But first I will bitch about my therapist.
Today was Therapy Thursday and my last session before my fucking therapist buggers off for a three week vacation with his wife, meaning my next session with him isn’t until September 25, which is almost a month from now.
Because of course he doesn’t arrange a locum (substitute doctor) or anything. After all, only my mental health is on the line. and even professional psychiatrists like him agree that mental health isn’t important, doesn’t matter, and won’t suffer if you just decide not to provide treatment for a month.
This kind of shit is why the other medical specialties look down on psychiatry.
Imagine if an oncologist took that attitude. “Sorry, no chemo for a month, I am taking a vacay with some chick I met at the gym. Try not to metastasize while I’m gone!”.
Not that I’m bitter.
Actually, I have not even started being bitter yet because you will never ever guess where my elderly therapist is going on this vacation.
Go ahead and guess.
Give up? Well here it is :
HE IS GOING TO FUCKING PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND.
My home province! Which is where I want to be this time of year!
Oh but wait, there’s more.
HE WILL BE SPENDING THREE DAYS IN SUMMERSIDE.
MotherFUCKER. He is going to be EXACTLY where I want to be so I can see my family and hug my Mom and meet a bunch of Acadian relatives!
And all in the gorgeous summer in my home province, the time year all my happy childhood memories take place.
ARGH. I am unbelievable pissed off and bitter about this. Of all the goddamned places he could go in this great nation of ours, he chooses not just my tiny home province of only 180,000 souls but my exact home town of around 17,000 people.
That son of a bitch. When we were on the phone, I had to strangle the urge to scream “Take me with you, god damn it!”.
The province really is a magnet for old people. They like our slower pace of life and the fact that we’re always behind the times.
The very things that drove me nuts as a kid.
So while my mental health wastes away, my therapist will be having my dream vacation, and there’s not a god damned thing I can do about it.
Old people have too much money.
Anyhow, back to the topic. During today’s therapy call, the subject of my pugilistic side came up because I have been struggling to integrate it into the rest of my psyche lately.
Part of me always wants to fight. Not out of some need to prove I am dominant or some inherent desire to hurt people or express my rough and rugged nature.
I just want to very energetically engage with the world. To be able to exorcise my deep seated latent aggression outside the usual rules of civilized restraint.
But I learned at a (thankfully) young age that my desire for a good scrap does not mean that those around me have volunteered to be my sparring partner.
So I locked that part of me away. It never fit with my mild mannered and pleasant persona anyhow. I didn’t want to fight, I wanted to be loved on and adored!
And now, thirty years or so later, I am wondering if I went too far. Surely I could have found some way to use those powerful instincts instead of pulling a Doctor Jekyll and isolating my angry beast and ignoring it and leaving it to wreak havoc in my subconscious mind and make me all kinds of mentally ill as it desperately tries to find some way to express itself.
Well I hereby declare my intention to start listening. I know it may not have a lot of coherent words to say at first, the poor thing, but I will listen nevertheless.
This is now the top priority in my attempts to reclaim my id.
Oh, right, and I did a vid.
More after the break,
I feel known
Apparently this Kee fella has pretty much got me and my childhood pegged.
He gets that I was both an ignored child :
But I was also a hated child :
It was a very simple system. When they noticed me, they hated me.
When they didn’t, I was, by default, ignored.
I was very passively punished for being noticed. Like Kee says, it was in the way people looked at me like I was interrupting when I entered a room, or how I got blank looks like I had just beamed in from Mars when I tried to enter conversations.
Because apparently I hadn’t existed until I opened my mouth.
I never really felt like a member of my own family. It was always my parents, my siblings, and me, the odd one out. The one who didn’t belong. The one nobody really wanted around any more.
The one who was just kind of… there.
The one where the costs of raising me were an extra burden on already overburdened parents, as opposed to being the same as the costs for my three older siblings.
The one who was just callously handed his baby bonus money and told to go do his own clothes shopping. When I was barely old enough to cross the street alone.
“Here. This is all you get. We do not think you are worth any of our own time, effort, or money, so you get what the government gives us for you being alive and that’s it. ”
That’s so god damned cold. How could they stand to be so cold to me? What did I ever do to deserve that?
I didn’t decide to be born.
And I was such a sweet, bright kid. All I ever wanted was for people to be happy around me. It didn’t even have to be caused by me.
I just wanted to be loved and valued.
I just wanted to be treated like I was wanted.
I just wanted someone to tell me I was okay. Good enough. Valuable. Not forever locked in being a burden on people who resented my existence.
I just wanted some god damned emotional warmth.
And I still do.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.