A Postcard from God
For Valentines my oldest friend broke my heart.
Testimony to the truism that you don’t know what your boundaries are until someone breaks them. In this case they drove over them, then reversed, repeat and mowed down my parameters for being in a relationship with anyone. Last week was nothing short of a relationship-car-crash.
Making the best use of being on strike I’d been visiting said oldest-friend because I was worried about them. With no reassurance forthcoming I left as my exhaustion combined with existential anxiety gets projected onto something mechanical, in this case my car. As I drove home I heard the exhaust start to go so I head at a diabolically slow pace down the quiet country roads to my local garage. Flashes of our friendship to the Echo and the Bunnymen soundtrack of our young lives.
The garage is the kind of place that doesn’t have a website, or any discernible customer service and you mustn’t talk too much otherwise Roy just walks off. You dump your car avoiding any eye contact and wait for him to phone. The next morning he calls, and using only west country code he says “It’s not yer exhausted, you’ve lost yer bearings’.
And that, my babber, is what a postcard from God* looks like.
Some words hit us in the gut, crystalizing a realization that can only come from someone else. A ding moment from someone who is not you, who sees things that you don’t about yourself. It is both specific to you and specific to someone who is not you all at the same time.
You could say that last week I lost my bearings. My oldest friend did something so devastating to me it was like a relational switch just flipped. Rarely overloaded and often engaged with complex unconscious processes, as a badge-holding psychoanalytic veteran this doesn’t happen often to me but when it does I feel it all. Unable to retreat into the comfort of denial of a pre-analytic person, I now have to dig deep and endure the full frontal experience of being hit by awful conscious reality.
As someone of a post traumatic persuasion I often experience life’s dramas as a series of slow motion car crashes. Even decades after trauma, many of us remain vigilant walking an anxious line of seeing something in reality but ahead of time. Seeing what lies on the horizon presents you with an impossible choice between walking away or saying something that often can’t yet be heard. Even now, as I watch tyres skid I feel my throat go sore, my voice already hoarse from the wear and tear of shouting through denial.
This experience has been more regular since the pandemic started and as such I no longer feel I can guarantee my recovery. The attack on trust, on relating and wanting to be with other people that we’re all trying to recover from now making my legs wobble in a way they didn’t. The emotional reserves needed to even think about something distressing replaced by an animal urge to shiver in a dark corner and wait it out. I guess that’s why I started writing again.
Post-Covid I’m also inclined towards the angry and unkind that comes with having thin skin, transactional in my calculation whether other people are worth it. Content with a Million Dollar Listing (Los Angeles) version of what people can actually get from each other until that is I have to be in contact with ACTUAL PEOPLE, an occupational hazard of being a parent.
At the moment I’m trying to teach my son how to make friends. In a way he’s in a much better position than I ever could be in doing that because he’s four and a total dude. His dreams and opening gambits are crazed and vivid and he’s just the best. But as with many lockdown babies he can’t really read a room because he wasn’t in one with other people for those formative years. So he keeps going up to random strangers and asking them why they’re so big or so slow and this doesn’t always work out for him. I’m not saying he’s precocious but…ya know.
I have a habit of buying him progressive books that make him say ‘please stop talking’ and pull out the farming machinery catalogue that’s been our bedtime reading for two solid years. Respect (by Rachel Brian) taught me a lot about me and my oldest friend. Cartoons on boundaries and how bribery, manipulation and gaslighting aren’t the same thing as consent. I realized that as part of the disorientation that anxiety brings, I’d forgotten to defend my boundaries. In fact l literally couldn’t locate them in amongst all the emotionality and harm of these last few years. And when I didn’t defend what was important to me from my oldest friend’s fantastic attack I lost their respect for me and mine for them. As we work our way through this, at the very centre is the importance of articulating the boundaries of me and then relentlessly defending them, even when it risks argument or walking away.
At the same time, I was reminded of my love of psychoanalysis. A craft where someone you have never really known sees your unconscious and deepest feelings, and articulates them in a strangely tweet-like communication in order to hold them up to the light. A framework that contains me enough to name. To find my bearings by relating to another person. And so to repair.
Many of us working in the therapy world have early experience of being able to see things others couldn't or weren't willing to see. Many of us saw the problem and then became the problem for speaking up. But many of us learned not to suppress what we know and to use this knowledge in our work and the everyday. There has never been a time when we have to use what we have - our ability to see and understand the realities around us, to build relationships and have some trust in each other. To remain vigilant for our postcards from God.
*I attribute the title A Postcard from God to Clare Slaney, a psychotherapist in private practice and the author of my most beloved blog title, Dancing for Daddy. You can’t have her she’s mine.
Social & Political Issues in Counselling & Psychotherapy: Holding space for difficult conversations - National Counsellors’ Day, 24th June. Surviving Work will be talking about how ‘It’s the Hope that Kills You’. Book here.