Echoes in a Hollow Space

I once knew a woman who was an echo chamber. She echoed things she'd heard other people say and pass it off as her own wisdom. I caught her at this several times (although I never confronted her with it). She once even echoed back something I'd said to her without remembering where she'd heard it from. She was also fond of spouting platitudes (another form of echo, really), and I took to calling her Platitude Woman to my friends. But this strategy worked, for the most part. She projected an image of competence and charm, even if it was only skin deep.

There had to be something more to her, I know there was something more to her, but she was so broken, so tragic-playing-at-I’m-fine, so holding herself together with bits of wire and cellophane tape, so wanting to be thought wise and whole and strong and charming that, it seems to me, she only had these echoes to sustain her.

Surely there had to be more.

Surely there were things in that years-long blank in her memory of her childhood that she sometimes talked to me about that made the hollow sound of other people’s thoughts and words preferable to anything genuine from her own psyche. She drove me crazy so much of the time with her terrifying need to talk about I-me-mine, turning every conversation no matter how far afield back to a discussion of herself and her family and the bad old days. She steadfastly refused therapy, saying she was scared of what she might find out.

I used to think it was my duty to listen to every person who needed to talk, to use my empathy in an attempt to rescue and to heal. This woman cured me (mostly) of that. I have, at least, learned that I have limits, that at a certain point I will damage myself if I persist in my savior complex. That, really, it is an insult to the needy person to think that I know best, that I can turn things around for them.

But it’s so easy to slip back into that fantasy of being able to fix people. I regularly wound up in the glide path of needy people who engaged my empathy. I was frequently told I was such a good listener. I suffered from the delusion that I could rescue people, help fix them. But it is a delusion. You can listen, you can help, point them in the direction of people who are trained to actually help, but ultimately people have to find the will to fix themselves. It’s not weakness of character that turns needy people away from that will to change. Some, like my echoing friend, are so broken it doesn’t even seem an option to them. Especially if that brokenness happened in childhood.

The echoing woman drained me dry—physically, emotionally, spiritually. I sat next to her at work every day for years and couldn’t escape those conversations. Some days as soon as my feet hit the door she started talking until finally I’d have to say, “I really need to get some work done” and turn my back on her. But I felt her staring at my back, willing me to turn around, needing me to listen. Some days I had to get up from my desk and take long walks around the building just to keep my sanity.

Then she injured her back, had surgery, followed by heavy duty pain medicines, developed a problem, was carried along at work by those of us who cared for until she was finally urged by management to consider retirement. Her job was an important part of her ego structure and it took a great deal of increasingly strong persuasion to get her to finally agree to it. The urging became another source of her victimization: she was doing a great job, anyone could see that, and the company was picking on her. Those of us who had actually been doing her work, even those of us who did not usually come down on the side of the company vs. the employee, tried to make it as easy as we could without feeding her sense of outraged victimization. It was not easy.

She had nothing left to anchor her at that point. I think, finally, she found relief from the echo chamber of trauma in her mind and soul by numbing them instead of dealing with them. I can’t judge her for that. What I heard of the parts of her childhood and young life that she did remember was pretty bad. Her mother was schizotypal in a time when that diagnosis wasn’t common, and, like my echoing friend, never got treatment. A brother and a sister were diagnosed, years later, and a third brother was frequently homeless and living on the margins. The burden of caring for them often fell on my echoing friend’s shoulders. Her brothers, who she’d fought so hard to take care of and shepherd through a heartless system, died within twenty-four hours of each other. The sister finally reconciled with her estranged son and he took over her care. Then came the drugs, and my echoing friend let go completely. She retreated into dreams, to a place where the harsh sounds were muted, where someone else could take over the burden of being wise and held together with wire and bits of cellophane. Where she could turn her face away from the world and slowly, peacefully slip into death.

Surely, there must have been something more. I still sometimes wish I could have fixed her, though she’s been gone years now. I hope she found healing on the other side of dreams, the other side of sweet oblivion.

But I’ll never know. Or, at least, not until I slip into the other side of my dreams.

Random quote of the day:

“Platitude—An idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.”

—H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

 

Dear X:

My mother says I have to write this sympathy card to you on her behalf because “I’m so much better at that sort of thing.” It’s difficult enough to express my own complicated feelings regarding the death of F., let alone trying to channel what I think my mother wants to say. F. deserves more than platitudes, but that’s all that seems to come out of my head. The enormity of her death, the way she chose to leave this world, the guilt at thinking I should have known, I should have been able to sense things, or help her somehow, some way even from 1000 miles away. Our complicated history. Our complicated, complicated non-communicative history. It all clutters up the stream of thought, the flow of writing.

But my mother has assigned me this task. Because I am so much better at these things.

Another opportunity to feel as if I have failed.

But it really isn’t about me. I must remember that, at the very least. It’s about this sorrow, and the inexpressible nature of such sorrows. It’s about words being hollow in the face of such circumstances, about them dropping like pebbles in a metal bucket because there is no richness, no roundness of sound when it comes to trying to express the anger and the heartbreak and the gut-wrenchingness of a decision to leave this world, a world gone irrevocably valueless.

There are no words.

Dear X:

There are no words to express my sadness at F.’s passing. I have struggled to come up with something to say to tell you how much I will miss her, and how much I wish I could comfort you, even though I know I can’t comfort you. I wish I could hug you and tell you it will be all right. It will be better, eventually, but never all right again. There will always be a patch of shadow over the brightest day, but as time passes

Dear X:

I’ve been thinking about you and your family so much. I miss F. and wish I could talk to her again and tell her how much I love her, but I believe that somewhere, somehow she knows that. If you need anything from us, don’t hesitate to ask.

All my love.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

First platitude of 2006:

"On your death bed, you're not going to say, 'I wish I'd spent more time at the office.'"

—Platitude Woman

Quote of the day:

"It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around."

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Which also strikes me as rather platitudinous. But it's so Kingsolverian.

Writing talk of the day:

I posted another Dos Lunas story to the workshop yesterday. This one features a much younger JK Montmorency, and naughty bits. But I didn't want to label it "Adults Only" under the new labeling choices, because it's hardly erotica. Sex, sure. But sex is not the main purpose, I don't think, not the theme. I generally like the new labeling options, but I didn't want to stick that one on my story. So I contented myself with a adult content warning in the author's notes.

Goofy thought of the day:

Platitudinous platypus. Coming to a screen near you.