Kannatlikkus

Kannatlikkus

Ma ei jaksa oodata.  Kaua ma oodanud olen? Kogu elu! Armasta mind nüüd, armasta mind, nii et sul pole ühtegi muud mõtet ka! Armasta mind püsivalt läbi aastate, aastakümnete, armasta mind igat moodi, kuidas üldse armastada saab, taha, et mul oleks hea, taha mulle rõõmu teha, armasta mind ometigiiii!!!

Ei, mitte sina.

Sellepärast on mul mu pisike sõnanorm, jup! Work less hard! Don’t work so hard, damn it! Take! It! Easy! You are doing great! More than great! AWESOME!!!!!!

Have created a new novel-writing approach for myself that I am calling Very Gentle Writing. Very Gentle Writing is an approach for people who live nearly every waking second in self-castigation and actually need peaceful slowness to unleash their creativity. 

Very Gentle Writing does not set staggering word count goals and then feel bad about it. No! Very Gentle Writing for me sets an extremely low word count and then feels magnificently productive when the low bar is exceeded (which is easy…it’s a low bar, I mean really low). 

Very Gentle Writing is about saying hey yo maybe I just want to listen to a chill playlist for a while and feel one sentence spill out. Go me! 

Very Gentle Writing is kind of about realizing I have a really limited amount of time to write in between work, and adulting, and taking care of a thousand life responsibilities, and trying to heal&deal from trauma in 2020. So I want that writing time to be….just…..nice. 

Very Gentle Writing means I have a goal of enjoying every single time I sit down to write. Really. I use all the fun words first. 

Very Gentle Writing came to me as an idea when I started to think about how as someone actively trying to recover from a lot of lifelong trauma, the usual word harder!! Work harder!! mantras in the world of “people doing hard things” didn’t motivate me at all, they only hurt me. I truly need a voice saying work less hard, personally.

Päris tabav. Ja siis ma panen selle konteksti, kus mina tunnen end kas jube halvasti või (vahel tuleb ette, teate) jube hästi võrreldes teiste inimestega, ja saan veel paremini aru.

Kui ma mõistsin (mitte esmakordselt, esialgu ma muigasin enda üle, “Oi, nii palju imelikkusi ja hädasid ühel inimesel? Pooled olen ekslikult endale omistanud, selge ju!”), et ma OLENGI autistlik krooniline  depressiivik, kes on kolm korda vägistatud, üliempaatiline ja väga psühhosomaatiline, oli päris hirmus. Sest kõik selle kannan ma ära suhteliselt sujuvalt ja ainult natuke teisi häirivalt.  Sellised inimesed ongi. Üsna tavaline tunduv inimene võib olla täiega traumatiseeritud.  Vau.  Siuke ühiskond. 

okay but like this is what deeply bothers me about the whole "tiktok is making people think every negative experience is a trauma!" thing

Trauma is common. Like really common. How do we accept statistics like "1 in 4 women has been sexually assaulted" or "1 in 3 people grew up in a home with domestic violence" or whatever number of people will fight cancer or be in a car crash or an abusive relationship, and at the same time doubt any suggestion that a lot of people may actually be traumatized?

It's in our cultural definition of trauma—that trauma is some extreme event outside "normal" life, and that the people that experience it are a sequestered group that is well outside the "average" person.

but like, even strictly Criterion A PTSD type "traumatic" events are...not rare. at all. You can be a hardass about it and say that you have to be raped or threatened with death or violence to have trauma, and that's still a lot of people that have experienced that. People around you. People that pass by you every day. People that appear and seem "normal" to you.

if you accept the idea that belonging to certain marginalized groups can have some traumatizing elements to it, "most people are traumatized in some way" is just the most blandly obvious statement ever.

but even if you're for some reason squicky about "watering down" the definition of trauma (lol), we can at least agree that most people are hurt, right? Deeply hurt. Most people have been mangled by their experiences in one way or another. People's behavior is guided by the fact that they are hurt.

One of my dad's sayings, which is earnest and not at all shameful or demeaning, is that People Are Broken. And in church settings (because he was a pastor and is still very devout) his measure of the quality of that church setting was always their ability to come to terms with the fact that People Are Broken, not just people Out There or hypothetical people but us, the people around us, the people we live alongside and befriend and love. And if a church thought of Broken People as an external category of people to be "reached," instead of a near-universal experience of being human in a cruel society, well that church was likely to be, ultimately, toxic. And hardly any church passes that test, because our brokenness is hard to talk about.

We can't admit that most people are traumatized because it means that the call is coming from inside the house, that the menace is contained within our society instead of being a freak accident/act of god/attack by a lone wolf outside of the normal confines of our world.

But this is the truth. That our world, the nice, "normal" world, the everyday world, hurts people. We are not gentle enough for other humans, our society is not kind enough for humans to thrive.

We have to try to be less cruel. We have to understand that almost everyone has endured something unspeakable and has not fully healed. This is why I don't care about watering down the definition of trauma. We have not even begun to fully define the wound. There is no virtue in conserving recognition for the most obvious and extreme human pain. Why would we need less compassion?

See lohutab mind. Pisut. Kuigi pole nimetatud ühtegi naist. Nad nii valesti mõistetud, et keegi ei saa isegi hiljem aru, kuidas: “Ohkurat, me tegime talle ülekohut! Ta mõtles hoopis seda!” Või kui saavad, ei kirjuta seda internetti =(

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates…and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Raske ja sitt aeg. Aitavad Alver ja Ehin ja natuke ka, kuidas koer jalaga vehib kui ta kõhtu sügada.

Rasked ja sitad ajad lähevad mööda teoorias. Ei tundu küll, et läheksid. Istuvad turjal mul soojas kõdunevas ja mädanevas, loovad äädikakärbeste parvi ja augusti lõhna karmi on täis nii mu pea kui keha.

Kannatan ära. Mis teha.