Blam, Blam, Blam, Blam, Blam

My sister showed up after her printmaking class, wanting me to dish up some food for her. 

She chatted, and what did she chat about?  She went over the trauma & drama at work, the nuances and details that got her fired and got her back and what has happened and what needs to come next and who acted well and who acted poorly, and what people might be thinking and what people might not, and why some haven’t acted and what the ripples might be and on and on and on.

In other words, she’s right back in the sickness, swirling about in the same externalized gaming.

She’s not young, and she has a pension & 401K.  I get the reasons why there are real and pragmatic benefits to continuing to play the game, and I know that’s her choice.

It’s just hard to keep choosing to support this rancid dance, to feel banged hearing it for the fifteenth time, when nothing really changes, and can’t change unless the cycle breaks. 

But me, well, me.  It’s the adoption of that child my sister-in-law chose today, a choice I don’t feel good about but know I have no standing to speak about.  It’s my sister filling the space with her drama, my father hammering me about how people don’t understand his paper & are plotting against him, my mother never making it out of her robe & sleepshirt all day.   And it’s Halloween coming and pain and the rest.

Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam.  People do what they need to do, and I engage and support, keeping my own inner life silent, both my views and my challenges because I know they do not want to hear it, do not need to hear it, cannot hear it.  The weight drags on me.

That Robyn Smith was on Oprah again yesterday, talking about people who thought surgery would fix everything, but instead it just changed the shape of problems that had gone unaddressed.  It wasn’t genital reconstruction surgery in this case, rather gastric bypass surgery, which has left many patients alcoholic.  “Don’t say you used to know who you were and that now, after surgery, you don’t know,” she counseled.  “If you don’t know who you are now, you didn’t really know who you were then.  You just knew what your identity props were then.”

She also talked to partners about the cost of enabling and participating in someone else’s disease, and how it affected them, the stress, the loss and the denial.

Yeah, I get that part too.

Carnie Wilson said that you have to share your sorrow in order to heal, that you can’t just swallow it like you have swallowed everything else. 

I am there for people sharing sorrow. 

But who heals the healers? 

Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam.