An Exercise

My therapist says that I dissociate by going to my intellect.  I detach from my emotions and become extremely intellectual, chasing my own logical tail until my paws are bloody…

I’ve written three posts in the last three days.  Every one turns into a rant.  And an intellectual tail-chasing.

She says when I do that, I need to look at what I’m avoiding feeling.

Why would I want to do that?  Clearly I’m avoiding it for a reason!  I say let nature do its thing and don’t mess with it! 

Sigh.

Fine.

I’m sad.

I’m lonely.

I hurt inside.

I’ve started to have moments of lightness and smiles and laughter and glimpses of happiness, but they are just moments, I always crash down into the pain again.  I’m not sure if it’s better to have the moments only to be thrown back down or to just stay down indefinitely and at least not get the emotional whiplash of being yanked back down from happiness to misery over and over again.

There are things that…  I have a list of topics to blog about in my head, but when I sit down to do it, I just don’t want to dig into those painful places.  I would rather rant about… anything.  And it’s not that my rants are worthwhile.  They are intellectual and logical and full of righteous indignation against social injustices…  Which… really do exist… and they really do deserve ranting at.

But…  I guess not at the expense of being able to say, simply, “I’m sad.”

I’m trying to get myself to go beyond that.  To actually write any of the list of things that are hurting right now, but I can’t.  Would you like to hear a rant about the KKK?  How about the way history is taught in schools?  Censorship?  Religious intolerance?  Intolerance of intolerance?  Hypocrisy?  Tax plans?  Politicians who rant about the government being over-involved in our bodies (requiring health care reform, gasp! not HEALTH CARE REFORM!) yet claiming the federal government has total authority to ban abortion.  (Does nobody else see the logic fail here?  I mean really, political affiliation aside, you’re butchering poor, innocent logic!  What did logic ever do to you??)

Chasing my tail again.  But I stopped crying.  There was a crying jag in there before that last paragraph.  Nobody knew that cause, you know, you can’t see me… So…  I could have just not told you all and you’d never have known.  But then what would we have learned from this exercise?

When things get too painful, when things hurt, when the tears come… Shadow retreats to the cranium and battens down the hatches.  Thing is, nobody knows that about me.  Nobody knows that when I’m most desperately angry about anything and everything under the sun…when I’m clinging to logic, when I’m trying to “explain” everything in the world… it’s probably when I’m most breaking apart inside and desperately, desperately trying to keep the hurt shut away.

K always got that about me.

When I’d start running in circles and snapping at my own tail, that’s when he’d STOP debating with me…  When all of the sudden he’d lean back and just get this look in his eyes and give me a little smile and say, “I love you.”

And I’d always crack at that moment and, still clinging to my righteous indignation get angry at HIM, tell him “Don’t do that! Don’t love me right now, I’m trying to be angry!” even as the tears were starting to leak.

And all he would say was, “I love you.”

Over and over again until I was out of anger and out of tears.

I should have married him.

I can’t talk about what I can’t talk about.  Exercise fail.

I’ll list the topics, then at least I’m not avoiding them completely, I’m just not getting into them:

Fathers

Love

Death

Hospitalization

Self-Soothing

Anorexia

T’s Memorial

Dancing

Children

Responsibilities

Loneliness

There.  That’s enough pain for one night.  If I go much longer we’ll be wading through more paragraphs about the stupidity of inaccurate historical fiction written for children.  Really?  Kids actually learn from that stuff, couldn’t you put some effort into not making it completely inaccurate?

See?  Hatches.  Battening.

I’m going to bed.

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