Tag Archives: mental-health

Delicate Flower

Something I think about too often is this time when my supervisor told me that I am a “delicate flower”. She was not trying to compliment me. This supervisor routinely told me that I was making her job harder, that she didn’t understand why I was hired, that all I did was make mistakes and that in this job, mistakes are not allowed. “You are just a delicate flower,” she sneered; “I know you go crying in the bathroom when I give you any criticism. I don’t even know what you are doing here.” When I finally got the courage to ask for a transfer from the person who actually hired me, the Operations Officer, she wondered if maybe there was a language barrier.

A language barrier. Sure. I shrugged and said, “Whatever it is, I don’t think I can keep working here if I have to work for her.”

I wonder often if I am just too sensitive. Do other people just hear criticism like that and “take it on the chin”? Do they respond with, “Okay, I will stop making your job harder and never make a mistake again,” with a little rueful, penitent smile? Do they fire back with something about how difficult it is to work for such a particular person?

I have received criticism without batting an eye. I don’t always take it personally when people make unflattering observations or comments about me. I have been a liar, adulterer, murderer-in-my-heart, envious, ungrateful, disobedient. I am not someone who walks around believing that I am in any way a good person, or even always a well-meaning person. Criticism doesn’t make me fold.

What makes me feel like a delicate flower is raised voices. My fight-or-flight kicks in pretty quick when someone around me is yelling, insulting (calling names), using exasperated tones, or threatening. My ability to think rationally, even to the point of understanding what the person is saying, vanishes. As I have gotten older, my ability to steel myself against verbal assaults has diminished. I don’t know if I have ever been the type of person to laugh while someone else is clearly having an intense moment. That has been the case as long as I can remember, but what is happening lately is this lingering sense of I am not okay, long after the yelling has stopped or I have left the situation. My mind swirls with fear. I do not feel safe.

Over a year ago, someone went berserk on me in a parking lot for hitting their car. The kids were all talking and I was distracted and all I was thinking about was getting parked so I could just stop for a moment and CRUNCH. Ooh, that was bad enough, but the person whose car I hit was sitting in it and she was livid. I think too often about that. I am more careful in parking lots, quick to hush the kids, afraid not just of hitting someone’s car, but of what the person might do. The kids probably remember this incident, but they aren’t scarred by it. I am.

I am not scarred in the sense that I replay the scene or constantly fear someone yelling at me again; I am scarred in the sense that I don’t trust myself to be okay if someone does. That may seem like splitting hairs, but the difference is staggering. Fear of someone yelling is focused outward. I can scan for threatening people and avoid them. I can drive more safely in parking lots. What I am afraid of cannot be avoided. I am afraid that I am not a strong person. I am afraid that I make things worse by reacting to anger instead of choosing to respond to it. I am afraid that something is terribly wrong with me, broken inside me, and I am terrified that there is no way to bind it up or heal it.

I don’t know if these are words fit to be shared. I just know that this is what kept me silent yesterday when my husband was asking me to please just talk to him. I spent years whining and acting like a victim. I don’t need to go on and on about how unsafe I feel in my own skin, having these sensitive ears, carrying this too-tender heart. I do not need to make much of me.

So in hopes of rescuing this post, I will answer my fear with what I know to be true: there is One who binds up and heals my brokenness. Fortunately/unfortunately, He refuses to do so by making me strong. His strength is sufficient in weakness. I may live the rest of my life practically blacking out when people yell at me. That doesn’t make me less safe, because my safety doesn’t come from my own coping skills. He is near to the brokenhearted. No matter what my broken internal alarm system is screaming, I know that He is near. And I do not have to tolerate abuse. Refusing to stay in a room where someone is yelling at me isn’t weakness. Do I really believe that? No. Should I? Yes, one hundred times yes. It is not weakness to leave an abusive situation, regardless of who the abuser is.

Maybe I am a delicate flower. But it doesn’t matter, really. Whatever I am, or was, I count as loss compared to the surpassing knowledge of knowing Christ. He is continually forming me, and I can say with great joy that it is better to be a delicate flower in His hand than a strong rock apart from Him.

Walking this out may take a lifetime. But the truth remains: God is good. His strength is perfected in weakness. All my hope is in Him.

Excuses

My latest excuse for not posting online is that I don’t want to feed the LLMs. I figure if I post something on the internet it’s fair game; the AI goblins will surely gobble it up and spit it out as some Foundmercified version of whatever ugliness it reflects back at the fools who eat up its psuedo-psychobabble.

I am rusty. That’s the real reason I don’t write much: I try to put out something meaningful and it either feels disjointed or smacks of the social media I spent too many hours consuming. I haven’t read enough real books lately. I discovered Substack in the last year, and while at first I was thrilled with the longer form content I quickly got sucked into the Notes page and scroll-scroll-scrolled my brain to mush.

My brain isn’t mush, but it is moving slower. I have so many thoughts, but everything else takes precedence. Part of that is as it should be. I take care of more than a few people; I have some special needs to tend to among my charges and myself as well. I do wonder if my soul wouldn’t benefit from a bit more of this, however. Simply the tactile experience of typing scratches an itch I sometimes believe will drive me up a wall and is often left un-scratched.

My latest thought is about confirmation bias, and how if I am not guarding against it, I can wreck my mental state before I have had a chance to get out of bed in the morning. The tricky thing is remembering that a large portion of what occurs around us and even towards us is neutral; we assign meaning to events based on our preconceived beliefs.

For example, I want to believe that my children arguing with each other is evidence that I am a horrible person whose influence they should be far removed from. (My English teacher would fix that sentence; I know it’s clunky.) The truth is, my children argue with each other for myriad reasons, and my influence is just one factor.

I have wrestled deeply with why I want so much to believe lies about myself, and why it is so difficult to rewrite the scripts. I think the answer is actually stupid simple: I want to believe hurtful things because somewhere along the way those beliefs seemed to help me, and my sin-wrecked body and brain take time to catch up to my renewed soul — because of pride-driven confirmation bias.

I have to have compassion on the dead-and-dying old me, because the new-in-Christ me was only ever rescued by unfathomable mercy. When I catch myself collecting evidence for some garbage belief, I am learning to ask myself, “What if I’m wrong? What if I’m not {fill in the blank with just about every hurtful adjective you can imagine}? What if I am who God says I am?”

I can’t jump straight to affirmations. Telling myself I am a new creation doesn’t unravel the yarn. I have to start where I am; if I am in the middle of spinning a tale that depends heavily on me being {insert adjective}, I have to stop it by first asking myself if I’m sure that I’m right.

Confirmation bias isn’t entirely evil; it is a function of our brains’ amazing streamlining abilities. Why question everything all the time? That is exhausting. Eventually, confirmation bias will work in my favor as the lies are less reinforced and the truth becomes the more worn neural pathway.

But in the meantime, maybe I should write and post more because I need to put more evidence out there that God has given me a means to bless people with words. I could use a bit more evidence that, despite being rusty, I still have a gift. I have a purpose beyond meeting the needs of my family — high purpose though that may be, and more than enough if I didn’t possess gifts outside of an ability to tend to needs. (I must say, I do not feel gifted in that at all, actually, but it does feel like a gift to me that I am able to do the laundry, dishes, homeschooling, etc.) Maybe writing and sharing my writing will help me overcome some of my “all I’m good at is cleaning and accounting”, self-protective lies.

But in the meantime, though it’s not much, I do hope this little article blesses someone. If I made you think, or made you laugh, let me know.

SDG

A Reflection on Appreciation

Katie said she misses my writing. Here’s something I messed around with a couple months ago and kept waiting for inspiration on how it should end. Looks like the ending is good enough. It’ll do, anyway.

I was in my late twenties when I posted a “shower thought” on Facebook: Saying thank you when someone does what they should anyway is sorta like thanking them for existing. No one responded except for one lone comment: It’s called showing appreciation. Try it sometime. Ok, ok, the “try it sometime” is probably an addendum of my bitter imagination and several years’ rumination, but the correction stung. 

In fourth or fifth grade, I was asked to be a reading buddy for younger children. I did not do it for long. I can’t remember how it ended, but I do remember being chastised for my lack of encouragement and enthusiasm. 

When I was doing some team-building exercise with my youth group in high school, my team wasn’t doing well. In an attempt to spur us on, I called out, “Guys that was pathetic!” Mrs. H knitted her brows at me and said, “Well now that wasn’t very nice.”

Appreciation. 
Encouragement.
Niceness.

These are things I learned in time, and often through these kind of unpleasant experiences. I still am quite confused by niceness, but I try to make up for this, and frankly most other things, with genuine kindness. 

I grew up being told, as most children of my generation were, that I was good inside and smart and could do anything. And yet I was also berated constantly for my thoughtlessness, rarely praised for anything but perfect results, and frequently told that I can do better. 

I grew up believing that the way to success is through constant criticism. And why praise anything less than the best? It cheapens the meaning of praise. I grew up thinking that spurring people on meant correcting every error until all errors were gone. Then and only then would it make sense to let up, to show appreciation and offer praise. 

I started to see in my mid to late thirties (far too late) that this is entirely backwards. We don’t grow from condemnation. Success isn’t the result of ruthless criticism. Ruthless criticism kills the drive to succeed at all. Sometimes it even kills the will to live. 

I cringe at high-school me shouting, “That was pathetic!” But I also want to wrap her up in the biggest, warmest hug and tell her that it’s okay — you don’t know what you don’t know. Because I know now that this is what I needed. I know now that we grow through nurture, which includes a bit of pruning, but is certainly not the whole work. 

I don’t post much anywhere anymore (another learning curve), but when I do it is with this in mind: the world is full of hurting people who are still learning what “appreciation” means. The least I can do is be kind.