I am SO ready to enter a new decade.
I remember exactly where I was when I entered 2000… yeah I’m not going to write that up.
It was bad. Very bad. Lets leave it at that. Oh, and it only got worse.
I think I’m finally getting my head out of my ass, none too soon.
So this decade’s resolutions (yes, I said decade):
Yeah, that oughta do it…
So this morning I finally understood.
Last night I received an email from a cousin of my mother’s (her closest friend growing up). She did not understand what I was asking, as my description of my mother’s anxiety and odd behavior did not fit what she remembered.
She remembered my mother being much more calm and assured than my description.
It occurred to me that many people would describe me the same way in my childhood, and that in fact no one would have noticed anything odd going on.
That’s when it hit me: the problem is never what’s going on in our lives.
It’s whether or not we consider our circumstances to be normal and dependable.
My mother’s very odd and at times traumatic childhood would not be apparent to outsiders at the time, as she would consider her circumstances normal, and would act normally in the outside world.
Just as I appeared normal to everyone around me, because I reacted to what I considered to be the way things always were.
Only when I reached my teenage years did my concept of “this is the ways things are supposed to be” fall apart (and me as well).
The difference between “normal” and “right” is often indistinguishable.
Our own personal normality and what we consider “the way things should be” often coincide. Only if we open our minds to new ways of thinking can we distinguish between what is normal for each of us and what is right.
Add in our own tendency to believe family before tribe, and tribe before outsiders, and its bloody amazing we’ve made any progress whatsoever.
Take, for an extreme example, the African AIDS epidemic. We in the US understand how HIV is spread, and how to prevent the spread, based on scientific evidence. Americans inherently believe in science and our own philanthropy.
However, whenever our missionaries (both religious and humanitarian) attempt to treat the local African populations or prevent the spread via education they are at best ignored and at worst vilified. Why is that?
Simple. Because the local leaders insist AIDS isn’t really a disease, or that it can be cured by dubious methods (virgins and witchdoctors come to mind). Often, the very people who are trying to help are accused of trying to kill Africans, or strip them of their virility.
The Africans in questions are incredibly and indisputably wrong, but as it is their “normal” and accepted way to believe their leaders and tribes over outsiders, they don’t question the wisdom of those leaders. Their “normal” is to believe all outsiders are trying to kill them and that ideology does not make room for missionaries.
Normality and “the way things are done” wins over what is right.
Apply that to individual people and their families, and it suddenly becomes clear why until children manage to leave their childhood homes they think they way things have always been done in the family is “the right way”.
Sometimes “the right way” is so ingrained that when faced with mountains of evidence to the contrary the person in question ends up with tremendous cognitive dissonance, or plain insanity.
This leads to such lovely situations as marrying a rich man, yet thinking being rich is inherently immoral. That’s just one example of a long list of incompatibilities.
I think this is where my mother ended up, with confusion and cognitive dissonance concerning the way things were done and morality. She knew much of what she was taught was wrong, yet taught her children many of the same lessons.
It’s also where I’ve ended up, and where my father has ended up.
All three of us were raised with some very wrongheaded ideas concerning the world. One (my mother) fixed what became obvious to her, but kept many other wrong ideas. Another (my father) retreated from the real world and the evidence that what he knew was wrong. He’s still avoiding the real world, and is still continually shocked that the “impossible” keeps happening to him.
Me? I’m going whole hog. I’m tossing the whole damn thing out, misconceptions and all. I’m rebuilding my concept of what is right from the ground up, because to do otherwise would be like swatting at damn mosquitoes all day instead of just exterminating the whole batch and draining the standing water.
Now I get it though. My parents had a lot of ingrained wrongheaded ideas to combat, and they just followed their initial instinct to believe family over the world.
I can easily forgive them for not wanting to deal with the immense, painful battle of ignoring everything they were taught and using logic to determine what is right. Especially as they would encounter major family resistance.
Me? I don’t get an excuse. I’m 29, and I understand that no matter what I was taught the truth and what is right is apparent to anyone willing to seek it out.
I’m going to live my life right.
Something happened about a week ago that’s thrown me for a loop.
Last Sunday I engaged in an actual civil, useful conversation with my brother Tim.
Tim and I don’t have the best history. In fact, for our entire lives our relationship has ranged between apathy and extreme hostility. Contradicting each other became a habit and expected.
So when we formed the same opinion concerning our father and his extremely unhealthy grieving lack-of-progress, I was quite surprised.
Then we delved into the past.
For two people so long engaged in contradicting each other, we have an astonishing amount of agreement when it comes to memories.
We remember the events of our childhoods the same, if from different perspectives.
For a long time, I’d considered what happened (or didn’t happen) to me to be my fault. I’d thought I was the exception, and that I’d been neglected purely because I was the youngest, and highly criticized because I was constantly wrong about everything.
Honestly, I thought I didn’t feel loved because I was inherently unlovable.
I’d gotten to the point mentally where I understood that my parents just couldn’t show any kind of love, and honestly had no business being parents. I thought it corresponded to the opening of the family business, and since my brothers were teenagers at the time I thought they’d escaped the neglect.
Not so much.
I was not the exception. My brothers received the same treatment I did, just 7, 8, and 10 years earlier.
The animosity in my relationship with Tim could be laid at the feet of too little time for either of us and intense competition for the time left over.
Also, I did not mis-remember the past. Unfortunately I remembered as well as Tim did.
Now I’m so angry I could spit nails.
WE DID NOT NEED TO GO THROUGH THIS.
This wasn’t a case of neglect by necessity, or a case of hard luck.
We were intentionally kept out of the real world by parents who did everything they could to stay out of the real world. Parents who were too wrapped up in their own drama to take care of us. A father whose favorite form of affection was criticism, a mother too worried about her own past to live in the same time as us. Neither would show affection, for different reasons.
For all this time I thought it was my fault. But its not. Not any more than it was my brothers’ faults.
To arrive at that mental place sucks.
Sure, it means I’m not a horrible unlovable human being.
On the other hand, that means I could not change the situation either.
Still can’t.
That’s what I’m angry about it.
I can’t fix things. I can’t make them better.
I can’t fix things for my brothers either.
That time is long past, and my chance at getting the parents I needed is long past. I can’t fix that, or change that.
I feel… helpless. And furious.
On top of that, I’m reversing a lifetime of believing in a life view that’s incredibly wrong.
It was easier to assume that things were my fault. Much easier than accepting that my parents would not leave their own neuroses behind long enough to be parents. Much easier than accepting that they did not love us enough to live here in the real world with us.
The one still alive still refuses to.
It’s a different kind of hurt. The kind that can’t be fixed, only lessened.
I am so hurt, and so angry that this completely avoidable pain exists, not only for me but for my brothers.
I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve never felt this kind of anger before. It’s eating me up.
I know one thing for sure though; I can’t do the same to my kids. I can’t make them grow up the same way. They need me to be their mother, and a good mother.
Even if I can’t change what is past, I can make it not happen in my family again.
why my parents and brothers and grandparents were so, well, miserable.
I’ve never wondered why I’m so miserable, I know why. Simply put, deep down I think of my self as an evil, selfish person who is going to hell.
This is in accordance with a philosophy that still runs rampant through my family.
Success is selfish.
Money is evil.
Joy is selfish.
Serving others is the highest goal.
Being the best means you’re making someone else suffer.
Moral and spiritual righteousness is the only way to get to heaven.
Bad things happen to good people, and suffering is the only path to righteousness.
So if feeling good is bad, and feeling bad is good… well, then feeling good and success MUST be punished with a good dose of bad consequences. Therefore a person’s best bet is to avoid feeling good and success if at all possible.
A person that does that to the extent of self sabotaging their own happiness subconsciously is called a misery addict.
I am a misery addict. I’m addicted to my own misery. If life is going well, I will intentionally do whatever I can to mess it up, in order to avoid more pain.
Yes it’s fucked up. It’s also endemic to most of my family.
I think I know why.
I call it the philosophy of the quitter.
“Oh, life sucks and is treating me so harshly. I could just fix it, but I don’t want to. Let’s just say it’s morally superior to be downtrodden, and that what’s happened is God’s irrefutable will.”
Yes, I lived with that. Hell, my grandmother, father, and brothers all still think that way. That’s fine, if it doesn’t bother them.
It bothers the hell out of me, because another part of me is screaming “I WANT TO BE HAPPY!!! I want happiness! I want to succeed! I can succeed!”
Yay cognitive dissonance. Yay paralysis. Yay guilt and shame and half-assed attempts at life.
I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m not a quitter. I don’t want to be a self-righteous, barely-getting-by bitch.
I want something far better.
Those who’ve known me for a few years have probably noticed a change. I’m not acting like myself, and I’m even more scatterbrained and irritable than usual. Extreme mood changes are prevalent and I’m more contrary and combative. Also, I’m WAY behind on projects. There’s no excuse for not having the cookbook done, but there are reasons.
First off, the cookbook is behind in part because of a massive technological failure. The proofs, layouts, and software all resided on Chris’s laptop. Chris’s laptop’s hard drive decided to fry.
Thank god we still have the pictures, and I’m a big fan of working out my recipes longhand.
The cookbook is also behind in part because mid-process (and a much more intensive process it turned out to be) the camel’s back broke.
We’re moving. We’re not announcing where on this blog (many of you know already anyway) but we’re leaving this goddamn hellhole.
Oh, we were planning on moving, in about 2 years. Then the bank merger happened and Chris started working 12 hour days so we decided we needed a bit more family recreation. Floating in the middle of a lake started sounding pretty damn good (what’s that? my cell phone has bad reception here. sorry!) so we started looking into boats.
The weekend after we got Zoe we went looking at boats and eventually ended up at Lake Pleasant looking at sailboats. The kids and I started really getting into the whole idea at that point, and we spent some time crawling over a couple of MacGregor 26 sailboats.
In 110 degree weather.
Sometime around the finishing of the second gallon of water on the way home, Chris made an announcement. He was tired of living somewhere he couldn’t leave the house 5 months out of the year, where he couldn’t do what he wanted to do.
We were moving. ASAP. Actually, as soon as our lease ends on February 28th.
Only one problem. We’re moving out of state. We can’t found the company yet.
So no ISBN number for the cookbook.
The last reason for the cookbook being behind is extremely personal.
I’m emotionally ill.
The facade of having it together? Completely fake. Emotional stability? Hah.
Healthy behavioral patterns? Now you’re just being funny.
I literally had a block in my head that said, “you can’t do this. You’re a failure, you’ll always be a failure. What are you thinking? You can’t do anything good. Everything you touch goes to shit.”
HAD a block in my head.
I’m dealing with decades of emotional illness, persistently bad coping behaviors, aftereffects of abuse and neglect, and general insanity all at once.
Note I wrote “dealing”. Not hiding. Not pretending. Not suppressing. Not just trying to keep myself together. Dealing.
I blame Tahoe. I blame the lull in court action. I blame not spending every day worrying whether or not my children will have food or clothing, and I blame Chris for making that possible.
I also blame the bank merger, the stress of which drove Chris to consider getting a boat, then had us at Lake Pleasant in 110 degree weather looking at boats. This led Chris to declaring that goddamnit, we’re finally leaving this goddamn hell of a state. This led to me having a direction.
In short, I blame everything that has lifted my emotional and mental load to the point that I have the “luxury” of leaving survival mode.
I don’t think I’ve spent this much time outright bawling since my mother died. Memories are resurfacing; insights into just how badly I’ve bungled things and WHY are a daily occurrence.
Many of these memories are less than happy; when I told people that my first marriage was emotionally and mentally abusive I didn’t even realize how much I was UNDERSTATING the problem. Memories are reaching the surface that I’ve haven’t touched since I left; if I had, I doubt I would have had the presence of mind to fight for the kids. I’d be too busy off in a corner somewhere either bawling or completely detached from the world.
I’m also remembering how I got there in the first place, and how stupid I was to willingly walk into such a situation, and WHY. Understanding where exactly I messed up is ego-bruising, to say the least.
All of this however is a good thing. For example, I now understand why I think everything that goes wrong is my fault; one of the problems in my first marriage was my ex-husband’s unwillingness to admit fault. Getting pregnant even though he knew I’d run out of birth control, refused to buy more, and refused to use a condom? So totally my fault. Taking the kids away from him? My fault, to the point that we’re still in court to “punish” me.
That’s just one example of the degradation and dehumanization shoved down my throat. My ex in-laws wanted to bring me “down to their level”. Enough verbal abuse, emotional abuse, shoving into unwinnable situations, and isolation will result in complete dehumanization.
I think I got out just in time, and one of these days I’ll write about how I came to the decision to leave, but now right now.
I’ve been trying to tackle one surfacing memory at a time and one breakdown at a time. Every day I feel a bit lighter, a bit more stable. A bit more human. It’s been a helluva roller coaster, but I’m finally getting somewhere.
Thankfully my friends seem to understand, and since all but one came after my life started improving they’re a constantly reminder that things have changed permanently for me. The one exception I’ve known for 12 years and has been my best friend since we were 15 and she’s been nothing but a help. Plus, when I think that maybe my memories are false, that maybe I’m exaggerating,she’s been there to correct me (and very often tell me I’m not, it really was that bad).
Just KNOWING that all of this had a reason, that I’m not imaging what happened, that despite being surrounded by the insane I’ve got some kind of footing in reality HELPS. Helps so much. I’m starting to trust my thoughts, my conclusions, my judgments again. It’s not that I was insane because everyone else was right, but that everyone around me was insane and wrong. This doesn’t just apply to my ex in-laws, but to my family and the way I was raised as well. My parents made everything needlessly complicated, and formed a tiny little petri dish of a world that had NOTHING to do with the outside world.
Everything I ever learned means squat. Reality is so much better. Reality is what I knew all along, but nobody around me was willing to admit to.
Now that I don’t think of myself as insane (or at fault for everything, or worthless), I see just how difficult I’ve made this whole process, and how soon I should be able to start shipping out. Cookbooks will be out before Black Friday, hopefully WAY before if I can continue to be this mentally stable.
As a bonus, for those of you who’ve seen the house, I’ve made tremendous progress is getting organized. I even found my Book of All Knowledge, the notebook my oldest recipes are written in, so THEY’RE getting added as well.
There is one last stress, however, and it has nothing to do with my mental and emotional state, but rather my father’s.
Chris and I never wrote about the full circumstances of my mother’s death. It’s not that “death by infection and metastatic breast and ovarian cancer” isn’t correct; it is. The circumstances are just much more complicated than a simple diagnosis.
In reality, what happened to my mother was a mixture of her own procrastination and ignoring of problems, my father’s outright denial, the first hospital’s apathetic care, the second hospital’s apathetic care (minus one doctor), and the ambulance ride to the third hospital.
My mother was admitted to the hospital with fluid in her abdomen, and 6 weeks later she was dead. I’ve never quite gotten over the shock.
I watched her as the doctors did tests, waited forever to get results, declared breast cancer and performed a mastectomy. After months of not being able to keep food down (even in the hospital) she developed an infection, went into respiratory arrest, and died in the ICU. That’s the short version.
NONE of this was unavoidable. My mother assumed the lump was a spider bite, even though it persisted for a year, and never got a mammogram.My mother spent months without an appetite and gaining weight without food intake. She hid her health problems from my father (and everyone else). Not until her distended stomach turned into a source of acute pain did she go into the hospital. Once at the hospital she refused to be “a bother” and attempted to make everyone ELSE’S lives as easy as possible.
Since my father believed her when she said it wasn’t a big deal, my dad took her in, then retreated into his work. He wasn’t there to help her make decisions because he thought she was mentally competent.
She wasn’t. She’s been hiding her pain for months, if not years, as became obvious once we tried to untangle the business’s finances afterwards.
I visited the hospital every day to see if she needed anything. She was almost always fine. I tried to talk to the doctors, but I could never seem to reach one of them. She always said they were waiting for tests anyway.
Until the day they scheduled her for a mastectomy, that is.
The day of I waited outside the surgical unit with my oldest brother. When the surgeon came out, he said it was worse than they’d feared. He estimated the cancer had been there for a decade.
All of a sudden my mother gave up the pretense.
My dad had no clue what to do, and leaned on my and my brother. Neither of us had authority to do anything. (As a sidenote, both of us now have power of attorneys for both our father and youngest brother, depending on who is more available in the situation).
My mother’s recovery did not go well. She still couldn’t eat.
The hospital tried to discharge her. She hadn’t eaten for 4 weeks and they tried to discharge her.
My father and I fought the discharge won. The first time.
The second time he took her to another hospital.
Another apathetic hospital.
My mother lost the ability to speak. She started hallucinating. She still didn’t eat.
One week later, we finally got a break. My mother’s oncologist went on vacation and someone filled in for her.
This doctor took one look at my mother, one look at her chart, and transferred her to the best cancer unit in the state.
Thank God for University Medical Center.
Unfortunately, during the 2 hour ambulance drive she went into respiratory arrest. The paramedics managed to keep her alive (they didn’t know she had a DNR) and she made it to the ICU.
I never had the opportunity to talk to my mother again.
4 days later my father and I made the decision to take her off life support. My father called my middle brother and told him to come down to see his mother; my brother said he’d be there in a week, they were driving and his wife wanted to visit friends on the way. My father called me, one step from falling to pieces.
Chris called my brother. All of a sudden my brother and his wife and kids were on a plane to Tucson.
2 days later while I was giving my father a break from her bedside, she passed on.
Afterwards I drove my dad to his guest room at a friend’s house. Picked up his things. Picked up my brother’s luggage to take to the house. BABYSAT MY NEPHEW BECAUSE MY SISTER-IN-LAW WAS TOO BUSY BAWLING OVER THE DEATH TO COMFORT HER HUSBAND OR TAKE CARE OF HER CHILDREN. Drove my father, kids, and nephew to my dad’s house. Called the pastor to make arrangements for my grandparents to be informed and for the memorial service to be held. Called all the other family members to inform them. Did the grocery shopping with 3 kids in tow so there would be food in the house. All in the day she died.
I made the cremation arrangements.
If it weren’t for Chris, I would have been a complete wreck. As it was, that month and a half almost killed me.
6 weeks of hell that could have been avoided. If my mother had been proactive in her health, if my father had taken control, if the first hospital had done more, if, if.
Chris “forced” me through the grief process, in that he prodded me until I dealt with and accepted my mother’s death. It was the kindest thing he could have done for me.
I’ve done my best not to dwell on it since, and to get on with my life. I could rail against the unfairness of the situation and seek out someone to blame. But I don’t.
That’s evidently my father’s job.
Since my mother’s death, my father hasn’t been quite all there. He spends quite a bit of time railing against the hospitals, blaming them for her death. When he’s not busy being enraged, he’s busy in self-pity mode.
In July (13 months after her death) my father went on an extended trip to his childhood home for a reunion. My aunt (his sister) and I hoped it would do him some good, and she did her best while he was there to help him through the process.
When he got back he seemed better, happier. I thought that maybe, just maybe, this scapegoat hunt he’d been on would be over.
A few days ago I called him, and he told me he was just about done with his project. He’d been going over everything that happened, and he was ready to take his notes and journals to the media and take on the evil hospital.
…….
I’m pretty convinced at this point that my father has lost it. My hope that he would ever come back to reality and be a father and grandfather? Well that’s pretty much crushed. I can accept that, I knew it was a possibility.
Then he told me he needed me to read everything to make sure it was all accurate.
Yes, my father wants me to re-read my personal hell from day one in order to pursue his own version of vengeance.
I can’t do that. My memories are horrifying enough without reliving everything, much less while I’m dealing with other resurfacing memories.
I don’t know how to tell him that I can’t do it, without doing what I really want to do, which is tell him to look in the mirror and he’d find one of the people responsible there. Then, if he looked on the shelf he’d find another responsible party in the urn.
I don’t know how to tell him just how much worse this is making things for me and the kids. That it’s not bad enough that at 28 I’m motherless, my kids no longer have a grandmother, my unborn children will never have a grandmother, that for all intents and purposes they don’t have a grandfather. No, that’s not enough, I also have my father attempting to destroy me (intentionally or not) by having me relive the worst couple of months of my life.
I am completely heartbroken.
So if I seem a little out of sorts, crazy, or otherwise not like myself, that’s why.
The good news is, despite all of this, life is getting much better.
Stuck in a Moment by U2.
This last month has been an interesting ride.
As mentioned before I’m experiencing a kind of oversensitivity to my own emotions, a kind of permanent PMS.
While exhausting, it’s led me to some interesting places. In fact, every time I’ve experienced an unusually fierce or irrational emotion I’ve discovered something I’ve been suppressing.
Oh, I’ve been acting as if certain incidents from my past don’t bug me, didn’t really affect me, etc. but that’s not the truth. While I’ve been pretending my subconscious has been busy sending up red flags and affecting my behavior from behind the scenes.
So some of my very irrational behavior? Not so irrational now that I know where it’s coming from. Now it’s just wrong.
In reality, my subconscious never left Vancouver. My subconscious kept dealing with things I refused to remember or acknowledge and acting according to what it knew I needed to do.
For example, my obsession with not being blamed for everything? My ex-husband blamed me for everything, up to and including getting pregnant the second time (though he knew I wasn’t on birth control and he wouldn’t pay for birth control or use condoms). So when the marriage fell apart, everything became my fault.
Now if I’m told something is my fault, I freak out and get defensive.
I also subconsciously rebel. Threats of consequences turn into a reason to bring those consequences on; consequences don’t reform my behavior, they inflame it. This is also a reaction to having unearned consequences forced upon me; I know that I’m going to get “punished” no matter what so why not actually earn the hurt and have some kind of control?
My first marriage was much more abusive than I wanted to admit, and the behaviors I learned are catching up with me. So much so that its causing problems between me and Chris, as I’m treating him like he’s my ex-husband.
This is a VERY BAD THING.
So lately every time I catch myself stuck in the behaviors of the past, I step back and determine what’s really going on. Tonight it meant realizing the reason I’m not motivated by consequences is because I expect that no matter what I do I’ll get screwed over; that’s just not true anymore. I have control over what I do and what comes of what I do.
This is a completely different life I’m living, and I need to get used to.
Y’all can fuck off.
Obviously I don’t mean my readers here. And I don’t mean my friends (who have the good sense to ASK before they expect something from me), or anyone else who is actually paying attention.
Just everyone else on the planet.
Sometime in the past month (I think somewhere out on Lake Tahoe) all of my stress and worries melted away, my mental and emotional burden lifted, and I started feeling something other than numb and tired.
This is a good thing, as I’ve been able to feel normal emotions again, like elation.
It also means I feel anger, irritation, and general pissed-offedness.
It’s like I’m experiencing 24/7 PMS but without the irrational bouts of crying.
Today I found out I’m back as a full-time contractor AND I found out the movie based on my favorite book of all time did NOT butcher the story. In fact, the movie was so good that I’m considering sending thank-you letters to the director and screenwriter for doing a good job with a rather difficult story. These are good things.
Unfortunately a few people managed to peg my irritation meter.
First case involved a guy I used to be working with who wanted me to come work with him at his non-profit. I liked the idea proposed to me yesterday so I said I’d attend a meeting today.
So today I was thinking about it, realized my “stuff Mel wants to do” list is already too long, and called him to let him know I just couldn’t help him out. I did so politely (I thought anyway) but he persisted. When I pushed back, he asked if my husband was there in the background insisting that I quit.
In fact, he wasn’t. In fact, Chris wasn’t pushing me to do anything. In fact, the entire concept that someone would think that Chris was controlling my actions fucking PISSED ME OFF just with the insinuation that he would force me to do something against my will.
I’m still pissed off, actually. Add to that the insinuation that what I want to do is just should NOT BE AS IMPORTANT as their pet project and I’m thoroughly in angryville.
On top of this I have a long list of people who, for whatever reason, think that whatever THEY need me to do is priority numero uno and that I should just drop the other VERY IMPORTANT SHIT I am dealing with so I can do something for them.
No, it doesn’t work like that and the more I get pushed the more likely I am to drop it to the end of my list, because I’m just petty like that. Or maybe, just maybe I HAVE A LOT ON MY FUCKING PLATE WHETHER I LIST ALL OF IT IN PUBLIC OR NOT. I don’t WANT to spend all my time typing “Oh God My Life”. I don’t want to spend all my time writing about how back up my life is or how much dealing with my emotional problems suck. I’d much rather BE DOING SOMETHING USEFUL.
So yes, if I’m taking a while to do something I HAVE AN ACTUAL REASON AND I’M TOO BUSY TO SPEND TIME EXPLAINING.
There. I feel much better now.
Every now and then parts of my behavior catch me by surprise, and I have no clue what the hell is going on.
I am a 24/7 submissive, complete with the innate personality type and wiring.
I also suffer from crippling anxiety.
Until today, I was unaware of exactly how much my submissive nature and debilitating anxiety have to do with each other.
So exactly 10 days ago Chris and I returned from our first vacation ever. We spent 2 days on travel, 3 in Reno at GBR-IV, and 5 blissful days at Lake Tahoe.
For Tahoe we rented a house and a sailboat and spent our days relaxing. At the same time I’d been instructed to back off of one of my anti-anxiety medications and use Xanax as needed. I thought I had a fear of deep water, so before leaving I asked my doctor to load me up with Xanax.
How many did I take the entire 5 days? ONE. Right before our inaugural voyage on the sailboat. Didn’t need any more than that. My ever-present anxiety never made it to Tahoe.
In fact, it barely made the trip to Reno. My usually crippling social anxiety? Not so much. Surrounded by people, some of them new, some of them not-so-new, and I didn’t have a problem.
I chalked it up to relaxation and enjoyed the lack of tightness in my chest.
So Chris and I drove back home, and somewhere in Cali my father called. He told me my brother got himself admitted to a hospital again, and I needed to pick the kids up from some family friends.
My anxiety came back in one fell swoop and settled in my chest again. The feeling that I suffered from a continual heart attack? Oh, that came back.
I noted the timing, and decided that maybe my problem stemmed from being constantly surprised AND expecting too much from myself (and letting myself be taken advantage of). I decided to set some real boundaries with my family and felt better immediately.
A few days later the Census Bureau called and I was notified that I needed to return to work for training on Monday. Now it’s Thursday, and I’ve spent the week training for work. Once again I noticed a decided decrease in my anxiety levels (though I’ve been hyper as hell) and figured taking more control over my life helped.
In the meantime the testosterone supplements have been working out for Chris. He has a lot more energy and so we’ve been making time for dom/sub release every day. I figured maybe that helped the anxiety as well.
So I’ve been going on with my life and duties pretty happily with little anxiety and few anxious symptoms. Sure, I’ve been a little anxious (work does that) but nothing that’s been debilitating.
Until today.
Everything I thought helped my anxiety? Oh, it helped. A bit.
But sometime between lunch with Kristina and Chris getting home from his training session today my old friend the panic attack returned to my life after an extended absence.
Well fuck.
Have I ever mentioned how much it sucks to feel like you can’t breathe even though you can? It’s kind of distracting. And panic-inducing. Makes for a nice vicious circle.
Of course after these blissful weeks of NOT freaking out, I did kind of take notice of when the anxiety returned.
I had no problem at work (surrounded by people).
No problem at lunch (surrounded by people).
No problem in Tahoe (with Chris 24/7).
No problem in Reno (with Chris, John, or assorted people 24/7).
Then all of a sudden I have a problem at home (with just the dogs for company).
Now that I think about it, my anxiety is at its absolute worst when I’m alone or when Chris is working at home but might as well not be there.
Maybe solitude has something to do with the debilitating panic attacks. Which is really funny, because on top of all of this I’m an introvert that occasionally needs time alone.
Hmmm.
So I start thinking about my reactions and the situations I panic in. I panic when:
In other words, I panic when the situation I’m in lacks a defined and stable command structure for me to refer to. But that’s still not entirely accurate, since lunch out with Kristina today did not induce anxiety, even though we don’t have an alpha/beta relationship. But I still knew where I stood, and where my “place” was in conjunction with Kristina AND the people surrounding us.
Aha.
I panic when I don’t know my place in a situation or when I’m in charge.
Why? BECAUSE I’M A FUCKING SUB.
The entire definition of sub? A person who is happiest with someone else in control.
How does a sub relate to the world? Through knowledge of their “place” and through their relationship to those around them.
A sub who works has a stable command structure has someone in control and knows their place within the organization.
A sub who is out with friends knows what’s expected in public and knows how they relate to their friends.
A sub who is with their dom (or surrogate dom) has both a command structure and a place.
A sub who is alone is LOST AND CONFUSED. And just maybe a little anxious as well.
A sub who is put in charge (as my father and brother tend to do) is just plain MISERABLE. And still searching for someone else to be in control. And EXTREMELY anxious because THEY DON’T WANT TO BE IN CONTROL.
So much so that a sub who holds any responsibility for anyone else and does NOT have an outlet for submissive release is gunning for a nervous breakdown.
No WONDER even talking to my father is enough to initiate a panic attack, since he expects me to take care of the extended family. No WONDER I hate being surrounded by strangers.
No WONDER being at home alone incites panic attacks.
Now that I know what precipitates the anxiety, maybe I can figure out how to work alone without going absolutely insane…
Sometimes experience does not represent life. Sometimes the very small sample size we grew up with is completely unrepresentative of our neighbors as a whole.
I deal with the… differences between the way my family does things and the way EVERYONE ELSE ON THE PLANET does things. To say that my family growing up (and even now) does not live on the same planet as the rest of us is an understatement.
Forget fundamentalist Christianity, there’s enough of us around. Forget the “poor man” complex that my father has; that abounds as well. The self-martyrdom of my mother? Everywhere. Double standards? Practically the human condition.
However every now and then I come across an ingrained concept of “how things work” and look at the world and see… nothing at all similar. Some of my ingrained ideas are SO wrong that I literally fight myself all of the way aligning them to “the real world”.
One of those is my extremely messed up work/reward matrix.
Take one gifted and talented child. Ingrain ideals such as service and self-sacrifice for your fellow man. Now ask her to do something with the promise of a specific reward, even if the reward in question is “pride in work done”.
Works really well, doesn’t it? Said child will do almost anything for the right outcome, won’t they?
Unless there’s a continual bait-and-switch of course.
Oh, the long list of reasons for the switch. Sorry, can’t afford it. Sorry, I didn’t really mean it. Sorry, you didn’t do it perfectly and “my way” or the criteria changed (sorry we forgot to tell you).
Yes, I’m bitching. That’s why I have a blog, after all.
Most of my formative experiences involved the eternal bait-and-switch, or at least in my mind they did. Honestly, most of what really happened was a mix between bad planning, not thinking things through, or ridiculous expectations.
However my young little mind could not associate my family with “incompetents who have no business making promises or deals in the first place”.
Oh, there are many examples but I won’t go into them here. One example will due.
The summer I was 14 I spent all summer detailing private airplanes for my dad. He’s the owner of an aircraft maintenance shop, and the rule was never to return a plane dirty. So I was hired on (at minimum wage no less) to clean and wax the airplanes before they returned to their hangers or tie-downs.
In summer. In Phoenix. Where it was 95 degrees in the shade. I washed windows, scrubbed bug juice off of leading edges, washed fuel residue off of plane bellies, and waxed entire exteriors. For minimum wage.
I did it quite willingly. Hey, money’s money, especially when you can’t drive yet.
Except it wasn’t. At the end of the summer it was decreed that all of the money I made would be applied to my latest dentist bill.
So, 10 weeks @ 30 hrs/week @ $4.75/hr? $1425
Dentist bill? $400
Hey wait a second… clearly I could do math at that point in time…
Yeah, for some reason that didn’t work out for me (and I would never work for my parents again, thankyouverymuch). My childhood up until that point was filled with similar experiences, where what was promised was “forgotten” or a flimsy excuse to renege was found.
Sigh.
Most often, what I’d been roped into was extremely labor-intensive, distasteful, time-intensive, or a mix of the above. God forbid I’d do anything helpful on my own either; unless it was done in “the right way” (even if done) it didn’t count.
Very quickly I learned only idiots and masochists put in the work only to be disappointed or unfairly criticized. In fact, excepting my paying jobs (with contracts no less! and paystubs! look, the paystubs are right!) I’ve not been motivated to do a damn thing I’ve been asked for a very, very long time.
For myself? Sure, not a problem. For someone else? Well, I tried in my first marriage only to end up in idiot and masochist land again (with an extra dose of “taken advantage of”).
How did I manage to consistently find unrepresentative samples? I don’t know, but I certainly did.
Now my life is completely different. I KNOW, in my head, that if I finish cleaning the house by the end of the week I will undoubtably depart on our long-planned vacation. I KNOW that Chris isn’t going to pull a bait-and-switch, and I KNOW what’s been promised will come to pass.
Oh, I understand that logically. However, my emotions and past experience are telling me NOOOOOO you’re just asking for PAAAAIIIIINNN. The harder you work the harder you’ll be hit with the PAAAAIIIIINNNNN.
God Pavlov was a genius.
Time to go beat some new operant conditioning into this mind of mine.
Big surprise: I’m still struggling over here.
Between the depression, the anxiety, and the general drama I’m feeling worn out and strained.
It’s all my own fault though.
I need to take a good long look at my expectations, both of life and myself. Being a perfectionist concerning my own matters is okay, except that I don’t accept little things like change. I still wake up every day hoping that things will go according to plan, and I’m still surprised and resentful when all my plans fall apart even though its been happening every day for the past 8 years.
Life is not as orderly as I’d like it to be. I need to get over it.
I also need to get over my fear of life being messed up. Hell, I need to get over fear in general, including fear that I will do something that will completely shatter the entire world (or at least my world). It’s not likely, but somewhere in my mind I’m terribly afraid that I will wreck everything.
Of course, that fear is what distracts me so much that I am actually wrecking everything out of pure inattention and fear of failure.
Irony much?
How do I deal with my fear and anxiety? How do I make this stupid fear go away?
I don’t know, but I will figure out a way.