This is for my friends who are neurodivergent, who are chronically ill, mentally ill, mad, crip, disabled, crazy, gimp, sick, traumatized, living as the other on the boundaries — however you choose to define yourself, this is for us. I don’t see you, no. Not that. Because most of us are invisible and because most of us are doing our damnedest still to blend in to the every day — and that’s what this is about, that blending, that passing, that doing what we have to do in order to get by with the flow of life.
This is hard for me to write, because it’s me admitting that I’ve been passing in a harmful way for upward of a decade.
Yesterday, my therapist said that she and my case manager and a long list of others often feel that something doesn’t ring true about me when I speak of my medical conditions, about trauma I’ve experienced, etc. At first I couldn’t speak to reply and then I started to sob. As I gasped to breathe, I managed to say that I thought I knew why, that it’s because of my detachment. The complete detachment from all emotional reaction, which I have been using since 2004 or so (and deepening over the years) as a response to any and all medical news, trauma, change, and just about everything else in my life. It’s how I cope with everything that I feel is going to possibly hurt too much: I detach. I choose not to feel. Because if I feel… all of this, everything that has happened to me… nope, not going there. Detached.
I want to talk about how I’ve used detachment as a coping strategy over the last decade and more. Before I started detaching, I was an emotional wreck. My diagnosis was bipolar disorder. I couldn’t regulate my emotions and I couldn’t maintain friendships, relationships, jobs, school attendance, anything. It wasn’t just my physical health that was a wreck, it was my emotional health, too. I was in need of balance and I couldn’t find it.
Being an emotional roller coaster was not rewarded by anyone. It was not appreciated. It was not loved. It couldn’t be counted on. It was not responsible. It was not listened to, trusted, or acknowledged. I include myself in this. When I started to stabilize by using emotional detachment, I started to give myself the same treatment others did — appreciation, love, respect, acknowledgement. The more I detached, particularly regarding my health and trauma, the more “normalized” others treated me. But I’ve learned that’s actually to my detriment.
Because what I thought was this great coping strategy isn’t so great. What everyone says they want — to not be bothered, to not be witness to a mess of emotions — it’s what they want, but hell, if that’s what we, the traumatized or sick deliver to them, then apparently we must actually be fine, right? Then we must not be performing our disability/trauma right or in a healthy way or maybe we’re just lying about it to begin with.
I went through the disbelief of others nearly two decades ago, which is itself its own trauma. I don’t need to go through it again and I’m choosing not to do so. I’m choosing instead to focus more on the fact that my coping mechanism is unhealthy and less on the fact that it’s somehow made me less believable because I’ve bottled all my emotions for…well, to never access.
I wonder how many of us have taught ourselves to cope in this manner? We can’t be a mess, so we just choose to contain, contain, contain, forever not feeling, forever not discussing. Over this past decade, many people I have known have ceased to communicate their pain and have chosen to end their lives. I’ve learned that isn’t for me, but I wonder if they had shut off like me, refusing to feel, refusing to talk about it, until it became too much.
Leela Sinha‘s new book, “You’re Not Too Much,” seems to be begging me to read it. That’s all I’ve got for a closer right now. I haven’t read her book yet, though it comes highly recommended. It’s my self-assigned homework. That and starting to let myself feel some of these emotions. Maybe.
