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.