mf

I’ve held onto a lot of mementos, souvenirs, notes, paperwork and other reminders, and for a long time I didn’t really know why.

I also used to take a lot of notes, photos, recordings, for no specific reason. Which I used to think was pointless, but now… I wonder. I was taught, as a child, not to “dwell” on things, and to think that there was something wrong with me if I did; now I wonder if my brain was trying to create workarounds somehow.

The things I dwelled on were always about inconsistencies. About situations in which my brain knew there was something bothering me, but I couldn’t spot it. Cognitive dissonance, basically.

It's like… have you ever had an acquaintance who kept saying they want to hang out and be friends... but then canceled a coffee hangout at the last minute? And then another? And maybe even forgot a third one entirely? So then when they say “let’s hang out!” again you scroll back over your text messages with all the “oops sorry can’t make it” and “hey looks like I’ll have to reschedule” messages like you’re trying to explain, to justify, to yourself that this is bothering you.

Here are words, here are actions… do they match? What would it take for them to match? What does it mean, either way?

Anyway I think that keeping lots of mementos, messages, paperwork, notes, etc without really knowing why was a trauma response.

Have you ever been told that “you’re being unfair” to someone? Like, not in the sense that you gave them only one cookie when you gave everybody else two cookies. In the sense that you feel they’ve done something messed up, and you’re telling someone else about it, and that other person says you’re being unfair. And you’re sure fairness has nothing to do with it, you’re just stating facts and stating your response to the facts, but still they insist: you’re being unfair.

I think… I think that if that happens enough times, you start doubting yourself. You start wondering if maybe there’s something wrong with your perception, your response, or your sense of what’s messed up and what isn’t. What’s inappropriate, what’s uncomfortable, what’s just plain wrong, and what isn’t. And I think that doubt can niggle away at you.

I think that what happened to me, like, as a kid, was that I taught myself to go along with this idea that I was "being unfair." And whenever I couldn’t work it out for myself, I’d hold on to what amounted to an evidence file, like I was trying to construct a narrative that made it all fit. That explained it all. I’d hold on to all sorts of reminders even though I felt like I was being self-indulgent when I looked at them, like I was wasting time and energy.

I can’t remember any examples from when I was very young, but here is a more recent example:

One time, I was service coordinator at a church for the summer, and a church member offered their help. When I asked if they had a specific kind of help in mind, they just told me when they were available. Over the following six weeks, this person and I exchanged dozens of emails… and in the end they decided not to be involved at all. The last email they sent me ended like this:

“You're taking on a big accountability - congratulations for that. I'm sure it will be a great learning experience and you'll make huge contributions and organize some great services. Hopefully we can work together another time.”

At the time, I thought the reason I kept rereading this email (and the emails that preceded it) was to check whether the last email they sent really was as passive aggressive as I remembered. (Was I just being touchy, when I read it as passive-aggressive? Or was it really passive-aggressive?) But now I think that I kept reading it over and over because the whole email chain is a contradiction. All those emails purportedly exist as a result of this person’s interest in *helping,* and yet in practice, those emails point to the opposite. The emails themselves are obstructionist. Whatever this person’s purpose was when they originally wrote “please call on me if I can help out,” it wasn’t helpfulness, at least, not in any sense of the word that I’m familiar with.

I think this is important: when I started writing this, I said that this church member and I exchanged “dozens of emails.” I hadn’t actually checked. I wrote “dozens” because that was what it felt like, but I didn’t think it was actually that many. I just figured I’d check, later, and correct what I wrote. But it turns out: there were 24 emails. Which is literally dozens. The fact that I believed myself to be exaggerating even while the statement FELT correct, only to establish that actually my feeling was right, is just so on the nose in terms of what I’m trying to articulate here that I just…

I keep thinking about that influencer person, Gabby Petito, who disappeared just days after telling the police that she feared her bf was going to leave her stranded in the desert. Like the mechanism that leads her, or me, or so many people I know, to have a VERY STRONG FEELING about something, and then ignore it because an internalized voice says “you’re exaggerating, you’re letting your imagination get the better of you, you’re being unfair.”

Sometimes, well, it’s not all the way in “it’s just a feeling” territory but it’s getting close. Sometimes, I only figure out what bothers me about an email thread when I ask myself: “does this person care?” Once, I had a lengthy email exchange with someone I thought was a close friend, over some Canadian political+cultural stuff (context: I am Canadian, they are not,) and as the exchange progressed, I felt increasingly confused and uncomfortable. They kept saying they were sorry I was uncomfortable, that they didn’t want me to be uncomfortable... and at the time I thought that was freaked me out was that this person, who I thought was my friend, didn’t understand what I was attempting to explain. I thought that what bothered me was that they were trying to tell me about my own culture and about the socio-political context in which things happen in Québec, despite never having been here and not speaking the language. I thought that it was their apparent lack of self-awareness that was making me uncomfortable. But now I think: that’s not it. Not really. What it was, was that they did not care. As in, care about *me.* They were only interested in determining whether they, or I, had the correct interpretation of a specific social/cultural incident. And when I pointed out that they were invalidating my experience, they responded that they cared about my well-being, and valued my autonomy, and that was where the cognitive dissonance was. They were saying the words “I value your autonomy” while everything else they did signalled the opposite.

When I was a teenager, I used to think there must be something inherently greedy about me for feeling lonely and craving companionship, because my family home was full of people who would hug me if I asked.

Now I’m an adult and I know that feeling lonely while being surrounded with people is perfectly possible; loneliness isn’t about proximity, it’s about how many of your feelings, values, and interests, matter to the people you care about.

For a long time, whenever I’d finally put my finger on what was wrong with a specific situation, my instinct was to go to the other person involved and tell them. Which is wild. What was I expecting? That these people displaying incoherent behaviour would, what, spontaneously snap out of it?

I don’t really know whether I’m writing this for myself or for other people. I’ve been better able to think about things, and, perhaps paradoxically, that is partly because I feel ok about saying stuff without having a prepared response to questions like “why would anyone be interested in this?” or “why is this relevant?” Maybe I’m just writing this because a good start for 2022 would be to remember that (1) wanting something, being interested in something, is reason enough to do it, and (2) there’s no need for something to be relevant to everyone, for it to have value for you.