Holding, Together

When the sun sets on solstice night, we hurl our faith into the darkness, vowing to hold fast until the return of the light.

Ancient European people staring up to the cosmos didn't understand a round and tilted world spinning around a central star, turning and returning.  They just knew that the world operated on a predictable pattern: the days get very short and the nights very long, and then the light comes back and the days slowly begin to lengthen and brighten in an annual cycle.

Winter cold and darkness kill.  Food stores stretch thin, fire and heat hold the line against freezing, and inclement weather can limit the ability to resupply and find help.  Predators starved of easy game get bolder as they get hungrier, and creep towards human settlements they'd otherwise avoid.  A dark winter night, and what you have to survive it, forces you to confront all the decisions you made in your times of plenty.  The coming of sun and spring feel like a benediction and a validation of your ability to survive.

We built elaborate rituals around this annual balance between the light and the dark. Some people assigned identity to the cycle, with Oak and Holly kings rising and falling.  Some laid the year out as a wheel, and hung practices and social conventions upon it.  We created celebrations of family and community because human connection drastically increases the chances of surviving the darkness.

Many cultures developed elaborate rules and practices around hospitality; the expectation that a kind stranger would take you in if you found yourself unsheltered was as critical as the expectation that the stranger you took in wouldn't slaughter your family in their beds.

And the darkness became a time for rest and domestic comfort, for rebuilding and repairing to prepare for the coming seasons. My Germanic ancestors sat by the winter fire telling stories as they made or mended tools they would need for the year's hunt and harvest.

As the understanding of astronomy and geography increased and ancient people began to understand the reasons for the cycle, the rituals persisted.  I am a modern, science-loving pagan, and I know why the sun comes back.  I do not doubt its return.

Yet every year, I sit in the winter solstice morning sunshine and give thanks that it has.

Why?  Because I too need the reminder, more often these days, that the dark times pass and the light comes again.  That there is time for rest and mending.  That even though we don't all survive every dark time, our chances of it grow if we hold faith and connection, and share with one another -- be it food, shelter, or story.

We are in a time of remarkable loss, uncertainty, and grief.  It has become very easy to feel helpless in the face of the world as it is, because that world appears to be spinning out of control along multiple axes. It is very hard right now to believe this long night will end.

It's all right to be afraid.  It's all right if your faith is shaken. It's all right if you're struggling to believe in a brighter day.  That fear we feel is as old as humanity.

So are the tools we use to oppose the fear: community, hope, shared stories, time for rest and mending, and faith -- be it in gods, ourselves, or one another.  Our celebrations are as old as our fears, for good reason.

As this Yule sun beams down after the longest night, let it inspire you to hold fast, my beloveds, and love one another, and we will carry as many through as we can, together.

Samhain

On Samhain night, we honor what is lost, we touch grief and memory together, and we settle in for the dark winter of rest and contemplation.

The last year has been one long and exquisitely difficult arc of grief for so many of us.  We're mourning lost moments, lost connections, and lost loved ones, all scattered before the wind of a history none of us would have chosen to live.

Our lives and our communities have changed, and some of the change is good.  Not all changes are bad or hard, and in times when everything is uncertain it can be hard to hold to the joyful transitions amidst the flood of upheaval.  I thought long and hard tonight about what to honor as this year draws to a close, and I'm choosing to honor and release the parts of myself that my own recent history has destroyed, or simply made vestigial; in so choosing I'm clearing the deadfall to make way for who I'm becoming.

I release the part of me that desperately wanted your acceptance and approval, who wanted so much to be part of an inner circle that I never stopped to ask whether you were worthy of my respect.

I release the part of me that needed to be liked more than I needed to be understood.

I release the part of me that allowed others to define their priorities as my own.

I release the part of me deliberately made palatable lest those with small capacity find it too complex, or choke on what I have to offer.

I release the part of me that waited, anxious, to be invited to the place I deserved to stand.

I release the part of me that believed I ever had anything to prove.

Here I stand within my circle, cloaked and hooded and ready to take my place.

I cast back the hood of self-doubt, so that my crown of self-awareness may be seen, gleaming above clear eyes.

I step out of the boots I wear, surrendering structure to stand grounded upon bare earth.

I peel away my gloves, so that all I touch now touches me, and we change each other.

I release the clasp at my throat, made up of the will and wants of others laid over my own needs and priorities.

Freed, the heavy cloak of expectations slides from my shoulders and pools around my bare feet.

And so I am ready to step forward, in a radiant gown woven of my own dreams, adorned with my love for friends and family and my chosen service to the larger world, and stand at the center of my circle shining dark and brilliant both.

I have been a queen of winter longer than I have acknowledged it; the dark of the year is mine to carry and to walk.  In the long contemplations of the year just past, I have embraced my role in the liminal space, holding just inside the darkness to show the way, walking the paths of grief as a guide but not softening the pain.  It's not mine to ease; my work is to show you that you can be the person who is strong enough to carry your pain, not to shoulder the burden for you when you think it's too much.  This makes me harder to know, sometimes, than I could be, and it's in those times that I need to remember what I chose to release to reach the center of the circle, and why.  It's also worth reminding myself that those who belong in my circle will always find a way there, and that what I would need to give up to BE easy to know is too important to lose.

I love you all.

Tapped Out

 Let's take a moment to talk about empathy, positive pressure, compassion fatigue, and burnout.

I am what is generally known as The Strong Friend.  I am a lot of people's first call in crisis, and last call before giving up.  I tend to maintain my own boundaries and capacities in a way that means I frequently have a small reserve of energy or space, and the ability to step back and hold calm in chaos.  I compartmentalize well, think fast, and work through problems to find the simplest solution easily.

For the most part, this is a structure I can maintain, exactly because I have boundaries like a motherfucker.  I don't give what I can't afford to lose, only pull from my own reserves and surplus.  That's a lesson I learned the hard way years ago when I found I'd given up what I *needed* to people who wouldn't sacrifice what they only *wanted* to replenish it.  I make it practice, in the darkest times, to set aside a portion of my reserves to be available to others in need, to hold flame so others' lights don't go out entirely.

So when the pandemic began, I found myself in a better place, emotionally, than a lot of the people around me.  I've dealt with isolation, I've dealt with sustained stress, I've been at war with my own mind since I was 11 years old.  I also have a good, stable job that allows me to work from home, a partner who helps and supports me, and generally steady resources on several fronts.  Consequently, I had the ability to be a space for support for others who had a harder time adjusting.  I reached out and offered support to people who were in a worse place than I was:  emotional, professional, financial, whatever was needed to help out.  I always assumed that support was a temporary offering until we all adjusted to the pressures of living under a pandemic.

But as a year went on, I found that "Let me hold space for you while you adjust to this state of trauma" became "Let me maintain a positive pressure for you, supporting you indefinitely while you continue to try and approximate your non-pandemic emotional state at all costs."  The adjustment I expected never came; people simply adapted to my support as a constant state of affairs, incorporated the belief that they'd always be able to rely on me into their plans.  They built their systems around the expectation that I would hold that positive pressure, that I'd always give just a little more than I asked.

Not familiar with the concept of positive pressure?  Systems that operate on flow and supply work because they maintain positive pressure: the ability of what's going into the system to stay slightly ahead of what's flowing out of the system.  As long as that pressure is maintained, even if the system has leaks, everyone's structural integrity stays the same and contaminants can't flow back *into* the system.  The positive pressure is essential to maintaining the health of the entire system, and it's surprisingly easy to maintain.  You just make sure the tiniest bit more goes in than out.

Here in Austin, we all had a bit of time two and a half months ago to understand the concept of systems under positive pressure when the big freeze killed our water treatment plant.  As pipes burst across the city and pumps shut down, the flow of water OUT of the system exceeded the water treatment plant's ability to put water INTO the system, and the whole thing depressurized and collapsed.  The reason it took so many days for some of us to get water back wasn't that the water plant couldn't produce the water.  It was that the whole system, having depressurized, had to fill its reservoirs to maintain that positive pressure so that it wouldn't collapse again and it would be able to provide stable, consistent water delivery.

And that, my loves, is exactly what happened to me.  For the last seven months, I've been solving an incredibly stressful, highly-pressured series of nested problems at work.  I have...not received the support I needed from my leadership.  I have, at the same time, been a source for emotional support, financial support, personal growth for others.  I stepped into justice movements to be a voice for support and allyship.  I gave, and I gave, and I gave, always from what I could technically spare.  

But the funny thing about giving what you can spare is that over the short term it just means you go without 'extra' for a little bit.  Over the long term, it means your 'extra' bypasses the chance to build your reserves, so you store up only what you think you might actually need in an emergency.  You think "I have enough in my reserves to weather the average crisis, I have enough to spare." So you keep sharing, and giving away, and you tell yourself that you're not HURTING yourself, you're just not hoarding, and hoarding is wrong, right?  My life is filled with people standing in perfect moral purity and condemning even the suggestion of hoarding anything someone else might need. The guilt and the shame over 'hoarding' my own energy have been so insidious that I've had to take drastic steps to counteract them; if you've been a voice yelling about how no one cares enough or talks enough about what you think they should, then congratulations, I have almost certainly 'snoozed' you for a month on social media at least once recently.

In December, I noticed the first warning sign:  compassion fatigue.  I stopped having the energy to turn to every single moment of pain I witnessed with an open heart and a desire to do active work to ease that pain.  I struggled with anger at people who continued to need my support for situations they had had power to fix and hadn't.  I talked about it, and heard "oh, yeah, we all feel like that."

I can't adequately explain how damaging "Oh, yeah, we all feel like that, it's totally OK that you're not OK," has been to me.  When I say "I'm not OK," to someone, and their answer is "Yeah, that's normal, it's fine that you feel that way, you of all people should know bad it's been, let me tell you about the hard time I am having," I don't hear solidarity.  I hear "Yeah, no one gives a flip that you're drowning, no  one's got time for you.  Suck it up, your crisis is not special."  I hear "Just lean into being not OK, just settle into that feeling and embrace it," which feeds my Traitor Brain.  Couple that with getting tired of being asked to provide detailed instructions clearly explaining how to support me in simple, easy-to-manage steps, and I just stopped asking most people for help.  If I have to spend three hours of emotional labor navigating you through the process of being there for me in a way that asks as little as possible of you (but still makes you feel good for doing it), I'll just spend that three hours doing that labor for myself instead.

So, February came.  I finished my first 100 hours of overtime, including a full month of back-to-back-to-back 60-90 hour weeks.  I limped, bitter and demoralized and weeping, to what I thought was a two-week space before my next deadline.  Instead, thanks to a massive weather disaster and a utility system collapse I found myself without a source of water for 100 hours, while almost no one I knew, no one I'd been supporting and tending and building up for a year, thought to ask "Do you need help?"  Not only was my 'positive pressure' system in the real world failing as my faucets stayed dry, it became brutally apparent that the emotional system I'd been so assiduously pressurizing for a year was only under pressure as long as I was putting INTO it, not when I needed to take OUT OF it.  

It's best exemplified by the fact that everyone I work with was given the time off and told to rest and take care of themselves because my employer was closed due to the weather, but my ability to check the departmental email and voicemail for a day or two turned into me being asked if I 'minded' taking them on for over a week, because I was going to be online anyway managing all the tasks for that next deadline and it just 'made sense' not to ask another person to give up their time off.  And that 'ask' wasn't even unreasonable, as I was the only one with consistent power and internet; it just meant that others had a break while I still had a responsibility.

I cratered, hard, and all my reserves and reservoirs emptied so that I could survive.  I still had two full months of the work project to manage, with every single day requiring me to put my full self into it to serve a goal I dearly love and believe in.  For the last 8 weeks, I've been maintaining baseline system functionality, meeting minimums while every single thing I could designate as noncritical fell to the wayside:  laundry, housework, friendships, creative time, sleep.  Had my partner not been an amazing human being, I would not have eaten on approximately 20% of the days in March and April.  I am currently carrying over 200 hours of comp time earned since mid-January, and almost 200 hours of unused vacation time (related:  I will be working four-day weeks until September).  Rest assured that "I worked 60 hours in a week where my leadership 'took some mental health time' and worked 30 while still communicating unmet expectations to me," will figure into my employee evaluation conversations this year.  So will "This was a make-or-break year, I made it, and it broke me."  Last week in the home stretch, my Sunday through Saturday daily hours were 12, 11, 18, 15, 16, 18, and 8, in order.

I hit something approximating my goal and have reached a time of rest and recovery, but the end result of all of this is that I'm deeply burned out.  The energy reserves I might otherwise have to offer support, or do the work, or push energy into that whole system, are now being entirely diverted to repressurizing my own system, filling my own holding tanks to keep me from collapsing and failing. I am, first, filling my reserves entirely before allowing the overflow to support others.  This will continue for some time.

If you've been relying on me this last year, and found me less available these last two months, you should expect that to continue a while as I equalize.  If this means the system suffers because I give less, so be it.  Others can either choose to make up the shortfall themselves, or learn to live with a lower-pressure system.

Also, if you are a person I only hear from when there's an 'ask' attached, a need, you may find me limiting my availability to you at all.  One thing I've become aware of is that I get a lot of messages that lead with a problem, not a hello, and the senders fade back into silence once I've provided support, solutions, or advice.  We all go through rough patches, but I'm going to ask you, if you're reaching out to ask me for my energy, to scroll up in that chat window and decide whether our relationship is based in shared positive pressure, or you just keep turning on the tap.

I do love you all, but I am so very very very tired.