(Yes, the title of this post is a Pokemon move. That's been my biggest survival tactic during quarantine right now.)
The COVID-19 pandemic is roughly nine months old in my part of the world right now. Because I've been essentially prevented from going anywhere or doing anything that isn't my day job, I've been thinking a lot about myself and what sort of person I currently am and who I'd like to be in the future. The problem with doing this is that you realize a lot of things you dislike about yourself and you want to work on, and that can be painful at times as you come to terms with yourself.
I ended up realizing I have a very toxic trait - I struggled to maintain friendships growing up, and so I turned myself into the 'helpful' friend to keep from being disposable. I was the one who would help mediate interpersonal issues by running between sparring friend groups, who would assist with assignments and homework, and who would loan some spare change at lunch. This eventually led to my usual process of doing entire group projects by myself because the teachers noticed and would always pair me with kids who needed help and wouldn't pull their own weight because they knew they could lean on me. (This is relevant now with stay-at-home orders and mask-wearing, too.)
Ultimately, despite all of that, I was still disposable and had trouble making friends at all, so I got very protective of the few friends I did manage to maintain. I feel my friends' problems very intensely (a trait common in autistic people) and I want to help as many people as possible, especially the ones I care the most about. This unfortunately landed me in an abusive friendship that lasted for about three years of my undergraduate life, which you can read about here. By trying desperately to help other people with their problems, I was both ignoring my own issues and spreading myself woefully thin. I studied military history in undergrad and yet I couldn't see that I had overextended myself.
It actually took a specific incident this year to make me realize what I had done and what a detriment to myself it was. I had several friends I was trying to help at once with various issues, and suddenly on top of that a 13-year-old child too young to be in the Autistic Gaming Initiative server joined and attempted to latch onto me. When he told me within days of meeting me that he was afraid I would die, I wasn't having it. Attempts to grey rock him over the next few weeks and reprimanding his public behavior in the server weren't enough, and when he didn't have an answer when I asked him why he was so desperate to have my approval and validation in particular, I removed him from the server. The stress the situation caused me was a lot more than it should have been, but I'd already had an abuser and his clingy behavior reminded me of hers. I had to prioritize myself and remove myself from the situation, which I did by booting the child from the server and promptly raising the age limit to join. I was lucky in that I had an amazing team of moderators to help me out with dealing with it - AGI's had a few growing pains this year and my mods have helped us see it through spectacularly - but this shouldn't have happened in the first place, because someone should have taught this child not to seek validation from random adults on the internet and never did. I was 18 years old the year he was born, raised in an era with an emphasis on internet safety. Clearly he wasn't taught what I was.
I was incredibly numb and overwhelmed for a while after that. I had to step back from a lot of other things because I realized that I couldn't help with them in the state I was currently in. And amazingly, when I did so...I became more helpful when I did step in and assist people. I was no longer overextended all over the map, but concentrated in specific areas that needed reinforcements, and I started to see small improvements. I had more tolerance for people again. I had an increased capacity to listen and stay calm. I got better at saying I couldn't help with certain things instead of trying to do it without the skills I needed and making things worse. I started removing myself from situations where I would be more detrimental than helpful because of my own stress levels and issues. This somehow began to make me feel lighter - normally I was the sort to throw myself into work to avoid dealing with my own problems, but this gave me the time to address them instead and look at myself more clearly and in doing so begin to lift the actual burdens I've carried for so long off my (admittedly bad) back.
Hopefully nobody has a wake-up call that reminds them of an abuser in their past, but I cannot stress enough the importance of actually going and looking introspectively at yourself. You don't have to be harsh or overly-critical when you do it, but it's good to identify traits and things you can improve on. I've found that this helps me far more than meditation or so-called mindfulness for mental health: as an OCD sufferer, it's difficult to meditate without intrusive thoughts worming their way in, so keeping myself actively busy is a lot more effective. Improving myself has started to do things regarding my self-image and self-worth that meditation and mindfulness could not, because instead of just trying to clear my head and sink into toxic positivity I'm allowing myself to feel fully and accept all of myself instead.
And you know what? I actually haven't had a dream about my abuser since June, probably the longest streak I've ever had since getting out of that friendship. There's something to be said for that.
