Dispatches from Cynicism

When a battle-hardened GenX-er asks for help

A lot of GenX-ers experienced chronic invalidation growing up; it’s part of what defines us. Protests were dismissed as complaining, we were told to rub dirt on broken bones, and too often, no one knew, or seemed to care, where we were.

We internalized all of it. The Boomers who “raised” us were largely a tribe of self-absorbed egomaniacs; the result is a generation of darkly funny, pissed off, distrustful, self-sufficient loners. We will pull up and help other people (and maybe make fun of them while we do it), but asking for help never got us a damn thing, so we just don’t anymore.

Except sometimes, even we fall and can’t get up (that’s a GenX reference and I’m not going to explain it).

Photo by Nerissa J on Unsplash

After swearing never to talk to another fucking therapist ever again, I did the responsible, adult thing and contacted a resource available to people associated with the Foreign Service. These are therapists who understand the lifestyle and the often unique circumstances we might find ourselves in.

But the circumstances and details aren’t what’s important; people respond to and heal with different strategies and approaches within any system. Advice and guidance, I’ve learned over the years as a mentor to college students, are much less important than just listening to and holding what people say. The most helpful thing I’ve experienced as a result of reaching out this time was the therapist’s acknowledgement that “yes, wow, that’s a lot, you’ve been through a lot.” And “you’re not crazy; what has happened to you is.”

It’s really that simple. And we never heard that growing up.

There are lots of explanations for that, of course, but no excuses, the same way the mistakes we made with our own children are perhaps understandable but nevertheless not okay. Blame is useless and deflects from the actual work of healing the damage, in both directions.

It’s hard, though, to be angry, and then to do the work of focusing that anger on what it’s really about and trying to understand it, rather than offloading it onto someone or something else. It’s tempting to assign fault elsewhere; some people think doing that somehow absolves them of responsibility. It can be hard to resist this behavior when it’s common in a family dynamic, for example. Admitting fault can seem like weakness, when no one around you ever does. In the worst situations, people might exploit your willingness to accept responsibility for your actions, and assign blame to you for everything they perceive as “wrong.”

Taking responsibility for myself, for my own behavior, though, is truly one of the most liberating experiences I have ever had, and once I felt that, once I did it without fearing what would happen if more blame was heaped upon me, I was free, from that moment on.

I am angry at the previous generation for what they did to us, including blaming us for their problems, but that doesn’t give me a pass to not deal with my own shit.

Anger, I learned somewhere along the way, organizes us for action when we perceive danger. When your system has been conditioned over the years to perceive danger in every possible situation, but socially and culturally you’re conditioned to suppress the anger that might help keep you safe, you will eventually drop to your knees in exhaustion. Look around, and you’ll see other people on their knees, too.

There’s a certain sacrality in Gen X claiming each other and our shared experiences. When I published a story about a murder that happened my senior year of high school in Fairbanks, Alaska, people my age who were there came out of the woodwork (Gen X lives in the woodwork) to say “yeah, that happened and no one talked about it” and “that was fucked up, right?”

Right. That was really, really fucked up. And most, but not all, of us survived, that and all the other things that have been harder than they needed to be.

So if you’re Gen X and you’re tired, maybe breaking a little, yeah, you’ve earned it.

And you’re not alone.