In Six Feet Under, there are two brothers who run a funeral home together. The older one, Nate, is impulsive. He does whatever he wants. He lives his life however he wants. He left the family business at a very young age because death scared him, leaving the rest of his family to do so.
The younger brother, David, is a lot more put together at first. He feels resentful at his brother for the amount of freedom and selfishness he lives his life with. He stayed in the family business his whole life when he wanted to do something else.
To me, the older brother has always been a lot more of an appealing character. He lives more freely. He doesn’t feel tied to material constraints and expectations
However, in real life, I live like the younger brother. I have an older brother with a serious mental illness and I do not. I have to be “put together” all the time, and it’s not so much pressure coming from the outside as much as it is pressure from the inside. It was pressure when I was younger not to be someone my parents had to worry about.
This manifested itself in a lot of hyper-independence. I don’t like help from my family — financial help, material help, whatever. There’s something to be said about hyper-independence being a trauma response because a lot of us push people away when we fear being hurt.
I mention having to be really put together, or at least appear really put together because I’m currently watching a Korean drama called It’s Okay Not to Be Okay. The protagonist of the TV show, Moon Gang-Tae, has a severely autistic older brother who he’s a caretaker for. His whole life seems to be devoted to taking care of his brother, and he even agrees to move every single year to accommodate his brother’s traumatic response to the anniversary of the death of their mother.
Moon Gang-Tae is also a nurse in a psychiatric ward, who seems to make the most sacrifices and takes on the riskiest and most stressful tasks. He does not seem to live a normal life not only because he’s a caretaker for his older brother, but because of his trauma from the early death of his mother and his needing to be the man of the house from such a young age.
Moon Gang-Tae and David are two TV characters who I realistically live my life more like — the golden child, the stable one, the put-together one. It’s not a role I intentionally tried to seek out, but a role I’ve found myself in regardless. It’s like it naturally comes to me — at work, I’m the reliable one, who can always get my stuff in on time and not be worried about and not a liability.
When I can’t be the reliable one at work, it stresses me out. I don’t like feeling like a liability. I don’t like feeling like I can’t be independent. This isn’t realistic to feel all the time because every person objectively needs help from people.
I think there’s a lot of temptation to be the stable one not only because you don’t want to be a liability, but you don’t want to stir up that natural resentment that comes from people when you’re seen as unreliable. No matter how good of a person someone is, those feelings of resentment will come up for any caretaker or person who has to sacrifice a large person of their life and ambitions for someone else’s obligations.
At the end of the day, we all have to live our own lives
In Six Feet Under, the two brothers bonded together after the death of their father. Nate gets married and has a child, and has to live a more stable life where he can’t be a complete free spirit all the time. David comes out as gay and learns to live and go out to clubs. He finds his long-term partner and allows himself to make mistakes.
I have friends that allow me to tap into the free spirit energy to live my own life. I’m not where I want to be yet, but I’m allowing myself to get there.
Having to be put together all the time means not allowing yourself to be a human being sometimes, which does a disservice to yourself and everyone around you.
It’s much easier said than done to break the trauma response of hyper independence. It takes a lot of work. It takes therapy.
But…I can see that it’s worth it.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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