Make it Work, Mothefucker!*

It may not seem so obvious, considering my blog title, but I have a problem with being passive...particularly in relationships or in large groups of people, especially if I don't know everyone well.

I started to see my current, brilliant therapist, in trying to deal with that "problem." And it was a problem. And I wanted to fucking solve it.

By nature, I'm an observer. I like to get the lay of the land. I like to know how deep the pool is before I jump in...whatever metaphor you like. For this reason, I can be a bit of a chameleon, and generally, I can get along with a lot of different sorts of folk.

I can also be a real fucking people pleaser (which, honestly, is probably how I learned to finesse the fuck you). I want others to feel good and comfortable and happy and loved and all good things...and, yeah, I want them to like me. I am also genuinely afraid (terrified?) of hurting or putting off people I care about. I once accidentally hit a friend with a jump rope in 2nd grade...and to this day every time I think about it I feel the awful pain and guilt I felt that I had hurt her, even by accident. It's like a terrible wave of grief. So I won't kid myself, or you, by portraying my behavior as altruistic because it largely centers around avoiding that feeling, intense as I feel it.

On top of being such a goddamn fixer, I feel terrified of being vulnerable and dead set on feeling independent (when I'm really co-dependent), making it easy for me to focus on others while keeping my worries and problems and never-ending self-analysis to myself (unless I'm blogging about it).

In relationships, few that I have had, these things can really work against me. I only started to understand to what level maybe four or five years ago.

The idea that I fell into this passive role in my relationship really baffled my therapist...at least to an extent. I can't count the times we talked about how striking it was that when it came to most things, I was outspoken and opinionated and knew exactly how I felt and what I wanted...but in my relationship I was a completely different person.

What has been most shocking to me over the last several years is to discover exactly how outspoken I came off to other people...because so often in my life I have felt passive, small, raw, and helpless. Apparently you can finesse the fuck you, but you can't hide it. It's only in the last seven years or so that I feel I have come into myself, and perhaps that's why at this point in my life the passiveness seems shocking and abrupt...out of place.

While the reasons I fall into passiveness are obvious, I'll be untangling this ball of psychological yarn my whole damn life, I'm sure of it.** It's a reflex. It's a behavior I find so natural that it eludes my rampant self-analysis.

This week I was reminded again of how easy it is to fall into a pattern and to be unaware of my behavior and interactions...passive ones anyway, I monitor all the others on account of they might affect other people, remember? No one ever taught me that being passive might ever be a problem.

And that's the real deal, as you may have expected. Passivity has worked for me in many situations in much of my life, which is exactly why it's such a fucking ridiculous default.

I spent some time this week really reflecting on how I can interrupt these psychological scripts that feel so hard wired. And that's when it happened.

My partner and I were talking and...he pointed out that my "passivity," or whatever you might call it, can be a strength.

Oh shift of paradigm shifts! I believe he described me as having something like a "quiet aggression."

"Not passive aggression?" I asked.

"Quiet aggression." He described it as a positive trait. I am aggressive, I suppose, in a gentler way...or perhaps I'm stealth aggressive. I do often maneuver my aggression in ways that fall under people's radar, that don't come off as combative, that often focus on consensus-building or common ground...usually hoping, I won't lie, that the consensus leans in my direction. I finesse aggression!

What an epiphany! Sure, in it's extreme forms, passivity is one slippery banana peel mother...but on the other hand, I draw from that same place for lots of positive reasons, lots of useful reasons, lots of beautiful reasons that make me who I am.

So, in the last few days, I've been thinking about how this element of passivity (or, again, whatever you'd call it, I don't have a better word) works for me. Rather than eliminating passivity, exterminating it, extracting it's ills from my existence, I'll just harness it. Sounds like a more reasonable goal anyway.



*Yes, too many episodes of Project Runway lately. Though I'd contemplate paying serious money for a recording of Tim Gunn saying, "Make it work, motherfucker!" if only because I can't even imagine Tim Gunn saying 'motherfucker.'

**Know that because I am obsessed with completing metaphor, I immediately felt the impulse to make a knitting metaphor, something about how untangling that ball of yarn will allow me to create something beautiful...but it was cheesy and pushing it and would have really distracted from my overall narrative.

The Fucking Paradoxes We Find in Ourselves

I have been dealing with a lot of 'fuck me' lately....that is, my dealings have been fuck me dealings more often than I'd like to admit. Cases in point:

-Instead of communicating about my worries and anxieties, I stew in them, take them on alone, and they fester.

-I wake up in the morning feeling as though I need to be a superwoman, and I feel broken under the weight of all the expectations I have for myself.

Obviously I've developed these strategies for some reason. I've always been independent, at times to a fault. As a reminder of this, my father sometimes likes to recall a time where he took me to get shoes. I don't know how old I was, maybe 10 or 12..maybe a little older. He picked out a damn fine selection of white tennis shoes, but I insisted I wanted grey or black tennis shoes. When he pressed, I apparently told him with no lack of certitude that I could make my own decisions.* Oh, I am glad my parents tolerated my independence even when it might have come across as teenage hostility.

Anyway, take the two problems I describe above and think about what they mean for my life. You'll notice that not only do I like to keep my own problems to myself, I feel responsible for all problems and, often, all people. I feel responsible for everything!

And sometimes this has been good for me or had positive outcomes. Because I feel responsible for others, I'm generally a pretty considerate person. I like to help people. I give really good advice and have a great shoulder to lean on. Because I feel like I have to shoulder all my problems and emotional weight, I tend to be pretty self sufficient. While I need other people, I can be pretty happy on my own.

Those are the positive qualities that result from my behavior, but this same behavior also fucks me up. I sometimes let problems fester or my anxiety balloon out of control when the simple act of communicating my concerns often does a good bit of the work of relieving my anxiety and bringing solutions into focus. I regularly set ridiculous expectations for myself and feel like I have to be tackling everything at once, which leads me to feeling incapable and disempowered...instead of taking one challenge at a time and realizing that I am quite competent--and sometimes pretty awesome--when it comes to tackling those challenges.

Often part of being successful is tackling this sort of paradox in ourselves. The traits/behaviors that give us power and success are many times the same traits/behaviors which bring us down and fuck us up. They are hard to question, even when they are fucking you up, because they have worked for you...they've become instinct, they've become parts of yourself that you take pride in.

My strategy? Just keep fucking trying.



*To this day I don't like white tennis shoes. Currently I own one grey pair in which I mow the lawn, one black pair with fancy gold details, and one regular black pair.