Eggshells
In personal injury, aka “tort” law, there is such a thing as an “eggshell plaintiff.” (In most places, maybe not all.) What this means, in a nutshell, is that if someone gets hurt and it’s your fault, you don’t get to knock down your damages because your particular plaintiff is more prone to injury than the “normal person.” It could be that they suffer from a preexisting condition that makes them more prone to injury, or less quick to heal. They could be more likely to suffer emotional injury than the “average” person. It doesn’t matter– you “take the plaintiff as you find them.”
I was thinking about this the other day as I was lamenting, internally, my emotional energy levels. I am in many ways an outgoing person, but when my energy is gone, boy, is it ever gone. And when it’s gone? I need to play the hermit for a bit– to recover from the “normal” whirl of social interactions that wouldn’t bother other people. I try not to beat myself up too much about it, but my cabin fever often sets in long before my stamina has returned to a point where I feel up to the demands of society, much less friends who can fairly lay claim to more of my emotional energy, to a right to be given to, than the normal day-to-day interactions. Which is a problem, when your work is also intensely social and interactive.
Having recently gone back to work full time, I’m trying to remind myself to walk on eggshells around my eggshell self. I am not a steel-girdered lawyer. Most of the time, I do ok. But if I am not careful to conserve my shell, someone could whack into me and make me spill all over, spoilt, and hard to put back together again. Living my life as Humpty Dumpty? Not what I would have chosen. But if I keep my surrounding carapace in mind, and stay off walls I should know better than to scale in the first place? Perhaps I have finally learned some skills to keep me from falling to extra-ordinary harm, harder to recover from, slower to return from, less likely to fully heal. If I could come work at being more hard-boiled, and not scrambled or bedeviled, then that’d be nice.
June 2nd, 2008 at 8:21 am
You hit the nail on the head, the trepidation I feel with presumed functional wellness. I am always looking over my shoulder, trying to sneak away, fearful if I make too quick a run for it, the mental health issues will pounce on me. Makes it so hard to enjoy the good stuff when I don’t feel like I can escape the shadow of the bad. It’s always looming, even if I am outwardly doing fine. I feel that I must take incredibly good care of myself, recharge considerably, and keep things as even as possible, so it doesn’t pounce again. It’s really tiring. Gosh, you summarized this well.
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:46 am
Learning to protect oneself is the most valuable lesson I could have learned. That said just because I have learned it does not always mean I am good at practicing it either. When I don’t, each time I end up reeling and then recovering from too much, I am further reminded why it is important to take care to take care…..
June 3rd, 2008 at 12:23 am
learning your limits is such a milestone, learning where you have to speak out or take an action is the payoff for all those days of being a sunken ship.
having just had my first real experience with a courtroom and the crazy contained therein, i wonder how lawyers manage the mental and emotional load. (i am guessing that a lot depends upon the type of law they practice.)
sounds like you are making progress (with things that are HARD!), hooray for you!!
June 3rd, 2008 at 6:19 am
Oh gosh, reading that was quite scary because it sounded just like me. I sometimes wonder about myself – because I am basically outgoing, can stand up and give a lecture to hundreds of people, tend to be lively company in the pub – but every now and then (and it is not a regular cyclical thing) I just need to hide, can’t face anyone not in real life, not even here on blogger. I have learnt to cope with it and I don’t think anyone else notices generally, they think I am busy elsewhere.
I am very careful to protect myself these days and don’t fight it at all – I just give myself the time and seek out the space and it passes.