The Road to Stepping Back is Very Long

I want to write the piece called “when quitting masquerades as tough love” but I can’t sort out what I think beyond the title.

It is dreadful hard to quit on someone especially if you aspire to be a giver of unconditional love. But aspirations are one thing and last week and last month and last year are other things. So, because the word quit sounds so cavalier – one quits a job at the ice cream store or quits smoking – and so final, I use the term “step back.” I am not quitting, I tell myself, I am stepping back.

I have had experience stepping back but each experience has been fraught with worry, self-doubt, and longing. I worry something terrible will happen. I doubt my read on events and my grasp on reality. And I long for how life used to be. I yearn for when quitting would have never occurred to me. And because I yearn so much for that time, I often pretend I am still there.

I read lifesaving instructions for children last week and one of the pointers was that if you’re a child swimming in a pool and another child who is struggling grabs you and you feel like you’re both sinking, you should curl up in a ball and dive away and when free, emerge from the water and yell at everyone that the other child is struggling. The grownups will come running and you will be a hero for calling for help but won’t die trying to save your little friend. This works. I know from experience. But it only works the first time. It doesn’t keep working. It is a one-shot deal.

I have learned somehow, or maybe I am imagining that this is how I would feel, that it is oppressive to be the object of someone else’s disappointment. I don’t know that personally but I sometimes sense that what I am doing to help someone is, instead, oppressing them, and I think to myself, suck in your hot breath of disapproval and disappointment, swallow the advice and referrals, the articles just read, the redundant fact that help is available, just around the corner, it’s just a matter of going. What you are breathing and saying is meaningless.

“This isn’t helping.” I have heard that sentence a dozen times. “This isn’t helping.”

The temptation is to look at that phrase as a dare and to think, well, if that isn’t helping, maybe this will. But that’s foolishness. The solution isn’t an algorithm yet to be pieced together. If it was, people would be passing it from person to person, family to family, a message on lined notebook paper folded into a tight triangle like notes passed in home room. We are left sitting with our hands empty of notes or overflowing with them. It doesn’t matter. The notes are all blank.

So, it seem that it is a good time to step back. But not as good for me as for someone else who has tolerated my futile helpfulness for so long. It seems that it is time to simply leave someone alone.

And hope for the best. Quietly. Silently.