I was looking forward to today’s Therapy Thursday session with Doc Costin because I knew I had a hell of a lot to tell him.
And tell him I did. I pretty much talked the whole time, which is rare for me. Usually I run out of gas at least a couple of times per session.
Not this time. Not ever again, maybe.
I told him all about my recent revelations about feeling like it was somehow my fault that layer by layer, I lost everyone I could count on, ending with my own damned mother.
And that’s when I became a victim of elementary school depression. Once it was clear that I had absolutely nobody I could turn to in my world, I turned inward almost entirely and became the vacant vessel for media consumption you see before you today.
All I know how to do is entertain myself.
And that is so very far from enough.
So forgive me for repeating myself, but I have to keep reminding myself : I can do stuff now. I don’t have to stay frozen waiting for the next time a little attention and validation happens to come my way so I can reward it with my positive grateful glow.
I can leave my lonely post in that wintry back yard and go off to explore the world and find new friends and discover new realms and finally know what it means to be alive.
That means leave my cozy, crappy nest, though, and voluntarily entering a state of higher stimulation, and that’s… hard.
Somehow, I need to stop being so afraid of stimulation. My current stimulation level – emotional, social, sensory – is so very low that any kind of change to my situation has to involve going up the stimulation gradient.
Which means I can’t stay down here at the bottom any more.
And that means I have to break the self-hypnotic trance I have been living in for coming up thirty years. It’s like some kind of closed loop of consciousness, and if I am to exit frozen fox mode and finally become a real little boy, I will have to truly wake up.
And that scares the hell out of me. But really, what doesn’t?
At some point, I will have to turn and face the fear instead of fleeing it. I will have to let the anxiety catch up to me and endure it no matter how fierce or long a storm it is.
But what then? That’s the real question. If I get over all that fear, I will be left trying to actually figure out what to do with myself again, which scares the willies out of me.
I know I can’t “solve” a problem that big. Too many variables. Ergo I cannot “figure out” what I should do with myself.
That leaves what I want to do.
And that’s no solution because I want to do a lot of things. So which one?
There has to be some way to choose a path that comes from deep within me and that feels intuitively “right”, or at least right enough for right now.
I guess I am trying to avoid being hurt.
But there are worse things than getting hurt.
Like rotting on the vine, and getting hurt THAT way.
Life hurts. Get used to it.
More after the break.
Fading into night
Had a bit of temporal confusion earlier.
Woke up from a nap, looked at the clock. 5:57 pm. OK, cool.
So I get up and take a eat at Miter Computer, and then the alarm goes off on my tablet.
WTF? Why would I set an alarm for 6 pm?
Pick up the tablet, turn off the alarm, look at the time again. 8 pm. Not 6.
Dunno how I misread 7:57 pm as 5:57 pm. But I just lost two hours., Jarring.
One thing that strikes me about the latest version of the narrative of my early childhood is that at no point did I feel like I could just ask for my needs to be met.
I was too timid for that. Besides, through their actions and attitude, my family made it clear that they were barely tolerating me as is. That’s why in my attempts to be “good”, I tried to exist as little as possible.
TO be undemanding and low maintenance and agreeable. I was alway eager to do whatever was asked of me.
But not a lot was asked of me.
Not directly, anyhow. I was just informed of things,. Like that I would be doing my own laundry and my own clothing shopping and getting myself to and from school every day entirely on my own and getting very good grades all by myself.
In many ways, I raised myself. If it wasn’t for Mom cooking supper every night, I would have had very little involvement with her at all.
What keeps running through my mind is : didn’t anyone notice how much I had changed? How I became a radically less confident and happy kid at one point (the rape) and how I just got sadder and sadder over the years?
But people don’t notice what they don’t want to notice. They wanted to pretend I didn’t exist and I did everything I could to assist them in that.
I was telling Doc Costin today that I don’t think my parents ever forgave me for being born. For coming along in the first place.
They never planned on having a fourth kid and I admittedly defied my mother’s tubal ligation to be conceived, so to say I was a surprise is a vast understatement.
An unwelcome one, at that. My existence was resented when I was still in the womb. And I’ve realized that I was never considered an equal to my siblings.
I was always an “extra” expense. MY parents have actually said, in my presence, that they were “already busy raising three kids” when I came along.
So I was left to my own devices most of the time. It was just expected that I would fit myself in wherever I could. Certainly nobody was going to make room for me.
And it was doubly certain that nobody was going to give up part of their current share of the parental love, attention, and so on so that I got an equal slice.
So I survived on whatever crumbs fell from their metaphorical table. And I was grateful for that. Grateful that I ever got anything.
Because it was clearl that I deserved absolutely and literally nothing.
I didn’t even deserve to be alive.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.