people ask you to be healthy for their sake. They don’t know how hard it is. You’re not doing anything to them. You have the right to your own life, and they need to get over it. You’re doing what you need to do to get by, so screw everyone else who wants to change that. Why is it your responsibility to take care of everyone else’s god damned emotions?

It isn’t fair. In no way is it fair. However it is also the reality of the situation that your actions affect others, and if you want to be consistent with your values you have to start taking care of yourself. You also have to start listening. I know that you are a strong, brazen individual who doesn’t give a fuck…except that you do. You give so many fucks and that’s why it hurts so bad when others are hurting. That’s why you have to poke and poke at the people who want to hurt you, that’s why you want to prove you’re stronger than it all, that’s why you want to look stone-faced. It couldn’t possibly get any worse, could it? Maybe it will get bad enough this time that you won’t have to keep going, you’ll be able to give up.

That doesn’t work. I have tried nearly every trick in the book to turn off the feelings. They keep coming back. Always.

And you and I have something in common that means you will never give up. We have a special kind of stubborn streak. You may be the only other person I’ve met who has one quite like mine. It’s the kind of stubborn streak that means we never leave things half-assed, including our own lives. Oftentimes it leads to problems. But this is one of those times where the stubborn can be used to your benefit. You will hold on to your bad patterns with the strength of Superman, but you will also hold on to life because change is terrifying and you’re used to being alive. Relish that stubbornness. Relish the fact that you’ll survive just to prove that you fucking can and you’ll be fine without any help thanks very much.

Except of course that you won’t be fine without any help.

There are people who are telling you that they love you and that they want to help. That’s not what you want to hear. You want to hear that they’ll leave you alone because you don’t even know what help looks like and you don’t know how things could possibly get any better (because they always seem to find a way to get worse). Somehow it doesn’t hit that these people really might have a perspective that you can learn from. How on earth would they know better than you about your life? They think they care about you and they think they love you, but if they knew who you really were they wouldn’t? They’re lying, it’s a trap, it’s a trick, they’re condescending fucks.

Or that’s what you tell yourself.

In reality, you cannot understand how terrified and in love your friends are. You will never understand what you mean to them. You will never understand how badly it hurts them when you lash out, when you tell them that you know they hate you. You think that you have to be the one to manage them all, to keep them in line. You have to come up with the magic bullet that will fix all your problems and they’ll stand there and smile nicely and maybe lend a hand, but they don’t know what’s going on and so they can’t help.

Except that each of your friends has an entire lifetime of coping behind them. The feeling of finally being able to fall into their arms and give it all up is amazing. They might not know exactly what to do, but a little bit of trust goes a long way: they probably know how to help a lot better than you think they do. They are willing to put up with so much more than you think they are.

Imagine, briefly, that one of us was far away and hurting. Imagine that we were cutting off contact, instigating fights, hurting ourself. Imagine what you would do to get to us, to save us, to make god damn certain that we were ok. Imagine how badly you would want to fold us in your arms and get us to a doctor and shut out the rest of the stupid world until we were safe.

And I get that it feels like we want to control you, and I get that it feels like you’re a damned adult and you can handle yourself, and I get that this all feels like a stupid overreaction and you don’t want it. But you know what being an adult means? It means taking responsibility for your relationships. It means being willing to do shit that is hard and terrifying and unpleasant. It means being willing to talk to your friends and listen when they say they’re worried and do silly, potentially useless things to help calm their fears.

Because really, how would it hurt to let them in? Besides the overwhelming fear of rejection (which you’ve already forced by pushing them away), what would happen? You’d have to stop doing all the things that rip your body apart and leave you broken but in control (or so you tell yourself). You’d have to stop holding so damn tightly to all the little things in your life that are making you feel human.

So yeah, it does hurt to let them in. And maybe some of them won’t be able to handle it. And that is a horrible, miserable feeling. But I can promise you that if you don’t let your friends in, none of them will be able to handle it and you’ll be really, truly alone. I can promise that you KNOW it hurts right now. It may very well get worse if you ask for help and you do the damned hard work of learning new ways to cope. In fact it probably will. For a while. It is a thankless task. But when you hear your friends and family saying things like “I never could have said this to you a year ago”, or you notice how much more relaxed they are around you, or how you haven’t felt like you have to hide or lie in weeks…somehow it’s a little bit worth it.

I’m not going to tell you it will all get better. There are no rainbows and unicorns. But you can get better. You can do better. And I expect better of you. I know that you’re hurting, but that doesn’t give you license to treat your friends the way you have. So please, stand up and be the version of yourself that is vulnerable, open, and compassionate, to yourself and to others.

I love you more than you can imagine.

Olivia

Random Writing

These bits of writing aren’t exactly about anything or for anything, but they’ve been floating in my head and I need to get them out. Here they are. A bit of what it’s like with anxiety and depression.

 

It’s hard when you have a bad day when you’re depressed. When other people have a bad day, they go home and they rant about the things that went wrong. But when I go home on the verge of tears and someone asks what happened, and if I want to talk, I have no words. Nothing happened. I woke up, a little tired as usual, I went in to work, did my usual things, had a therapy appointment, came home and took a nap. I purged. I had dinner. I went back to bed. That’s it. Nothing happened. But that doesn’t stop the weepiness from showing, that doesn’t stop the tightness in my chest, that doesn’t stop my hands from bunching into tight little fists whenever I stop moving. It doesn’t stop my thoughts from whirling around and around. It doesn’t make sense.

Last night, when I got home, I did all the appropriate Self Care actions. I let myself rest, I put on fuzzy pajamas, I watched a TV show I like. I finished an episode and something hit me all at once. The air went out of me, and it felt as though something was being pulled from my chest: my heart or my soul or some other unnamed bit. When it pulls, I can feel my jaw and my tongue aching downwards. Tears are pulled from my eyes and onto my chin. I shake and I don’t know why, but no matter how many times my face contorts into some disturbing silent grimace, I can’t still my heart or my mind. I won’t make a sound. No one needs to know because I won’t be able to explain, because it came from nowhere, because there is no reason or purpose except that everything is wrong and my ribcage is empty and my muscles can’t contain all the hatred and fear that’s inside of me. There’s a claustrophobia to it, as if there is not enough space for me, so I scrunch in on myself and hug my legs and rock, hoping that I can expand the world past my toes again. It never works. Somewhere in my mind, I notice that I’m having a panic attack, that there’s ways to deal with this, that I could go find some ice and put it on my face, but me, the me that feels and exists in the here and now has no time for that because breathing is taking all of my time and if I stop then my body might rip itself apart.

It hurts. There’s shooting pains down my chest and across my collarbone, cold like when you chug ice water too fast. My head is stuffed. I know it’s thanks to the mucus filling my sinuses, but it feels like all the thoughts have taken physical form and are now living below my eyes, tramping and stamping and pushing their way outwards. I am not vessel enough for them. They want their own life now.

I don’t know when it will stop. I don’t know if it will stop. If it does, there’s a hollowness to my face, filled to the brim with snot and pain and confusion. My mind has gone numb and I cannot come back. You are all very far away today. I try to smile though. That’s what I’m to do, isn’t it?

 

People are rough. They’ll rub you raw and then walk away with no further thoughts. Some of us blister and callous until the skin grows thick. The sharp edges no longer puncture. But my skin does not grow back. Every day I lose a layer of myself, and I’m down to scraps today. I’m trailing grated skin behind me: you can follow my path back to the party, to the first tear. It couldn’t be avoided. And since the first rip, each word has pulled and pricked and rubbed until I am left losing myself with every movement. How do I grow a new self?

Clean House Clean Mind

This weekend I’ve been helping my boyfriend deep clean his bedroom, send a lot of things off to the Goodwill and a lot off to the dump, and generally try to start with a fresh slate in terms of stuff. It’s interesting because it’s been a fairly emotional process for both of us. I’m not entirely sure why we as human beings feel such an attachment to possessions, but one thing that is certain is that a large part of cleaning house involves looking at who you have been and where you have gone, and making decisions about where you want to go in  he form of asking “Will I ever use this again?” or “Is this important to me?”

As we answer these questions, we decide which futures still seem possible to us. Each time you look at an object and decide whether you will need it, you’re deciding whether it’s part of the future you want, and with it, all the possibilities that it represents. When you throw away the sushi kit you never used, you have to abandon the small part of you that still dreams of being a sushi chef. And while you do it, you also have to recognize the things you’ve failed to do, the things you’ve failed to accomplish: you never used it. You never pursued that dream. Things didn’t work out the way you intended when you purchased it and imagined rolling out your homemade sushi.

None of us like to cut off futures. None of us like to close doors. Unfortunately, when we’re  cleaning, we don’t get to see the new doors that we’ve made space to open. Each of those things that you’re holding on to is taking some amount of your attention, some amount of your energy, and when you consciously choose to move on from it, you’re freeing up mind space and physical space that can be used for something new, something that you’re passionate about now, something you will actually love and move forward with. The difficult part of cleaning house is that you don’t get to see that particular pay off. All you see is your past walking out the door.

Because of the link between objects, emotions, and futures, cleaning house can be a practice in cleaning your mind. You remove the rubble, the things that you were holding on to and thinking of and worrying over, and try to let them go.

An important element of this is the reminders. Objects are firm reminders of the past. You see pieces of who you used to be, dreams and identities you used to have, past relationships, past careers. All of these are difficult to be reminded of, and can trigger you to reprocess the memories and the events. The objects you chose to keep can symbolize a lot about how you felt towards a particular event or person. Choosing to remove those reminders can feel like giving up on the past or losing your connection to your past, and even more potent, looking at your past laid out in front of you can be a really difficult moment of self-evaluation. All of us have disappointments, whether it be looking at the guitar we gave up playing, or finding a letter from the lover we thought we’d marry, and when you see the objects from past years strewn out in front of you it’s incredibly difficult to not feel like you haven’t done enough or you haven’t done well enough, like you’ve stagnated, like you’ve disappointed others and yourself.

In reality, these physical reminders are often just reminders of the bad things. We don’t notice the diploma we already have hanging up, or the books we’ve read and replaced on the bookshelf, or the career that we now have. And while we might feel bad about removing the reminders of the bad things, we can’t escape the past no matter how hard we try. It shapes who we are. When we choose to remove reminders, we free up mental and emotional space that can be used for the here and now. It can literally give your brain the space to begin rewiring for new identities, thoughts, priorities, and actions. And it gives you the literal, physical space to grow again: you can begin new projects, you can feel comfortable enough to start something in your apartment, or to dance, or to work out. Giving yourself literal space to move around in can absolutely make you feel mentally more comfortable.

Choosing to make changes like removing detritus or purging your things is always difficult. It means accepting that certain things in your life are over, letting go of who you were, accepting that your life has changed. It can also mean accepting lost opportunities. But on the plus side, accepting all of these things is the first step towards changing and growing. It’s an odd paradox, but the first step towards change is radical acceptance of what is, because you have to accurately see the current situation before you can change it.

I think perhaps the best part of practicing cleanliness and simplicity in your home and your things is that it can help you to live in the present. When you are living in the present, the only pain you feel is the pain of the moment. You’re not thinking of the futures that could be, and you’re not thinking of the past and what hurt you then. The future and the past contain a great deal more pain than this moment right now, and when you recognize that and only reside in the present, you liberate yourself of a great deal of pain.

I have always believed in the importance of limiting how much STUFF I hold on to. I think that having enough things to tie you down and make you feel solid, as if you have a real identity and have chosen which memories to keep, can be extremely beneficial to feeling certain of who you are. But like any practice of emotional balancing, it’s important to consistently clear out the remnants that you don’t want, so that you can feel solid without being weighed down.

Things are often more metaphorical than we realize. It can be good to think of what they’re representing for us.

Follow-Up: Further Thoughts on Self-Harm

Ok, this is not going to be a well thought out or organized post, but I’ve had a lot more thoughts since the previous post about self-harm and I’d like to just throw some of them out there:

Tim brought up the interesting point of stigma being there because self harm necessarily involves harm. I think this is potentially true, however I think there are two important things to consider about this:

1.What constitutes harm?

I posed this question on twitter: would you consider a cut to be harm? Many people answered not necessarily, and that it depended on how serious it was. Let’s take a couple of examples-

a.You’re walking in the woods and you accidentally run into a tree branch. It scratches you/cuts you and you bleed a little. You shrug it off and you continue walking through the woods. You get home and everyone probably ignores it. Few people would say that you had been harmed, unless they take a definition of harm that suggests ANY pain is harmful.

b.You intentionally cut yourself and you bleed a little. You shrug it off, and go downstairs. Everyone freaks out and asks you why you would harm yourself. Are we sure it’s more harmful in this case?

I would propose a definition of harm that generally includes keeping someone from doing what they want to do, or keeping someone from functioning in their life as they so choose. Some people might include subjecting someone to any amount of pain in this definition, but I’m not sure I would go that far.

2.There are other things that we do, which we believe are good, which necessarily involve harm. Most medical care falls under this heading. Therapy. If we include pain in the definition of harm then every time you work out you’re harming yourself (my new argument to be lazy!). So while there may be a distinction between say rock climbing and self harm (it perhaps wasn’t the best example, although I do think that rock climb automatically comes with some pain), there are other examples we could look at that are praised when we do a cost/benefit analysis and decide that the necessary pain is worth it.

Beccy mentioned that there is a good deal of bias against self-harm and so it could be harmful to cut simply because of the attitudes of other people and the crap you’d get from them. Also an important consideration, I think generally subsumed under the first point I made in my other post. I personally would tend to weigh this slightly lower because I don’t really care too much about the opinions of people who are biased against those with mental illness.

So what do you think? How is self harm similar to and different from other forms of harm? What about BDSM? What constitutes “harm”? Does a small cut really count as harming if it does nothing to impinge on someone’s life?

Why Is Pain a Badge of Pride?

So I’m sitting here at work trying to muscle through the last 4 hours while sick and somewhat miserable, my head hurting and my brain hurting, and I’m wondering why I don’t just go home and go to bed. Well partly it’s because I can’t afford to since I don’t have any PTO right now, but partly it’s more than that: it’s the idea that the more we suffer for something, the more it’s worth.

A while ago I was reading an article on cracked.com (my usual haven of hilarity) when I ran across this choice quote about getting to the end of a Tough Mudder:

“And that’s exactly why I felt like an idiot by the end. I went in with the confused notion that any experience that is awful was also good for me. Suffering is always supposed to have rewards in the end, and even if those rewards are sometimes vague, I can at least chalk it up to a rounding of character. But Tough Mudder offers a window dressing version of personal betterment without much behind it. I don’t mean to insult anyone who loves the challenge of Tough Mudder because I will certainly admit that it kicked my ass. But it was painful like torture is painful. The simplest way I can describe it is that when I ran through the swamp portion of our course in the gloom and cold, I secretly wanted the experience to be like Luke training on Dagobah. But the most important challenge, the part where I fight myself in a cave and overcome my own weaknesses, wasn’t there. In its place were some greased monkey bars instead. I guess if I had one suggestion for the people who run Tough Mudder, it would be to include a Cave of Evil. That would be really nice.”

I think this sums up some of why I’m pushing myself to make it through work today. Part of me imagines a glorified image of me passing out in the hallway while I run to copy some highly important document so a little kid with developmental delays can get their testing done on time (ok not really but my Dayquil addled brain found that image funny). Unfortunately my job really isn’t that important, and I’m more in love with the idea of suffering than I am with the idea of sacrifice for a good cause. In many ways, we have falsely associated pain with success: we have phrases like “pain is weakness leaving the body” or “no pain no gain”. We assume that the things causing us pain are always there for a reason. If we’re working insanely hard at our job, it’s because we’re getting tons done and we’re going to get a huge promotion with lots of money. If we’re working really hard at our marriage, it’s because we’re so in love and everything will work out and become flowers and rainbows someday soon. If we’re working really hard at school then we’ll be a straight A student who will be rewarded with scholarships and acceptances to amazing colleges or grad schools.

Unfortunately all of that is bullshit. And it’s really privileged. In general, these things are only true if you’re coming from a very privileged position. People who are oppressed go through pain every damn day for no apparent reason. If pain really were a badge of overcoming and making something better, then we’d have a lot of really successful and awarded black single mothers, but unfortunately the reality is that pain often comes for no reason whatsoever and we have to just keep dealing with it. But even in privileged lives we seem to take it for granted that pain is a good thing, signalling progress.

I was watching a documentary last night on ballet dancers, and they talked about working through injuries, about continuing to dance no matter how much pain they were in, about not letting their feelings show when they were disappointed and simply working through any pain they had. In some perverse way, they wore it like a badge of honor: I will keep doing what I love no matter how much pain I’m in. I will even put myself in more pain to continue doing this. It will make my dancing worth more because I kept going through the pain.

I think that we often tell ourselves things like this to convince ourselves our pain is not useless. It’s similar to Miri’s post about depression, and how everyone wants to think that we can gain insight from every type of pain. We want to comfort ourselves into thinking there’s a reason for when things go poorly or that we can at least get something from every type of pain. And while I can understand this completely human dishonesty, and while I agree that many times pain does come with insight, I think that dishonesty almost always leads to bad consequences and this is no different. When we associate pain with improvement (either of self or situation), we unconsciously tell people that they should be in pain. I’ve felt this pressure often: I’ve felt as if I SHOULD be stressed out or I’m not getting enough done, I should be tired or I’m not working hard enough. And when people start to feel that they should improve their lives in some way, they might turn to pain instead of a positive method of life-improvement. This may be why self-harm is so damn popular: it feels like it means something because pain is always supposed to mean.

But it’s so important to remember that pain is not inherently important. When we earn something through pain we can be proud of ourselves, but the pain does not make the end result better or more worthwhile. The sour doesn’t sweeten the rest of life. We don’t need to glorify pain.