I have often wrestled with this idea with some deeply painful life experiences: that you can’t really help someone who won’t help themselves.
Oh, that good ol’ adage: You can lead that damn horse to water but you can’t drink for ‘em. Even forcing that water in, you can’t make them swallow.
It sounds so simple and obvious.
And yet, when you deeply love someone. If you are loyal. If you see their potential. If you know they could be better. If they have done so much for you. If it breaks your hurt to lose them, to have them no longer be in your life.
Then you find yourself allowing once again to let down the guard and loosen those boundaries.
Sometimes we care too much and, for some, like one of my dear friends, it can almost cost us our lives. We age. We hurt. We hyperventilate from the emotional pain.
So, often those enablers have hearts of gold and they mean well, but it can cost them in dire ways to care too much and to abandon themselves/ourselves.
I often think of this sad reality when remembering my dear mother and the last few years of her life. Her suffering and misery. That many couldn’t even recognize her from pictures. Her pain and what her existence became.
The lengths that I went to in order to try to help her went on for years. Repeatedly. Trying new things and approaches.
Nothing would take.
I don’t blame her for this. But still, it hurt like hell and I allow it to affect me too much, to self soothe in unhealthy ways because I had been her world, she had been through so much.
The least I could do was to make it so she become my world. To reciprocate.
It was up to me to take care of her. So, I thought then.
Now I think this:
I let that go. I remember my mother for who she was for much of her life and not what she became after a lifetime of trauma. An amazingly resilient and strong woman, a force. The survivor. She would have had every reason to have put the gun to her head. But she didn’t.
So, now—I choose myself, and to work towards healing and growth in ways that she never could—as an educated, independent, professional woman.
That is a hard (and sometimes stumbling, continuous-seeming) lesson for me. Even as an adamant feminist. Patriarchal culture and toxic masculinity teaches us that our worth is only such that we’re only complete if we’re with a man. If we have children. We have to unlearn that in oh-so many days. Sometimes daily.
But I re-commit to it everyday. To be untamed, as Glennon Doyle says. To live as that fucking caged cheetah couldn’t.
As I write this, Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” is blaring in the background. There was a time not so long ago that I could not listen to this, it would have reduced me to tears, as the song floods my mind with memories of my ex-partner and our shared loved of Queen.
But now, I choose myself as he chose myself. And I am all the better for it. I hope he is too. But I’ve let that shit go. It isn’t worth my energy. I’m reaching for higher ground.
I relish my single status now.
And this, this, is how I honor my mother.
We can’t save someone from themselves if they are unwilling to work and see no issue with their behavior and that the problem lies always completely outside of them.
Ultimately, we have to choose ourselves. Because we’re all alone in our own skin. We come in and leave this world all alone.
I am doing something my mother never could do. But it often feels like I am doing it only because I learned from her example and because she did not.
She would assure me I deserve all the credit. That I did it all on my own.
I don’t really know—that is dependent on a million other tiny factors of extenuating circumstances.
But I will say this, as a learner and believer of indigenous cultures and AA communities who of collectivism, I know this:
I did not do this all on my own.
I no longer feel alone and lonely, as a single woman. Because my single status is my choice.
And mostly, because I am enriched, encircled, enshrouded and encouraged by a circle of some of the most amazing women.
Though separated by time zones, some having walked on from this life, they are all still there. They sustain me.
And I turn to them when I momentarily forget or stumble from the pain of existing in the body/with a brain of someone with complex PTSD.
They helped/help me so much.
But I saved myself.