pray you never

I'm sitting at a cafe waiting to pick up Roi. He spent the weekend in New York and then extended his stay by two nights. Without asking. Certainly without respect to my schedule, or my triggers. He was decidedly unapologetic about it. Heck, he went so far as to guilt me. 

But then, I know this. This is Roi, and this is how he does life. It's good to no longer be surprised by his absurd behaviors. Better still to be focusing on what I want to do, where I want to go next, and how I'm going to get there. Sometimes I wonder if Roi was sensing my movement away from him and felt compelled to buy a house, not JUST because the market was right, but because unconsciously he may have thought I would never leave if there was a house.

I'll admit. I had a brief few weeks of worry about this - that I wouldn't want to leave for love of a house. 

As my last post indicates, I no longer worry about that. 

Right now the only thing I'm worried about is Kyd. Those worries could fill three volumes, but in the best summary I can give. Kyd is facing 90 days if he doesn't come up with a pretty large sum of money between now and next Thursday. This is for the DUI and accident he was in 3 and a half years ago. He's not been able to find work, nor be stable enough to look properly or present himself as a desirable employee. 

I don't talk about Kyd much. I'm not sure why this is. It seems to be wrapped in fierce motherly protection, denial wrapped in clutching hope, bottomless feelings of helplessness that don't like to be poked, the brain-crunching juxtaposition of feeling no empathy for Roi and wanting desperately for Kyd to not hurt others the way Roi has, and god knows what else.

In fact, I find I can't really talk much more about him even now when I set out to do that. 

Neurofeedback is saving my life, keeping me sane amidst what would bring the best of us to our knees. I'll just say that. And ask that whatever form of prayer or good energy you practice, if you could send some toward this corner of the world it would be much appreciated. 

quicksands

Therapist is really settling into her chair in a way I haven't seen before. She's got one leg over the arm now, the other leg tucked underneath the first one. We're talking about my "future", as in career and livelihood. It's never easy for me to explain what I want to do, and frankly, there's no real job title for it either. I have several "talents" that look unrelated, or abilities that suggest talents I don't actually have, and it's taken me a third of my adult life to circle around this mix of talent and abilities and wants to find the one or three common threads and how they fit together. 

I only started getting any real clarity a year ago, before the big bad sad, when I was happening to have a lot of lunches with a friend who was also a personal coach. She was the centrifuge to my handfuls of ingredients. We were meeting this way to work on some collaborative projects together, but after a time she was all, "Briar, you need clarity", and I was all, "I KNOW DAMMIT". So she asked me questions and I answered, and there was nothing new or surprising until we got past the point in the conversation where I would normally switch topics because I could feel the other person getting exasperated or overwhelmed or lost or bored. 

I never got much chance to work with what we pulled out of those conversations - by that time I was already clutching onto the edge of sanity by my fingernails. 

Therapist leans forward a little now as my throat clenches with frustration, my voice tighter and higher. "How long ago did you come to see me?", she asks as she reaches for my file. She shuffles through a few papers and announces, almost to herself, "June 16...so 9 weeks, just over two months." 

I'm not sure what she's getting at. She drops the folder back onto the table and looks at me, "It's rare that someone comes to see me in as much distress as you were in and makes this much progress in just two months, you know that, right? You're quite resilient." 

Her point, I gather, is that I'm being impatient. And I am. My birthday is next week, and I can't help but feel time is slipping through my fingers. One of my competitors in my industry has announced his book will be launched in November, he's already in editing stage. That could've been me and I blew it. And someone else has come out of left field with 1/8 the experience I have and will be presenting at the industry's biggest conference on MY GODDAMN TOPIC. That should've been me. I'm losing ground every day. I've already lost ground I can't get back. I'm not being pessimistic, I know how this shit works. I was positioned at the front of a cutting-edge wave, I had made incredible in-roads, but all those months I spent being depressed I dropped off the radar and other people moved in. Nature abhors a vacuum and all. 

I've got other plans, and I know I'll be ok, but no amount of well-meaning sentiments will convince me I didn't lose something back there in the quicksands of the Big Bad Sad. 

sometimes therapy is just 'meh'

And other times you find yourself like a half-dead fish gasping for air while being gutted alive. Everything, everything, tilts on its axis and you see yourself in the world in a different way and you can scarcely believe it. 

The realizations come without warning, breaking in waves over the breast bone. It fucking hurts, like chest-cracking open-heart surgery without anesthesia. 

I knew before I went in that I was looking for the connection and interplay between multiple emotional abuses in childhood and my fucked up relationships. It seemed obvious. It seemed...simple. Of course, of course I'm somehow playing out those abuses repeatedly. It's in all the textbooks. 

Therapist decided today was the day to tickle at my random thoughts, to gently nudge here and then there, to turn me again and again to face down particular corridors and walk to their end and open the doors I found there. Doors linking past and present. 

There was my frustrating need to expend energy on getting people to give me permission to be. Why if I knew someone was wronging me and they refused to see or apologize or make it right on their own was I so determined to batter myself up against their wrong thinking repeatedly? Why expend so much of my valuable time and energy getting them to see? Why the need for their permission to feel hurt? Why the need for them to have the right view so I could move on?

All people? Or certain people, she asked. 

Certain people...people who are consistently mean to me (even if they are sometimes also nice, generous, giving). 

Something...an awareness...a truth is coming up and I feel like crying. 

I'm one of those people, I think. I look at Therapist with a rising shock in my eyes. "I'm repeating the abuse...I'm repeating it because I want to come up with a different ending, and I think I CAN come up with a different ending. If I can get one bully to see their error I can relax, that's what I'm thinking. It's so predictable." 

No, it's still not that obvious. There's more, and each new revelation strikes its blow, swift and precise. Therapist says nothing now, she sees she doesn't need to. 

"I was a good child, and these people, they punished me because of it. My caretakers, my peers, they wanted to make me feel awful not because I was bad, but because I was good and open-hearted." 

It's true. As a child I was a little ray of sunshine. Talkative, brave, kind, curious, sweet, sensitive, and pretty. I was stubborn as hell, but I wouldn't hurt a fly. And for whatever fucked up reasons, my caretakers and peers took it upon themselves to make me feel as bad about myself as they possibly could. Seemingly without remorse.

"What you're describing sounds like evil", Therapist said. I heard those words through the pounding rush of revelations, it barely registered, but I felt myself nod slightly through tears.

Therapist asked me if I felt any anger or rage. Yes, I have a lot of rage. "Sometimes the rage comes through because we have moments of knowing how wrong it is", she said. 

All of this. It manifests in various ways. I repeat the abuse hoping I can undo the evil this time. I take on the burdens of others hoping that kind of good will be appreciated. But instead my strength gets used, ABused. My ex-husband, when we were splitting and he couldn't bear to be alone started an affair before we were properly separated. His excuse, "you were always the strong one". 

Bottom line, I can't fix this problem from the inside. 

Still

I've been too long without writing. When this happens I get overwhelmed about where to begin or how to cover it all. I get frustrated that all the beautiful or important things I wrote in my head are gone. 

I could talk about the recent Sisyphean battles with Roi or how Therapist recently said the word "narcissist" in a sentence about Roi. I could tell you about the blissful week I spent on a cushion in a shrine room surrounded by the noise of children all about. I could tell you how I quit smoking and if I had only known how much better my skin would look I might've done it much much sooner. I could tell you about some futile crushes I've developed recently (the Sensei, the tall Russian, and the goateed Matthew Broderick look-alike) and how obviously wrong and stupid it is for me to be extending any energy on such foolishness. 

But for today I'm just saying, "hello, yes I'm still here". Still here trying to crack the code of me. Still here in battle gear hacking away with a broad sword at the tangle of what's what in this relationship. Still mothering and laughing and sleeping in too late and sometimes crying and moaning on the telephone to the precious few who won't grow tired of my need to follow every thread to its end. Still kicking the shit out of a punching bag when I have the energy to. Still dancing to trashy Euro-pop and synthetic 80's tunes every time I find myself alone in the house. Still having moments of clarity and double the moments of confusion.

Still here. Still me. 

sweating bones

The days still flow on by, a relentless passage of time. I've watched movies, danced some more, cried on the therapist's couch, held hands with my daughter, laughed about things, walked out on a conversation I couldn't have (and then walked two and a half hours to home), gone swimming, drove in a thunderstorm, cooked things and then ate them, stayed up too late and slept too late, and conversed with various friends.

These days are my life such as it is at this point in time. 

Therapist says I have a resilient little brain that is responding well to treatment. She says I am different already from when I first came to her. I feel it too and we smile at each other. It's still only the beginning, which is frustrating at times, but I am determined to not just come back, but to come back reinvented - stronger, wiser, softer, grounded and fierce. 

I feel closer to letting Roi go. The "thing" of Roi. He's more sober than he's ever been and that's different. I haven't once caught him ogling another woman, haven't smelled alcohol, haven't seen the pinpoint pupils. Yet he is small without these things. A deflated, simpering thing dragging his wibbly soul around in the length of his arms which hang limp at his sides. One might think he's depressed, and that in itself is depressing; that sobriety doesn't suit him.

He wants to be happy. He wants to be happy with me he says. But his sad discontent drapes over his shoulders, sagging them and when I look at him, I think, "I just can't". 

Roi has a white, pasty, piggy-eyed friend who moved to the Philippines to live out his days in financial luxury and sexual decadence. He's already gotten one girl pregnant, and to his credit, is supporting her. Of course it hasn't stopped him from continuing to fuck as many desperate young women as he can in between working and sleeping. Roi says he sounds happy. I want him to feel sorry for his friend for having to buy a proximation of love and acceptance in a foreign country away from family and friends. An awkward clinging hope that somewhere in Roi is a noble man, but that's how I got here isn't it? Hoping for something to be what it's not. He doesn't pity mr. pig-eyes, he thinks its swell that he "figured things out". It probably means that when I leave Roi will pack his bags to solve his money, love, and sex problems. I won't want to know, but I'll know. I already know. 

A sadness sweats down the inside of my bones.

You Feel Better Now, Ya Hear?

I walked into therapy, flopped on the couch and announced I had a big problem I needed to solve. Liz has the background on Kyd already so I didn't need to go into much. After I told her about events of the last few months she said, "he's really making all of this your problem, isn't he?". 

"YES!", I cried. 

Then we did the exploration thing. How does this or that make me feel, what do I get out of it - and as happens in the company of a good therapist, details came into focus. I won't bore you with every piece of it. The upshot is that I can't handle the anxiety and guilt over Kyd's situation so I pull out the "helping" toolkit and even when it looks like I'm not getting in his business, I'm getting in his business.

Not because I WANT to be in his business. In fact I feel resentful about it all. the. time. As I do with Roi, or with Lexie at times. They all expect that I'll fix the problems, even when they don't think they are. And I don't get a rush out of helping, I feel angry about it, but I do it anyway. I'm not a helper, I'm a martyr. Forever sacrificing myself expecting this will lead to love and respect. It almost never does.

Liz gave me a line to chew on, practice, and apply as needed. "That's not my problem to solve, but I'll help if you'll allow me to." The line between enabling and supporting stays elusive, but this approach helps keep it exposed to the light. I will help (support) if he allows me to -- meaning he becomes amenable to help, has the right attitude for help, and so on. 

Of course there were other tools given. Visualizations, thoughts to contemplate, other lines to use. 

At the end of the hour my anger and frustration had dissipated. I felt softer but firmer, like I could stay connected to Kyd while still keeping distance.

Again I am struck by how lucky I am to have Liz. Finding the right therapist is such a crapshoot and I just got damn lucky for once. She is always gentle, but not so sympathetic and washed out that I want to spit in her eye. She offers clear guidance without making me feel like I'm being given unsolicited orders. She is a master at balancing sympathy with stepping in before I can get fused to a particular emotion or past event.  She helps me see the good in myself without insulting my intelligence and making me forever after distrust her. She is human with me, allowing appropriate glimpses now and again into her life but without drawing me into it.

It makes me want to be her best patient ever. To come home with straight A's in therapy. I imagine my magical future filled with good fortune and rainbows and glitter, all because I was the best patient ever of the best therapist ever, and together we polish my life until it shines, never a blemish again. 

It's a childish wish, but I don't scold myself too harshly. I simply observe that childish hope as it arises and then let it float out the window.