I’m writing this with curiosity about others’ experiences.

Something which bothers me endlessly is that I feel I fall so short of being able to mount an adequate response to the times we’re in. 

I know that the complexity and enormity of the predicament that we find ourselves in means that whatever I do will never be enough. I know that the world’s tangled mess of problems are not all mine to fix, if they can be fixed at all. But I do have my share of responsibility. I have things that are mine to do. 

However, there is an infuriating gap between my competence and my capacity. My capacity isn’t great – there are some bugs in the system and I start to malfunction easily. There are things that I know would be mine to do if my capacity was greater. I try to grow my capacity, and it works in small ways, but not overall. I wonder if there will ever come a turning point when I feel a kind of expansiveness I have not felt before. But until now, everything I’ve tried has not (yet) led to this. 

I find myself to be such a wildly different person on different days. There are things that I can do to help predict who I’m going to be (such as by tracking my menstrual cycle), but there are many ways where all I can predict is unpredictability. Big Me and Small Me rapidly kaleidoscope in and out of each other. Big Me is capable, can come up with ideas and explore politics and philosophy, can create and organize and hold space and take action and problem solve and have fun with people. Small Me is foggy headed, sometimes to the point of being unable to articulate myself or make decisions or deal with the smallest of issues. Small Me is exhausted and in pain, often for no particularly identifiable reason. Small Me needs herculean feats of will to do the basics of life. And to have to do a Big Me thing on a Small Me day is indescribably painful and has an inordinate amount of recovery time. 

I’ve often felt depressed to the point of despairing about my own fragility, which only made things worse. So for some time now I’ve been working on coping mechanisms. Here are some things that I find useful. I stick to the principle, ‘Do What You Can,’ because if I focus on what I can’t do, I dig myself into a deeper hole. I figure out an action I can take, no matter how small, that lies within my limits at that time. The action might be as simple as recognising that my head is a shed at this moment in time, and taking deep breaths to see if I can become more centred. I’m also learning to give value to every small thing I do, rather than chide myself endlessly for what I can see I could do if my malfunctioning aspects healed themselves. And I’m starting to learn to think in less individual terms; I can see that I am but a part of a braid of collaborations, and I have my small powers to contribute. I try and identify points of leverage, so that rather than feeling I have to do everything myself, I put something in place that might empower someone else to do something. I take actions in line with my values, even if they aren’t the superhero actions I believe would actually accomplish something. I tune into the things that I feel are most important and ruthlessly do away with everything else. I tune into what’s going on in my body when I do work, and am working on getting better at responding when my body says, ‘that’s enough.’  And above all else, I am learning to be ruthlessly kind to myself. 

I’ve pretty much set up my life for Small Me to be okay, which means that I am quite often able to be Small-to-Medium Me. But on a Big Me day, it’s all very frustrating because in my heart of hearts, I still feel that what Small Me does isn’t enough. Big Me sees the potential for who I can be, and on those days things do feel so very possible. It’s horrible to have to concede that if Big Me starts doing Big Me things, the crash will come hard and fast and I’ll end up even smaller than my usual Small Me. Big Me has learnt to be very scared of Small Me’s power. I’ve observed that other people with fluctuating conditions, including mental health conditions, often struggle greatly with something similar, though probably thought about in different terms. 

And then I start to wonder where the limits are in the usefulness of this Big Me/Small Me way of seeing myself. What if Big Me really means the days that I’m able to put on a mask and push on through a lot of stuff that I’m not acknowledging are actually hurting? What if we have built our perceived ability to take action out of a culture of performativity? What if I could do the things that I see as big in a Small Me way and it would be okay? What if we had a culture where we supported each other to the extent that we had the capacity to step into our real capability for a while? What if we had genuine inclusion, where we work with people’s access needs without question and where all contributions are valued, not just the heroic ones? What if small actions didn’t just mean doing the thankless behind-the-scenes boring shit that Disabled and chronically ill people often end up doing out of a desire to contribute, but mainly because there isn’t the support to do the shinier stuff? Couldn’t we recognise small as beautiful again? 

What if we acknowledged that our Big Me’s and Small Me’s are always there, are always careering from one to the other, in and out of each other? What if we brought all of our differently-sized Me’s into the room and figured out the shapes we could make? Would this be enough to better take on the world?

—

Thanks to Shona from SNJ for giving the imperative to be ruthlessly kind to yourself.

Also to Alice Bowley’s work on Mind Body Reconnect.

Also to Yaz Brien for pointing out how much work Disabled and chronically ill people often do behind the scenes to make things happen. 

Also to Pino, a Shiatsu Practitioner who helped me start to heal the gap/divide between Big Me and Small Me. 

I am trying to get better at crediting people, but it’s a work in progress.

Also, even though I believe in accessibility, I am bad at giving image descriptions. This was my first time.

If you want to share your thoughts, write to me at info@fromtheheartgrowswild.net