CJ the Curmudgeon

[cjsmith]

I'm beginning to lose patience with a certain category of people. Oh, I'm not proactively rude, but I no longer accept some pronouncements unquestioned.

"I can't swallow pills," someone said to me once. Well, I carefully didn't say, you better not live to be much older. (NB: This person had no dramatic anatomical weirdness. She could swallow food and drink.) Seriously, who lives to middle age without learning to cope with swallowing pills? Heck, who gets to COLLEGE age and hasn't learned to cope with that one? I felt like she was bragging that she was still five years old inside, and a spoiled five at that.

I remember a recent comment in a friend's journal about not dealing well with needles. I can relate. I used to faint -- no kidding here, FAINT -- at the sight of needles in use. I now inject myself daily. I don't LIKE it, don't get me wrong, but I DO it. There are certain special-snowflake attributes that I simply no longer have the luxury of keeping.

"Restrictive diets don't work for me," said a coworker of mine at lunch today, referring to what I don't eat on the Lyme/antibiotic/yeast-control diet. And this time, I spoke up.

"They don't?" I said. Like you're so special, I didn't say, that if you got this disease you would somehow be above managing it. "What if you knew that eating ice cream would make you pretty sick?" I asked instead. "What if you knew it would land you in the hospital, what then? Where's the line?"

He readily rephrased, saying he has no strong motivation to lose weight; I agreed that I could totally understand that, and we rambled off on side topics.

I think I'm beginning to see that in some cases, "special snowflake" translates to "I've been very lucky in certain ways and I take it for granted." I don't have nearly as much patience with that as I once had.

Bad me, for having little patience? Maybe, but y'know, I'm not at all sure of that.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

Occasionally, the reaction to a realizion of "I'm not actually a lazy worthless stupid person like I've been believing for the past lifetime; I'm just depressed / dealing with thyroid problems / have a specific learning disability / etc." can come off as pride, when a person is just starting to detach their sense of self-worth from their ability to do what they believe (and what most of society believes, often enough) is part of normal functioning.

Not to say that everyone who says "can't" is in that situation. But some are, even though they may just look lazy or whatever from the outside. And, while I know you know they exist, and aren't saying they don't, it sort of seemed to want explicit mentioning.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I definitely agree that limiting factors exist and are worth mentioning. Good point. Heck, I'll say "can't" about walking long distances, when a more explicit phrasing might be "choose not to because it will HURT LIKE @#$!".

[brooksmoses]

Yeah.

I guess part of why I felt like I needed to say that is that "just suck it up and deal" is being kind of triggery for me. I've been through mild depression; I've had loved ones go through deep depression. And a large part of how they got there was believing that their experience of inability to do "what needed doing" (for whatever example was relevant) was merely a failure at being a Grownup and that they needed to work harder at sucking it up and dealing, and so they tried harder to the point where they emotionally broke and were barely capable of keeping themselves fed without having panic attacks.

And, you know, "If I actually push myself hard enough to start typing on my dissertation right this minute, I'll get to a panic attack first" is ... eh. I don't feel like ranting and getting defensive about this. (And, you know, yeah, I dealt with it -- but the first step to dealing with it was going through admitting that I flat couldn't do that, and recognizing that believing that I ought to be able to didn't change the facts, and then figuring out what I could do.)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Depression is a particularly insidious one, precisely because it can look so much like laziness or some kind of character flaw from the outside... and people get massive loads of those "grow up, stop whining" messages from the folks around them. Which does NOT help. Even if those folks are well-meaning, and some, um, aren't.

Depression is just as much a limiting factor in various things as, oh, my 5'3" height is when I try to reach up and touch the basketball hoop. It simply ain't going to happen. That's... it's reality, it's what is, and I can accept it or not, but it's what is.

[brooksmoses]

That, yes. And even worse, it can look so much like laziness or some kind of character flaw from the inside, too.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

If nothing else, we humans are very good at internalizing the messages we get from others. :-( It is often painfully suboptimal. :-(