“Normal” Feelings

Here’s a thing I’ve heard from more than one of you: “I’m not sure if my feelings are ‘normal’”. I’ve seen it at times too; maybe more than I realize because I’m not very sensitive to it. The context is something along the lines of feeling anxious or sad or hurt and thinking maybe that feeling isn’t “right”, that maybe it’s one you aren’t allowed to have because it’s “bad”, or that it isn’t “safe”, or that isn’t “real” because you have anxiety in general, or that isn’t something you should react to because it’s not fair to other people, or won’t help you, or isn’t logical. I’ve been trying to relate that my experience to this, because it seems like a thing that should apply to me but it doesn’t easily click. Here’s my best shot — I think I experience this as part of my “I should be less” feeling. The one where I think I should be less expressive, less demanding, less visible, have less need, expect less from others. I don’t quite register the idea that any particular type of strength of feeling is unacceptable because I’ve already decided their mere existence is too much for anyone else to deal with, and am already declining to act on them directly. I was trained so thoroughly to avoid sharing that I never get around to questioning which ones are “right” because my answer is “they’re all selfish and dangerous”. But I do think I understand the concept, at least a bit.

Here’s a thing I know about feelings — they are happening all the time to everyone and there is no version of them that is wrong or unacceptable or useless or too much or any other dismissive categorization. They’re just happening, and like the weather it doesn’t matter if you like them or hate them or think they’re irrelevant to what you’re doing or expect them to dominate your day, they’re still happening. It’s possible to read the wrong message from them – to think they tell you something they actually don’t — and to react in a way that doesn’t make your life better. But still the feelings themselves are not a problem, they’re just information about your life, like the number of minutes since you last ate or the Pantone color code that most closely matches your big toe. Literally none of the feelings you have a different from the ones other people have all the time; all of your feelings are “normal” and they all tell you “real” information. You never need to question whether or not your feelings are okay, because they always are.

Knowing what’s contributing to them and reacting in a way that’s useful for managing your life is of course more complicated. It’s easy to have very strong reactions to things that remind you of trauma, or that you’ve been trained — through years of maladaptive practice — to react to in a specific way. I have precisely that problem with physical touch, or with feeling recognized. I super have that problem when I see someone else react to my emotions and think that I’m hurting them just because they can tell what I’m feeling (particularly if that feeling isn’t “positive”). But I believe it is possible to train yourself to react in ways that better match your goals, just like it was possible to be trained the other way initially.

Likewise you never need to ignore or suppress or get rid of your feelings. The information they give you is imprecise and sometimes illogical, but it’s still information, and it’s often very useful. At the very least it tells you things about yourself, even if it doesn’t tell you anything about the world. You don’t have to ignore the feeling that this isn’t going well, that you’re being mistreated, that you are being attacked, that you are nervous or anxious or depressed. You don’t have to be controlled by that feeling, or let it dictate how you react, but you always want to feel it and think about it and try to integrate it into your life. When you feel mistreated you don’t have to write it off to your anxiety or misunderstanding or mistake and suppress your feeling and reaction, you can assume that some real thing that happened contributed to this feeling and decide what what reaction would help you address it. When you feel depressed you don’t have to dismiss it as a symptom of your mental illness or an overreaction because of your fragile and broken being, you can own it and be depressed and figure out how that affects your life going forward. I have a tendency to assume my feelings are things that I need to deal with on my own without letting them affect anything that happens outside my head, even when they’re clearly telling me making some change in the world would improve my life.

I don’t mean to rant about what you ought to be doing. I’m probably only 57% correct and obviously if I knew how to merely do the things I think would be good my life would be much different. But I wanted to talk about it on the chance my perspective helps anyone, and to try to explore how this feeling we share relates to my own dumb shit. I want to range because I think it would be easier to deal with this way of thinking — this self-denying, self-abusing way of not feeling entitled to the full range of human emotions — together instead of separately.

I think the Hauser debt is done — I’m waiting on a counter-signed document but I signed a written settlement offer today. Turns out if you agree to join the corruption scheme that is debt collection — that is, if you’re rich and well-connected enough to be able to, and lucky enough to catch them cheating — you can get paid to skip out on a technically legitimate debt. Not paid a lot, but enough to cover the cost of a lawyer to handle the corruption bits for you, and the whole debt blinked out of existence. So that’s good news, other than the part where the ethics make me retch.

I got back to work today only to find my laptop won’t boot. I can unlock the disk and check the filesystem but after it starts the window server it just sits and cranks and runs the fan. IT decided they want to replace it instead of fixing it, so I’m without a machine in the office until sometime tomorrow. On the bright side it let me go home real early and get all my hairs cut. On the downside it means I didn’t advance the plot on any real work — all I did was meetings. I think I made my boss feel better with my physical presence, but I would rather have had a day off. I sort of feel like I haven’t had a normal, down weekend day in months. That’s probably not literally true but the fact that I’d have to check my calendar to know means I haven’t had enough. I’m definitely going to take a week here in the near future for nothing but lounging and playing with Dog and maybe working updating my SMS system to properly support MMS.

I’m less anxious today than yesterday, by a fairly wide margin. That’s expected now that travel is done (for a week at least), but still a big relief. I’m nervous about getting phone-based stuff done for M; I’m sure I’ll get it done but the time zones and limited access make it harder, and my day job feels a more oppressive and demanding in-person. I’m also nervous about figuring out how to talk to you remotely — I have so much more information when I can see your eyebrows (not to mention the influence I can get just by suggesting and facilitating eating and the like) — because I’ve tried a lot of things over the months and I’ve never done better than a couple of paragraphs per month in the other direction (and often less).

There’s a good deal of pointed-at-me anxiety from Shanda now that I’m home, which is hard not to be anxious about myself. I can see you trying not to blame me, but I also see you literally tell me to stop talking because even asking purely logistical questions about things in the household is “pressure”. It’s hard not to feel like that’s my fault, when you tell me it is, and hard not to feel like I should somehow be more careful and less demanding even though I’m already treading so lightly. It’s so hard when I can see you avoiding a things with direct real-world impacts — impacts not just to you but to me — but we can’t talk about it until it’s approaching a crisis (or creating one by forcing it). It’s not everything but it’s enough to be real stressful. Not unexpected after we’ve been apart so much, but still hard. And harder still when you want to discuss it in terms of how everything would be fine if I would just not react to your emotional state — where the solution you want to enact is to put more space between us.

I was thinking recently about model trains. There was a time — when I was like 9-14 — when I was assigned the task of liking model trains and had one as a toy. At least to the extent I ever had any toys; there was a table assigned for the task that eventually had a loop of track on it, and I would sometimes get bags of trash that contained assorted, used (often broken) train parts. The system was rarely actually functional, couldn’t be modified without special permission and supervision, and I wasn’t allowed to play with it even when it was working, but it was my assigned toy and supposed creative outlet. In any case, I had a realization about the way that sort of deprivation drove my interest in programming. It was something I could do without any physical goods — I could just type things on essentially any computer to accomplish something new and interesting. It was a great way to be occupied when I was abandoned at the church or the school, and I didn’t need to have anything with me to make it go. It let me make things, things that couldn’t be destroyed because they existed in my head and could be made manifest merely with time. And the things I did with programming were invisible to Mother so she couldn’t even criticize me about them. Not like writing, which she would read and punish me about. Or like drawing, which she would print off and punish me about.

But these days I am allowed to have physical things for use in my creative work. I already let myself expand to include home automation and 3D printing — and to coach a robotics team — as a way to use programming to achieve physical work. Occasionally I even let myself speculatively own a couple bits of hardware in case I decide to make something later, or buy pieces for a project that’s only half baked. But I really should own a variety of goods for creative use — from motors and Adruinos to colored pencils and schmancy tape — so that I can do cool things without having a careful plan first. I do lots of planning and it’s great but it shouldn’t be my only option. M has provided me with more than a couple pieces of color in that sense, and I really appreciate it. I wouldn’t have done it without you; it doesn’t even occur to me that it’s a thing I could do or would want to.

Dog vomited on the bed this morning. I woke up to his preparations and tried to get him down, but short of a Sparta kick he couldn’t be convinced, so on the bed. Then he trotted around the house drooling on things for like 20 minutes, refusing to have water. Eventually I bodily moved him into the shower so I could rinse out his mouth and snout, which he did not like. It was not a good time for anyone.

I have a short session with another therapist this afternoon. This thing where I’m nervous about therapy every time it happens or doesn’t happen is getting old real fast. I sometimes wonder if merely the concept of therapy would be basically as useful and wouldn’t include the parts of worrying about another person or paying for it. That’s probably not true, if I ever found someone who I thought was helping, but thus far (both recently and historically) it’s in practice what I’ve been doing — imagining what a therapist would do and then doing it for myself. It’s not super effective but it’s all I’ve got, and while it’s all I’ve got the part where I do extra work to be misunderstood by a stranger doesn’t feel like a good idea. I have decided to just do this on the logical belief that it will help, but it would sure by great to feel that way sometime instead of operating exclusively in the sphere of faith. I spend a lot of time just doing a things on faith, particularly in a social context, and I don’t want therapy to be one of them. It’s one of the things I want therapy to help me change, and it’s so defeating to have the process be part of the problem.

ZiB