A hell of a week, I tell ya. Feels like there’s been all kinds of crazy swirling around me lately and while I myself am not directly implicated in all of it, it is fucking exhausting to deal with. I’m not about to out any individuals or any specific details here, but as a little sample of what’s going on:
1) in family stuff, one person who is regularly abusive and always unpredictable went on a little bit of a tear recently, making daily life so unbearable for some others that they began to feel they had to leave their own home to appease the bully; this, in turn, spilled over into several days of highly emotional exchanges in the family generally, touching folks in those deep places of memory and pain that we’ve all got. Now, in any other situation it would be possible to walk away, to disengage, to refuse to play into the drama this one individual so loves to stir up. In family, though, it’s a whole other thing, both because those emotional triggers are so much more powerful and because, really, we do have to suck it up and deal with the traumas and soap-operas in a way we don’t have to do with non-familial relationships.
2) in community stuff, ongoing drama and bullying in the activist community and a strategy of appeasement from those who I wish knew better or were prepared to act with a little more courage and integrity. I am very aware of the similarity between this and the family scenario – bully screams and shouts, hurls accusations and makes demands; peacekeepers try – over and over again – to satisfy the bully by giving in a little more, a little more, a little more to the demands, hoping that the strategy of appeasement will one day work, despite all the evidence in the world that appeasement does, in fact, only further encourage the shitty behaviour by rewarding it. Here it’s slightly easier to disengage than on the family front – it is possible to make more distance in relationships or say goodbye to them altogether, it doesn’t hit buttons quite so deep as those scars from childhood. But not easy, by any stretch, and it all creates a weight, a tension, a sadness that is sitting pretty heavy on our household these days.
3) in work, I am dealing with a hunger-striker. Yes, that’s right, a hunger-striker. A member who is so isolated and alienated from his professional community that he has decided the only way to draw attention to his pain is to refuse to eat and try to get the press to pay attention. Oi. That’s about all I can say. Oi.
It’s all a bit much. And all the more exhausting as we’ve had a house-guest flitting in and out over the past while, which though not bad has introduced a more manic and anxious energy to the place and made it tough for Meg and I to simply collapse and get the rest and recovery we normally find in another.
Finally, Friday. Finally, we hope, a couple of days to normalize a bit, to lose ourselves in task and routine, to clean the house, work in the garden, watch a movie, brew some beer and generally just do what we do – live and enjoy the everyday living. All this madness ain’t going anywhere anytime soon. So the moments of retreat are just that much more important.
