Sparing the Repair

How many times have I been asked how I’m doing and answered, “I’m fine” without really meaning it? It has to be a lot. And I’m sure I’ve asked other people the same thing and had them tell me they’re fine when I could see plainly that they were otherwise. We’re all conditioned to report out along these lines, for any number of reasons. The reflex is likely protective for the person being asked, and sometimes for the person asking too. If someone wants to know how I am and I’m not well, I may not want to burden them with the many ways in which that’s true.

Sometimes there’s fatigue, a degree of irritation, even standoffishness. There have been times I’ve said “I’m fine” when what I really meant was “stop asking, please leave me alone.” It can take energy just to name our feelings, to say nothing of explaining them to someone who, for all their good intentions, might not understand.

When I say “I’m fine,” it could also be to smooth it over or divert attention from whatever is actually alive at the time. It’s a perfectly human thing, but it misses an opening for connection beyond wanting to make a situation better or easier.

The B-side of pretending (or needing?) everything to be “fine” is the ever present urge to fix. When it arises in me, I try to recall how Rachel Naomi Remen describes this urge. Remen is a pediatrician who has spent much time with individuals with cancer. She wrote that helping, fixing, and serving are three different ways of relating and that they aren’t interchangeable. When we help, she said, we may see the other person as weak, as lacking something, and to be on the receiving end of that rarely feels good. When we fix, we assume something is broken, and if it’s a person we’re trying to fix, we may be telling them, however gently, that they’re broken. But when we serve, we can meet them as whole people.

It sounds like an arbitrary distinction until you catch the urge in yourself, or in a caregiving scenario, and then it can be tricky. But also simple, once you can be present with tenderness rather than needing to make the discomfort go away, your own or anyone else’s.

On the other hand, after a day spent in proximity to other people’s pain, I might want to assure myself that it all went well and that I knew what I was doing, which conveniently leaves out the long stretches where maybe I didn’t. A kind of narrative “fixing.” The tendency to smooth my own confusion into something that reads as competent is always with me, because the messy version is harder to live with.

But serving, including serving myself honestly, doesn’t ask me to deny what I’m feeling, even if the feelings are uncomfortable. It only asks that I accept myself as fundamentally okay, as not in need of mending. That’s sometimes difficult, but it’s necessary, because being present for another person means meeting them as someone of complexity and completeness, and I can’t offer that to anyone if I can’t extend it to myself.

All of this seems harder than fixing, because I can’t perform it. I can’t box it up afterward and say “this was the useful part.” And so it both requires and enables a kind of patience that doesn’t even see that quality as something to cultivate. It just accepts.

Not indulging the urge to fix or to help isn’t the absence of care. It’s the form care takes once it stops asking the other person, or even ourselves, to be anything other than what we already are.