I wrote a post yesterday (limited to 500 words and everything) but decided not to share it. Second time I’ve done that recently.
How do I feel about that today? Well, without going into too much detail, I did it because I wrote about my Thursday therapy session, in which – because I didn’t know what to say, I showed her the photo of my son and myself when he was a baby, and then I told her in detail about the pregnancy; preceding troubles with conception and miscarriage; the isolation I felt living in Dallas; about giving up my career and being out of the job market from 30 to 43; my sense of inadequacy as a mother and conviction that my son would grow up to hate me – I’ve been through this before on here. I cried, and she said she felt close to tears when I was telling her.
I wrote about all that intense unhappiness and hopelessness, about the cycle of self-pity leading to anger with myself, and anger leading to shame, and shame leading to more self-pity, and I didn’t want to share it yesterday, probably because I was right in the middle of it at the time.
There have been other times of such intense unhappiness in my life – that wasn’t the first or the last. I’m not suggesting I’m in any way special in that, it’s just the human condition. Perhaps I’m worse than other people at dealing with them? My therapist has spoken in the past about my lack of resilience, which I take to mean my low tolerance to unkind remarks, criticism, perceived rejection, my own failings (which are legion) etc. All these apparently minor irritations and frustrations can plunge me into that cycle of anger, shame, and self-hatred simply because I know they are minor, I know the healthy thing to do is to rise above and laugh them off, yet I can’t, and so everything becomes my fault, I take on all the blame because the fault lies in my inability to accept these things like any mature person would do.
I could feel the anger rising as I wrote that last sentence, all that shame and frustration and self-loathing, I can feel it now. Probably why I didn’t post what I wrote yesterday.
But what do I do with the big stuff? Somehow I hide it away, I don’t want to talk about it, because it would be unbearable and I’d never be able to come out from under it, and you have to live, don’t you? I think back to all the shit I went through in the second half of 2011, all the things I don’t want to talk about now, but at the time it felt like a perfect storm, and what did I do? I ran away. I ran and I kept running, as I’ve said before, till a couple of years ago.
And now I will go and eat my breakfast in the sunshine.