Not designed to cope with this
Feb. 2nd, 2026 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseI don't often feel I'm getting a direct verbal reply from God; it's not that I don't hear from him, but generally he uses other methods. But this morning I did, and I'm going to share it because it may be reassuring to some of you.
Most Sunday afternoons I have a long chat on the phone with Athos. Yesterday I asked him how he was, as I always do; he's not in good health, so his usual response is "still 'ere", but yesterday he said "grumpy". It turned out that a good part of the reason for his grumpiness was world events in general. Yes, well, nobody's coping too well with those, and in particular I'm afraid d'Artagnan is having a very bad time with them. He is gentle, empathic, and kind, so he's naturally inclined to suffer on behalf of a lot of other people; it is a beautiful but exhausting characteristic. I told Athos that d'Artagnan wasn't coping well either, and indeed he was never designed to cope with that sort of thing. He was designed to sit on a branch and sing. (All right, the branch was metaphorical, but Athos has heard me compare d'Artagnan to a songbird often enough that he took the metaphor in his stride.)
This morning I was still thinking about that, so I took it up with God, in the hope that he'd fix the world events rather than toughening up poor d'Artagnan, who's great just the way he is. And I got this:
"I didn't design you to have to cope with the childhood you had, either. But I did help you through it."
And, yes, looking back, that was 100% true, even though I didn't realise it at the time. There were the adults who mysteriously showed up and taught me to do things that my parents thought I was too clumsy to learn. There were the people who listened and provided the emotional support which I needed but which my parents weren't capable of providing (and, therefore, they deemed me not to need any such support, because how could I have an actual need for something they weren't equipped to provide? Things just didn't work like that in their book.) There was the extremely distant relative who normally sent a box of hankies for Christmas and then, suddenly, for no obvious reason, decided to send me a really nice Bible in a modern translation when I was eight years old. I wasn't a Christian yet, but I still found things in there that I could hang on to. (And it wasn't a great translation, but it was probably still the best available at the time, and it beat the King James Version into a cocked hat because it was obvious what everything meant. My problem with the King James wasn't the grammar - it was easy enough to get the hang of that; it was some of the vocabulary, plus the very obscure way some of the sentences were constructed.) I read Revelation quite a lot, and it was scary (it still is!), but even at that point I could see just a little way past the scary... just far enough to understand that "scary" was only temporary.
My childhood was scary. That, too, was only temporary.
As humans, we're really not designed to cope with scary, because when you get right down to it it's not what we were made for. Some people do cope better than others, either because they're good at blocking stuff out that they can't affect personally (which is my own standard strategy - I'll ask God to deal with it, I'll do whatever small things I can, and then the rest of the time I just get on with other stuff that will hopefully make the world at least a slightly better place), or because they're just not that empathic and they don't worry about it too much if it's not affecting them. But nobody really copes all that well.
Like a bad childhood, it won't be for ever... and there is help when we need it.
Most Sunday afternoons I have a long chat on the phone with Athos. Yesterday I asked him how he was, as I always do; he's not in good health, so his usual response is "still 'ere", but yesterday he said "grumpy". It turned out that a good part of the reason for his grumpiness was world events in general. Yes, well, nobody's coping too well with those, and in particular I'm afraid d'Artagnan is having a very bad time with them. He is gentle, empathic, and kind, so he's naturally inclined to suffer on behalf of a lot of other people; it is a beautiful but exhausting characteristic. I told Athos that d'Artagnan wasn't coping well either, and indeed he was never designed to cope with that sort of thing. He was designed to sit on a branch and sing. (All right, the branch was metaphorical, but Athos has heard me compare d'Artagnan to a songbird often enough that he took the metaphor in his stride.)
This morning I was still thinking about that, so I took it up with God, in the hope that he'd fix the world events rather than toughening up poor d'Artagnan, who's great just the way he is. And I got this:
"I didn't design you to have to cope with the childhood you had, either. But I did help you through it."
And, yes, looking back, that was 100% true, even though I didn't realise it at the time. There were the adults who mysteriously showed up and taught me to do things that my parents thought I was too clumsy to learn. There were the people who listened and provided the emotional support which I needed but which my parents weren't capable of providing (and, therefore, they deemed me not to need any such support, because how could I have an actual need for something they weren't equipped to provide? Things just didn't work like that in their book.) There was the extremely distant relative who normally sent a box of hankies for Christmas and then, suddenly, for no obvious reason, decided to send me a really nice Bible in a modern translation when I was eight years old. I wasn't a Christian yet, but I still found things in there that I could hang on to. (And it wasn't a great translation, but it was probably still the best available at the time, and it beat the King James Version into a cocked hat because it was obvious what everything meant. My problem with the King James wasn't the grammar - it was easy enough to get the hang of that; it was some of the vocabulary, plus the very obscure way some of the sentences were constructed.) I read Revelation quite a lot, and it was scary (it still is!), but even at that point I could see just a little way past the scary... just far enough to understand that "scary" was only temporary.
My childhood was scary. That, too, was only temporary.
As humans, we're really not designed to cope with scary, because when you get right down to it it's not what we were made for. Some people do cope better than others, either because they're good at blocking stuff out that they can't affect personally (which is my own standard strategy - I'll ask God to deal with it, I'll do whatever small things I can, and then the rest of the time I just get on with other stuff that will hopefully make the world at least a slightly better place), or because they're just not that empathic and they don't worry about it too much if it's not affecting them. But nobody really copes all that well.
Like a bad childhood, it won't be for ever... and there is help when we need it.
