pride and presence
Yesterday, Ostara passed almost unmarked. I did not rise to greet the sun. We did not manage to get the eggs dyed or make the natural ink that Rena wanted to use for journaling. I had a cold and my body was bleeding out all my energy into pads and I was miserable. I had classes to plan for co-op, and unresolved drama with a co-teacher of one of those classes, and that teacher was leaving suddenly with her family and I was being left to finish the class that hadn’t even been my idea on my own. I was a bundle of raw emotions and much older unresolved drama and trauma that was being dragged up by everything that was going on—and I was miserable. By this morning I wanted to call off sick even though I didn’t need to and covering both classes would be a major pain. I hadn’t had a shower in three days, I was sick of being sick, and I desperately needed to get out of my head. So I threw on some clothes and went for a walk around the property. It took me almost two full loops to get my eyes off the ground, and when I did my feet veered off course of their own volition and I stopped to lean against Grandmother Maple. I told her everything that had happened in that easy way that comes without words, when you simply pour all your jumbled feelings into another’s spirit, the kind of communication that happens when you’re a child and all you can do is cry into your parent’s arms. Shake it out, she whispered back. I straightened up and walked on, shaking my arms, punching the air, growling and yelling and telling the trees just what I thought, the unfiltered version. Afterwards, I was smiling. I felt light for the first time in weeks. Showering once I went back inside buoyed me further yet.
Until I saw my phone. On it was a message from said co-teacher, “apologizing” for “hurting” me, while demanding sympathy for how badly she had been treated. Up until that moment I had felt sad for her; sad for the determined way she held herself apart while complaining about feeling like an outsider, sad that she was choosing to leave instead of staying and fighting for the relationships she cared about (apparently, she didn’t care about any of us enough to do that), sad because I had been raised to “cut and run” as soon as relationships got difficult and I know how isolating that is when it becomes a habit. I empathize with her, I empathize with her daughters. But I won’t be manipulated. I decided not to respond.
Maybe it was because I’d been reading Lindsay Gibson’s Self-Care for Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, but I had a minor epiphany. I had listened to two podcast episodes last week on which Lindsay Gibson had been a host, and her work was more than a little bit responsible for both my recently highly triggered state and my newfound calm. After shutting down part way through re-listening to the first episode, I ordered every book of hers that our library system had. Self-Care was the first to come in, so that’s the one I picked up this morning over breakfast. One of the first sections was about pride, about how praise and encouragement fuel growth but that most people have pride trained out of them by the time they reach adulthood, and how we have to relearn how to acknowledge and delight in what we do well in order to continue progressing. I realized that, for better or for worse, I am really good at recognizing emotional manipulation. I am a walking emotional bullshit meter.
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