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Navel-Gazing
Nov. 3rd, 2007 10:36 amNovember is the busy season at work. I'm working awfully close to six days a week right now, with one or two half-days depending.
I had a thing on Wednesday night. This would make a bunch of really bad spots in the last few months, spots where I was basically incapable of doing _anything_ that a human being could be expected to do. I've been doing a lot of thinking to try and figure out what precisely is happening.
Let me tell you a little story about when I was growing up. I think I was fourteen or maybe thirteen and it was evening. I'd just gone to the Mr. Mission Pageant, where my boyfriend dressed up as a girl and competed against other boys-dressed-as-women in a beauty pageant (this was in the days when a boyfriend was someone you held hands with and kissed sometimes). Mom came to pick me up -- we lived a significant drive from town, so my parents had to get me back and forth from everything -- and she drove to a friend's house to pick up my brothers. When we got there, she sat us down, and she said I can't go home. It's an abusive situation, I can't live in it anymore, you kids are welcome to stay with me or I can drop you off there with Dad, it's no problem either way.
And she just didn't go back. We were in a transition house for a month, then the court ordered Dad out of the house (he could live with his mother for free, wheras we were taking up space in the transition house, and he wouldn't leave voluntarily) and when we got home, Dad was gone -- alone with the majority of the furniture, though there was tons of rotten food on the counters and trash downstairs all over the floors.
Mom moved to Vancouver as soon as I'd finished high school (she didn't want to disrupt my final years in Mission), lives on a boat, took up ultramarathoning, tennis and scrabble, met some good friends, and in the last few years has travelled in Europe by herself and lived in space that's completely her own for the first time.
Hold onto that idea.
I've always been a perfectionist. If I can't get something perfect, I'm terrified to do it. This may be a result of growing up with Dad, who was both terrifying and unpredictable in his punishments. You never knew what you might do that was wrong or right, so the answer was to never do anything at all if you could help it, and if you had to do something, to make sure it was perfect. It's not that it was a constant perfect standard but I've read that random reinforcement is much more effective and longer-lasting than anything consistent, and I believe it. And believe me, this was random. Dad behaved this way around my friends as well, and so I rarely had them over to my place, and of course one needed to bring oneself to his attention to get a ride anywhere - well, unless mom wasn't busy. It may be just an innate trait exacerbated by my childhood as well, though it does appear in all my siblings.
So I grew up without much socialisation outside of school, was pretty isolated for the first several years because of some choices I made, and then BAM! Here I've got tons of friends and a wonderful network of people around me, and all sorts of adult responsibilities. Not only is it a learning curve, but it's a super-complex situation that's impossible to be perfect at all the time.
What happens is that I mess up a little bit, and then I freak out because I've messed up. I get paranoid that people will do random bad stuff (be hurt, be angry, despise me, hate me, be disgusted by me) because I've messed up -- even if messing up is something like being a little short on the rent and borrowing some money or cancelling a visit with someone. Sometimes I can cover up the freak-out, but sometimes something clicks in my brain and it says you've fucked everything up anyhow, there's nothing you can do and I turn off. I drop out of the world, out of the situation, and I simply cannot cope -- can't borrow the money, can't call and say I need to skip the appointment, can't look anyone in the eye. I walk away.
It worked for mom that one time to walk away. It's not a good idea as general practice though.
This behaviour shows up in my relationships too. Previously there was a very strong tie and a strong dependence but now I have a measure of emotional self-sufficiency going for me. Instead of having those two tensions balance -- escape from a situation I fucked up vs the strong need for someone supportive -- now I just escape from the situation and continue to support myself emotionally. I screw up (I think it's normal to do this in relationships once in awhile?) and then I drift away rather than returning and rebuilding.
So there we go. It's been awhile since I've learned much about myself. I've been mostly drifting along. This pattern just jumped out at me this week, though, and I'm glad it did. What can be understood can also be worked with and reshaped.
I'm sure there are other ways the kaleidoscope can be shaken where the same parts make a different story but this seems to be true for me right now and I can already feel the light of knowledge driving out the poison-- not to make a sentence full of horrific half-realised trite mixed metaphors or anything.
Happy winter. Here's to turning inwards for awhile against the cold.
I had a thing on Wednesday night. This would make a bunch of really bad spots in the last few months, spots where I was basically incapable of doing _anything_ that a human being could be expected to do. I've been doing a lot of thinking to try and figure out what precisely is happening.
Let me tell you a little story about when I was growing up. I think I was fourteen or maybe thirteen and it was evening. I'd just gone to the Mr. Mission Pageant, where my boyfriend dressed up as a girl and competed against other boys-dressed-as-women in a beauty pageant (this was in the days when a boyfriend was someone you held hands with and kissed sometimes). Mom came to pick me up -- we lived a significant drive from town, so my parents had to get me back and forth from everything -- and she drove to a friend's house to pick up my brothers. When we got there, she sat us down, and she said I can't go home. It's an abusive situation, I can't live in it anymore, you kids are welcome to stay with me or I can drop you off there with Dad, it's no problem either way.
And she just didn't go back. We were in a transition house for a month, then the court ordered Dad out of the house (he could live with his mother for free, wheras we were taking up space in the transition house, and he wouldn't leave voluntarily) and when we got home, Dad was gone -- alone with the majority of the furniture, though there was tons of rotten food on the counters and trash downstairs all over the floors.
Mom moved to Vancouver as soon as I'd finished high school (she didn't want to disrupt my final years in Mission), lives on a boat, took up ultramarathoning, tennis and scrabble, met some good friends, and in the last few years has travelled in Europe by herself and lived in space that's completely her own for the first time.
Hold onto that idea.
I've always been a perfectionist. If I can't get something perfect, I'm terrified to do it. This may be a result of growing up with Dad, who was both terrifying and unpredictable in his punishments. You never knew what you might do that was wrong or right, so the answer was to never do anything at all if you could help it, and if you had to do something, to make sure it was perfect. It's not that it was a constant perfect standard but I've read that random reinforcement is much more effective and longer-lasting than anything consistent, and I believe it. And believe me, this was random. Dad behaved this way around my friends as well, and so I rarely had them over to my place, and of course one needed to bring oneself to his attention to get a ride anywhere - well, unless mom wasn't busy. It may be just an innate trait exacerbated by my childhood as well, though it does appear in all my siblings.
So I grew up without much socialisation outside of school, was pretty isolated for the first several years because of some choices I made, and then BAM! Here I've got tons of friends and a wonderful network of people around me, and all sorts of adult responsibilities. Not only is it a learning curve, but it's a super-complex situation that's impossible to be perfect at all the time.
What happens is that I mess up a little bit, and then I freak out because I've messed up. I get paranoid that people will do random bad stuff (be hurt, be angry, despise me, hate me, be disgusted by me) because I've messed up -- even if messing up is something like being a little short on the rent and borrowing some money or cancelling a visit with someone. Sometimes I can cover up the freak-out, but sometimes something clicks in my brain and it says you've fucked everything up anyhow, there's nothing you can do and I turn off. I drop out of the world, out of the situation, and I simply cannot cope -- can't borrow the money, can't call and say I need to skip the appointment, can't look anyone in the eye. I walk away.
It worked for mom that one time to walk away. It's not a good idea as general practice though.
This behaviour shows up in my relationships too. Previously there was a very strong tie and a strong dependence but now I have a measure of emotional self-sufficiency going for me. Instead of having those two tensions balance -- escape from a situation I fucked up vs the strong need for someone supportive -- now I just escape from the situation and continue to support myself emotionally. I screw up (I think it's normal to do this in relationships once in awhile?) and then I drift away rather than returning and rebuilding.
So there we go. It's been awhile since I've learned much about myself. I've been mostly drifting along. This pattern just jumped out at me this week, though, and I'm glad it did. What can be understood can also be worked with and reshaped.
I'm sure there are other ways the kaleidoscope can be shaken where the same parts make a different story but this seems to be true for me right now and I can already feel the light of knowledge driving out the poison-- not to make a sentence full of horrific half-realised trite mixed metaphors or anything.
Happy winter. Here's to turning inwards for awhile against the cold.
