Sometimes a poem resonates deeply. This one makes me think about how many people struggle to stay strong, to hide their mental storms, because they feel that to permit their visibility would be to demonstrate themselves to be weak.
It’s a familiar story, particularly to many women.
When she is angry to the breaking point, her rage emerges as tears.
When she cries in such instances, she becomes more frustrated and angry at herself because she believes that it demonstrates weakness.
So she beats herself up and tells herself:
“I’ve failed, again. Clearly shouldn’t be where I am. I am unworthy.”
The logical part of her brain tells her this is not true, that she has worked damned hard, in a world designed to not support her in the things she has pursued, that she has earned her stripes, her place.
But logic doesn’t win these internal arguments.
Particularly when she witnesses blatant examples of inequitable treatment that have impacts on the morale of herself and others.
She swallows it.
She is told how critically important she is, because they have allowed her to shoulder the entirety of something that should be a shared responsibility; they want to squeeze too many things out of her, because she is competent and rarely says no.
But, because she has repeatedly been told that she is instrumental to something, she feels that she can’t fail at any aspect of it, because to do so would let someone down.
Letting her believe that she would be letting others down is a manipulative lever to hold her in place, intentional or not.
She piles more perceived responsibility onto herself.
And she starts to show cracks.
They make it her responsibility to find a way to cope, with bandaids that they may or may not provide access to.
They suggest stress management though things like yoga, meditation, going for walks.
They tell her to learn how to deal with the stress while they pile yet more on.
And then they are shocked when she breaks and gets angry.
They get angry at her for being angry.
She is supposed to tell them when she is struggling, when she is getting angry, well in advance. But in a nice way. Because the messaging is that anger is bad, they don’t want her to be angry, when she is angry they are disappointed in her.
Disappointed.
When she does try to tell them that she is getting angry, that things are not going well, she is told to not just not get angry, it’s uncomfortable to them, they punish her, but subtly, through ways that are impossible to quantify.
She has assumed responsibility for things that no one else is willing to. She sees things that need to be done, that aren’t being done and, because no one will do them, she tries to help in too many places.
It’s unsustainable.
They tell her to let things go, ignore the things that she feels responsible for.
But she can’t, because then she is letting others down.
And that means she is failing.
She is failing others.
It’s worse than failing herself, she has always failed herself, so that’s not new.
She sees others gain unfair advantages, preferential treatments, inequitable workloads, because others ‘play the game’; she is tired of games.
She just wants to be competent.
“Oh look, they say, there we go, she breaks when things reach a critical mass for her, that’s why we can’t trust her to be a strong or decisive person unless she learns how to control those pesky emotions and be more masculine, because we don’t pay attention to, or attribute any respect for, women who let their emotions show through any cracks. If she cries, we can’t ascribe intellect or logic, or faith in her ideas. Because we can’t ascribe confidence in the face of her human emotions.“
They push and they push and they push until they break her, but all they see is that she broke, not that they participated in the end result in any way. They bear no responsibility. It’s her fault for being too weak. She is accountable for her own situation, they tell her.
It’s her own fault.
There are solutions, but those solutions are too hard for them because they require acknowledging the larger issues, they require change. The status quo, permitting the continuation of problematic behaviours, is less effort. Platitudes sound good, they are easy, they check a box.
Just let something go, they say. Let something fail, they say. Just ignore it/them, they say.
But how does she choose what, or who, to abandon? How does she choose what, or who, will fail? How does she choose who or what to ignore?
In some cases, that struggle ends in her losing her compassion for others.
She becomes part of the problem instead of the solution.
So she becomes quieter.
She retreats.
She focuses on her own flaws and magnifies them to herself.
It’s easier to attack and blame herself.
She finds it easier to attribute hard work to the successes of others, but luck to her own. It makes it easy to assume that her failures are the expected norm and that her successes are somehow flukes that should not be attributed to anything other than happenstance. She is skilled at pulling the rug out from underneath herself; she does not celebrate herself because she doesn’t know how to. If she just tried a little bit harder, put in a little bit more effort, maybe she could be better.
Eventually, at some point, she concludes that she is less than she is, that she is the one at fault for….something?
They prefer it when she is quieter, because it means they don’t have to reflect on their own flaws. She seems to be behaving the way they want her too when she is quiet. They don’t see her unhappiness. They don’t want to see her unhappiness. It’s uncomfortable. So when she is quiet they tell themselves things are going well. They don’t ask any questions. They don’t want to know.
When there is a reaction, when the anger bubbles to the surface, all that is seen is that she reacted uncharacteristically strongly to some seemingly isolated situation or event, how outwardly irrational it appears.
The pile that last straw fell on is invisible to everyone, because she tries to hide it at all costs.
She is embarrassed, and she feels like she lost her ability to articulate clearly, that anything she said before the tears of anger and rage crept out is coloured in weakness.
She is weak.
She tries to compartmentalize, to bottle things up and put them on a shelf.
She tries to isolate that part of her and shut it down.
She tries to control and quell her emotions.
Eventually, again, there will be that ‘one’ thing that will be just too much, and that crack in the wall causes something to crumble and the wall fails, but no one has seen the things that have been chipping away at the wall behind the scenes, from other chisels, until the wall is breached and before she can find something to fill the cracks, even temporarily, until she is alone and able to fall apart in isolation, shore up the breach, and put up the false front again so that everything seems as normal as possible to the next person she encounters.
The storm builds. Waves crashing on the beach. The waves come more frequently. They are taller and carry more strength when they land on her.
But she keeps getting back up. There is still strength left in her. For now.
Fake smiling, she’s an expert at it.
When she smiles it pushes her cheeks up below her eyes and, unless you look very closely, you wouldn’t know she’d been crying ten minutes ago behind that closed door.
It’s just another defence mechanism.
I’m only just starting to recognize that mental health is something important. It always seemed like a topic for other people, or something I should educate myself on so that I can recognize when other people are struggling. The concept of a mental health day seemed like a thing that other people needed, never me. I took my first ever mental health day a couple of years ago. I was having too much trouble coping with a situation, with a combination of people, with a specific person in combination who bore a responsibility that they chose not to be accountable to. I found myself using avoidance as a technique to cope with what was becoming more and more damaging. Over time the stress started manifesting as physical pain (aging sucks); it lingered for days, then weeks, then months…then over a year. It was superficial, subcutaneous, not organ related. I went to a clinic, the doctor thought it was soft tissue injury. A life change happened, and gave me a bit of distance from that very stressful environment. The pain faded and disappeared for a time, but I seem to have become susceptible to similar pains when things start to pile up psychologically.
I’m not sure if I’ll ever be the same, if the walls will ever come back down completely. My trust in an entire layer has been obliterated and I understand some things so much better, things I’d rather have never had to learn to understand.
I intend to continue to be there for others, to continue to enable growth and success. I don’t ever want to become hard and brittle, but it’s easy to see how it can happen.
My sick day bank is ridiculously large because I rarely take sick days. It’s not that I never get sick, I do, though not often. In a time of such connectedness, one doesn’t really have to take a sick day unless one is incapacitated. It’s easy to have a cold or the flu and still be able to work because one is at home. That’s probably not a good thing, mental rest is just as important as physical rest. I can write that, and I preach that to others, but I don’t seem to honour it for myself. I have banked overtime. I never use all of my vacation days and have rolled the allowable six weeks’ worth over year after year after year after year. I haven’t touched a collective bargaining week’s worth of banked time that never expires, that’s been available for I don’t know how many years now. I used to take all my banked overtime as Fridays to go ride the motorcycle in the US when the traffic was lighter. But then …Trump…followed by COVID. So that hasn’t happened since 2016. I’m trying to resolve to make that happen this year. And I think I’ve only used one or two available ‘Family leave” days ever across my 12 years, when Kirk had his surgery.
A mental health day feels like a luxury that I can’t rationalize.
Ironically, the reason I logged that one that I did take as such was that someone would have to see ‘why’ I was taking a day off. Total failure. It didn’t even spark a comment, let alone a conversation. That’s when I gave up on that particular situation and realized that I truly was alone in most things. No one was going to make an effort unless I did or said something along the lines of “help me“.
I’m not good at “help me“. I never have been. I once had a former lab-mate point that out to me when I was trying to do everything on my own. She stopped in front of me and said something along the lines of “OK She-Ra…we are all here to help each other, you can’t always do everything on your own. You are always there to help us, would you let us help you? Please just ask?”
Spoiler…..I did…..but probably only because she was right there, in my face.
We need to not only ask people how they are doing, but listen for the cues in their answers that tell us that things are not “OK” when they tell us that they are. But, ultimately, we are all on our own in this world.
The systems don’t seem designed to help people.
I guess that’s why we hide behind ‘thoughts and prayers’. They don’t actually do anything, but we can tell ourselves that we are ‘thinking’ about the problem, and then we can at least say that we have empathy.
Others will listen, but rarely will they help, because they usually can’t. Regardless, it is a kindness to listen even when you can’t help, sometimes it’s a gift someone desperately needs.
We need to treat other people better.
We need to treat ourselves better.
Saturday thoughts.
Right….that poem……
