Shakespeare understands grief better than I do.
Sir Patrick Stewart said on Graham Norton that when he took on the role of Macbeth, Sir Ian McKellan asked if he could give him some advice. Patrick said, “PLEASE!” Patrick proceeded to make tears roll down my face when he said that Sir Ian said, “the key to unlocking Macbeth is ‘and.’ It is not “tomorrow.” It is “tomorrow….. AND tomorrow…. AND tomorrow.” It is the interminable march of days, the piling on of all kinds of trauma small and large, the fact that it seems like it will never end right up until it does. That’s why there’s such a dramatic boost between happiness while poor and happiness while comfortably middle class. When you have savings, the minutiae of life does not drown you, constantly. It is also true that happiness does not get much deeper after that. Once your basic needs are met, it doesn’t make you another 50% happier to be a multimillionaire.
I think that’s because Shakespeare recognized a specific kind of future. The one where you, too are stuck in a moment and get get out of it. I wish I could do all of life like I cook, which is knowing enough to be able to correct a mistake on the fly… not knowing whether I have just experienced a symptom or whether it’s a regular dumbass attack and treating everything like the latter, blowing it out of proportion with rejection sensitivity disorder. And I could give truly frightening examples of it, but most people who have anxiety and depression jump to the worst of conclusions first because they can’t handle their environment in the first place. It’s hard to feel like people love you when they’re exhausted by behavior that frustrates you all by itself.
It’s hard not to feel like everything is your fault when people are so insistent that the common denominator in every interaction is me. There is no possible way I own a hundred percent of the blame for every situation in which I encounter. It’s just not physically possible, especially when I’m a fixer/pleaser and do things to make people smile often. But people are more naturally drawn to you when things are going well…… and when things aren’t going well tend to think they’re right more than they are. So do I. It’s human nature. The objective truth is found in the chasm between our two stories, and most people don’t have the stomach for that.
People conflate “the common denominator is you” to mean that you are responsible for every slight that happens (as if you have that kind of power) and every misfire in communication; it’s “you are somewhat responsible because a situation takes two or more people to create and you need to own your part.” For instance, Dana and I agreed that we both fucked each other up. After one fight, we divided up percentages and decided it was 60/40 in her favor. Then, I told her I would have taken 75 and she lowballed herself. I tend to take on more guilt than I should, and I am now only reclaiming a normal amount of room in the universe rather than being unable to dictate any terms with anyone. It leads all my energy to bleed out, trying to please everyone from my family to strangers. This has often led to people being entitled to their boundaries with me while ignoring mine because I’ve let them get away with it for so long.
I didn’t decide that I was the only arbiter of my friendship with Supergrover. She shut down and didn’t give me information, then didn’t have any tolerance for me making decisions based on what I thought rather than what was actually going on with her. But it wasn’t because I didn’t ask or want that information to purposefully ignore her needs. It’s that mine were never addressed, ever. She felt great about me adoring her, but not about the fact that she had severely emotionally wounded me. And I wouldn’t have cared by now if she hadn’t forgiven me on the surface so that I felt like I was a ghost in her life. The one in which she thought I was a threat and then checked in with me, not establishing new boundaries so that I didn’t constantly walk on eggshells around her.
Like getting annoyed that I wanted to know something basic through conversation, seemingly annoyed I hadn’t looked it up when I couldn’t have Googled the information, anyway. Why would I do that if I don’t want to give you the impression that I try to get information about you that you don’t want to give?
Tomorrow…. AND tomorrow…. AND tomorrow….
The feeling of how she treated me hasn’t gone away, and I know exactly why I didn’t walk. It felt like the pattern to which I’d become accustomed to in childhood, trying desperately to please someone that had already moved on so that it felt like I was pouring love into them while they tolerated me. Fully capable of being a baby monkey, too scared to walk away from wire because I don’t know how to find cloth yet. I haven’t been taught. But I am teaching, reparenting myself. Trying to give mysellf what I didn’t get, and part of it is saying what I mean and meaning what I say. Everything is a lie as I figure out what’s masking and what’s not.
I just know that my social masking wasn’t limited to autism, it was reinforced by trying to be good (which meant quiet and out of the way) and covering my needs. I’m not special. Most women and girls do this. However, most girls aren’t preacher’s kids, either.
I’m not trying to piss anyone off, it’s just a side effect of change. People see me differently and they ought to. But remember that we’re both going through a struggle and behavior doesn’t exist in a vaccum. If I have to be responsible for my behavior, you have to be responsible about what triggered it. You cannot say I am wrong a hundred percent of the time, because my self-esteem isn’t low enough to believe it anymore. I can work with boundaries, but not when you don’t set them.
So much of my need to run from Supergrover stemmed from her marrying Michael, then not telling me for almost two years, then saying “surely I must have gotten the wedding announcement,” then saying there weren’t pictures, etc. I can believe that last one, but everything else sounds like “lies you tell” when you want to protect someone…. and this isn’t the first or only example of her doing it. Her identity fundamentally changed, her life had moved on in a concrete way, and it felt like I wasn’t worth telling…. whether it was/is true or not. It’s not what she intended, it’s what I felt in those moments. She also didn’t talk about anything but work when that was the last thing I wanted to know about her most days.
It was too big a hurt to mend alone, but an even bigger one that she was right there and couldn’t hear me. She had the right to set that boundary with me, but I had the right to walk away when she did it, because she explicitly said that there were things she wouldn’t be opening up about again…. which was, of course, the thing that drove my crazy dreams. Then, over time, she relaxed about it and I felt like there was a new boundary set with no way of knowing whether it was true. Actions and words didn’t line up for a long time. She wouldn’t have reacted to me so angrily all those years if I hadn’t hurt her, or if we had truly mended the rift. We “put the word ‘free’ on a note so high we couldn’t sing it,” paraphrasing Tony Kushner. Or, one of us couldn’t. Taking Kushner literally, I can hit that high B flat at 1500 yards when I’m on my game. I’m currently not, but that’s not the point. The point is that you get out what you put into it. I wouldn’t be able to hit an emotional high B flat at 1500 yards without years of understanding someone, just like years of voice lessons makes me able to sing “The Star Spangled Banner” (No one will ever, no not ever beat Whitney Houston taking it in four at the SuperBowl.) I will never be Whitney Houston without another party’s input. It takes both of us being vulnerable to move forward.
It’s so counterintuitive, but leans the relentlessness of life into rolling joy rather than rolling pain.
Being able to move fast and take chances doesn’t happen in a vacuum, either. It comes from examining yourself to the point where you understand and trust your own intuition, because you’ve talked to enough people to know whether you’re a good judge of a situation or not. How often your behavior is a source of joy or worry. When it pays off to focus on yourself and when you’re ignoring people. When you ignore them too long, they’ll go away.
When I tried to set boundaries with someone who had no issue setting them with me and just not apprising me of the situation consistently enough to understand it, she ran. I don’t have to take it personally, but I do have to remember it’s what she does. She doesn’t let me know what the boundaries are and blames me for overstepping them, but is also the one I’d trust with my whole life because she’s shown me she’s rock solid in other areas of our relationship. It’s worth working on, but…
Tomorrow….. AND tomorrow… AND tomorrow.
Stories That Are All True 