A Metaphor Involving a Boob
It's Painful But Not Fatal
Last week began October but I’m going to say HAPPY OCTOBER now. So.
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To me, there is nothing worse than watching your loved ones face an unrelenting onslaught of daily horrors.
For the years between my mid-20s and my early-30s, that’s what I was watching.
I was having my fair share of daily horrors. Certainly. But there is a stark difference between experiencing the daily horrors and watching them. Experiencing them is active and all-encompassing. There is no time to figure out if one event, one moment, will be fatal. You keep going and you keep going. “The only way out is through,” people love to say. What they mean is the only way out is a forced journey through a swamp, slogging one step at a time. It’s hard, it’s terrible, it’s exhausting, and there is an advantage: you don’t usually clock the daily horrors in the middle of them. Maybe you see the big things but, usually, not the small everyday things. That’s a realization that comes with time and reflection. A realization you have when recounting your journey to someone else—”The only way out is through.”
Watching someone experience the daily horrors is akin to the car crash metaphor but with extra layers. Because, of course, you don’t want to just be watching. You want to be able to do something. So, yes, it is watching a car crash you can’t seem to stop but the car crash is a pile up and vehicles keep appearing out of nowhere and you can’t find your phone and you’ve forgotten the number to 911 and you wonder why you never got around to taking that first aid course and you have lost your voice so your yelling is useless and everything is moving in slow motion because it feels kind of like a dream and you wonder if you are even any sort of helpful at all. You start to wonder if maybe you are actually a sort of hurtful. You start to wonder if, maybe, you are actually part of the daily horrors.
Experiencing the daily horrors is worse, of course. I am not here to say watching something is harder than living through it.
Being on the outside is its own sort of heartbreaking.
I don’t think it is unusual for the years between your mid-20s and early-30s to be difficult. That’s around the time your brain becomes fully developed. Those are the years after the years of first living away from home for many people which means a whole new kind of learning how to live. It’s expected you’ll be out and about, hanging at bars, meeting people, dancing the night away. Calendars are full and careers are (sometimes) beginning and lives are meandering in unexpected ways. Getting ready to enter your 30s is a sport and sports do not come without injuries.
What I mean when I talk about an “unrelenting onslaught of daily horrors” is all the stuff that happened on top of and around the regular “being a late 20-something” season. As much as I hate to be ellusive with the stories, this is another place where the details are not mine to share. It is a zoomed out picture of the minuate of the daily horrors I’m looking at; the effect of living and watching and, whether we like it or not, growing through a time that is marked by a myriad of personal crises. I’m looking at how we got to the lessons we didn’t want to learn and shouldn’t have had to learn. I’m also looking at how, at some point, things simply become more manageable.
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Thank god for gchat.
Thank god for all the ways we can get a hold of each other these days. But, for the time I’m talking about, thank god for gchat specifically.
When I moved 2500 miles away from an established community of friends and from my family, I knew it would be hard to keep up the communication, to maintain the connection. Other friends who had already made a big move experienced the same difficulty. I was ready. I was willing. And I was armed with social media, text messages, and, of course, gchat.
It felt doable to me. At least, it felt doable on my end. I am only one half of the equation though. Sometimes, try as hard as you might, the other person doesn’t have the time, energy, want, or need to keep a relationship going. That’s something that has to be dealt with too, at some point. But, for those who want to keep it going or who want to pick a friendship up again,
thank god for gchat.
To be fair to previous employers (I don’t know why but to be fair), the amount of ways we can stay in contact with each other can, definitely, be distracting. Millennials and younger get a lot of shit about this. I, too, have been scolded about it numerous times. Sometimes, after I was scolded, I would also get tips on how to hide the chat windows better. You lose some, you are given a back-door key to some. I don’t necessarily disagree that a full day worth of gchat, social media messengers, and text messages aren’t distracting. We all make our choices (and/or take our meds) on what to be focused on.
These methods of contact can also be a lifeline. They can be instant information and instant updates. They can be a way to be less distracted, actually. I don’t know if you’ve tried to remain productive and focused while you are waiting to hear from someone you are worried about but, in my experience, it is damn near impossible.
In getting ready for my move to New York, I was so excited. I knew a move was going to be good for me, to at least try a different city for awhile. I felt out-of-place, I was lost, and I needed to wander somewhere new. There was also a feeling of immense dread.
The Summer of 2013 was full of Events with a capital “E” for many of my loved ones. As those Events piled one on top of another and other Events peeked their heads from underground, I started to doubt the move was a good idea. I began to feel like I wasn’t moving towards my goals or finding the best version of myself. I began to feel like I was running away from my people when they needed me the most. I began to feel a bit cowardly. My deposit for school was paid, I had a room lined up, and I started to reconsider the whole thing. If I am remembering correctly, it was a talk with my Mom that finally pushed me to stay the course. She basically asked me what good it would actually do for me to stay. She said something along the lines of, “You have to go.”
And go, I did.
I often “joke” that I never would have survived in New York without Google maps. I also don’t think I would have survived without gchat. I stayed connected with good friends, I reconnected with other good friends, I developed relationships into good friendships with this silly little app. And, most importantly, I could get the news and I could be available. This new adventure was filing me up in so many ways, repairing things in me that I didn’t know needed mending. Simultaneously, my heart was broken being so far away as my people faced the tsunamis they did. Gchat was the communication tool stringing both of those truths together.
It was in the first five (or so) years, I started calling some of friends “warrior queens.” They were coming up against it and and they were still going. They were standing, they were crouching, they were crawling but they were still going. I hated that they had to deal with this shit and I was so inspired and proud and impressed by them.
On gchat, I told them as much as often as possible.
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The thing about times that are marked by an unrelenting onslaught of daily horrors is that, eventually, that time does come to an end. More likely, it fades away without much fanfare. One day, it’s not quite so hard. The next day, it is a little bit easier. And so, it goes.
There continue to be Events with a capital E. That’s how life goes. As clichéd as it is, you do, in fact, become more equipped to deal with those Events as you get older. Often times, that means that those Events don’t fracture so easily into other Events that you also have to deal with. Hopefully, there is a bit of breathing room from tough time to tough time. Hopefully, that breathing room is nice, actually. Good, actually. Some fun, actually. Hopefully, it is marked by times when laughter comes easier and it feels more natural to smile. Hopefully it’s, at least, a little bit…hopeful.
Just because it gets a little easier, does not mean those past times are erased. They are obviously folded into everything. If you have lived through those times yourself and/or watched and lived through them with other people, you know that. Knowing that, to me, is an incredibly important element of friendship or any relationship. That, to me, is what “trauma-informed” means.
Trauma (and violence) informed care “describes a framework for working with and relating to people who have experienced negative consequences after exposure to dangerous experiences.”
Trauma-informed is a phrase that is said often these days. It fits into the therapy-speak that is popular. People will use it without thinking too much of it or the implications of its use. It is a phrase that can feel like it doesn’t mean anything depending on the context. But, for most people, it means a hell of a lot. In the context of most systems, it is paramount. It means empathy and awareness. It means knowing that even if someone doesn’t understand what you went through, they will, at the very least, understand that you went through something that effects the way you function in the world.
I am not a therapist or a psychologist or a medical professional of any sort (suprise!) so you certainly can take all this with a grain of salt but I try operate in my friendships and relationships from a more trauma-informed point of view.
Which is why, acknowledging the “boob stabs” of life is a fundamental tenant of my personal philosophy.
Boob stabs are things that happen that are painful but not fatal. I came up with and started using this phrase six or seven years ago. The phrase came about pretty naturally, in that time when the unrelenting onslaught of daily horrors became not so unrelenting and not so daily. It has been important in my vocabulary because it is such a good, easy, shorthand for something that is effecting you but you also know what the scope of it actually is.
The most important aspect of this phrase to me, however, is that it acknowledges that there have been, are, and are likely to be again, things that will be more painful than this. It doesn’t discount past experiences, it gives words to a certain level of experience. And it also gives a direction to your friends and family about what kind of support you might need.
Most things I run into these days are simply boob stabs. Partially because, I am older and have been through things and have therapy so the Events with a capital E are a little more manageable but also because, I think, I know where to put my energy. I know how to use a boob stab to evaluate the event or the relationship and I can make informed next steps from there.
Yes, I have boob stabs on a pretty regular basis. Many of them are heartbreaking and sad and confusing. Many of them are followed by tears and question marks and imaginary conversations with people in my head. Many of them ache for a bit. When that happens, I try and remember why I started using the phrase “boob stab” in the first place. It’s not just about the pain, it is also about what comes after. Remember, it is painful but not fatal—the healing begins almost as soon as the bleeding stops.
No matter what, I know I have friends who understand what is beneath that boob stab and who may not know the exact right thing to do or say in the moment but will always ask what kind of Disney character band-aid I want for the wound.
And, if any of my loved ones need it, I always have a stash of neon colored band-aids around myself.
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Ready with ALL the Disney bandaids