Empathy and Disability and Boundaries, oh my.

I’ve been “blogging” on Facebook instead of doing my morning pages, like I feel I should.

Should is a terrible word.  Louis Hay says in You Can Heal Your Life to turn “should,” which implies a wrong, into “could,” which implies possibility.

If a word implies wrongness, we say it has a negative connotation, or negativity attached to it.

Growing up feral in Florida, we have too many shoulds and not enough coulds…unless we do well in school, join the military, are good with people, or get really lucky…which again usually involves being good with people.

I am good with people.

But lots of people are not good with me.

They think I don’t understand them, or that I’m bad because I have screaming fits when I get too stressed, and life without quality support for forty years has been rather stressful.  Quite stressful, really.

Yes, I recognize that I am responsible for my behavior and for behaving like I am not disabled in front of people who shouldn’t have to deal with my disability because I’m not their burden.

What if this is our circus and we are all one huge monkey population with too much fear and not enough love going around?

Love and fear are limitless, since we produce them in our bodies and can share them with our words and other sounds, our movement, expression, tone…

Members of the LGBTQ+ community argue about whether it is nicer to not tell our families who we love if it will hurt them.

Why are their feelings more important than ours?

Why do we think we need to protect people from their own feelings?

Because we don’t know how to navigate the stormy ones?

It’s so easy to get stuck on how wrong someone was to think or feel or act a certain way, because of the control and obey culture of the past.

The future has spoken, and it rejects controlling behavior and obedience training for children.  Obedience does not teach problem solving nor solution seeking.

Education does.  But our public education system is locally funded.  So you have to work three jobs and sell your body on the side to get your kid into a good school, where they will undergo monthly active shooter drills.

That’s the world my generation created.  Class of ’99.  Mass murderers lately tend to be our age, and there’s even a female now!

Middle aged white women voted for the liars because they love their culture and see progressive culture as an attack on their identity.

I’m a middle aged white woman, but I dye my hair pink and dance along to music in the grocery aisle…the bank…wherever I hear music…even when I know I’m the only one that can hear it.

I’m weird. I’m loud. I have great difficulty regulating my attention, tone, volume, facial expressions, and emotional experience due to genetics as well as physical damage from repeated trauma, and because I have two college degrees, I have been told I know nothing of this “real” world working class people live in.

The real world literally hates me.  It tells me I have special needs and what, do I think, I’m special? That I deserve accomodations for my disabilities but no one should have to put up with my big feelings or hypersensitivities or short memory or the behavior I perform while lost and overwhelmed.

If I hadn’t found my penguin and if we hadn’t committed to loving each other forever, I would be dead. No question.

Thanks to our commitment to love, we are still here, raising our happy, compassionate boys, making people smile and laugh every chance we get.

Mr. Rogers said "Always look for the helpers."

Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

So I have always tried to be helpful. Without knowing what I needed, I gave it all away.

42 is a good age to learn how to negotiate boundaries with people without feeling rejected. A good age to learn how to comfort myself before I ever get close to spiralling or melting down.

I learned that happiness, and friendship, and love, are more than feelings. They are practices. Habits that become more regular with support, medicine, and radical acceptance.

I accept and love you exactly as you are.

My feelings do not depend on your behavior…unless I’m overstimulated or otherwise dysregulated. But then, you just trigger them. You don’t make me feel.

But you can share your feelings with the goal of feeling better together.

When we feel confident that we’re committed to loving each other, we can stop trying to control each other’s words and tones and actions, and get straight to the communication exchange to build a better future, together.