State of the me

[serinde]

A little over a month ago [this post is fairly long-saved-up; oh now that's a shock, innit?] I had what might best be described as a breakthrough. That is, I knew that I had been carrying a giant emotional anvil for quite some time, and I was coping (with varying degrees of success) with the resultant aches and pains and tiredness, but I was in the very odd position of knowing the shape of the anvil yet not recognizing it, until it fell off; at which point I could analyze it with perfect clarity. I guess because it wasn't behind me anymore.

Gosh, that was coherent.

It says something that I pride myself on my perspicacity, not only of others' emotional states but of my own (obviously, we can't see ourselves with total accuracy all the time, but I think I do better than many), yet I couldn't figure this one out. This in spite of the fact that a) it's a really obvious sort of problem for those of us in what you might call "relationship webs", and b) it's a problem I have had the privilege (ha!) of front-row seats to watch others try and cope with. I think what it says is "DUHRRRR." There's also several other aspects which require further thinking about:

* I knew that things were terribly amiss when I was, for a time there, bursting into tears about every 10-14 days. That's good; it shows I am somewhat in touch with reality.

* I thought it was my own shit to deal with, which is why I was trying to communicate some parts of my unhappiness but mostly cope with it myself. This is...kinda good. Lots of things need to be handled this way. But if it's that big a problem, I need to make sure everyone knows I have a really big mess I am trying to wrangle.

* On the third hand, it DID turn out to be my own shit, at the most fundamental level. Whinging to others would not have solved it.

* On the fourth hand, some perspective might have led me to losing the anvil quicker.

* On the fifth hand, I think what I probably needed was outside perspective, not something from within House Pooky.

* Tangentially to the second point, I sometimes felt resentment that people weren't noticing just how fucked up I was feeling (like, the fact that crying more than once every I dunno 6-10 months is vastly out of character). I know that it's important to tell your loved ones when you're unhappy, but in the tongue of my people that often sounds like whining, and we do not approve. There is a level beyond which I don't seem constitutionally capable of bringing the same thing up, and I don't know how much intuition/sensitivity is justifiably required from the rest of the world.

* I do still feel that, by turns, I don't get listened to a lot of the time; or I'm listened to and then my stuff is "filed for consideration" which is the file that is circular and gets emptied every Sunday night. Some of that is probably always going to be so, just because people are like that, but I need some way of having a list of, I don't know, "action items" that I can point to and say "hey, I don't want to nag, but this is still an issue".

* The release of the anvil was keyed to two things: one, something I feared horribly happening and then me finding out it was Not The End Of The World and in fact was probably going to be pretty favorable, and two, a random post from someone I don't really know reminding me of a central philosophic point that I knew but had not been following, I'd only thought I had. Yes, this is vague.

Of course, now that I've gotten my brane sorted, I have won the poison ivy; an additional not-truly-serious but very unpleasing health issue; and I have to captain the ship while everyone else in House Pooky is varying combinations of ill and/or under epic levels of life stress. There is something here about the reward of a job well done.

Anyways, this explains why I haven't posted a lot of stuff beyond the trivial, and also why I may not have been as responsive, communicative, etc. as I ordinarily am. (Though busy work crap hasn't helped my ability to keep up with correspondence, either.) If I owe you mail, prod me. If I just sort of ditzed off at some point, I'm sorry; send mail and I'll answer it, I will.