Turning Leaves

I have a lovely long-haired Siamese cat. And Siamese cats are very vocal, and normally I’m good with that. Lately, however, it seems like she wants to just yell at me, over and over, and since I’ve been headachy on and off (and mostly on) since mid-October, I have gotten more and more impatient about that. And it’s not as if she’s good at non-verbal communication. Even when I look her in the eyes and ask what she’s yelling about, she doesn’t lead me to an empty water or food dish, or come to me and ask to be picked up. Heck, she won’t even stand still to be picked up.

But most of the time, if I do manage to snag her before she darts under something or far out of reach, and I hold her gently and pet her, she starts to purr and continues purring for a long time. Sometimes, if I’m not too busy to hold her that long, she tucks her head into the crook of my elbow and falls asleep. Other times she’ll just stop purring and start to look like she’s done resting, and I’ll set her down and she does, indeed, go off to do whatever her kitty heart wants in that moment, done with yelling at me for a while.

And I know a lot of people who resemble her in some way. Some of them have a hard time identifying what they want until they get it, or until they get a response that is most definitely not what they want (and sometimes not even then). Some of them know what they want, but aren’t sure how to articulate it, or how to navigate difficult social waters to get to where they want to be. Some of them are prickly or anxious, and take actions that, like my cat running away to avoid being picked up, are totally incongruent with getting another person to give them the kind of attention they are craving. We are all imperfect, and we are all faced with situations where our old reflexes make a situation worse—and it’s very hard to change old reflex reactions, no matter why they formed, but especially if those habits were initially formed to protect us from trauma.

I expect my cat will continue, for the rest of her life, to run from me when she wants me to stop being busy and hold and love her. (And it’s not that she doesn’t trust me. She hides from strangers and is much more careful to avoid being picked up by anyone else, including my partner who has fed and cared for her for as long as she’s been alive. It’s as if she slows down her reflex hiding reaction for me, so I can catch her and love her.) I don’t know of any trauma that caused this reaction, and if there was trauma I should know about it since she was born under the radiator in my living room. I figure that if she was human, she’d have a formal diagnosis of an anxiety disorder—but that isn’t the point here. The point is that I do my best to meet her where she is and to give her the things she needs even if she doesn’t know how to ask for them, and even if my head is throbbing and I’m desperate to have her stop yelling because it is grating on my nerves and making my headache worse.

I have another cat who never likes to be held and petted. He loves getting petted when he’s in the mood, but only while he’s standing on his own four feet. He is, unlike my Siamese girl, very good at non-verbal communication and letting me know what he wants. And I try my best to meet him in the middle too, though that requires very different skills and behaviors than my Siamese girl needs.

And similarly, I try to discover what my friends need that they may not be able to articulate clearly and offer it to them, if it is reasonable for me to do that. I try to figure out what things they’re good at and honor them for those things. I try to figure out what they are bad at and to not demand they try to be someone they are not. If they have reactions that I have even the slightest suspicion are due to trauma, or to protective habits formed early in life, I try to forgive them their rough edges and work around those behaviors, because I know how very hard it is to change them. I try very, very hard not to trigger trauma reactions, even if I don’t understand how that reaction was at some point in their past protective enough to be repeated until it became a deeply engraved habit.

I know, for instance, that some of the behaviors that a small child might devise to protect themselves or at least reduce the harm they suffer when they are in a bad situation (and do not have the independence, skills, and resources or legal right to just leave that bad situation) can be deeply dysfunctional when those behaviors are continued into adulthood. But even if they realize why they started doing those things, and why they became engrained habits, those behaviors are very hard to change. A person wanting to change those things has not only to fight inertia, but to also somehow address the pain and fear that, as a small child (or even as an adult), led to them starting to do it in the first place.

So I try, not always successfully, to give people respect for the good things about them and to work around their rough spots. It is usually none of my business what trauma a person suffered in the past. I don’t even need to know if they are reacting to trauma or if the problem is as organic to who they are as my dyslexia and dyscalculia, which no matter how much I’ve gotten good at working around them and training my brain to compensate for them, are not things that can be cured and not things that I can grow out of. (And I got good enough that if there was a word someone needed the spelling for in a law firm, they asked me.)

So regardless of what might or might not be the cause of someone’s rough edges, I try to look past those things and figure out if we have enough in common to be close friends, or if I should just strive to be cordial but not intimate friends, or if our faults clash badly enough, that we should stick to a relationship in that category that many people call “friends” but in my heart I think of as acquaintances or coworkers and I’m best off being polite but not trying to get close. And then I try to maintain and respect the relationship as it actually is, and and as it naturally develops, not as I might wish it would be.

I have been told that I give people too much benefit of the doubt, that I make excuses for people, that I forgive too easily. But I know I won’t always be correct in my assessment of people or in the assessment of their actions, especially ones that hurt me and my friends. A long time ago, after a lot of consideration, I decided I’d far rather give people more grace than they deserve and later have to say I was wrong about that (and either confront them or back away from doing things with them) than to give them less grace than they deserve and unjustly cause them pain that can never be taken back.

And now I looked back at this whole long bit of writing, and I thought, wow, why did putting everything aside to pet my cat for a half hour lead to all this? And I knew, instantly on asking that question that the thing that prompted this particular stream-of-consciousness meditation, was certain recent events in my primary and most beloved community.

Apparently I felt a need to consciously look at how I’ve been doing things and why, to make sure I am clear about my goals for my own behavior when things are rough, and to reexamine my own tactics and the reasons for them. I wanted, or my inner higher self wanted, to consider whether I might have learned something new that might lead me to reassess some part of how I’m thinking about these personal ideals and also to see if I want to change how I implement them in my actual behavior.

Or to put it another way, to consider, not for the first time, how best to be the best me that I can for myself, my friends, and my very dear community.

And if you chose to stick around and read to the end of this whole introspective thing, thanks for hanging out with me!