I think what my family, and particularly my brothers, don't understand is that I missed an entire section of my childhood, somehow. I'm not entirely sure how it happened or what happened - I think it was a matter of timing, and poor emotional resources on my mom's part, and total emotional unavailability on the part of my dad.
I think I did my best to survive, but I was operating at almost a survival level in terms of getting my emotional and developmental needs met, in spite of living in a comfortable house and having most of the comforts an average, middle-class family might expect.
I keep wondering if those first seven years, when money was so tight and we moved so many times created a kind of instability for me that my parents didn't register and my brothers didn't experience? It's as if I have a different, separate history from any of the rest of them, and they just simply don't *get* it.
And without anybody to 'witness' it or who actually *remembers* how it went .... well, I'm not sure what to do.
I feel this strong need for 'validation' of my experience(s).
In the past, when I've tried to talk to mom about this, I've found myself getting angry with her because she never seemed to be able to see my point of view. She'd always get defensive, and try to make *me* feel guilty for being upset with her. And it would spiral down into one of those useless, pointless arguments that goes nowhere and before long you no longer have any idea what the discussion is even *about*. Down the rabbit hole.
I wonder, if I could talk to her about the FEAR and the TERROR that I have experienced most of my life (with brief exceptions, such as the first two years I was with ex-partner), I wonder if she would LISTEN? I'm remembering that another reason I'd often find myself angry with her was because, instead of listening to MY story and asking me questions and wanting to know more or understand, instead she'd constantly turn the conversation to herSELF and make it a competition to see who had the worse time of it. Which is totally pointless and a waste of time.
I think I'm still looking for a way in, a tiny crack in the sidewalk where I can somehow, some way, find closure, completion, understanding of this story. If I can find even ONE person who somehow GETS it, who was there, who KNOWS what I was going through - then maybe I can regain something like emotional solid ground? Instead of feeling constantly at sea, adrift, unanchored, floating (and not in a good way).
Staying away from them is one solution, but they're also the only people who KNOW me at that level, to that depth. No one else on the planet was around for that period of my life.
I keep trying to 'figure this out', over and over and over again. Like a dog worrying at a bone. I can't seem to let it go - even when I'm not consciously thinking about it, the insecurity of it seems to nag at me.
***
The problem is that money doesn't solve the basic issue of lack of connection. Or, "Money can't buy you love." Which is why it's hard to get motivated to go out and look for a job when I don't have any reason other than just my own survival to keep me going.
And it's not that I don't CARE about myself; it's just that it's not enough. Not enough of a reason to get up every day and slog through a tedious, mind-numbing pile of crap that I couldn't care less about. It just doesn't make sense.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
images
Maybe the reason I love the Pirates of the Caribbean is that there are so many fantastic visual metaphors?
One favorite moment is when Cap'n Jack's ship is sinking, and he steps off onto the dock just as the crow's nest hits the waterline and disappears. To live life with such aplomb, such style - as if everything is exactly as you meant it to be, never a moment's doubt. Or, never *showing* it, anyway. It seems to be a kind of mindset, a fearlessness.
I have to remember this is a movie, Hollywood. In real life, the ship would sink 50 yards away from the dock, or you'd get your foot tangled in a line and trip, or, or, or. And Johnny Depp has so insanely much money that he's got the first 4 or 5 levels of Maslow's Hierarchy covered for the rest of his life, barring major mishaps.
But still. Can you take that *attitude* and somehow combine it with a realistic approach? Keep your expectations low, but always walk with your head held high? Or some such?
Don't worry, I haven't been brainwashed by some 'positive thinking' guru - never happen, I don't believe in it.
***
The hard part is that these stories are always about men, and any women in the story seem to be afterthoughts, asides. And the women are almost always young, and beautiful.
Remember: Most Hollywood movies are bankrolled and produced by aging, fat, balding men living out their fantasies on the silver screen. So they cast a guy like themselves as the lead (that's the only explanation I can understand for the success of someone like Jack Nicholson) and the woman of their personal dreams as the female sidekick.
***
I can tell myself this stuff over and over, but it still doesn't help.
It's still insanely exhausting to be female and forty-something and broke. The idea of getting on the treadmill just so I can afford to feed and house myself so that I can be well rested to go get back on the treadmill the next day - I don't see how people do it.
I did it for as many years as I could stand it, until I basically had to run out of there as fast as possible while I could still escape under my own power and not with an escort of men in white jackets flourishing scary-looking syringes...
***
I'm scaring myself. I have to stop this.
Turning to my old friend Distraction, yet again.
Later, 'gaters.
One favorite moment is when Cap'n Jack's ship is sinking, and he steps off onto the dock just as the crow's nest hits the waterline and disappears. To live life with such aplomb, such style - as if everything is exactly as you meant it to be, never a moment's doubt. Or, never *showing* it, anyway. It seems to be a kind of mindset, a fearlessness.
I have to remember this is a movie, Hollywood. In real life, the ship would sink 50 yards away from the dock, or you'd get your foot tangled in a line and trip, or, or, or. And Johnny Depp has so insanely much money that he's got the first 4 or 5 levels of Maslow's Hierarchy covered for the rest of his life, barring major mishaps.
But still. Can you take that *attitude* and somehow combine it with a realistic approach? Keep your expectations low, but always walk with your head held high? Or some such?
Don't worry, I haven't been brainwashed by some 'positive thinking' guru - never happen, I don't believe in it.
***
The hard part is that these stories are always about men, and any women in the story seem to be afterthoughts, asides. And the women are almost always young, and beautiful.
Remember: Most Hollywood movies are bankrolled and produced by aging, fat, balding men living out their fantasies on the silver screen. So they cast a guy like themselves as the lead (that's the only explanation I can understand for the success of someone like Jack Nicholson) and the woman of their personal dreams as the female sidekick.
***
I can tell myself this stuff over and over, but it still doesn't help.
It's still insanely exhausting to be female and forty-something and broke. The idea of getting on the treadmill just so I can afford to feed and house myself so that I can be well rested to go get back on the treadmill the next day - I don't see how people do it.
I did it for as many years as I could stand it, until I basically had to run out of there as fast as possible while I could still escape under my own power and not with an escort of men in white jackets flourishing scary-looking syringes...
***
I'm scaring myself. I have to stop this.
Turning to my old friend Distraction, yet again.
Later, 'gaters.
terrified
From this website
http://www.healer.ch/bmsarticle.html
http://www.healer.ch/bmsarticle.html
The Root Chakra is associated with the parts of our consciousness concerned with security, survival, or trust. For most people, this concerns the parts of their consciousness concerned with money, home, and job. When this chakra is in its clear state, the person is able to feel secure, be present in the here and now, and be grounded. When there is tension in this chakra, it is experienced as insecurity or fear. When there is more tension, it is experienced as a threat to survival.
Parts of the body controlled by the sacral plexus and this chakra include the skeleton system, the legs, and the elimination system. Symptoms in these parts of the body represent, therefore, tensions at the level of the Root Chakra, and we therefore know that the person is seeing the world through a perceptual filter of insecurity or fear. The adrenal glands are also associated with this chakra.
pretty *in progress*
People do what they are rewarded for doing.
Men are rewarded for far more things than women are. Men are rewarded for:
Being male
Women are rewarded for: Being pretty
Where 'pretty' is defined in such a narrow way that only .00073% of women can possibly hope to conform adequately to the absolutely insane beauty standards being foisted on us.
Men are required to:
Be clean, neat and tidy
Wear decent clothes
They may shave or not, as they see fit.
They may wear their hair any way they like; convenience is more important than style. Any man who spends more than 5 minutes a day on his hair is considered a WUSS.
Women are required to:
Remove every speck of body hair, visible or not except
The hair on her head, which she must wear inconveniently long, and which must give the appearance of a healthy mane, the maintenance of which shall consume not less than one tenth of her daily energy, time and income.
At the same time, a woman must achieve all this while NEVER inconveniencing anyone in the production of said miraculously perfect appearance; she must never keep anyone waiting, or inconvenience someone by having to stop and check her makeup or comb her hair.
Yet no matter what her age, income or social status, she must CONTINUALLY take into account the FEELINGS of the people around her, who may be offended if she is less than PERFECT.
A woman may, if she is exceedingly fortunate, find herself periodically in conformance with the prevailing beauty trends at any given moment. Her hair may happen to naturally be straight at just the moment that stick-straight hair is all the rage; she may happen to be thin, or curvy, or have a particular complexion that just happens to be the flavor of the day.
Men are rewarded for far more things than women are. Men are rewarded for:
Being male
Women are rewarded for: Being pretty
Where 'pretty' is defined in such a narrow way that only .00073% of women can possibly hope to conform adequately to the absolutely insane beauty standards being foisted on us.
Men are required to:
Be clean, neat and tidy
Wear decent clothes
They may shave or not, as they see fit.
They may wear their hair any way they like; convenience is more important than style. Any man who spends more than 5 minutes a day on his hair is considered a WUSS.
Women are required to:
Remove every speck of body hair, visible or not except
The hair on her head, which she must wear inconveniently long, and which must give the appearance of a healthy mane, the maintenance of which shall consume not less than one tenth of her daily energy, time and income.
At the same time, a woman must achieve all this while NEVER inconveniencing anyone in the production of said miraculously perfect appearance; she must never keep anyone waiting, or inconvenience someone by having to stop and check her makeup or comb her hair.
Yet no matter what her age, income or social status, she must CONTINUALLY take into account the FEELINGS of the people around her, who may be offended if she is less than PERFECT.
A woman may, if she is exceedingly fortunate, find herself periodically in conformance with the prevailing beauty trends at any given moment. Her hair may happen to naturally be straight at just the moment that stick-straight hair is all the rage; she may happen to be thin, or curvy, or have a particular complexion that just happens to be the flavor of the day.
communicating with parents is like - making sausages?
I took a shot at illustrating my take on the saying, "Laws are like sausages: It's best not to see them being made."
For me this is most apropos in the situation of trying to say something to my mom: When you say something to a parental unit, what goes in bears little resemblance to what she hears. Apparently.
You put something in one ear; it churns through what passes for the parental 'thought' process like so: The base mix of chopped preconceptions is sprinkled with doubt and seasoned with a dollop of selective listening; the result is cooked in the fire of parental certainty ("My way or the highway") and squeezed into an intestine-like and equally constraining tube of parental bias.
The drawings aren't as funny as I'd like. WAH! But I like to draw, so we'll see if I can find something I think I *am* good at (with the drawing, that is.)
***
The ideal outcome of an attempted communication is something like this:
This is where what you've attempted to express and what is understood by the other person are pretty much the same thing.
Then there's the case where *most* of the communication gets through, but the other person sees things from a slightly different angle, which is pretty normal. Not a big deal.
Then we get to selective listening:
And finally, there's THIS kind of 'communication':
It reminds me of a game called 'telephone' that we used to play in school when I was a kid, where the kids would all sit in a circle, and one person would whisper a sentence to the person next to her. Whatever the sentence was, it was supposed to get repeated all the way around the circle, one person to the next, til it got to the last person, who then said the sentence out loud.
Invariably, no matter how simple it was, the sentence would become scrambled beyond all recognition. "My grandma wears purple hats" would morph to "My aunt's dog eats underpants" or some equally HILARIOUS transformation. (Usually there were at least 10 or 15 kids in the circle, which would add to the craziness. The fact that they're kids, the complexity of the sentence, the number of people must all be factors - but I used to use that game to illustrate to co-workers and colleagues how hard it can be to achieve clear, precise communication.
***
These drawings are making me a little sad - they looked so great when I was working on them, but in the final edition they just look kind of boring. Too much focus on small details that get lost at any distance. Seems that 'big picture' thinking may be more effective for this kind of thing?
And can you even TELL that the yellow thing in the first frame is supposed to be a banana? Argh. I'm TRYING not to try so hard, I really am. I'm TRYING not to think so much.
Fuck it. Too many rules. I yam what I yam. (Can I draw a picture of Popeye that looks sort of like me?)
Maybe I'll try posting a detailed bit, to see how it looks:
Hm. It still loses some definition, and what are those brown specks on the bottoms of his FEET??? Are Banana Man's feet rotten? Blech. More to learn. [Edit: I think I just need to draw the really detailed stuff BIGGER. More room for error that way, plus then when you shrink it down to blog size it doesn't look so pixelated.]
***
"I used to be indecisive...but now I'm just not sure."
For me this is most apropos in the situation of trying to say something to my mom: When you say something to a parental unit, what goes in bears little resemblance to what she hears. Apparently.
You put something in one ear; it churns through what passes for the parental 'thought' process like so: The base mix of chopped preconceptions is sprinkled with doubt and seasoned with a dollop of selective listening; the result is cooked in the fire of parental certainty ("My way or the highway") and squeezed into an intestine-like and equally constraining tube of parental bias.
The drawings aren't as funny as I'd like. WAH! But I like to draw, so we'll see if I can find something I think I *am* good at (with the drawing, that is.)
***
The ideal outcome of an attempted communication is something like this:
This is where what you've attempted to express and what is understood by the other person are pretty much the same thing.
Then there's the case where *most* of the communication gets through, but the other person sees things from a slightly different angle, which is pretty normal. Not a big deal.
Then we get to selective listening:
And finally, there's THIS kind of 'communication':
It reminds me of a game called 'telephone' that we used to play in school when I was a kid, where the kids would all sit in a circle, and one person would whisper a sentence to the person next to her. Whatever the sentence was, it was supposed to get repeated all the way around the circle, one person to the next, til it got to the last person, who then said the sentence out loud.
Invariably, no matter how simple it was, the sentence would become scrambled beyond all recognition. "My grandma wears purple hats" would morph to "My aunt's dog eats underpants" or some equally HILARIOUS transformation. (Usually there were at least 10 or 15 kids in the circle, which would add to the craziness. The fact that they're kids, the complexity of the sentence, the number of people must all be factors - but I used to use that game to illustrate to co-workers and colleagues how hard it can be to achieve clear, precise communication.
***
These drawings are making me a little sad - they looked so great when I was working on them, but in the final edition they just look kind of boring. Too much focus on small details that get lost at any distance. Seems that 'big picture' thinking may be more effective for this kind of thing?
And can you even TELL that the yellow thing in the first frame is supposed to be a banana? Argh. I'm TRYING not to try so hard, I really am. I'm TRYING not to think so much.
Fuck it. Too many rules. I yam what I yam. (Can I draw a picture of Popeye that looks sort of like me?)
Maybe I'll try posting a detailed bit, to see how it looks:
Hm. It still loses some definition, and what are those brown specks on the bottoms of his FEET??? Are Banana Man's feet rotten? Blech. More to learn. [Edit: I think I just need to draw the really detailed stuff BIGGER. More room for error that way, plus then when you shrink it down to blog size it doesn't look so pixelated.]
***
"I used to be indecisive...but now I'm just not sure."
Pandora's Box again
I'm reading a blogger right now who's at the age I was when everything started going AWOL (which was the year Dad died, when I was 24).
She's inspired me to start drawing, which makes me happy, because it satisfies at least one of the three D's: Distraction. Actually, that's not really true - the drawing just makes me happy, period, it's something I've always liked doing. And it's a good way to express things. Sometimes the silliness of some of the drawings makes me happy in itself, or when something goes differently than I expected, I can laugh at it, because hey, it's just a drawing, right? And it's actually pretty funny the way things come out sometimes.
I was thinking about how her mom and my mom seem similar to me, or rather our relationships with our mothers seem somewhat similar. I've tried explaining my relationship with my mom (or lack thereof) many times and am most often left with the sense that my listener isn't quite getting what I'm saying, that my meaning isn't really coming through.
***
My mom used to be intensely involved in my life (and still would be, if I let her). Which sounds like a good thing, on the surface, right?
But when it's a *substitute* for living *her own* life, then it really sucks. Because she's always projecting *her* thoughts and feelings onto you about what's happening in your life, rather than *listening* to what's actually happening to you in your real life.
So your real life stops feeling real, and instead you're caught in this nightmare of projected hopes, dreams and unfulfilled fantasies from your *mother's* Pandora's Box.
It's like a kind of gaslighting, only it's worse than that because, in gaslighting, you can eventually escape when you realize that the person is intentionally messing with your head and is really a jerk.
With someone like my mom, she has no idea she's doing it, so there's no way to ever get her to stop. And if you shun her, or try to stay away from her, then she's like this pleading puppy dog who gives you those sad, wounded eyes and never, EVER understands a thing you're talking about. It's like trying to live with a Martian disguised in a human body - they LOOK like a human, and many of the things they do APPEAR human because it's a human body doing it, but the CREATURE occupying the cranial cavity of this homunculus is NOT what you think it is. It is an ALIEN.
***
I went over to Paint to try to draw a picture of how 'communication' between me and mom goes (or more accurately, *doesn't* go).
Sometimes the act of drawing makes the problem so clear that you wonder why you didn't see it before. And sometimes it helps you see that something is so ridiculous, so completely ludicrous that you *really* shouldn't be wasting any time on it.
***
On the whole chakra thing: I'm realizing that maybe the really tight 'cinch-y' feeling around my middle, just above the third chakra, may actually be my best protection against all the overwhelming feelings. When I can't SOLVE any of the problems, or can't solve them at the rate at which they're confronting me, then I HAVE to find a way to block off the excess emotions so that they don't overwhelm me.
What I have to do is to figure out how to reduce the number of problems to a number I can MANAGE. Working on that :-)
She's inspired me to start drawing, which makes me happy, because it satisfies at least one of the three D's: Distraction. Actually, that's not really true - the drawing just makes me happy, period, it's something I've always liked doing. And it's a good way to express things. Sometimes the silliness of some of the drawings makes me happy in itself, or when something goes differently than I expected, I can laugh at it, because hey, it's just a drawing, right? And it's actually pretty funny the way things come out sometimes.
I was thinking about how her mom and my mom seem similar to me, or rather our relationships with our mothers seem somewhat similar. I've tried explaining my relationship with my mom (or lack thereof) many times and am most often left with the sense that my listener isn't quite getting what I'm saying, that my meaning isn't really coming through.
***
My mom used to be intensely involved in my life (and still would be, if I let her). Which sounds like a good thing, on the surface, right?
But when it's a *substitute* for living *her own* life, then it really sucks. Because she's always projecting *her* thoughts and feelings onto you about what's happening in your life, rather than *listening* to what's actually happening to you in your real life.
So your real life stops feeling real, and instead you're caught in this nightmare of projected hopes, dreams and unfulfilled fantasies from your *mother's* Pandora's Box.
It's like a kind of gaslighting, only it's worse than that because, in gaslighting, you can eventually escape when you realize that the person is intentionally messing with your head and is really a jerk.
With someone like my mom, she has no idea she's doing it, so there's no way to ever get her to stop. And if you shun her, or try to stay away from her, then she's like this pleading puppy dog who gives you those sad, wounded eyes and never, EVER understands a thing you're talking about. It's like trying to live with a Martian disguised in a human body - they LOOK like a human, and many of the things they do APPEAR human because it's a human body doing it, but the CREATURE occupying the cranial cavity of this homunculus is NOT what you think it is. It is an ALIEN.
***
I went over to Paint to try to draw a picture of how 'communication' between me and mom goes (or more accurately, *doesn't* go).
Sometimes the act of drawing makes the problem so clear that you wonder why you didn't see it before. And sometimes it helps you see that something is so ridiculous, so completely ludicrous that you *really* shouldn't be wasting any time on it.
***
On the whole chakra thing: I'm realizing that maybe the really tight 'cinch-y' feeling around my middle, just above the third chakra, may actually be my best protection against all the overwhelming feelings. When I can't SOLVE any of the problems, or can't solve them at the rate at which they're confronting me, then I HAVE to find a way to block off the excess emotions so that they don't overwhelm me.
What I have to do is to figure out how to reduce the number of problems to a number I can MANAGE. Working on that :-)
filling the belly
I feel as if I never really got to relax and be a KID, where I had the full support of somebody older and wiser than me and got to just do kid things without worrying about the so-called 'grownups'. I suppose all this would have made sense to me sooner if I'd been the kid of a single mom, or an orphan, or had some more obviously non-standard upbringing.
But given that I was raised pretty much middle class (after the first 7 years of endless moving and having no money, dad got established rather quickly and was able to 'climb the ladder' in a fairly short time), it wasn't easy to see where the predators lurked. I nominally had parents - a father and a mother, there were people whose physical bodies occupied those niches in my life.
And I lived in a middle class house with a middle class roof over my head. Though when I left for college I was still sleeping in the same half of a twin bunkbed that I'd slept in when I was 6 years old, and my dresser was a cardboard one that somebody'd bought cheap years before, and my clothes were still, often as not, purchased second hand - I have to say that I resent the stinginess which, now, years later, allows mom to live in unthinking comfort, but cost me a lot as a kid. I always felt like I deserved nothing, no matter how hard I worked or tried to 'do things right' - I was never rewarded, not verbally and not in the tangible ways parents often 'praise' their children for a job well done.
No WONDER there's a hollow place in my belly that seems like it can't ever be filled.
But given that I was raised pretty much middle class (after the first 7 years of endless moving and having no money, dad got established rather quickly and was able to 'climb the ladder' in a fairly short time), it wasn't easy to see where the predators lurked. I nominally had parents - a father and a mother, there were people whose physical bodies occupied those niches in my life.
And I lived in a middle class house with a middle class roof over my head. Though when I left for college I was still sleeping in the same half of a twin bunkbed that I'd slept in when I was 6 years old, and my dresser was a cardboard one that somebody'd bought cheap years before, and my clothes were still, often as not, purchased second hand - I have to say that I resent the stinginess which, now, years later, allows mom to live in unthinking comfort, but cost me a lot as a kid. I always felt like I deserved nothing, no matter how hard I worked or tried to 'do things right' - I was never rewarded, not verbally and not in the tangible ways parents often 'praise' their children for a job well done.
No WONDER there's a hollow place in my belly that seems like it can't ever be filled.
pickled
What do you do if your life seems to be resistant to any and all forms of long-term planning? What if any and all end results seem to turn out so differently from what you'd hoped for and/or expected that you can't even tell that you ever *made* any effort at planning?
I've gotten to the point where I pretty much don't make any plans other than short-term ones. I have so little confidence in my ability to predict ANYTHING that's going to happen in my life beyond about 6 months from now that it seems ridiculous to even attempt it.
I've tried to sell myself on the 'surfing' metaphor so that I can feel less out of control. And I continue to collect various sayings and quotes that appear to offer solace, such as, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans," or, "I might be going to hell in a bucket, but at least I'm enjoying the ride..." (I think that last ought to be edited to say, "Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide.......")
It reminds me that about 5 years ago a friend did a (relatively serious) astrological chart for me, and when he read it, translating the details, he basically said, "Your chart is a little unusual in that it really offers no concrete advice or wisdom - you're pretty much going to have to make up everything as you go."
Great.
Well, I'll let you know if I come up with any brilliant new ideas for how to get myself out of *this* pickle. Or maybe I should go 'distract' again and see if I can *draw* a pickle with my new friend, MS Paint.
[Ok, so it looks more like a jalapeno. Whatever.]
Maybe a surfer pickle? Pickle surfer?
I've gotten to the point where I pretty much don't make any plans other than short-term ones. I have so little confidence in my ability to predict ANYTHING that's going to happen in my life beyond about 6 months from now that it seems ridiculous to even attempt it.
I've tried to sell myself on the 'surfing' metaphor so that I can feel less out of control. And I continue to collect various sayings and quotes that appear to offer solace, such as, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans," or, "I might be going to hell in a bucket, but at least I'm enjoying the ride..." (I think that last ought to be edited to say, "Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide.......")
It reminds me that about 5 years ago a friend did a (relatively serious) astrological chart for me, and when he read it, translating the details, he basically said, "Your chart is a little unusual in that it really offers no concrete advice or wisdom - you're pretty much going to have to make up everything as you go."
Great.
Well, I'll let you know if I come up with any brilliant new ideas for how to get myself out of *this* pickle. Or maybe I should go 'distract' again and see if I can *draw* a pickle with my new friend, MS Paint.
[Ok, so it looks more like a jalapeno. Whatever.]
Maybe a surfer pickle? Pickle surfer?
bzzzzz
Attempting to hold my sanity together through sheer willpower. The three D's take the edge off (denial, distraction and dissociation, in case you forgot :-), but the constant buzzing of stress and anxiety from all the unsolved (and often unsolvable) problems only gets drowned out for short stretches before drilling its way through through whatever moments of peace I'm able to carve out like a whining, miniature SawsAll.
I wonder what's going to give out first? My brain? My heart? My liver? Will I even know it's happening? What will the warning signs be? One 'problem' with coming from such basically healthy stock is that it has to get REALLY BAD before anyone's going to even believe I've got a problem, and by then it'll be too late. Just like it was with my Dad.
Ach, well.
I wonder what's going to give out first? My brain? My heart? My liver? Will I even know it's happening? What will the warning signs be? One 'problem' with coming from such basically healthy stock is that it has to get REALLY BAD before anyone's going to even believe I've got a problem, and by then it'll be too late. Just like it was with my Dad.
Ach, well.
Monday, August 30, 2010
butterflies come equipped with their own personal bendy straws! :-)
Well, this is nuts. I feel silly even writing this stuff down, but since I have no one to talk to and, as far as I know, there are at most two people who ever read this blog anyway, I may as well use it as the 'sounding board' I so sorely lack.
So this morning the first thing I craved was potato chips. I almost went down to the convenience store to get some, but held off for various reasons - got sidetracked by the garden, typing, drawing, etc. When I finally got it together enough to get out of the house, I was so hungry that I went to McDonald's instead and had a cheeseburger and some fries. Given that I'd eaten nothing but sugar the last 24 hours, a solid hunk of protein and some 'taters seemed like a good idea.
Good call! My body definitely thanked me, though the 'crash' of trying to process that much food on a stomach which had basically been empty for almost a day made me nearly non-functional for about 3 hours afterward.
So I was glad I'd eaten something approximating an actual meal, but was still hungry when I got home. Ate two packages of Reese's sticks, which helped; chewed on a bunch of gum, which also seemed to get my blood sugar leveled out. About an hour later, I was finally good to go...
While waiting for my blood sugar to get itself straightened out, I sat out in the late afternoon sun, which was fabulous and warm. I watched the billions of tiny orange butterflies swarming all over my mint plants (which have lovely, fuzzy, pale purple flowers when they go to seed), plus honeybees and what looked like mason bees, and even a gorgeous white butterfly (they only show up for the briefest time near the tail end of summer, if I'm remembering right.) I LOVED watching her roll out her little tongue so fast, flickering it like a built-in bendy straw into each of the tiny blossoms (florets?) on the mint plants.
While I was sitting there, I saw something rolling around on the ground near my feet, and, looking closer, discovered that a hornet appeared to be attacking a honey bee! Ack! So I knocked the hornet away with a pen I had in my hand (I was doing a little drawing, too), and then proceeded to try to rescue the injured bee. I don't know if my 'rescue' was what hurt him, or whether he'd been mauled by the hornet, but one of his main back legs wasn't working right, and he kept falling over. I picked one of the mint blossoms and put it near him, thinking maybe he'd at least be able to eat, but he kept pawing his face, over and over again, the way insects do when they're washing themselves. But I couldn't tell if it was because he was hurt, or what? I wondered if maybe the hornet had STUNG him, and he was - hurting, somehow? Often insects seem to carry on as if they feel no pain when they've been damaged. But this guy didn't seem very happy.
However, he kept trying to right himself, and kept climbing on things, and I thought for a while he was taking some nectar out of some of the flowers. But then he crawled off somewhere and I lost track of him.
***
Anyway, after all this saga, I eventually came in and did some more drawing and writing, and came to the realization that that's what I really wanted to do, and stopped guilting myself for not going for a walk or something 'constructive'.
I think the encounter with the family has (had?) me in a bit of a tailspin for practically the entire week since it happened - it's that cognitive dissonance thing, where your mind is trying to simultaneously hold two equal and opposite thoughts.
And then the weather's been all over the map - too hot, too cold, never just right (yes, i know, i said that before!) And today finally being just right had me feeling all guilty for not getting more done.
But I was exhausted - lack of proper food, the endless money/life stress, feeling like the whole family thing is trying to suck me back into its vortex again, while knowing nothing good can come of it. Plus I didn't sleep very well last night - I woke up from a nightmare in the wee hours and lay there twitchy and exhausted until I finally gave up trying to go back to sleep and got up. And one of my contacts has been messed up for over a month now - i thought it was a grease spot, but no amount of cleaning seems to remove it. I tried swapping lenses (they're identical, same prescription for both eyes), and that solved it, so evidently that lens is just past its sell-by date. Which isn't surprising - I haven't gotten replacement lenses in nearly a year. First the place I'd been ordering them from went out of business, and I couldn't find anyplace as cheap as that that would sell me lenses without a prescription; and then I just didn't have the money. Or, when I had the money, it just didn't seem urgent enough to go through the whole agony of finding a new vendor.
But now I can't put it off any longer.
***
I've lost the original thread of this, but I'll just say that I finally went and got those chips about an hour ago (at almost 11 p.m.) and you know what? They were just the ticket. I felt the adrenaline that's been fizzing in my veins all day long calm right down. I feel sleepy and almost relaxed, or as relaxed as I can get under my current life circumstances.
So I should just always trust my instincts, right? Right!
So this morning the first thing I craved was potato chips. I almost went down to the convenience store to get some, but held off for various reasons - got sidetracked by the garden, typing, drawing, etc. When I finally got it together enough to get out of the house, I was so hungry that I went to McDonald's instead and had a cheeseburger and some fries. Given that I'd eaten nothing but sugar the last 24 hours, a solid hunk of protein and some 'taters seemed like a good idea.
Good call! My body definitely thanked me, though the 'crash' of trying to process that much food on a stomach which had basically been empty for almost a day made me nearly non-functional for about 3 hours afterward.
So I was glad I'd eaten something approximating an actual meal, but was still hungry when I got home. Ate two packages of Reese's sticks, which helped; chewed on a bunch of gum, which also seemed to get my blood sugar leveled out. About an hour later, I was finally good to go...
While waiting for my blood sugar to get itself straightened out, I sat out in the late afternoon sun, which was fabulous and warm. I watched the billions of tiny orange butterflies swarming all over my mint plants (which have lovely, fuzzy, pale purple flowers when they go to seed), plus honeybees and what looked like mason bees, and even a gorgeous white butterfly (they only show up for the briefest time near the tail end of summer, if I'm remembering right.) I LOVED watching her roll out her little tongue so fast, flickering it like a built-in bendy straw into each of the tiny blossoms (florets?) on the mint plants.
While I was sitting there, I saw something rolling around on the ground near my feet, and, looking closer, discovered that a hornet appeared to be attacking a honey bee! Ack! So I knocked the hornet away with a pen I had in my hand (I was doing a little drawing, too), and then proceeded to try to rescue the injured bee. I don't know if my 'rescue' was what hurt him, or whether he'd been mauled by the hornet, but one of his main back legs wasn't working right, and he kept falling over. I picked one of the mint blossoms and put it near him, thinking maybe he'd at least be able to eat, but he kept pawing his face, over and over again, the way insects do when they're washing themselves. But I couldn't tell if it was because he was hurt, or what? I wondered if maybe the hornet had STUNG him, and he was - hurting, somehow? Often insects seem to carry on as if they feel no pain when they've been damaged. But this guy didn't seem very happy.
However, he kept trying to right himself, and kept climbing on things, and I thought for a while he was taking some nectar out of some of the flowers. But then he crawled off somewhere and I lost track of him.
***
Anyway, after all this saga, I eventually came in and did some more drawing and writing, and came to the realization that that's what I really wanted to do, and stopped guilting myself for not going for a walk or something 'constructive'.
I think the encounter with the family has (had?) me in a bit of a tailspin for practically the entire week since it happened - it's that cognitive dissonance thing, where your mind is trying to simultaneously hold two equal and opposite thoughts.
And then the weather's been all over the map - too hot, too cold, never just right (yes, i know, i said that before!) And today finally being just right had me feeling all guilty for not getting more done.
But I was exhausted - lack of proper food, the endless money/life stress, feeling like the whole family thing is trying to suck me back into its vortex again, while knowing nothing good can come of it. Plus I didn't sleep very well last night - I woke up from a nightmare in the wee hours and lay there twitchy and exhausted until I finally gave up trying to go back to sleep and got up. And one of my contacts has been messed up for over a month now - i thought it was a grease spot, but no amount of cleaning seems to remove it. I tried swapping lenses (they're identical, same prescription for both eyes), and that solved it, so evidently that lens is just past its sell-by date. Which isn't surprising - I haven't gotten replacement lenses in nearly a year. First the place I'd been ordering them from went out of business, and I couldn't find anyplace as cheap as that that would sell me lenses without a prescription; and then I just didn't have the money. Or, when I had the money, it just didn't seem urgent enough to go through the whole agony of finding a new vendor.
But now I can't put it off any longer.
***
I've lost the original thread of this, but I'll just say that I finally went and got those chips about an hour ago (at almost 11 p.m.) and you know what? They were just the ticket. I felt the adrenaline that's been fizzing in my veins all day long calm right down. I feel sleepy and almost relaxed, or as relaxed as I can get under my current life circumstances.
So I should just always trust my instincts, right? Right!
drarings
It turns out that if you open a Paint doc in some other viewer (say, Office, for example), it suddenly loses all of its useful editable properties :-( So I won't be editing the pretty version of the 'YES', because it'd be a total pain.
So instead I drew a new version of the flower part, which was the only part I really wanted to edit anyway:
Argh. NOW I discover that once you EXIT a Paint document, it gets saved in a format that is never again properly editable.
So here's a second version of MS Daisy, as a cartoon character:
Drawings copyright of grasshopper @ orts & leavings 2010
Hah. After a bit of experimentation, it appears that if you save a Paint doc in the PNG format (whatever the heck *that* means), it doesn't seem to lose its editability. Yay!
So instead I drew a new version of the flower part, which was the only part I really wanted to edit anyway:
Argh. NOW I discover that once you EXIT a Paint document, it gets saved in a format that is never again properly editable.
So here's a second version of MS Daisy, as a cartoon character:
Drawings copyright of grasshopper @ orts & leavings 2010
Hah. After a bit of experimentation, it appears that if you save a Paint doc in the PNG format (whatever the heck *that* means), it doesn't seem to lose its editability. Yay!
still more YES
I drew another, prettier (?) 'yes', and I'm not sure whether I'll finish it, so I'm posting it in its incomplete state:
Yes, I've been told I'm a 'flower child' many times. Flowers and butterflies have always been favorites :-)
Drawing copyright of grasshopper @ orts & leavings 2010
Yes, I've been told I'm a 'flower child' many times. Flowers and butterflies have always been favorites :-)Drawing copyright of grasshopper @ orts & leavings 2010
more YES :-)
After several loud, "No!"s, I'm practicing saying "Yes!!!!" Which seems far more important just now - to *have* things to say yes to, that is...
The ready-made 'yes'es I was able to find online seem kind of boring, so I'm experimenting with MS Paint to create more interesting ones. No, it's not beautiful, but I had fun doing it :-)
The yeses and noes (sp?) are an attempt at creating an internal navigational system, a rudimentary compass that helps guide me between the shoals of various wanted and unwanted things/people/activities in life. Crude, yes. Effective? Also yes, so far.
I've tried this before, but this time I'm actually able to *feel* the 'yes' and the 'no' in my gut, literally, if I'm paying attention. If I forget, another pretty loud indicator is a sudden surge or drop in energy. I actually made a whole bunch of 'yes' and 'no' signs and scattered them around the house to help me remember to use my guidance system. It makes me smile, especially the small flock of 'yeses' currently heading southward across my living room floor :-)
***
It's also a boundaries thing, if that isn't clear. I keep refining that, but it still seems that there's a sizable 'lump' of unfinished business right around my third and second chakras. I seem to have started at the heart chakra and worked my way outward from there, both up and down the chakra system.
I'm now as far as this intransigent lump in my spine, which is slightly higher than my belly button, but seems pretty clearly third chakra related. Something to do with willpower?
And the second chakra one is very much relational, in all kinds of ways with all kinds of people. Hence the boundary thing. That seems to be a pretty universal theme in general for me: Boundaries. How to set them, maintain them, and put no more energy into them than necessary. That last is a new idea for me, and that's all I'll say about it for now :-)
***
The other thing I'm noticing is that my legs have been getting weak lately when I'm doing something I don't want to do. It's really bizarre, but sometimes my legs get so noodly that it feels like they're going to collapse! And no, it's not a blood sugar thing - I get that all the time, so I know the difference. Low blood sugar usually starts by me feeling tired and cranky, sometimes almost a little flu-ish. This is different, and a little disturbing.
I keep having this thought that it's from when I was learning to walk, and somehow linked to being two or three years old and not getting to go through my individuation phase (terrible two's) properly.
I'm not sure what all this means, but I'm trying to learn from it.
I also wonder how many other people have to learn how to read their emotions by braille like this? And wonder what it's like to consistently have more direct access to them.
***
It's also to do with 'shoulds', which seems to be yet another way to talk about boundaries, individuation, etc.
I feel REALLY strongly that I MUST not go near my mother right now, because she is so utterly and completely oblivious to any and all boundaries I try to set with her of whatever kind. I feel like I end up getting steamrollered, every time.
[Edited to add: I tried to draw a steamroller, but between the Etch-A-Sketch-like qualities of MS paint and the fact that I don't really know what a steamroller looks like, it ended up looking like Ma Kettle driving the Flinstones-mobile. Oops. Guess I won't be showing you that one!]
***
I'm also remembering a yoga weekend I took about 10 or more years ago, where we did some Feldenkreis at the end of the long weekend of stretching, relaxation and yoga exercises, and I remember forgetting how to walk. Whatever the work was that we had done, I felt like I literally needed to re-learn my walking technique.
And it feels like I'm still 'holding' whatever that (faulty?) pattern is in my hips. It's as if I'm trying to fend someone off, as if there's an unnecessary tension (unnecessary in the physiological sense, if not in the psychological one) that's making me push them outward all the time or something.
Huh. I hope all this becomes clear really soon, because I'd like to think there's more to my life than simply untangling the mental/emotional/psychological knots that my family implanted all those years ago. I'm READY, universe, for the next thing. Please.
And, aware of the whole, "Be careful what you ask for" concept, let me be a little more specific: I want something GOOD. Something HAPPY and CHEERFUL, something DELIGHTFUL, that makes me want to LEAP out of bed each day with absolute and utter joy!
***
Oh, and another one I keep meaning to add to the breadcrumb trail (hope I'm not repeating myself, but I guess if I am, it must need repeating :-): "Once bitten, twice shy."
That one seems like an excellent metaphor (?) for the whole PTSD thing. Maybe I'll write another post on that.
The ready-made 'yes'es I was able to find online seem kind of boring, so I'm experimenting with MS Paint to create more interesting ones. No, it's not beautiful, but I had fun doing it :-)
The yeses and noes (sp?) are an attempt at creating an internal navigational system, a rudimentary compass that helps guide me between the shoals of various wanted and unwanted things/people/activities in life. Crude, yes. Effective? Also yes, so far.
I've tried this before, but this time I'm actually able to *feel* the 'yes' and the 'no' in my gut, literally, if I'm paying attention. If I forget, another pretty loud indicator is a sudden surge or drop in energy. I actually made a whole bunch of 'yes' and 'no' signs and scattered them around the house to help me remember to use my guidance system. It makes me smile, especially the small flock of 'yeses' currently heading southward across my living room floor :-)
***
It's also a boundaries thing, if that isn't clear. I keep refining that, but it still seems that there's a sizable 'lump' of unfinished business right around my third and second chakras. I seem to have started at the heart chakra and worked my way outward from there, both up and down the chakra system.
I'm now as far as this intransigent lump in my spine, which is slightly higher than my belly button, but seems pretty clearly third chakra related. Something to do with willpower?
And the second chakra one is very much relational, in all kinds of ways with all kinds of people. Hence the boundary thing. That seems to be a pretty universal theme in general for me: Boundaries. How to set them, maintain them, and put no more energy into them than necessary. That last is a new idea for me, and that's all I'll say about it for now :-)
***
The other thing I'm noticing is that my legs have been getting weak lately when I'm doing something I don't want to do. It's really bizarre, but sometimes my legs get so noodly that it feels like they're going to collapse! And no, it's not a blood sugar thing - I get that all the time, so I know the difference. Low blood sugar usually starts by me feeling tired and cranky, sometimes almost a little flu-ish. This is different, and a little disturbing.
I keep having this thought that it's from when I was learning to walk, and somehow linked to being two or three years old and not getting to go through my individuation phase (terrible two's) properly.
I'm not sure what all this means, but I'm trying to learn from it.
I also wonder how many other people have to learn how to read their emotions by braille like this? And wonder what it's like to consistently have more direct access to them.
***
It's also to do with 'shoulds', which seems to be yet another way to talk about boundaries, individuation, etc.
I feel REALLY strongly that I MUST not go near my mother right now, because she is so utterly and completely oblivious to any and all boundaries I try to set with her of whatever kind. I feel like I end up getting steamrollered, every time.
[Edited to add: I tried to draw a steamroller, but between the Etch-A-Sketch-like qualities of MS paint and the fact that I don't really know what a steamroller looks like, it ended up looking like Ma Kettle driving the Flinstones-mobile. Oops. Guess I won't be showing you that one!]
***
I'm also remembering a yoga weekend I took about 10 or more years ago, where we did some Feldenkreis at the end of the long weekend of stretching, relaxation and yoga exercises, and I remember forgetting how to walk. Whatever the work was that we had done, I felt like I literally needed to re-learn my walking technique.
And it feels like I'm still 'holding' whatever that (faulty?) pattern is in my hips. It's as if I'm trying to fend someone off, as if there's an unnecessary tension (unnecessary in the physiological sense, if not in the psychological one) that's making me push them outward all the time or something.
Huh. I hope all this becomes clear really soon, because I'd like to think there's more to my life than simply untangling the mental/emotional/psychological knots that my family implanted all those years ago. I'm READY, universe, for the next thing. Please.
And, aware of the whole, "Be careful what you ask for" concept, let me be a little more specific: I want something GOOD. Something HAPPY and CHEERFUL, something DELIGHTFUL, that makes me want to LEAP out of bed each day with absolute and utter joy!
***
Oh, and another one I keep meaning to add to the breadcrumb trail (hope I'm not repeating myself, but I guess if I am, it must need repeating :-): "Once bitten, twice shy."
That one seems like an excellent metaphor (?) for the whole PTSD thing. Maybe I'll write another post on that.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
NO.
Set my terms and STICK WITH THEM.
I don't know how to help myself remember this, except to repeat it over and over and over again.
I need an image, some kind of really powerful PICTURE, to help me remember this. Because it's ESSENTIAL to my survival, my sanity, my LITERAL ability to make it through all this.
The 'no' that is the title of the previous post captures it. Maybe that's all I need? Just, "No." Period. Full stop. I will not go there. Maybe the Green Eggs and Ham - no, too silly. Need something simpler, blunter, more direct, to the point, unmistakable. No joking about this.
NO.
I don't know how to help myself remember this, except to repeat it over and over and over again.
I need an image, some kind of really powerful PICTURE, to help me remember this. Because it's ESSENTIAL to my survival, my sanity, my LITERAL ability to make it through all this.
The 'no' that is the title of the previous post captures it. Maybe that's all I need? Just, "No." Period. Full stop. I will not go there. Maybe the Green Eggs and Ham - no, too silly. Need something simpler, blunter, more direct, to the point, unmistakable. No joking about this.
NO.
boundaries?
Perhaps it's a boundaries thing. I keep feeling this need to express MASSIVE anger at various people - in fact spent a bunch of time ranting, rather loudly, in the yard this afternoon while I was working. It was pretty quiet, Sunday, there weren't many people around, and I actually yelled at the top of my lungs a couple of times with no response. A little scary, really.
I still have this feeling of being stuck, trapped, of being unable to make myself heard.
I have to simply NOT LET PEOPLE CLOSE TO ME who I don't trust. (Which may seem really, really obvious, but given that I grew up with people who expected me to trust them no matter WHAT they did or said - well, I'm not doing it any more. But MAN is it a hard habit to break.)
And the 'not letting people close to me til I trust them' thing is crazy, because given that I have NOBODY AT ALL to be close to, and the need for close human contact is as powerful as the need for air, food and water - what the FUCK am I supposed to do? I get sucked into every passing vortex just because I fucking NEED, CRAVE, am literally STARVING TO DEATH for interaction of any sort whatsoever.
And of course I try really hard to hide it, this aching, painful need; but I'm sure everyone can see it. I'm not embarassed by it, any more - I just don't know how to deal with it. It's like someone who's dying of thirst finally encountering water and trying not to choke to death on the first few gulps because they're so desperately thirsty.
But I cannot, MUST not, allow other people to make the rules, to set the terms of engagement. That's the problem: When you're the only person who admits to NEEDing anything, you're fucked, in this world where power and domination are everything and showing any sign of need whatsoever is considered weakness.
Again it's Fundamental Attribution Error. People who HAVE what they need have no capacity to grasp or comprehend what it's like to NOT have that particular thing. Even if they've been in the exact same situation themselves, even if they were only RECENTLY in that exact same situation. The human capacity for forgetting, denial and compartmentalization may be great coping/survival skills, but they sure make it a living HELL for those of us who aren't yet out of the woods.
***
I think if my stress level were any higher, you'd be able to literally hear a hum from my personal, mental hard drive melting down. I feel like one of those hummingbirds, my little wings flapping at 300 mph, consuming twenty times my body weight daily just to keep up with the stress. Eating myself alive with nervous tension.
I still have this feeling of being stuck, trapped, of being unable to make myself heard.
I have to simply NOT LET PEOPLE CLOSE TO ME who I don't trust. (Which may seem really, really obvious, but given that I grew up with people who expected me to trust them no matter WHAT they did or said - well, I'm not doing it any more. But MAN is it a hard habit to break.)
And the 'not letting people close to me til I trust them' thing is crazy, because given that I have NOBODY AT ALL to be close to, and the need for close human contact is as powerful as the need for air, food and water - what the FUCK am I supposed to do? I get sucked into every passing vortex just because I fucking NEED, CRAVE, am literally STARVING TO DEATH for interaction of any sort whatsoever.
And of course I try really hard to hide it, this aching, painful need; but I'm sure everyone can see it. I'm not embarassed by it, any more - I just don't know how to deal with it. It's like someone who's dying of thirst finally encountering water and trying not to choke to death on the first few gulps because they're so desperately thirsty.
But I cannot, MUST not, allow other people to make the rules, to set the terms of engagement. That's the problem: When you're the only person who admits to NEEDing anything, you're fucked, in this world where power and domination are everything and showing any sign of need whatsoever is considered weakness.
Again it's Fundamental Attribution Error. People who HAVE what they need have no capacity to grasp or comprehend what it's like to NOT have that particular thing. Even if they've been in the exact same situation themselves, even if they were only RECENTLY in that exact same situation. The human capacity for forgetting, denial and compartmentalization may be great coping/survival skills, but they sure make it a living HELL for those of us who aren't yet out of the woods.
***
I think if my stress level were any higher, you'd be able to literally hear a hum from my personal, mental hard drive melting down. I feel like one of those hummingbirds, my little wings flapping at 300 mph, consuming twenty times my body weight daily just to keep up with the stress. Eating myself alive with nervous tension.
no.
Clinging to this lifeline as to a life preserver.
I never had anyone to 'count' on in my life, and I still don't.
I am alone, in a terrifying way.
I do not trust my family; all my 'friends' are either physically or emotionally distant, either too involved in their own lives to have time for me, or they're males who only want involvement if it includes sex.
Conundrum. Again. Help.
***
I canNOT get involved with my family again.
It's so INCREDIBLY painful not to be able to see my nieces. I want so badly to spend time with them, to have SOMEbody to give all this love to that I feel welling up inside me. They, at least at their current ages, actually NEED what I have to offer.
And my brother knows it. And appreciates it.
But the PAIN involved in seeing HIM, or trying to get together without seeing my sister-in-law or mom. My GODdess, how fucking CONVOLUTED this all is. It makes my brain and my HEART hurt.
I've been looking for a way out, an escape hatch, all day. Running in emotional circles, chasing my proverbial tail. Thank the universe that it was a good gardening day today for at least a little while - I managed to get out there and get a bit of satisfaction from nurturing some plants, taking care of some of the green, growing things for a while. Felt myself rooting, grounding, connnecting a little.
But then it started to get cold, and I've since been huddled in front of this computer all afternoon, un-rooted, unconnected to anything real or tangible or alive. I feel as if I'm literally starving to death for loving, caring, kind, gentle, supportive human contact. I feel as if all these people around me KNOW exactly what's going on, and not a single one of them can spare the tiniest drop of compassion to help me survive. It's like being some kind of desert cactus - somehow I'm still alive in spite of the eternally protracted drought period, but: HOW MUCH LONGER CAN I GO ON???? My system can't take these repeated bouts of panic, terror, fear, living as if any minute might be my last. I'm literally going to burn out, fry, crisp my adrenals or whatever the hell it is that's been keeping me going for so long. Pure stubbornness (sp?) near as I can tell, or as Terry Pratchett would put it, 'sheer bloody-mindedness.'
I never had anyone to 'count' on in my life, and I still don't.
I am alone, in a terrifying way.
I do not trust my family; all my 'friends' are either physically or emotionally distant, either too involved in their own lives to have time for me, or they're males who only want involvement if it includes sex.
Conundrum. Again. Help.
***
I canNOT get involved with my family again.
It's so INCREDIBLY painful not to be able to see my nieces. I want so badly to spend time with them, to have SOMEbody to give all this love to that I feel welling up inside me. They, at least at their current ages, actually NEED what I have to offer.
And my brother knows it. And appreciates it.
But the PAIN involved in seeing HIM, or trying to get together without seeing my sister-in-law or mom. My GODdess, how fucking CONVOLUTED this all is. It makes my brain and my HEART hurt.
I've been looking for a way out, an escape hatch, all day. Running in emotional circles, chasing my proverbial tail. Thank the universe that it was a good gardening day today for at least a little while - I managed to get out there and get a bit of satisfaction from nurturing some plants, taking care of some of the green, growing things for a while. Felt myself rooting, grounding, connnecting a little.
But then it started to get cold, and I've since been huddled in front of this computer all afternoon, un-rooted, unconnected to anything real or tangible or alive. I feel as if I'm literally starving to death for loving, caring, kind, gentle, supportive human contact. I feel as if all these people around me KNOW exactly what's going on, and not a single one of them can spare the tiniest drop of compassion to help me survive. It's like being some kind of desert cactus - somehow I'm still alive in spite of the eternally protracted drought period, but: HOW MUCH LONGER CAN I GO ON???? My system can't take these repeated bouts of panic, terror, fear, living as if any minute might be my last. I'm literally going to burn out, fry, crisp my adrenals or whatever the hell it is that's been keeping me going for so long. Pure stubbornness (sp?) near as I can tell, or as Terry Pratchett would put it, 'sheer bloody-mindedness.'
running away from the trap
All the layers that I so successfully peeled away - all the pain, the shame, the rage - I feel it trying to creep back in. It's like I can't see myself as valuable unless -
This is the mom thing again.
The obliviation - what's the word - obliteration thing.
I have to understand this.
It's like being eaten from the inside out by a parasite. This thing that absolutely CONSUMES you, and leaves nothing left.
And it's like this pattern applies to everybody in my family that I interact with - my youngest brother, my nieces, my sister-in-law.
There's this PENITENTIAL aspect to it all, like 'guilty 'til proven innocent.'
As if my default setting is 'WRONG', and I have to make up for it somehow. I have to constantly PROVE myself, atone for my sins.
Is that what it really is, at root? The long-standing, generations old puritanical GUILT at work here? The punitive patriarch that lurks in our souls?
How to eradicate it, or him?
I came across this article late last night, and perused it a bit, it seems relevant here:
http://dbs2000ad.com/narayan/where-art-thou-romeo.htm
It kind of goes on and on, and loops back on itself and repeats a lot, but it seems to capture many of the ideas I've had myself about how all this crap fits together (or doesn't), a kind of unified field theory of human nature and relationships and what not.
Let's see if I can find a representative quote that sums it up fairly tidily. Ach, doesn't look like it'll fit into a handy-sized nutshell, so I'll just quote some bits:
This is the mom thing again.
The obliviation - what's the word - obliteration thing.
I have to understand this.
It's like being eaten from the inside out by a parasite. This thing that absolutely CONSUMES you, and leaves nothing left.
And it's like this pattern applies to everybody in my family that I interact with - my youngest brother, my nieces, my sister-in-law.
There's this PENITENTIAL aspect to it all, like 'guilty 'til proven innocent.'
As if my default setting is 'WRONG', and I have to make up for it somehow. I have to constantly PROVE myself, atone for my sins.
Is that what it really is, at root? The long-standing, generations old puritanical GUILT at work here? The punitive patriarch that lurks in our souls?
How to eradicate it, or him?
I came across this article late last night, and perused it a bit, it seems relevant here:
http://dbs2000ad.com/narayan/where-art-thou-romeo.htm
It kind of goes on and on, and loops back on itself and repeats a lot, but it seems to capture many of the ideas I've had myself about how all this crap fits together (or doesn't), a kind of unified field theory of human nature and relationships and what not.
Let's see if I can find a representative quote that sums it up fairly tidily. Ach, doesn't look like it'll fit into a handy-sized nutshell, so I'll just quote some bits:
The foundational source of most of these difficulties is the paranoid patriarchal system under which we have been living for about 8000 years. And the basic parameter here is the intensely destructive gender roles that have been imposed across the board. What has happened is that males and females have been separated and trained into highly specialized and mutually incomprehensible patterns of functioning.Hell, I'm just going to quote this whole long section, from 'Problematic Parameters':
The male is expected to be basically a problem-solving impersonal machine who is feeling-avoidant and relationship-incompetent. He is paid for being a walking cerebrum and a pair of hands, period. Sometimes he is even expected to just LOOK like a certain image. He is not paid to be a human being with feelings and with relationship capabilities and a family and commitments and needs that compete with the work world.
In the meantime, the female is basically put in responsibility almost single-handedly for the entire emotional/ecological system. What that means is that nearly everything about the process of being human and rearing children lands on her shoulders. And since this is a basic biological impossibility to pull off, her failures then become the target of much attack. The male is neither capable of handling the requirements of the situation nor is he emotionally and often even physically present.
To make matters worse, the household is expected to be a "hymn to him" process in which he is minimally demanded of emotionally and his word and whims are law. He is also the "enforcer", as in "Just wait till your father gets home!". He IS expected to bring home the bacon and to handle physical maintenance and protection, but anything in the realm of emotions, relationship and child rearing is beyond his call of duty and his ken and his capability.
For the male child, therefore, that means that he has to piece together what it means to be a man from the little snatches he gets of this distant and mysterious figure who won't tell him anything about what is going on inside and who works at a job which is highly complicated, technical and situationally set up in such a way that a child can't comprehend what's going on when his father engages in his work. So he has no one to look up to as a model and he has to fall back on mother's attitude and shaping in terms of creating his masculine manifestation.
He also learns that the real action is in the realm outside the home in a technical society that requires complete emotional suppression. In addition, he learns the "buck stops here" ultimate accountability, responsibility and authority role in which every time anything goes wrong, everybody turns to the male in the situation and he has no one to turn to. It's his job to come up with the resources and the solution to the problem. The result is a problem-solving machine.
In the meantime, the female child is inundated with training experiences in how to handle ecologies, emotions, far-reaching responsibilities, and relationships. Not infrequently, she becomes the mother's sole source of intimate love, perhaps even going into erotic involvement. In addition, she's usually pressed into service to assist in the overwhelming overload of responsibilities of her mother early on, and she very frequently is even forced to reverse roles and to be her mother's mother from a very early age. Yet at the same time, she is supposed to be nonthreateningly incompetent in many areas of personal power expression and competent world handling, so that "Big Daddy" can "take care of her". She quickly learns to hide her candle under a basket and to handle the "home front".
Now the mother in the isolated nuclear family is the lifeline for the child of either gender, especially during the first four years when the child is putting God on her face in the "in loco Deity" response resulting from the "commons" evolutionary history. But she is also the "polarity parent" (the other gender) who establishes the boy's gender identity, his personal worth as a male, and the "stand-in" for the "Home Office". She is in effect everything to him, especially in the light of the absence of the father. She thus becomes a "Statue of Liberty" figure for him -- she can crush him in an instant.
Very frequently, he also becomes her spouse-substitute and even her father-substitute due to the severe limitations of the male gender role and its effects. He in effect becomes the man in her life because she has never been fulfilled and she has been in effect neglected or abandoned by the masculine all her life. But of course, he can't deliver the goods, and she then projects all her betrayal-rage on him. He then can do no right for his unpleasable mother. She also seeks to prevent his developing his personal power, both because she doesn't want to lose him, and because she is afraid of his abuse of his power. He is thus expected to be her man while at the same time not manifesting his masculinity. He ends up utterly enraged and perplexed by women.
For the female child, the situation is one of severe deprivation of validation and gracefulness training from her father. He doesn't intervene in the profound "double bubble" dependency relationship between her and her mother, who is using her as an associate or role-reversed parent. Between his non-involvement and his non-intervention, she ends up believing she is undeserving of his attention, and she ends up depressed, self-denigrating and longing for love from a male.
This situation is horrendously confounded if in addition, he becomes sexually involved with her on the emotional or even the physical level (the latter now being reported at 60% and perhaps as high as 90%). In such a situation, all of the above reactions are extremely exacerbated because of our evolutionary history in which the female was the determiner of who became sexually involved with her. This results in her being biologically programmed to believe that she is the one responsible for this situation.
As a result of all this, she often wants to avoid full feminine maturity, and she wants to be protected and taken care of in the little girl experience she never had. She rejects her sexuality and power in order to remain an eternal girl. The eating disorders revolve around this desire not to become a mature female. And because of her profound frustrations, suppressed rage and powerlessness programming, they are also prone to helplessness feelings, seething "tripod-rage" and cancer.
Yet at the same time, she feels totally responsible and accountable for the entire emotional and physical ecology, and she therefore feels that it is all her fault when things go wrong there. This also results in her believing that all the negative things that happen to her are her "just deserts" for not having handled things in such a way as to avoid the negative outcomes for which she feels responsible.
Simultaneously, between her mother's programming and her father's betrayals, she ends up full of "tripod-rage" in which "he can do no right". But then again, she finds herself "romancing the stone" of her father-stand-ins while simultaneously subconsciously hating them. And if she gets a really relevant male, she can't relate to him because she doesn't deserve it, and besides he can do no right.
The male comes out of his experience fascinated by, terrified of, dependent upon and extremely vulnerable to women. He also puts his worst foot forward with them as a result of his "You can do no right!" experiential history with his mother. He ends up full of male shame for all his betrayals and incompetences and failures, while at the same time he is full of fury for his mother's effective destiny-destruction. And he falls into the pattern of not-thereness, exploitation and authoritation abusiveness in a hate-mate relationship pattern. The only emotions he can express are artificially inflated sexuality and rage.
The net effect of all this is that when a male and a female get together to form an intimate relationship, all of these dynamics come into play and all hell breaks loose and interacts with all the other processes going on in relationships today. And the situation is even more complex when same gender pairings occur, inasmuch as all the societal rejection comes into play, along with all the extremely confusing complications arising from the gender role dynamics having to be played out in a multi-layered kaleidoscope of profoundly painful playouts.
One of the commonest forms this takes is the "demonic dynamic". This is a situation where within seconds, the two individuals are in a blind, perhaps even homicidal rage over some passing trivial issue. It is the resultant of all the damage, pain, rage and neurotic interlocks that are the outcome of all the parameters involved. It is a mutual jackhammering process that can get physically dangerous very quickly. It reflects all the horror and pain they have both gone through all their lives in intimate relationships, starting with the most rejecting parent phenomenon.
stories
Want to keep track of my past, part of the trail of breadcrumbs, reconstruction that helps me make sense of it all. Putting all the puzzle pieces together to complete the picture, stitching in every last detail into the tapestry of my life.
I sometimes wonder, if I had a more 'connected' circle of family and friends, would all this be necessary? The blogging, and everything? The years of journaling, the many attempts to be 'heard' and seen, via whatever means or media are available to me. To chronicle everything that's happened. It seems to be an essential part of feeling 'real', of knowing that one has existed, that one's passage through time and space has been recorded somehow, somewhere, that one has made an IMPRESSION and been NOTICED, taken note of.
Answer: No. If I had a supportive, caring, concerned, involved family, none of this would be necessary. But that's a fantasy life I don't actually live, so instead I'll carry on with the writing, and hope for the best.
[Edited to add: It occurs to me, based on some recent experiences, that if I'm just aggressive and insistent enough, I can MAKE myself heard. The problem is that that kind of aggression is just not in my nature, so it's exhausting, daunting, draining. Basically, I don't want to do it. But I'm *learning* how to do it, in spite of not wanting to. As a survival tool. And guess what? It's working! Yayyyyy!!!!! And I'm even learning how not to spend so much time and energy *fretting* about it, feeling guilty for standing up for myself, and just DOING it. More yay. Onward.]
I imagine being part of a clan where all the stories were passed on by word of mouth, and EVERYBODY knew all the stories, to the point where some became legend, with time. I'm sure that happens with lots of folks - I hear people telling stories all the time, and have told a few myself. In fact, one of the moments that brought me closest to tears was when my middle (and currently estranged) brother told a story about *me* that I didn't realize he even knew, and told it with some details that even *I* hadn't been aware of, because I'd been so traumatized by the event itself (falling under a wagon and being dragged along on some gravel when I was about 8 or so, leaving me bruised and bloody while my brother cried and cried that I was 'dying'! Who knew that my most vicious tormenter once had great feelings of fondness for me? And what happened to change all that? I'll probably never know.)
Anyway.
So today's story is picking up from around the time of dad's death - that whole period is hazy because of all the changes and emotional trauma and stress and the horrible loneliness and complete lack of any kind of support - physical, emotional, financial, mental - from ANY source whatsoever.
I'll just start throwing bits of it out there, then maybe fill in the gaps later. Maybe retell it a time or two for continuity, to smooth things out. I like this idea :-)
***
Putting this out in 'public', as it were, makes me aware that my brothers (or their kids, or somebody connected to the family somehow) may someday read some of this, and it makes me want to be fair. To tell the truth, but not be hurtful - not to exaggerate, but to tell it as simply and clearly as I can. When I'm angry it's hard to do that - some of the things I've written while angry shock me when I read them later, but I don't want to edit out my feelings, so I leave them up as is and hope that someday, if and when there's ever an opportunity to *discuss* all this, I'll get to actually *explain* how I was feeling and *why* I was so angry (if it isn't self-evident from the stories themselves.)
I'm getting side-tracked just now by playing a bit with Microsoft Paint, it's WAYYYY more fun! :-) So maybe I'll come back to this later. To be honest, it's all a bit of Pandora's box, and *I'm* as scared of what I'll feel and say as my brothers might be. I think.
I sometimes wonder, if I had a more 'connected' circle of family and friends, would all this be necessary? The blogging, and everything? The years of journaling, the many attempts to be 'heard' and seen, via whatever means or media are available to me. To chronicle everything that's happened. It seems to be an essential part of feeling 'real', of knowing that one has existed, that one's passage through time and space has been recorded somehow, somewhere, that one has made an IMPRESSION and been NOTICED, taken note of.
Answer: No. If I had a supportive, caring, concerned, involved family, none of this would be necessary. But that's a fantasy life I don't actually live, so instead I'll carry on with the writing, and hope for the best.
[Edited to add: It occurs to me, based on some recent experiences, that if I'm just aggressive and insistent enough, I can MAKE myself heard. The problem is that that kind of aggression is just not in my nature, so it's exhausting, daunting, draining. Basically, I don't want to do it. But I'm *learning* how to do it, in spite of not wanting to. As a survival tool. And guess what? It's working! Yayyyyy!!!!! And I'm even learning how not to spend so much time and energy *fretting* about it, feeling guilty for standing up for myself, and just DOING it. More yay. Onward.]
I imagine being part of a clan where all the stories were passed on by word of mouth, and EVERYBODY knew all the stories, to the point where some became legend, with time. I'm sure that happens with lots of folks - I hear people telling stories all the time, and have told a few myself. In fact, one of the moments that brought me closest to tears was when my middle (and currently estranged) brother told a story about *me* that I didn't realize he even knew, and told it with some details that even *I* hadn't been aware of, because I'd been so traumatized by the event itself (falling under a wagon and being dragged along on some gravel when I was about 8 or so, leaving me bruised and bloody while my brother cried and cried that I was 'dying'! Who knew that my most vicious tormenter once had great feelings of fondness for me? And what happened to change all that? I'll probably never know.)
Anyway.
So today's story is picking up from around the time of dad's death - that whole period is hazy because of all the changes and emotional trauma and stress and the horrible loneliness and complete lack of any kind of support - physical, emotional, financial, mental - from ANY source whatsoever.
I'll just start throwing bits of it out there, then maybe fill in the gaps later. Maybe retell it a time or two for continuity, to smooth things out. I like this idea :-)
***
Putting this out in 'public', as it were, makes me aware that my brothers (or their kids, or somebody connected to the family somehow) may someday read some of this, and it makes me want to be fair. To tell the truth, but not be hurtful - not to exaggerate, but to tell it as simply and clearly as I can. When I'm angry it's hard to do that - some of the things I've written while angry shock me when I read them later, but I don't want to edit out my feelings, so I leave them up as is and hope that someday, if and when there's ever an opportunity to *discuss* all this, I'll get to actually *explain* how I was feeling and *why* I was so angry (if it isn't self-evident from the stories themselves.)
I'm getting side-tracked just now by playing a bit with Microsoft Paint, it's WAYYYY more fun! :-) So maybe I'll come back to this later. To be honest, it's all a bit of Pandora's box, and *I'm* as scared of what I'll feel and say as my brothers might be. I think.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
cutting ties - again
I'm hoping it will be easier this time. I've been away long enough that I really don't feel the same kind of entanglement(s) I felt before.
But the guilt is still there. I just have to keep reminding myself that this is not an equal and opposite kind of thing - that if my FAMILY felt the same kind of guilt as *I've* been feeling (which they SHOULD, as far as I'm concerned - they're equally culpable in this whole situation, I shouldn't have to be carrying all this shit alone), they would have DONE something about it by now. The fact that they've said and done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING tells me that they don't give a shit. Or, that their ability to express 'giving a shit' is so fucked up as to be something I want nothing to do with.
I am NOT going down that one-way street again. It's two-way streets or nothing from here on out.
***
I realized today that my brother seems to think he can just ignore all of what went before and that I'll be happy with the tiny little crumbs he's willing to fling casually my way.
Not so, buffalo breath.
I had made a couple of tentative moves toward re-connecting without thinking about it too hard - the birthday card for him a few weeks back, and the unexpected visit to mom's where I encountered the girls, and, briefly, my brother; and then the next day I emailed him a link to a comic/blog that i thought he might like.
All very natural, a normal desire to connect with someone who's been a long-term part of your life, right?
But things don't change so easily. I realized today how angry I still am, how nothing has changed, how there are all these assumptions being made without any discussion whatsoever. And that the same absence of conversation that has been standard operating procedure in my family for my entire life HASN'T CHANGED ONE BIT.
I thought I'd escaped unscathed, but the feeling like I wanted to make myself throw up again last night and this morning, for the first time in over a year, clued me in: I was literally 'swallowing' my anger - 'swallowing' something I didn't want to swallow. Namely the bad feelings, the fact that everyone was just brushing by me again, making light of my feelings, ignoring all the things I've said in the past as if it's all just magically better now.
Maybe I make it too easy for them. Maybe that's a habit I need to break. I don't know how to do it single-handedly - in fact, I'm pretty sure it's not POSSIBLE to make a giant, relational change like this by oneself. It takes the cooperation, interest and involvement of ALL parties.
Anyway. So, tonight, I found myself starting to feel sick, literally nauseous, as if I had eaten something bad. But I knew it wasn't food poisoning - if it had been from the food I ate earlier, it would have hit me hours ago and much more strongly.
This started with (I know this seems unlikely, but this is what I felt) a knotting in my liver. I'm wondering if the 'clenching' I was feeling is where my gall bladder used to be? And I thought, this is how the bulimia started all those years ago:
Back then, I felt incapable of expressing anger because any anger on my part made me 'bad', no matter how provoked I'd been by a person or situation - the feeling was 'unattractive' and therefore not permissible, and therefore I must bottle it up in order to be 'liked'. (See how fucked up/tangled up this gets? And how quickly? And how INSANELY DIFFICULT it is to figure out once all the complicated layers have gotten all twisted together over many long years of unquestioned bottling-up of feelings?)
And I realized that the 'backed up anger', or bile running the wrong direction (which was how I translated/interpreted the clenched (?) liver feeling), was me going against myself so as not to upset anyone in my family. Putting THEIR needs ahead of my own, once again.
As soon as I had that thought, made that connection, the nausea began to subside, and I could feel my energies begin to flow the 'right' direction again.
So I know I'm doing the right thing. I let my body be the guide here, to help me understand, feel and connect with my deepest, most powerful feelings.
It was really fucking cool! Though depressing to have to go through this all over again.
But it's like any path you travel enough times: You learn the shortcuts, how to avoid any traps or pitfalls, and you just generally learn how to make the trip as quickly as possible, especially if it's an unpleasant one.
Ideally, I suppose, you eventually learn to find a different route altogether, a PLEASANT one, or perhaps find a way to eliminate the need for whatever it was that caused you to take the unpleasant route in the first place. Although I think that last idea is just fantasy, wishful thinking - there are *some* things we can do without altogether, but close family ties isn't one of them. It's a bit like trying to do without air, water or food.
But perhaps I can learn to find other substitutes for the particular humans I started with. That's what I'm working on, for now.
***
The problem is, what if you're the only one in the family who seems to have any AWARENESS of the feelings of other people? Or, to the degree that you have that facility (or curse, handicap or whatever)?
***
I don't want to think about 'leaving the door open' or whatever - I feel like my prime directive right now is: SURVIVE.
Think ONLY and ENTIRELY about myself, no one else. No one in my life has EARNED that place of honor with me. So I will not give that 'position' away just because someone comes up and demands (or seems to expect) that I do so just because they WANT it.
Argh, this is getting all blargly again. Stop for a minute and let things coagulate (ick?) or whatever it is they need to do before I can continue 'processing' (blech-y shrinkology term.)
But the guilt is still there. I just have to keep reminding myself that this is not an equal and opposite kind of thing - that if my FAMILY felt the same kind of guilt as *I've* been feeling (which they SHOULD, as far as I'm concerned - they're equally culpable in this whole situation, I shouldn't have to be carrying all this shit alone), they would have DONE something about it by now. The fact that they've said and done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING tells me that they don't give a shit. Or, that their ability to express 'giving a shit' is so fucked up as to be something I want nothing to do with.
I am NOT going down that one-way street again. It's two-way streets or nothing from here on out.
***
I realized today that my brother seems to think he can just ignore all of what went before and that I'll be happy with the tiny little crumbs he's willing to fling casually my way.
Not so, buffalo breath.
I had made a couple of tentative moves toward re-connecting without thinking about it too hard - the birthday card for him a few weeks back, and the unexpected visit to mom's where I encountered the girls, and, briefly, my brother; and then the next day I emailed him a link to a comic/blog that i thought he might like.
All very natural, a normal desire to connect with someone who's been a long-term part of your life, right?
But things don't change so easily. I realized today how angry I still am, how nothing has changed, how there are all these assumptions being made without any discussion whatsoever. And that the same absence of conversation that has been standard operating procedure in my family for my entire life HASN'T CHANGED ONE BIT.
I thought I'd escaped unscathed, but the feeling like I wanted to make myself throw up again last night and this morning, for the first time in over a year, clued me in: I was literally 'swallowing' my anger - 'swallowing' something I didn't want to swallow. Namely the bad feelings, the fact that everyone was just brushing by me again, making light of my feelings, ignoring all the things I've said in the past as if it's all just magically better now.
Maybe I make it too easy for them. Maybe that's a habit I need to break. I don't know how to do it single-handedly - in fact, I'm pretty sure it's not POSSIBLE to make a giant, relational change like this by oneself. It takes the cooperation, interest and involvement of ALL parties.
Anyway. So, tonight, I found myself starting to feel sick, literally nauseous, as if I had eaten something bad. But I knew it wasn't food poisoning - if it had been from the food I ate earlier, it would have hit me hours ago and much more strongly.
This started with (I know this seems unlikely, but this is what I felt) a knotting in my liver. I'm wondering if the 'clenching' I was feeling is where my gall bladder used to be? And I thought, this is how the bulimia started all those years ago:
Back then, I felt incapable of expressing anger because any anger on my part made me 'bad', no matter how provoked I'd been by a person or situation - the feeling was 'unattractive' and therefore not permissible, and therefore I must bottle it up in order to be 'liked'. (See how fucked up/tangled up this gets? And how quickly? And how INSANELY DIFFICULT it is to figure out once all the complicated layers have gotten all twisted together over many long years of unquestioned bottling-up of feelings?)
And I realized that the 'backed up anger', or bile running the wrong direction (which was how I translated/interpreted the clenched (?) liver feeling), was me going against myself so as not to upset anyone in my family. Putting THEIR needs ahead of my own, once again.
As soon as I had that thought, made that connection, the nausea began to subside, and I could feel my energies begin to flow the 'right' direction again.
So I know I'm doing the right thing. I let my body be the guide here, to help me understand, feel and connect with my deepest, most powerful feelings.
It was really fucking cool! Though depressing to have to go through this all over again.
But it's like any path you travel enough times: You learn the shortcuts, how to avoid any traps or pitfalls, and you just generally learn how to make the trip as quickly as possible, especially if it's an unpleasant one.
Ideally, I suppose, you eventually learn to find a different route altogether, a PLEASANT one, or perhaps find a way to eliminate the need for whatever it was that caused you to take the unpleasant route in the first place. Although I think that last idea is just fantasy, wishful thinking - there are *some* things we can do without altogether, but close family ties isn't one of them. It's a bit like trying to do without air, water or food.
But perhaps I can learn to find other substitutes for the particular humans I started with. That's what I'm working on, for now.
***
The problem is, what if you're the only one in the family who seems to have any AWARENESS of the feelings of other people? Or, to the degree that you have that facility (or curse, handicap or whatever)?
***
I don't want to think about 'leaving the door open' or whatever - I feel like my prime directive right now is: SURVIVE.
Think ONLY and ENTIRELY about myself, no one else. No one in my life has EARNED that place of honor with me. So I will not give that 'position' away just because someone comes up and demands (or seems to expect) that I do so just because they WANT it.
Argh, this is getting all blargly again. Stop for a minute and let things coagulate (ick?) or whatever it is they need to do before I can continue 'processing' (blech-y shrinkology term.)
Friday, August 27, 2010
why are some families
so full of pain?
i saw my nieces for the first time in over a year on Monday (the 23rd), and was there long enough to end up seeing my brother as well, though only briefly. He seemed all red and tight and angry, like something that was going to explode - he made me think of a very large grape, in shape and redness. That kind of tautness that grape skins have? Like they're holding in a lot of tension?
It was at my mom's house, I'd stopped by to ask her something, and the girls were there - I kind of thought they might be, because Monday used to be their regular 'day at grandma's,' and I was pretty sure school wouldn't've started yet.
So I went in when they said they were going to have tea and asked me if I'd stay (they were all out in the yard when I got there and I was just going to ask mom the question and go, but with two nieces clinging to me and the third gazing on with an - i don't know what - kind of look on her face, I didn't have the heart to just leave them.)
It was ok at first, but then the oldest started tormenting everyone (I think she's 10 now?), she would have tormented me except I've spent so much time working on all this stuf that it hardly fazed me at all. Mostly just the shock that it's gotten so blatantly out of hand in such a short time (the bullying, I mean.) The other girls seemed sort of resigned to it, they put up a little bit of a fuss, but they both seemed to more or less do what domestic animals do when they've been mauled too much by little kids: Just lie there until the kid gets bored and goes away, and try not to do anything that might get them seriously hurt.
So I stood up to her and stood up *for* the others, and taught them little tricks to fend for themselves, right there in front of her, and shifted the balance of power a bit; but it was exhausting, and I had no notion of trying to do it on any kind of regular basis.
I wasn't thinking about how late it was, but then I heard the front door open and knew it was my brother; we scarcely exchanged a word or a glance, except that I caught the red-grapeness out of the corner of my eye and decided to keep my head down. He finally, maybe right as we all were leaving? remembered to blurt something about "Thanks for the very cool birthday card" that I'd left him on the back porch of their house almost three weeks before. At that point I was pretty much just trying to get out of there intact, so wasn't even thinking about it, and it was a pleasant surprise.
Interestingly, the one that clung to me most was the youngest (who's now 5, she tells me); I seem to have adopted the classic, defensive distancing that I remember from my *own* aunts and uncles. A family that never apologizes for anything nor takes responsibility for the effects of their behaviors and words on the other members of the family, and is unwilling to ever DISCUSS anything, carries a lot of old pain.
It seems that, when this is the case, everybody's so busy kind of holding themselves 'still' - you know, like when you've got a bruise or some other sore spot and you're basically just trying not to jar or bump it until it has a chance to heal properly?
But there are SO many sore spots in our family that we can hardly be in the same room with each other.
Except my mother, who blithely and glibly trots out every story and tale as if it were the breeziest, most unconcerning little family anecdote, oblivious to the winces of pain and embarassment, sometimes humiliation and shock, on the faces of her children and other listeners. She's the one who unknowingly rubs salt in the wound (smiling all the while, like a child, "See, aren't i great, aren't i a good storyteller? Just like the grownups?"), drags crushed glass across flayed, raw, bleeding skin. She has ABSOLUTELY NO AWARENESS of the feelings of other human beings, as near as I can tell.
So there are the Oblivions, like my mother, who are the emotional equivalent of the bull in the china shop; and the Passivites, like the middle niece, who just lie there and take it and hope it will be over soon; and the Explodies, like my brother, who lets it build until steam comes out his ears and he resembles one of those old-fashioned boilers, and everybody runs for the hills.
And me? I don't know which camp I'm in. I like to think I've become this detached observer, this Wise Woman (goddesss, how our family could *use* some wisdom!)
I picture myself as Justice (my name is Biblical in origin and means 'the judge', as I understand it, ho ho :-), you know, the one with the scales and everything?
The one who impartially weighs the pros and cons and reads out the verdict, assigning responsibility and recompense, assuring fairness and equity for all. Or something like that.
***
I want it to all go away and leave me alone. I've been so much happier this past year - able to make healthier connections with new people, never falling into the absolute depths of blackest despair that had me in their death grip in years past; I walked away and left it behind. I feel that I am standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and admiring its depth, but knowing I definitely don't want to fall down there! 'Cause I'll never get out again! It's a dry, sandy, dusty, chasm with no food, water or shelter from the blazing desert sun; no protection at all. "Run away! Run away," scream my instincts.
The guilt part is a tiny little voice I can barely hear, now - I've wrestled it to the ground so many times that I'm beginning to win. My OWN need for survival is becoming more important than 'looking good' to people whose 'rules' do not in any way, shape or form include concerns about MY health and well-being.
Where's a pretty picture? I've decided I'm going to start posting photos/clips from my massive cache of images just to get them out there, disseminate them, spread them on the ether-wind.
I sorted/gathered my grasshopper pictures today, maybe I'll start with them:
***
The thing is, how long would it have been before someone from my family made contact with *me*? I mean, there's been NO effort, no energy. I walked in as if I'd never left - but it's a kind of gaslighting - my presence? My absence? It's all the same.
Except the youngest niece said, "Auntie ____, it's been years since I've seen you!" Which, from the perspective of a 5-year-old, is pretty accurate, when you get down to it. A year's a fifth of her entire life, after all....
I'm so used to feeding them all, emotionally - being aware of their needs, knowing what they need especially when they don't even know, and yet coming away hungry, myself - starving for the tiniest crumb of emotional sustenance.
The girls, especially the youngest, still give to some degree, they haven't learned to hoard it to themselves, yet; though the oldest is getting scarily good at it already and I'm afraid to learn what the middle girl's 'coping mechanisms' are turning out to be.
My youngest brother is the only one who gives anything back at all of the so-called 'adults', and even he seems to do it in spite of himself - it was reflexive when he was a child, but now he, too, has learned to 'keep it to himself.' Mostly. It's almost as if he surprises himself when he becomes unexpectedly generous. And he fights himself: There's the anger, the guilt, the shame, the resentment.
Sigh. I wish it could all be simpler, somehow, not so horrible and tangled up. I really think it's the money (or lack thereof) that messes everything up: The unfairness, the inequity, grates on everyone's nerves, and nobody wants to talk about how it got that way, and the longer we go without talking about it, the more set everybody gets in their ways, the more unwilling they are to change. The lack of contact reinforces peoples' preconceptions, biases and misconceptions, and the misunderstandings and lack of communication become set in stone. Immovable. Inert.
Sad.
But somehow I don't FEEL it - I've become inured to it. I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing, but I can actually stand this close to the vortex and not get sucked in. And I don't even feel like it's an act of willpower or resistance - I'm just simply not attracted any more. I am indifferent. It has nothing to do with me.
***
I've been thinking, lately, of the 'choices' people make, many of which seem to be like the one a wolf caught in a trap makes when 'choosing' to gnaw its own leg off in order to escape: No choice at all.
Chew my leg off and live, crippled;
or die?
Many so-called 'choices' in life seem like this: Work as a coal miner and slowly die of black lung in order to 'live'? Work some meaningless white-collar job, trapped in a dimly-lit, airless cubicle through many of your most productive life hours so that you can - live???
I don't get it. There HAS to be another way.
***
Bouncing back and forth, working away at this, an invisible splinter that hurts like a sonofabitch, and I keep thinking I've gotten most of it out, yet there's still evidence of infection.
My mom. I haven't spoken to her, except briefly when it's unavoidable when she shows up at a dance, and yet when I showed up at her house the other day it was as if we'd only spoken yesterday, as if there was no animosity, as if everything was normal and fine.
It MAKES ME FUCKING CRAZY!!!!! This business where I CANNOT MAKE ANY IMPACT ON MY FAMILY WHATSOEVER.
It's like you PUNCH THEM IN THE FACE AS HARD AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN, and they don't even blink. They appear not to even notice you, at all! It's like you're this tiny, insignificant, meaningless fly speck that has no power. Maybe that's the origin of all those monster movies - children who've grown up in families like that, or with parents like that. The horrible, scary creature that crushes everything in its path, unstoppable.
Yikes. I don't like where this is going. No WONDER I had so many nightmares as a kid! It's a wonder I don't still have them now. Massive will power at work, plus staying awake until the wee hours until I'm so exhausted I HAVE to go to sleep. Keeping the demons at bay, the ones that lurk continually at the corners of your vision, always just out of conscious view, waiting for you to let down your guard so they can GET you...
Ok, now I'm REALLY going to give myself nightmares if I don't stop.
But I'm on to something, I have to follow this. Maybe not now, right this minute, but understanding the connection between staying away from my 'family' (and certain other kinds of people) and the nightmares and my continued sanity and mental health IS CRUCIAL.
I MUST stay away from them.
I MUST protect myself.
I MUST do this. At all costs.
I CANNOT AFFORD to go there again.
I do not LIKE green eggs and ham.
I will not EAT them, Sam I am.
I feel like I've been fighting an internal battle at a subconscious level for the last four days, sleeping as much as possible to 'gird my loins', maybe? Or maybe as an escape. Hard to tell. Seeing my family now is not good timing. This time is for ME, dammit. The flower only blooms under certain very specific conditions. I've been working up to this particular bloom period for a VERY long time. I WILL NOT let it be sucked dry by some random, drive-by - whatevers. Even just THINKING about it, or AVOIDING thinking about it, is taking up WAY too much time and energy. I can't afford it.
And now today I finally have a trickle of energy, and it's getting sucked into this vortex. This argument, about whether I'm a 'bad person' for not putting their needs ahead of my own.
"Kill it! Kill it!"
I've gotten so I can actually smash certain kinds of spiders (the kind I *know* to be biters) without too much regret; can I get to the point where I can turn my back on people out of self-preservation?
Yes.
I CAN. :-)
***
my shoulders and neck are all tense and sore, scrunched up as if fending off a blow. This is a sure sign that I fear 'getting in trouble' from somewhere. Here it seems apropos to quote from an article on guilt:
Ach, here's the quote I was lookin' for, I think:
i saw my nieces for the first time in over a year on Monday (the 23rd), and was there long enough to end up seeing my brother as well, though only briefly. He seemed all red and tight and angry, like something that was going to explode - he made me think of a very large grape, in shape and redness. That kind of tautness that grape skins have? Like they're holding in a lot of tension?
It was at my mom's house, I'd stopped by to ask her something, and the girls were there - I kind of thought they might be, because Monday used to be their regular 'day at grandma's,' and I was pretty sure school wouldn't've started yet.
So I went in when they said they were going to have tea and asked me if I'd stay (they were all out in the yard when I got there and I was just going to ask mom the question and go, but with two nieces clinging to me and the third gazing on with an - i don't know what - kind of look on her face, I didn't have the heart to just leave them.)
It was ok at first, but then the oldest started tormenting everyone (I think she's 10 now?), she would have tormented me except I've spent so much time working on all this stuf that it hardly fazed me at all. Mostly just the shock that it's gotten so blatantly out of hand in such a short time (the bullying, I mean.) The other girls seemed sort of resigned to it, they put up a little bit of a fuss, but they both seemed to more or less do what domestic animals do when they've been mauled too much by little kids: Just lie there until the kid gets bored and goes away, and try not to do anything that might get them seriously hurt.
So I stood up to her and stood up *for* the others, and taught them little tricks to fend for themselves, right there in front of her, and shifted the balance of power a bit; but it was exhausting, and I had no notion of trying to do it on any kind of regular basis.
I wasn't thinking about how late it was, but then I heard the front door open and knew it was my brother; we scarcely exchanged a word or a glance, except that I caught the red-grapeness out of the corner of my eye and decided to keep my head down. He finally, maybe right as we all were leaving? remembered to blurt something about "Thanks for the very cool birthday card" that I'd left him on the back porch of their house almost three weeks before. At that point I was pretty much just trying to get out of there intact, so wasn't even thinking about it, and it was a pleasant surprise.
Interestingly, the one that clung to me most was the youngest (who's now 5, she tells me); I seem to have adopted the classic, defensive distancing that I remember from my *own* aunts and uncles. A family that never apologizes for anything nor takes responsibility for the effects of their behaviors and words on the other members of the family, and is unwilling to ever DISCUSS anything, carries a lot of old pain.
It seems that, when this is the case, everybody's so busy kind of holding themselves 'still' - you know, like when you've got a bruise or some other sore spot and you're basically just trying not to jar or bump it until it has a chance to heal properly?
But there are SO many sore spots in our family that we can hardly be in the same room with each other.
Except my mother, who blithely and glibly trots out every story and tale as if it were the breeziest, most unconcerning little family anecdote, oblivious to the winces of pain and embarassment, sometimes humiliation and shock, on the faces of her children and other listeners. She's the one who unknowingly rubs salt in the wound (smiling all the while, like a child, "See, aren't i great, aren't i a good storyteller? Just like the grownups?"), drags crushed glass across flayed, raw, bleeding skin. She has ABSOLUTELY NO AWARENESS of the feelings of other human beings, as near as I can tell.
So there are the Oblivions, like my mother, who are the emotional equivalent of the bull in the china shop; and the Passivites, like the middle niece, who just lie there and take it and hope it will be over soon; and the Explodies, like my brother, who lets it build until steam comes out his ears and he resembles one of those old-fashioned boilers, and everybody runs for the hills.
And me? I don't know which camp I'm in. I like to think I've become this detached observer, this Wise Woman (goddesss, how our family could *use* some wisdom!)
I picture myself as Justice (my name is Biblical in origin and means 'the judge', as I understand it, ho ho :-), you know, the one with the scales and everything?The one who impartially weighs the pros and cons and reads out the verdict, assigning responsibility and recompense, assuring fairness and equity for all. Or something like that.
***
I want it to all go away and leave me alone. I've been so much happier this past year - able to make healthier connections with new people, never falling into the absolute depths of blackest despair that had me in their death grip in years past; I walked away and left it behind. I feel that I am standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and admiring its depth, but knowing I definitely don't want to fall down there! 'Cause I'll never get out again! It's a dry, sandy, dusty, chasm with no food, water or shelter from the blazing desert sun; no protection at all. "Run away! Run away," scream my instincts.
The guilt part is a tiny little voice I can barely hear, now - I've wrestled it to the ground so many times that I'm beginning to win. My OWN need for survival is becoming more important than 'looking good' to people whose 'rules' do not in any way, shape or form include concerns about MY health and well-being.
Where's a pretty picture? I've decided I'm going to start posting photos/clips from my massive cache of images just to get them out there, disseminate them, spread them on the ether-wind.
I sorted/gathered my grasshopper pictures today, maybe I'll start with them:
***
The thing is, how long would it have been before someone from my family made contact with *me*? I mean, there's been NO effort, no energy. I walked in as if I'd never left - but it's a kind of gaslighting - my presence? My absence? It's all the same.
Except the youngest niece said, "Auntie ____, it's been years since I've seen you!" Which, from the perspective of a 5-year-old, is pretty accurate, when you get down to it. A year's a fifth of her entire life, after all....
I'm so used to feeding them all, emotionally - being aware of their needs, knowing what they need especially when they don't even know, and yet coming away hungry, myself - starving for the tiniest crumb of emotional sustenance.
The girls, especially the youngest, still give to some degree, they haven't learned to hoard it to themselves, yet; though the oldest is getting scarily good at it already and I'm afraid to learn what the middle girl's 'coping mechanisms' are turning out to be.
My youngest brother is the only one who gives anything back at all of the so-called 'adults', and even he seems to do it in spite of himself - it was reflexive when he was a child, but now he, too, has learned to 'keep it to himself.' Mostly. It's almost as if he surprises himself when he becomes unexpectedly generous. And he fights himself: There's the anger, the guilt, the shame, the resentment.
Sigh. I wish it could all be simpler, somehow, not so horrible and tangled up. I really think it's the money (or lack thereof) that messes everything up: The unfairness, the inequity, grates on everyone's nerves, and nobody wants to talk about how it got that way, and the longer we go without talking about it, the more set everybody gets in their ways, the more unwilling they are to change. The lack of contact reinforces peoples' preconceptions, biases and misconceptions, and the misunderstandings and lack of communication become set in stone. Immovable. Inert.
Sad.
But somehow I don't FEEL it - I've become inured to it. I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing, but I can actually stand this close to the vortex and not get sucked in. And I don't even feel like it's an act of willpower or resistance - I'm just simply not attracted any more. I am indifferent. It has nothing to do with me.
***
I've been thinking, lately, of the 'choices' people make, many of which seem to be like the one a wolf caught in a trap makes when 'choosing' to gnaw its own leg off in order to escape: No choice at all.
Chew my leg off and live, crippled;
or die?
Many so-called 'choices' in life seem like this: Work as a coal miner and slowly die of black lung in order to 'live'? Work some meaningless white-collar job, trapped in a dimly-lit, airless cubicle through many of your most productive life hours so that you can - live???
I don't get it. There HAS to be another way.
***
Bouncing back and forth, working away at this, an invisible splinter that hurts like a sonofabitch, and I keep thinking I've gotten most of it out, yet there's still evidence of infection.
My mom. I haven't spoken to her, except briefly when it's unavoidable when she shows up at a dance, and yet when I showed up at her house the other day it was as if we'd only spoken yesterday, as if there was no animosity, as if everything was normal and fine.
It MAKES ME FUCKING CRAZY!!!!! This business where I CANNOT MAKE ANY IMPACT ON MY FAMILY WHATSOEVER.
It's like you PUNCH THEM IN THE FACE AS HARD AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN, and they don't even blink. They appear not to even notice you, at all! It's like you're this tiny, insignificant, meaningless fly speck that has no power. Maybe that's the origin of all those monster movies - children who've grown up in families like that, or with parents like that. The horrible, scary creature that crushes everything in its path, unstoppable.
Yikes. I don't like where this is going. No WONDER I had so many nightmares as a kid! It's a wonder I don't still have them now. Massive will power at work, plus staying awake until the wee hours until I'm so exhausted I HAVE to go to sleep. Keeping the demons at bay, the ones that lurk continually at the corners of your vision, always just out of conscious view, waiting for you to let down your guard so they can GET you...
Ok, now I'm REALLY going to give myself nightmares if I don't stop.
But I'm on to something, I have to follow this. Maybe not now, right this minute, but understanding the connection between staying away from my 'family' (and certain other kinds of people) and the nightmares and my continued sanity and mental health IS CRUCIAL.
I MUST stay away from them.
I MUST protect myself.
I MUST do this. At all costs.
I CANNOT AFFORD to go there again.
I do not LIKE green eggs and ham.
I will not EAT them, Sam I am.
I feel like I've been fighting an internal battle at a subconscious level for the last four days, sleeping as much as possible to 'gird my loins', maybe? Or maybe as an escape. Hard to tell. Seeing my family now is not good timing. This time is for ME, dammit. The flower only blooms under certain very specific conditions. I've been working up to this particular bloom period for a VERY long time. I WILL NOT let it be sucked dry by some random, drive-by - whatevers. Even just THINKING about it, or AVOIDING thinking about it, is taking up WAY too much time and energy. I can't afford it.
And now today I finally have a trickle of energy, and it's getting sucked into this vortex. This argument, about whether I'm a 'bad person' for not putting their needs ahead of my own.
"Kill it! Kill it!"
I've gotten so I can actually smash certain kinds of spiders (the kind I *know* to be biters) without too much regret; can I get to the point where I can turn my back on people out of self-preservation?
Yes.
I CAN. :-)
***
my shoulders and neck are all tense and sore, scrunched up as if fending off a blow. This is a sure sign that I fear 'getting in trouble' from somewhere. Here it seems apropos to quote from an article on guilt:
As the French playwright Albert Camus wrote in The Fall: ‘The more I accuse myself, the more right I have to judge you. Even better, I make you judge yourself, which comforts me the more.’Hm. I'm not sure that's exactly what I was looking for. But i like the quote, so i'll leave it there. (And i'm not trying to be 'hip' with my lower-case 'i's' and beginnings of sentences - my shift key seems to be on the fritz and it's PISSING ME OFF to the point that i can't be bothered to keep going back and bashing on it to try to make it work right. So it's hit and - miss. Cry me a rivah.)
Ach, here's the quote I was lookin' for, I think:
Erich Fromm suggested that there are two forms of conscience. The first and most exercised is what he called an ‘authoritarian conscience’. Its universe is a fearful one, dominated by angry gods of insecurity, low self-esteem and conformity. It metes out punishment and drives us towards actions that temper its wrathful flames, including consumerism (‘retail therapy’) and malignant narcissistic behaviour like that of Schumaker’s ‘happichondriacs’.This is the key bit, bolded by me for emPHAsis:
For Fromm, guilt was firmly part of this authoritarian conscience:And this:
‘When most people feel “guilty”, they are actually feeling afraid because they have been disobedient. They are not really troubled by a moral issue, as they think they are, but by the fact of having disobeyed a command.’
Child development specialist Penelope Leach echoes this sentiment from the perspective of good parent-child relationships: ‘Guilt is the most destructive of all emotions. It mourns what has been while playing no part in what may be, now or in the future. Whatever you are doing, however you are coping, if you listen to your child and to your own feelings, there will be something you can actually do to make things right.’
i think i finally burned out my worry function
yay. it doesn't work any more - it's BROKEN! Fried from one too many jolts of hyper-adrenaline pulsing through its little worry circuits. The resultant calm is similar to the effect of certain anti-anxiety drugs, I imagine - it roadblocks all those synaptic (or whatever they are) worry-paths.
Hey, that sounds like a good name for a 'condition': I'm a bonafide worrypath! But I can't use it now, since my worrier (not to be confused with 'terrier', though both are somewhat neurotic and prone to not letting go of things), she is a fused lump of - well, not silica, what is an organic worrier made of, and what does it look like when fused? Organic analog to hard disc. Hm. Life beginning to attempt to copy - not art, but technology. Yuck. Not sure I like the way this is going.
Ok, start over.
First, I take 'dibs' on the word, 'worrypath'. I hereby officially claim its coinage on the 27th day of August, 2010, at or about 12:42 in the very early afternoon.
(Is it morning? or afternoon? I can never keep track of that a.m./p.m. thing in the vicinity of noon or midnight - so arbitrary and confusing.)
So, here it is:
WorrypathTM is MINE! All MINE!!!!
And second: Now that the excitement of coining my very own new-word-for-the-day is over, including googling to see if somebody else already used it (only found cites for 'worry path', but not as one word, 'worrypath'. Not exhaustive research, but I think I'm good.) Plus minor side-trips to visit Creative Commons to see if a CC license is free and what's involved in appending such a thing to one's blog and/or website. More head-scratching required on this one, wasn't enough of a no-brainer to just slap it on here. Some figgerin' will be necessary, methinks.
Continuing 'and second': I'm realizing 'worrier' isn't actually out cold, she's merely stunned. I feel her twitching, trying to come back to life. I think she's been somnolescent (?) in keeping with the sudden, drastic weather change from too hot to too cold (whatever happened to 'just right'? I think she must have been hijacked by one of the Ninos... [dang, can't find one of those tilde-thingies when you need one {ok, done with the hyper-parenthesizing now, (I think?)}]) that's occurred here with an absolutely inadequate amount of warning. I spent the last two days sleeping - thank goddess this miserable weather shift didn't happen on the same day as the arbitrary time change, or I might've had to sleep for a week...
Hey, that sounds like a good name for a 'condition': I'm a bonafide worrypath! But I can't use it now, since my worrier (not to be confused with 'terrier', though both are somewhat neurotic and prone to not letting go of things), she is a fused lump of - well, not silica, what is an organic worrier made of, and what does it look like when fused? Organic analog to hard disc. Hm. Life beginning to attempt to copy - not art, but technology. Yuck. Not sure I like the way this is going.
Ok, start over.
First, I take 'dibs' on the word, 'worrypath'. I hereby officially claim its coinage on the 27th day of August, 2010, at or about 12:42 in the very early afternoon.
(Is it morning? or afternoon? I can never keep track of that a.m./p.m. thing in the vicinity of noon or midnight - so arbitrary and confusing.)
So, here it is:
WorrypathTM is MINE! All MINE!!!!
And second: Now that the excitement of coining my very own new-word-for-the-day is over, including googling to see if somebody else already used it (only found cites for 'worry path', but not as one word, 'worrypath'. Not exhaustive research, but I think I'm good.) Plus minor side-trips to visit Creative Commons to see if a CC license is free and what's involved in appending such a thing to one's blog and/or website. More head-scratching required on this one, wasn't enough of a no-brainer to just slap it on here. Some figgerin' will be necessary, methinks.
Continuing 'and second': I'm realizing 'worrier' isn't actually out cold, she's merely stunned. I feel her twitching, trying to come back to life. I think she's been somnolescent (?) in keeping with the sudden, drastic weather change from too hot to too cold (whatever happened to 'just right'? I think she must have been hijacked by one of the Ninos... [dang, can't find one of those tilde-thingies when you need one {ok, done with the hyper-parenthesizing now, (I think?)}]) that's occurred here with an absolutely inadequate amount of warning. I spent the last two days sleeping - thank goddess this miserable weather shift didn't happen on the same day as the arbitrary time change, or I might've had to sleep for a week...
Thursday, August 26, 2010
brain blarps
Blarp: A cross between a burp, a blurt and a - I don't know what. I just like the sound of it.
So. Onward...
First of all, as donated by friend G, at a dance the other night:
baby steps. It's ok to go slow, take your time, and - gasp! MAKE MISTAKES WHILE YOU LEARN HOW TO DO SOMETHING!
He didn't actually say all that - when I expressed concern about going 'too slow' in learning to use an unfamiliar technology, he simply gave me a big, encouraging grin and said, "Baby steps!"
Thanks, G! If only my parents had ever understood this basic cheerleading technique - sigh.
So, breaking the ensuing thoughts down into small bites to help unravel, untangle and overwrite the old thought-tapes that imprinted themselves in my infant cranium as a result of growing up with unsympathetic, unsupportive, clueless parents:
being allowed to go at your own speed
being allowed to MAKE MISTAKES!!!!!!!!
even if you’re really smart
not being punished for being really smart
smart people still make mistakes, and sometimes they make really big, really stupid mistakes. We’re still human, you know.*
being allowed to learn at your own pace (as distinguished from being allowed to learn at your own 'speed'- speed is the raw processing capacity for learning a *given* thing; 'pace' is when you're ready to move from one 'thing' to another, or possibly to the 'next', thing - these are all arbitrary symbolic assignments [?what word? almost said 'assignations' WRONG buffalo breath.] I mean, who gets to decide what's 'next', anyway? If Einstein had followed the 'tried and true' series of 'next' steps in life, he'd never have found his own path. So FUCK road maps, anyway. Get there however you want. Or better yet, stay home, don't go there AT ALL. Just go in your head, or something. Do something else ALTOGETHER, don't let 'them' fuck with you. The Joneseseses [or who-ever].)
(symbology SUCKS and feels REALLY REALLY LIMITING right now. I need to TALK and WAVE MY ARMS AROUND with some other REAL LIVE HUMAN BEAN who actually GETS it. NOW. Ahem.)
*I think my dad used to try to make me feel bad when I'd make mistakes because *he* often felt bad because of how smart I was - ok, let me try writing that again so it makes more sense.
So. My dad was really insecure, and didn't feel very smart a lot of the time.
Enter new baby girl, who at an unexpectedly early age shows great precociousness (yes, that would be the actual *definition* of 'precociousness', now, wouldn't it?)
So now dad feels even *more* insecure and self-conscious, because, dang it, here's this little *kid* who's constantly showing him up! And she doesn't even know it! And isn't even *trying* to make him feel bad - no, she manages to 'make him feel bad' by merely existing. This tiny, wee, brand-new baby girl stirs up such horrible feelings of insecurity in this young man that he feels compelled to (emotionally speaking) squash her like a bug. So that *he* can feel better, regain his manly sense of superiority. Or some such shit.
No, as the squashee, I *refuse* to have any sympathy for the squashER. I mean, come on - *I'm* the one who got to have my little innards splattered all over the pavement. Metaphorically speaking. Theoretically, there isn't even enough 'me' left to be capable of having sympathy for another being. Besides which, I'm the one we're having sympathy with, here. NOT him. Ok? Got it? Good.
***
Next thought-fragment:
being uninterrupted by the needs of others while you’re trying to learn how to do something
***
The thing that people from previous generations don’t understand, and even people only 10 years older, or sometimes only 5 or 6 years older, is that things are changing and have changed so fast that no one can keep up. It takes time, and energy, and focus to learn how to do all these new things, and still get all the *other* things done, as well. Especially when you have nobody to help you learn, nobody to CARE *if* you learn, or *what* you learn, let alone HOW you learn. Mostly they're just pestering you to GET ON WITH IT AND DON'T BOTHER ME WITH YOUR STUPID PROBLEMS.
So piss off, all y'all, while I figure out what the hell's WHAT here, and decide what *I* want to be doing with MY time, energy, and LIFE.
And THEN, *IF* I've got any time, energy, or LIFE *LEFT*, after all that, then MAYBE, if you're really really GOOD and NICE TO ME ALL THE TIME, I just MIGHT let you back in. To my life. MAYBE.
***
And just because our *technology* has leaped ahead at the speed of light in the last human years, doesn’t mean humans have ‘evolved’ to keep up. Yes, we’ve *adapted* to a certain degree, but our basic wiring, physiology, mental and emotional coping mechanisms haven’t changed. So there’s a massive cognitive dissonance, culture clash, etc. I'm pretty sure I don't want to be around when the results are in, when this asymptotic catastrophe curve gets close enough to ground zero to implode.
***
parents who expect you to do too much too fast because they are impatient, or you are too obviously smart (it took me a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time to get that if you're FEMALE (ack!) you're not supposed to be smart. Or, you're not supposed to show it. Or, you're supposed to hem and haw all the time and pretend not to get it so as not to step on anybody's toesies or hurt their little ... blech. Feeling ill, now. Must stop.
I guess,to be honest? I STILL don't get it. And I DON'T WANT TO!!!!! What the fuck, why the HELL should I fucking HIDE one of my best ATTRIBUTES, for FUCK's SAKE????? Jesus H. CHRIST on a fucking toothpick. I just don't GET people. ever. At ALL.)
Continuing... They put this pressure on you to grow, like those hothouse plants that are force fed nutrients so that they’ll be showy enough to sell at some particular time and place.
And that’s another thing: Feeling like you’re a performing seal or a trick pony or something. They only want you around if you’re somehow a feather in THEIR cap – you have no intrinsic value of your own, as a person, as a human being. You’re only valuable to them if they can PROJECT something onto you: Their needs, fears, wants, unrealized hopes and dreams; or, if you’re a SERVANT, and DO WHAT THEY TELL YOU; or, if you somehow COVER THEM WITH GLORY, in the reflected limelight of your successes and achievements, which they try to take credit for, again, as if you were a performing seal and they taught you all your tricks, taught you everything you know.
Which we all know is total, utter, complete CRAP, and, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit.
***
I am making
a big mess
you know how you get these theories
and then you try them out
and sometimes they turn out to be totally wrong
but sometimes, they turn out to be totally RIGHT?
Well, this time, I think I’m on to something. I mean, I’m *often* on to something, because I’m just brilliant that way.
But – THIS time, I think I’m REALLY on to something.
Ok ok already, what is it then, madame le ultra-brilliance?
It is this: When I was little, I was not allowed to be messy (and somehow, my mother never made the connection between her obsession with cleanliness and my fear to make a mess and my hyper-organizedness, which, even she, when I was a little kid, admitted blew her away. Maybe being organized was actually *hard* for her [yes, I would say so, given her *current* lifestyle], so I totally flummoxed her with the apparent ease with which I, this tiny little kid, with no training or experience, could put things together? Wow.)
Anyway. So NOW, as an ‘adult’, I’m making up for it. In spades. Or something. As in, “It’s MY house, MY life, and I’ll make a great big mess in it IF I WANT TO.” And you can’t stop me. So neener neener.
In summary? Because I wasn't allowed to be a messy little kid, I have to be messy now. To make up for it.
***
More random thought bubbles from the same gassy patch of memory-swamp:
I think my parents resented how *easy* I made things seem, things that *they’d* always struggled with. (Actually, I think my dad was the one who really resented it - my mom's reactions seemed to be anywhere from a vaguely perplexed, "huh - should she really be able to do that at that age?" to a more opportunistic, "Hey, this could save me a *lot* of time!" The main problem with the latter response was that it seemed to label me as 'adult' long before I was anything *like* an adult [at least, in my mom's mind] - she used to say I was "Two going on twenty." Curses, foiled again.)
But what they forget is, I learned from THEM. From watching them. I learned quickly, and easily, and I had lots of examples, all the time, all around me, both of GOOD ways to things and BAD ways to do things. Did I say I learned quickly? And without being taught. The basic definition of high intelligence: One who learns by observing rather than being told how to do it.
The point being, I think, that i sort of wish I could go back in time to my too-young, clueless parents and say: "Hey, it's ok that she's really smart. It doesn't actually HURT you for her to be smart - in fact, in can be an advantage, right? And guess what, even though she's really smart, she still has to pick up what she's learning from somewhere, right? And guess who she's learning all this really cool stuff from? You two! That's right! You parental units have actually made a significant contribution to all this brilliance! Yay! You're not just loser slug-heads!"
Actually, I'm pretty sure mom never thought of herself this way (as a loser slug-head) - her defense mechanisms were too solidly in place for that. And my dad? I think he pretty much went to his grave doubting himself, though he learned how to hide it reasonably well by the time we (kids) would've been old enough to begin questioning him about it. Which was right about the time he died.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, maybe dad would've felt better if he'd realized I wasn't just totally figuring all that stuff out out of thin air? That I actually gleaned it from somewhere, and hey, who else would I have learned it from if it wasn't him or mom? But maybe that wouldn't have made him feel better after all. I don't know.
And the truth is, by the time I was a little over three, I was already reading so fast and furiously that I think a lot of my ideas *were* coming from 'outside' sources.
Reading so much at an early age is the only way I can explain having such different notions from my parents, because I had very little interaction with others outside the family (maybe because we moved so much, my dad was gone a lot, and my mom was pretty anti-social between raising two young kids pretty much single-handedly and various other factors I can only guess at?)
There really weren't any other 'outside influences' to speak of until I went to school, I was something of a hermit between ages 3 and 5 while my mother cloistered me (unintentionally - I think she was trying to do the right thing, but simply didn't 'get' that a kid that young shouldn't be left alone so much) in her pseudo-'Montessori' space up in the attic that she made for me. I don't really remember that time - I have a flash image of a dark space with lots of 'stuff' for me to play with, and a screaming little brother downstairs taking all her attention. I'm pretty sure this is when I began my lifelong tendency to escape into books, and why I get absorbed in them so quickly and easily, and why I read so fast: They were my own personal equivalent of TV. All that was a coping skill rather than a talent, although it served me well in later years. Two-edged swords, once again.
***
part of it's being an energetic, talented, smart WOMAN in a world where GIRLS (blech) are expected to SIT AROUND BEING PRETTY and NON-THREATENING in case there are any MALES (note: I did *not* say 'men') in the vicinity to feel THREATENED by your superior mental fire-power and general all-around AWESOMENESS.
Note to all be-penised ones: I will not SMALLIFY myself any more. Yer on yer OWN.
FUCK this 'nurturing the yayhoos that get all the power in the first place'. FUCK that shit. And the dinosaur it rode in on.
So. Onward...
First of all, as donated by friend G, at a dance the other night:
baby steps. It's ok to go slow, take your time, and - gasp! MAKE MISTAKES WHILE YOU LEARN HOW TO DO SOMETHING!
He didn't actually say all that - when I expressed concern about going 'too slow' in learning to use an unfamiliar technology, he simply gave me a big, encouraging grin and said, "Baby steps!"
Thanks, G! If only my parents had ever understood this basic cheerleading technique - sigh.
So, breaking the ensuing thoughts down into small bites to help unravel, untangle and overwrite the old thought-tapes that imprinted themselves in my infant cranium as a result of growing up with unsympathetic, unsupportive, clueless parents:
being allowed to go at your own speed
being allowed to MAKE MISTAKES!!!!!!!!
even if you’re really smart
not being punished for being really smart
smart people still make mistakes, and sometimes they make really big, really stupid mistakes. We’re still human, you know.*
being allowed to learn at your own pace (as distinguished from being allowed to learn at your own 'speed'- speed is the raw processing capacity for learning a *given* thing; 'pace' is when you're ready to move from one 'thing' to another, or possibly to the 'next', thing - these are all arbitrary symbolic assignments [?what word? almost said 'assignations' WRONG buffalo breath.] I mean, who gets to decide what's 'next', anyway? If Einstein had followed the 'tried and true' series of 'next' steps in life, he'd never have found his own path. So FUCK road maps, anyway. Get there however you want. Or better yet, stay home, don't go there AT ALL. Just go in your head, or something. Do something else ALTOGETHER, don't let 'them' fuck with you. The Joneseseses [or who-ever].)
(symbology SUCKS and feels REALLY REALLY LIMITING right now. I need to TALK and WAVE MY ARMS AROUND with some other REAL LIVE HUMAN BEAN who actually GETS it. NOW. Ahem.)
*I think my dad used to try to make me feel bad when I'd make mistakes because *he* often felt bad because of how smart I was - ok, let me try writing that again so it makes more sense.
So. My dad was really insecure, and didn't feel very smart a lot of the time.
Enter new baby girl, who at an unexpectedly early age shows great precociousness (yes, that would be the actual *definition* of 'precociousness', now, wouldn't it?)
So now dad feels even *more* insecure and self-conscious, because, dang it, here's this little *kid* who's constantly showing him up! And she doesn't even know it! And isn't even *trying* to make him feel bad - no, she manages to 'make him feel bad' by merely existing. This tiny, wee, brand-new baby girl stirs up such horrible feelings of insecurity in this young man that he feels compelled to (emotionally speaking) squash her like a bug. So that *he* can feel better, regain his manly sense of superiority. Or some such shit.
No, as the squashee, I *refuse* to have any sympathy for the squashER. I mean, come on - *I'm* the one who got to have my little innards splattered all over the pavement. Metaphorically speaking. Theoretically, there isn't even enough 'me' left to be capable of having sympathy for another being. Besides which, I'm the one we're having sympathy with, here. NOT him. Ok? Got it? Good.
***
Next thought-fragment:
being uninterrupted by the needs of others while you’re trying to learn how to do something
***
The thing that people from previous generations don’t understand, and even people only 10 years older, or sometimes only 5 or 6 years older, is that things are changing and have changed so fast that no one can keep up. It takes time, and energy, and focus to learn how to do all these new things, and still get all the *other* things done, as well. Especially when you have nobody to help you learn, nobody to CARE *if* you learn, or *what* you learn, let alone HOW you learn. Mostly they're just pestering you to GET ON WITH IT AND DON'T BOTHER ME WITH YOUR STUPID PROBLEMS.
So piss off, all y'all, while I figure out what the hell's WHAT here, and decide what *I* want to be doing with MY time, energy, and LIFE.
And THEN, *IF* I've got any time, energy, or LIFE *LEFT*, after all that, then MAYBE, if you're really really GOOD and NICE TO ME ALL THE TIME, I just MIGHT let you back in. To my life. MAYBE.
***
And just because our *technology* has leaped ahead at the speed of light in the last human years, doesn’t mean humans have ‘evolved’ to keep up. Yes, we’ve *adapted* to a certain degree, but our basic wiring, physiology, mental and emotional coping mechanisms haven’t changed. So there’s a massive cognitive dissonance, culture clash, etc. I'm pretty sure I don't want to be around when the results are in, when this asymptotic catastrophe curve gets close enough to ground zero to implode.
***
parents who expect you to do too much too fast because they are impatient, or you are too obviously smart (it took me a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time to get that if you're FEMALE (ack!) you're not supposed to be smart. Or, you're not supposed to show it. Or, you're supposed to hem and haw all the time and pretend not to get it so as not to step on anybody's toesies or hurt their little ... blech. Feeling ill, now. Must stop.
I guess,to be honest? I STILL don't get it. And I DON'T WANT TO!!!!! What the fuck, why the HELL should I fucking HIDE one of my best ATTRIBUTES, for FUCK's SAKE????? Jesus H. CHRIST on a fucking toothpick. I just don't GET people. ever. At ALL.)
Continuing... They put this pressure on you to grow, like those hothouse plants that are force fed nutrients so that they’ll be showy enough to sell at some particular time and place.
And that’s another thing: Feeling like you’re a performing seal or a trick pony or something. They only want you around if you’re somehow a feather in THEIR cap – you have no intrinsic value of your own, as a person, as a human being. You’re only valuable to them if they can PROJECT something onto you: Their needs, fears, wants, unrealized hopes and dreams; or, if you’re a SERVANT, and DO WHAT THEY TELL YOU; or, if you somehow COVER THEM WITH GLORY, in the reflected limelight of your successes and achievements, which they try to take credit for, again, as if you were a performing seal and they taught you all your tricks, taught you everything you know.
Which we all know is total, utter, complete CRAP, and, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit.
***
I am making
a big mess
you know how you get these theories
and then you try them out
and sometimes they turn out to be totally wrong
but sometimes, they turn out to be totally RIGHT?
Well, this time, I think I’m on to something. I mean, I’m *often* on to something, because I’m just brilliant that way.
But – THIS time, I think I’m REALLY on to something.
Ok ok already, what is it then, madame le ultra-brilliance?
It is this: When I was little, I was not allowed to be messy (and somehow, my mother never made the connection between her obsession with cleanliness and my fear to make a mess and my hyper-organizedness, which, even she, when I was a little kid, admitted blew her away. Maybe being organized was actually *hard* for her [yes, I would say so, given her *current* lifestyle], so I totally flummoxed her with the apparent ease with which I, this tiny little kid, with no training or experience, could put things together? Wow.)
Anyway. So NOW, as an ‘adult’, I’m making up for it. In spades. Or something. As in, “It’s MY house, MY life, and I’ll make a great big mess in it IF I WANT TO.” And you can’t stop me. So neener neener.
In summary? Because I wasn't allowed to be a messy little kid, I have to be messy now. To make up for it.
***
More random thought bubbles from the same gassy patch of memory-swamp:
I think my parents resented how *easy* I made things seem, things that *they’d* always struggled with. (Actually, I think my dad was the one who really resented it - my mom's reactions seemed to be anywhere from a vaguely perplexed, "huh - should she really be able to do that at that age?" to a more opportunistic, "Hey, this could save me a *lot* of time!" The main problem with the latter response was that it seemed to label me as 'adult' long before I was anything *like* an adult [at least, in my mom's mind] - she used to say I was "Two going on twenty." Curses, foiled again.)
But what they forget is, I learned from THEM. From watching them. I learned quickly, and easily, and I had lots of examples, all the time, all around me, both of GOOD ways to things and BAD ways to do things. Did I say I learned quickly? And without being taught. The basic definition of high intelligence: One who learns by observing rather than being told how to do it.
The point being, I think, that i sort of wish I could go back in time to my too-young, clueless parents and say: "Hey, it's ok that she's really smart. It doesn't actually HURT you for her to be smart - in fact, in can be an advantage, right? And guess what, even though she's really smart, she still has to pick up what she's learning from somewhere, right? And guess who she's learning all this really cool stuff from? You two! That's right! You parental units have actually made a significant contribution to all this brilliance! Yay! You're not just loser slug-heads!"
Actually, I'm pretty sure mom never thought of herself this way (as a loser slug-head) - her defense mechanisms were too solidly in place for that. And my dad? I think he pretty much went to his grave doubting himself, though he learned how to hide it reasonably well by the time we (kids) would've been old enough to begin questioning him about it. Which was right about the time he died.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, maybe dad would've felt better if he'd realized I wasn't just totally figuring all that stuff out out of thin air? That I actually gleaned it from somewhere, and hey, who else would I have learned it from if it wasn't him or mom? But maybe that wouldn't have made him feel better after all. I don't know.
And the truth is, by the time I was a little over three, I was already reading so fast and furiously that I think a lot of my ideas *were* coming from 'outside' sources.
Reading so much at an early age is the only way I can explain having such different notions from my parents, because I had very little interaction with others outside the family (maybe because we moved so much, my dad was gone a lot, and my mom was pretty anti-social between raising two young kids pretty much single-handedly and various other factors I can only guess at?)
There really weren't any other 'outside influences' to speak of until I went to school, I was something of a hermit between ages 3 and 5 while my mother cloistered me (unintentionally - I think she was trying to do the right thing, but simply didn't 'get' that a kid that young shouldn't be left alone so much) in her pseudo-'Montessori' space up in the attic that she made for me. I don't really remember that time - I have a flash image of a dark space with lots of 'stuff' for me to play with, and a screaming little brother downstairs taking all her attention. I'm pretty sure this is when I began my lifelong tendency to escape into books, and why I get absorbed in them so quickly and easily, and why I read so fast: They were my own personal equivalent of TV. All that was a coping skill rather than a talent, although it served me well in later years. Two-edged swords, once again.
***
part of it's being an energetic, talented, smart WOMAN in a world where GIRLS (blech) are expected to SIT AROUND BEING PRETTY and NON-THREATENING in case there are any MALES (note: I did *not* say 'men') in the vicinity to feel THREATENED by your superior mental fire-power and general all-around AWESOMENESS.
Note to all be-penised ones: I will not SMALLIFY myself any more. Yer on yer OWN.
FUCK this 'nurturing the yayhoos that get all the power in the first place'. FUCK that shit. And the dinosaur it rode in on.
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