I've mostly gone through life feeling that if I can do something, then it's a job with my name on. If no one else will make changes to try and fix things or make things work, then I will. I won't say that I can't, unless I'm so ill I can't move, or so burned out that I can't think coherently. I'm aware that plenty of other people say "can't" at the point when something looks too costly, not at the point where they are too broken to function.
This has gone badly for me in a number of situations, both work related and personal. There were several people in my history who made me responsible for things I had no way of shouldering, but was left to fix, over and over. To be blamed when you had no power to avert the problem, and to be made responsible for fixing other people's messes and mistakes, is not a great place to be. I know it happens a lot in workplaces. Having responsibility without the power to act is an incredibly stressful thing - I've seen content around this in relation to how little real pressure there can be in the 'responsibility' of management compared to the impact on people who will bear the brunt of the blame when things go wrong but have no power to direct their own working lives.
At the moment I'm learning a lot about how to share responsibility. This is turning up in conversations with my offspring, as he increasingly stands in his own power. We're talking about where he might still need input from me and what he can manage for himself and he's being wonderfully explicit about where he thinks the limits of my responsibility should be. It's an experience I feel profoundly grateful for.
I've had other exciting conversations about how to share things out, and when to say that I'm not coping. Being allowed to be a bit fragile is a very lovely thing. I've done a lot of coping, and toughing things out and slogging on, and that's in part come from a place of not knowing when it might be safe to stop. Having explicit conversations about where the boundaries are is really helpful. Knowing what isn't mine to deal with, and what can be shared, and what I can put down in the short term is making this a lot easier for me.
When it comes to mental health, I'm seeing everything in collective terms. We do not get ill on our own, we get ill because of situations, systems, other people, misfortune - there's a context for the majority of it. Getting better on your own is hard because as a solitary person your odds of overcoming the external factors harming you aren't great. Teamwork gets things done.Holding boundaries on your own is hard, holding those edges together is much easier. When someone else needs you to be well, and safe, and for their own wellbeing needs the edges held that allow that, it gets easier to work things out.
I have a lot to learn about where my own boundaries need to be. The easiest way for me to learn and to think about it is to consider how I'm relating to other people's responsibilities and boundaries. I'm watching friends exploring similar issues, and seeing how much we can do for each other just by affirming that it is ok to say no, and that there are limits to what any of us can shoulder. When we shoulder things together, the load is always easier to bear and no one is crushed by it.
Responsibility and power have to be aligned for things to be sane and functional. When the person with the power is not the person with the responsibility, things are never going to work well, and the toll on the person who is forced to bear responsibility without having enough power to really do that, is huge. The tendency of governments to blame those who are poor, ill, disabled and otherwise struggling for circumstances they have no power over is very much a case in point.
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