Getting Fixed
It’s that time of year in education.
Tensions are high.
Most people are awesome. Most. Awesome.
But there’s always that one demanding person that can make life for us people-pleasers miserable.
Throughout my career, I have ocasionally faced demands that sometimes feel, or verifiably are, unreasonable. The week I drew this comic, I was facing more of the verifiable kind from one particular sector at work, from one particular person. This one person had been rigorously testing my patience over the course of several years like an evil boundaries scientist. I had pushed back, both passively and directly, but to no avail. The week that inspired this comic, I finally reached a boiling point with the fighting I had to do to maintain my reasonable boundaries. I wanted off the merry-go-round.
The scene above describes how it all felt, although the demand wasn’t so obvious. It was subtle, which made it harder to confront and harder to identify the clear response needed to address it. I was being gaslighted. Drawing it out, as is often the case for me, clarified what was happening, both the gaslighting and the false messaging between the lines. This then helped me to chuckle at the ludicrousness of the underlying demand.
You can probably tell I had particular fun scribbling the mouth in panel 2. I think it’s my favorite part of the comic, though I do love the increasingly hostile frowns in the lower panels. I still can’t explain exactly why those drawings are so cathartic except that they somehow capture something about the reality in that situation, and the ridiculousness of it all. In other words: it captures life. In lightening up about the situation, I gained some enlightenment.
I realized, as is often the case in those comics, that the reason the demands got to me so deeply is that I have my own “inner demander-demon” shouting the same message to me: “why can’t you fix this person??? You’re a failure and a fraud if you don’t!” I know, from experience and training, that this message isn’t based on actual truths, yet I gaslight myself pretty darn well. Perhaps the intense hostility was so much fun to draw because it put in full view the unreasonable demands I make of myself.
I have got to ask myself: “is there maybe another question I can ask?”
Drawing this gave me distance from the external demands too. It helped me hold my inner boundaries* which helped me hold my outer boundaries. And to find the exit.
The Spaldings of the world will be mostly fine. It’s up to them at the end of the day. We can only offer our support to them as they work to fix themselves and participate in the world we all share. Maybe we could even take a lesson from them: when faced with unreasonable and ludicrous demands, just say “plop” and leave.
*Vicky Tidwell Palmer in her podcast, Beyond Bitchy does a great job explaining inner boundaries in the early episodes, and provides insight into how to strengthen them.
