Ok, so here we go. I have been thinking a lot lately about what I bring to other people’s lives and what they bring to mine. What has come up for me in this inventory is me seeing how out of balance I have been for so long. I have habitually been too available, too involved, too engaged and too present. Over the last several years, I have had to address this in every aspect of my life. This compulsive need of mine to prove my worth by making myself accessible and vital to the ongoing nature of other people’s lives.
It is kind of the same idea I had when I was a young teen, if you plan all the parties, then you can’t not be invited to them. The best way to be valued is to make yourself indispensable in the lives of others. Except, that isn’t true. Making yourself indispensable does nothing to solidify value. Like at all. In fact, my experience is that it all too often falls the other way, like you run around trying to prove your worth to someone who totally relies upon you but then undermines everything by doubting your intentions, sincerity or even your merit.
What I see now is that I became jumper cables for other people’s lives. They would drain their own battery and then I would be deployed to restart their lives. But unlike actual jumper cables, I am not a neutral inanimate object. I am a person so every jump start I did, drained me. Took from my energy and vitality for my own life and gave to others.
I had that codependent philosophy that if I just kept showing up and jump starting these shitshows, one day they would turn around and be available to supply life and vitality to me. I wasn’t giving to get exactly, because I literally waited in some cases for years and years and years. Giving and showing up, fixing and resolving, jump starting repeatedly and didn’t even realize that I was getting nothing, almost fucking nothing in return.
It is a tricky business this whole giving and receiving. I am way better at the giving, receiving makes me uncomfortable for a variety of reasons: it makes it seem like I am incapable of providing it for myself, it requires me to be vulnerable (receiving requires an ability to need and that is inherently vulnerable), and it allows someone else to be close to you in ways that might feel uncomfortable and hard.
So I see how and why I defaulted to this human jumper cable person. It was never them, it was always me. Seeking out people who would let me in but not really ever ask for any kind of intimacy from me. I could lie dormant in the proverbial trunk of someone’s car, waiting to be deployed into action where I could save the day. Then quickly relegated back to the trunk where it was safe.
I always thought that other people were using me, when in fact, I was using them.
That was a very hard admission right there. Fuck.
So I have been engaged in relationships in this wholly dysfunctional manner for decades and I had no idea. None at fucking all.
But the last three years has been revolutionary in the Erin department. I have done a lot of inventory, therapy, hitting of bottoms and growth to arrive at this place where I can see that I set all this shit up and it was me the whole time. I was selecting these mother fuckers, they were just doing what they did.
Fuck me!
Such a hard day when you realize the people in your life are not haphazard randoms but a series of individuals your trauma, issues and history demand you seek out and then move into your life. That is a very ouchie revelation!
And coupled with that realization is the fact that you need to be the jumper cables because on some very basic levels, you are the one that likes to start shit.
But, the good news, is that if you press on, you will arrive at wholly different and divergent shore if you plod the course of your relational malfeasance.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
And if we do, then we have all the material we need to realign ourselves and our trajectories towards some new shore, some new person, some new vista. And we leave the jumper cables neatly tucked away in the trunk of our life and become much more discerning about our deployment and use of said cables on individuals who are in distress and in need of a pick me up.
I guess what I am trying to say is that we do have the choice to take all that energy and turn it inward and redirect it outward in a healthier and more spiritual manner. Instead of just persisting as some sort of fail safe in the lives of others. And that this endeavor will require a great deal of strength and metal and resiliency from us. An almost daily renewal of personal accountability and willingness to be vulnerable and authentic which will often leave us unwilling or unable to resurrect the individual standing in front of us demanding and requiring us to be the jumper cable in their life.
You have to pick you, in order to ever really pick them. Which has taken me a very long time to comprehend but I think I am getting there. And I am releasing the whole identity as a jumper cable kind of gal. I am going to leave that to AAA instead.
Again...still.
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