On Communication

2020 has been a wild year and I haven't written much about it, thanks to burnout and depression. There are a lot of things I have wanted to talk about. Things like my experience with Covid, and then the vaccine. Things I have been learning in therapy. Later when I summon the energy I can talk about those. But right now, I want to share how I am dating a guy and I think he might be the One, and all because I told him I was mad at my insurance company.

My company switched health insurances. After a bunch of "don't worry you can keep your doctor" talk, it turns out like 80% of the providers in this town won't work with this insurance so I suddenly need to find all new providers. And because this is "network-free" insurance they don't have a list of providers for me to pick from...I have to basically find someone who is taking new patients and then go through a bunch of hoops to find out if they take this weird insurance. It's frustrating as hell. 

Anyways, I was making phone calls and getting trapped in robo-phone-trees while doing my laundry when my boyfriend called me. He could tell by my tone of voice that I was upset, so he asked "is something wrong?"

In the past, I would have stuffed it. In the past, I would have said "It's nothing; I just don't want to talk about it." Even now, my knee-jerk reaction was to push away and isolate. It wasn't his business, and it wasn't anything he could do anything about.

But I decided to try this new thing called talking to people. So instead I said, "Actually I'm really frustrated because I'm dealing with stupid insurance stuff and the insurance is stupid and the doctors are stupid and the pharmacies are stupid and everyone in this town is stupid and it's pissing me off, so now I'm in a real shitty mood."

In the past, I would have been told how I was overreacting, how it wasn't that bad, how I just needed to "suck it up and deal with it." I would have been told this by parents, supposed friends, and romantic partners. At some point, I just stopped opening up. Opening up always lead to invalidation, so why bother?

This time was different though. Because, as I regularly seem to need to remind myself, my boyfriend is not those other people.

This time, I was met with, "That sucks. I don't know if I can help, but let me know if I can."

Maybe that seems like such a small thing, but when you spend decades of your life being told your experiences are invalid and you're overreacting, that small gesture of acceptance and tolerance becomes a really big thing.

I am relearning how to open up and be vulnerable, because I was met with so much antagonism in the past. Slowly, bit by bit, conversation by conversation, I have been getting there.

Don't invalidate your loved ones. Because when you do, you make them shut down, and opening back up becomes a long and hard process, even if it doesn't seem that way from the surface.