Failure to Thrive
On holding onto struggle, and the grief of letting go
The phrase was written in her medical records, by a doctor, when she was a baby.
Failure to thrive.
She’d got hold of those records a few months ago, for the first time. Weak and sickly, apparently. Tests that found nothing.
On Friday’s support call, she described the life that had formed around that diagnosis. Survival as the default, always gravitating back. “It’s not pleasant,” she said, “but it seems to always gravitate back to not thriving.” Patches of ease, then back to the edge. The tightrope. The almost-wanting of it. “It’s almost like part of me has got this drive: how far can I go? Like, where’s this edge?”
I pointed out how many of us do this: balance on the knife edge of disaster with almost clockwork precision. As if we’ve arrived at exactly the level we’ll allow.
“Yeah. And somehow wanting to do that.”
Then we got to the stories.
She’d begun to see something: she needed them. Not just as history, but as material for a particular narrative. “If I let go of the stories, then I don’t have that. The contrast of look what I came through, look what I overcame.”
A story of overcoming requires something to overcome. And then came the next layer:
“If you just let it go, then you’ve been through all of that struggle for nothing. Then it didn’t mean anything.”
So I asked: what would happen if she got everything she ever wanted?
“Oh. Disaster. Oh.”
There was a churning in her stomach when she said it. Not irony. Gut-level.
And then she kept going.
“If I let all this go and then I do allow the abundance, then there’s trying to avoid the grief of, oh my God, I spent so many years doing this when I could’ve just let it go.”
She paused.
“So I’m going to hold onto it even longer to avoid doing that. Which is stupid.”
The whole structure named in one sentence: seen, described, and editorially dismissed by the person it had been running in.