How Resilient Are Your Relationships?
When your health goes sideways, you learn about yourself, the life you’ve built and the altering of your future vision– fast. And when things turn chronic, derail on the fly and a malfunctioning body becomes your new “normal”, well everything changes. Some changes are direct and dramatic, others are subtle and quiet.
One of the hardest aspects of the long-haul version of your new reality is strength testing your relationships in real time. Not your fault, just the new reality you’re learning to navigate. And here’s the thing the doctors and therapists don’t tell you; you’re about to find out just how resilient your deepest friendships are and the results will be more brutal than your actual pain.
Life happens, I get it. We’re all careening towards an abyss right now and no one knows which way is up, down or sideways. Most of us are so busy trying to survive and keep our families safe that we don't have the bandwidth for anything not directly in our line of site.
Many of my generation are still soothing their end of day anxieties with the algorithms that feed them their past, present and future in steady stream of Insta cosplay photos or Facebook groups. And if you’re not in those algorithms, if say, you chose to remove yourself from the toxic web of the broligarchs years ago, you’re no longer on some of your oldest friend’s radars. And, for the most part, that’s ok. You touch base with your fav gif when birthdays happen and squeeze in a phone call between Santa and Turkey each December.
And if you’re left-hand path nerd like me, most of your adult life was spent nomadic and disconnected from a calendar and a mailbox, so you dropped off the Christmas card list long ago and you have no idea whose child was born when or what grade they’re in. That also bumps you down the list of daily priorities for many parents, and rightfully so.
Spoiler alert, I’m not the one who sends birthday cards or presents on time, or at all. I’m not the one who can usually pop by for the annual Turkey dinner or help decorate the cupcakes for the last day of school party. I am usually the one you ping as you’re on an adventure to see if I want to tag along (spoiler alert, it was usually a yes) and more importantly, I’m the one you call or text when shit falls apart and you need someone to help you sift through the ashes and make sense of it all.
And honestly, I’m good with that. Yes, I really suck at sending things on time for milestone events. Yes, I’m the one with a flexible enough life to clear a day when you need me on short notice. Yes, I’m the one to go deep with. No, I’m not the friend to be shallow with or stay on the surface. Yes, I’m the one who can hold the darkest, deepest conversations so you can let it out, hit the ground and have someone to pick you up, dust you off and point you towards the next path. And I love that about my relationships. Give me depth and meaning over the other stuff any day of the week.
And here’s the brutal part of all of this-- when you navigate an ongoing, life-altering health condition and rebuild your life, you’ll find out real fast just who-- or IF-- your friends can hold the same space for you. And sure, you’ll have friends who show up when you first get a diagnosis or injury, but over time, life kicks in and people drift. And that’s ok most of the time.
But what you’ll find over time, as the PT appointments drag on for months and the blowback from each visit wrecks the next 5-7 days until your next PT visit and you’re simply oscillating between pain management and enough clarity to do your work for a few hours or clean the kitchen (which requires a pain check in and possibly post-cleaning pain management too), is that the silence is more devastating than the pain itself.
The abandonment isn’t deliberate. The silence isn’t on purpose. But the pain of both is still deep and sharp. Your absence may or may not be felt, you simply aren’t registering in your people’s timelines or algorithms because they don’t have the bandwidth to hold your presence anymore. Maybe they never did in the first place.
Maybe all those missed birthday cards or holidays accumulated over time and just bumped you to the periphery and you only register when they’re “popping by” or on your own birthday because the calendar reminder is still in effect even though Zuckerberg isn’t throwing the reminder through the app anymore. And, well, that's all fair.
When my neck first broke, I was so busy at work that no one showed up for me and I had to drag my broken ass out of bed every morning, crawl to the espresso maker, fire it up and shuffle to the Zoom to do it all again. No one showed up for me to help with the stupid, mundane shit of being an adult with a broken neck- and that was beyond eye-opening. I took a long hard look at all of it and about two months after my injury, I was ejected for whistleblowing anyway and the one “anchor” I had, the work, was yanked out from under me and the freefall began.
A freefall that was inevitable really. My neck was wrecked long ago from years of soccer, adrenaline sports and photojournalism, but the job forced me into such a state of perpetual stress because my boss and their ilk were openly crimin’ in front of me that finally my neck was like “ok, bitch, here ya go. Fix your shit now”.
I’m on month 32 now, round 2 of a 4 month physical therapy stint, and the situation itself is now very clear and very real. And as I roll out of this PT round (6 more days!!) I’m now faced with rebuilding a life that I thought was going to look very different. As I restructure the physical side of my life and the work I produce in the world so its all in alignment with what my body can and can not hold, I’m also taking a long hard look at how my relationships function.
How healthy are they?
Who shows up when I’m at my lowest and just sends me stupid gifs and silly videos so I can scrape my sorry ass off the floor that day and have hope that tomorrow won’t feel so raw and devastating?
Who blows me off when I reply to a last minute “I’m in town for a few hours, let’s grab lunch” with a “I’m broken, on pain killers and can’t drive right now, come see me” with a “I’ll be back in 3 months, maybe then”?
Who swings by to take me out to lunch so we can have a long, beautiful afternoon sitting with everything that is on fire in our lives and exploring everything we still have hope for that we can see rising from the ashes?
Who pops over for a 4 hour tea at my apartment to enjoy the porch and dance through the chaos of the patriarchy and compare notes since I can't drive to see them?
Who swings by to take the dog for a walk after a brutal PT session and then spends the afternoon by the pool shooting the shit about technology and politics?
Who meets you in the middle for long beers in a dive bar to co-regulate on the regular and just make sense of it all?
We need our packs now more than ever. And we need diversity in those packs too. Some who can sit by the pool, some who can sit for long lunches, some who can send the comedic relief through the texts and some who can just sit with it all and co-regulate together.
I get it. Everything is collapsing right now at scale.
But here’s the true thing that is universal, no matter what the rest of the world is doing. We are all battling something and it is usually invisible.
We all need those people, and not just one– many– who notice our silence, who are present and in-tune enough to take our silence as a sign that something is wrong. We all need those people who, when learning we’re in pain and are just down the road, will rearrange their day and their meetings to come give us a hug and tell us it will be alright, just for an hour or two.
We all need those humans who have done the deep and difficult work of processing their own pain and trauma so they can hold space for yours when you're losing your grip on it all.
That’s the work we do as Tantrikas. We are trained, through years of practice, somatic application of that practice and fine-tuning our nervous systems, to sit in the cremation ground in the heat of it all, sift through the ashes, gather the bones and sing them back to life.
And when we’re the ones whose bones are scattered on the ground and still radiating from the fire, our fellow humans who have done the work can show up, slip on their oven mitts and help us gather those smoking bones and sing them back to life.
Be sure, no matter what, that you have those dear ones who have the strength and the practice to sit next to you in those flames and help you gather what’s left. We all need it. Now.
Build your pack of humans and nurture each other, that's what the Care Layer is all about. Being present enough to know when you're needed by your humans and being vulnerable enough to say, "I need you" when you can't hold it all anymore.
We’ll all navigate this chaos and build a more resilient world on the other side, one way or another. The Care Layer makes the regenerative version of our collective rebirth possible and gives me hope.
