So, the past year has been full of all kinds of experiments, both intentional, unintentional, natural and constructed. One of the unintentional experiments was the subject of the last blog, although it has continued in a somewhat “natural” way – in terms of learned behavior, which of course is not what we really mean by natural, but I mean, in this case, reflexive. That is, I have continued to interact some with the Videographer, giving some rein to what I really want to say or do, but also not giving in totally to my impulses. It’s not that I think either matters in terms of outcome or impact to the situation, but rather the resolution I feel. Well, obviously that’s not 100% true. I could probably act in a way that would drive him to cut me off, totally, or engage in Svengali-level manipulation that would draw him in. But I mean within a reasonable, honest scope. Of course, if I had half of any sense, it never would have become a topic of conversation, in the first place. But he has been in my astral plane enough that the connection has still been “live.” Therefore, I have not 100% let go of a fantasy that I will come home one day to find him sitting on the stoop, waiting for me, to spend the weekend or whatever, even though most days I think the taint has already ruined that ever happening, in whatever quantum realm of possibility it existed. Hard to easily summon magic over the sourness now drizzled on top.
No doubt, the pandemic and vaccines and whatever else have been a huge experiment for us all, whether or not we yet realize we’re in one, and whatever that may specifically mean – as yet to be discovered or known, although I think some people are asking anticipatory questions which are apt.
But speaking of injecting toxins or whatever the Q’s are talking about these days, one experiment I’ve been engaged in nearly the last two years has been more involvement with my family. In Jan 2020, contact with my mother was re-established, and although I never actually closed the channel, for whatever reasons, this time she pursued the opportunity. That may or may not have corresponded with economic need, or feeling the death was imminent, or whatever myriad factors go into these complicated equations with so many variables. What I can say is that it has been a deep struggle, some of which I have talked about in other posts, and where I am left today is with certain recalled realizations. Primarily, that it is not particularly helpful or healthy for me to be so engaged – it has, as the kids say, triggered old scripts which I heroically resisted (mostly) during Pennsylvania’s occupation – and so I should pull back to a safe distance. No one should like to watch a car wreck happening, but more importantly, if you do find yourself traveling on that same stretch of dark and rainy roadway for a moment, you should pull over on the shoulder and get out of range of shattering glass and flying quarter panels, stat.
It is important to acknowledge that I was trained/programmed from birth to be helpful – not really helpful, but enabling. To sacrifice myself for the purpose of mitigating the consequences of chronic bad decisions of people around me. To make people feel better. The bigger problem was that I was good at it: I had enough capacity that I could perform some bronze-level miracles, and I let that become, for a long time, a mantra that “if I could, I should, because not everyone can.” I’ve made a lot of lives better, if we measure that in terms of not letting them drown in their own proverbial vomit. Ironically, the Videographer just asked me recently why, as such an obvious and potent healer, I wasn’t in the business of healing full time; and I simply didn’t have the time to explain to him how that was, in a way, precisely a problem that I didn’t want to step back into. I had peeled back a number of those layers over time, but I now find that being in sustained exposure to the very same childhood dynamics and relationships which formed that faulty wiring has led to it carrying a charge again. Let me throw that circuit breaker before something burns the fuck down.
So, what I have remembered this week, likely not for the first time these past two years, is that help does not equal enabling. And so when people ask for help, explicitly or implicitly, and tack on “but I won’t do anything differently, regardless of the evidence my methods are utter shit,” you know no one is asking for help. They are asking for you to fill in as many cracks as possible to enable them to continue to the same fucked up shit as always. And so, my mom, who is in an abusive and toxic relationship, continues to sacrifice herself, which I guess is her sovereign right, but also everyone and everything else around her, which is not. The gaslighting is extreme: an hour long conversation full of genuine panic and emotional overwhelm will be followed by an absolute denial that anything is really a problem when I have the temerity to recall what has been said.
I do feel angry, but in part because I feel sad. My mother will tell you at some length how she only married so and so in some way because of me, or his kid, or X or Y, but never acknowledges that in the years since, she has thrown me under the bus for that relationship again and again and again. Even a simple request that she visit me here, to see what I’m up to, etc, for a mere couple of weeks is impossible because…. her husband can’t be left for a couple of weeks alone? “It would kill him.” Really? Maybe he would feel some relief, some freedom. But if not, why not? Interacting with that level of codependency is truly like trying to retrieve a favorite shirt from the worst maggot-filled, vomit and diarrhea puddle you can imagine. No solutions, please: don’t clean it up, just understand why it’s there. Oh, I understand: that doesn’t mean I want to accommodate it and leave it in the middle of the living room floor, thanks. It’s just like I told the Videographer: maybe it’s useful to know why something is a reflex, maybe it’s not. But either way, it does not excuse or exclude the choice of action, now. In this case, nothing is ever going to get better, because no one is ever going to do better.
And so it relates, of course, to the feelings bound up with a few things this past couple of years – reactivating that story of how someone wants my support, both material and otherwise, without having to offer anything in return and/or actively sabotaging me in exchange. That has been derailing, because damn, I’m only a person, and there’s only so many fissures opening up in the ground that I can hop over, sidestep, anticipate or whatever and still keep moving. Jesus fucking Christ. I have a rather long list of shit to do, and none of this is helping me one iota.
So, I’m now going to get back in the car and try to put some safe distance between myself and this decades-long slow car wreck unfolding. I’m going to listen to my favorite songs of the Musician and wistfully remember why I am not with someone whom I loved so cosmically. I’m going to plan my escape from this fucking trauma vs scavenger tar pit of a town. I’m going to center and regroup, and remember why I did not succumb to the vast majority of what I was set-up to, coming through not completely unscathed, but evidently with proper pruning that has yielded amazing fruit.
Ya’ll can all suck a bag of dicks.
NOBLE BATTLE MAIDEN 