Thanks for Dept. of Eagles!

Today. Okay. Positive. Okay. I went to a Bible study and good things came of that.

I don’t want to be a rational architect.

Wishful thinking is symptomatic of anxiety. okay. I think I’m ruining everyone’s life. No. Stop generalizing just so that you don’t have to make any particular person feel any particular way. I might have ruined my family. No. More specific. Today I called my mom, because a woman at the Bible study talked about her daughter who had Aspergers’ Syndrome (high-functioning autism–trouble reading social cues or understanding social behavior), and I had thought, when I met this woman’s daughter… She reminds me of my mom and my mom’s family! Probably more along the lines of.. Aunt Annette? And sometimes my mom, I dunno, she gets so fixated on houses, building things, productivity… And I got inspired that maybe if my mom figured out that she needed help with social things… or that maybe I wouldn’t feel like I was the crazy one for thinking people’s behavior abrupt/rude/abrasive… So I called her, but I chickened out in saying that I thought she might have it, so I said “your family” and she said, “No.” And I kept prodding around, mentioning Aunt Theresa and Aunt Annette, and she said, “No, you don’t get to find diseases.” Then I was like, “What do you mean by that?” And she was like, “I don’t know” kind of coyly. Then I was confused and halted, and I felt like she’s got this thing built up around me that I’m a hypochondriac. Her and Russ: it’s in your head! Well, you know what I thought of saying after I had hung up and my altruisitc attempt had failed:

Hey Mom, remember that time I thought I had lice and you kept saying “No, you don’t. You’re just imagining it. You’re a hypochondriac.” And then you finally believed me when my entire head was itching and you saw a bug run across my hairbrush???

That’s because I was RIGHT. I was good at deciphering what was happening to me. I’m not a hypochondriac. And admitting that something is a problem is not DEFEAT. Such tight denial.

 

I sat on a builder on the premises of The Yoga Hut and some thoughts breezily unfurled.

Acknowledge that her words led to me feel hurt, manipulated, and misunderstood. The misunderstanding of my intentions perhaps hurts the most, being treated like my curiosity needs to be extinguished.

Don’t suppress the feelings, but now… the most freedom comes from knowing my own freedom of choice, that I don’t have to let pain ripple through my cells and out into my actions against others.

 

I dunno how I feel about blogs and the internet now. It seems like the maximum in social scrutiny. Maybe I could check out of all of this. Maybe that’s avoidant. Hey!

 

But I think my big push away from people is because I’m not setting identity boundaries. Meaning: whoever I’m around, I feel at their mercy, whatever they believe, whatever they’re doing, whatever their opinion about a CD or a shirt we passed in a window, well, disagreeing can’t be as important as our relationship, so I don’t need voice it! Or I chatter incessantly, I say things outside the realm of my good discretion, projecting other people’s opinions because mine aren’t sharply and quickly formulated. and Silence is not. allowed.

BLECHG so much garbage in my mind. Who’s operating the gas grill beneath me? Maybe this is what they mean by Hell. Oh yeah! My theory of God. The kingdom of God is within you. The Bible is a metaphor for the entire inner, emotional/spiritual journey of a single person, and each of us can use it to exquisitely calibrate our inner lives with the richness of wisdom. The infinity stretching out before us is within us. Right now.

evaporated

I’m burned. So burned. Smoke is rising off my body. I found a square of paper listing free classes at the TWU student fitness and wound my way through ‘power flow yoga’ at 4:30. The soot squeezed itself through my muscles.

I took a black Sharpie last weekend and wrote down everything painful I have retained from others in the past. It was twiggered I mean triggered from turtle and I visiting Uncle Paul. Uncle Paul’s bitterness/negativity/tension/perseveration was at a high tide, and in a new person’s presence (turtle’s), it really stood out. We traded observations in the car, and I thought of how much time I’ve spent with Uncle Paul in the past two years… and what I might have absorbed from him in his words, his choices, his actions, his attitudes, his emotions… and  how some of it did cause me pain, but I glanced down at the wound and did nothing, kept staring at him and listening for his sake. And I’ve borne others’ pain for a pretty long time. A pretttty long time. This is what deters me from counseling–too strong of an empath. 

So last weekend I wrote down all the scorching words and burned them in my bathroom sink. I know that’s not the end. I’m going to yoga again today. Transform-a-thon!

Frangy and Roossey

I got into about a 2 1/2 hour conversation with brother tonight. It just ended. Mom and I had gotten into a fight over her eating some of my popcorn without asking. Hmm, summing it up like that, it sounds pretty silly. What made me mad was that I brought up that it bothered me if she didn’t ask, and she dismissed that, so I didn’t drop it, so she took it all the way to “Well, I pay for everything so I own your life”. Russell, with his larger perspective, helped me to see how confused Mom was by my snapping… She didn’t see that it was about me wanting her to acknowledge my viewpoint, even IF she thought it was silly… I don’t think I have the energy right now to relay everything Russ and I threshed through; he worked with me thought by thought and, unlike me, he can acknowledge restrictions without needing to push them. So he helped me see what I can do within the set-up of our family and my life. He listened. I want to thank him, but I want to do it with genuine energy later… These heady emotional conversations literally physically wear me out. I think that’s a reason fueling avoidance. But it’s like cardiovascular training. It’s like what my roommate Crystal said last year about her family, “We talk everything out. It doesn’t matter if we have to go into a room for hours, cry, scream, we fight things out and we don’t let things go unresolved.” Her family seems to have developed endurance in this. It was good to have Russ meet me in words, for me to tussle and be weak. To write down the major points of clarity that were reached:

1. If I want to have real relationships with my parents (and I do), I need to be independent of them first. They won’t treat me like an equal until I am. This means graduating, getting a job, and getting out of here.

To this, Russ exclaimed gleefully, “So there! You have a plan!” Aw he likes plannin.

2. Mom and I are essentially mismatched in our natural desires and inclinations. Russ drove home that she just wants me to be happy (which surprised part of me, yeah), and she expresses this by doing things like making a ramp for my dog, setting up washer machines, buying me pants, and folding clothes. While I receive these actions with, “Oh, that’s convenient, thanks”, I emotionally need words of affirmation, which is exactly what she deems unnecessary or finds too difficult to dispense. Meanwhile, what I want from people I care about is emotional accessibility, being informed of their inner state so that I can help them achieve some peace (of course I can’t be wholly responsible). And Mom does not inform! I can often infer, but there’s no discussing it or reaching it in any way where I can use my strength.

3. All that established, we could go to counseling together, and it would most likely be beneficial. Mom has respect for authority figures if not for me, so a counselor would help keep the lines open instead of the shut-down that often happens “I OWN YOUR LIFE”. I’m gonna talk to her about doing this. It could help clear the air for a reset, help us learn what the other wants and expects, and help us create better communication habits.

4. Russ and I got to a point where I admitted: I want to please my parents, and so it’s so…difficult…for me to… disregard their standards even when I don’t own those standards. Like I brought up how Dad thrives in keeping pressure on himself, so it’s difficult for me to relax without feeling guilt.

I said, “If I love someone, I want to do what they want me to do” and “I don’t want to constantly argue with my parents, but if I am myself, I will argue with them, because we are different.”

Russ replied, “Okay. You don’t have to please them in everything… You please Dad in that you don’t kill people, you don’t sleep around–”

I brought up our differing political views and Russ said, “Well, you believe in owning guns, don’t you?” We all laughed. I nodded. So he kept on, “You won’t be a murderer, you won’t end up killed, he doesn’t have to worry about you in school, and you won’t take away his right to bear arms. That’s pretty much it. He’s happy. And Mom, well, hers is even simpler… She just wants you to be happy. They might try to influence you, but…” He brought things down to the basics. He laid out the parameters in such a clear way that I glimpsed safety and boundaries again instead of feeling pulled apart.

5. I need a base of happiness that is my own. My own central happiness alleviates periphery irritation. I haven’t been establishing this, but I have before and I know I can.

 

Fyi: Russ is an ENTJ. The neat thing about NTs, Rationalists, is that they can see life built from the ground up (Idealists or NFs see life as falling down from an idealized vision). So that makes Rationalists excellent at explaining how mental/emotional processes take place… A book I read compared them to Prometheus, who starts anew each day and must rebuild each day. His liver and that giant boulder, you know? This allows for an explicit knowledge of the contruction process, be it concrete or abstract. Like turtle, at the bad rehearsal, explained exactly how the characterization and projection parts of acting fit together. It was delicious to witness. It’s something I can do sometimes, but my greater (I originally typed “greather”) strength comes from faith and not knowledge… which is more difficult to quantify, but. Here I am! Existing like that.

PS – See if you can get my title!

Harsh Strings

Here in my Professional Development in Psychology class, my professor is talking about reinventing yourself on a regular basis.  This is something I get the urge to do… but something else is stopping me. This entry is devoted to finding what that is. I hope you injoy enjoy this essay.

When I start to imagine who I want to be ideally, I imagine people claiming that I’m copying others. I imagine myself becoming another cookie cutter in the Denton socialscape.

Ideas are being spoken in class. They’re coming toward me. They’re hitting my ears and funneling into my brain, but this melting force says, “Eventually, you have to stop learning. Eventually, you have to stop at one point.”

What an insane thought. No wonder I’m continually writhing. It’s an impossible requirement, to find one state of being and hold it constantly, all the time, unchanging… and why? To what end? I’m not even sure what it could mean to hold one state forever. And yet I feel this constant pushing down to not change, not change, not change. Am I a point at which all forces lean? If I changed, would the beams of existence come crashing down? I don’t think so.

Steven’s words from Seattle resound: “You tend to heap way too much responsibility on yourself, more than is fair.”

How do I want to change anyway?

I want to be more open. I want to show myself to people instead of living within a construct.  I want to be bubbling up from within myself, outward. Ideas! Kindness! Value of life! Beauty…

The other change-stopper I find is embarrassment. Preservation of my outer-image, eliminating any possibility of another person judging me or laughing at me, is the apex of my endeavors. I shrink in disgust from associating with this belief, and yet it has taken such pervasive root in my character.

I guess I forgot to mention that my mom came to Denton last weekend…

Cirrus are my favorite

La La La

La La Laeerlaaa

 

 

As I walked into Opening Bell today, I passed a guy sitting on the couch laughing at something on his laptop.  I glanced at him without any real intention.  He stopped laughing, and his expression drew into something like contrite.

Is my gaze really that severe?  Please don’t stop laughing in my presence!  I like laughter!  Really!

 

Living with Uncle Paul for a few days is wearing on me a little bit.  He has a lot of nervous chatter in him.  I think he feels like there needs to be talking when another person is present.  Sometimes I want to say:

“Don’t you ever need quiet?” 

I find myself responding less and less to him with the hope that the conversation will die.  I just want to be with my own thoughts sometimes.  Just leave me alone. 

He likes to report on things.  “Your dad lost a few shingles on his house in the tropical storm.  He’s going to call me later and tell me more.”  It’s like he doesn’t know another way to function other than in the firefighter/paramedic/emergency-response mode of collecting and updating information.  Like he’s still hooked on catastrophe.  He seems like a pretty calm person to outsiders, but when you get closer to him you can sense that there are silent alarms going off everywhere. 

And I just don’t know what to do when presented with facts in a tone of presumed significance.  Most of the time, I’m not specifically interested in what he’s talking about.  I mean, I listen because I respect him, but I have nothing specific to say to his topics.  Usually I say “Oh” or “Hmm”.  It really drives home how much more connected to reality other people are… or how head-in-the-clouds I can be.  I don’t want to change that, though.  I like the clouds.

Continuing Observation

If you haven’t noticed yet, whenever I write an extremely negative entry, a few hours later optimism usually strikes back.  This is the cyclical nature of my personality.

 

I do like Michael and Mary and their daughters, my cousins, Sarah and Rebecca.  They can be sort of blunt with each other, but they are pretty gentle in dealing with people outside of their family, and I can have a decent conversation with Sarah and Rebecca.  Some sort of caring if unorthodox family nucleus exists for them, and it translates to how they treat others.  But Mom hardly knows her oldest brother, who is a good fifteen to twenty years older than her, so we’ve hardly ever seen them.  I suppose now that I’m gaining independence, I could forge my own acquaintance with them, and that might be something worth doing…

Aunt Annette is pretty oblivious, but she can have an appreciation for strangeness that I appreciate in turn.

Uncle Doug has pretty much always talked to me like I’m an equal.  That’s the way to go if you would like to be in my good graces.  Or, I would think, anyone’s good graces.  It just seems like such a plain fact to me, to speak to each person you encounter on a simple and unpretensed level… although the more insecure you get, the less you are able to do that, which I think is a problem with most family members on my mom’s side (I see its seeds in me; I want to uproot them).  You gotta fight and claw for self-esteem in that pack.

Grampy is THE MOST oblivious.  Grammy is nice, but she has such a need to serve others that it can make you feel horribly guilty.  Aunt Beverly usually has something critical if reserved to say… very, very dry sense of humor.  Connor is all right, although he’s mostly interested in sports, which knocks me out of the ballpark of conversation. 

My cousin Buff (who is not at this gathering, studying for the bar exam, good for him) once said that something monstrous happens when you get our whole family together in a group.  Viewing the people singularly, I can’t find anything inherently or insurmountably offensive about them, but I have to agree with Buff… when put all together, trying to function as a decision-making fun-having body, something goes terribly, terribly awry.

Family Estrangement: Pros and Cons

Pros

I wouldn’t have to deal with any of the general discomfort and misunderstanding in even the simplest communications anymore.

I wouldn’t have to work at fixing a family disharmony that has been decades-long established.

I wouldn’t have to have my feelings hurt or belittled or just not understood anymore.

I wouldn’t have people talking down to me.

I wouldn’t have people still treating me like I’m twelve when I’m actually twenty, six months to twenty-one.

I wouldn’t have to slough through all of their negative and deadening undercurrents.

I wouldn’t have to be scaldingly surveyed by rational eyes.

I wouldn’t have to watch the constant power plays and passive-aggressive conversations.

I wouldn’t have to worry about becoming like them…

or, in cutting them off, would I become more like them than ever?

Cons

I would have slightly fewer Christmas gifts (this isn’t a serious con, I’m not really materialistic…)

I would lose points of support across the country.

I would lose contact with people who, after all, are genetically related to me, and would thus lose opportunities for self-knowledge.

I might miss Aunt Beverly and Uncle Doug or at least Uncle Doug, and I would miss Kenneth… these people are actually okay/good company.

I wouldn’t receive any help in starting my life from this side of the family when I graduate from college.

It’s hard to tell when I may have to cross a bridge that I’ve burned.

The Semester of Suckitude

So basically this semester has been a lot of screwing up. 

I think I’m learning from all of this.

I suddenly want to apply myself in college.  If I only concentrate on what I have to do at this moment, it’s quite feasible.  I can do well in classes.  Not just pass, make the Dean’s List!  Yeah.  Let’s do that. 

You figure out what to do with all the learning at the end of the road.  I’m hardly to the middle.  Barely anyone my age has an explicitly outlined plan, yet we can’t all massively fail in the years to come.  Right?  Somewhere you must grab onto the next rung and move into… life.  Or maybe I’ve always been there, in life.  But somehow I move out of the only constant structure I’ve known so far in my life, school, into some new area which seems to involve work.  I don’t really like that.  I think I’d like it to be church, community, something more purposeful than just my day determined by a schedule.

Angela 3000, new and improved.

It’s more like Angela 2008, learning to live with my limitations. ly ly ly

 

I was straightforward with my anger today in a new effort to be truthful and open.  Michelle accidentally snapped at me when I had come to visit her specifically at the computer lab.  I had picked up a stapler and clicked it in her ear to get her attention, which happened to annoy her tremendously at that moment in her frazzled mood.  Her and her friend jumped on me.

“That is not cool.  Way not cool.  That really hurt my ears.”

I just blinked confusedly.

Robin, the friend, said, “Yeah, stapler.  Not a good noise.”

Michelle grabbed my arm suddenly when my bewildered look continued and said, “Sorry!  I just snapped at you!  I’m just trying to think of how I’ll get all these things done.  BLAH.  So busy.  It’s good to see you!” in this panicked, unhinged sort of way that really reminded me of my old insanely stretched-thin choir teacher whom I hated.  So that was not a good entrance for either of us. 

“I just thought I’d make a noise to get your attention,” I said.

“Yeah, it was just–”

“Staplers.  Bad noise.”

“Yeah.  Bad noise.”  Robin and Michelle finished me off, and I silently walked away to sit at the computer I had checked out.  Gazing at the monitor, I wondered why I was there if the person I had just come to see had made me feel like shit over something entirely insignificant and then blown me off.  I checked various accounts, mail, Facebook, whatever, heard Michelle leave to give her sick boyfriend some food, and then left as silently as I had come, save that fatal click of stapler and save whispering, “I was at number thirteen” to the lab attendant. 

On the way home, I consolidated my anger into the above phrase, “making me feel like shit over something insignificant.”  I decided that, however stressed and overexpended a person was, that still didn’t excuse hurtful behavior.  I also reasoned that if I had behaved in such a way, I would want a friend of mine to take her stand so that I would make amends… standards for each other, you see… because I’m pretty sure my friends and I hold the common value that the way you treat others is more important than anything else in life.  And I also realized that I had been hurt, not gravely but still hurt, and why were my feelings less important than theirs? 

So when I got home and Michelle, who was departing, said “Hey”, I sort of ignored her.  Naturally, she got the picture very quickly.

“Are you mad at me?”

“Yes.”  I think this may be the second time I’ve directly told a friend that.  If I remember correctly.  That doesn’t mean I never got mad at friends in the past.  It means I kept it in.

Then we talked briefly, got it all squared away, had a hug, and….

I love it, developing these good habits.  Much of my childhood and adolescence were spent in the shadow and pressure of restrained emotions and opinions, but I find that outside of my family (with people to whom I feel more akin), it is possible to have things like anger, disagreements, sadness… it is possible to acknowledge and deal with them and keep going!  Wow!

Now if only I had done that with someone else… Would there be more conversation budding and less mystery?  I feel a little numb right now, as if someone has put that anesthesiological liquid that they use when cutting off moles all over me, inside and out, emotionally, mentally, physically.  I was just thinking of times when I could watch myself touch my skin but not feel it.  Likewise I watch myself get up, go to work, chew blueberry waffles, bathe dogs, shovel shit, defiantly talk to my theatre teacher when annoyed, but I don’t know how much I feel.  I definitely recollected with the anger incident.  Interesting, the lift that came from working through that decline.  I feel as though Michelle and I have both gained a little strength.  How cool.

Like a Vacuum, This Semester Rolls Forward

I got my midterm grades back from my terrible aural skills exam: 79 on the sight-singing and harmonizing portion; 68 on the written.  I have a 75 average in the class right now, not counting what I assume will be a devastating deduction for my number of absences.  My teacher recommended that I drop.  If I drop aural skills, I have to drop music theory as well, because they are tied together by college of music law.  That means that I will have a grand total of 3 hours for this semester.  This entire situation is pathetic. 

I’d just like to say

STUFF SUCKS

!

It is my fault, but it doesn’t help that I had a medication slowly accumulating in my bloodstream from the beginning of the semester that has, by now, made me more clear-headed and able to function.  I just feel like everything is going too fast.  Why did I have to sign up for twelve hours worth of crap when I didn’t even know what I wanted to do?  Why can’t I stop and breathe?  I wanted to take this semester off due to my uncertainty.  And now I virtually am.  Unless, when I talk to my professors tomorrow, something new develops. 

Mostly I’m afraid of breaking this to my mom.  All I can imagine is the cold steel blade of her disapproval cutting through me, maybe snide jokes, the pushing….. I can’t take it.  Which makes me want to hide the whole ordeal from her.  Which is not what she wants either. 

I was just so exhausted at the beginning of the semester… the flu, other crap… blah blah

Yeah, I think I just won’t tell her.  If she’s on my back for the rest of the semester, it’ll just make everything worse.