Complaining
A thing I have been working on for [redacted] years is where to put my feelings. What is the right balance between acknowledging something sucks and not getting bogged down? How do I get over something without making myself smaller in the process?
I’ve often come down on the side of minimizing my needs, working under the misapprehension that I am being ~chill~ about it. But this comes from growing up with my mom, who often took the path of “becoming Mr. Hyde” when confronted with the slightest inconvenience—a real Karen, asking for the manager of the Mr. Subb, the school bus drop-off, the universe.
Though recently, I had a bit of a breakthrough. I had been working on a sewing project, making a cushion for a chair we found and rescued from our neighbor’s trash. Anyways, it got fucked up—I misaligned the top and bottom panels, and I needed to pull out the stitches and re-do the final portion.
C. got to work right away, trying to help me troubleshoot. The more he analyzed my mistakes, figuring out where I’d gone wrong, the madder I got. Until, finally, I said something ungenerous, and we got into a fight.
Later, after the cushion was redone and looked more square-like, I apologized. I also realized I hadn’t been ready for the help he was trying to give. He dove headfirst into making things better while I needed a minute to just be mad about it. I wanted to complain a bit about how it’d been hard, that it took way longer than I expected, that the fabric was expensive and fussy and the YouTube instructions for this part really weren’t that good, that I needed more practice and had maybe overcommitted, that I knew it wouldn’t come out perfect, but I thought I could try anyways. Then, I’d be ready to fix it, but not before.
I suppose you could argue that my husband’s approach is the better one. He’s logical, a natural problem-solver, someone who relishes the opportunity to improve upon things. Optimize! we say, half-jokingly, imagining that GIF of Spongebob, a rainbow between his outstretched palms.
But maybe better is giving C. too much credit, and me not enough. Not that this anecdote about a minor craft project mishap is on the level of any of the many frankly untenable things that happen all around us nearly every single day—but to ask for resilience is, in some way, to ask for acceptance. To tolerate the way things are and alter ourselves in the face of it, not the other way around.
Maybe my answer about what to do is to make space for my complaints. To be cheesy about it: Think of it not as a wall but a window. What if my feelings can help me see how to fix things?