Personal Story: Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope

“I have had a great deal of hurt in the theater both as a Negro and as a woman, but I don’t get immobilized by it,” she [Vinette Carol] said an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1967. “I tell myself that no one individual is going to make it impossible for me.”

The title is from a 1970’s Tony Award winning play. I chose it because often times I feel just like that, snapping at the world to ‘get back’ because I can’t cope. That feeling of immobilization, the fight/flight/freeze reaction is fully formed at birth. Yes, we are wired to feel before we able to think and reason. The ability to think and reason isn’t fully formed until around age eleven.

As children, we learn how to cope, how to deal with this fight/flight/freeze reaction from our parents or the adults around us.

Growing up, it often felt as though my feelings would overwhelm me. My Southern-born parents were reserved. Let me put it this way, there were things that happened that should have been talked about and never were.

Food became a coping mechanism for me, it didn’t matter whether I was happy or sad (read: good or bad stress), food was the answer. I was literally swallowing my feelings instead of sharing them. It didn’t take long for that to take a toll on my health.

At a very young age I was diagnosed with hypertension and diabetes. During a doctor’s visit, he simply looked at me and shook his head and said, “You’re not going to live very long if you keep going this route.”

To be continued.

- Aunt B