Petty Tyrants

I started this piece of writing so many times today. I have opened and closed Substack so often there has been a draught. No drafts. Just start and delete. Go away. Come back. Start and delete. Go away.

Go away. Two, pivotal words that seem central to what I’m trying to get to actually. Which is hard to do when there is a lot of away from rather than towards energy in those words. I think I am simultaneously trying to pin something down whilst removing myself from its vicinity. At this point I am oscillating wildly. It is using a lot of energy and I am going nowhere. I look like I’m having a fit. I feel like I’m having a fit.

Something that I have lived with for several years and which has shaped my life in unimaginably complex ways is about to come to an end. It’s been dying for months now. Long, painful months in which the promise of the ending has been so tantalisingly close, only to be cruelly snatched away over and over again. The longer it has dragged on, the more painful it has become until, if I think about it with my whole self, rather than the bit of me I have anaesthetised sufficiently to cope with it, I feel sick.

Over the last few weeks, as we have crept nearer and nearer to completion it has been harder and harder to numb myself off so that I can carry on. That’s partly because it has become more and more intrusive and partly because I dared to dream I might finally be free of it. It feels a bit like when you really want a wee and you need to get home. You do so well until you can see your front door and that’s when you usually piss yourself. I let go too soon.

I expect it also has a lot to do with the fact that I have woken up to myself. It was much easier to deal with things when I had a whole other me ‘over there’ to pour all the uncomfortable bits of myself into.

Last week we were told that this thing would be done by Wednesday. Then Friday. Every day since then there has been another broken promise and another day in thrall to the waiting, which makes every day feel about ten weeks long. Today was absolutely going to be the day. No question. Except it wasn’t. Tomorrow will be the day now. Absolutely. Maybe.

I have wanted this thing, this poisonous thing to go away for such a long time now. I have been so very, very patient. Even on the days when I have lost that patience and snapped, I have picked it up again. Even on the days when I have said that I can’t take any more, I have found ways to dig deeper and bear the unbearable. I have found myriad ways to not burn everything to the ground, and I can tell you that I really, really wanted to burn everything to the ground - so many times. Stoicism is not my natural state, which is annoying because it has been where I have lived now for some years.

I have had a migraine now, on and off for over a week. Along with a trapped nerve in my neck and forty tonnes of stress in my shoulders and jaw, it’s been a lot. It continues to be a lot. I am in pain. I am in physical pain and I am in emotional pain and it is shit. It is shitty because of the interminable ending of the thing that refuses to bloody end. Then there have been a whole bunch of other, shitty things on top that have been demanding my attention, too loudly to be ignored.

When I connected my whole self back together, my therapist issued a word of warning. She said that I might want to be on the lookout for what she calls petty tyrants, cropping up in my life. In therapy speak, a petty tyrant is someone who attempts to impose their will on you, psychologically speaking rather than physically. She said that once you begin to stand in your power, it can attract these types of people for a whole host of reasons. The hardest thing, she said, is that petty tyrants are often people who love you and who you love in return. Sometimes they are unconsciously invested in you going back to the way you used to be for their own benefit. Sometimes they are just attracted to what is powerful in you and want it. Petty tyrants very often do not mean to hurt you. It doesn’t mean that they don’t.

She said that it is important to recognise them and their behaviours because they are a gift. The gift is to figure out what you want to do about it and them. Rather than reacting or retreating, this is the time for thinking about what you need and want and taking the opportunity to do things differently. A petty tyrant can give you the chance to look at your own behaviours and change things for the better.

Rather like when I glibly signed up to reconnect my whole self and step back into my body as a permanent home rather than using it as a weird, dusty, trophy cabinet, I casually said: ‘Yeah. Yep. I’ll look out for them.’ I didn’t think ‘Woah,’ which is what I definitely should have done, shortly before I changed my name and ran away to Spain forever.

Therapy quite often feels like that bit in Grand Designs when the couple who have just sunk their life savings into a project with no contingency plan, blithely say they are going to come in under budget and it will all be over by Christmas. This jump cuts to Kevin, rubbing his hands together and flicking his little lizard tongue out in glee, standing in a field up to his knees in mud, demonstrating why they are insane. In Grand Designs terms, my therapy is now at the stage where I am living in a badly insulated mobile home, trying to sell my kidney to buy enough roof tiles to make the house watertight. I’m in it too deep to go back, but I am bleakly aware of the cost of what lies ahead before I can collapse in front of my state of the art log burner and announce that it was worth every one of the twenty seven nervous breakdowns it took to get here.

What I would really like to know is why things that are a gift turn out to be so fucking painful? And why are these gifts things I have to build for myself, usually without a manual and on the fly, with a headache? I do not want to go to the birthday party where everyone I invited turns out to be having a crisis and the crisis is the gift they dump on you before they piss off to a better party, with vol au vents and girls who jump out of cakes.

Much like the thing which may or may not end tomorrow, and which I was fairly sure that I couldn’t bear for one more moment twelve months ago and yet here I am, bearing it like a bearing thing, I will get through this. Of course I will. The alternative is unthinkable. And even though child me is lying on the floor in my half built house of therapy, drumming her heels and screaming because she has just about had enough of this bullshit, the grown up me knows what to do.

Grown up me knows that I am infinitely stronger than I feel right now and far, far more bendy than my stiff neck will attest to. Grown up me knows that there have been much worse times and there will be much better ones. Grown up me knows that thanks to the fact that therapy works and because I have been doing my homework like a good girl, I can weather whatever this ending brings and I can vanquish an entire coach load of petty tyrants. Grown up me also knows that the answer, whenever things seem unbearable, is to take them one day at a time. And if, like today, one day has been far too tall an order, there is always one breath, one moment at a time until it’s done, because nothing stays this way forever.

Please God.