A dozen roses

While I was driving from Maine to Boston this morning, the light on my dashboard signifying that a door is opened was lit. Before I'd left Maine, I'd tried to open one of my back doors, and because of ice and snow on my car, the door wouldn't budge.

Apparently it had budged. Apparently I'd been driving with an opened door for miles on the highway.

I decided that when I reached the Maine Turnpike toll-booth in several miles, I would get out after I'd handed the toll-person my money and I'd close the door. This seemed safest, the best option for not getting smashed by a sleeping truck driver (which, by the way, happened to me in 1994).

The only problem was in my head. I thought that I may not get the permission of the toll-person to get out of my car and close the door.

I was right.

When I got to the toll-booth, I made the mistake of telling Mr. toll-man what I was about to do: get out and close my door.

"Your door's closed," he said.
"No, the back door, on the other side," I said.
"Well you can't - that guy is behind you." Mr. toll-man pointed to a big-ass truck behind me. "Pull to the end of that guard rail over there Ma'am, and do it there," fucker told me.

I acquiesced.

And I almost got hit. Mr. big truck came very close to hitting my car, me, as I was getting out to close the door that was indeed open. I was pissed. First at Mr. stupid-ass toll-man who had no regard for human life. What the hell? Just don't give me a hard time, dude, about getting out for 10 seconds tops and closing the door. This way I live and you get to spend the remainder of your days guilt-free about not having been the cause of a young woman's horrific death.

Then I got really mad at myself. What the hell? It's that old authority thing kicking in. The 'if I don't have permission to do something, then I can't do it' thing. Even if what I'm asking is permission to stay alive. Like, if my career choice, if my success, is somehow an affront to Dad, then I won't do it. The being trapped to do something you know is wrong for you because you don't want to disappoint someone else's expectation of you - even if that expectation is failure, pain, death.

This needs to stop. It's not okay anymore. The life I'm living is actually mine, and a good old fashioned confrontation is worth it sometimes. I don't owe anyone submissiveness. Sure, it probably saved my life as a kid, but now, things are different. So Mr. toll-booth may have called me a name. I would have then had the pleasure of a single-digit wave goodbye.

I wonder how many people's behaviors are automatic, unexamined reactions from damaged childhoods.

Are we really willful creatures?

***
I bought myself a dozen roses today.

jem

Restitution

• Even when I am alone, I am alive. I've felt this lately, and it feels nice.
• My father has some kindness in him. He actually has a certain level of concern for my well being. I've seen this lately, and it feels nice.
• There is joy in life, in the little things that are hidden until you stumble over them, until you do a double-take and lift them to your face for a closer look. I've done some stumbling lately, and I've encountered these quiet satisfactions.
  
• George Eliot is brilliant. I've read her lately, and she shines.
• My friend MM is a beautiful woman, faithfully offering me rare insight into growth, development, and being human.
• Spring is on the other side of winter.
• Even in the silence, there is something...life?

jem

Residue

Panic.
That I've done something to take someone I love away from me.
Anger.
At myself for not just going forward and forgetting her, for wanting to be with her still.
Panic.
For feeling controlled by her coming in as feels right for her, for discarding me and my feelings as feels right for her.
Indignation.
For doing something healthy and feeling like it made her go away for good.
Anger.
For feeling controlled by my desire for her.
Vulnerability.
For feeling controlled by my desire for her.
Confounded.
For not moving forward when something feels so precarious so consistently.
Looking.
Around the corner, for a little light, for a glimpse of what I look like looking at it.

jem

jem controlling jem

I've often felt ashamed for being a control freak. Control over my body, how big or small it is, control over health, control over when I speak to someone or not. The list goes on. Why the bad rap on being in control?

How I control
Control for me can get out of hand. If someone treats me disrespectfully, I feel like I need to control the situation. This can mean that I pull away so that they cannot have access to me. This can mean that I test the situation and create a conflict where there may have been none, so that I can kick some ass out of self-righteousness. Like, 'don't you mess with me - I have rights.' It becomes a need to create a situation where I am wronged, so that I can point out that I am being wronged. It becomes mastery over a situation in which I am being mistreated, abused, treated like crap.

If I feel out of control, it can also mean that I put myself in a victim position, a recreation of where I was as a kid, a position that feels familiar and in some really twisted way, comforting.

Pebble pebble
Control for me can be stepping on a pebble with my left foot, and though I've taken several steps past it, needing to return so that I can step on it with my right foot. What is this? My most recent feeling is that it is me feeling at my core something like, 'I need to control this so that nothing bad happens to me.' If I don't step on the pebble twice, I fear that the impulse to step on it will overtake me, will control my thoughts, my mind, until I come back and step on it twice. I'll be ruled by the impulse, it will invade me, I won't be able to go back to the thoughts that make me who I am.

I wasn't able to control all the scary shit that happened to me as a kid - the near death stuff, the parents leaving me alone sick stuff, the parents making me keep quiet and not allowing me to be a person with thoughts and opinions and passions stuff, the parents telling me I was a freak and not much of a person stuff. So, stepping on a pebble twice now means that this stuff won't happen again. (When I did it as a kid, it probably meant 'Maybe I can control what they're doing to me.')

Reality and hopes for now
Plenty of stuff can happen to me. Hopefully I won't ever live under the the type of tyranny and oppression I did as a kid. For now, I have relative control over myself, my life. But still, anything can happen at any time. I want to learn to be more agile, more flexible to handle the hard stuff. I think this would be helpful to me. Now when something 'goes wrong,' it doesn't have to mean that my life is at risk - it did mean this as a kid (if my parents just left me, I could have died). People can persist even though they deal with lots of stuff. I want to learn to be an agile, adaptable person.

jem

Unearthed

• If someone likes me, it does not mean there is something wrong with them, that they have a defect that will prevent me from being in a successful relationship with them.
• If someone makes themselves vulnerable with me, it may be simply because they like me and that they feel safe with me and want to be close to me. It does not mean that they are weak or inadequate.
• If someone wants to spend time with me, it does not necessarily mean that they are trying to control my mind, to prevent me from doing things I love to do.
• When someone continually tries to connect with me, to be close to me, this does not necessarily mean that they are out of control and are not to be trusted. They may simply want to keep trying to be close to me.

jem

More on the past in my present

So, I'm working on interpreting my past these days. I feel like I've come up with some really solid things regarding my problems with being in a relationship.

Why the panic?
One thing I've always felt when I sense that someone really likes me is panic. I feel a bit sick to my stomach, I'm aware of my heart beating, I can't focus on what is happening. The long-term end result of this is that I destroy the potential for a relationship. I find a reason to be unhappy with the person, a reason why they aren't right for me. I can't stand the panic, and so I make it stop. The short-term result is that I probably am not as attentive back to the person, or that I'm freaking out inside, wondering how to escape. If I don't escape, I feel that I will disappear, that I will be overtaken, that I'll have no sense of self left.

The source is clear to me now: my parents, of course. A relationship with them was painful and they did indeed take away my sense of self. It wasn't okay to be a person around them. I couldn't express an opinion, especially if it conflicted with their own, my own thoughts were completely forced out of my own head and filled with the things they told me about myself, and by my attempts to figure out what they wanted from me, what might prevent them from being mean. As I spoke about in a previous post, intimacy meant bad, harmful, painful things.

Fear of being dumped = terror
As well, though, I think that by avoiding being close to someone, I've avoided being dumped by them. To be dumped by someone (which I was in fact just recently) is to be discarded, to be labeled as inadequate, to be shoved to the side while the cool people, the interesting and happy people walk by without noticing me. But this is from the past too, these feelings. I was indeed treated as inadequate, as not quite right, but not by the woman I'm dating at such or such a time. It was by my parents, and that's in the past.

My fear of being left, and therefore my discomfort with getting close, also has to do, I think, with my many sicknesses as a child. I was given last rights at birth. And that was just the beginning. To be left alone when I was a kid could mean that I would die.

And I was very often left alone.

My mother worked nights, and my father didn't care. One night, after a tonsilectomy, my stitches came undone in the middle of the night, and when my teenaged sister went to tell my father that I wasn't well, he told her to go back to bed, that I'd be fine (he never came to see if his 5 year old daughter was okay). I almost bled to death. By the time my mother came home from work in the morning, I was vomiting blood everywhere, and I had to be physically carried to the car and rushed to the emergency room where I received a transfusion. My parents abandoned me in a really big way. I've tried so hard to avoid being left again by not getting close.

I'm rehashing all this because enough is enough. It's all controlled me for so long, but I refuse to let it do so anymore.

The plan
The plan: to stick with the panic when my next woman is looking at me with love and promises of caring and nurturing. The panic will pass. That's the nature of panic. The panic will be replaced with feeling the feelings I've always longed for.

And I will sit with the uncertainty. The uncertainty of whether she's right for me or not. I've been unable to sit with that uncertainty in the past, accelerating the relationship by sleeping with her too quickly, or by ending it because she wasn't this or that, when this or that isn't something I even care about! It'll become evident in time whether she's right for me.

In the meantime, I'll enjoy her smiles, her touch, her tenderness. And hopefully those will become mine indefinitely.

jem

I will be her kind

I used to alternately blame my parents for my chaotic, confusing life, and berate myself for including them in the equation at all. Now, I see their role in my life, in my relationship life to be exact, in a new way.

Here's how it works: mom (a beautiful, wonderful woman) was overwhelmed with the 5 kids, and an alcoholic-ish husband who left her to raise a family alone while he watched hours and hours of television a day. Dad (a man overwhelmed by his own sad past, paralyzed by his own faults and fears) was constantly on the cusp of a violent outburst, but had a desperate need for my mother. My mother was overwhelmed, longing for a different life (for the Montreal of her youth, for a better partner, for less responsibilities), barely unable to keep it all together, prone to yelling outbursts that targeted and paralyzed each of us with fear. Mom was mad at dad for completely ignoring any responsibilities he had to the family, for abandoning her daily to keep it all together all alone. Dad was a zombie at best, a violent, angry, mean-spirited, and hurtful person normally. Mom sometimes showed us love, sometimes not. Dad never did.

A kid automatically gets fucked up from this. A kid learns what love is about from her parents, and associates what she got from them with what it is. A kid, like me, who usually got nothing, often was the object of resentment and violence, who had moments of affection, will grow up to give these things back to those she loves, to her partners.

Until she sees what's happened, figures out how it all happened, and resolves to fix it.

That's where I am folks.

I learned about making hurtful comments to your girlfriend from my parents. I learned about feeling threatened by her closeness (because her closeness might suffocate me with bad things - disrespect, fears of my individuality, jealousy, rage, abuse, all things my parents offered me in a close relationship to them). I learned about giving a few signs of affection, mostly because you were terrified to be all alone in life, because at your core, you felt empty and non-deserving of anything good, and hoped to hell people wouldn't abandon you to feel those things all on your own. I learned that closeness is about sadness, and feeling trapped, and thwarted goals, and a less desirable life, and about bickering, and making the person feel like less in order that you might feel like a bit more.

These things, of course, are horrible. It's not the me that is me. It's the me that I inherited, and that I really have no interest in anymore. I'm willing to do the work. I'm doing the work.

I see glimpses of my future: a me happy, fulfilled, at peace alone. A stronger than ever me. A woman. A woman who is fun and loving and happy and strong. A woman who may choose to be with someone if it feels like a good thing. A woman who will not try to anticipate what her partner wants and then ignore her own feelings in order to meet her partner's desires. A woman who will fulfill her own needs, and in so doing, will be a better partner to her woman. A woman who will love to be with another woman, who will feel gratified and happy by it.

I will be her kind.

jem