Capability and Belief

Had another therapy session today. Felt better able to direct the discussion. But not really better understood. Initially I thought it was going better because I wasn’t so defensively positioned, but I still felt like they weren’t talking to me personally. Whether they weren’t hearing me, didn’t believe me, or simply was making inaccurate assumptions it continued to be an exercise wherein I could not get them to see where I was and adapt their technique to my needs.

It’s very easy for me to think “eventually this will get better” and just keep putting up with it. And eventually it might get better, though Shanda tells me it’s been long enough that I shouldn’t still feel unheard. I also fear that I am somehow being dismissive of their professional analysis – that I’m wrong to tell them that I am familiar with mindfulness and avoidance and that neither of those are useful tools to improve the situation I am describing. Or as happened last week when we spoke about The Screed that I am not harassing people with it or abusing myself. It’s easy for me to question my own analysis and assume that their understanding is correct.

But that’s not gonna work. Even if I am wrong they need to be good enough at this to explain why and how, not merely follow the script about what some people need in similar situations. Instead of assuming I’m so far off base that I can’t trust anything I think I know about myself I could just assume that they aren’t up to the job of being my therapist. And so I am.

That leaves me back at not having a therapist, though hopefully it will be a little eaiser to arrange once I’m back in Seattle full-time. And it leaves me worried that I won’t be up for the arduous and potentially long-term work of finding one that can help, and therefore won’t ever be able to access help. But it’s better for me to stop now than to keep going with someone who isn’t helping, because that’s not better in terms of me feeling like help is available. Also I’m annoyed to spend $750, 4 hours of deflating work, a good deal more time being stressed, and 4 weeks without something better. I’m not one to wish for the past to be different, but I do hope the next version goes better, or at least faster.

Spent 2.5 hours on hold with the Ohio Medicaid office today, only to be hung up on moments after my call was finally answered. Literally moments after someone finally picked up. Fuuuuuuuuuck them. The hold time alone is intolerable – but it’s a program for “the poors” so no one cares – and the fact that it didn’t even get me to someone who couldn’t help makes me consider a new day job finding ways to protest this cluster fuck by directly and persistently harassing the people responsible. In Washington Melissa literally accidentally got approved for Medicaid instantly online. In Ohio it’s been weeks and there’s still no status change or even a request for information. Also the benefits website pops up a window to make you search for jobs before logging in or even checking for eligibility, which is both technically annoying and politically abusive. The whole thing makes me want to scream.

Didn’t do any day job today. Well, I did some before that Medicaid call and was thinking I’d do more afterwards but I hadn’t really expected to spend all afternoon on hold. Tomorrow I can multitask. I somehow got signed up for fucking travel anyway. I could refuse to go but I’d spend political capital on it, and I have better uses for that resource. Instead I’m going to go but make it super expensive while doing a shitty job so they never send me again. It’s even a thing I’d be vaugly willing to do if it was in town but air travel makes it abusive (not to me tion wasteful). So I’ll charge them for the ~30 hours of time it requires and not do any other work that week, and then provide as little benefit to the company as possible while still technically doing the task that was assigned. I suspect my boss thinks this is helping me with my career but he does not understand that my main career goal is to steal money from the rich assholes who own the companies I work for. “Networking” in the corpo-social sense, is strictly not a thing I am willing to do, at least not for the sort of money they are giving me access to.

Scheduled the last few days here with M. It’s sort of a mad dash to the finish, which is expected given the way things developed in previous weeks but still stressful. It will have me leaving with more unprocessed feelings than I’d prefer, but such is life. I’ll have plenty of time on the plane to be weepy, and the things I’m afraid of would mostly still scare me later.

I would have liked to practice some of the things that are always promised, with the goal of moving them closer to habit than hope. I fear they’ll never be promoted after I go, or will be too fragile to survive when they’re needed most. But that’s not really any different than any point in the past 10 months. I’ll just have to patiently wait for the someday that provides enough time for sharing and relief, and keep trying to build enough safety to allow that day to arrive. Engaged patience through fear and isolation is my great skill, but also my great pain*, and leaving makes the pain part pretty potent.

I was recently invited to participate in some of M’s schoolwork, which was interesting for me. I don’t have strong memories of my undergraduate work – I was not myself at the time and did not quickly recover – so when I think of school I sort of project grad school all the way back to my freshmen year. But of course that’s not accurate, and seeing your work helped me remember bits of mine, and get some perspective across my own experience. I sort of expected to feel like I couldn’t contribute except maybe in very narrow ways, but it felt like something I could participate in. That I had done and could still do again.

Since leaving school entirely almost a decade ago, since I stopped doing programming day in and day out a few years ago, and particularly while I was overburdened with Melissa, I’ve come to feel sort of academically incapable. Which is provably false in some ways: for example, I regularly do research for both my personal and professional life using academic journals that would be insensible to most humans, and I recently tracked down and patched a significant security flaw in OpenSSH from nothing but a certification test failure. But my perception is not entirely false because there have been some barriers; I got burnt out and lost the time I needed for the sort of introspection** that lets me be exceptionally smart. But that wasn’t permanent and I shouldn’t feel so incapable. I don’t feel quite as incapable now that I can peer back across my own academic history with a little more clarity.

I also realized that I felt really incapable when I was burnt out in undergrad, and that remaining burnt out was one of the reasons I had so much trouble recovering. My perception that I need to be able to support myself financially with shift labor and do full-time school and run a business and recover from my abuse all at the same time and all by myself made it easy to feel like I wasn’t smart (or otherwise good) enough to pull it all off. Made me feel inferior to people who had an easier time making school go (because it was all they were doing), and to resent them for not taking on the “real” responsibility of total independence.

I kept slogging through, letting the burnout tell me that relief must wait until I was finally finished and safe. Even today it’s easy for me to believe that more work will eventually get me to a “done” position where I can finally take a breath, if only I keep pushing. But I try pretty hard to aim for sustainable because nothing else will ever let me be content. Because being too busy to be me, or to share myself, will keep me from ever having what I really want – a life I love while it’s happening. We all need goals and enough discipline to plan for and achieve them. But we also need real life to happen in the mean time, not just after we’re “done”. 

ZiB

*A thing I tried to talk to my therapist about today but could not get any traction on. They speak as though I’m avoiding my fear and anxiety, unwilling to live with it or unable to face it. But that’s not how I do this, and I shouldn’t let them make me feel so incapable.

**This the thing I worry about when there isn’t time for sharing. Not necessarily that everything will collapse, but that it will prevent access to the best and most joyful parts of a person.

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Sent from a phone.