Well, maybe not ALL…
Nothing particularly revolutionary about that vid, and yet I am quite pleased with how it turned out. I think it’s because I was being very candid and open and I think that imparted a certain amount of warmth to what I was saying.
I will have to remember that for future vids.
The camera picks up honesty remarkably well, at least for me.
Did the Therapy Thursday thing today. Talked about how relatively unemotional my family was and is. We all ended up being highly intelligent and deeply neurotic, and I think that came from the top, from our mother.
My mother, being a teacher, did an excellent job of encouraging and nourishing our young minds but not a lot to help us mature emotionally.
The truth is, we were never all that close. Especially not me, the uninvited one. I was telling Doctor Costin about how when my babysitter Betty would take me to her house when I was a wee thing, I got to see a family that was radically different than mine.
I’ve talked before how I had to figure out that despite all the yelling and swearing and verbal roughness, they were not, in fact, angry with one another.
That’s just how they communicated. Loud, blunt, open, and direct. So very, very different than my cold and constipated home.
But what I was talking about today is how Betty’s family was constantly doing things for one another. Their milieu might have been rough but their hearts were warm and they were always doing things for one another and in general they seemed to face the world as a group or a team and my home was just not like that.
We always just kind of did out own thing. I can’t even imagine asking one of my siblings for help unless the stakes were pretty dire. I don’t think any of us would dream of imposing on one another like that.
And that’s pretty messed up, to be honest.
We could chatter all day but displays of emotion were not a thing. For one thing, we didn’t want to upset our mother.
Not upsetting her is like a prime commandment for all of us kids. We shield her instinctively because her being upset upsets us severely.
We feel what she feels, I guess.
And so we became kind but aloof intellectuals, just like her. None moreso than me.
In fact, of all four of us Bertrand kids, I’m the most like her.
We also talked about how I have never been emotionally close to anyone. At least not after elementary started and Betty went away.
That’s when the emotional coldness really set in, causing me to continue to withdraw from the world deeper and deeper into myself.
I keep imagining myself as going around the world in a human-sized mecha suit in which I clumsily pretend to be human and present but all the world sees is a hologram of me and the real me is miles and miles away.
Like my mother, it’s not as if I am cold in any obvious way. I come across as a warm, genuine, and kinda wacky dude just like her.
And if the situation calls for it, I can being a very sensitive and insightful listener who makes people feel heard and understood.
And it seems like I am getting very close to those people. And I am. But then again, I am not. I am getting close like a therapist would, not like a friend.
The truth is that I don’t really know how to open up to people. I intellectualized everything even when I am talking to my therapist.
I want to change that. I want to be more emotionally open and present and real. I want to truly connect with others for the first time in my life and that means abandoning my posture of the curious intellectual and risking being “out of control” and, heaven forbid, doing things for purely emotional reasons.
I need to let go of that chokehold my ego has on my id so that I can just relax and do the best I can with being myself.
I think that’s how normal people do things.
It’s worth a try.
More after the break.
Relax and let go
Let’s poke this particular knot : the moment of error.
That’s the moment where you realize that you’ve fucked up big time. Everyone has been there. It’s a very bad feeling.
But it’s what happens immediately after that I’m interested in tonight.
The self-repudiation. What form does it take?
For me, it usually takes the form of excoriating myself for not thinking. I’m such an idiot, if only I had given it two seconds thought, why didn’t I do that, argh.
Which is understandable, and even healthy when done in a balanced way.
But taken to the sort of scourging extremes a mind like mine takes it and it becomes the birthplace of “the committee” that insists that absolutely no action can be taken without its express approval to make sure you’re not doing something “stupid”.
And it does not approve much.
In fact, in my case at least, “the committee” has metastasized into a thick wall inside me that lets almost nothing through and so I remain “safely” constrained.
But hey, at least I’m not doing anything stupid, right?
I’m not doing anything.
And all out of a hyper-neurotic fear of making a mistake. But what’s the big deal about mistakes? You learn from them and move on.
I act like the whole universe is booby-trapped and only by inaction and staying within my tiny comfort zone can I avoid catastrophe.
But it’s just mistakes. They’re part of life. And eminently survivable.
Total inaction on anything that isn’t a “sure thing” is far too high a price to pay.
I think I need to think about this some more now.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.