If Roi Had a Blog

I found this in drafts from about a year ago.

I'm experiencing a lot of anxiety over this work situation. I've got to do more sales and bring in more work, yet I'm depleted of the necessary energy after having to manage my recovery AND Briar's complete dysfunction around work. She's screwing up royally but I can't talk to her about it. She is unable to take direction or criticism. 

We went to lunch today where I hoped to extract from her her intentions around work, and come up with a plan that might work for everyone involved. She couldn't look me in the eye and stubbornly refused to share her thoughts on the matter. Next thing I know she's bawling right there in the restaurant and I don't know what I've said. 

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. 

The Truth is Sometimes Funny

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes." ~William Gibson

Dead Zone and Why Do I Open My Big Fat Mouth?

It's been a tough few days. For some reason I'm losing my footing. It could be the days on end of rain which never works well for me. But if lack of sunshine were the only thing the solutions would be simple.

For months I've been becoming more and more dysfunctional in my work, but these last few weeks I have been borderline non-functional. Last week I clocked zero hours. For someone who wants financial freedom this is counter-intuitive self-sabotage. At the same time, my work is with him and for him. I can't separate it in my head. Still, that doesn't explain it fully because I have my own little side gig and that has been suffering too. I can do nothing but a few chores and read and write, mostly on this topic though I'm doing writing elsewhere that is unrelated. What work I do get done is forced and painful. One email to a client and I feel impossibly exhausted and drained. 

That "dead zone" that Estes talks about in WWRWW -- it's like I entered the killing room, saw what I needed to see there, but when I came out I got stuck in the dead zone around it. A place that is totally without light, without sound, without feeling. There is nothing to get hold of here. 

Meanwhile, Roi has stepped up his recovery to a meeting a day, working with his sponsor, and participating in a daily email group for sex addicts. I see visible changes, and to be honest I think this may be contributing to my having fallen into the dead zone. I don't want hope right now. Not now.

On a different, but always related topic, Kyd has come to stay for a few days. When he's here his girlfriend is often here too, and I get to see them interact, and I'm becoming increasingly disturbed by what I see. Nothing horrible, but an emergent pattern. They rarely fight, and have never fought in my presence. Mostly they talk, wrestle, play, watch movies, and joke around. It's the joking that's bothering me. Kyd tends toward those "jokes" that are semi-insulting. The kind of jokes you find in emotionally abusive relationships. I see no other evidence of overt emotional abuse. Other than the joking he treats her kindly, compliments her, listens to her, and generally obviously cares about her a great deal. 

But this need to poke with barbs wrapped in the scapegoat of a "joke" is problematic for me. It means that he needs to make sure she stays attached to him because he is the one who will define her. Even compliments, if this is the dynamic, are part of this. He often talks about how she says he treats her better than any boyfriend she's had, or how he supports her and encourages her. He wants to secure himself as her everything, he wants to secure himself by defining her. 

I tried to talk to him about it. Told him that I see that sometimes she doesn't always seem to like his "kidding around" and I gave him a recent example. He explained it was because she's a Pisces and this means she sometimes takes things too personally. WTF? 

It didn't go well after that and perhaps I should've known better. We're now giving each other a wide berth while we let the words between us settle. When he rejected wholesale my suggesting this was mildly emotionally abusive, I dug my heels in, which in turn prompted him to do the same. Nothing was accomplished.

I have no idea what to do about it, so I guess I do nothing.