So, the name of my blog is Smashed Potatoes. For a reason. Yeah. I say that sort of thing all the time. Kind of annoying, huh?
I’m kinda putting this stuff out there right now for a couple of different people, so even tho this may seem disjointed, it really isn’t. Kind of like string theory.
Life, folks, ain’t fair. It isn’t math logic. It isn’t chaos, either, even though it may always feel that way. I know, because I frequently feel that way.
Those of us who’ve taken the therapy road fall, usually, into one of two categories. “Hey, I’ve got a handle on this now. Thanks, Doc.” And those who fall into “This is what I’m supposed to do to make sense of Life.” It’s that second category of people I’m sort of talking to at the moment. I am one and hopefully, recovering from it.
As yukky as this is going to sound, know that I mean it with love and care. Shut up! Just… shut up.
Your history is important to you. Only you. And you use it as a test to know who is going to be a jerk to you and who isn’t. The thing is, you’re actually pushing away lots of people. Because you don’t know how to convert: “hey, I get why this hurts now” into “I’m thinking about pancakes.” By reciting your rote history, and by now it is rote, you are actually damaging yourself and you don’t even know it. What you know is that ____ still bloody hurts. And you just can’t seem to get over it.
I’m telling you. Shut up about it. And think.
It probably isn’t that you want someone to actually listen. Because if you did, your words wouldn’t be a recitation. They wouldn’t repeat. And by going ahead and repeating, you are actually reliving what you went through before. If you did want someone to listen, it wouldn’t usually come in a rush, getting the words in your head slightly out of order because you know the story in your head so well, you have no idea what short cuts you are taking. And you are still reliving it. If you did want someone to really listen, what they say would matter and make a difference. You relive it to the point where it’s a dirt track in your head from all the times you’ve crossed that thought pattern in your mind.
See, those of us on the therapy road or the support groups or prolonged whatever are basically trained to look for patterns of boo-boos. And that isn’t to make light-hearted comments about that. Dealing with trauma is never easy. But I mean we’re actually taught to look for small patterns so we can figure out the big ones. If we take things apart, identify the problem, identify the wound, then we can heal. Right? The problem is that some of us get trained on that too well and we start to think about taking everything apart and we have to identify and we have to label.
Guess what? The people that hurt us the most are the ones that deny that in the first place. The very action we need to learn to adopt in order to transfer that hurt into “Mmmmm… pancakes.” Some of this is called desensitization.
Guess what else? Half the time, that is training even more of us that we have to ritualize the desensitization with even more analysis and labels.
Phew, you’re exhausted all the time right?
Right.
So, I’m telling you. Shut up. Make yourself matter more than the hurts. Stop telling people that history that hurts so much to make sure you are around people who get that sort of thing. Because the *hurt* shouldn’t matter. *You* should. I’m not saying ignore it completely. I’m not saying don’t refer to it. I’m saying, don’t sound like a history book about it. Don’t live and breathe the pain every waking moment anymore. Getting to know someone should be about favorite colors, and liking certain cloud patters in the sky, and please avoid mentioning certain superheroes because I can’t deal with it, and I have action movies in common with you. See? One in four. That’s it. When you get better about it, you will know where your triggers are and can say point blank, “Hey, I don’t deal well with this and I’m not going to put any more energy into fixing it ‘cause I’m not a bleeping robot and I’d rather think about… pancakes.”
This is where the tie-in is gonna happen, so watch for it.
What people really want is for someone to say “I give enough of a ___ about you.”
This is also where most people who are what we call desperate or soul suckers or negative or whatever screw up. They scream to the universe that they just want someone to love them. Well, that isn’t true. They want the people who they care about to stop hurting them. And it probably isn’t going to happen. The excuses start happening. The reasoning starts happening. The anxiety and pain start happening. And it repeats, until it builds up into this huge, massive ball of hurt that is incredibly overwhelming.
If I say “I love you” to someone, it means I am willing to deal with chaos, pain, frustration, and illogic. I’m willing to take the damage your mouth and actions make. It means you aren’t statistics to me or counting the number of ways we connect or that you fit in a box or paint by numbers any more than I do and I’m not going to dehumanize you by doing that. I’m going to care about your hurts, large or small. More importantly, I’m going to still see you as the person you are beyond that pain and do what I can to reconnect those two parts of you. It means that you are worth it. I love with the whole of who I am. Not the finger and elbow. Not the knee. Not my paycheck. Not the three square feet my pillow takes up.
It does not, however, mean that I will let you bleed me dry because you won’t convert pain into “mmmm… pancakes.” Especially if you put all your time and energy into the people who take you to pieces. ‘Cause guess what? A jerk’s a jerk and it doesn’t matter what label they wear for you, be it the clerk at the grocery store, the guy who stole your wallet, the idiot who cut you off on the thruway, or your aunt.
I’m willing to spend all it takes to put you right again. But not if you’re going to repeat it. Repeatedly. If that’s how you want to spend your life, your choice. Mine would have been to spend it with you, making pancakes and bubbles and laughter and bonking heads and finding common ground, but you obviously don’t want that. Same exact thought if you put every task in the way. Because we are not tasks. We are not math. We are human beings.
My ex would beg to differ on a lot of this. Say that I am a complete hypocrite. As far as he’s concerned, he’s right. I would be. Because I used to be one of those people who railed against people not listening. Especially with him. I would blather, over-explain. Because I was trying to get feelings down into labels and math and how to fix. And I would get pissed that he would never listen.
Idiot me for staying. He is one of the people I used to be this way about. “Why don’t you love me?” Why won’t you listen. Oh, that’s why you keep me at arm’s length. I learned to live with less and less. Every day. Jokes weren’t about sharing. They were about him. Blah, blah, repeat, repeat.
If I had shut up, and I did this quite often and stupidly let people talk me out of it, and instead, listened to what I really wanted, compared to what was going on, I would have left a heck of a lot sooner. My heart wouldn’t hurt so much. My entire life would have been different. I can only partially blame him for being a jerk. I took that toxic, head on, because when we have that much “therapy” in our lives, we can fix and contol and justify and life will finally make sense.
It does the same if you just decide to like pancakes and focus on that.
To the three people I love most in this world? I will love you. I will miss you like crazy and my heart is grieving like there’s no tomorrow. But I’m getting up again and saying, I love pancakes and that’s more important than the hurt you’ve caused. You go focus on Life not being perfect and go focus on the family members who treat you like crap and all the things on your honey-do list that will never end. I’m hurt. You’ve told me enough times and in enough ways that I’m not important enough for you to give to me what you want so desperately. If you aren’t willing to say it and mean it, and mean it for more than the moment, well, I can’t help you there. You can spend the next five years in your toxic. You can spend the next ten being exhausted. Loving you in the first place wasn’t wrong and if you want to continue to treat yourself like crap, it’s your choice and my love would never be enough to show you otherwise. Don’t ask me to hang on when you are too willing to let go, even if it’s under the guise of being supportive.
Me? I’m shutting up and I’m gonna have pancakes. Because I get to love me, too. I’m gonna go look for the honey jar. And when that’s done, I’m going for smashed potatoes and my cats and my stories and all the things in my life that are pure sunshine.