The almost unbearable misery of fixing your shit

House Scientia
Jul 21, 2017 · 4 min read

I was 37 years old and starting the run-up for the divorce from my gay-in-hiding ex-husband before I finally landed in a therapist’s office.

I’d needed therapy for a good twenty years before that, and spent most of them married to a man who through a toxic mix of misogynist family attitudes, internalized homophobia, astounding cowardice, and his own metric ton of unfixed shit spent that time abusing me emotionally and psychologically, though he was particularly proud of the fact that out of his family, he didn’t resort to physical abuse and really thought that was enough to exempt him from the shitty person reckoning. (Side note: None of us get a pass from that. We’re all shitty people from time to time.)

The divorce wasn’t my idea. Like a lot of folks, I got the “I just don’t love you anymore” speech and the sudden coldness that pointed to my husband having someone else — which he certainly did. It would be a few more months from that bombshell that he would force me to out him as gay one sunny Spring day in our living room, as if THAT could absolve him from the countless cruelties inflicted since the speech and that day, instead of being the greatest cruelty of all.

At first, I was in therapy to deal with the emotional destruction of the person I loved most in the world declaring that no only did they not love me, but they had no use for me, and would be much happier if I would just pack up the twenty years of life we’d shared together and go away quietly. This moved to my being in therapy to deal with the rage and contempt my husband now held toward me because I wouldn’t — COULDN’T — give him the divorce he wanted at the speed he wanted it, which was RIGHT THE HELL NOW. Therapy to save my marriage. (Another side note: Despite books to the contrary, you can’t if one party has decided they really, honestly want out. It’s not your failure, it’s just how it is.) and finally, over a period of weeks and months and years, therapy to fix my shit. Which is where things really got hard.

Fixing your shit is hard. It hurts. It forces you to confront things about yourself that you don’t like, the things that you hide from everyone and don’t talk about to your friends, even your bestest, closest friends. You have to dig out all the things about yourself that you’ve buried deep inside yourself and lay them out on a table for someone else to look over, like some really fucked up knickknacks you would never display to your polite, friendly guests sitting there in the living room of your life. And you’re asking someone else to help you live with this shit. To look at it and call it by its right name and DEAL WITH IT. To stop letting it control you, betray you, poison you. The worst of it all is that this is YOUR shit. You built it, each and every one of these macabre, broken, misshapen, malevolent trinkets, out of pain and hate and fear and love and abuse and the every day struggle of life in a universe that at best is benignly uninterested in you and at worst is attempting to crush you under its all-consuming entropy.

It’s much easier to avoid fixing your shit, isn’t it? Bury it deep, don’t think about it, don’t feel it, don’t let anyone see it, because if they do, they won’t like you. Well, here’s a little secret. We ALL have shit to fix. Every single one of us. It’s just like our first gasp of air and our last breath. Every human gets their own load of shit to carry throughout their life. You can’t avoid it. Lots of people try to avoid doing the work to fix their shit, and they almost always destroy themselves and other people in the process, whether intentionally or not. You can’t hold up some Shield of Avoidant Rationality +1 to keep it at bay, though lots and lots of people try.

None of us work like that. Facing your damage and emotional pain is scary and it hurts. Oh gods, it hurts. It tears out all those pieces of you that you built over a lifetime to pass as “normal.” It shakes your very idea of yourself and leaves you sitting in that living room of your life, looking over all the broken, wretched things on the carpet, wondering how you’re ever going to look your neighbors in the eye again.

In my five years and counting in therapy, so far my answer to that has been to meet their gaze, open my hands and say, “This is my shit. I’m fixing it as best I can. Come in and have some tea, and we can talk about it.”

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Written by

Feminist fat girl spoonie who geeks out about geeky things, nerds out about nerdy things and snarks about everything. Social justice cleric of Loki.

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