The Toxic Myth of Control as Reliability
Would you believe that I have written two posts for this newsletter but just haven't sent them? When I came back to this from my unintentional summer hiatus, I had this grand vision of a ritual of writing and putting out regular newsletters, but something kept getting in the way. I drafted things and they didn't feel "right" - something was always missing. I don't mean in a "I need to keep editing this" way, I mean in a "I am missing something" way.
This used to happen sometimes when I would write academic papers and it would stress me out because I was always writing on a deadline. It felt like tightened muscles, tension, or sometimes like I wanted to burst into tears at the overwhelm and being lost and unsure how to get back to the path I was on. I could have hit publish, it would have been fine honestly, but I am also working at honoring my feelings, at moving at my own pace. I will write at some point in the future about how I learned to differentiate between these feelings and anxiety, but for now, I can say that it feels like the difference between letting go vs. holding on to control.
Control was a plan, stability, a neatly mapped path of what a newsletter would look like. Dependability. Equating rigidity with reliability. I want to be seen as reliable, so I tried to control my energy to let me write on a set schedule. In a lot of ways, I wanted it to be an equation: put x in here, always get y. Putting it this way makes it sound mechanical, because it is. And I am not a machine. I live in a deeply animal body.
I had a rude awakening when I got sick again and was forced to take time off. To be clear, I don't think this was fate or a cruel lesson in humility from a judgmental deity though in the past, I would have. The reality was being immunocompromised in a world where masking is seen as deeply unnecessary. As an already disabled adult, I had the privilege of having space to just be sick. To curl up and just let my immune system do its best. Unlike the past, I didn't even have a chance to pretend that I was okay enough to go to school or work. I had to just take it slow. Honestly, I am still chewing on this whole experience and will continue writing about it, but for today, I want to focus on cycles, this newsletter, and digesting who I want to be.
Part of my goal with this newsletter is to make space to talk about overwhelm, bullet journaling, and information management, but from a disability angle. So often, organizational resources are built for mythical people - people who perfectly keep detailed systems in working order and are never surprised by anything. While I would argue this is a toxic myth that hurts everyone, it can be particularly cruel to those who have less energy or resources in the first place, and who have to sort through/advocate for themselves more than others. For example, I have to keep extensive personal medical records so that I can advocate for myself when I am dealing with doctors (who I see far more than the average person), but I also have brain fog and am likely to forget words in times of stress. My hope is that this newsletter can be a place to pass notes about experiments I have tried in dealing with these things and invite you to take what might work for you and don't feel pressured to leave the rest.
Experimentation is key though - so often it is hard to know that accommodations might be helpful until we try them. A classic example of this is sidewalks in the US. After passing the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), more cities were required to build sidewalks with ramps, to help those in wheelchairs navigate outside easier. This was an accommodation imagined to help a single group of people, a subset of disabled people, but the reality was more complex. It turns out ramps are actually helpful to a whole host of people - those with strollers, small kids on bikes or scooters, people on crutches, people using shopping trolleys to bring home groceries without a car. It turns out that there are some accommodations that can be systemic - helpful to everyone without limiting access to those who truly need them, but it might have been hard to predict this at the outset. People had to try it out to see that ramps were helpful. That is my hope for this space - to share my own experimentation in case you might find systems or tools that might help you in ways you didn't even know you could get help.
For me, dealing with overwhelm and disability is a more explicit process of figuring out what to cut out and what to invite in, but on so many scales and in a variety of areas of my life. Such choices can be daunting and my needs always changing, so it is about trying to build systems and filters to help facilitate this. I need processes for figuring out if I have capacity to agree to do something, processes for seeing if I can do something but I need to do it in a different way, and processes for letting go of things I can't or don't want to do. There are the systemic processes - here is how I sort my emails, but what I specifically want to make space for are the emotions that come up in this work and how I live in an animal body - I am alive and have changing needs. I hope that by sharing my experiences, you might find things that resonate and try them out yourself.
In this time of overwhelm and people looking for things to do, this is some of what I can offer: A space to process feelings and share resources in order to be more grounded when turning to face the rest of the world.
How are you feeling now? What emotions are coming up? Any physical sensations? Ideas? Questions?
Maybe take a moment to notice them, jot them down, or even share them with me at literaturequery@gmail.com - I am genuinely curious to hear if/how any of this lands with you or if you have themes or questions you want me to explore here.
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