Memoir
How I Protect My Peace
Weeping in my car and some fucking hard life lessons
I woke up this morning thinking about someone I care about who is going through some wicked heavy life. Then I thought about everyone I love. I went through all my people and their nows and every single one of them has heavy stuff they are carrying.
Every single one, including myself.
Only child over here, with one parent who is basically out of his mind, and another parent who is in so much pain in body, she’s having a hard time functioning.
Both without close family or friends by, both needing major help, both only in their mid 70s, both are without some healthy outlets to vent their pain. Like I say to my Mom, you need someone to vent to, even if it’s about me. But please just talk with me first, however you can.
When I was younger the easiest way for us to communicate (before technological messages existed) was with a notebook we’d write back and forth in. My mother has been hard of hearing my whole life. And she’s not a fan of her hearing aids.
But please vocalize your pain in whatever way you can to another — this is kindness to yourself.
Please talk with someone about your pain, anyone.
It’s a challenge watching our parents crumble, watching anyone we love neglect themselves and their well-being.
Especially when it’s pain that can be lessened with action. And there’s not much I can do but watch it happen. Not many of my friends are of the age where their parents need near full-time help yet. I’m only 42.
It’s not old age that gets ya, it’s neglecting your pain.
It’s band-aiding your pain with false coping. Foping. I still have my fops, my vices. I am working on it too. Yet, it’s in allowing your pain to be set free with self-care and intrinsic joy actions, with help from another human who loves you.
Part of why I am constantly saying:
Make your inner peace your top priority — is because if you neglect it, you can make it someone else’s pain to carry down the road. As with both of my parents. (And we’re all carrying our share already.)
Or you end up like my father and you are utterly alone because you’ve pushed everyone away who loves you.
You must take care.
You must ask for help.
You must open your heart to the people you trust and say, I’m not okay.
It’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay to be sad, it’s okay to be angry!
It’s not okay to pretend you’re okay and go around saying you’re not an angry person, and giving lashings to people who didn’t abuse you to begin with — and never would.
I sat in a store parking lot and weeped the other day. I am overwhelmed.
I’d like to just be whelmed.
But unlike old me, I didn’t weep alone. I weeped into a voice memo on whatsapp sent it out and reached out for other perspectives, other hearts. I knew there would be beautiful people who would listen and care and help.
And fuck is it hard to say I’m suffering here, please help me. Because there’s this part of me that knows my people carry their own deep pain, and I don’t want to compound it.
But my people know the depths of my own pain, and if they held back their shit because they thought I’d be overwhelmed — I’d be upset.
I know what I can handle, what my strength is in carrying pain. I’ve carried a lot for many years. I am the only one who knows what I can deal with. So if they made that assumption, I’d be upset.
So why the fuck was I doing that to others? Keeping it in?
I have the kinds of relationships where my people know they can be straight up with me. I can say,
“I love you I want to help but I don’t have the emotional bandwidth right now to give this the attention it deserves.”
It is rare I say this, but I have. And they know they can too.
This is fucking self care.
When did we start thinking selflessness was righteous and noble?
When is it ever noble to leave someone you love out in the cold to freeze to death? That fucking includes you!
Why have we forgotten ourselves?
When did we start thinking rugged individualism fucking helps anyone?
Fuck this bullshit.
We’re a family out here, all of us. Start encouraging your human family! Better yet stop fucking playing the game of you’re all alone. You’re not all alone. You didn’t get to this place all alone. People died for you to be here. People suffered for you to be here.
So why the fuck are you neglecting yourself?
Honor your ancestors in self care if you can’t do it for you, yet.
Why have you left yourself out in the cold? For what?
Pray tell me please.
How is this helping anyone?
Then you’re so depleted you can’t fucking help anyone anymore.
Protect your peace.
Protect your well-being from people emotionally abusing you, or physically abusing you. And while I’m at this, why the fuck is it “acceptable” to say —
Oh, yeah damn stay away from the parent (or any person) who whipped you with a wooden board with concrete in the middle of it every day (and would still abuse you if you hadn’t grown into an adult body) — but totally cool to judge someone who is protecting themselves from emotional abuse?
“Oh but he’s mentally unwell, Jenny.”
Yeah, no fucking shit my Dad is mentally unwell. He refuses to get help for his deep trauma.
So because he’s family I should allow his emotional (and eventually physical abuse) slowly bleed me to death because his abuse was “only” emotional?
Like I say, you’re not going to walk into a place that’s radioactive.
Why allow radioactive people into your world?
I did everything in my power to help him. Then I had to protect myself and my peace from him. I turned that help back onto me and my people.
Anyone we have to protect ourselves from is dangerous.
Just because emotional abuse doesn’t leave physical scars, does not mean these people are not dangerous to your well-being.
There’s no fucking excuse for physical or mental abuse! So stop claiming that one is worse than the other, please.
Fuck, of all people, family needs to be the ones who respect us and want to protect us. If you didn’t have that, you create a family who will love and protect you.
You do not have to fucking stay with anyone who physically or emotionally abusing you, fuck this “family” bullshit. The people who love you, hurt when you are in pain.
Not give you pain and hurt you. That’s not love. I don’t know what fucked up indentured servitude of blood that is, but it ain’t love.
The people who love you will even know when something’s up with you, sometimes before even you do.
The people who love you will not yell at you “with love” they will not cut you down, judge you, constantly criticize you, or belittle you.
The people who love you will lift you up.
Will make sure you know you aren’t alone, even if you physically may be, in the moment, crying in your car. I felt their hugs. I felt their words and perspective before I even heard from them. I felt them saying I’m here, I’m listening. I wasn’t alone in that moment, Love in all these human forms were right there with me.
When one is an only child, with preoccupied devoted teacher parents, you’ve got a lot of alone time. Especially when you live on a street with no other children. The chipmunks and dragonflies and trees were my friends.
As an only child you learn that you must be independent, fiercely independent. And this can swing wildly into, I don’t need anyone, I can do this all myself.
There’s no sibling to share thoughts with, or to have that unspoken telepathic — can you reach that for me?
No, you reached for things alone. You learn to have eight arms.
It wasn’t until my mid 30s, mired in an abusive relationship, 2000 miles away from home, did I ever start helping myself. Putting in massive amounts of self-care.
When someone you care about is in active addiction you have no other choice but to care for yourself. Otherwise you drown along with them.
They are the person you go to save in the ocean flailing their arms around for help and end up knocking you out and using you as a floatation device.
So make sure you’re extra strong with self care.
If I hadn’t turned my love and care back into me, I would have killed myself in the Netherlands. I was very close to jumping off my balcony.
Art saved me, writing saved me, reaching out for help saved me. I was the lowest I’ve been since 1998, at 18.
I was alone, yet again, in a relationship where someone else wouldn’t lift a finger, even if I were feeling very sick.
The only times I have ever felt really alone was in past shitty relationships.
It was just me taking care of yet another grown-ass capable human being. Where I was doing everything but spoon-feeding them and wiping their asses. They just got to be.
I take full responsibility for this role I took on. Savior complex. Seeing the best in people who had given up on themselves, attempting to show people love who couldn’t even fathom why someone loved them.
I put in my all. This is who I am. All in.
All my energy, all my love, all my money, all my time — into what I thought were the relationships, but was only for the personal benefit of selfish human beings.
That’s on me. I am not a victim. But I had an actively passive role where I didn’t stand up for myself.
Selflessly harming myself.
And it was a fucked up thing to do. Because I forgot about me. I forgot about my financial future. I watched my full-time income being depleted every month by exes who didn’t care to value money, or my time, or my life.
So I got radically self compassionate.
Took me three years from 2015 to 2018 to finally get there, when I was 38, to leave my Dutch ex.
July 11th, 2018. My date with freedom.
Therapy, self care, admitting to myself that the future I had formed there, wasn’t going to happen. Eight years later I broke free. Flew home to my hometown. To the place I know. To the language I know.
But I knew I was jumping from the fire into the frying pan.
Every Summer I’d come back, and every summer I’d see the obvious break down of each of my parents themselves, and their homes. About a mile away from one another, divorced, living alone and separately in their own houses, independently.
I knew I needed to be back in America, they needed major help, but the thought of being overwhelmed in a whole new way — well, fuck it was a new pain I’d be facing, a new struggle, a new suffering. There’s really no one else but me physically to help them.
Just me. And now G.
And I am also very lucky to have Georges, he’s there for me, there for my Mom. There for anyone who needs it really, because the kind of heart he has.
I am blessed and grateful to have all the relationships I have. They are the most important aspect of my life.
So I live with my mother now and care for her and the home I know the best, with the strong body and mind I have. And G is here too. Even though she doesn’t think she needs it, while still maintaining my sanity.
But sometimes I get in my car and weep in parking lots.
Sometimes I dance out my sadness, the helplessness I feel because my parents don’t "need" help, don’t "need" therapy. They can’t do this alone, it’s far far too much for them. It’s a lot for me to carry. I get incredibly overwhelmed. I need help too.
Who the fuck doesn't need help with their pain?
Even therapists have therapists, beautiful people.
Quit the stoic “I can handle all my shit on my own.” Can you really? Get real here. We all need help, fuck we’re all suffering out here.
Why are you torturing yourself in your stubbornness, or need to be right, or all knowing?
You know what finally got me out of the Netherlands? Out of that abusive relationship?
Watching the pain — my choice to stay — was putting the people I love through more pain. Pain I can handle but they didn’t choose that pain.
I was very angry and popping off on others who didn’t deserve to be my emotional dumping ground. I was getting therapy.
But if you are around someone who refuses to get help, they’re poisoning your well, your work on your inner peace.
How long will you drink that water?
My very direct Dutch therapist finally said to me,
“You’re doing okay here, but I can’t help you anymore, the only thing that will help you is to leave, now.”
So I talked with people I trusted, and made a plan to leave. Had at most, 100 dollars in my bank account.
Left my friends, the greatest job as a teacher I ever had, one of my cats, Wonder.
I had to leave my home, my great friends, a country which had become my second home, all my plants, my stuff, except what I could put in my suitcases to save myself. My mother bought me a fucking ridiculously expensive one-way ticket because I was broke. And me and Miracle came home.
We started again in America. I got up and I kept going. I worked as a substitute teacher, because frankly I don’t want to teach in the clusterfuck that is the American Educational system (keep the soapbox under the bed right now Jenny). I subbed in a technical vocational school and spent all my lunches in the Metal Fabrication wing. I learned to weld. It was fabulous.
I was the shop sub at the school. Most of the other substitutes didn’t dare to be in these classrooms. This was my sweet spot. Working with my hands, helping out the students with their projects, and listening to their stories, their lives, and what they were going through, without the confines of a desk or lesson plans.
At work, I learned to talk to co-teachers, to men again without a crippling fear someone would chew my head off, or worse, for talking to a human with a dick.
I had to relearn this American culture. I had reverse culture shock. No more direct Dutch honesty. But no more rain for weeks.
I had to find me again. A new me. I had to put all my love back into me. Build my bank account to something that could support me, while learning my mother is in so much pain it’s difficult for her to stand for even three minutes. Learn how to cope with this new circumstance myself.
My biggest fear?
Watching the people I love being in pain and not being able to do a damn thing about it.
But you know what I can do?
Radical fucking self-care, radical love for me, radical attention to the aspects and skills I’ve been neglecting to suit other people’s vision of what they thought I could be.
I am a writer. I am an artist. I am me. I am Jenny Lane, interbeing.
And I’m not helpless to being witness to others’ pain. I can fucking deal with my own pain now, so the people I love don’t have to have extra pain because of my self-righteous need to be needed.
You know who fucking needs me the most?
Me.
I need me.
And I’m radically loving, radically self-caring me in a way I haven’t had in my life until this time.
I am finally me again.
With radical love,
Here is the audioversion I’ve narrated of this piece:
Note about authors who personally narrate here on Medium:
As of now, our human narrations are NOT calculated into our read time earnings. (Ai listening is, human narrations bypass any earnings) So if you listen, it would be a great help to us if you could also scroll through/read along. Thank you for listening!
Dear Tony Stubblebine,
Could we please make human narrations a priority here on Medium in the year of peace, 2023? It would be a wonderful gift for us! Hearing the human heart behind the words brings all of our hearts closer together in humanity. And good gracious do we need this. < 3