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If you see yourself as holding a “caretaker” position in your social sphere: please don’t force yourself to perform ok-ness til you physically can’t anymore. It doesn’t just hurt you, it suggests to the people you support that you & they are a different species.
If you have different expectations for yourself vs every other adult in the world right now, then you’re probably overestimating yourself and underestimating them. Ask to lean on other people more than you usually would. Ask to change plans.
There’s a martyr identity thing that happens sometimes when you repeatedly get told you’re very good at something, or when you even observe that objectively you are better at something than others. You start thinking a whole loop of interconnected things that fuck you up.
Like you start thinking “only I can x” and “if I stop doing x I’m giving up my purpose in the world” and “this is objectively true because everyone else is way worse than x”.
You know what sucks about those apocalypse memes, about which role each of your friends would play? A lack of built in redundancy.
My friend @beli_yaal_ recently wrote that everyone’s role on an apocalypse team would be “generalist”. Some specialisation is really useful, some people do have particular aptitudes! But we need systems with many people doing each of the things. So there’s spare, so there’s rest.
If you see yourself as the main caretaker for your social group and you’re struggling a lot, that’s a reminder that it isn’t sustainable for there to be a lone caretaker of anything.
The “mutual” in mutual aid is about no one being a saviour, but rather about sharing resources to sustain a group.
So if you’re depleted and you’re going “BUT NO ONE ELSE CAN -“ and you’re talking about emotional resources, and you’re SURE that you’re not distorting based on your narrative of yourself, then it’s possible that what you mean is “but no one else has shown they will yet”.
Talk to your most trusted people about what you worry would get missed if you had to step away from what you usually do. Talk about your fears, acknowledging that you can’t always tell if you’re being proportionate, if you’re saviourising yourself.
The load has to start spreading, because martyring yourself doesn’t leave a succession plan. And also, a lot of people want to carry more of it than they are. It gives a sense of purpose and connectedness and mutuality, the same one it gives you.
Care is a skill that you practice. If you do it all and don’t tell other people that you’re waning, you enshrine an ecosystem that has its martyrs and its everyone else, and makes the work the martyrs do invisible til they drop out.
*whispers* if you rt this with the caption "I'm in this picture and I don't like it", that's a first step, not an only step. It's time to do something different. Don't wait til you can do it elegantly. Your friends are allowed to ugly cry with you, so do something imperfect.
Folks for real, if you rt this with any variation on "I feel called out here" it needs to go along with an acknowledgment that you've figured out who in your life you're going to talk to/break down with, and what you're going to do if you don't know who that would be.
You know how sometimes people talk about how tired they are and how busy they are and it's both a complaint and a brag? This thread isn't for that. If you read this with a sense of dawning recognition, you have to use the feeling to propel an action beyond a rueful-brag retweet.
Let me be clear: if you retweet this with any “how dare you call me out like this” cute variant but no accompanything nascent thought about what you’re gonna try to reach out/lean on others/change the dynamic, I will literally come into your replies to ask you about your plan.
