I had a friend.
When things were good, they were amazing. Self-sustaining, boundaried, us against the world. When things were bad they were traumatic.
I'm the friend everyone wants with them at the hospital. The friend who gets the 1am calls for help and who makes the 3am calls to whānau if you're very ill. I'm the friend who got better before everyone else, and the friend who can always serve you up dinner at late notice. I’m the friend with a comfy couch in a warm lounge, and enough blankets to host you at short notice. I’m the friend who can move their schedule and babysit for you at the last minute. I will find a way.
And when that’s good, that’s amazing. When its bad, its very very bad.
Contrary to my availability, I’m also very boundaried. If there’s a sustained lack of drive to stabilise, or refusal of support, I can’t offer support. I’m a safe landing pad, not a doormat. The line is hard to see until you’ve hit it.
My friend had a crisis. More specifically, a sustained two-plus-year crisis requiring weekly intervention at minimum. They didn’t have access to supportive services. My friend was criminalised unfairly for their crisis. I fought in doctors offices, in court rooms, on the phone, and at their bedside for them. I don’t say that to centre myself unreasonably, I say that to emphasise that what I put in wasn’t nothing.
They finally got granted access to help. There were boundaries to that help. They made a series of choices that they’d been told would result in that help being withdrawn. The help was withdrawn. And the consequence was that my help was withdrawn too. No matter how dearly I love them, I can’t keep someone warm by setting myself alight.
Love is a silly, relentless, ongoing thing. Sometimes people call me a rescuer. I think I maybe just love too much. Maybe when I get older I’ll learn to love a little less. In the meantime I see beauty in it.
I want to be dependable and consistent. I want to do my bit in this very fucked up little world to make it better. Can anyone love this world into being better? Am I trying to be superhuman?
I’m considered and clear, but I’m blunt and honest. It isn’t a flavour liked by all. It isn’t that my love is transactional. It’s that in all of this, I have to love myself too. I wouldn’t have lived that value five years ago, but I certainly do now.
The system is broken, and deeply flawed, and it’s people who love like I do that hold the lives in the balance that the system doesn’t have room for. We aren’t paid, we’re rarely thanked, and we aren’t backed up by any institution. There is no support for us when it gets too much. Our whānau get less of us, our mahi is strained, and our lives shrink because we love so much.
And this is the goodwill that the New Zealand health and disability systems depend on. It’s amateurs, doing our best on a whiff of an oily rag. What happens if our societal structures degrade so much that us amateurs just can’t keep going? Who’s there to care for us when we can’t care anymore?
I can’t sit at the hospital all night anymore, I’ve gotten too sick. It’s hard to even cook for my kid, so cooking for extra people is getting hard. My couch is still comfy, but I can’t afford the power bill anymore. I’m available to babysit less and less.
I’ve been grieving someone living for two years straight because my love and my autistic pattern recognition are too consistent, and to keep myself well, I need to stop. What will be will be, and I trust in this world, as fucked up as it all is, to just be.
Hā ki roto, hā ki waho.