On Friends, the Power of Offloading, and When to Put a Cap on It

Adulting when absolutely necessary, and right now it is

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

It’s time to stop pushing our nightmares onto our friends; they have plenty of their own

If you’re like a great many of us, you might be having nightmares and waking up at two am with worry eating at your brain. Me, too. This past week has brought home what many of us older folks feared, the potential loss of Federal funds that keep us housed and fed. I see a lot of those comments and of course, since that touches me, I get it.

I may be wrong. I sure hope to hell I am. If so I will happily eat an entire platter of crow. But until we are through that point and there is some way forward, the dis-ease is pretty bad.

Once you get to a certain age these days in America, with the exception of those in our inner circles, it feels like folks in this country wish we would hurry up and die already. We’re using up precious resources, when the real resource, ahem, is us.

The only reminder I need is the wisdom I receive online from so many older Substackers. Gems. You know who you are.

Real or not, that fear has infected a lot of us. Some days I feel energized and others I feel terrorized. Some nights I’m up with night sweats, cocooning with my dog for comfort. Other mornings I leap out of bed with verve and energy.

Can we please talk?

Last week I wrote that we need to “offload that shit” before we post on Substack post-election. There was a lot of anger and wailing and blaming and ugliness, none of which is helpful to much of anyone, including the complainers. Truth, I likely felt many of the same things. It’s been an interesting few days as I have followed my own advice and watched what happens.

Offloading too much of that shit onto our friends without regard for the burden that they, too, are carrying is both unkind and unnecessary. It may cost us friendships.

Second, this kind of untrammeled terror and all the negative storytelling that goes on in our heads has a role. A big one. A lifesaving one.

Before you throw your laptop at me, hear me out.

There are all kinds of belief systems, religious and non-. Most of them, if they’re healthy, invite us to grow through discomfort.

The worst of them make a terrible, dishonest promise: that by following OUR brand of packaged deity, your life will be sin-free, guilt-free, easy and comfortable; just lie back on that cloud and judge everyone else for not being a Believer. It’s Easy Street from here on out.

That’s a lie.

Life is often a shitshow. Ask anyone born with a disease, paralyzed in a car accident, whose sister in Guatamala was skinned alive by gangs. Ask women who have been raped or assaulted. Victims of incest. People whose entire towns were leveled by floods or hurricanes. People dealing with the ravages of aging and unexpected family disasters.

Life is full of stuff we didn’t sign up for (knowingly, at least), yet there it is. A Parkinson’s diagnosis. Cancer. An horrific bike wreck. Death of someone we love. Even those working hard to eat healthy and move much are still sideswiped by an unexpected disease.

We all get a turn in the barrel, some more than most.

We need emotional maturity and real skills to handle those times.

But then there’s this:

We often desperately lean in to comfort because we simply do not wish to be inconvenienced.

We are a society irritated by a half-second lag in Google results, who cannot be bothered to walk across the room to turn something on, and who get out of control when we can’t park ten feet from the front door of our gym.

When we shoot somebody in a parking lot over a space, it’s safe to say we have zero ability to regulate our emotions.

It’s no wonder we aren’t resilient.

If you doubt, please see Michael Easter’s The Comfort Crisis.

Discomfort is excellent news.

That means we’re growing. Of course it feels like shit. It’s supposed to. If we remain comfortable, we stagnate.

When we’re stagnant we’re unable to deal with the worst of what life throws at us. In fact we can’t deal with much of anything at all, Our emotional muscles are flaccid and our resilience is thin as cheesecloth.

A long-term friend of mine, whom I had elevated to goddess/heroine for years because I believed that she lived her word, taught me a rough lesson a few years back. She was big on spirituality. She read her golden words every morning in a quiet nook that looked over her lovely yard.

The problem was that when I called her out for some repeated and deeply harmful cruelties that had come out of nowhere, she attacked me with claws out. Her response, rather than be genuinely concerned that she’d done harm, was to do as much further damage as possible.

She apparently could not deal with the news that first, she was human, second, she had done real harm, and third, she was way out of integrity with all those golden words.

Apparently all those golden words meant nothing when it came time to act in accordance with them.

We can all calmly read all the fine phrases, the Biblical quotes, the Buddhist sayings when things are fine. They are utterly meaningless if we can’t put them into practice when the worst is in our faces.

The only true test is when we are pressed. The harder the better.

People talk so knowingly until the shit hits the fan in their lives. “All you gotta do is…”

Yes, until your marriage falls apart, until your child refuses to talk to you ever again, until you get the dreaded diagnosis.

When you and I swing back and forth from despair to hope, when we deal internally with stark terror, then do our best to talk that down and reset ourselves to something resembling calm, that’s what success looks like.

None of this is easy. The emotions are real, raw and threaten to overwhelm.

Working with them, walking into and through them, feeling them- that’s what success looks like. It’s messy and awful and deeply unsettling. It’s supposed to be.

Embracing emotions as they rise takes courage. Then we watch how we’re feeding the flames of our fears, and back that self-talk down so that we can breathe, think, and act.

We’re not nuts. We’re dipping a spoon deep into the well we dug for the strength we need. If we have zero practice with discomfort, the well is empty. If we’ve been willing to be inconvenienced and feel pain or discomfort regularly, there’s a supply to sustain us.

The more we learn to bear, the more there is in the well. No magic to it. Real and imagined threats are exhausting, which is why the well needs to be full.

No matter who we are, no matter our training, we all have horrible moments of feeling lost and angry and alone.

It’s just life.

It’s what we do next which defines us.

Here’s where I’m going with this.

My best friend and I speak daily. She feels much the same way I do about recent events, but she is not at the same level of personal risk with her finances. She’s been willing to listen to me. That’s been a lifeline, except.

It’s been too easy for me to forget that she and her partner just split. That loss continues to hang heavily over her heart. I’ve been so full of my own stories that I was running roughshod all over my best friend, downloading that shit.

I crowded her right out of the conversation.

Yesterday she set a guard rail. As much as we love each other, she explained, I need a rest from that part of the conversation. It’s gotten toxic.

I’m lucky that our relationship is so close that we can call that kind of thing out and both of us are fine with it. It takes great courage to say such things. It also takes a backbone to hear it and not be hurt.

That was very uncomfortable.

Both of us have a deep well to draw from, one full of trust and faith and caring. Difficult conversations are safe. We have years of testing those waters and finding each other up to the challenge.

It doesn’t matter whether what irks you is the election, a bad boyfriend, a foolish investment. It doesn’t matter if what pains you is loss of income, a job, the loss of a child, the death of the love of your life.

It’s all just life. Each is an opportunity to watch: watch our emotions, honor their truth, stop trying to suppress or anesthetize them. The more we are willing to feel, the more we can feel, and the better we can manage what’s next.

In a world where too many of us believe we need a fix the moment we have an uncomfortable emotion (see drug overdoses, please) standing in the wind is one hell of a choice. It’s the adulting choice.

So yes, offload that shit. But be willing to bear the bulk of it yourself. Everyone in our lives is carrying burdens we know nothing about. Let’s shoulder our own, share as necessary to get going again, and learn to swim in the turgid waters of our own scary emotions

Vulnerability is an essential part of the hero’s journey. But so is knowing when to put a cap on it so that we still have friends.

Let’s learn to love and trust our emotions, so that we can play.

Photo by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash

Thanks for walking along a sometimes difficult path with me. If this added valuable perspective to your joourney, please consider

You deserve to be stromg, but we only get strong when we’re willing to risk, to evolve, and to embrace discomfort. Let’s have each others backs as we do.