Loyalty

Loyal – faithful to a private person to whom faithfulness is due; faithful to a cause, ideal, custom, institution or product; unswerving in allegiance

Faithful/Faith – steadfast in affection or allegiance; firm in adherence to promises or in observance of duty

Loyalty as it plays out in my life has commanded a number of areas. I make more time available to listen and to be still and to sit with others. Instead of tackling my “to do” list, I watch as it becomes a “should’ve done by now” list.

Loyalty has led to bad fashion choices like my pair of red Sallie Jessie Rafael glasses. Or this pair of shorts with ostentatious dollar bill signs and nice, big pockets. Bandanas! A small bandana can be used as a hair accessory. If it's larger it can be made into a cute top. A much larger one can be fashioned into a skirt or sarong. Then there's holding allegiance to defending the possibilities of the Cleveland Browns. I know it’s wrong to hold on to this type of hope, especially with the structure of the AFC North. Maybe loyalty needs to be readjusted in this area.  

Because of loyalty, feces is a big part of my life. If you’re a caregiver, you will deal with discussions caused by fecal matter. You know how loyalty causes this to become a thing.

When it comes to being a Good Girl, we have been wrapped up and raised in ideals of loyalty and faithfulness. Good Girl people are shaped to be loyal. We oversee project building phases when there’s nothing in place but a skeleton of an idea and a choice to work and believe beyond.  If hard work is a tool that help build bridges to get to the other side, loyalty to a person or institution is the trait that ensures attention to the task.

Which is a great but also dangerous because missing from generalizations is the idea of a duality in relationships or reciprocity. The Merriam Webster definition of loyalty did not state – faithful to a private person to whom faithfulness is due and who also receives such faithfulness. There is the hope of mutual support but no requirement of this commitment to reciprocity.

This is very much in play when it comes to employment. Employees become committed to the job as they are courted with language like “being part of one big happy family”. Managers utilize loyalty (whether to the betterment of the company or to the paycheck) as a vehicle for guilt, to secure certain requests or illicit certain behaviors. Companies design teambuilding exercises without once surveying or asking their employees what a successful teambuilding excursion may look like because the act within the fullness of range concerning employee loyalty.   

With companies, sports teams, consumer brands and the like, loyalty is a shifting game. Suddenly Lebron James decides to leave Cleveland and take his talents to South Beach and the perceived loyalty of his game is smashed into a thousand smithereens. Number 23 jerseys lit up the Cleveland skyline brighter than the Mistake on the Lake (By the 1960’s, Cleveland’s pollution was getting out of hand, as it was quickly becoming one of the biggest industrial centers in the United States of America. The sewage and waste disposal would dump all the litter into the Cuyahoga River, until on June 22, 1969, pieces of debris slicked with oil caught fire, soon emblazing the whole river.^[1] )  

The Coca Cola Company gave no care to the loyalty of its customers and their taste buds when they introduced that gawd awful New Coke. The company completely overshot its need to compete with Pepsi and had to deal with the brunt of a huge marketing and budgetary misstep that occurred when execs chased competition instead of courting and showing loyalty to its customers.

To be loyal in and of itself is like committing to a disappointment that will surely happen. When searching for discourse on this other facet to loyalty, the organizational site Church Leadership (which I reference but make no spiritual endorsement towards) points to this other side of the same coin, the one that is needed to invoke other characteristics like forgiveness and mercy. We are to realize this disappointment will happen, and that our loyalty will be underserved and unearned.

I love love and I love loyalty and yet it is far too reckless to assuage loyalty as an admiral trait with no inclusion of boundary setting.

But when it comes parents & families who have a loved one struggling with a mental health condition, loyalty does not give a damn about boundary setting. Loyalty towards managing mental illness will change you.  It exposes hurts and depths of despair that don't feel survivable and yet we do.

Like a damaged appendage, it becomes a part of you, your experiences and how you must function.  And yet life keeps moving and so do the people around you. We do our best to find a way through. But a lot of us endure loss along the way.

But with loyalty losses don't count because that's what loyalty is. It is allegiance. Loyalty has nothing to do with liking what or who we’re loyal to. It's about the servicing. It's about the faithfulness in doing, and so for parents, our faithfulness lies to the belief of reaching a place of peace and of calm. It's very bittersweet and incredulous how the concept of calm exists within the chaos of mental health struggles. Loyalty is there existing to the very end.

Frodo has his Samwise, Batman has his Robin, and to a much greater extent, the Batmobile. Adult children have their parents. By definition and by lived experiences we already know that loyalty is a hell of a superpower and is oftentimes the one thing that keeps hope alive for those struggling to reach a place of recovery and healing.

*https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-reason-why-Cleveland-is-called-the-mistake-on-the-lake