WEEKLY WTF
01-06-25 Edition
Not Giving A Fuck
Tanks & Hoses
People hurt in all kinds of ways. Some are holders, that is to say that they hold their hurt inside of, what equates to, an internal sort of pressure tank. Some of these tanks that we’ve created have been around since our childhood. Installed as an effective, albeit unsophisticated, way to survive whatever fucked up thing or person or circumstance that pressured us to build such a thing in our minds.
These trauma tanks are so effective that they last for years and not only do they suck up, sequester and store past traumas, they also absorb every single little worry, problem or confrontation that happens to us “tank types” as adults. The upside is that we tend to be really good at handling otherwise stressful situations and jobs because, in fact, we’re not really handling shit- we are just storing it in our tank.
These tanks we build also serve as a sequestering perimeter in our wrinkly pink meat computers. We section off certain parts of our mind in order to not have to feel. These tanks, these dead zone boxes, are generally quickly and crudely installed such that the part of our mind that they are meant to quarantine is not precise and the outer perimeter of our tank or box may also inadvertently swallow other nearby parts of our mind leaving us accidentally numb to certain feelings and possibly even empathy itself. But every single box or tank no matter how big or how thick its walls- has its maximum capacity.
Have you ever had a propane tank filled up and noticed at the end there is usually a brief spurt of white gas that smells like egg fart? That is a safety function, a pressure release valve that spews when the tank is full so that it doesn’t explode. (Fun fact- propane is odorless so we add a chemical called ethyl mercaptan to make it smell like egg farts- this factoid will come into play later.)
Tanks are meant to store shit only for the sake of releasing said shit later on, but we are covetous of our egg farty stored trauma. We keep it in the tank, we pretend we don’t even have a tank. I can tell you one thing I’ve learned: what goes in, must come out which is true both of trauma… and of farts.
We “tank types” have a similar safety valve when we’ve reached capacity but instead of a cloud of egg fart we randomly spew a cascade of cortisol, adrenaline and other brain chemicals that present as anxiety or panic attacks. The initial spew, like propane in its natural state, is odorless. Therefore we don’t recognize what’s going on. Our minds cannot abide not knowing something so we cast about looking for reasons why we are feeling so fucked up and we latch onto the first idea we find. Heart attack, stroke, the world is ending, whatever. Until we recognize the panic attack squirt for what it is, a pressure release, we will continue falsely identifying the problem. Once you figure it the fuck out, you add the identifying fart smell such that when it happens you know it for what it is and can engage in relaxation and de-escalating protocols.
When your tank is full- then it’s fucking full and everything that you keep trying to put in it will just spill over and spew out and present in some weird and unexpected way. Maybe as depression or anger or who knows what, we are all very unique creatures with our own specialized tank dimensions. Mine is a perfect cube, painted black but corroded and covered in steaming cracks and ancient rust.
I’ve known about my tank for a long time but despite my best efforts I had not previously been able to release the pressure in the form of crying, until very recently. I mean I have literally been unable to cry as an adult and believe me I have fucking tried. Until my Daughter broke her spine I didn’t think I ever would. Her injury blew my tank up in entirety and I have cried a lifetime of tears in just a few months.
Old habits die hard though. I still find myself trying to shunt things back into my tank but there’s nothing left, it has been reduced to a pile of bent metal and curled rusty shards and I find that I am having to find new strategies to deal with what seems to be a perpetual onslaught of logistical, medical, financial and emotional difficulties. What’s a tank boy to do when he has no more tank? I’ll tell you what: he figures it the fuck out.
In relationships a tank person tends present as the more “mellow” partner and perhaps due to some sociological law of attraction often ends up with a partner who is the exact opposite of a tank person. At the risk of over generalizing let’s call these other folks “hose people”, hose as in something enters into one end and immediately spews out the other like, you know, a hose. Or in other words their sense organs of eyes and ears and such are the receiving side of the hose and information goes in and by the constricting friction of the hose and its coils and the speed at which the perceived data moves through the persons system, it becomes heated to some degree then immediately spews out of the other end at varying degrees of temperature. Anything from lukewarm watery words to scathing hot yelling and sometimes even a raging steam will emerge due to the fact that they do not have a tank with which to store emotional pressure.
The hose partner frequently squirts the tank partner and in doing so there has been established a sort of unspoken contract. Hose partner normalizes spewing towards tank partner and tank partner puts it right in the tank. For a while this symbiosis works out quite well, but it’s not necessarily sustainable long term.
Hose people are to be admired in their ability to quickly process and let shit go but if it’s done without tact or regard to the effects on others it can be a damaging process. A leaking steam pipe can literally cut a person in half. Tank people are to be commended that they have devised a strategy for dealing with some intense trauma but as a long term strategy it is inferior because a person can only take so much. You can stare down the Rhinoceros of life with cheeks clenched for a good long while but eventually that horn is going to slide up your ass and not in a pleasant or sexy kinda way.
I cannot say I fully understand hose people because I am not one, though I endeavor to learn a little of their ways in order to achieve more balance in how I deal with shit. To be able to take in data, then immediately spew out an emotional distillate is foreign to my internal experience but I think they may be onto something if it can be done mindfully and not in an extreme or insulting way.
The tanker can store the hoser’s steam for a very long time depending on the gage of their tank walls but when their tank is full then- SHHPPEERRT, the hose person is inundated in egg fart and is absolutely shocked and horrified. In other words, while hose people have normalized being somewhat emotional or “spicy”, “intense” or “feisty” and appear to speak harshly at times and raise their voice on such a frequent basis it’s hardly even noticed or regarded. But when the tank person finally has a pressure release, usually as a mild spurt of eggy anger, it’s so out of character that it outrages the hose people who just aren’t used to it. “OMG what the fuck is wrong with you!?” The hose person ironically yells in decibels much higher than the tank persons little spew. That invisible and unspoken contract has been broken you see.
I can’t definitively say what I think a hose person should do to become more balanced because I am (or was) a tank person. Hose people have to figure out their own hose shit. But I do have some thoughts on it which I think can apply to both tankers and hosers alike. As a newly broken tank person I at least know I can no longer withstand being hosed and continue to act in accordance with the same old unspoken contract. It’s a very challenging thing to navigate- suddenly experiencing huge emotions unleashed from my ancient tank for the first time and having nowhere to put new pressures. At last I am eliminating an outdated tank strategy but not fully having a new one to take its place, but I am in the development stage. I am wanting desperately for my hose people to feel better because they are also going through some serious shit and watching them, by necessity, build a little tank deep inside of their own selves is rough because I feel responsible for it to some degree, I’m breaking the invisible contract but tank boy simply no longer has the capacity to receive and hold all that steam.
Perhaps I am, by default, becoming a bit more of a hose person. I don’t really have a tank left and so when I receive steam it has nowhere to go but back out. A breach in a silent contract can be devastating for a relationship. We want only the best for our hosers but we cannot be supportive if we ourselves are destroyed. We have to learn boundaries. We can love and be concerned, we can be vulnerable and honest but we can also maintain a boundary so as to not become superheated and melt. You can only be of service to a drowning person if you yourself maintain buoyancy. So step 1 is: don’t fucking drown.
When we discover we are playing outdated and unproductive games with a person- someone has to do the difficult thing and take their piece off of the game board and not, under any circumstances, be lured back into playing. There will be resistance. It’s incredibly difficult, these games of the heart we play. They are full of angst and upset but because we play them so often they become familiar and we are comforted by the familiar. In fact we generally choose an unsavory familiarity over a scary unknown, but potentially, new happiness in the form of better communication strategies. Couples often get stuck playing a perpetual chess game in which both need desperately to feel like they’re winning, to feel like they have the higher ground. Playing the Queen vs playing the King are two very different strategies but I think things get easier if no one is trying to win all the damn time. Perhaps rooting for your “opponent” to win is the ultimate solution.
Difficult times are an amazing sort of Petri dish for growing new strategies and finding ways of dealing with life better. That’s what this whole life thing is about anyway. Look around, this electric universe is constantly expanding and evolving and if we are not riding that expansive wave then by default we fall into the trough of entropy. I have no degrees nor have I gone to a bunch of therapists nor have I read a shit ton of books about how to live life. I went to a violent high school and maybe escaped death or prison or perhaps worst of all- a bland life of bored conformity, by escaping Fresno and turning 18 in boot camp. I’m just committed to figuring this shit out and my only guide or guru is nature and circumstance itself. Reality is subtly but constantly communicating with us both as observable phenomena and inter personal interactions. And of every difficult situation we encounter within it lies the seed of growth and expansion, you have to look for it though. The more we get out of our own way the more we can see. The point is, if I can do it, you can fucking do it. With that I will share my current strategies because people suffering in any form pisses me off and if I have to go through it then what’s the point if I cannot offer up some sort of benefit to others. Also, if I write it I have to live it as I refuse to be a hypocrite. So far the results have been transformative. Do with it as you please.
“Understanding”. As in: try to understand what a person is going through rather than focusing on defending your own position, that’s not to say we sacrifice our sense of self or that we eat shit or allow ourselves to become a punching bag. It just means becoming more expansive in our awareness that we are dealing with someone who is also the center of their own universe who is probably just doing their best like you are. And while we may be frustrated that we are misunderstood we should realize that we can never truly understand another person or their particular flavor of pain, nor can anyone else taste ours. Understanding can ideally lead to compassion.
“Compassion”. It’s hard as fuck to be compassionate towards someone who is triggering you but the thing is, is that it’s not really them that’s the issue, even if they are being an asshole. (I take exception here for narcissists and gaslighters) If you are grinding down a piece of metal the sparks fly off and hit your skin and you barely even feel it, it’s flashy and bright but sparks are no big deal. People throw sparks at each other all the time and it doesn’t necessarily hurt. But, if you are wearing a coat soaked in gasoline or if you have little piles of gunpowder in your pockets then that’s on you. Yeah, I know that this is a very difficult perception to maintain because we take the sparks personally and sometimes, the other person’s pain is so great that they purposely throw sparks into your little flammable pockets. Considering another persons pain at least 50% and your own 50% seems the minimum to achieve some form of compassion. The more we empty our pockets of gunpowder the more percentage we can give and thus compassion grows. But this shit ain’t easy, you gotta reeeeeallyyy fucking want it.
“Boundaries”. If you reeeeallyyy want it and you try reeeeallyyy hard and you are still met with anger, frustration, displeasure or outright meanness then boundaries must be employed. The expectation that your efforts and actions will somehow alter someone’s behavior in a certain way is one of the biggest piles of gunpowder there is. Any response they have to your efforts that doesn’t conform to your expectation pocket full of gunpowder- is a spark. You have to ground yourself by a different metric than how they respond. You have to ground yourself- in yourself. My anchor is thus: “I will do my very best in any situation and I will always allow for honest mistakes and growth”. These are roots that you run deep into yourself so that any external hot air or hosing cannot blow you over.
We are all herders, clumpers, mother flockers. We are pack animals and so we’re constantly pinging other people’s responses in order to measure our own efforts and self worth. We do a thing, then we ping the person on the other end of the thing for their reaction and if it’s positive we feel like we done good. If it’s negative then we either consider the thing a failure and feel like a piece of shit or we defend our action and try to make them wrong so they can hold the “feel like shit torch” instead of us. It’s a poor strategy, this pinging thing that we do, because we leave ourselves so dangerously vulnerable to the whims of others.
We care too much about what the fucking pack thinks. If we are rooted in doing things our best for the sake of doing our best and we did our best then that can be measured as a success. Do the right thing because it’s the right thing, not as a means to pressure someone to conform to your expectations. Some people do “nice things” as a means of manipulation- maybe don’t be an asshole.
We don’t need to ping other people to determine our own self worth. We can strengthen our self esteem as a closed system. This method takes expansive awareness and a brutal willing honesty with one’s self. “Am I actually doing my best?” “Did I just fuck up?” If you did fuck up then congrats you learned some shit and with that data evolution and growth is possible. Again- this shit is not easy, but it is doable even in the most challenging of situations. In fact, it is in the worst kinds of situations that you have the greatest opportunity to learn in ways that may have been previously impossible.
Arguments are things that tend to devolve into one person expressing a narrative that’s been cycling in their head building tension and charge, like a hurricane approaching the shore. Then the other person who has been cycling their own stormy narrative feels compelled to “correct” the other persons narrative by trying to overwrite it. It’s fucking useless and it never works.
When I was in the Coast Guard I was stationed in Gloucester Ma. during the “Perfect Storm” where a hurricane and a Nor eastern met. It wasn’t pretty, when storms meet the shit hits the fan at around 60-100 knots. Highly charged narrative storms are the same: gusting emotional winds carrying objects of memory with which to batter the other person.
We think we are our thoughts and therefore we think we are the stories we tell ourselves and when our story is challenged, in a way, our very identity is challenged. Though difficult, I think there is much more value in letting the other person just spew. A tall and strong tree will get knocked over by hurricane force winds, a blade of grass just bends for a while then bounces back. You don’t have to give up your sense of self or adopt the narrative someone is trying to enforce on you. If you do then you’ve just validated their view of reality and it could be you’ll fall into their quantum trap and will collapse into their narrative and lose yourself.
Keep your bubble. You don’t have to negate someone’s narrative in order to maintain your own. Only you have the keys to your kingdom, if you don’t like the story knocking hard at your door then keep the fucking door shut. Knocking can’t hurt you unless you unlock the door. Don’t let someone else’s emotions barge in. More often than not a person will get tired of knocking. Or in other words they’ll feel better by being able to articulate the painful story in their head and tensions will go down which can lead the way to something productive. Let their storm hit shoreside in order to be dissipated by the unmoving mountains of your patient presence and awareness.
Narratives are made of thoughts and thoughts reeeallyyy want to be thunk and reinforced as real. Therefore it is very difficult to let someone weave a tale about you that doesn’t align with your view of yourself. Sometimes a person’s perception of you can be a valuable thing if the person is reasonable and is making good points but if it’s just a vent or an emotional dump then it’s not worth considering. Careful discernment is the rudder you must employ when underway through such stormy and troubled waters.
Speaking of honesty, there is a two-fold method for communicating that is a must for surviving the storm it is: “vulnerable honesty”. It’s not healthy to eat someone’s shit and it’s destructive to be the shit slinger so we must take the other person out of the equation. When we are communicating our honest feelings in a vulnerable way never say the word “you”. Own your part of the equation and open yourself up so that your partner can either understand you better and flood into that vulnerable void or continue to hold onto their feelings and be upset or pissed or whatever but either way, it doesn’t fucking matter, because you are acting for the sake of appropriate action and not pinging them and measuring their response. No one can logically argue with you or dispute how YOU fucking feel. If you keep it about you then you create a space for them to process their shit- or not. Did you do your best to be vulnerable and honest and not hurt the other person either directly or from the back door? If so then good for you, that’s the way- let the fucking chips fall where they may.
“Radical acceptance”. And I do mean radical. It’s allowing other people to be exactly who and how they are and letting them think whatever the fuck they want to think without taking it on board and making it personal. This one is hard as fuck especially when criticism is aimed directly at you, when sparks are being pointed directly into your gunpowder pockets. The easy, and inferior strategy, for dealing with this is a big “fuck you” but that’s not any kind of acceptance at all, that is resistance and judgement. You’re just throwing the same sparks back. Fighting fire with fire isn’t a thing unless you want to burn down relationships. It’s hard to come by but you can actually be appreciative of the gift of criticism and judgement and anger aimed at you because it shows you where you’ve hidden your gunpowder. To be clear, it’s not ok to let people treat you like shit or to allow yourself to be a punching bag. It’s some master class shit though to take the other person out of the equation entirely and see what lights up within you. If we are unaware of where our combustible issues lie then we go through life unconsciously reacting to shit. If we notice our internal flames and are willing to do the hardest thing of all- turn our scrutinous gaze inside out, then we can see what makes us react so that we can then choose consciously whether to act or not. Reacting is unconscious, acting is conscious. Be conscious.
Thoughts and emotions are just weather. If our sky of consciousness is clouded then that’s all we’ll see and we cannot come to know ourselves. Thought clouds rub together and get charged and release emotional lightning. That’s what’s going on. If you and your partner or family or friend or person are having a hard time and are throwing lightning bolts at each other then maybe it’s time to let some of your own clouds go. We are not our thoughts and emotions, we are the clear sky of consciousness. Storms will come, just be sure to let them fucking go too. Toodaloo
Dedicated to Miracle Maisie Mae
Toodaloo
