Help by Leaving

I can’t seem to get my feelings into a stable state today. One minute I’m fine and the next I’m desperately lonely. One minute I’m motivated to work and the next I can’t stay focused enough to watch TV. I suspect I’m one the edge of an old feeling about when I was kicked out of school, felt hopeless abandoned in Iowa, didn’t know how (if) I was going to claw my way back out, or even how I was going to keep paying the rent. And that I’m just getting enough brain space back from this week’s stresses to actually have feels I’ve been twitchily avoiding while I was hiding. But I don’t have my head around what it is yet.

Things are better in many practical ways. The mothers are gone, though that didn’t happen until well past noon. We’re done looking at apartments and have found one we like — I expect we can get the paperwork done and take possession later this week. I’m slightly hesitant to sign a lease before I’ve lined up long-term funding, but I doubt I’m going to feel safe about money anytime this week so there’s no reason to delay. I’m gonna feel money pressure about first/last/deposit, buying a house full of furniture, and setting up utilities well before long-term rent becomes an issue. And it would be nice to be done bouncing around, even if we’re currently someplace decent. And to let M feel like you can start to settle a bit and face the next challenges.

We moved out of the first short-term and into a smaller one. It’s much nicer and walkable to more places relevant to our interests. But we also sat around for more than an hour waiting to get into it while the rental company worked out their first-tenant nonsense. And before that we sat around for 90 minutes waiting for our last apartment viewing and not having anyplace to go inside. And before that we waited around for everyone to get their shit out of the last place. So lots of waiting, which is anxious and I’m sure not helping my emotional regulation.

Talked to a lawyer today about the appeal, but didn’t really get any help. The school only gives us 7 days for an appeal — time we’re already half way though —and he didn’t think that was enough to be useful. Me either. But there doesn’t seem to be much to do about it. I think we might have until Monday given the university holidays, but without external support it doesn’t much matter if it’s 3 days from now or 6. Shanda helped find this lawyer, and left messages with others, but I’m not very hopeful we’ll find anyone who can help in time. Got through a couple other pieces of anxious appeal work but only small bits of progress. I’m gonna try hard to spend real time on it tomorrow, and maybe we’ll get some useful info from a meeting with the dean.

I did get to talk with M some, which always helps. It’s often easier to be nice to myself when I can imagine being nice to you. But today was taxing for both of us, and my feeling today is I think less about my ongoing lack of self-compassion and more about processing specific trauma. I did try to engage Dave on it, because he’s right there in my old feels too. Sent him a message I wrote to M months ago, before The Screed. He even pinged back. But he’s still talking around things at me, not about them. I don’t want to complain because it’s so much better than the nothing we’ve had for so long. But it’s not a great salve for today’s abandonment feels.

We’re getting closer there. I’ve got some names for it. It’s not a whole picture yet but it’s starting. It’s tough sitting here half-baked though, feeling like I’m 0.78 steps from breaking down.

…And finally Shanda becomes available, and helps me talk about the pieces I need to fit together to make this go over the corse of a couple of hours…

It’s definitely about abandonment. The same abandonment I got from Mother when I was 4. The self-abandonment I learned to cope with that. The way I learned by example that I should — I must — protect other people from my life, just as Mother always taught. Like when I stepped away from everyone during my worst depression during undergrad, so that I didn’t drag the people who cared about me down with me. It was self-imposed and I think even now still the right thing to do, because I would have hurt people who love me. But I was only ever in that position because I was abandoned so completely as a child that by the time I was 20 the options were me or them, not us together.

Being here in Cleveland, after ghosting my usual life, reminds me of the terrible times I had back then. Where I tried to eek out just enough support from the handful of physically distant people I knew to stay alive, while at the same time ensuring they didn’t get close enough to get dragged down with me. Where I imagined running away as a way to protect others and wasn’t entirely wrong. Where I continued to understand it as my duty to not “trick” anyone into being close to me.

I know that’s not true. That I don’t want to be the person who can just leave and not need anything. I can maybe stay alive that way — at least until something dramatic happens — but I couldn’t be me anymore. Just like I couldn’t be homeless anymore without changing my personality. And I’m not. Before I would have left Shanda and Rev and robots and only have thought about it again in the context of how I shouldn’t have let things get that bad — that attached — in the first place. That I was only hurting myself and other by letting that sort of attachment build up.

It’s what I shared with Dave today, an example of exactly that line of thinking that involved him individually.

My feels are also about having the right Plan. The carefully selected, contingency-aware Plan that — if followed perfectly forever — allows one to accomplish a necessary or useful goal under such independent circumstances. By managing not only yourself and your environment but also everyone around you it might — might — be possible to achieve a thing you want or need. And how any failure in the Plan might take months to recover from. Might not even be recoverable. Even though you did all the right planning. And so there’s a backup plan. Like running away to Canada or becoming a tattoo artist, just in case the regular Plan fails.

I’m still all for plans. Knowing how things will go is very useful and sometimes lets you do amazing things. But I find adaptability to be much more fulfilling. Being able to approach goals from many angles and recover from changes — in circumstance, in resources, even in desire — and still accomplish the thing you want. Like being able to go across the country to do a thing that’s so hard but so good, and to do that not by ghosting your life but by asking people to accommodate you, and expecting them to do so. By building a system of support that includes enough people to make such demands light enough for individuals to bear.

There’s also terrible Father feelings, and a handful of other hard buts, but those are for tomorrow. There’s righteous anger for today and yesteryear that I definitely need to share**. Today it’s enough to grab the shape of the thing so I can decide when to work on it. How to work on it. And so I can manage it in some way other than alternating bits of avoidance and panic.

ZiB

*And reset my account, which got locked somehow. I don’t know what’s trying to log in as me, or why it didn’t happen until today. I literally haven’t been home to even touch any other computer, and these have both been working fine.

**That I should have listened to more carefully today when you did something similar.