Recursive Repression

Yesterday I had a whole series of repression triggers. It’s tough this thing where getting better requires that you go through the middle of all the parts that were too much for your brain before. You think I’m too much on the outside – imagine the bits that were too much for me.

I got at some repression about parenting. Sort of the culmination of the smaller bits I’ve been prodding at for weeks. The way I refuse to remember doing it. Remembering hurts because I wasn’t great at it last time. In lots of ways I failed. It hurts because while I was trying lots of people told me to stop, like that was an option. Mother told me I was hurting people just by trying; she meant that it made her feel bad because it reminded her that she ought to be doing it. Or it showed her how I did it better, and how the Kids liked me better. But regardless of the reasons many people told me I shouldn’t, and I took it to heart because I could see how it often didn’t work.

I also refuse to think about it because it’s on the list of things I know I can’t learn. Where I believe, a even against evidence, that I have never tried and didn’t ever learn any skills. Or that I did try and failed to learn anyway. This is the second layer of repression on top of the first, developed after the Kids were older and I didn’t have to provide as much direct care. I already had to repress all the memories and feelings about the earlier bits to make this one go. I had external motivation for this – it’s a thing that Mother said out loud to other people about me (paradoxically at the same time she assigned me child care tasks for their children) – but it’s a sort of repression I was happy to buy into because it protected me from having to do as much child care, in addition to protecting me from all the underlying trauma.

There’s the layer where I repressed my feels about abandoning the Kids when I left for school. Like all the other parts of my life that I had to give up my escape required that I just not feel the loss. I was so good at giving things up by then it hardly felt like a choice, but in retrospect there was a lot of work required to make it happen. The impacts of fleeing – being alone imagining that I can’t have connections – was definitely hard in an ongoing way, but the direct effect didn’t feel like anything at all. And I needed that to be able to escape. Whether it hurt me or anyone else is irrelevant – I had to cut off my arm to keep myself alive.

There’s a new layer I piled on too, at the request of a friend. One where I ignored the survival fear syou sometimes yelled out loud at me about your parenting. One where I taught myself to not remember all the times we had talked about it. One where I learned to imagine (or more accurately, to indulge my existing repression) that I was too bad at this, to dangerous, incapable of learning, and therefore must stay at arm’s length. And that was maybe even the right call at the time. I could have picked a better method, but you needed and deserved space, so I kept doing the thing I always did to give people space about parenting. The same thing I did to give myself space when I wasn’t ready.

And I was triggered in two different ways about the same topic – the one where I make people defensive and overwhelmed just by asking for their help. Where sharing my need makes everyone else go running for cover. And sometimes you should. Sometimes my need is overwhelming, or at least pointed in the wrong direction, and you should pull away until I figure out something more tolerable. I try to avoid that version and am often successful, but even when I do you’ve got your own reactive bits that still throw up a facade of rejection before you even know what I need. Regardless of the reason it bashes all the buttons about being 3 and people being disgusted when I needed help. It still pushes me into helplessness where I can do is wait until I figure out how to repress this unmeetable, inhuman need.

So it was a big day. Some of that repression I had been squeezing out already and some of it was a new experience but all of it sort of tore apart once it started to fall. It met with my my (more) rational current worries and the most recent bits of repression I had still been packing in over the past couple of weeks and the expectations and hopes for change that I’ve been ramping up recently. The whole thing was a mess.

It took a long time to work out. I wasn’t even mostly calm about it until like 8 PM. It’s still enough to keep my anxiety high. I can feel my brain trying to write a story that explains how the repression is what I need to protect me. About how everyone will learn the terrible truth about my repulsive inhumanity and my putrid motivations. About how I’ve already leaked too much – hurt too many – and the only option is to flee across the continent and change my name and hope no one tries to track me down while I start yet another new life from nothing.

I didn’t get much done in therapy. Didn’t get to do LI. I did get to vent, whiched helped me build calm but is sort of an expensive way to accomplish that goal. And it’s always a frustrating experience because the amount of careful consideration and action I have taken already, and the robust insight I already have from it, makes it difficult for people to even appreciate the situation let alone offer useful responses. It’s the shitty situation that makes me not want therapy in the first place, because I could get vauge reassurance and lots of explicitly unhelpful advise about things that aren’t my problem from ELIZA. I like my therapist fine but they are not a person familiar with the details of my life and when I’m upset I don’t want spend an hour trying to explain myself – it’s unlikely they’ll provide anything new or actionable.

After venting in therapy, and another couple of hours working on myself, I did get it together. Decided I am ready to be done with parenting repression. Decided that I am capable – even good – at many parts of it, that I have skills and insights that can help people, and that I can learn other bits. Remembered that I’m excellent at keeping my feels seperate from others, at reading and responding to other people’s feels, and at caution and preparation and continuous improvement. And so I called it a day and did my usual Wednesday night pro-social thinking, where I try to restate the new things I learned this week in terms of things I should do for myself or others.

The details are still in process and will be for a long time, but I decided that I want to participate in social parenting. For my own sake, for the sake of young people (in general and individually), and to help you with this impossible task. Now that I’m done with my internal censorship I will get to use my lack of fucks to fight bad parenting in public. I will get to not care what parents (or their agents, like schools) think or do when I help young people. I will get to use my training as a former child and in the dependency courts to push whatever I want through the edges and holes in legal rules to fight the oppression of young people wherever I see fit. I will get to stop being afraid to self-parent. I will get to parent you. And I will get to stop hating myself for wanting to parent young people I know.

Today was better. Didn’t get to a call I hoped for but got some other good connection. Missed the HA4H stream but did a project with C instead (but forgot to take a picture) that qualifies as hand art, and did it in the new studio space. Dropped off my glasses up at Greenlake and rewarded myself with a cookie and wine. Sat outside with untethered Dog for a while after it got dark. Watched the HA4H stream later and talked about it in Discord. Tried my new blue lipstick [fig 1]. Got a UV cured nail stuff; didn’t do my nails yet but made label swatches ¹Like all light-sensitive chemicals these come in opaque bottles. That’s good for having them not bake in storage or transit but bad for seeing what color the are. So I made little color swatch stickers to show what paint was inside. [fig 2] and ran through the curing process. Got enough day job done; I’m clear on SRs and release process and email, but still haven’t gotten back to the BZ project. Paid the IRS $17.47 in interest because our tax preparer sucks. Dealt with Dog meds. Got a new vanity mirror to do makeup in the studio. Got a new toy I hope to get setup this weekend. Made plans for D&D, learned about pokeweed poisoning, chatted with @BPS about inaccessibile memory. Made lunch, ate hot supper, cleaned bits of the bathroom and kitchen. Thought about hair and dragons, bought an industrial hot glue gun ²and later saw that the HA4H stream had significant discussions about them, and posted picture and text to reach out in several places.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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