We had reached the bit where you were extolling the virtues of grinding it out, keeping a stiff upper lip and behaving like a professional when I was stuck in a job and life I didn't like. I should spare everyone my feelings and get out, leaving behind such a huge pink cloud of goodwill that people will wonder why I left.
That would be called “denial” and it is very definitely a Bad Thing.
You see, for those of you who haven't been there and don't know – it's not like having a headache or a cold or a cough. It's like having a permanently bad knee, or tinnitus, or air bubbles in your retina which cause blank patches, or an ache that won't go away because the bones didn't quite heal right. When something happens to you, gentle reader, you get upset, you get angry or down in the dumps: that's the emotional equivalent of a cold. You can “move on” from that – if you can find somewhere to go - or you can adjust, behave professionally, take it in your stride. What happened to us is for life. We can learn some tricks – they teach you to “manage” tinnitus, which means they can't cure it, and you can “manage” it, but it doesn't go away – we can manage our behaviour and reactions, but the underlying emotions are still there and if the trigger is too strong, blooey – we're off. Would you say to someone born with a dodgy heart “so you have a dodgy heart, get over it”? Maybe if you're that insensitive. What we have is like a dodgy heart – no, metaphorically, it is a dodgy heart. If you're a normal person, you have no idea what I'm talking about, and if you do know you might not believe that your emotional stuff is as permanent as a physical condition, but it is. The deep emotional stuff is as debilitating, hampering, disabling, disadvantaging, irritating, upsetting and painful as any serious physical injury.
So when you say words to the effect of “grind it out”, “get over it”, “you need to move on”, ask yourself what you're really asking us to do. It's okay to ask that we stop moaning around you – if done with some firm kindness, that's not insensitive. Are you asking that? Or are you honestly suggesting that we leave behind emotions we can barely name caused by incidents we can't even remember in the same way you left behind the carpets when you moved house?
That's one of the things you don't get. We often don't know where it hurts, what hurts and what effect that hurt is having on us. Get an abscess on your foot and you will soon wind up with pains all through your back as you adjust how you walk and hold yourself. If you don't know what's happening, are you going to connect the neck pain with the foot problem? We know something wasn't right, but we don't know what because we don't know how it was supposed to be. That's another of the things you don't get. You can, in the end, look at your foot and you know you're not supposed to have an abscess there – we don't know what's right and wrong, what was us and what was them.
Does this stuff really last as long as this? We really can go into our late middle age with it? Doesn't it fade away? Like the colour of the spines of books exposed to sunlight? Wrong analogy. It's cracks in walls, too much sand in the cement, trees drying out the soil in your foundations; it's the way your face changes as you get older and you did nothing to make it look like that, it just happened; it's the way your body just decided it would not recover from that collision in the rugby match so quickly. The soul might be immortal, but it is not ageless. It wears and tears and cracks and you have to go round fixing it.
Call no-one normal until they are dead. And then call them lucky. Lucky that nothing happened in their whole lives that hit one of the weaknesses in their morale, identity, character or emotional make-up. Lucky that if it did, they had friends, relatives or colleagues who could help them, people to tell them how to handle it, that it isn't their fault, that, yes, actually that boss / girlfriend / boyfriend / relative / whoever is a Bad Person / degenerate addict / thief / psycho and you are best off away from them. What you don't get is that we never had anyone like that.
The question is: what can we change, what do we have to live with and what won't we give up?
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