well, it's an interesting morning. Syd is sick, throwing up, so i called her off from school. i woke refreshed, after a very good nights sleep. i listened to thunderstorms for 8 hours on youtube. going to have to remember that one for my nighttime relaxations. waking, i said my prayers, got into my shorts and gym stuff, went out and had a cup of iced coffee and water, blood sugar was 155, not bad. then came the Syd thing and after calling her off school for the day i went to the gym to find it closed. Yom Kippur, a Jewish holiday. if i'd gone yesterday as i should have, i would have known that. so i have to walk today. my plan is to go to the meeting a bit early, set up, and then go for a walk before the meeting starts. that way i kill two birds with one stone. breakfast was two boiled eggs and a piece of toast again. 200 calories to start the day.
i have some things that i have to get down today. in counseling, for a long time, VF would listen to me talk about a 'gray wall' inside my soul, maybe? some place that was impossible to see through and impossible for me, unaided, to get through. i took her suggestion that maybe there was nothing behind it, and that regardless, getting on with my life was a good thing, but i've come to it again. it's not a questioning of VF's skills or her abilities as a counselor. i do believe she's top notch, and the best mind-person i've ever dealt with. but i am a metaphorical realist. i am speculative reality in my outlook. i don't believe in divisions between dimensions. i believe if you squint enough, you can see eternity through your altered gaze. and that's what keeps me coming back to this place. to wit:
i noticed monday i was sabotaging quite a bit. nothing heavy duty, just grazing all day, pinch and eat and pinch and eat. that's a bad sign for me. most of my destructive eating starts out that way, like the 'ex-smoker' who 'borrows' just one cigarette. or the drinker who keeps going to the bar for coffee when its right next to a coffee shop. i've done it before, in fact, which is how i know. and my thing is, there's something that makes me do this.
i am the child of an alcoholic. i am an alcoholic. i am the child of a co-dependent. i am co-dependent. i am a product of my environment. i was a very bright child. i was too smart for my own good. i built this wall of which i speak. i built it for a specific reason. like so many other things, though, i can't remember what i built it to hide, or to protect myself from. but there were an abundance of things around me as a child to necessitate the building of a wall.
my dad's drinking, which didn't end until i was was four. my dad and mom's fighting, my dad beating my mom when i was a kid. i know my brothers likely have very clear memories of this, especially the oldest, but it's in my memory banks somewhere (behind the wall). i know my mom was borderline abusive, in some of the things she'd say, but i don't recall many of them. i remember when i asked her, as a junior high school student i believe, how i would look with my head shaved, she angrily said 'like a bald, fat fool'. i know if that is there, other things must be as well. behind the wall, most likely. that doesn't mean that i think my mother is an intentionally abusive person or that she set out to hurt me. i'm saying that a child would internalize something different than a grown person would.
i know my eldest exposed himself to me. i have that as a clear memory. but i don't have anything further as clear and defined. i am not trying to crucify someone. i want to see, and so i'm going to tunnel through, like a ship trying to get to the center of the earth, to see what's really there.
when i was very young, my parents fought constantly. i believe a lot of it had to do with my mom having an issue stemming from being pregnant out of wedlock before she married my father. i now wonder at the circumstances of my eldest brother's birth. why would my mother continue on in a reactionary fashion fifty plus years after the birth of her child? is there more to it? was there something specific, like a rape, or an assault by a relative? something so dark and so 'bad' that no one would ever speak about it? it's possible. secrets keep us sick. that's what they say in the recovery programs, which has now become a common saying in society. but that's my mother's thing.
i was sexual early in life. maybe i should say i was a sensualist as a child. i liked the feel of things. i had no hesitation about running my hands over women's legs for the feel of their hose. i liked to touch things. i still love different textures. i used to have sexual dreams as a first grader. that would have been at five years old, as i was advanced a year from kindergarten. i had dreams about beating a woman with a belt in my parent's basement. i had dreams of feeding a naked woman to dogs. i had dreams about my first grade teacher doing a handstand. i don't recall dreams of specific genitalia, so i don't believe it was anything other than some kind of basic porn that i discovered, as the cartoons that my dad kept in an old album cover. i never found porn from my dad. my dad had a book about sex that he used to try to teach the kids about sex. i never got that talk but i did masturbate to the very real pictures that were in the book. i remember the beatings. not all of them, of course, but a lot of them. beatings for accidents while playing. beatings for accidents while at school. beatings for leaving the cap off the toothpaste. beatings because of not getting straight A's. sometimes i think that's the genesis of the wall. Roger Waters would probably agree. "mother, can you help me build a wall?"
i learned to hide a lot of myself away. i had to. if i didn't, then i would have to be perfect. perfection is a very hard thing to be. perfect grades, perfect manners, perfect actions. i had to lose weight because it made me less than perfect to be fat. i had to be perfect on the piano because i liked to play piano. i had to be perfect in school because it reflected well on my parents. i thought, sometimes, if i could just find the real family that i came from, everything would be okay. but i'm writing in circles here. i am looking for me behind a large gray wall. i am seeing sabotage in certain actions that may get me closer to the child feeling threatened. so the question is, what makes me feel so threatened that the system begins to shut down?
relationships used to do that.
i was made to feel like a complete freak as a young person. a monster. that is not random language. i felt like a monster. i watched Frankenstein when i was a kid and i immediately related to the monster's sadness. i watched the Elephant Man, first movie that i ever cried at. 'I AM NOT AN ANIMAL...I AM A HUMAN BEING!' i could have had that tattooed on my forehead. it would have said exactly how i was feeling.
and i was a sexualized young person, as i said before. i was about little girls in my kindergarten class, my first grade class. i remember coat room antics. i remember wanting to know the secrets that girls possessed. it was often to my detriment as far as correction from the teachers. but i don't think that was so much as all the ridicule. i wanted to talk to girls. girls mostly, like everyone else, just sort of laughed at me. i had friends who were girls, but i always screwed something up in those friendships. too smart for my own good.
its funny, yesterday i could see pretty clearly what may lie at the heart of this satellite, but today, it's sort of elusive. what i'm going to do is back away, let the drill cool, and come at it from a different angle tomorrow. got my walk in, got a meeting done, lunch with Lonnie, fish and soup for dinner and i'm feeling pretty okay right about now.
No comments:
Post a Comment