I keep thinking about what drives us to insist everything is fine when it's absolutely not. We've all done it and we've all seen other people do it. When we run into someone they say they're doing great, the test results came back with good news. Then we run into someone else who gives us the real low-down. Is it just not the right time to talk about it. It's too precarious to open up that emotional box in the aisle of the grocery store when it's so hard to keep things from falling apart completely? Is it shame, this idea that we should be entirely self-sufficient and good vibes only all the time? Are we just not as close as we thought, so they don't feel comfortable sharing their reality with us?
This gap between our truth and the version of the truth we’re comfortable sharing came up in conversation between Kate Bowler and Kelly Corrigan. Corrigan talks about that moment when we first tell someone what's going on. This is when we establish a narrative that's difficult to break out of once it's set. We can select which details to share in order to protect how we want to be seen. Or we can open up and share a version of events that feels a little raw. Or we can say everything’s fine, how about you?
When we share the version of things that protects how we want to be seen, we put ourselves in the position of now feeling we need to maintain that version of reality. We have committed ourselves to showing other people that we're stronger than we feel or need less than we need or have less power than we suspect we have. We're turning down an opportunity for connection and choosing to cast ourselves in a role instead.
That might be the right thing to do. This is a boundary we're setting: deciding how much to share, who we want to connect with, and who we want to be with other people. Often when we insert this distance between us and someone else there's a good reason for the choice we’ve just made.
Sometimes, though, we do it reflexively. I see people taking this step away from their community and then mourning the lack of support, baffled to find that people take them at their word or that they see through the role and choose to respect their boundaries. When we’re acting on autopilot during a crisis, we don’t always understand the cause and effect relationship between telling everyone we’re fine and then having those people drift out of our lives.
I suspect it's this behavior — the ‘fine, thanks’ — these walls we put up around ourselves, that's the reason so many people believe they're the only one they know who's doing care work. Can we honestly believe that the people around us don't understand what it is to be human?
The rates of chronic illness, critical illness, accidents, and frailty are so high that the only person who truly isn't impacted by them has a fate that sounds terrible: no community around them at all.
People don't need to share our exact experiences in order to connect. They just need to be willing to listen and be with us.
In order to find out who’s going to be there when we need them, we need to give them the opportunity. We need to show our true selves and share what’s really going on. We need to cautiously take one step at a time away from ‘fine’ and one step closer to our reality.
It's not just about denying anything is wrong, keeping quiet about illness and grief. It's also about positioning ourselves as the victim, the saint, or the rock. The more convincingly we play the role we cast for ourselves, the less the people in our lives see us for who we are. When we don’t play the role well, we demonstrate to people that we don’t want them to know us.
When we write ourselves a script and commit to a role, we deny people the chance to see us, and love us, for who we are.
Anne Helen Petersen has a brilliant little guide to fill out and share with friends and family so we know how to care for each other in the ways we each want to be cared for. And there's a comment on the post I found to be a particularly handy tip for making it easy to match the help that's offered to the help we're comfortable accepting:
“It reminds me of when I was organizing care for my beloved fairy godmother after she'd been released from the hospital after brain surgery. The thing I learned from her is to make a grid: This set of things anyone can do for me / This set of things can be done by people I'm willing to have in my house / This set of things is ONLY for a very small subset of people. Because the person in need should be at the center of power, not the helpers.”
This article about repair raves begs the question: how can we make care work communal and, most importantly, fun?
A reminder that you don't need to go skydiving in order to leave your comfort zone. So much of care work certainly transports us out of our comfort zones!
Natalie Serber takes us along with her as she takes her mom to get a cognitive test.
If you or someone you know can't get Google's voice control to work, Project Relate might help.
If you'd like a nudge to connect with your emotions, check out this interactive story.
A roundup of Things I learned about disability and ableism in 2022 from Lucy Webster.
Low cost therapy options for caregivers in the US.
US hospitals are short staffed by choice, not just because of the pandemic or a ‘worker shortage.’
How to determine what’s covered by US medical insurance: face holes or not face holes?