Daddy’s Favorite Sister-Mother

I’ve found a new way to think about the gym. Lots of people gym and hope for something about feeling better or stronger or an increase in agency or the progress of statistics of some sort. None of that is for me. I’m going to the gym to imagine that I can intentionally undertake a physical activity and not have it trigger my survival fears. And I need to do that about 600 times because I have too many examples of physical activity being a risk to my survival. Of not being able to stop because of social demands or temperature concerns or simply because I needed some physical task done to keep me alive. I currently can’t feel good exercising no matter what I do. But I can at least build some examples of not dying so I can convince my brain it’s possible to be safe. So I’m going the gym and not trying very hard and not keeping track of what’s happening and just doing a medium amount of work and never feeling like I need to flee. People talk about having trouble going or doing but I don’t have that trouble. My trouble is it that I do it even though it makes me feel like I’m dying. Survival brain needs that skill. But I’d sure like to use it less.

I called out from work today on a mental health basis. I’ve never done this before. I mean, I rarely call out for any reason, but certainly not just because I feel terrible. My brain worries a bit that if I let myself call out once – if I admit that life is killing me – I won’t ever be able to go back. If I stop moving I might never get back up. But this is silly – I give up on working all the time and have gone back every week since I was 13. But it turned out well. Felt better for dealing with it, and for not having day job hanging over my head while it happened. My instinct is to cover my shame, but instead I just told my boss I was dealing with old oppression and stopped thinking about work until I felt better.

I started reading “The Only Girl in the World” by Maude Julien, which is their own story ¹told as an adult, after they became a psychotherapist about the individual concentration camp – run by their father – that she lived in during the first part of their life. It’s not my exact experience but it’s uncomfortably close in many ways. It’s easy to read and imagine I shouldn’t believe my own story, or at least that I shouldn’t expect – don’t want – the same compassion this story evokes. But it also walks me through some of my own early childhood thinks and feels.

For example, the first person Maude regularly interacts with other than their captors is a piano instructor. This instructor is not warm, makes no attempt at person connection, and uses physical pain in the course of instruction. But the instructor does not belittle Maude, and only hits them according to established rules, not capriciously. Which makes the instructor the best person Maude has ever met. It’s how I felt about my kindergarten instructor, and reading about it gave me access to some 5-year-old memories and feels. Feels that made my life hard to deal with for a while. So I didn’t. I took the day off.

This morning I was also back in a pattern I’ve been in before, where my experience or perception doesn’t match what someone expects and I question myself instead of the expectation. It’s not that I can’t believe the expectation is wrong, it’s that the expectation being wrong means I’m not being understood. Or maybe is the proof I’m always afriad exists – proof that I’m not really human, or that I’m too broken to be clearly seen by anyone who is.

A common experience for people dealing with chronic repression is having specific feelings that you are ashamed of, or that you don’t think you’re allowed to have, or that you find upsetting and never want to experience, or that you feel very detached from or that for whatever reason you do not process. It’s commonly discussed and often sort of assumed that this condition exists along side basically any recurring repression.

But I don’t feel like that matches my experience. I feel like I learned to be okay with and engaged in all my feels ²Obviously I’m not perfect at this. There are certain sensations I have trouble noticing even when I pay attention. There are feels I react to without engaging in them. There are whole bits of my childhood I abandoned and never felt. When stressed I sometimes repress my reaction for a few minutes or hours until the crisis level has gone down. But … Continue reading but simply to not respond – to not imagine that they are important to other people, or to my immediate plan. That might seem like a meaningless distinction but to seems important to me – I know what my feels are, generally speaking, and I don’t feel like I have trouble being engaged with them or discharging them. And I’m sort of sick of my therapist talking to me like that’s a thing I ought to be worried about. My brain tells me I should assume – or at least pretend – that I match the expected behavior. But if it applies to me I don’t understand how, and I should at least question the assumptions before I decide my perception is faulty. Before I give up and try to conform.

I had good thinks and feels on both points today. I suspect I’ll have more early childhood stories and feels throughout the week as I find new connections. I’ve already got one about pins – about the genesis of my button collection – and about kindergarten name tags. There’s one in there about piano that’s only half out. And I’m ready for more.So it was time well used, in spite of my brain’s insistence that it would leave me burnt out and unable to resume my regular life.

Skipped robots today too. I was feeling mostly okay by 3 but the extra break was nice too, and gave me a second to get chores and email and whatnot done. I also spent a minute doing team administration ³Which I never do. I try hard to not know how to do it for fear someone will ask me. But a task from J popped up today and sparked me to action. I got to imagine a social heist instead of just paperwork for my oppressors – I got to art instead of grind. and getting the code base setup for the new season. We’ve now got a code base that complies and is stagged against the now-current SDK and Gradle versions, so we’re in good shape to get coding. At least assuming the things I did to make it compile today weren’t too far from reality.

I was expecting a call today after robots, but that’s still falling through. Presumably for both the long standing reasons (lack of routine) and some more pressing ones ⁴I did get an itinerary as reassurance. That’s 4000% better than nothing but also sort of confirmation that the short-term situation is still on hold – still too dangerous to look at or address – rather than in recovery. (fear that I’ll trigger a big feel). We’ll see what I can manage tomorrow. Or the next day. I have had faith in my persistence, and now I finally have the will to wield it.

You should watch @MMF. Their latest video is part one in a series about Christian film. This one focuses on the Daddy-Jesus connection, the wierd focus on money as a proxy for morality and spirituality, the denial of emotion, and domestic abuse. Made me have feels about economic abuse, which is still on my writing list. https://youtu.be/Gh581gMSZY0

ZiB

—
Sent from a phone.

• 

•