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Existential Problems
May. 20th, 2020 05:10 pmAfter what happened in supervision this semester we’ve been trying to figure out what the takeaway is. How do you glean something useful from a traumatic interpersonal relationship? How can we learn something other than that entrenched, “well I guess we shouldn’t have trusted anyone in the first place”? We are all tired of living in that stuck place, where everything and everyone is against us and life is a constant war of defending ourselves to stay alive. Where people who are supposed to love you actually feel scorn and disrespect under the surface, and laugh at every mistake you make. The world where all of our differences must remain as hidden as possible or else we’ll be vulnerable to people assuming we’re stupid, crazy, freakish, just need to be normal, need to be fixed by someone else. Sometimes it feels like people just look at us and we become a target- that person to blame, shame, scapegoat in the group. That happened again in this relationship. Our fumbling around, trying to connect, resulted in that horribly familiar scapegoating and backstabbing behavior that has occurred too often in our life. We’re left wondering, do we reek of weakness? Is there a sign on our back that says “easy target for emotional abuse”? When we arrive, ready to apply ourselves and be open-minded, why does it often end in us being used for someone else’s purpose without our consent? When we’re going out on a limb of emotional vulnerability, why does that signal to others that we’re incompetent, ripe for blaming, or that we need fixing or for them to take control of our life?
These questions have been floating around in our head, constantly discussed and poured over. How does it all relate to how we try to present? To our attempts at fleeting moments of authenticity? What does it mean to be ourselves around other people? Is that even possible without eliciting this behavior from them? Because when we show our true emotions and concerns, these abusive behaviors from others seem to intensify. How should we be in the world? Trying to be what others wanted or expected never worked out for us: it precipitated our worst mistakes.
We’ve been searching for a mentor our entire life, someone who can give us advice and lead us in a way that takes into account all the layers of our identities and experiences, acknowledging and accepting all of us. Our parents were never that for us- they like to see only what they want to see and disavow the rest, and have always required our management. But in our search for mentorship, we feel constantly othered by advice we receive. Mental health advice needs serious editing to accommodate our “severe” but highly selves-aware presentation. Graduate school advice is mostly vague reassurances while refusing to explore the issues we face as a disabled trans student. Any realm of activism seems to hyperfocus on one aspect of identity while failing to account fully for the rest. Advice from our family is usually to take responsibility for everything we suffer to the exclusion of admitting sometimes situations are more complicated than “work hard and get over it”. As a result, we feel like we can’t rely on others to figure out our immediate concerns, which seem strange compared to the immediate concerns of peers. Instead of wondering how to afford fees associated with internship and standardized tests, we’re trying to figure out how to navigate transness when we don’t “look trans”. Instead of exploring our past and how that might impact our clients, we’re navigating post-traumatic stress in the context of caring for clients, dodging supervisors who might take issue with the whole wounded healer trope that we represent. We spend a lot of time strategizing about how to be seen without being truly seen. What does that even mean?
We’ve given so much thought and exploration into our mental health, our healing, our relationships, and yet it still seems like our problems tend to be extreme and strange. Our clients heal so much faster than we do. We get stuck all the time, and feel like there’s nowhere to turn for actual answers. We have a tendency to make our therapist cry with our catch-22s and complicated existential crises. We find ourselves in constant emotional storms that only make sense months later and derail our ability to be present in our own life. We worry that we’re “too crazy” to reach any of our goals. And yet we keep going for some reason. Maybe because the alternative is to stop.
At the heart of our distress is the feeling of alienation, of being “too different”. We have a sense that no one can understand us. This teenage type of thought is possible for most people to shake off, but in our case, it seems like our life keeps proving just how different and non-understandable we really are. A few close people do seem to understand us, but they rarely know what we should do, because the answer is usually that things with us are too complicated for a straightforward course of action.
When we read books looking for advice, that sense of alienation becomes a barrier to getting anything out of our reading. As soon as a book on theory talks about how women are and how men are, we’re checking out of the hotel. The second an author jokes about “multiple personalities” as a dismissive ha-ha moment, we’re booking a plane ticket out of there. When a supervisor we respected told us that we need to “just suck it up” when people misgender us, we found ourselves questioning that entire relationship and seriously considering never talking to that person again. When a book about therapy mentions that people with “serious mental illnesses” should not become therapists, we will literally throw it across the room.
How do we find the useful takeaways from authors, professors, and supervisors who are dismissive of our experiences and antagonizing towards our identities? How do we learn in a world that repeated proves its hostility towards who we are inside? We feel raw from the constant re-opening of this alienation wound. Where we used to pull the good out and discard the rest, we now throw out the entire bathtub, because we’re tired of seeing the same insults, dismissals, and erasures. But that doesn’t help us learn anything, or improve, or grow as people. When it comes to our cultural environment, we mostly feel like yelling, “what the fuck am I supposed to do with any of this?!”
Just like the rest of our life, this entry is more question than it is answer. We are incredibly bad at tolerating uncertainty, but maybe that’s another area we need to improve, another life skill we need to master. One thing I can say about us is that we are always striving. There always seems to be a farther distance for us to travel, compared with everyone else, but somehow we manage to get there eventually. No matter how much adversity we face, we continue to show up, and that’s what will get us through our degree, not answering any of these questions. Which is a good thing, because I doubt we’ll find these answers easily, or anywhere we expect to find them.
-Izzie and Nenilor
These questions have been floating around in our head, constantly discussed and poured over. How does it all relate to how we try to present? To our attempts at fleeting moments of authenticity? What does it mean to be ourselves around other people? Is that even possible without eliciting this behavior from them? Because when we show our true emotions and concerns, these abusive behaviors from others seem to intensify. How should we be in the world? Trying to be what others wanted or expected never worked out for us: it precipitated our worst mistakes.
We’ve been searching for a mentor our entire life, someone who can give us advice and lead us in a way that takes into account all the layers of our identities and experiences, acknowledging and accepting all of us. Our parents were never that for us- they like to see only what they want to see and disavow the rest, and have always required our management. But in our search for mentorship, we feel constantly othered by advice we receive. Mental health advice needs serious editing to accommodate our “severe” but highly selves-aware presentation. Graduate school advice is mostly vague reassurances while refusing to explore the issues we face as a disabled trans student. Any realm of activism seems to hyperfocus on one aspect of identity while failing to account fully for the rest. Advice from our family is usually to take responsibility for everything we suffer to the exclusion of admitting sometimes situations are more complicated than “work hard and get over it”. As a result, we feel like we can’t rely on others to figure out our immediate concerns, which seem strange compared to the immediate concerns of peers. Instead of wondering how to afford fees associated with internship and standardized tests, we’re trying to figure out how to navigate transness when we don’t “look trans”. Instead of exploring our past and how that might impact our clients, we’re navigating post-traumatic stress in the context of caring for clients, dodging supervisors who might take issue with the whole wounded healer trope that we represent. We spend a lot of time strategizing about how to be seen without being truly seen. What does that even mean?
We’ve given so much thought and exploration into our mental health, our healing, our relationships, and yet it still seems like our problems tend to be extreme and strange. Our clients heal so much faster than we do. We get stuck all the time, and feel like there’s nowhere to turn for actual answers. We have a tendency to make our therapist cry with our catch-22s and complicated existential crises. We find ourselves in constant emotional storms that only make sense months later and derail our ability to be present in our own life. We worry that we’re “too crazy” to reach any of our goals. And yet we keep going for some reason. Maybe because the alternative is to stop.
At the heart of our distress is the feeling of alienation, of being “too different”. We have a sense that no one can understand us. This teenage type of thought is possible for most people to shake off, but in our case, it seems like our life keeps proving just how different and non-understandable we really are. A few close people do seem to understand us, but they rarely know what we should do, because the answer is usually that things with us are too complicated for a straightforward course of action.
When we read books looking for advice, that sense of alienation becomes a barrier to getting anything out of our reading. As soon as a book on theory talks about how women are and how men are, we’re checking out of the hotel. The second an author jokes about “multiple personalities” as a dismissive ha-ha moment, we’re booking a plane ticket out of there. When a supervisor we respected told us that we need to “just suck it up” when people misgender us, we found ourselves questioning that entire relationship and seriously considering never talking to that person again. When a book about therapy mentions that people with “serious mental illnesses” should not become therapists, we will literally throw it across the room.
How do we find the useful takeaways from authors, professors, and supervisors who are dismissive of our experiences and antagonizing towards our identities? How do we learn in a world that repeated proves its hostility towards who we are inside? We feel raw from the constant re-opening of this alienation wound. Where we used to pull the good out and discard the rest, we now throw out the entire bathtub, because we’re tired of seeing the same insults, dismissals, and erasures. But that doesn’t help us learn anything, or improve, or grow as people. When it comes to our cultural environment, we mostly feel like yelling, “what the fuck am I supposed to do with any of this?!”
Just like the rest of our life, this entry is more question than it is answer. We are incredibly bad at tolerating uncertainty, but maybe that’s another area we need to improve, another life skill we need to master. One thing I can say about us is that we are always striving. There always seems to be a farther distance for us to travel, compared with everyone else, but somehow we manage to get there eventually. No matter how much adversity we face, we continue to show up, and that’s what will get us through our degree, not answering any of these questions. Which is a good thing, because I doubt we’ll find these answers easily, or anywhere we expect to find them.
-Izzie and Nenilor
