empathy – Stories That Are All True

What motivates you?

I am motivated by the same thing that motivates all neurodivergent people….. the fear of being misunderstood. I think I’m worse about trying to please others because I was raised in an environment where it was prized. My parents didn’t have to do or say anything. I would react if I displeased anyone anywhere. I don’t think I have necessarily been good at it. Sometimes I’ve stuffed anger down until I’ve completely exploded. I’m excellent when I have no needs and/or agree with someone that what they’re doing is correct. If I do not understand you, I will want you to explain until I do. If it’s a social cue I’ve missed that isn’t written down, please be prepared to defend your dissertation. I am not going to be the cook that walks around with everyone’s orders memorized……….. anymore.

I’m not being a hardass, I’m being real with you. In order for me to comply with something, I need to know why it is necessary. Sometimes I do not feel empathy if the reason you need me to do something is “I’m embarrassing you,” because first of all, no I’m not if you’ve got good boundaries. My behavior is not a reflection of others and I resent people who treat me that way. That’s because most of the time, they’re embarrassed by the same things I am because I am trapped in this body and they aren’t. I tend to be a clown because of my cerebral palsy, because God forbid someone actually need help.

I am starting to change that internal motivation, because there are starts and setbacks just like everything else. People are quite used to me not having feelings, and therefore not having to take them into account. I am not going to be the person who caters to everyone else until I die, hoping to get some of it back and feeding the problem by not letting anyone know what they’re doing is hurting me.

I know that if I put myself out there as your friend, I will do the things it takes to keep you when you let me know what they are. I cannot agree to a deal I don’t understand, especially when you make it murky trying not to hurt my feelings. I would rather you take a knife and stab me all the way through than think that we are solid because I don’t notice all the times you’ve simply shaved a bit off the top.

I am also not innocent of these things, and am not trying to make excuses for it. I am trying to create better communication with my friends going forward. I will do anything for them if communication is clear. I will work on any problem if I know that someone wants me to work on it with them. My PTSD makes me think that every problem in a relationship means it’s the end of the world, so I don’t need conversations that allude to “we need to talk” without actually talking about whatever change it is you need.

Keeping me in that kind of limbo is not okay, and I have enough emotional fortitude not to leave someone in that place of wondering whether I’m mad enough to walk off or not.

I’ve just stopped getting angry when they don’t do the same for me. I take inaction as my answer and move on. It’s easier to do having a journal, because even when I say goodbye to future interactions, I still spend time with them in our memories. It’s not an immediate end to a story when there are recurring themes.

Recognizing that I love emotionally unavailable people because that’s the pattern of relationship I love the most was progress. I learned to stop expecting other people to express themselves to the level that I did when I knew damn well they were incapable. That’s why I loved them.

I was familiar with that pattern/division of labor. The one where I did all the feeling and the other person just told me if I was right or not. It was great because they were doing all the logical, neurotypical decisionmaking and understanding why I don’t think that way. They also did not dive into themselves and give me information based on their understanding of themselves, just what I thought. By the same token, I could have read up more on logical decisionmaking and done my own.

Understanding the ways in which I am and am not the main character in every story has been essential these last 10 years. My perspective has changed. I have become a completely different person because of writing. I know that I only have the right to this space. I am free to spread out and decorate and be my whole self. At no time does that make me the main character anywhere else.

I am trying to motivate myself less out of fear these days and more in the hope that I can write stories here that are worth reading. That’s because they are so valuable to me that it makes me cry when I take in how much other people enjoy listening…… as fallible as I am. God, it would be easier to write down the mistakes I haven’t made. But even when they’re painful, writing them down does give them a better chance of being humorous in the future. I’m not sitting there holding everything in.

Sometimes, motivation is seeing the things I write about me and wanting to reinforce them. It makes me want to live up to the character I present, to take moments of bravery and remember them so they happen again, for instance.

I cannot expect anyone else to provide me with validation, so the motivation is to find the things in life that make me feel whole so that I am not searching for anything outside my own brain housing group. It is the thing that stops fear-based motivation, and it has given me some peace that I got to these conclusions myself. That they weren’t easily won. It took decades.

I cannot always be angry at myself for my mood and behavior because a lot of the time I’m berating myself for a symptom of a disorder. I cannot expect others to have compassion for it, but I need to or I’ll hate myself my whole life.

No one else has to love me, and really can’t, until I do.

Fear is motivating me to find my people and stick with them, but it’s the good kind of fear, now. The kind that keeps you from the people you know you can’t handle and directs you toward the ones you can….. and not for any other reason than them letting you know it’s okay. Their fear is your fear, and we’ll melt it together.

I’m trying to take stock of the ways my life has changed since my mother died, because now that it’s been a little over two years, things look different than they did when it first happened. I have found a new version of normal, although I am emotionally bleeding out for my cousins because their father just died unexpectedly. Additionally, this is the second sibling my aunt and uncle have lost in a very short time (the uncle that died was the second of four children on my mother’s side). So, we are all trying to find a new version of normal, trying to wrap our brains around two people in our family that have died very young. My mother was only 65, and my uncle died the day before his 64th birthday.

This is crushing because as people in grief know, birthdays and anniversaries are the hardest to get through. I cannot imagine having those two days so close together, yet another thing that makes grief as individual as a fingerprint, because even though my cousins and I share the pain of losing a parent, no situation is the same. I would not presume that they’re feeling the same thing I am (or even did), particularly because I am further along in my process of finding Option B.

I do remember how terrible those first few days were, because I saw everything through a deep and penetrating fog. People would say things to me and I would forget one second later what they said, or not even reply because I would go deaf and dumb to the world around me. I completely fell apart. For months, I would forget where I was going, or even the way out of my own neighborhood. For even longer, I wouldn’t interact. For instance, one day I’d think getting together with friends or going to church would make me feel better, then not only regret that decision, but drop off the face of the earth and people would wonder where the hell I went. Ummm, I went home. And not only did I go home, I didn’t even take up space in the house. I confined myself to my room for far longer than anyone thought I could or should.

I would (and still do) bounce between zero and what seems like 50,000 calories in a day. Grief took away hunger and thirst until I couldn’t ignore it anymore. It also occurred to me that drinking alcohol is often a trap when someone close to you dies, so being completely sober was a good and bad thing. There was no social lubricant for anxiety at being around people, and when I felt my feelings, I really, really felt them.

I am normally a little bit socially anxious, for which I take medication. But social anxiety is different in deep grief. People notice when you look like crap, and will tell you, not knowing the bomb you’re about to drop on them. See, the reason I look like a hot mess is that my mother just died…. and that’s when you can literally hear the whistle with Doppler effect. You desperately don’t want it to, but the conversation goes from zero to weird in 2.5 seconds and you regret you said anything. The hardest part about telling people someone close to you died is that the air in the room changes, and people start treating you differently.

Some people know exactly what to do, which is either say they’re sorry and leave it at that, or say nothing and just give you a hug. With others, it is a litany of I know just how you feel, and then tell a story that legit has nothing to do with what you’re going through.

30704001_1986837498021611_1417297838002122399_n This is the Facebook meme I found today that made me laugh and cringe, because for the grieving, it describes our experience perfectly. I really don’t fucking care how sad you were when your cat died and how it relates to my grief that I’ll never see my mother again. I also don’t care how you’ll feel when your mother dies, because first of all, you have no idea how you’ll feel when your mother/father/spouse dies, because thinking about it ahead of time is so much different than when reality punches you in the face. Secondly, my smart ass response is always going to be, well, it’s a good thing I’m going through it instead of you. However, that part generally seethes inside me because I know no one is trying to elicit that response. They just have no idea what to say, so what they think they’re saying is good and what they’re really saying hurts.

The other thing that happens is that your mother/father/spouse’s death becomes a subject no one wants to touch, so they stop bringing up the person altogether, as if remembrance is the worst thing ever. Say her name. Tell me funny stories about what you remember, especially if you knew her at a time when I didn’t.

I learned this lesson initially through divorce, that people thought bringing up Dana was somehow verboten, when it would have meant the world to me to laugh about the funny things that happened to us…. and at first, it really hurt that Dana and my mom have the same birthday, but now it feeds me because I think about celebrating Dana instead of being mired in grief…. mostly the old joke about how since she’s two years older than me, she’s just that much closer to death than I am. 😛

Yes, divorces are terrible. Yes, deaths are terrible. But it doesn’t render my great memories invalid. Just because it’s over doesn’t mean I don’t want to remember.

Speaking of “over,” I don’t view my relationship with my mother as such. I have a long history of writing letters to people or entities who are unlikely to respond. It doesn’t seem weird to me at all that we still “talk.” Maybe other people have trouble bringing up the topic of my mom, but I don’t. During the day, I basically narrate to her in my head, and in my dreams, she responds.

She thinks Dan and Pri Diddy are good for me. We agree on so much.