Yep - I Have a Complex
Yes. This is a "come to Jesus" blog/post/hub/article/non-suicide note/vent/rant/plea. I'm trying to get a handle on something and I have no idea if even I'll be able to circumvent the irony of doubting the responses this gets (if any) as yet part of the "scheme", the entanglement in which seems to be the definition of my life.
I'm gonna dare to be optimistic. I have to be. That's why I'm writing. So here goes: "...the scheme, that entanglement in which seems to be the definition of my life...
...thus far".
Freeze! Silence? Pinch. OW! Okay. I'm still here. But, and mind you, I am NOT a superstitious person, although a pretty darned obsessive compulsive one, the manifestation of which can look very much like superstition (like, in my repeating rituals, I do avoid 13 and it's multiples). Hey - "just in case" ISSSSSS the crux of OCD!!
Anyway - this hub isn't about OCD exactly. It's about broader fear. It's about being afraid of everything that happens in life even before it happens. Is there such a thing as pre-emptive frustration? Or is that merely the bringing forth of very real past frustrations and the unfortuneately habitual (HA!!! *HABITUATED!!!!*) projection and anticipation of the inescapable repetition of said failures and disappointments?
Yes, Yes. I know. All very abstract so far. Again the fear thing. Fear of disclosing specific and concrete parts of my life, past and VERY present, which feed the manic massage I give the keyboard right now.
Okay - to hell with form and development and story arc and all that shit. I'm freakin' out a bit. Does anybody here feel like they never really know where they stand with people? Like - the absence of betrayal, insult, criticism and mockery is ITSELF a source of anxiety, which abates only when replaced by the anger, resentment and depression that sets in once these attacks come to pass?
Even if only by YOUR interpretation? Which isn't always - or even often - wrong, by the way - but which surely multiplies the damage and pain, some of which was needless and, as a wanna-be Freudian in my life likes to put it "You're your own (world's) [sic] worst enemy".
Yeah - but I ain't the only one, Sigmund. You're just rationalizing your own responsibility for turning a cigar into a penis, and an unreturned phone call into a chance to pressure me to be aggressive and call again "because ya gotta be aggressive - you can't wait all the time - you've got important stuff, too" (translation: said person wants this problem out of my way so that he can claim credit, and then hoodwink me into a chore, task or project that I do indeed truly have NO time, energy, will, obligatory guilt, or gratitude out of which to partake voluntarily.
But there is one thing I have plenty of, which gets from me almost anything another wants any time s/he wants it. Fear. Fear of confrontation. Fear of rejection. Fear of threatened consequences and emotional blackmail. Fear of REAL consequences if/when it's in the workplace or dealing with a financial, legal, or "where the hell am I gonna be living in 2.5 months?!" realm of this, my very real and concrete dilemmas.
Let me get the hell away from this ambiguos and confusing "macro" malarchy for a minute - or perhaps until I wrap this piece up in a nice, eloquent and insightfully clever and witty conclusion rife with double entendre and ambiguous "so there"s!
This week at work has been hell on my nerves. And yes, on occasion, it turned out that I was being my "own world's [sic] worst enemy" - in that I am THE king of pre-emptive fretting, worrying, and catastrophizing.
But, in my own defense - scientists - and science in general - states that one exception ruins a hypothesis, that is, disproves the rule. So, I can be as determined as freakin' hell as I want and am able to "think positively" and all that self-help section, Dr. Phil mumbo jumbo, but you worry about something and you worry about something going wrong - and when it does, by virtue of statistical certainty given the passing of time and living life - BAM! There is the worrier's/OCD'ers PROOF that their mindset is just and rational - even superior to the "flaky optimists" out there.
But, I'm what you might call analiteral. I analyze everything to death - and there is ONE change in the curvature of the "circles" we've just cut out for God-knows-what table-time "applied math" art activity, then I'm thinking - it's not a circle - but is it circular enough for me to put it down and do the next one?
Often - too often - my answer is "no".
Now apply that mindset to working with actual *people*. Even more so - *children*. Ever even more so, "severe/multi-disabled" children who are unable to "tell" you what's wrong or what they want, and to this (yours truly) VERY verbally oriented (okay, full disclosure - dependent - NVLD and severe anxiety on top of the OCD), and you get a scenario in which that little comic bit by Stephen Wright describing in the comedian's mainstay of realistic jest, that "you know that feeling when you're almost falling back in your chair, and you think you're gonna fall and at the very last second you catch yourself and fall forward? I feel like that all the time..." - is a lot closer to reality than I or anyone should have to endure.
And yet...
Thank God - no, thank science, for Clonazepam!
I just don't know. I'm one of those people who has to be told EXACTLY what to do.
And life doesn't give me that.
And often I fall short because I don't understand.
Getting pretty #$!!%% sick of it, too.
Just when I'm learnin' the kid, I get a "maybe you'd do/feel/work better with (A and B). Yeah - that's right - the proposed change is gonna have me primarily responsible for not one kid - but TWO!
"Here comes the rain again...falling on my head like a memory...falling on my head like (an old and very very very tired!!!!) emotion...."
"Talk to me......I need you to"
"Talk to me...so I understand you...."
Why doesn't the world - and the people actually capable of this very simply function, open their fucking mouths and TELL ME WHAT TO DO AND HOW TO DO IT!
Stevie Wonder ain't drivin' nobody to the airport, and I ain't gonna "get" the unspoken expectations!
Yes. I'm "still like this" today. (What a dumbass!!!!). Do you still have....brown?....brownnnn?....brownish eyes? You still smokin'? You still breathin'? Does your sister/mother/cousin/best friend/son/daughter/father still have MS?
Well, there ya go, sistah. Yes - I'm still "like this" today. And tomorrow. And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow...You wanna argue about it and complain and "whine with a 'tude" (substitution for the "b-bomb") and be all unsupportive and spirit-crushing and a mean, sadistic little fuck? Talk to the Big Guy.
I've tried many times.
Apparently He ain't listenin'. I'm an admittedly on-the-fence agnostic facing the catch-22 of faith versus survival. I can NOT afford to give my blind trust to anyone anymore - because one thing I have FINALLY learned is that I don't speak the same language as most people. I am literally blind, in real time, anyway, to the vocal tonality and body language that "winks" and "nods" at a comment, suggestion or promise. Whenever I "turn it on" - that is, get the guard up and ready to fire, some may regard me as a paranoid dude who's "losin' it" - simply because I say "now you REALLY meant that, right? I mean - there's no "unspoken expectation" you're gonna be mad at me about in 10 minutes because I couldn't have figured it out on my own and "you should't have to tell me", right?
Right?
Right....? It's not a rhetorical question. I really need you to answer it.
Unfortunately, the only person with whom I have begun to literally place that demand - that spoken comfirmation on his part that he believes me and that what he is saying is all that he means - no errors (or LIES!!!!!) of commission or especially of OMISSION). If I say "I didn't hear you agree when I said I'm doing the best I can. I need you to say it. I'm waiting. SAY IT, PLEASE! No, no no no - not, "you seem to try most of the time" - no, that's a blatant, lame-ass NT cop out from somebody who doesn't want to commit to believing his own fucking son. I'm telling you the truth and I want you to acknowledge that right here and now. Well......????"
The hemming and hawing and eventual "urgent need" to (go to the bathroom, call/answer the phone) whatever is nothing but a stall tactic and an avoidance of the moral responsibility to answer the question. Eventually his silence grows more stubborn and resolute, and my vocal output and volume grow to what some uncharitable folks might call manic proportions. But you wouldn't classify it as such if you understood the desperation for your own father to accept you and finally and once and for all GET YOU, and dare to believe that you are and always HAVE done your best and that some is and was seriously wrong.
To do so may invite the bitter and uncomfortable question any decent parent would then have to ask: did I do all I could for my kid when he WAS a kid?
For some - the answer would be cathartic, a weight off your shoulders, and a resolute rejuvination to stand behind your children - grown or still actual children - like you always have, because it was and is the only right thing to do.
For others - the answer would be barely lookable. Deafening. Blinding. Wreaking of a stink so foul you'd practically projectile vomit your intestines for the subconscious but definite desperate urge to purge you of a past this has been and gone. But which did happen. You'd deny your Oreo pilferage to the very cosmos (which has recorded everything that ever was), all the while the bits of chocolate cookie are falling from your desperately lying mouth. You'd run scared from it like a condemned man wishes he could run from the warden coming to take him to the chair. You'd cling to any excuse you could find to absolve yourself of the blame that you could have but didn't defend your own child when he desperately needed you to do so. You'd acknowledge your responsibility for the past and accept it in the present as your kid - this being a fearsome and bitterly uncomfortable moment for him as well! - is TRYING to reach out to you.
Waving your hand and (later, in a separate but *hardly* different conversation) announcing that your grown, employed, 39 year old son is gonna have to move out, will not distance you from the responsibility you have for the past that does indeed influence (hopefully - DEAR GOD, PLEEEEASE!!!!! hopefully not predict) prologue - which the "grown up" manifestation would almost certainly crush the hopes, doom the future, and perhaps even predict a poverty and homelessness that is all too common among the street-dwelling "have nots".
This author will not here describe the spiral in linear hypothetical, as this would serve no purpose but to stoke the "bootstraps" stubborness of society's most putridly greedy and hateful "haves", and compel my own palpable panic and rage and hate and God-knows what all, which devastating catastrophizing has NO place to go at 2:30am.
Suffice is to say that I've got some serious shit on my plate - and I have no clue where to start. I never have! THAT'S the point! So WHAT if Louis XIV did this, or that the difference between a theorem and a corollary "isn't important" to some so-called teachers, or the past participle of "eat shit" is "have eaten shit" or the future perfect of "his hopes are crushed" is "his hopes will have been crushed"!
When will help, instruction, therapy or miracle arrive such that I can handle a future filled with all of the things a painful past has taught me that "regular people" don't have to be taught?
I DO have to be taught!!!!!
From whom will this long overdue and heinously neglected education and guidance come??
For, without it, indeed my hopes, dreams and life "will have been crushed"! Without the intervention of folks who give a DAMN showing me all the stuff - ALLL OF IT, DAMN IT! - that most people have lazily and meanly and selfishly dismissed with a "I shouldn't have to tell you", I am a *dead* man.
You shouldn't have to tell me???!!!
Yes, you should.
YES - you SHOULD.
*I* am hereby telling YOU - *YES* *YOU* *SHOULD*!
