A Toolbox

When I was first introduced to the phrase, “When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” in a recovery meeting I was skyrocketed into a fourth dimension of existence, as the recovery folks say.

Its meaning is concise without being judgmental and offers a reminder that there are more ways of being than just the way we’ve been shown by those who’ve been there.

When a non-recovery friend used it during a call where I was pouring out my heart over some crisis I was in charge of responding to, I remembered that training and stopped panicking.

“Self-reflection is a rare gift,” my comrade periodically reminds me when I find myself getting bent out of sorts with how some folks seem to gloss right through the reality that they’re just projecting their damage onto other people and situations. And I get more frustrated as I get older because it feels like development and self-discovery is going by the wayside. But I remember that I had to learn—and be taught—how to reflect as a way of stopping me from being damagingly impulsive.

“Have you ever considered writing just for you,” another dear friend asked me once after I was in a period where I was writing some intensely personal things for public consumption. It never occurred to me that even in reflection, I was still performing for an audience to gain their approval. Today, I journal first, and if something still turns over in my head for days, I share something simply, like this.

In the culture I grew up in, secrets were our trade. It started with being shushed to see how good I was at being quiet. I was excellent, in public. Because at home, I was a holy terror, as my mother would say. Outbursts, exuberance, excitement, sadness, were all part and parcel of me after a large cup of Kool-Aid. Beyond that, however, other people were a mystery to me, both by design and by circumstance. I’d ask what happened to this uncle, that cousin, or a friend of my brother and often I’d get told it was none of my business.

As I got older, the internalized shame of being queer was what kept me quieter than the rest, in public and at home. It slowly dawned on me that I had a secret that might just get me disowned or, after the murder of Matthew Shepard just one state over, killed. So I learned to love my privacy, which wasn’t easy in a large family like mine. It wasn’t until I was throwing up blood in a casino hotel room on a work trip in 2013 that I realized all my secrets were physically eating away at me and I got sober.

In recovery, I learned how to process my own feelings instead of just throwing them in the trash can until it overflowed. Sometimes I let things go, most of the time, I take them out to examine if I can use them for a task or project, and some of the time, I appreciate these complex feelings as the emotional works of art that they can be. Like a stunning sunset speckled with majestic clouds, all while you stand in a grocery store parking lot grumbling about the way someone parked next to you.

But for folks who can only ever see problems, or for folks who can only ever see challenges to be overcome and never talk about again, or for folks whose first instinct is to apologize than sit and wrestle with complexity, life can look like a series of nails that exist just to be hammered in, a series of tasks to be completed, or a quiet resignation that it’s not their responsibility, for them I find myself using all of my tools.

A friend reposted on their social media, “Not enough people talk about the burnout from dealing with unhealed people,” and I hit share quicker than my mother told me to shush.

And, upon reflection, I was reminded that burnout is also a construct of a lack of healing. In my experience, I feel burned out most when I’m not using all the tools in my toolbox. Before Lent, I told my therapist that I’d been missing church. He was caught by surprise because I don’t necessarily talk about where I am with the faith of my colonizers these days. That helped me realized that the fact that I call Catholicism “the faith of my colonizers” puts it in a neat little box for everyone to make their assumptions about it.

What I get from the act of worship is the reminder that I’m not in charge of anything nor anyone, myself included.

That doesn’t mean I excuse myself when I act unwisely or without care, it means that my faith system reminds me that I’m a part of a great machine. But even thinking about it like that sounds hopeless. I don’t think of machines as gears and rotors and pistons that only have one function. I’m but one planet in a galaxy of planets and together, all of our efforts are acts of creation, and that is the great machine I think of when I think of my faith. But the takuskanskan, the thing that runs through everything, is where god resides and shows us where to go next.

When I feel like nothing is going the way I expected it and I get frustrated, I immediately ask myself, “what was my part in it, what expectations did I put on this?” And I’m halted from feeling worse about my day. People be peopling, as my colleagues say. When I am confronted with my own unspoken expectations, I am better able to slow down, put my problems on me and let others go free. Except for traffic, I will yell at bad drivers all day and feel justified. But seriously.

It’s not easy. Healing is never easy. But being willing to put oneself in the care of something greater than ourselves, whatever that needs to be, is how we start the process.