part 66

I’m feeling a bit in limbo, but not in a bad way. There has not been much drama and I have the opportunity to just rest for days and weeks at a time. Sometimes I go for walks, and sometimes I sit out on the deck, and I sleep in as much as possible and take naps when I am tired. That is what “resting” is for me.

I don’t go out much, and I don’t feel bad about it. I am used to being really distressed when I stop going out, like I am doing something wrong or unhealthy or that will lead to mind-shredding insanity. I am finding that the more I rest, though, the better I feel. I feel more solid, safer, saner – that kind of thing, and then when I eventually do want to go out it is so much easier.

I’ve started reading again (I’m on Russell Brand’s Booky Wooky 2 – I think he is fantastic), and I’ve started knitting some, again, too.

I’ve been having a lot of physical symptoms like I did when I first stopped drinking and started living life. I’ve been getting headaches a couple times a week – they can be bad, but it reminds me of when I was getting headaches all day every day, and I try to be grateful for the opportunity to recognize my progress. I used to have constant headaches – I had more headaches than I did non-headaches.

I used to work in a research lab, and a part of my job was screening potential participants for research studies. One of the questions I asked the potential participants was how many headaches they had in a week – most of them said none.

I didn’t believe them. I mean, I did, but not really.

One of the things I started to do when I began to figure out and acknowledge how fucked up my experiences have been and how they have affected me is looking for ways other people’s lives are fucked up and how they have been affected. I have always been fascinated with human behavior and the way it can be predicted a lot of times, but there is really no way of knowing how anyone is going to act in any situation at any time until after it happens.

I really love looking at behaviors and then learning – or just trying to figure out – what life experiences may have contributed to a person acting any certain way. It is a bit tricky because of how easy it is to slip into the mind-frame that I am able to know what people are going to do before they do it. As I said before, there is a certain predictability about human behavior, but there is never EVER anything completely certain about those predictions.

Also, I do not have superhuman mind powers to see the future – sometimes I forget, though. I can’t deny that having a sense of being able to know what is going to happen is comforting. It isn’t real, but it is comforting.

I like learning about people’s pasts, about their childhoods. The way people are raised and the experiences they have affect and shape everything they do, from tying their shoes to choosing a career. I used to be very concerned with being able to look at behaviors and believe I knew with absolute certainty what a person had experienced in their lives, and then letting them know what I knew about them, which is actually quite obnoxious of me, so I’m glad I have reined that in a bit.

When I began to remember my experiences and make all of the maddening “connections” to how they have shaped my actions and decisions and feelings without my previous awareness of this influence, I decided that all people must do this – it’s called “denial.” I suppose all people actually do this, but I wanted everyone around me to examine their lives and find what exactly it was that happened or didn’t happen to fuck them up, how they were previously not aware of this relationship between past and present, and then to acknowledge it and have their knowledge contribute to a change in behavior (and then acknowledge what an insightful genius I am and express their gratitude to me for making their lives better, an expectation I have found is also obnoxious of me).

I really believed this was all I had to do for myself, too. It turns out that knowing every single little thing that happened to me and being able to explain why I do certain things as a result does not necessarily mean that behavior will automatically change. I have experienced a lot of internal conflict about this.

I recognize something I feel is negative about myself, and then I figure out what it was that most likely contributed to this negative thing. If I can connect it to any of my past experiences – good or bad or neither – I feel like I have unlocked a secret, and now that I know what the secret is, the negative things I do regarding that secret will stop happening.

I had a certain expectation that everyone else should be able to do this, too.

I have found out in a very painful manner that being able to intellectualize my experiences and tie them to things I see as negative about myself is not going to change – all by itself – what I think is negative about myself. I especially felt this was true of abusive or harmful or traumatic past experiences. I really believed that any current behavior associated with traumatic experiences somehow made that behavior bad and gross and wrong.

This has been especially true about sex. All of my sexual experiences originated in trauma, in pain, in confusion and betrayal. I have learned to separate a lot of those feelings so that I can have my own voluntary and intimate and special sexual experiences, but sometimes I find that something I enjoy sexually now has been something I was sexually traumatized by in the past, and that can be quite distressing.

But that’s what therapy is for.

Anyway.

A big part of accepting myself and accepting other people is figuring out that it doesn’t matter how much I try to separate what hurt me from who I am now – I’m always going to be me. Those things that hurt me will always be a part of me. Nothing is going to change that.

Using the intellectualization of my experiences and attributing that to my current behaviors does not change what happened to me.

Figuring out exactly why I am agoraphobic does not make me less afraid to leave my house. Knowing that I am not ever going to be a helpless child again does not make me feel like a strong and capable adult. Being aware of what dissociation is does not mean I have stopped dissociating.

Finding out about myself and the ways my experiences have shaped who I am has helped me to grow and recover A LOT. But I have to do something with those realizations – the realization in itself is not sufficient to make my life easier or better.

That has been difficult to accept because coming to learn and know and accept what has happened to me has been horrendously painful all in itself. Having to then take that and make it work for me now feels like insult added to injury. I have a certain sense of entitlement I suppose.

But it is what it is. That is such a pat and irritating phrase, but there is no better way to describe the past and how it affects me now. The past is the past and I am not going to be able to change it.

Expecting myself to change and become different and literally and figuratively become someone who has not had the past I have had is what suffering is all about.

Figuring out that I don’t have to have an explanation for everything I do has been pretty liberating. Figuring out that just because I can see a cause and effect between traumatic experiences and how I behave or feel now does not mean I must change how I behave or feel now has been liberating.

It has allowed me to accept myself. It is difficult for me to not question my acceptance of myself as being somehow complicit or approving of what happened to me in the past, but it is getting easier for me to remember that all of that is not necessarily relevant to me being a good and happy person.

Have I mentioned the Dalai Lama yet? That dude is brilliant. He is all about peace and love and serenity for your own self, and he has figured out that the only way to have that is to have peace and love and serenity for those around you. The only way to have peace and love and serenity for those around you is to have it for yourself.

Simple yet maddening – how exactly is all of this peace and love and serenity supposed to happen if one is dependent upon the other? It doesn’t matter. Seriously. It’s just something for me to recognize as true, and when I face a situation in which I can change my way of thinking in order to tolerate myself, that is what I try to do. When I face a situation in which I can change my way of thinking in order to tolerate someone else, I try to do that, too.

This is difficult to continuously do – I actually do not think it is possible to continuously do. However, I am getting a lot of practice doing it while I am getting all of this rest. Also, I follow the Dalai Lama on twitter so I am reminded almost daily of how to do it.

Between the peace I get from the Dalai Lama’s tweets and the laughter and joy I get from Conan O’Brien’s tweets, I can really put together quite a nice day.

Okay, I am going to go rest some more.