Learning Curves of Sanity and Games of Emotional Chicken: A recap of a pretty okay worst year ever.

Most people’s year in review blogs will be stuff like their favorite albums, books or tv shows. Some will talk about the societal things they’ve learned or the hobbies they took up. This is not one of those.

I feel like nearly every essay written this time of year is going to begin with a line like “2020 wasn’t the easiest year for any of us and the holidays are always hard” and that’s entirely true. It was a very difficult year filled with with a lot of turmoil for people on a macro and micro level. The world as a whole was brought to a halt by a deadly virus and the country I inhabit did far and away the worst job of dealing with it. Our political leaders forsook us in the name of partisan posturing and our president has done everything he can to subvert the will of the people he was elected to represent. A lot of people lost things that meant the world to them, homes, jobs, other people. It was not a banner year for anyone, to be sure. Exacerbating this is the fact that every year ends with a season that can often be very sad and emotional taxing. The stress of a normal holiday season, the feelings of loneliness and longing, the juggling of emotional baggage that we carry and we help our friends and family carry, has also been compounded by the fact that many of us will have to do so from a distance, if we get a chance to do it all. That may be a welcome change for some but a devastating one for others.

2020 has been a lot of things for me, the last year of my 30s, the year when I finally made a breakthrough with my cat, the year my dad’s aging began to really pick up the pace, the year my sister got her freedom back and the year I quit therapy 1 week before the world shut down. A real mixed bag to be sure but ultimately one I am grateful for. It was a year of growth, realizations, heartbreaks and breakthroughs that was more often than not of my own making.

When I think back on it, there were two major decisions that made things worthwhile for me this year. The first was that I finally accepted that mental health is a gradual process. For a long time I had always viewed it as an absolute thing, you were either sane or not, and that weighed heavily on me. Strangely enough this changed when I quit therapy. Now, you may be thinking “That can’t be true, therapy is the thing that helps you figure out the steps you need to take towards better mental health” and that is generally true, if you use it correctly. However, I was so concerned with putting up a veneer of having it together that I wasn’t using right.

For my entire adult life, and a bit before that, I’ve had to be the strong, together one in my family. My sister fell in to deep addiction issues when she was in her early teens and my parents began to pour themselves entirely in to trying to get her on the straight and narrow, which meant a lot of the slack for making sure the family functioned, like grocery shopping, making sure they were paying bills and basics around the house, fell at my feet. This took it’s toll in a lot of ways, but most of all not feeling like I could open up and be emotionally vulnerable to them was probably the biggest because it’s a thing I internalized to all my relationships. If you know me now, you may find that hard to believe, but it for a long time while sharing my emotions and struggles was very hard, helping others through theirs has been conversely very easy, again because that’s a role that I’ve occupied most of my life. A real emotional Atlas if you will.

So, when it came to therapy, I would mostly use it to air my petty squabbles since the last session. Complaining about co-workers or my downstairs neighbor who calls in the middle of the night if the cat makes too much noise. I’d never approach talking about my loneliness, my feelings that my emotions were a burden on people who very clearly, in hindsight, just wanted to be there for me in a way that I had worked so hard to be there for them. So I decided to quit and it was honestly the best thing for my mental health. When I think back on why, I always come back to these memories of my mom teaching me to swim by just letting me wade myself in to Card Pond and figure it out myself. Did it go great all the time? No. Not by a long shot, sometimes I came close to drowning but was always able to get my head above water and keep trying until I figured out what I was doing. Same with my mental health journey this year. It was the scariest but ultimately most gratifying experience of my life. I came pretty close to drowning in late March/early April when I had what could best be described as a complete mental collapse. I live alone and would go days without speaking because my job, which was already almost entirely computer based, had now moved home so I didn’t even have the experiences of making facile office small talk or answering the phone when it rang past reception. It was, for lack of a better term, a suboptimal time. However, the thing I learned there was that sometimes it’s far easier, and more fulfilling, to totally rebuild something that has come crashing down than it is to try to fix things piece by piece. I was able to shed a lot of the things that I had let weigh me down, not by slowly and carefully deconstructing them, but by letting them crash down on my head and then throwing them in the dumpster with the rest of the detritus and debris, and build up a new internal structure centered around the parts of myself that I had valued but had been covered up. Things like compassion, empathy, selfless love and self love. Sometimes if you look at a something you’ll notice little details that you like a lot, but aren’t necessarily the things that you feel like you SHOULD be appreciating at because of some preconceived notion you have about aesthetics or whatever. What if you had the ability to make something for yourself entirely out of those features that you liked the most? That’s what recovering from a mental breakdown can be like.

So I almost drowned but I didn’t. I came back up for air and I identified a thing I had been doing a lot in my life, from family, to friends, to romantic partners. That is what I refer to as games of emotional chicken. For those unfamiliar with the concept of “Chicken”, based on my understanding from television and movies, at some point hot rod racers used to play a game where they would just drive straight at each other and either one person would swerve out of the way for fear of a head on collision, or they would just crash. This is how I navigated a lot of my personal life. This is how I managed things with my family, interactions full of either head on fights or someone kowtowing in the interest of avoiding them, leaving themselves unsatisfied and unheard. Fights about what to do with my sister or deferring to my parents event though I knew I was right because I didn’t want to deal with the arguments of “Well when you have a child you’ll understand”. It’s how I dealt with my sister herself, often times trying to correct things in secret, like returning credit cards I had found she’d stolen or carrying her home when I would find her nodded off in the park or the train station, but never brining these things up to anyone. It’s how I dealt with friends, often times not calling out bad behaviors or wrongheaded stances because I didn’t want to deal with the loneliness or anger that would come from having those hard conversations. In perhaps the most phenomenal game of emotional chicken I have ever played, I got married for three months to my college girlfriend because she was going to move away. I told her I loved her, she said I wasn’t committed, I angrily said “what the fuck would it take to convince you? You want to get married?” and there you have it folks, the worst proposal of all time. We had dated for three years, all of a sudden we were about to enter a marriage that neither of us wanted or was ready for just because we were both too prideful to steer out of each other’s way. We went to the courthouse, we did the thing, we signed the papers, we were miserable and loveless. Two completely destroyed hot rods, smoldering in the wake of a game that had no winners. Three months later she accepted enrollment at a veterinary school in Texas, and we went to a lawyer, explained we were not of sound mind when we had entered in to our vows, and had it annulled. It was a sad time, but I’ve not been any stranger to sad times before or after, and I would hardly say it was the saddest. It felt that way for a long time though. It closed me off from a lot of things, and I think that’s the problem with these games, is that while you may consider the immediate impact, just like a real car crash, you don’t consider the long term effects. Once you’re in a major crash like that it informs a lot of how you look at the world around you. You get jumpy, always bracing for another one at the faintest sight of headlights coming in the other direction.

I think, though, that the biggest thing that has saved me in this year is being able to identify the thing that almost sunk me back then. I realized that I didn’t have to point my metaphorical car at anyone and if I did feel I was on a collision course with them I didn’t have to continue on that course if I didn’t want to. This year, more so than any other, I’ve found great pleasure in joining people on the paths that they’re heading on as opposed to continuing my own path towards them. I read a quote that stuck with me by Mike McHargue that said “People grow when they are loved well and people are loved well when you love them without an agenda” and I think that’s 100% true. If you want truly fulfilling relationships it’s about loving the people you love because you just do. It can’t be based solely on some kind of want or desire. If the things you want come to fruition, that’s great but if not, as long as it’s not actively harming you, you can’t hold that against another person. It’s not their fault that they didn’t want the same things you did, especially if you’re particularly bad at expressing those things, like I am.

This hasn’t been easy all the time. It takes constant revision of course to decide when you should try to meet someone at a center point and when you should try make your way along side them. This has been the case in a lot of my relationships. My dad will turn 90 next year and this has been the most rapid year of aging I’ve seen from him. In no small part because I don’t see him very often, where as previously I was seeing him at least once a week. I’ve had to pick and choose spots where I have to confront him about his inability to do things he used to do, like doing shopping because he isn’t that mobile anymore and gets tired easily, and pick the spots where it’s best just to let him try and be there with him on his way so if he need help I’m there, like compromising to let him go to the supermarket a couple blocks away but getting delivery and calling him a car home. I’ve had to revise my relationship with my sister. We’d always had a very superficial relationship, not out of any lack of love for each other but because that’s how we related to each other. I did a lot of looking out for her but it was never my intention to make her feel bad or guilty because of it, so instead of talking about how I was secretly trying to help her we would just shoot Reno 911 quotes back and forth or talk about Bloom County comic strips, a thing that growing up we didn’t really understand in general but understood that it was funny. She got out of prison in the midst of COVID in a state that has been phenomenally bad at handling their personal responsibilities. It hasn’t been an easy time for her and it’s made far less easy by the fact that our parents are incapable of just listening and without giving their instructions on how to proceed. As someone who has always valued someone’s willingness to listen and not give unsolicited input, that has been the role I have happily stepped in to. Being a sounding board first and foremost, listening to and learning from the experiences of someone who is trying to learn to be a regular human being again for the first time in nearly a decade. It has been a truly gratifying lesson in loving without an agenda, just trying to take the steps needed to be there for a person in for their needs and not for what you need from them.

One of the things I’ve opened myself up to for the first time since that game of chicken in Arizona is the idea of actively pursuing romantic love and truly fleshed out friendships. Every relationship I’ve been in for the past 20 years has been something I’ve accidentally stumbled in to. They’ve elationships based on familiarity and mutual loneliness, based on mutual affection but not necessarily attraction. This year I’ve tried to reform that. I’ve taken strides to let a person I’ve held close for a long time, however cautiously, how deeply I care for them. I’ve tried to evaluate the nature of my relationships, decide what I want and if I think somebody else wants the same. A pattern in my life has been figuring out someone I may liked also may have also liked me, but way too late. Hell, I think I might have gotten COVID in early March because I went to Las Vegas to watch someone I held a torch for a long time for get married. So that’s a thing I’m trying to be better at. I’ve also done things like asked for phone numbers, which is something I have stupidly been terrified to do for how simple and low stakes it is in reality. I also met someone I really like and, although clumsily due to being out of practice and trying to navigate the uncertainty of a global pandemic, have tried to act with intention, instead of just wishing for good things whenever the clock hits 11:11 (which I also still do, it has like a 35% hit rate). How is all this going? I haven’t the faintest idea. Sometimes any one of these things will feel like they’re going swimmingly and at other times there’s practical radio silence as I try to figure out how to be communicative without feeling like I’m being a nudge or a bother. Anything new that’s worthwhile will always be a little scary, but ultimately fulfilling so I’m taking time to enjoy the learning of it. In the grand scheme of things though, you have to love the people you care about without an agenda. It could be that none of these things come to bear fruit but in the end the things that make good prospective romantic partners are the same things that make strong, supportive and loving friendships and I’m happy to have them in my life, regardless of context. That’s totally fine! I’ve also really loved building substantive relationships with my friends this year after years of having surface level ones. It’s been a great joy to realize that people I’ve hidden my true self and actual emotions are just as happy to hear mine as I am to hear theirs’. Through no easy steps of pushing myself to be more transparent, I learned that nobody was better at making me feel less than or unappreciated than myself. I figured out the people out there who surround you rarely do so out of anything other than a true desire to be there with you. This has led to not only fortifying some of my longest standing current friendships but, equally importantly, building new friendships based on nothing but friendship. Shit, on a whim not long after I had my breakdown, I decided to reach out to someone I’ve looked up to since the first time I tried comedy but have always been intimidated by because they’re so much more successful, and now we email back and forth almost every week. They even gave me their mom’s home made applesauce recipe and that stuff was good. I made a bunch and gave it to my friends, because acts of service is one of my love languages. I have a somewhat annoying habit recently of whenever I learn something in my journey of rebuilding I bring it up all the time like it was a word I just learned on one of those word-a-day calendars. So when I learned about love languages, and figured out what mine were, it was like a whole new world opened up. I’m not gonna go on a rant about that here but I would just like to apologize to the people who I have repeatedly brought up the terms “Quality Time”, “Words of Affirmation” and “Acts of Service” to over the past year. I’d often retreated in to roles of servitude, not through any imposition or desire of my friends, but just because it was a role I felt comfortable in, always doing for others without expectation of anything in return. I do think that selfless giving is important, I think you should do nice things for people without expecting something quid pro quo (thanks Mueller Report!). I also, though, think that it’s equally important to know that most people want to do that for you too, and that was always my stumbling block. Giving but not accepting. So I’ve tried to be more intentional about receiving the love and kindness of those who have been so willing to give it to me despite my stubborn refusal of it for so long. I think that one of the biggest things that happened when I collapsed was that the walls of the prison of self doubt I kept myself in crumbled as well and as of now I’ve just opted not to rebuild that part. I hope I never will.

So here’s my year in review, I really liked Ted Lasso and How To with John Wilson a lot. My favorite albums were probably the Chubby and The Gang record and Cincoriginals by Tobe Nwigwe. My favorite books were Mutations by Sam McPheeters, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and the autobiography of professional wrestler New Jack. I only saw like 5 new movies, they were all fine. Actually, I really loved Extra Ordinary. I didn’t die. I DID completely destroy myself only to rebuild myself in an image much closer to my ideal than I ever thought possible. I’m in the best mental and physical health I’ve been in in probably 15 years. What a weird flex to somehow have come out of this shitstorm of a better, more loving and open person.

I generally hate essays that give advice. I don’t ever want to pontificate or try to share some blanket guidance on how people should live their lives without knowing their struggles and stories. I won’t really do that here. I’ll just say that this year, and any year, the best gift you can give yourself and the people you love is the patience to keep learning and finding their paths. Some people are naturally gifted enough to have the wisdom to find their ways, some people find themselves only through calamity, some people are somewhere in the middle. I’d just encourage you, as we stand on the precipice of hopefully beginning to rebuild our lives, our routines and our communities from a categorically awful time that you extend whatever level of love you can to those who you truly love and get companionship from, in whatever form it may be. I know it may not be the easiest time, especially as circumstances have forced us in to our own little corners during an emotionally taxing time, but as a good friend of mine says, in a video she made that I think about at least once a day, “We can do it, alone. Together.” That’s a thing that sticks with me because ultimately, no matter what we want in the world, we have to be the drivers of our own fate, but we also have to be open to the fact that everyone else is also driving theirs. Sometimes, while it’s easiest to keep barreling towards the people you love, or sometimes even the people you dislike, it’s best to try to join them where they’re at and just be along side them. It may not always go in the direction you want it to but it will almost lead to something rewarding and valuable.