I think it can be tolerable if there's at least *one* person somewhere in your life who you feel 'gets' you. But when there's no one? I think every interaction can then become painful, excruciating, fingernails on chalkboard, salt in the wound... because all the backlog can't ever come out. And this crazy idea that some random peson (aka, shrink) is going to understand you just because you're paying them a lot of money? Is bullshit. (I think the letdown from going to a meeting with a shrink with the expectation - or even the hope - that you'll find something you haven't been able to find elsewhere is almost sadistic in its potential to re-traumatize someone whose whole problem is the lack of experiencing a true meeting of the minds.)
I keep seeing over and over again how a person who was struggling and struggling suddenly is able to turn it around and overcome their obstacles because one person was there for them when they most needed support, and the supporter really understood what was needed and gave that thing unstintingly until the struggling person was actually steady on their feet and able to make it on their own. In other words, the supporting person stuck around long enough to actually see it through, so that the person who was in trouble was able to focus on learning what they needed to learn and not focus on 'looking good' or appearing to have it together, which is the biggest, most complete and total waste of time imaginable.
More often than not I think people get stuck, not because they can't do the thing that needs doing (although there are certainly plenty of people who have *that* hurdle as well), but because they don't have the infrastructure that allows them to get it done - time, money, enough space, the right materials and tools, someone around to help them if they need another pair of hands or an extra brain to brainstorm with.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
old messages
My needs are wrong and bad.
that's what i learned from my parents. i can feel my neck and shoulders scrunching up as i say that, as if expecting to be hit. But as far as I know my parents never hit me (physically) though their words often hit me so hard that i can *still* feel the blows, all these years later... it wasn't that they shouted, or called me names; it was that they said things that were so callously unfeeling, so inconsiderate, so thoughtless, so - cutting. They'd cut me to the bone, over and over again, and leave me there to bleed. And then they wondered why, at some point, i lost all enthusiasm for everything and just wanted to lie there and read.
***
i agree with some of Reich's ideas, i think, though not all of them (sorry, my shift key isn't working very well and i don't feel like messing with it right now.) It seems to fit with the whole idea that the physical and emotional are not separate, but are one and the same.
if this is true, then the meridians and their pathways, and the whole idea about body segments, are just different symbologies (the way geometry is for understanding 3-D objects) for understanding how things - thoughts, feelings, etc. - manifest themselves in the body. Which is still a dual/dichotomous/dialectical (? not sure which word is right for this application) way of thinking about it. i keep wishing I could get back to the more animalistic way of doing things, without losing my hard-won awareness. hm. might just have to give that up, it may be getting in my way. And all the 'thinking' isn't really the same as 'awareness', is it? Afraid to let go of the one thing that's always gotten me through, though: Thinking. my brain. Reading and writing and using words to hang on to when there was nothing else (other than a stuffed dog or something.)
that's what i learned from my parents. i can feel my neck and shoulders scrunching up as i say that, as if expecting to be hit. But as far as I know my parents never hit me (physically) though their words often hit me so hard that i can *still* feel the blows, all these years later... it wasn't that they shouted, or called me names; it was that they said things that were so callously unfeeling, so inconsiderate, so thoughtless, so - cutting. They'd cut me to the bone, over and over again, and leave me there to bleed. And then they wondered why, at some point, i lost all enthusiasm for everything and just wanted to lie there and read.
***
i agree with some of Reich's ideas, i think, though not all of them (sorry, my shift key isn't working very well and i don't feel like messing with it right now.) It seems to fit with the whole idea that the physical and emotional are not separate, but are one and the same.
if this is true, then the meridians and their pathways, and the whole idea about body segments, are just different symbologies (the way geometry is for understanding 3-D objects) for understanding how things - thoughts, feelings, etc. - manifest themselves in the body. Which is still a dual/dichotomous/dialectical (? not sure which word is right for this application) way of thinking about it. i keep wishing I could get back to the more animalistic way of doing things, without losing my hard-won awareness. hm. might just have to give that up, it may be getting in my way. And all the 'thinking' isn't really the same as 'awareness', is it? Afraid to let go of the one thing that's always gotten me through, though: Thinking. my brain. Reading and writing and using words to hang on to when there was nothing else (other than a stuffed dog or something.)
Thursday, July 29, 2010
dreams
Still trying to catch the tail of that dream, there’s something in there I didn’t quite get. Guess if it needs to get my attention I’ll just dream about it again :)
Abandonment revelation (think I may have to repeat this one over and over again for a while 'til it sinks in): The reason I had nightmares for 10 years after my dad died, I think, is because I never really had him even when he was alive. So the ‘loss’ occurred long before he died, possibly when I was quite young. I remember having my first abandonment nightmare when I was about 6, the one about dad leaving me stuck on a crowded bus while he got off and the bus drove away with me still on it.
The abandonment dreams about my father during the ten or so years after he died were all extremely confusing – I never knew if he was alive or dead, or he’d keep showing up after I thought he was dead, or somehow I’d lost touch with him and wasn’t sure if he’d died while I wasn’t looking (which actually happened in real life – during the three months it took my father to die, a friend and I took a little two-day vacation to a friend of hers’ little seaside trailer along the Oregon coast. It was a nice, and much-needed, little break during that stressful time – but I remember waking up in a cold sweat from a nightmare that my dad had died while I was gone and I hadn’t gotten to say goodbye to him. That real-life nightmare remained, I think, tangled in my dreams/nightmares about my father for many years afterward. Guilt about having abandoned him – funny, never thought of that before? Might have more thoughts about that later.)
fear (again :-)
29 july 2010
fear
I keep wishing I could take it all less seriously. But then I realize that’s just another judgmental voice from my family, my culture, saying, “Don’t be a buzzkill.” Telling me yet again, but with different words, that my feelings don’t matter, are irrelevant. Only their feelings and needs matter. In fact, they seem totally unaware that they even ever express feelings and needs. They just seem to take what they need, when they need it, or want it, without any apparent awareness of how it affects others, or, particularly, me.
Maybe that’s the difference between those who ‘succeed’ and those who don’t? Maybe those who were ‘fed’ properly as children – emotionally, physically and otherwise – don’t have this bottomless need to be seen and heard, don’t constantly doubt their worthiness and value, don’t constantly question whether they should even be here. They have a basic comfort level with themselves, a rootedness, a solidity, that comes from being treated as real and valuable and important. From being treated as if they matter.
***
I had a nightmare about my father again last night, though this time a difference I’m realizing as I write this is that he and I were actually arguing, which, it occurs to me, is quite different from the sense of powerlessness I had in previous dreams. He would just go away, and there’d be nothing I could do to stop him. He wouldn’t tell me where he was going, or when he’d be back – it was as if he was just gone, forever.
I’m realizing that I blend this eternal sense of abandonment by him (and by my mother as well) into the loss of him through death. Somehow that second loss seems less powerful – it’s as if I never had him, really – he was always just out of reach, always unavailable in the very deep ways I needed him to be there.
There were a few times, a very few times, when he seemed to let down that barrier, and want to let me in. But they were the extremely rare exceptions, and he made those overtures so infrequently and withdrew them so quickly at the slightest sign of rejection, that I didn’t really trust it. It felt almost like a relief when he went away again, because then I didn’t have to put my trust in someone who was for sure going to let me down.
(It’s funny, the thing on the surface is never the thing that’s really bugging me – it’s like a symbol, a representation, the end of a long string that I have to pull on and untangle in order to make sense of. Like the dream.
So it seems, suddenly, that all the nightmares over all the years have been the root level, survival level, existential dread of having both a mother and a father who didn’t know how to be ‘present’ for me in that deepest, comforting-the-middle-of-the-night-terrors kind of way.
***
The other dream was about an older man who was very influential (again a symbol, not anyone I know from real life) who for some reason thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I sort of pooh-poohed it, because I was so used to being treated like nothing and nobody that I couldn't’t believe that anybody would really See anything of value in me. Again, my inclination is to avoid ever rising to any height at all, because there’s always somebody out there who’ll take a swing at you and try to knock you down. It’s easier to just never get ‘up’ there in the first place, so that no one will take a swing at you. Less pain that way. Or so it seems. Child mind?
Anyway, this guy was some bigwig who’d decided to take me on, but then suddenly there was this lady involved who was going to play cribbage (???) with him to decide whether he’d do it or not. So it was (almost literally) a crap shoot – my one (?) chance rested on the luck of this complete stranger and her interaction with this other complete stranger.
May take me a little while to sort that one out. Or, actually, I know already – it’s the sense of the randomness and fickleness of life, and how so many people who are ‘successful’ are completely oblivious to the fact that their so-called ‘success’ was absolutely NOT achieved single-handedly – that somewhere along the way some important and influential person (and I mean on the level of a parent or other relative, or a boss, or a teacher, or some such thing, not anything fancier than that) helped them in a way that turned out to be quite significant, but they did it in such a low key way that the person being helped never even noticed how they were being supported by this older, more experienced, more powerful person. They just completely took it for granted, as if it were the air they breathed.
And how I never trust such ‘relationships’ anyway, because they always come with strings attached, or at least the one in the dream did: The man expected a certain fealty, which I wasn’t about to give. My friend, who advised me to not rock the boat, because this guy was a big shot and could influence my whole future, seemed to accept this as the way of things. But I felt that it too clearly made me dependent on someone who, like my parents, was fickle and unreliable and couldn’t be counted on when it came to a pinch. I needed someone who genuinely had my back, through thick or thin, no matter what. Don’t know that I’ve ever experienced that with anyone. The closest I’ve ever come to that was with my youngest brother – I think we had that kind of relationship on and off over the years, but when he got married he transferred that loyalty to his wife. Which kind of pisses me off, because it feels like *I* taught him that way of being, of doing things, but she’s the one who gets to benefit from it. Whereas *I’m* left out here in the cold, waiting for *my* opposite number to come along… cold days in hell and all that. Humph.
fear
I keep wishing I could take it all less seriously. But then I realize that’s just another judgmental voice from my family, my culture, saying, “Don’t be a buzzkill.” Telling me yet again, but with different words, that my feelings don’t matter, are irrelevant. Only their feelings and needs matter. In fact, they seem totally unaware that they even ever express feelings and needs. They just seem to take what they need, when they need it, or want it, without any apparent awareness of how it affects others, or, particularly, me.
Maybe that’s the difference between those who ‘succeed’ and those who don’t? Maybe those who were ‘fed’ properly as children – emotionally, physically and otherwise – don’t have this bottomless need to be seen and heard, don’t constantly doubt their worthiness and value, don’t constantly question whether they should even be here. They have a basic comfort level with themselves, a rootedness, a solidity, that comes from being treated as real and valuable and important. From being treated as if they matter.
***
I had a nightmare about my father again last night, though this time a difference I’m realizing as I write this is that he and I were actually arguing, which, it occurs to me, is quite different from the sense of powerlessness I had in previous dreams. He would just go away, and there’d be nothing I could do to stop him. He wouldn’t tell me where he was going, or when he’d be back – it was as if he was just gone, forever.
I’m realizing that I blend this eternal sense of abandonment by him (and by my mother as well) into the loss of him through death. Somehow that second loss seems less powerful – it’s as if I never had him, really – he was always just out of reach, always unavailable in the very deep ways I needed him to be there.
There were a few times, a very few times, when he seemed to let down that barrier, and want to let me in. But they were the extremely rare exceptions, and he made those overtures so infrequently and withdrew them so quickly at the slightest sign of rejection, that I didn’t really trust it. It felt almost like a relief when he went away again, because then I didn’t have to put my trust in someone who was for sure going to let me down.
(It’s funny, the thing on the surface is never the thing that’s really bugging me – it’s like a symbol, a representation, the end of a long string that I have to pull on and untangle in order to make sense of. Like the dream.
So it seems, suddenly, that all the nightmares over all the years have been the root level, survival level, existential dread of having both a mother and a father who didn’t know how to be ‘present’ for me in that deepest, comforting-the-middle-of-the-night-terrors kind of way.
***
The other dream was about an older man who was very influential (again a symbol, not anyone I know from real life) who for some reason thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I sort of pooh-poohed it, because I was so used to being treated like nothing and nobody that I couldn't’t believe that anybody would really See anything of value in me. Again, my inclination is to avoid ever rising to any height at all, because there’s always somebody out there who’ll take a swing at you and try to knock you down. It’s easier to just never get ‘up’ there in the first place, so that no one will take a swing at you. Less pain that way. Or so it seems. Child mind?
Anyway, this guy was some bigwig who’d decided to take me on, but then suddenly there was this lady involved who was going to play cribbage (???) with him to decide whether he’d do it or not. So it was (almost literally) a crap shoot – my one (?) chance rested on the luck of this complete stranger and her interaction with this other complete stranger.
May take me a little while to sort that one out. Or, actually, I know already – it’s the sense of the randomness and fickleness of life, and how so many people who are ‘successful’ are completely oblivious to the fact that their so-called ‘success’ was absolutely NOT achieved single-handedly – that somewhere along the way some important and influential person (and I mean on the level of a parent or other relative, or a boss, or a teacher, or some such thing, not anything fancier than that) helped them in a way that turned out to be quite significant, but they did it in such a low key way that the person being helped never even noticed how they were being supported by this older, more experienced, more powerful person. They just completely took it for granted, as if it were the air they breathed.
And how I never trust such ‘relationships’ anyway, because they always come with strings attached, or at least the one in the dream did: The man expected a certain fealty, which I wasn’t about to give. My friend, who advised me to not rock the boat, because this guy was a big shot and could influence my whole future, seemed to accept this as the way of things. But I felt that it too clearly made me dependent on someone who, like my parents, was fickle and unreliable and couldn’t be counted on when it came to a pinch. I needed someone who genuinely had my back, through thick or thin, no matter what. Don’t know that I’ve ever experienced that with anyone. The closest I’ve ever come to that was with my youngest brother – I think we had that kind of relationship on and off over the years, but when he got married he transferred that loyalty to his wife. Which kind of pisses me off, because it feels like *I* taught him that way of being, of doing things, but she’s the one who gets to benefit from it. Whereas *I’m* left out here in the cold, waiting for *my* opposite number to come along… cold days in hell and all that. Humph.
night sweats
28 july 2010
part the 2nd
I was having the night sweats just now, only during the day – I could attribute it to this weird spider bite I got, or maybe I ate too much sugar, or how it went from being really cold this morning to briefly being sweltering and is now, rather drastically, back to that slightly clammy, cool coastal evening feeling. It’s like it’s fall already, but we only got summer about three weeks ago! Blam. Like being slammed through a revolving door, suddenly you’re out the other side and you have no idea how you got there, no recollection of the whole transition.
part the 2nd
I was having the night sweats just now, only during the day – I could attribute it to this weird spider bite I got, or maybe I ate too much sugar, or how it went from being really cold this morning to briefly being sweltering and is now, rather drastically, back to that slightly clammy, cool coastal evening feeling. It’s like it’s fall already, but we only got summer about three weeks ago! Blam. Like being slammed through a revolving door, suddenly you’re out the other side and you have no idea how you got there, no recollection of the whole transition.
peace of mind
28 july 2010
Yesterday, misting the fuschias in that perfect window of coolth (opposite of warmth :-) before the moving line of shade dissolved in the sun’s heat – I saw a spider, one leg monitoring his web for telltale vibrations, waving his arms menacingly at a small, passing hover-hornet (those tiny little black-and-white-striped ones). “Hey, hey,” he seemed to say, “Watch out for me, I’m gonna eat you.” Reminded me of the crabby crabs guarding the vent ports along the sewage treatment pipeline in Finding Nemo.
Yesterday, misting the fuschias in that perfect window of coolth (opposite of warmth :-) before the moving line of shade dissolved in the sun’s heat – I saw a spider, one leg monitoring his web for telltale vibrations, waving his arms menacingly at a small, passing hover-hornet (those tiny little black-and-white-striped ones). “Hey, hey,” he seemed to say, “Watch out for me, I’m gonna eat you.” Reminded me of the crabby crabs guarding the vent ports along the sewage treatment pipeline in Finding Nemo.
imagine
27 july 2010
part two
imagine
being able to suddenly (and I mean in a leap from one generation to the next, not meaning within one’s own lifetime) process data and information at much higher speeds than others around you?
Autism. I’m convinced that it’s a feature, not a bug, but people can’t see it because most of them aren’t as smart as the autistics.
[Massive disclaimer:
Please note: I have never been diagnosed with autism or anything resembling it. I find myself consistently fascinated by autism and what I've *read* about it, but have no direct experience whatsoever either working with, living with or interacting with, in any significant way, folks who have been labeled as being along the autism spectrum. All my thoughts here are purely SPECULATIVE, from my own head, not backed by any research (that I know of). If anyone who actually has been diagnosed as along the autistic spectrum reads something here and finds it offensive or objectionable, please feel free to comment and straighten me out and/or educate me if you're so inclined. I use the words 'autism' and 'autist' here based on my own, very limited understanding. I am using this language as a way to try to understand whether there are, in fact, real parallels and/or connections between some of the things I personally experience and the stories I've read from people who self-identify as being on the autism spectrum. I resonate quite strongly with the writings of several of these people, and have been drawn to autism as a concept for a number of years. Hope that clarifies things.]
Now, this cannot be a broad sweeping categorization. But:
imagine a person whose sensory capacity is – say – twice? that of her parents’. And in addition to that, her raw processing capability is – some order of magnitude – in other words, significantly – higher than that of her parents.
It may actually be a natural growth stage that hasn’t been achievable for many generations because of sub-optimal conditions for growth? Perhaps humans in the past were just this ‘smart’, but the Machine Age, the Industrial Revolution and the ‘Age of Reason’ have caused us to lose so much of our pure, raw, animal intelligence (that’s what I loved about Mo: His raw, animal intelligence was always in full evidence.)
Culture blocks it, including so-called ‘education’, which is really just a way of herding the unwashed masses into a big pen and dumbing them down enough so that they won’t fight it too much when you make them a meaningless cog in the big machine.
Thoughts are all over the place, trying to get enough of them down to not lose any, will maybe ‘corral’ them later?
***
So, whether it’s a return to an old thing lost and now found again? Or something new, the ‘autistic’ suddenly has access to brain parts that either didn’t exist or fell into disuse for many generations past.
It’s the intuitive part of the brain that I’m talking about here – that ability to make a massive mental leap, from a standing start, compiling (want a different word?) a whole HUGE series of small bits of data and experience into an instantaneous ‘grokking’ (Robert A. Heinlein coinage, means, roughly, a grasping of the gestalt, or whole picture view, of a situation).
It’s the cognitive dissonance bit that gets us by the short hairs: The ‘sheeple’, who’ve been successfully brainwashed and/or dumbed down by culture to accept unquestioningly what’s fed them, have very – simplistic? and/or limited? comprehension of the interactions between humans. The subtler nuances of feeling are not communicated to or by them - they seem to miss out on most of what is communicated non-verbally.
Whereas the autist is exquisitely, almost painfully attuned to every slightest interactional nuance, and the so-called ‘normals’ ability to ignore any- and everything that they don’t find applicable to their own immediate, personal ‘goal’ (whatever it may be) drives us absolutely fucking nuts. It’s like being able to see the full spectrum of colors and trying to communicate with beings that can only perceive (whether willfully or by training [aka brainwashing]), say, red and blue. Or something.
The autist is left not knowing whether the so-called ‘normal’ literally can’t perceive those subtler cues of body language, tone of voice and facial expression, or is simply ignoring them for reasons that are incomprehensible to the ‘autist’.
The one-eyed woman in the land of the blind, or something?
***
Perhaps being raised by unattuned, distracted parents has become so common that the resulting ‘dissociated’ humans are now considered the norm? Scary.
And those of us whose ability to process the information has somehow remained intact, despite our upbringing? What do *we* do?
***
The ‘normals’ have the same kind of hubris, the unthinking assumption of superiority, that the whites did when they encountered ‘savages’ (such as the Incas, who’d developed astrology while the white races were still running around in short pants, or some such thing). Or when humans study non-human species: There’s the immediate assumption of superiority, of having something to ‘teach’ the Other (but rarely ever is there the humility to recognize that they might have something to learn.
part two
imagine
being able to suddenly (and I mean in a leap from one generation to the next, not meaning within one’s own lifetime) process data and information at much higher speeds than others around you?
Autism. I’m convinced that it’s a feature, not a bug, but people can’t see it because most of them aren’t as smart as the autistics.
[Massive disclaimer:
Please note: I have never been diagnosed with autism or anything resembling it. I find myself consistently fascinated by autism and what I've *read* about it, but have no direct experience whatsoever either working with, living with or interacting with, in any significant way, folks who have been labeled as being along the autism spectrum. All my thoughts here are purely SPECULATIVE, from my own head, not backed by any research (that I know of). If anyone who actually has been diagnosed as along the autistic spectrum reads something here and finds it offensive or objectionable, please feel free to comment and straighten me out and/or educate me if you're so inclined. I use the words 'autism' and 'autist' here based on my own, very limited understanding. I am using this language as a way to try to understand whether there are, in fact, real parallels and/or connections between some of the things I personally experience and the stories I've read from people who self-identify as being on the autism spectrum. I resonate quite strongly with the writings of several of these people, and have been drawn to autism as a concept for a number of years. Hope that clarifies things.]
Now, this cannot be a broad sweeping categorization. But:
imagine a person whose sensory capacity is – say – twice? that of her parents’. And in addition to that, her raw processing capability is – some order of magnitude – in other words, significantly – higher than that of her parents.
It may actually be a natural growth stage that hasn’t been achievable for many generations because of sub-optimal conditions for growth? Perhaps humans in the past were just this ‘smart’, but the Machine Age, the Industrial Revolution and the ‘Age of Reason’ have caused us to lose so much of our pure, raw, animal intelligence (that’s what I loved about Mo: His raw, animal intelligence was always in full evidence.)
Culture blocks it, including so-called ‘education’, which is really just a way of herding the unwashed masses into a big pen and dumbing them down enough so that they won’t fight it too much when you make them a meaningless cog in the big machine.
Thoughts are all over the place, trying to get enough of them down to not lose any, will maybe ‘corral’ them later?
***
So, whether it’s a return to an old thing lost and now found again? Or something new, the ‘autistic’ suddenly has access to brain parts that either didn’t exist or fell into disuse for many generations past.
It’s the intuitive part of the brain that I’m talking about here – that ability to make a massive mental leap, from a standing start, compiling (want a different word?) a whole HUGE series of small bits of data and experience into an instantaneous ‘grokking’ (Robert A. Heinlein coinage, means, roughly, a grasping of the gestalt, or whole picture view, of a situation).
It’s the cognitive dissonance bit that gets us by the short hairs: The ‘sheeple’, who’ve been successfully brainwashed and/or dumbed down by culture to accept unquestioningly what’s fed them, have very – simplistic? and/or limited? comprehension of the interactions between humans. The subtler nuances of feeling are not communicated to or by them - they seem to miss out on most of what is communicated non-verbally.
Whereas the autist is exquisitely, almost painfully attuned to every slightest interactional nuance, and the so-called ‘normals’ ability to ignore any- and everything that they don’t find applicable to their own immediate, personal ‘goal’ (whatever it may be) drives us absolutely fucking nuts. It’s like being able to see the full spectrum of colors and trying to communicate with beings that can only perceive (whether willfully or by training [aka brainwashing]), say, red and blue. Or something.
The autist is left not knowing whether the so-called ‘normal’ literally can’t perceive those subtler cues of body language, tone of voice and facial expression, or is simply ignoring them for reasons that are incomprehensible to the ‘autist’.
The one-eyed woman in the land of the blind, or something?
***
Perhaps being raised by unattuned, distracted parents has become so common that the resulting ‘dissociated’ humans are now considered the norm? Scary.
And those of us whose ability to process the information has somehow remained intact, despite our upbringing? What do *we* do?
***
The ‘normals’ have the same kind of hubris, the unthinking assumption of superiority, that the whites did when they encountered ‘savages’ (such as the Incas, who’d developed astrology while the white races were still running around in short pants, or some such thing). Or when humans study non-human species: There’s the immediate assumption of superiority, of having something to ‘teach’ the Other (but rarely ever is there the humility to recognize that they might have something to learn.
unconscious parental cruelty
27 july 2010
unconscious parental cruelty
mom was cruel in a sort of defensive way – she blocked me out, as if I were – something frightening?
and my dad was just mean – he’d smash me down as cruelly, unkindly, unthinkingly as you would a bug. I think he gave me just about as much thought, too – and when I got old enough to ‘talk back’ to him? learning to do things just the way he did (no surprise – why are parents *always* so fucking surprised when their children – miniature mirrors that we all are at that age – start mimicking them? parroting them, perfectly, word for word, gesture for gesture, capturing tone, body language, and facial expression as well as the best comic mimic?) it was as if I’d stung him, unexpectedly, like that harmless, fuzzy little bug that would be so easy to squish because it’s so small, and therefore, weak and helpless, right? suddenly giving you one HUMDINGER of a bite on the ass [evil grin here :-]
So. I got even. But boy, did he ever make me pay for it. I think I said something cutting to him when I was about in 7th grade (maybe 12 or so? remember, I skipped a grade so my numbers were off by a year at that point.) and he never, EVER forgave me for it. Way to go, dad, way to set an excellent behavioral example for your offspring. Rock ON, dude.
My parents were fucked up (emotionally) in so many ways it’s a little embarrassing to try to catalog them all. I guess that was at a time when everyone wore their fucked-up-ness on their sleeve, as if it was some kind of badge of individuality or something.
Actually, I thinking it was the beginning of what some call ‘the Age of Aquarius’ – that vast, cosmic, universal ‘enlightenment’ that’s supposedly happening to us all right now.
I think the potential for such a thing is there, but I think there’s going to have to be a whole hell of a lot of pain, fear, anger and resentment on a pretty much world-wide level for it to really start happening. I’ve been wondering if the massive oil spill off the Gulf and the ensuing fucked-up responses, both the actual physical attempts to deal with it, as well as the political posturing and endless finger-pointing (trying to find a scapegoat, as usual – last night it sounded, on NPR, as if some folks were going to try to pin it on NOAA, one of the most underfunded and least powerful agencies on the planet, as I understand it) might end up acting as a trigger to set it all off.
unconscious parental cruelty
mom was cruel in a sort of defensive way – she blocked me out, as if I were – something frightening?
and my dad was just mean – he’d smash me down as cruelly, unkindly, unthinkingly as you would a bug. I think he gave me just about as much thought, too – and when I got old enough to ‘talk back’ to him? learning to do things just the way he did (no surprise – why are parents *always* so fucking surprised when their children – miniature mirrors that we all are at that age – start mimicking them? parroting them, perfectly, word for word, gesture for gesture, capturing tone, body language, and facial expression as well as the best comic mimic?) it was as if I’d stung him, unexpectedly, like that harmless, fuzzy little bug that would be so easy to squish because it’s so small, and therefore, weak and helpless, right? suddenly giving you one HUMDINGER of a bite on the ass [evil grin here :-]
So. I got even. But boy, did he ever make me pay for it. I think I said something cutting to him when I was about in 7th grade (maybe 12 or so? remember, I skipped a grade so my numbers were off by a year at that point.) and he never, EVER forgave me for it. Way to go, dad, way to set an excellent behavioral example for your offspring. Rock ON, dude.
My parents were fucked up (emotionally) in so many ways it’s a little embarrassing to try to catalog them all. I guess that was at a time when everyone wore their fucked-up-ness on their sleeve, as if it was some kind of badge of individuality or something.
Actually, I thinking it was the beginning of what some call ‘the Age of Aquarius’ – that vast, cosmic, universal ‘enlightenment’ that’s supposedly happening to us all right now.
I think the potential for such a thing is there, but I think there’s going to have to be a whole hell of a lot of pain, fear, anger and resentment on a pretty much world-wide level for it to really start happening. I’ve been wondering if the massive oil spill off the Gulf and the ensuing fucked-up responses, both the actual physical attempts to deal with it, as well as the political posturing and endless finger-pointing (trying to find a scapegoat, as usual – last night it sounded, on NPR, as if some folks were going to try to pin it on NOAA, one of the most underfunded and least powerful agencies on the planet, as I understand it) might end up acting as a trigger to set it all off.
mouse in the kitchen
[These next few (half dozen?) entries will just simply be cut and pasted from Word docs, don't have easy internet access just now, so they'll be even more like straight-up, unedited journal entries than usual. Including date in title because they were written over the course of several days even though all are being posted today.]
26 July 2010
Housesitting for some friends, they’ve got a little problem with sugar ants (those tiny, little bitty ones) in the kitchen.
26 July 2010
Housesitting for some friends, they’ve got a little problem with sugar ants (those tiny, little bitty ones) in the kitchen.
I’d been doing battle (yes, with a tiny sword and armor!) with some on the kitchen counter, which was where she’d told me they had a problem.
It was a really hot day, blistering, really, compared to our part of the world’s usual standard. I hadn’t eaten all morning and had been out in the sun too long watering plants, so I was suffering from both low blood sugar and a bit of heat stroke.
As I came back in through the back kitchen door (the one that leads out onto the back porch/stairs) I noticed some movement on the floor out of the corner of my eye. I looked down, and there was an absolute river of ants coming in on either side of the door sill. AAAAaaagggghhhhh!!!!! I dashed to get the cinnamon and sprinkled it madly all over the threshold, trying to dam up the flow.
I then commenced with the murdering, smashing little be-feelered crawlies like a madwoman. This took care of the immediate flow on the *right* side of the door, but unfortunately, it looked as if on the *left* side I had merely trapped about a million ants on the *inside* by confusing their scent trail and ‘blocking’ them inside the kitchen.
Now, here’s the funny part: In my fog of brain-sugar deprivation and sun-addlement, I glanced down to where the big pool of ants was, and wondered where they were all trooping off to. I saw two funny-looking little sticks on the floor and an odd little scrap of wood, kind of up near the baseboard a few feet from the back door, behind the leg of the little table the toaster sits on. My mind immediately flashed, “Mouse! Dead mouse, eww, in the kitchen! EEWWWWWWwwww!!!!! GROSS! YUCK!” Which thought I immediately proceeded to block out of my mind.
I attribute it to the brain fog, because three times my mind tried to flash me the ‘dead mouse’ message, and three times I blocked it out, not wanting to know, see, think about or deal with it. Yuck. So the remaining so-called ‘reasoning’ part of my brain that was attempting to operate oh-so-fuzzily on the maybe two or three remaining brain cells that hadn’t been fried by the heat, thought (very slowly and muzzily), ‘Hm, two little sticks. Little block of wood. Look closer. YUCK! No, don’t wanna don’t wanna! (all this of course happens in a split second, nowhere near the length of time it’s taking me to describe it). “Dead mouse and a trap,” my intuiting brain-part declares. “NO!” The other part is still in denial. Finally, the third time I looked at it, as I was bending down sprinkling cinnamon, red-hot chili peppers and cayenne on the *other* side of the big ant puddle (while removing the previous cinnamon-powder road block) to try to redirect the ant stream back out on their old path – I got close enough to see that, yes, indeed, those two little funny-looking ‘sticks’ were indeed the dead, dried-up hind legs of a poor little old mouse corpus. And the ants! Were EATING him! GROSS!!!!!!! AAAAAAaaaaggghhhhh!!!! All this went on entirely too long for a person who otherwise generally tries to comport herself as a grown human as often as she’s able.
So finally I’d faced it. I re-routed the ants as best I could, squashed a bunch of the unruly ones that weren’t heeding my attempts at ant-traffic control, and finally dealt with the dead mouse body. EWWWW!!! YUCK! Two plastic baggies between hand and – it – YUCK! Then a third bag to put the works in. Then very gingerly, after thoroughly scrubbing hands with hot soap and water, took a glove and (trying not to touch the bag while still carrying it) got it in the trash. EW.
Then came back in and dumped a huge pile of baking soda on the remaining ICK and muddle of confused ants. I think a lot of them got suffocated (and also possibly dessicated? I think baking soda has some drying action). A score of bold explorers seemed to set off for parts unknown, seeking sugar, for I later found a few in places heretofore un-beset (?) by them, such as in the bathroom. But after diligent death duty over the next few days, I didn’t see any more except the occasional odd wanderer. Interesting, they seem to sort of travel in small ‘herds’. I wonder if there are ‘leader’ or ‘scout’ ants that break the initial trail, leaving the scent path that the more sheep-like followers, um, follow?
[29 july addition: Sitting at the kitchen table this morning, saw a little guy running along the tabletop, proudly (I imagined) holding aloft his prize of some small white crumb, traveling some unimaginable distance to carry it home to his family. Or whatever. Anyway, I hesitated to squash him, tried to pick him up on a piece of paper to set him outside, where he could go about his business. But - he evaded my every attempt to 'help' him, and finally I gave up in frustration and not wanting to let him run free in the house: I squashed him! VERY sad face. For some reason, seeing him carry his little bit of food made him more - human??? to me, and therefore I suddenly couldn't play goddess any more. But I still killed him anyway, out of pure expediency. Guilt :-(
Saturday, July 24, 2010
link on attunement
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2169321/
Long quote:
"While attachments develop throughout the lifespan, clinical and neurobiological evidence indicates the importance of early foundations, remaining, as in a wall, important whatever is added. Like any relationship, infant attachment is a two-way, mutually-reinforcing process, which depends on what each contributes, on opportunity for closeness, on the attitudes of others, and on wider social factors. It develops through sophisticated maternal attunement to the baby's overtures, involving tone, pitch and rhythm of voice, posture, facial expression, movement, and touch. In this way, the parent reflects back the baby's emotions, giving them meaning and regulating them, which moulds development of the right pre-frontal cortex. This requires the baby's ability to elicit a response, and the parent's to respond.
Long quote:
"While attachments develop throughout the lifespan, clinical and neurobiological evidence indicates the importance of early foundations, remaining, as in a wall, important whatever is added. Like any relationship, infant attachment is a two-way, mutually-reinforcing process, which depends on what each contributes, on opportunity for closeness, on the attitudes of others, and on wider social factors. It develops through sophisticated maternal attunement to the baby's overtures, involving tone, pitch and rhythm of voice, posture, facial expression, movement, and touch. In this way, the parent reflects back the baby's emotions, giving them meaning and regulating them, which moulds development of the right pre-frontal cortex. This requires the baby's ability to elicit a response, and the parent's to respond.
"Attachment allows emotional regulation before infants can self-regulate. Involuntary stress regulation, mediated by the hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis (indicated by salivary cortisol), is ‘set’ in infancy — and probably antenatally — at a level adaptive to the prevalent environment and reflecting the effectiveness of calming. Stress regulation is important for exploration, learning, independence, and effective relationships. While poorly regulated infant stress can produce persistently exaggerated stress responses, serious abuse can cause them to ‘switch off’, leading to fearlessness, and, for example, relative bradycardia. Altered HPA axis function relates to childhood behavioural difficulties, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Disturbed attachment may also affect immunity and healing, and predispose to ‘psychosomatic’ illness, mediated by physical manifestations of autonomic dysfunction. While neuronal plasticity, developing cognition, and experience modulate stress responses, they do so around a baseline influenced by the first relationship an infant experiences.
"Attuned parenting imparts meaning to the ‘inner world’ of body signals (for example, hunger, satiety, full bladder, thought, and emotions). It teaches children that others recognise their needs, and establishes foundations for trust, empathy, understanding relationships, and verbal and non-verbal communication. Preconceptions are established for subsequent relationships, close and otherwise.
"Anything that interrupts the cycle of attunement affects the quality of attachment. If substance abuse or depression, for example, intermittently disturb otherwise good attunement, children experience attention as valuable, but unreliable, and not necessarily easily achieved, causing anxiety. Maternal stress, anxiety, and fatigue have similar consequences, by affecting the reading of social cues and subtlety of response. These children learn strategies for achieving and holding attention — over-compliance, constant smiling, disruptiveness, soiling, or use of symptoms — whatever works. Any attention, positive or negative, may be better than none. Management involves focusing attention on desired behaviour. The emotional ‘separation’ of discipline is difficult to tolerate and fear of rejection colours relationships. Breaks in attunement are unreliably resolved and stress is poorly regulated.
"Sometimes attuned, sometimes antagonistic parenting conveys attention as valuable, but unreliable and frightening, causing children to be ambivalent about seeking or sustaining it. Hypervigilance to parental mood affects concentration and causes ‘over-reading’ of disapproval. These can be difficult and confusing children to parent. They may seem to push away those to whom they are closest, while also craving their attention.
"Consistently unattuned parenting (for example, because parents have poor foundations for attachment, or learning difficulties), fails to teach children the benefit of closeness, while aggression can make them fear it. These children become ‘avoidant’ loners, inept at understanding non-verbal cues and the subtleties of language, and often seeking control through ‘sameness’. The resulting picture resembles ‘innate’ autistic spectrum disorder.
Pervasively abusive parenting can leave children disorganised and ineffective both in self-sufficiency, and with relationships, and without empathy. Successful independence is improbable, and adult criminality likely.
"Throughout life, individuals fall on a continuum of attachment style, ranging from ‘loners’ to those craving attention and approval — some seeming wary of sustaining the relationships they seek. The pathology implied by the labels ‘avoidant’, ‘anxious’, or ‘ambivalent’ attachment styles respectively (collectively described as ‘insecure attachment’), has qualified justification when 40% of the population are so categorised. However, the greater the deviation from ‘secure’ attachment, the greater the likelihood of dysfunction. In the middle of the spectrum are the 60% who are classified as ‘securely attached’. They may find the more comfortable personal path through life, valuing relationships yet independently competent. Although moulded by subsequent experience, childhood attachment continues to be reflected in adult personal, social, and professional relationships, and in approach to parenting. Adult attachment style also relates to how trauma and loss are handled, and to career choice. For example, medical students with ‘secure’ attachments are more likely to opt for a career in primary care than those tending to avoidant or anxious patterns. Childhood attachment might also influence aging, which relates to HPA-axis function."
more from Reich
From this link again: http://www.philhine.org.uk/writings/ess_reich.html
Character armour then, in Reich's terms, is the sum total of our defences against external threats and internal excitation or distress. It stays with us in later life, and limits our freedom of expression, the depth of our emotional responses and our feelings of aliveness. Reich would say it arises as a response to fear and threatening situations, as well as from frustration of our primary needs - the latter being for healthy, warm physical and emotional contact. It is both psychic and somatic. He said "functional identity means nothing more than muscular attitudes and character attitudes have the same function in the psychic mechanism: they replace one another and can be influenced by one another. Basically they cannot be separated … tensions are not the "results", "causes", "accompanying manifestations" of "psychic processes"; they are simply these phenomena themselves in the somatic realm". The unity of psyche and soma is expressed in the diagram on the cover of all his books — two arrows curling in to meet each other, both expressions of an underlying energetic process.
highly sensitive?
Quote from Elaine Aron's Highly Sensitive Person:
But my body is more and more rejecting all substitutes, and forcing me to go out into the world and face my fears.
The scary thing is, having had no training whatsoever in healthy ways to deal with and express anger, I find myself raw and vulnerable, irritable and cranky, just like a baby. Everything has to be just so, and if it's not, I can lose it.
I think the anger comes from feeling that I was never allowed to have boundaries or borders - my mom could come and take what she needed from me (emotionally) whenever she wanted, and I was absolutely powerless to stop her (being an infant, and all, when it first started).
The pattern between us became so deeply ingrained that even now, with two years of almost total non-communication between us, I still have a very hard time setting limits of almost any kind with people, even complete strangers. I always give them the benefit of the doubt, always second-guess myself, feel guilty that I've been too stingy with my time or energy.
I think the anger, irritability and bursts of rage is the raw inner core of me trying to protect myself from this incessant energy drain: It sometimes feels the way I imagine a dog feels when it barks or growls at somebody who frightens it or it dislikes or wants to stay away from.
But we are so trained to 'be nice,' not to make waves, put on a happy face, etc. etc., that it's very difficult.
Tonight a guy at a convenience store asked me how I was, and I said, "Cranky and irritable." I get so sick of totally random strangers asking, "How are you?" when you know for a fact they couldn't care less. I mean, what if somebody's feeling totally miserable and suicidal? Isn't it a form of cruelty, of sadism, almost, to ask such a casual question when so many people truly are suffering or in some kind of physical or emotional pain?
I mean, would you ask a beggar, or a one-legged person, "How are you!" in this bright, cheery voice that practically dares the askee to give any other answer than a chippy, "Great!"
***
Hypervigilance; Reich's theory about segments, especially the eye segment and association with anxiety and hypervigilance.
I've been working a lot on the armoring around my eyes for months now, and sometimes I feel it let go. I think it's come a long way in the last 10 years since I started worked on all the stuff in this Pandora's box of mine :-) Wonder how much further I have to go? I imagine certain aspects of it will always be present, and will always require a certain amount of - maintenance? - work, or something. It's like someone who learns a language as an adult never has quite the same fluency, freedom or comfort level as someone who learned the same language from the cradle on.
***
A couple of interesting Reich links:
http://www.orgonomicscience.org/training/appearance.html
More from Elaine Aron HSP book:
"...bright, angry little fairy who lived in a secret garden and would allow no one in. [She] has used food, alcohol and various drugs compulsively - in amounts that bordered on excessive. But she was too smart to go over the edge, having a very practical streak and an IQ of over 135. In one dream she was wheeling a starving, angry infant through a banquet hall filled with food, but it wanted none of it.That's me! The part I've bolded, that last sentence, is exactly what I'm pretty sure happened to me, because I've tried to fill that gigantic void in the middle of me for so long now in so many ways.
We discovered that the baby was starved, in a greedy, desperate way, for love and attention."
But my body is more and more rejecting all substitutes, and forcing me to go out into the world and face my fears.
The scary thing is, having had no training whatsoever in healthy ways to deal with and express anger, I find myself raw and vulnerable, irritable and cranky, just like a baby. Everything has to be just so, and if it's not, I can lose it.
I think the anger comes from feeling that I was never allowed to have boundaries or borders - my mom could come and take what she needed from me (emotionally) whenever she wanted, and I was absolutely powerless to stop her (being an infant, and all, when it first started).
The pattern between us became so deeply ingrained that even now, with two years of almost total non-communication between us, I still have a very hard time setting limits of almost any kind with people, even complete strangers. I always give them the benefit of the doubt, always second-guess myself, feel guilty that I've been too stingy with my time or energy.
I think the anger, irritability and bursts of rage is the raw inner core of me trying to protect myself from this incessant energy drain: It sometimes feels the way I imagine a dog feels when it barks or growls at somebody who frightens it or it dislikes or wants to stay away from.
But we are so trained to 'be nice,' not to make waves, put on a happy face, etc. etc., that it's very difficult.
Tonight a guy at a convenience store asked me how I was, and I said, "Cranky and irritable." I get so sick of totally random strangers asking, "How are you?" when you know for a fact they couldn't care less. I mean, what if somebody's feeling totally miserable and suicidal? Isn't it a form of cruelty, of sadism, almost, to ask such a casual question when so many people truly are suffering or in some kind of physical or emotional pain?
I mean, would you ask a beggar, or a one-legged person, "How are you!" in this bright, cheery voice that practically dares the askee to give any other answer than a chippy, "Great!"
***
Hypervigilance; Reich's theory about segments, especially the eye segment and association with anxiety and hypervigilance.
I've been working a lot on the armoring around my eyes for months now, and sometimes I feel it let go. I think it's come a long way in the last 10 years since I started worked on all the stuff in this Pandora's box of mine :-) Wonder how much further I have to go? I imagine certain aspects of it will always be present, and will always require a certain amount of - maintenance? - work, or something. It's like someone who learns a language as an adult never has quite the same fluency, freedom or comfort level as someone who learned the same language from the cradle on.
***
A couple of interesting Reich links:
http://www.orgonomicscience.org/training/appearance.html
The Ocular segment [...] is always involved in processes of psychosis and disassociative disorders. [...] for example, in schizophrenia, there is a problem in eye tracking.... In orgonomy, that fact is regarded as a central issue. The fact that the eyes are not in contact with the world to the extent that they are in normal people, we think is a factor in being able to distinguish reality from unreality.http://www.philhine.org.uk/writings/ess_reich.html
What one learns when one investigates how eyes are armored is sometimes surprising. For example, one patient reports that when she looks into a mirror, what she sees is her body outline. Another patient reports that when he is in a painful confrontation, he has learned to endure that confrontation by focusing on one point on the other person's body and keeping his eyes fixed at that point. That way he is able to get through the confrontation. Another patient reports that she has no visual memory. When she looks at something and closes her eyes, she cannot remember what she has just seen. These are things that happen not only in psychotic people, but people who are walking around as if they are normal.
Reichian work differs from pranayama in that in doesn't try and impose a rhythm on the breath — instead; it just tries to loosen it, to allow it's natural function and depth to return. This can be really powerful — the first time I tried it, I couldn't conclude the session, I found myself overwhelmed by the intensity of feeling. With breathwork, moods can shift rapidly and I've frequently found myself completely exhilarated, laughing ecstatically or on the brink of tears. .I began working with the ocular segment by allowing myself to notice my peripheral and the area to the sides of my eyes. I think this is worthwhile as it's an area of the body we don't normally notice. I noticed that allowing this alongside becoming conscious of my peripheral vision brings up some odd indefinable sensations — hard to describe, a "deepening of feeling" is the best I can come up with. You start to see the connection here between the emotional tone of our gaze, perhaps we have habitual patterns of staring, or a gaze which flicks rapidly from thing to another. You begin to notice other qualities in the act of seeing. I've followed this with another Reichian therapeutic procedure which is, after some work with the breath, to have someone manipulate an object (such as a fingertip, a pencil or penlight) near the eyes in irregular patterns, while you try and track it with your eye — the random movement is supposed to loosen the armouring, the muscular stiffness around the eyes. I've found this to have very powerful effects. When this has really hit home something "clicks" between you and what you're looking at, and all of a sudden, you're flooded with emotion and bodily sensations, breathing deepens rapidly, and sobbing reaches right down into the chest.
Some other techniques of mobilising armouring in the segment would be to have a patient roll their eyes, and raise their brows, or make suspicious or angry or needful expressions, expressing as much as they can through the eyes. I've found it a useful meditation to study people's gaze as I go about my day to day business and see if the quality of their eyes tells me anything about their character.
More from Elaine Aron HSP book:
Like hungry chickens, when we cannot be fed what we need, we feed ourselves what we can find. [bold mine.]
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
in a market-driven culture, even *people* become commodities
This thought comes to mind just at this moment, I *think*, because we no longer (in the vein of the previous post) rely on one another the way we evolved to. Our literal survival no longer depends on the kinds of close bonds our (ancestors?) formed.
However: Our brains haven't evolved much since then.
So what we've got is prehistoric brains in hyper-modern, over-technologized environments. Monkeys flying rocket ships, in other words. (There's a catch-phrase I can't remember.)
I notice this especially on online dating sites, where people seem to see even themselves as objects to be marketed and commodified: I have this, this and this trait, and am looking for someone with that, that and that. Like ordering your mate from an L.L. Bean catalog or something. "Can I have a red ribbon with that?" Erg.
However: Our brains haven't evolved much since then.
So what we've got is prehistoric brains in hyper-modern, over-technologized environments. Monkeys flying rocket ships, in other words. (There's a catch-phrase I can't remember.)
I notice this especially on online dating sites, where people seem to see even themselves as objects to be marketed and commodified: I have this, this and this trait, and am looking for someone with that, that and that. Like ordering your mate from an L.L. Bean catalog or something. "Can I have a red ribbon with that?" Erg.
mother who turns to infant for comfort
Mom said something once that shocked me into a revelation that I think had always lurked at the back of my mind, but never really wanted to face: "I love babies because a new baby is the only time I get unconditional love."
I was too flabbergasted to scream at her, though some part of me wanted to strangle her; and in the end? I realized it was pointless. I had my answer, my key, the missing piece of the puzzle, my Rosetta stone: My mother is totally, utterly, completely clueless as to the basic caretaking dynamic that *should* exist between mother and child, and never the twain shall meet (*her* concept and reality, that is).
I felt as if (in retrospect) I was some kind of oversized doll, that she would feed and diaper and cuddle, but all the messy stuff of a real baby, such as crying endlessly and projectile poop and so on were not part of her plan. I *think* (meaning, I of course don't know for sure, but it just feels true) that she would often abandon me, in the sense of walking away and leaving me when I was crying, or she would laugh at me, as if my terror was some kind of joke? (I still don't get this part) hoping whatever was wrong would just go away. I think my mother actually terrified me, sort of the way clowns terrify some children: The clown is in your face and you can't get away from him; and he's bigger than you; and: He's doing all these things that scare you and nobody seems to notice how frightened you are. It's all supposed to be this big funny joke, but it's not funny to you - and none of the adults around you seem to care. They're all busy trying to get you to act some particular way that fits their script of what should be happening; your reactions, feelings and needs are completely invisible to them, or possibly so inconvenient that they can't be bothered to deal with them.
***
I no longer feel angry about it; the impulse to anger is there, but my body/mind/psyche has experienced the futility of that particular path enough times now to seek an alternate course of action: Think about something else. Do something else. Find another path. Blood from stones, and all that - I think it just took me some time to recognize her as an ungiving 'stone'.
The odd thing is, she seems quite receptive, quite approachable, on the surface. Until you actually ask her for something, at which point she becomes the proverbial stubborn donkey, all four feet firmly planted in absolute opposition to whatever it is you're asking for, almost as if it's a reflex. There seems to be no cognition involved, no consideration, no rational thought. Just a pure, gut level, knee-jerk reaction. Almost as if she's still - three? or six? Or some such really frightening, terribly young and completely inappropriate age for someone to be in charge of very small children. Yikes.
And she took care of us well enough physically - clean clothes, well fed, hot baths every night, all that; it was in the mental and emotional arena that she just didn't seem to have any awareness whatsoever as to what was needed (and, in my case, still *is* needed, all these long years later.)
***
I think what I saw as 'receptiveness' was really her need to be seen herself, in the same ways *I'm* currently battling. In other words, that engaging gaze, the friendly smile, was really her way of trying to get me to take care of her. Yikes. I think I encounter (possibly draw?) a lot of people like this in my life. I'm like a magnet for them, a caretaking magnet?
It's not my fault, and I don't blame myself. I'm working on discouraging people from relying on me in these ways. I think I'm learning how to set boundaries here (yay grasshopper!)
The images that were trying to pop into my mind above were: Cobra, mesmerizing you while waiting for a chance to strike; and carnivorous plants, such as the giant venus fly-trap in Little Shop of Horrors. Once again, yikes.
***
Now for the REALLY hard part (as if the rest of it's all been a walk in the fricking park, right? :-):
I have to recognize the ways in which her behavior shapes/shaped my behavior; I have to look at how/if/whether I'm duplicating those same behaviors myself, and *if* in fact I am reproducing those same behaviors (and I suspect I am, to some degree, though I'm far more aware of same than my mother ever has been or ever will be [which is not to compete with her, just to cut myself some slack and not give into the little voices that try to say, "You're just as bad as she is!"])
So: I suspect that I'm 'needy' in ways that seem 'age-inappropriate'; and I'm ok with that.
I don't buy into the cultural bullshit that we all are (or should be) self-sufficient and/or responsible for everything that happens to us (nuke that 'Secret' bullshit and the fucking kamikaze elephant it rode in on).
I'm ok with asking for the help I need; I no longer take it personally when someone says, "No," but just move on and keep asking for what I need.
I don't buy into the 'co-dependence' bullshit; we're all interdependent - that's how humans evolved. We're a tribal species, and a whole huge portion of our brain (limbic) evolved specifically to deal with the bonding necessary for a largely hairless, somewhat slow, dull-toothed and clawless mammal to survive an otherwise scarier-than-shit environment: We co-operated with one another.
I was too flabbergasted to scream at her, though some part of me wanted to strangle her; and in the end? I realized it was pointless. I had my answer, my key, the missing piece of the puzzle, my Rosetta stone: My mother is totally, utterly, completely clueless as to the basic caretaking dynamic that *should* exist between mother and child, and never the twain shall meet (*her* concept and reality, that is).
I felt as if (in retrospect) I was some kind of oversized doll, that she would feed and diaper and cuddle, but all the messy stuff of a real baby, such as crying endlessly and projectile poop and so on were not part of her plan. I *think* (meaning, I of course don't know for sure, but it just feels true) that she would often abandon me, in the sense of walking away and leaving me when I was crying, or she would laugh at me, as if my terror was some kind of joke? (I still don't get this part) hoping whatever was wrong would just go away. I think my mother actually terrified me, sort of the way clowns terrify some children: The clown is in your face and you can't get away from him; and he's bigger than you; and: He's doing all these things that scare you and nobody seems to notice how frightened you are. It's all supposed to be this big funny joke, but it's not funny to you - and none of the adults around you seem to care. They're all busy trying to get you to act some particular way that fits their script of what should be happening; your reactions, feelings and needs are completely invisible to them, or possibly so inconvenient that they can't be bothered to deal with them.
***
I no longer feel angry about it; the impulse to anger is there, but my body/mind/psyche has experienced the futility of that particular path enough times now to seek an alternate course of action: Think about something else. Do something else. Find another path. Blood from stones, and all that - I think it just took me some time to recognize her as an ungiving 'stone'.
The odd thing is, she seems quite receptive, quite approachable, on the surface. Until you actually ask her for something, at which point she becomes the proverbial stubborn donkey, all four feet firmly planted in absolute opposition to whatever it is you're asking for, almost as if it's a reflex. There seems to be no cognition involved, no consideration, no rational thought. Just a pure, gut level, knee-jerk reaction. Almost as if she's still - three? or six? Or some such really frightening, terribly young and completely inappropriate age for someone to be in charge of very small children. Yikes.
And she took care of us well enough physically - clean clothes, well fed, hot baths every night, all that; it was in the mental and emotional arena that she just didn't seem to have any awareness whatsoever as to what was needed (and, in my case, still *is* needed, all these long years later.)
***
I think what I saw as 'receptiveness' was really her need to be seen herself, in the same ways *I'm* currently battling. In other words, that engaging gaze, the friendly smile, was really her way of trying to get me to take care of her. Yikes. I think I encounter (possibly draw?) a lot of people like this in my life. I'm like a magnet for them, a caretaking magnet?
It's not my fault, and I don't blame myself. I'm working on discouraging people from relying on me in these ways. I think I'm learning how to set boundaries here (yay grasshopper!)
The images that were trying to pop into my mind above were: Cobra, mesmerizing you while waiting for a chance to strike; and carnivorous plants, such as the giant venus fly-trap in Little Shop of Horrors. Once again, yikes.
***
Now for the REALLY hard part (as if the rest of it's all been a walk in the fricking park, right? :-):
I have to recognize the ways in which her behavior shapes/shaped my behavior; I have to look at how/if/whether I'm duplicating those same behaviors myself, and *if* in fact I am reproducing those same behaviors (and I suspect I am, to some degree, though I'm far more aware of same than my mother ever has been or ever will be [which is not to compete with her, just to cut myself some slack and not give into the little voices that try to say, "You're just as bad as she is!"])
So: I suspect that I'm 'needy' in ways that seem 'age-inappropriate'; and I'm ok with that.
I don't buy into the cultural bullshit that we all are (or should be) self-sufficient and/or responsible for everything that happens to us (nuke that 'Secret' bullshit and the fucking kamikaze elephant it rode in on).
I'm ok with asking for the help I need; I no longer take it personally when someone says, "No," but just move on and keep asking for what I need.
I don't buy into the 'co-dependence' bullshit; we're all interdependent - that's how humans evolved. We're a tribal species, and a whole huge portion of our brain (limbic) evolved specifically to deal with the bonding necessary for a largely hairless, somewhat slow, dull-toothed and clawless mammal to survive an otherwise scarier-than-shit environment: We co-operated with one another.
what's been most helpful
is to recognize what function any particular behavior is serving. In other words, instead of criticizing, judging, dismissing any behavior, instead, try to understand what purpose it serves.
By understanding the purpose of the behavior, one can then recognizing the underlying need that is trying to be met. By understanding the underlying need, one can then, eventually, perhaps, under the right circumstances, meet that need in more direct ways. Possibly.
Or not - sometimes this is where Fundamental Attribution Error comes into play: When there are circumstances beyond our control, sometimes we have to adopt coping mechanisms in order to survive the situation. In which case, we must always remember that our circumstances are not necessarily our own fault.
And: It is possible that some situations will never be under our control.
For example: Sexism. Misogyny. I cannot control the fact that I am, as a female, treated in ways over which I have very little control. I can change my behavior to try to mitigate how I am treated; but I can't change the culture, nor the other humans who perpetuate that culture.
But I still fight it, anyway, still try to educate men, in particular, that it's ok for me to be the way I am. That I am not required to conform to their, or anybody else's expectations.
And introversion: In a culture of extroverts, the (supposedly) 20% of us who turn inward instead of outward are considered freaks, unnatural, not normal. Something broken, to be fixed.
I myself have wondered whether introversion is in fact *not* an innate character trait, but is rather the product of a person's native temperament combined with their upbringing, so that a person who grows up in an environment that's sympathetic to her nature and/or way of being is comfortable around other humans; whereas, someone who grows up encountering only friction with those around her, will generally resist the company of other humans, based on her long-term childhood experience of not fitting. Again, my readings suggest that as many as one third of all children are a mismatch with their parents. The gap between that 30% and the 20% statistic I've seen about introversion could be accounted for by the fact that *some* folks *do* find a place to fit later in life, such as with a colleague, a friend, a spouse, etc. Or maybe some of those folks actually have a sympathetic other somewhere in the family-at-large, such as an aunt or grandparent.
By understanding the purpose of the behavior, one can then recognizing the underlying need that is trying to be met. By understanding the underlying need, one can then, eventually, perhaps, under the right circumstances, meet that need in more direct ways. Possibly.
Or not - sometimes this is where Fundamental Attribution Error comes into play: When there are circumstances beyond our control, sometimes we have to adopt coping mechanisms in order to survive the situation. In which case, we must always remember that our circumstances are not necessarily our own fault.
And: It is possible that some situations will never be under our control.
For example: Sexism. Misogyny. I cannot control the fact that I am, as a female, treated in ways over which I have very little control. I can change my behavior to try to mitigate how I am treated; but I can't change the culture, nor the other humans who perpetuate that culture.
But I still fight it, anyway, still try to educate men, in particular, that it's ok for me to be the way I am. That I am not required to conform to their, or anybody else's expectations.
And introversion: In a culture of extroverts, the (supposedly) 20% of us who turn inward instead of outward are considered freaks, unnatural, not normal. Something broken, to be fixed.
I myself have wondered whether introversion is in fact *not* an innate character trait, but is rather the product of a person's native temperament combined with their upbringing, so that a person who grows up in an environment that's sympathetic to her nature and/or way of being is comfortable around other humans; whereas, someone who grows up encountering only friction with those around her, will generally resist the company of other humans, based on her long-term childhood experience of not fitting. Again, my readings suggest that as many as one third of all children are a mismatch with their parents. The gap between that 30% and the 20% statistic I've seen about introversion could be accounted for by the fact that *some* folks *do* find a place to fit later in life, such as with a colleague, a friend, a spouse, etc. Or maybe some of those folks actually have a sympathetic other somewhere in the family-at-large, such as an aunt or grandparent.
beetle
I think not having a time in my life where I was allowed to be totally dependent has kept part of me forever frozen at that developmental stage: Always needing someone to hang on to, to cling to when I'm afraid or uncertain.
It's really quite a small thing, as a percentage of my average day; but when I get stuck there and there's no one to turn to for comfort? I suddenly become, emotionally, that terrified infant again. That baby with arms and legs she can't control, a body she can't move around, lying there helplessly, unable to change her situation. She screams and flails (huh, just like the beetle! So that's where that image comes from!) ineffectively, and this big face looms at her and smiles, as if her antics are merely entertaining.
Somehow this person who's supposed to be my surrogate arms and legs has no clue that I need her (or his) HELP! I'm not just flailing to amuse myself! My howls, my terrified, wailing face, are a cry for succor, for HELP, you fucking idiots! Who the hell allowed you two to be parents, anyway? Jesus fucking H. Christ on a toothpick. I want a do-over.
It's really quite a small thing, as a percentage of my average day; but when I get stuck there and there's no one to turn to for comfort? I suddenly become, emotionally, that terrified infant again. That baby with arms and legs she can't control, a body she can't move around, lying there helplessly, unable to change her situation. She screams and flails (huh, just like the beetle! So that's where that image comes from!) ineffectively, and this big face looms at her and smiles, as if her antics are merely entertaining.
Somehow this person who's supposed to be my surrogate arms and legs has no clue that I need her (or his) HELP! I'm not just flailing to amuse myself! My howls, my terrified, wailing face, are a cry for succor, for HELP, you fucking idiots! Who the hell allowed you two to be parents, anyway? Jesus fucking H. Christ on a toothpick. I want a do-over.
rudderless? or is it something else?
I feel not so much out of control, and it's not directionless, or purpose-less...
It really has to do with the people in my life. Whenever I have someone to interact with, someone who actually expects me to show up and cares whether or not I *do* show up, whether physically, or by phone, or by email - suddenly there's a reason for me to be here, another hand with which to clap, to make a sound. Without that, I suddenly spin my wheels, have no purpose or meaning.
It doesn't have to be any particular person, just a person. Even one, who cares whether I show up, who cares what I say or do. My existence then has meaning.
It really has to do with the people in my life. Whenever I have someone to interact with, someone who actually expects me to show up and cares whether or not I *do* show up, whether physically, or by phone, or by email - suddenly there's a reason for me to be here, another hand with which to clap, to make a sound. Without that, I suddenly spin my wheels, have no purpose or meaning.
It doesn't have to be any particular person, just a person. Even one, who cares whether I show up, who cares what I say or do. My existence then has meaning.
it feels
as if there was a specific time and place at which it all went wrong. More than once. And the compounded effect of all that was to flatten me into one of those post-Wile E. Coyote moments where I'm nothing more than a grease spot on the road.
My father was such a fucking hammer, emotionally. He flattened me, over and over again.
And what makes it worse is that I trusted him. If I'd never trusted him, if I'd always been on guard would things have turned out better? I don't know.
All I know is, one day I was in, like Flynn, the next day I was out. Out of favor, out of my father's heart, and nothing I could do forever after that ever won him back over.
I wish I could ask him: "Dad, why do you hate me so much? Why are you always mean to me? Why do you treat me as if I'm nothing and nobody, as if I don't matter to you at all, in any way, shape or form?"
My father was such a fucking hammer, emotionally. He flattened me, over and over again.
And what makes it worse is that I trusted him. If I'd never trusted him, if I'd always been on guard would things have turned out better? I don't know.
All I know is, one day I was in, like Flynn, the next day I was out. Out of favor, out of my father's heart, and nothing I could do forever after that ever won him back over.
I wish I could ask him: "Dad, why do you hate me so much? Why are you always mean to me? Why do you treat me as if I'm nothing and nobody, as if I don't matter to you at all, in any way, shape or form?"
feeling totally, completely rudderless
[added: I keep changing the title because I can't figure out what that last word should be.]
I know this is ridiculous, but I just feel like I'm flailing here.
I feel like, my whole life, what've I've really needed is somebody to care. To notice. To pay attention to what I'm saying and doing and give some USEFUL fricking feedback.
I feel like nobody can really see who I AM, what I'm good at, what I'm useful for. I mean, the culture, of course, has all kinds of definitions of what a woman 'should' be and what a grown adult human 'should' be able to do and achieve.
But how does one get there, to this magical place of 'adulthood', all grown up, all figured out, all put together?
Nobody ever seems to want to talk about this stuff, and the people who seem to HAVE it together seem to have no idea whatsoever what I'm talking about. If I try to ask them questions or talk about it, it's as if I've sprouted three heads or started speaking Swahili or something.
I feel like Rip Van Winkle, like somehow I've been asleep or something all this time, and my body has kept aging, and I've continued to live life and have experiences, but - somehow, I, the essential me, has been disconnected from it all. And now all of a sudden I've got all this catching up to do, and no CLUE whatsoever how to it with very few financial, emotional or other resources.
What am I supposed to DO? People look away, as if you're something shameful, when you try to talk about this stuff. So I try to avoid such people, who are either in denial that anything like that has ever happened to them, or who really never have experienced having no safety net. Or, not the safety net you always assumed was there until you found yourself falling, screaming through space, terrified, and realized that - you were going to shatter. And no one was going to care. No one was going to help you pick up the pieces, or put them back together again. No one was going to care whether you managed to put the pieces together again. You begin to feel like some kind of Frankenstein's monster - all patches and seams and crooked places out of joint, like you've got this gigantic hump on your back that no one can literally see, but everybody reacts to as if you're some kind of - FREAK.
***
It's the same as it ever was - that feeling of not belonging, of having no place to fit in. Of being accepted (and even liked) in certain places, but it's just not enough - little fragments here and there that are never enough to create a whole picture. Like trying to put together a puzzle with half the pieces missing, or trying to sew a queen-size quilt with 3 square feet of fabric.
I keep searching for metaphors, some simple, straightforward explanation, something that fits neatly into a nutshell so that when I'm trying to explain, for the thousandth time, what's going on with me and WHY I need help (you can't ever just say, "Hey, I really need help with this, could you help me?" There's always this, "Why? Why can't you just do it yourself?" and it always seems pretty goddamn self-evident that, hey, if I could have done it all by myself I would have fucking DONE it by now, you fucking maroon.)
***
At this moment I feel less angry than simply perplexed, puzzled, at a loss, frantic to figure out WHAT THE BLOODY FUCKING HELL I'm supposed to DO.
I keep trying things, and nothing ever seems to make a substantial change. I've said this before, but I feel like one of those stupid beetles that keeps falling over on its back, and every time it falls over it lies there, helplessly, with no one to set it upright. It just flails its stupid beetle legs in the air, gaining no traction, making no progress. And if I *do* turn it over? It immediately falls over on its back again. It's like it LIKES lying there on its back, flailing its little legs with no meaning or purpose. Stupid beetle.
***
When your parents use you as a projection screen for their hopes, fears, needs, etc., you never have a chance. You never have a chance to be seen, to be heard, for who you really are. Because all you are is fragments of the bits that they project onto you - you never really get to be yourself.
(Thinking of the Snow Queen here, and the mirror shard that gets into
***
The pieces I need help with are (I'm pretty sure) developmental stage issues as far back as that murky, shadow time when I was a blob of cells lurking around in amniotic fluid, more than a twinkle in somebody's eye, less than a fully-formed, fully embodied being.
Gah. It gets so - esoteric, so weird, so quickly. I mean, I've spent years reading the literature, googling seven million questions from Sunday, and feel like my head is full of all these ideas of how things could be, should be, but simply AREN'T.
And then the three-heads phenomenon: Either they're touchy-feely, woo-woo New-Age bullshit practitioners who have no more clue what I'm on about than the most ill-read, ill-educated average Joe Clueless, or they're people who ought to know better, but somehow, they don't.
Just got a flash of an answer, try to grab its tail: Friend, lots of money, divorced, teenage kid. When she was quite young he was worried how the divorce was affecting her, and was afraid that he wasn't doing a 'good job' as a parent.
Now, I'm glad he asked for help, and that he had the money to BUY the help.
But there's this sneaking suspicion that, in a way, having money let him off the hook of doing his job properly. That these so-called 'experts' are just another scam, and he basically paid somebody to pat him on the head and tell him it's all going to be ok. Kind of like a mutual admiration society or something, or like one of those crystal ball readers who only tells good fortunes. Can't seem to quite capture the thought here...
***
Another attempt at nutshelling: The feeling is like, I've got all these parts, and I'm pretty sure they're supposed to make a bicycle - there's the wheels, and these gears, and a chain, and a seat. And some other bits and pieces that seem pretty bicycle-like.
But somehow there's something missing - the main frame, maybe? So, what the hell IS this thing, and how the hell do I put it together, all by myself with no models, no help, no frame of reference, and no fricking instruction manual? HELLO, can somebody PLEASE HELP ME????
The thing that's REALLY crazy-making is that all my life, people seem to act as if *I'm* in charge, as if *I'm* the one who knows what I'm doing. It's as if, when I ask them for help, I'm letting them down, somehow, because they NEEDED me to be the one in charge. Or something. Gah. I wish somebody would read this and tell me that it makes sense.
***
The word crawstep seems applicable, here - a kind of indirect, sideways shuffle that gets you where you're going, eventually, but you have to look nonchalant, as if there's no purpose or meaning to your movements, and sort of trick people into looking the other way while you're doing it, so that suddenly, while nobody's looking, you're there (wherever *there*, is. Cryptic.)
***
I think what I need is just someplace where I fit, where I'm *not* the oddball, odd woman out, etc. Someplace where I feel needed, wanted, accepted, understood. I don't have that feeling with my nominal 'family', (though I feel like my youngest brother accepted me pretty well til our falling out about a year ago).
Someplace that isn't a job, isn't a place of employment. I know it's supposed to be your 'family', but so often the cost of that so-called 'unconditional acceptance' is a whole lot of silence, an entire elephant shoved under the rug of 'issues we do not discuss'.
***
I think the truth is, everybody's faking it. Everybody's playing that 'man-behind-the-curtain' role, filling their lives with smoke and mirrors and we all accept it because - why? The alternative is too scary?
I've asked other people about this - that feeling that one day, you'll be there, that you'll know, you'll actually FEEL grown-up. But the truth is, most of us? are children hiding our insecurities in ever-aging bodies.
***
I've answered my own question: I don't have enough support.
How do I get enough support? Where is the support system for smart, sensitive, talented people who've somehow washed up onto the beach of later life without many of the things we're 'supposed' to have achieved by now, but somehow haven't?
I have to remember Fundamental Attribution Error. It's so easy to blame oneself for circumstances beyond one's control, especially when nobody else will accpet any responsibility.
I know this is ridiculous, but I just feel like I'm flailing here.
I feel like, my whole life, what've I've really needed is somebody to care. To notice. To pay attention to what I'm saying and doing and give some USEFUL fricking feedback.
I feel like nobody can really see who I AM, what I'm good at, what I'm useful for. I mean, the culture, of course, has all kinds of definitions of what a woman 'should' be and what a grown adult human 'should' be able to do and achieve.
But how does one get there, to this magical place of 'adulthood', all grown up, all figured out, all put together?
Nobody ever seems to want to talk about this stuff, and the people who seem to HAVE it together seem to have no idea whatsoever what I'm talking about. If I try to ask them questions or talk about it, it's as if I've sprouted three heads or started speaking Swahili or something.
I feel like Rip Van Winkle, like somehow I've been asleep or something all this time, and my body has kept aging, and I've continued to live life and have experiences, but - somehow, I, the essential me, has been disconnected from it all. And now all of a sudden I've got all this catching up to do, and no CLUE whatsoever how to it with very few financial, emotional or other resources.
What am I supposed to DO? People look away, as if you're something shameful, when you try to talk about this stuff. So I try to avoid such people, who are either in denial that anything like that has ever happened to them, or who really never have experienced having no safety net. Or, not the safety net you always assumed was there until you found yourself falling, screaming through space, terrified, and realized that - you were going to shatter. And no one was going to care. No one was going to help you pick up the pieces, or put them back together again. No one was going to care whether you managed to put the pieces together again. You begin to feel like some kind of Frankenstein's monster - all patches and seams and crooked places out of joint, like you've got this gigantic hump on your back that no one can literally see, but everybody reacts to as if you're some kind of - FREAK.
***
It's the same as it ever was - that feeling of not belonging, of having no place to fit in. Of being accepted (and even liked) in certain places, but it's just not enough - little fragments here and there that are never enough to create a whole picture. Like trying to put together a puzzle with half the pieces missing, or trying to sew a queen-size quilt with 3 square feet of fabric.
I keep searching for metaphors, some simple, straightforward explanation, something that fits neatly into a nutshell so that when I'm trying to explain, for the thousandth time, what's going on with me and WHY I need help (you can't ever just say, "Hey, I really need help with this, could you help me?" There's always this, "Why? Why can't you just do it yourself?" and it always seems pretty goddamn self-evident that, hey, if I could have done it all by myself I would have fucking DONE it by now, you fucking maroon.)
***
At this moment I feel less angry than simply perplexed, puzzled, at a loss, frantic to figure out WHAT THE BLOODY FUCKING HELL I'm supposed to DO.
I keep trying things, and nothing ever seems to make a substantial change. I've said this before, but I feel like one of those stupid beetles that keeps falling over on its back, and every time it falls over it lies there, helplessly, with no one to set it upright. It just flails its stupid beetle legs in the air, gaining no traction, making no progress. And if I *do* turn it over? It immediately falls over on its back again. It's like it LIKES lying there on its back, flailing its little legs with no meaning or purpose. Stupid beetle.
***
When your parents use you as a projection screen for their hopes, fears, needs, etc., you never have a chance. You never have a chance to be seen, to be heard, for who you really are. Because all you are is fragments of the bits that they project onto you - you never really get to be yourself.
(Thinking of the Snow Queen here, and the mirror shard that gets into
***
The pieces I need help with are (I'm pretty sure) developmental stage issues as far back as that murky, shadow time when I was a blob of cells lurking around in amniotic fluid, more than a twinkle in somebody's eye, less than a fully-formed, fully embodied being.
Gah. It gets so - esoteric, so weird, so quickly. I mean, I've spent years reading the literature, googling seven million questions from Sunday, and feel like my head is full of all these ideas of how things could be, should be, but simply AREN'T.
And then the three-heads phenomenon: Either they're touchy-feely, woo-woo New-Age bullshit practitioners who have no more clue what I'm on about than the most ill-read, ill-educated average Joe Clueless, or they're people who ought to know better, but somehow, they don't.
Just got a flash of an answer, try to grab its tail: Friend, lots of money, divorced, teenage kid. When she was quite young he was worried how the divorce was affecting her, and was afraid that he wasn't doing a 'good job' as a parent.
Now, I'm glad he asked for help, and that he had the money to BUY the help.
But there's this sneaking suspicion that, in a way, having money let him off the hook of doing his job properly. That these so-called 'experts' are just another scam, and he basically paid somebody to pat him on the head and tell him it's all going to be ok. Kind of like a mutual admiration society or something, or like one of those crystal ball readers who only tells good fortunes. Can't seem to quite capture the thought here...
***
Another attempt at nutshelling: The feeling is like, I've got all these parts, and I'm pretty sure they're supposed to make a bicycle - there's the wheels, and these gears, and a chain, and a seat. And some other bits and pieces that seem pretty bicycle-like.
But somehow there's something missing - the main frame, maybe? So, what the hell IS this thing, and how the hell do I put it together, all by myself with no models, no help, no frame of reference, and no fricking instruction manual? HELLO, can somebody PLEASE HELP ME????
The thing that's REALLY crazy-making is that all my life, people seem to act as if *I'm* in charge, as if *I'm* the one who knows what I'm doing. It's as if, when I ask them for help, I'm letting them down, somehow, because they NEEDED me to be the one in charge. Or something. Gah. I wish somebody would read this and tell me that it makes sense.
***
The word crawstep seems applicable, here - a kind of indirect, sideways shuffle that gets you where you're going, eventually, but you have to look nonchalant, as if there's no purpose or meaning to your movements, and sort of trick people into looking the other way while you're doing it, so that suddenly, while nobody's looking, you're there (wherever *there*, is. Cryptic.)
***
I think what I need is just someplace where I fit, where I'm *not* the oddball, odd woman out, etc. Someplace where I feel needed, wanted, accepted, understood. I don't have that feeling with my nominal 'family', (though I feel like my youngest brother accepted me pretty well til our falling out about a year ago).
Someplace that isn't a job, isn't a place of employment. I know it's supposed to be your 'family', but so often the cost of that so-called 'unconditional acceptance' is a whole lot of silence, an entire elephant shoved under the rug of 'issues we do not discuss'.
***
I think the truth is, everybody's faking it. Everybody's playing that 'man-behind-the-curtain' role, filling their lives with smoke and mirrors and we all accept it because - why? The alternative is too scary?
I've asked other people about this - that feeling that one day, you'll be there, that you'll know, you'll actually FEEL grown-up. But the truth is, most of us? are children hiding our insecurities in ever-aging bodies.
***
I've answered my own question: I don't have enough support.
How do I get enough support? Where is the support system for smart, sensitive, talented people who've somehow washed up onto the beach of later life without many of the things we're 'supposed' to have achieved by now, but somehow haven't?
I have to remember Fundamental Attribution Error. It's so easy to blame oneself for circumstances beyond one's control, especially when nobody else will accpet any responsibility.
Monday, July 19, 2010
embarrassing
So, the other day I desperately needed to get out and get some exercise. The weather was finally perfect - not too hot, not too cold :-) I hadn't been for a run in eons, and wasn't sure I could even coax this creaky machine into gear to do it. Plus I knew I'd have to run the gauntlet of the construction crew I'd had a run-in with a while back in order to get to the path, plus it's a dry, dusty route with little shade and lots of traffic (read: Breathing copious quantities of exhaust fumes while trying to 'exercise' seems like - stupidity? Cost/benefit ratio doesn't pencil out. Or something.)
So I was nervous, and unshowered to boot (it gets harder to feel 'presentable' as one gets older, even leaving the house can be a bit scary unless you've 'done yourself up' properly. The way a woman alone gets treated if she hasn't conformed properly to expectations is - painful, to say the least. And especially if you're reasonably attractive, it seems as if they punish you more for it than if you're unattractive. It's as if they're saying, 'You're so close to being what I expect you to be, why don't you just make that little bit more effort and make yourself look good so I can have some eye candy?')
Argh. Sometimes I wish I could just shut my brain off for a while, just do whatever the hell I feel like without being affected the least bit by what others say or do, how they look at me, how they respond to me, how they treat me. I sometimes wish there could be less me about it all, and just live. Sort of like I imagine an animal lives: Not cursed by this horrible disease of self-awareness.
So I finally got myself dressed, out the door, down the hill, past the construction site uneventfully - didn't hear a peep from them, maybe by chance I happened to go past at lunch? Didn't have the nerve to even glance over there. Anyway - whew, fears were unfounded in that particular case. Yay! Then felt a little bolder, started to trot. Got down to the main drag and the path, and it was dusty and dry and traffic-laden as predicted. Slowed down again, feeling overwhelmed by the ugliness of it all, even though this is a well-used, well-maintained path - I just needed something quieter and more friendly.
But I kept going, stopping to rest when needed. Came to the golf course and was annoyed that these over-moneyed folks got to enjoy the nice green grass and shade while I had to do my work out in the hot (it was getting hotter) sun on dusty pavement too close to the cars. So I detoured onto the grass and under some shade along the edge of the golf course for a bit, til I got to a place that was too close to the putting greens, with too much risk of getting hit.
Got to the stretch where there are two casinos in a row, which is even more miserable and barren - no trees, giant parking lots with loose, slippery gravel all over the place and alien beings in weird, glittery get-ups on their way to smoke themselves to death in some darkened cave while feeding their money to hungry machines that maybe never give them anything back... actually never been into one of those places, so I really don't know. No desire to visit that particular universe.
I almost turned back at this point, was feeling overwhelmed by the ugliness of it all, and was starting to get a little tired. But I was almost to the one section of the path that's usually pretty attractive, the part along the river that bends away from the road for a mile or so, and has lots of nice trees and growies. Being the middle of the day on a weekday, it should be pretty quiet.
So I got onto the river part of the trail, and begin to feel a second wind, started to cheer up, actually began to feel happy! And then, around the bend, I could hear some infernal combustion engine roaring away. What the hell??? Don't I get any breaks at all today? Isn't there anyplace in this fricking area that I can get away from the constant construction/destruction/noise/etc? Apparently not. I hesitated, not sure whether to continue or not. I was so frustrated at this point, having gotten this far, surmounted all the hurdles, to have the 'prize' of a few quiet moments in a pretty place snatched away from me.
'Dammit,' I thought, 'I'm not going to let the buggers get me down.'
So I belted ahead, thinking I'd just run past whatever it was as fast as I could. I got around the corner, and lo and behold it's this guy with giant headphones on and one of those industrial size leaf-blowers smack in the middle of the path, blasting up dust and dirt, filling the air with unbreathable clouds. I got angry, and stood there, staring at the guy, who appeared not to notice. I stuck my fingers in my ears and approached slowly, hoping he'd get the message and at least shut the thing off so I could pass without being deafened or blasted by the stupid thing.
Lo and behold, when I got about 20 feet from him, he shut the thing off! Will miracles never cease! I was grateful, gave him a quick smile and nod, moved forward to pass.
But then he did that creepy thing that so many guys do when they think they're doing you a 'favor', (as opposed to just doing the fucking right thing), and he kind of leered/smirked at me as I passed, as if he expected some further kind of interaction from me as 'payment' for him being 'a nice guy'.
Fuck. I just turned away from him and kept walking. At which point, the *second* I was past him, he started that leaf blower up again before I'd gotten five feet away from him, and the sound was overwhelming! It was like someone had hit me in the head.
My response was visceral: I turned and shoved him as hard as I could. Unfortunately, my adrenalin surge wasn't enough to overcome the fact that he out-massed me by a significant margin, plus he was carrying that 50-pound (?) gizmo, so it was basically like trying to shove a rock.
Not to put to fine a point on it, I fell over (laws of physics and all that, for each and every action, there will be and equal and opposite reaction, etc.)
I would have laughed, except I was too busy scrambling to get up because this yayhoo (sp?) appeared to be threatening me with the damn leaf-blower, as if he was going to hit me with it or something! As if that wasn't enough, he was asshole enough to say something like, 'Get back down there on the ground or I'll...' at this point I tuned him out and just shouted, 'You did that on purpose! You jerk!' And I almost bit him, I wanted to so badly, one of his hands was on the leaf blower nozzle very near me, and I could have done it. But my mind was thinking, 'Blech, he's all dirty! You don't want to bite that!' Besides which, I didn't know what he'd do, or whether he'd get violent.
He seemed clearly shaken up by the whole thing - one of these guys who thinks women can just be shoved around and treated any old way they want. Or maybe it's a power/bully thing? Maybe he just saw me as 'weaker', and didn't really think of it in terms of me being female. I have to say, it felt a bit more like the latter.
I felt so victorious, I almost did a victory dance! But I thought the best thing was to hightail it out of there as fast as possible, before he found some further way to come after me. Because there was a maintenance truck a little further down the trail, and I could just see him coming after me in it, he seemed like that kind of guy. I just wanted to get away as fast as possible.
I so felt like I won, even though *I* was the one who fell (and fell hard - though I didn't really *feel* the bruise til the adrenaline started draining away, I knew I'd done some damage, I felt it hurt when I hit the ground, but was too busy getting up again to think about it just then).
I STOOD UP to the motherfucker! I didn't let him just walk all over me! It felt so fucking good to actually, physically, push back against someone who was obviously used to being able to throw his weight around in the most literal sense. I didn't even care that I fell over! It was almost funny, it was worth it just to see the flicker of shock and dismay on his face that he hadn't managed to frighten this little pipsqueak. Hah! Take that, you bullies of the world!
***
I had another run-in with some guys in a parking lot a few days later, I was getting into my car after picking up a few things at the store, and the radio of the car next to me started blasting some rap. I looked over, not having realized there was anyone in the car til then, and there were two late-teens, early-20s guys looking all tough and staring at me as if daring me to say anything.
I just stared back, and they backed out, stopping while one of them spit out the window right in front of me.
I spit right back at him (though unfortunately most of it just drooled down my chin - d'oh!), but enough of it went toward him for him to see it and yell at me, 'what the fuck, crazy lady', and they drove away while I shouted how rude they were, how obnoxious, and they drove away calling me names, while I yelled back over the top of them, 'Ooh, what tough guys,' practically dancing with rebelliousness, daring them to come back (but only in my mind - and really hoping they'd just go away - they seemed like the kind of lame losers who'd key my car or something rather than deal with me directly).
Feeling victorious yet again for having not backed down, I returned to my car and this middle-aged couple asked me what was going on. I admitted that it was kind of stupid, but the guys were rude and seemed to be trying to (almost casually?) intimidate me, and the spitting pissed me off, and the couple agreed and said, 'oh, you should be careful!' And I said, 'well, you know, if we don't stand up to them they just keep doing it. I have to stand up to them.' I don't put up with that shit (unless I seriously think I might be endangering myself, in which case my spidey sense usually tells me to shut up.)
At which the guy said, 'You're one in a hundred, you know that? Not many people would stand up to them like that.' I said, 'I know, I wish more people would do it, then maybe they'd stop being bullies! Because they'd know they couldn't get away with it.' We talked a little more, the woman told me she'd been hit with a gun once, which had made her a little wary. But the guy was more encouraging and appreciative, I guess because he maybe hadn't ever been 'quashed' himself? Dunno. Anyway, nice 'validation' moment. Ka-ching! :-)
So I was nervous, and unshowered to boot (it gets harder to feel 'presentable' as one gets older, even leaving the house can be a bit scary unless you've 'done yourself up' properly. The way a woman alone gets treated if she hasn't conformed properly to expectations is - painful, to say the least. And especially if you're reasonably attractive, it seems as if they punish you more for it than if you're unattractive. It's as if they're saying, 'You're so close to being what I expect you to be, why don't you just make that little bit more effort and make yourself look good so I can have some eye candy?')
Argh. Sometimes I wish I could just shut my brain off for a while, just do whatever the hell I feel like without being affected the least bit by what others say or do, how they look at me, how they respond to me, how they treat me. I sometimes wish there could be less me about it all, and just live. Sort of like I imagine an animal lives: Not cursed by this horrible disease of self-awareness.
So I finally got myself dressed, out the door, down the hill, past the construction site uneventfully - didn't hear a peep from them, maybe by chance I happened to go past at lunch? Didn't have the nerve to even glance over there. Anyway - whew, fears were unfounded in that particular case. Yay! Then felt a little bolder, started to trot. Got down to the main drag and the path, and it was dusty and dry and traffic-laden as predicted. Slowed down again, feeling overwhelmed by the ugliness of it all, even though this is a well-used, well-maintained path - I just needed something quieter and more friendly.
But I kept going, stopping to rest when needed. Came to the golf course and was annoyed that these over-moneyed folks got to enjoy the nice green grass and shade while I had to do my work out in the hot (it was getting hotter) sun on dusty pavement too close to the cars. So I detoured onto the grass and under some shade along the edge of the golf course for a bit, til I got to a place that was too close to the putting greens, with too much risk of getting hit.
Got to the stretch where there are two casinos in a row, which is even more miserable and barren - no trees, giant parking lots with loose, slippery gravel all over the place and alien beings in weird, glittery get-ups on their way to smoke themselves to death in some darkened cave while feeding their money to hungry machines that maybe never give them anything back... actually never been into one of those places, so I really don't know. No desire to visit that particular universe.
I almost turned back at this point, was feeling overwhelmed by the ugliness of it all, and was starting to get a little tired. But I was almost to the one section of the path that's usually pretty attractive, the part along the river that bends away from the road for a mile or so, and has lots of nice trees and growies. Being the middle of the day on a weekday, it should be pretty quiet.
So I got onto the river part of the trail, and begin to feel a second wind, started to cheer up, actually began to feel happy! And then, around the bend, I could hear some infernal combustion engine roaring away. What the hell??? Don't I get any breaks at all today? Isn't there anyplace in this fricking area that I can get away from the constant construction/destruction/noise/etc? Apparently not. I hesitated, not sure whether to continue or not. I was so frustrated at this point, having gotten this far, surmounted all the hurdles, to have the 'prize' of a few quiet moments in a pretty place snatched away from me.
'Dammit,' I thought, 'I'm not going to let the buggers get me down.'
So I belted ahead, thinking I'd just run past whatever it was as fast as I could. I got around the corner, and lo and behold it's this guy with giant headphones on and one of those industrial size leaf-blowers smack in the middle of the path, blasting up dust and dirt, filling the air with unbreathable clouds. I got angry, and stood there, staring at the guy, who appeared not to notice. I stuck my fingers in my ears and approached slowly, hoping he'd get the message and at least shut the thing off so I could pass without being deafened or blasted by the stupid thing.
Lo and behold, when I got about 20 feet from him, he shut the thing off! Will miracles never cease! I was grateful, gave him a quick smile and nod, moved forward to pass.
But then he did that creepy thing that so many guys do when they think they're doing you a 'favor', (as opposed to just doing the fucking right thing), and he kind of leered/smirked at me as I passed, as if he expected some further kind of interaction from me as 'payment' for him being 'a nice guy'.
Fuck. I just turned away from him and kept walking. At which point, the *second* I was past him, he started that leaf blower up again before I'd gotten five feet away from him, and the sound was overwhelming! It was like someone had hit me in the head.
My response was visceral: I turned and shoved him as hard as I could. Unfortunately, my adrenalin surge wasn't enough to overcome the fact that he out-massed me by a significant margin, plus he was carrying that 50-pound (?) gizmo, so it was basically like trying to shove a rock.
Not to put to fine a point on it, I fell over (laws of physics and all that, for each and every action, there will be and equal and opposite reaction, etc.)
I would have laughed, except I was too busy scrambling to get up because this yayhoo (sp?) appeared to be threatening me with the damn leaf-blower, as if he was going to hit me with it or something! As if that wasn't enough, he was asshole enough to say something like, 'Get back down there on the ground or I'll...' at this point I tuned him out and just shouted, 'You did that on purpose! You jerk!' And I almost bit him, I wanted to so badly, one of his hands was on the leaf blower nozzle very near me, and I could have done it. But my mind was thinking, 'Blech, he's all dirty! You don't want to bite that!' Besides which, I didn't know what he'd do, or whether he'd get violent.
He seemed clearly shaken up by the whole thing - one of these guys who thinks women can just be shoved around and treated any old way they want. Or maybe it's a power/bully thing? Maybe he just saw me as 'weaker', and didn't really think of it in terms of me being female. I have to say, it felt a bit more like the latter.
I felt so victorious, I almost did a victory dance! But I thought the best thing was to hightail it out of there as fast as possible, before he found some further way to come after me. Because there was a maintenance truck a little further down the trail, and I could just see him coming after me in it, he seemed like that kind of guy. I just wanted to get away as fast as possible.
I so felt like I won, even though *I* was the one who fell (and fell hard - though I didn't really *feel* the bruise til the adrenaline started draining away, I knew I'd done some damage, I felt it hurt when I hit the ground, but was too busy getting up again to think about it just then).
I STOOD UP to the motherfucker! I didn't let him just walk all over me! It felt so fucking good to actually, physically, push back against someone who was obviously used to being able to throw his weight around in the most literal sense. I didn't even care that I fell over! It was almost funny, it was worth it just to see the flicker of shock and dismay on his face that he hadn't managed to frighten this little pipsqueak. Hah! Take that, you bullies of the world!
***
I had another run-in with some guys in a parking lot a few days later, I was getting into my car after picking up a few things at the store, and the radio of the car next to me started blasting some rap. I looked over, not having realized there was anyone in the car til then, and there were two late-teens, early-20s guys looking all tough and staring at me as if daring me to say anything.
I just stared back, and they backed out, stopping while one of them spit out the window right in front of me.
I spit right back at him (though unfortunately most of it just drooled down my chin - d'oh!), but enough of it went toward him for him to see it and yell at me, 'what the fuck, crazy lady', and they drove away while I shouted how rude they were, how obnoxious, and they drove away calling me names, while I yelled back over the top of them, 'Ooh, what tough guys,' practically dancing with rebelliousness, daring them to come back (but only in my mind - and really hoping they'd just go away - they seemed like the kind of lame losers who'd key my car or something rather than deal with me directly).
Feeling victorious yet again for having not backed down, I returned to my car and this middle-aged couple asked me what was going on. I admitted that it was kind of stupid, but the guys were rude and seemed to be trying to (almost casually?) intimidate me, and the spitting pissed me off, and the couple agreed and said, 'oh, you should be careful!' And I said, 'well, you know, if we don't stand up to them they just keep doing it. I have to stand up to them.' I don't put up with that shit (unless I seriously think I might be endangering myself, in which case my spidey sense usually tells me to shut up.)
At which the guy said, 'You're one in a hundred, you know that? Not many people would stand up to them like that.' I said, 'I know, I wish more people would do it, then maybe they'd stop being bullies! Because they'd know they couldn't get away with it.' We talked a little more, the woman told me she'd been hit with a gun once, which had made her a little wary. But the guy was more encouraging and appreciative, I guess because he maybe hadn't ever been 'quashed' himself? Dunno. Anyway, nice 'validation' moment. Ka-ching! :-)
emotional dialects?
Sometimes I feel as if my ability to communicate is like a car with a broken steering wheel, or trying to drive with a linkage that's been tampered with. You turn the wheel, but the car goes some other direction entirely. Who's steering this damn thing anyway???
To some degree I think it's just human nature: Even though many of us nominally learned some form of 'English' as children, we each learned our own peculiar variant or emotional 'dialect' from our families. And if as many families are dysfunctional as seems to be suggested by the shrink literature, then it's no wonder so many of us can't communicate with each other.
What compounds the frustration for me is when the other person not only doesn't seem to get what I'm saying, but doesn't seem to be aware of any miscommunication. They walk away, perfectly content (or so it seems), while I'm left with this slightly sick feeling in my stomach from being unheard yet again.
It seems that the only thing to do is to try as hard as you can to *only* allow people in your life who 'get' you, and you 'get' them. Because otherwise the frustration level is phenomenal, and severely impedes forward motion of any kind. It's like trying to run with 50-pound weights around your ankles. Or something.
I think I must have written something similar to this a thousand times, but I guess it can't be said often enough. And maybe, since I was the 'odd woman out' in my family, I'm so used to fighting to be heard and swimming upstream and all that, I almost don't feel at home unless there's a certain amount of friction going on. Is that true? That seems like a really stupid and counterproductive thing to have happening. But maybe it *is* true. Hm. So: Should I fight it, tooth and nail, or just do the old 'radical acceptance' thing? My gut says to go with the latter. Notice it, try to pay attention to it, but don't try to change it particularly, one way or another. Sometimes just observing, as if from outside of oneself, can be enough to begin to shift the pattern.
To some degree I think it's just human nature: Even though many of us nominally learned some form of 'English' as children, we each learned our own peculiar variant or emotional 'dialect' from our families. And if as many families are dysfunctional as seems to be suggested by the shrink literature, then it's no wonder so many of us can't communicate with each other.
What compounds the frustration for me is when the other person not only doesn't seem to get what I'm saying, but doesn't seem to be aware of any miscommunication. They walk away, perfectly content (or so it seems), while I'm left with this slightly sick feeling in my stomach from being unheard yet again.
It seems that the only thing to do is to try as hard as you can to *only* allow people in your life who 'get' you, and you 'get' them. Because otherwise the frustration level is phenomenal, and severely impedes forward motion of any kind. It's like trying to run with 50-pound weights around your ankles. Or something.
I think I must have written something similar to this a thousand times, but I guess it can't be said often enough. And maybe, since I was the 'odd woman out' in my family, I'm so used to fighting to be heard and swimming upstream and all that, I almost don't feel at home unless there's a certain amount of friction going on. Is that true? That seems like a really stupid and counterproductive thing to have happening. But maybe it *is* true. Hm. So: Should I fight it, tooth and nail, or just do the old 'radical acceptance' thing? My gut says to go with the latter. Notice it, try to pay attention to it, but don't try to change it particularly, one way or another. Sometimes just observing, as if from outside of oneself, can be enough to begin to shift the pattern.
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