It’s been a while since I posted last and that’s because I’m struggling. It’s the dip from hypo-mania to the crash of depression and zero motivation. It’s the hope of finding local support and community, and finding none.
In the first part of this series I wrote about being a selective mute and how the feeling of being unheard and unseen relates to me being an oversharer. Having bipolar disorder lends itself to this as well, per Carrie Fisher’s experience at least.
I still struggle with wearing the appropriate filter, though it used to be much worse. An experience that haunts me to this day took place over twenty years ago. I was attending the Evergreen State College. My second year program was called Women’s Voices and Images in Literature and Film. I was part of a four person group, all women, and we became very close. We read books like The Awakening by Kate Chopin, The Yellow Wall Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir just to name a few. We examined films like Vertigo, dissecting the male gaze. The voices of these powerful women reverberated through each of us, triggering memories, epiphanies, and transformations. One woman realized after reading The Awakening that she had to leave her miserable marriage or end up like Edna, forever belonging to the sea. Another woman opened up about her childhood abuse, another about her family dynamics as a stepmother and co-parenting. I opened up about my childhood trauma as well as having only been out of a cult for four years.
Because one of the women had her birthday in mid May and mine is the last day of May, we celebrated our birthday together at Red Robin. I had a few drinks, and before I knew it I was talking, with abandon and graphically about one of my worst childhood traumas. The woman who was also celebrating her birthday got up and said, “That’s it. I can’t listen to this anymore.”
At first I was hurt and devastated. We talked later that night and she reminded me what she had been through and how similar our experiences were. I came from a place of, “But I have a right to share my story,” and she responded with, “And I have a right not to listen to it if it is triggering me.”
Of course she was right. And of course I felt terribly ashamed of my thoughtlessness, selfishness and lack of self awareness.
Things were never the same after that. Over the years I have replayed this moment many times. I had spent the first twenty-five years of my life being rewarded for my silence and punished for trying to set boundaries. My mother taught me that setting boundaries is unkind and unsafe, and people pleasing is the only way to survive this mad world. She taught me that when others set boundaries for me, they were being cruel and hateful. It has literally taken me decades to unlearn this conditioning and to find the right balance between authentic discourse, and traumatizing or triggering my listener.
Maybe it’s due to my neurodivergence, but I have always felt most comfortable in the uncomfortable spaces, and difficult conversations. Meaning, the deeper the dive, the murkier the water, the more at home I feel. It’s why I spend so much time alone. If I find myself in a group setting and the conversation remains surface level for an extended period of time, I feel like my soul is dying. Insanely dramatic, I know, but I can’t come up with a more accurate description. It’s not a judgement on how others relate, in fact, I wish I could remain on the surface instead of divulging and oversharing my thoughts and feelings. Sometimes I blurt something out, some traumatic childhood memory, or something dark and taboo and the table or the room goes silent, and I want to ooze out of my own skin, I want to disappear into the cosmos and reinvent myself into something palatable and acceptable. I do this on social media at times as well, and the silence is devastating.
I’m also a student of astrology. I find that it often if not always coincides not only with a person’s personality and behavior, but also physical and mental health conditions. I am a Scorpio rising and I have two major placements in the 8th house. If you aren’t familiar with astrology that means nothing to you, so let me explain in my own words (links also available).
You have the big three placements: your sun, your moon, and your rising. In basic terms, your sun sign is your ego, your moon sign your inner being, what you need emotionally, and your rising is the way you move through the world. Scorpio is known for being mysterious, dark, think Wednesday Addams or Lydia Deetz if you need an archetypal example. The 8th house is associated with sex, death, rebirth, and all things taboo. It represents what is beneath the surface, what is kept hidden. Both my sun and Mercury, planet of communication, are in the 8th house. This brings me comfort, to a degree.
I have learned just over the past five or six years to ask first. I take into account what someone else might be dealing with and before I take a deep dive into a psychological abyss, I ask the listener if they have the bandwidth to hear it or not. I appreciate how honest people have been with me. Sometimes they will even recommend someone else for me to talk to. I was getting pretty good at this until the last few months of traumatic events that no doubt triggered mania and depression. Then that anxiousness, that desperation for someone to understand overwhelmed everything else.
I’m in the midst of it. Some days I feel so hurt, disappointed and angry by the lack of support. It sends me deeper into the abyss. But when I catch even a sliver of light, I remind myself of this Rumi quote, “If everything around you seems dark, look again, you may be the light.” Because in all of the shame and aloneness and confusion I have felt, I have also discovered that I have a gift.
In one of my first posts, the one about how much I hate when people say that everything happens for a reason, I wrote about how I walked into a shop at a beachtown this summer, and the woman managing the store broke down when I went over to ask her about her dog. She told me it was her son’s birthday, or would have been, because he was murdered three years ago. Customers came and went, visibly uncomfortable. I listened to her a good thirty minutes or so, and she kept apologizing. I told her, “You chose the right person to share this with.” I comforted her as much as I could, as well as I could, and when I left I hoped that just having someone to witness her pain and hold space for her would be enough if even for the end of her shift.
I had similar experience weeks later. A woman was in crisis, she apologized too, and I also told her, “You chose the right person to talk to. Believe me, it’s okay.” And it was okay. Because the very thing that makes some people deeply uncomfortable when it comes to my nature, is also the same quality that invites others to share their pain. I can go below the surface, into daunting and unknowable territory, and this is where I am most aware of what I am made for.
It never feels like too much. Often the person will apologize for oversharing or trauma dumping, but I remind them that I can take it. I’m terribly sensitive, and this often gives the impression that one must be careful with me, as if the fact that I can emit intense and sometimes overwhelming emotions, must mean that I am fragile, or unstable. But I have realized, just recently, that I am the right person. I am someone who can take it without absorbing it. I listen and I can cry with you, and hold a judgement free space.
I remember my mother telling me when I was very young that it was my job to make her feel better, my job to cheer her up and listen to her when she was sad and when she cried. Obviously, this is a terribly toxic, if not downright abusive thing to do to a child, to make me responsible for managing a parent’s emotions. But I also wonder if without realizing it, I alchemized this emotionally abusive trauma into a purpose. I know I’m not responsible for managing anyone else’s emotions. I know that it is not my job to keep another human being from escalating. I know that boundaries are both crucial, and loving. And I also know as a Scorpio rising, as a woman who has had to die and be reborn hundreds of times, that I know the magic and the power of transformation. I know that witnessing them process their pain and heal out loud, that dark, jagged rock inside of them can dislodge itself, if even for just a moment.
I am very sad these days. I struggle to find this support in my community. So I go back to Rumi’s quote. If I’m surrounded by darkness, aloneness, isolation, then maybe it is up to me to be the light for someone else. This after all, is my territory. If I can’t find that for myself, at least I can invite others to share it with the right person.
So that’s what I’ll do. And maybe that is the healing journey I’m meant to be on after all. Wading in the dark waters, hoping I can keep someone else from drowning.
This is a poem I wrote several months ago that I hope will bring someone comfort.
Carry On I am halfway through my life, and still I can think of nothing else to offer than these paltry words, “Friend, I’m sorry, for what has been done to your heart.” Your love so clearly an unbroken song in the throat of a warbler, digging its wings into each note because you believe in what you have to offer. If I could, I would break the pain in half, like a chalky tablet, taper its dosage, and spare you from its full potency. Instead, I offer you a soft landing to a brutal crash from an almost-forever, the lesson we elbow in the face when it repeats, and repeats, buttons pushed by the fingers of our grief. Friend, I am halfway through my life and no one, and nothing, has taught me how to potion away the heartache, to satisfy the yawn-wide “why’s” of endings savage as these. So, think of me as a branch and not a tree, a limb to catch you mid fall, think of me not as a cure, but an interruption, a moment of respite from the dark chorus of your anthem.