When I like to be bossed around

[cosmolinguist]

So yeah. This is my life right now. (And at other times. But it's worse lately than it's been in a long time.)

Because there is a place beyond tired — bone tired — where you don’t even have the wherewithal to ask for what you need. When you’re in this state of mind, kind humans offer up their time and talent to you, but somehow you can’t receive it. You’re in a fog of exhaustion where you can only see an arms length ahead: reply to this email, return this call, drink this coffee, do this dish, survive, barely.

And it's nice to know I'm not the only person reacting to this stuff in the way that I do.

Then someone stopped offering help and started ordering me around — namely my husband (which, if you know me, is pretty hilarious). “That’s it,” he said. “Get in bed and take a nap.”

Without saying another word, I stripped down, peeled back the clean, white sheets of the hotel bed, set the timer on my iPhone for one hour, and crashed.

If you don't get why somebody would unquestionably take advice like this, be glad you've never been in this state where you're failing so hard at basic stuff like eating or sleeping or relaxing that you're not only bad at them or not doing them, you don't even notice you're not doing them, you don't care you're not doing them, and you don't even think doing them with help you feel any better. Sometimes you get into a state you just can't get out of by yourself; you need someone to tell you how to do it.

I think about this kind of stuff all the time, and I talk about it a fair bit, generally with the few people who kinda provide this for me. diffrentcolours and I acknowledge this really blatantly; I think it started at Lib Dem Autumn Conference in 2011, the first I went to, and since he remembered what his first Conference was like and since I was staying with him and Eve in a house rather than by myself in a hotel like most people do at conference, he was explicitly kind of looking after me, reminding me to eat and making sure I was reasonably happy. And it worked really well, because I have very fond memories of that week (driving adventure! Akira the Don! Akrams! D pointing out Edgbaston when we drove past because his dad always did that! huddling together for warmth while waiting for a taxi back on like the fifth night in a row when we'd been out from nine in the morning until eleven at night!), without which I probably wouldn't have gone to any subsequent ldconfs.

And that's still a thing he and I do for each other; I go over and cook dinner every now and then, once he ordered me Chinese takeaway because I was in such a state I couldn't even operate Just Eat or have opinions about food, we tell each other to go to bed if we're online too late at night, and if I'm running myself into the ground and never giving myself a break for too long, he'll threaten to chain me to a bed somewhere so I have to relax -- which never fails to cheer me up, and I don't care if that makes me weird.

So anyway, I think and talk about this but I haven't written about it because I have never been able to find a way to address the fact that I really only approve of telling people what to do if it's very specific people and very specific things and very specific situations. And I haven't been able to articulate what those are! I just know them when I see them. Mostly I know them when they happen to me. And as this writer says, when it happens to you you're not in a state to talk about it.

I have had so many moments when I am deep in the fog and I don’t reach out. I don’t know what to say. I don’t have a neat story about my sadness. There are only a few people that I feel comfortable being totally incoherent with, calling and saying, “Hi. I’m going to cry. I’m okay, but I’m just going to cry.” Often I don’t call, not just in order to spare someone my blubbering, but to spare them my confusion over what they can do to soothe me. It’s so much responsibility, isn’t it? It feels like we are expected to be simultaneously devastated and proactive in our culture.

I do a lot of apologizing for myself and my existence, and my friends think that's unnecessary -- because of course they do, they're cool people who don't think anybody needs to justify their existence like this -- and it's because I do feel like this pressure to have a neat story about my sadness and to be proactive rather than blubbery and to tell people what they can do to soothe me.

I spend a lot of time making decisions and looking after people. Buying the house, much as I like it as a place to live, has given me a pretty near constant state of decision fatigue. Andrew's been unwell in recent months in ways that I'm really good at helping with, which is awesome because I'm glad I can do that, but it also means that I'm doing all the executive function for two people, it sometimes feels like, and that is difficult in itself. It's not just that doing the chores and remembering the appointments and running the errands is difficult (though sometimes it is, because it makes demands on your willpower and stress levels just like something like poverty does), it's that having to organize the to-do lists and the meta-to-do lists can be mentally and emotionally tiring...something I learned from a post in the wonderful Blue Milk blog which I'm still grateful to haggis for pointing me at because it's been very useful to me ever since to be able to keep this in mind:

Walking someone through all the steps in preparing a meal, making sure you haven’t run out of laundry powder for when it’s their turn to do the laundry, writing the shopping list for them and describing where on the aisles they will find the items they need to buy.. all draining work.

Making sure the family meets its social obligations and remains connected to its community is work – were birthday presents bought for children’s parties, did the mother-in-law get a phone call to wish her well in surgery tomorrow? Who is keeping an eye on how well the children are adjusting to the new school? Who went to the parent-teacher interviews? Who worries about whether it is time to see the pediatrician about the younger child’s night terrors?

Just articulating that social and psychological chores exist has been hugely helpful to me. Because part of my problem was that I was feeling exhausted despite not being able to point to anything that explained it, and this is where the possibly most evil word in the English language comes in: should. I shouldn't be having so much trouble doing simple things. I should be better at looking after myself/my house/my husband/my job/everything. I shouldn't be such a drag or a bore or even a slight inconvenience to anybody. I know these thoughts are ridiculous but, if we could extinguish thoughts merely by wanting to...I don't think mental illness would be such a big problem for humanity.

The only really effective way I know of to beat those "should"s is to cut myself some slack, and that's easier to do when I can convince myself that there are actually a lot of real obstacles and energy-sapping things in my life. That seems like it'd be a depressing realization, but actually it's kind of awesome because it means me feeling shitty is not, as I tend to assume, a sign of weakness or failings on my part, but a totally reasonable reaction to difficult shit going on.

And one way to remind myself of this is to listen to the people saying "Go to sleep. Come out for a drink. Eat something. Do you want to come over and hang out? You can do the chores later. Looking after you is more important right now. You are important."

Okay, they might not think that's what they're saying! But I think it is. I absolutely love Captain Awkward's answer to "how can I help people with depression?", which I think goes back to "don't stop at 'is there anything I can do to help?' "

Making suggestions can seem presumptuous, and generally sensible people expect their loved ones to be the best judge of what they need. My first link addresses that as well:

In part, people resist doing things — bringing soup, making an acupuncture appointment, taking the kids for the day — for friends in need, because we wisely understand that not everyone is built the same, particularly in their darker moments. Some of us genuinely want to be left alone; we need the salve of silence. Some of us feel comforted by a body right up next to us — the isolation shattered by the warm breath of another human. Some of us need sleep. Some of us need to be dragged out of the house.

After a while you'll get to know what your important people are likely to need. And you can always ask them. I make a point of trying to ask "would you like advice or sympathy?" when people tell me their problems, because I know sometimes I want pragmatic solutions and sometimes I just want someone to make sympathetic noises or give me a sandwich/whisky/fun excuse to get out of the house.

Comments

[kaberett]

(The sandwich means "I love you.")

[cosmolinguist]

One of the good things about my upbringing is that the lack of people using their words to express love does mean I'm really good at discerning love in actions and gestures. So I totally know I've had sandwiches that I know mean "I love you" and I think that's awesome.

[kaberett]

Also, this is actually a lot of what I love about Calming Manatee - it tells me, very firmly, that this shit is allowed and is okay and I should eat some fucking cake already. It makes things better without me needing to ask and that is precious.

[andrewhickey.info]

I love you, and I'm sorry I'm such hard work.

[cosmolinguist]

Everybody's hard work. Love you.

[andrewhickey.info]

You're not

[cosmolinguist]

I am. You just talk about these things differently. Having decided that I'm worth it, you've reframed everything, from having to go to America for Christmas to living in a house that sometimes contains peppers to being nagged about stuff all the time, as "worth it." Which is fine, but those things clearly are problems because they cause you various kinds of very obvious distress. That you think these things aren't a problem doesn't mean they aren't at base the same kind of thing I'm talking about here.

[rmc28]

Oh wow, it is so nice to read something about how the organising and social obligations is tiring. Because I do most of the organising and logistics, because I enjoy it and I am also clearly better at it. But yes, it is hard at times.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, it's amazingly good for me to read about things like this. I imagine you'd like the Blue Milk blog in general, because it's about motherhood and thinking and feminism.

[mathemagicalschema]

So, my partner and I recently split up, after three years together, after moving in together. And this is basically why. We had a fairly equal division of cooking and cleaning and all the physical work, but I was doing almost all of the decision-making and logistical work. We weren't planning dinners and writing shopping lists together, I figured out when certain things should happen and then she just gave input on what she would cook and what she needed for it.

I always had to ask for what I needed when I was upset, even for a hug. She would freeze in fear of somehow doing something wrong. She didn't know how to comfort me, and I wasn't just not comforted... I would get more upset, because I couldn't stop wanting and expecting comfort from my partner.

[cosmolinguist]

I think another advantage of recognizing social and psychological and executive-function chores as chores is that it validates them as something that couples (or roommates, or families, or even co-workers) can note their compatibility in. It doesn't mean we'll always be able to perfectly get what we want/need, of course, but if we're able to acknowledge it as an important part of our lives, and something that can be complementary or not like any other aspect of a relationship, I think a lot of us would be happier and better off.

[sfred]

*nods a lot*
I have established protocols with myself and with D and G about what to do with a me in particular states. The one for myself is "tell D or G that I'm in $state".
One that's been useful this week is "if your Yoyoangel is being too stressed to enjoy its holiday, put it next to a body of water that it can swim in". For example.

(I think I have more comment to make but I don't know what words so I'll just send love.)

[cosmolinguist]

It's nice to have go-to protocols like that. Swimming is a good one, and I hope it helped you de-stress. I think I need to do more thinking about what I want to have happen when I tell the people I can tell that I'm in $state; so far I mostly just throw myself at the mercy of whoever I've just unburdened myself to.

I hope you found ways to de-stress and enjoy your holiday. Feel free to offer more words later if you want to (and not if you don't, obviously! there just seems to be this cultural assumption that goes "things on the internet from more than a couple of days ago is too old to be worth further discussion), and I send you love, too.

[davidgillon]

I think this should be tagged as 'Exactly the Right Amount of Introspection'.

[cosmolinguist]

Thanks :) Pre-emptively self-deprecating things like that are one of my defining features, I fear. I make jokes to cover my discomfort at being (what feels like to me) too weird and intense for anyone to like, and to get the criticism in before anyone else does so I feel I have some control over it.

Of course the jokes don't diffuse tension or keep people from criticizing me, because the tension's all in my head so people are confused about why I'm saying some odd negative thing about myself, and often as not they end up criticizing me for something anyway, it's just that now that thing is that I'm too hard on myself or apologize too much. So it's not really a good coping mechanism. :)

[davidgillon]

I think we share a coping mechanism!

[silveradept]

I think it's more common than we realize, because that's also my style.

[calissa]

Thank you for this. I appreciate the way you articulated that social and psychological chores exist because it has helped me to realise that this is what occupies a lot of my time. I'm very good at it, but it is tiring.

I also wanted to say that I have been in a position when I'm so tired I've needed someone to order me around, so I understand that.

Thank you.

How have you been faring lately?

[cosmolinguist]

I think it's in some ways especially important for people who are good at the social/psychological chores to think of them as a "real" thing, because it's easy to discredit things that come easily to us (especially when those things are coded as "women's work" and thus devalued in our culture). I'm really glad this was useful for you.

As for how I've been faring...I'd be fine if I didn't have to get a job. I've let the job-hunting slide, despite my increasing stress and guilt about not bringing in any money. But I have been catching up on sorting out some things that have needed doing since we moved in -- I'm working on building enough shelves that I can unpack the remaining boxes, and I'm slowly working on other stuff like getting pictures hung up and cleaning out the basement -- and I've been looking after a particularly stressed/ill husband. He's struggling to cope lately with a variety of mental health issues himself, and is what we call "especially autistic" lately, which is difficult for both of us in different ways. My mom's reached the point in recovery from her surgery where the pain is no longer quite enough a deterrent to keep her from doing too much...at least right away; now the pain comes later and brings with it more disappointment, because it stops her fooling herself that she is fine and can do everything again. A lot of people dear to me are struggling in other ways; it seems we all have psychic weights we're struggling to throw off. So I'm okay, but I think I will look back on 2014 as a very grim year indeed.

[calissa]

That is quite a lot to deal with, so I can understand how 2014 has been one of those years you'd prefer to see the back of.

[silveradept]

Should is an evil word, and yet I pay attention to it much more than I want to.

Thanks for the post - it helped me think about better ways to offer assistance and to empathize.

[uglybuffy.livejournal.com]

Big hate for should!