How to recognize survival mode when you still look highly capable

Raise your hand if you can write a letter.

It can be simple.

Dear Human,
I think you’re great.
XO, Me.

If you can do that, raise your hand.

Now imagine writing it on an airplane.

Everything is smooth. Your handwriting looks like yours.

Then the plane hits turbulence.

What happens to the page?

Your hand still works. You still know how to spell. You still know what you wanted to say.

But the evidence changes.

The lines jump. Letters run together. Maybe the sentence you were writing no longer makes much sense.

If I handed you that letter later, would I have to tell you where the turbulence started?

Probably not.

You could see it.

That is one way I have learned to recognize survival mode.

Look at the handwriting.

Not necessarily the literal kind.

Look at the artifacts of your life.

Your emails. Your calendar. Your work. Your conversations. Your house. Your patience. Your decisions. Your ability to follow a sequence that used to be automatic.

Survival leaves evidence.

The tricky part is that highly capable people can produce a staggering amount of evidence while they are surviving.

They run meetings.

They raise children.

They take people to appointments.

They solve crises at work and then come home and solve different ones.

They learn complicated systems. Lead cross-functional teams. Build programs. Write things other people use around the world.

And while they are doing all of that, they may also be actively and effectively mitigating the crisis happening inside their own lives.

I know women who have rebuilt businesses while lawsuits threatened them.

I have watched a woman manage a major cybersecurity crisis from behind the booth at the conference where she was supposed to be launching the work she had spent months creating.

From ten feet away, she looked like a successful business owner handling business.

She was.

She was also surviving.

That is why appearances are such lousy evidence of capacity.

Sometimes the shaky handwriting isn’t evidence that somebody failed.

Sometimes it is evidence that somebody somehow kept writing while the airplane was being thrown around the sky.

I have had to confront a lot of my own shaky handwriting lately.

Preparing a disability application has required me to go backward through years of work, correspondence and decisions and look at what I was producing while my capacity was changing.

I’m a writer. Some of it is painful to read.

Misspellings. Strange sentences. Too many words because I couldn’t find the right ones. Work that clearly came from somebody fighting much harder than anyone looking at the finished page would have known.

My first reaction was embarrassment.

Then I began asking a better question:

How in the hell did she do all of that with everything happening around her?

That is the story I want us to get better at seeing in one another.

Because we have become remarkably good at taking a handful of pixels from somebody’s life, arranging them into a picture, and calling the picture truth.

The first clue that we’ve arranged those pixels badly may be that the resulting story requires us to strip the person of compassion.

If our version turns a complicated human being into a cartoon villain, we should probably inspect our work.

Not because people shouldn’t be accountable.

They should.

Not because harm should be excused.

It shouldn’t.

But accountability does not require shame, and understanding cause and effect does not require blame.

That was the original premise behind The Cardinal Rule in my work: remove tones of shame and blame from the narrative long enough to see what actually happened.

That is where compassion becomes a practice instead of a personality trait.

Can I look at someone’s worst chapter and still see the whole human?

Can I look at my own?

First: orient.

Before you start fixing anything, figure out where you are.

If you’re in an airplane experiencing severe turbulence, this is not the moment to design your dream vacation.

You want the pilot looking at the instruments.

What are the conditions?

What is still functioning?

What requires immediate attention?

What can wait?

What will get us through the next ten minutes?

Survival is like that.

We tend to leap directly to How do I thrive?

I think that’s too far ahead.

First:

Where am I?

Then:

What will help me become slightly more regulated right now?

Here are three things small enough to use even when your bandwidth is terrible.

1. Soften one thing.

I often check my jaw and tongue.

For me, tension frequently shows up there before I consciously realize how braced I am.

So I soften my jaw. Let my tongue relax. Drop my shoulders if they’ll cooperate.

I’m not trying to achieve enlightenment in the cereal aisle.

I’m just turning off one alarm.

2. Inhale pink. Exhale blue.

A friend named Erin taught me this about twenty-five years ago, and I’ve been paying it forward ever since.

Picture the inhale as pink.

Picture the exhale as blue.

That’s it.

You don’t need to assign a scientific theory to the colors.

You’re giving a busy brain one simple thing to follow.

Sometimes simple is exactly the right dosage.

3. Finish this sentence:

Wouldn’t it be great if…

Don’t argue with the intrusive thought that came before it.

Just make this the next sentence.

Wouldn’t it be great if I woke up tomorrow feeling ready for the day?

Wouldn’t it be great if I could walk into that meeting without bracing myself?

Wouldn’t it be great if I could trust myself again?

Mine was:

Wouldn’t it be great if I could speak comfortably out loud in my own backyard?

I said that in February.

In February, I couldn’t.

In September, I can.

The sentence didn’t magically fix my life.

It reminded me that the condition I was experiencing did not have to be permanent.

Sometimes survival is turbulence.

Sometimes the plane actually crashes.

And if you’re sitting in the middle of the ocean surrounded by wreckage, you probably don’t need an assessment to tell you you’re surviving.

You need a life preserver.

Instructions.

A map.

Some rations.

Maybe a raft with enough material inside to rig a sail when you’re ready.

That is what good support should feel like.

Not somebody standing safely on shore asking why you haven’t started thriving yet.

First we recognize where we are.

Then we stabilize what we can.

Then we orient.

Only after that do we start deciding where we’re going.

And if your handwriting from this chapter is shaky?

Look at the conditions before you judge the penmanship.

You may discover that what looks embarrassing from a calm room looks an awful lot like heroism when you remember the turbulence.