Grabbing Attention

Yet another early departure for the Screed. It’s still my intent to have these default to going instead if default to stopping, but I am a little annoyed I didn’t get to pick a title. I did need a break though, since I was just about to write about Dog barking less and he was currently barking at me. Getting up to deal with him is why I hit send.

One of the changes I got out of my recent diverted attention was more engagement with taking care if Dog. It has been a challenge for Shanda to work with me on this, particularly since I went to Cleveland. Not that he isn’t getting care, but that you and I haven’t been able to coordinate except in very basic logistics. Which means we can’t get him to do anything new, that I can’t help you with the parts that are hard for you, and perhaps most importantly that when you think Dog needs attention I can’t have any.

It’s been hard, the thing where everyone around me is upset every time I eat. Dog barks because he got into the habit ¹a habit he formed for lots of reasons including my absence and our inability to coordinate. You’re upset because Dog is barking. But regardless of the reasons it’s a life where I have to eat alone and in secret. Where I’m always asked to spend less time eating so as not to upset anyone, and where I can’t have any positive attention for the period starting before supper and not ending until after we walk Dog. That’s tough in general and extra hard for me because eating alone in a hurry in secret is the life I lived with Mother.

We’re making improvements though. Now that I’ve got your attention we’re finally managing Dog’s food in a way that allows variation. We’re taking him with when we go out for people things, which not only gives him more activity and bigger contrast in socialization but which makes it easier for you to see the difference between your emotions and mine, and harder for you to run away. Plus it gives me a dog to use to control my interactions with other people. And though it’s still tears-level hard you are starting to be able to pay attention to me while Dog is unhappy. Which is important because often you’re unhappy at the same time as Dog, and Dog is unhappy at times when I need attention. He’s making good progress in being calmer at supper time even just a few days in, and you’re finally working through some of your mixed feels about caring for him. I know it’s hard but if you keep it up for a while longer I’m sure we’ll be to a lower stress version soon.

It’s is very frustrating to not be able to get your attention. To get anyone’s attention. I talked at @BPS the other day, about the way I can get a whole room full of people to stare at me but can’t get anyone to pay attention in quite the way I hoped. None of you can smell what I’m shouting. I suspect they have a similar feel, not for the same reasons but with a similar result. Their work is often about manipulating the way people pay attention. In changing the way they pay attention. And that feels like a space adjacent to the one I live in.

Talked to M about building identity. It’s a thing a many of you talk to me about ²Which I appreciate you including me in. I’m trying hard to work on my own, and to add all the parts I’ve been denied. Talking about yours helps me with mine, and helps me feel like a human. I hope I can sometimes help with yours too.. For most of my life I imagined a life that could be disguised as sufficiently bland to give me cover for whatever I need to do. I imagined that never expressing myself in a way that would change people’s emotions was the ideal way to pass as human. That it was my duty to protect people from having an emotional reaction when I interact with them. Sometimes interactions were technically required but they should never encourage the other party engage emotionally. I imagined that asking people to engage is rude and demanding.

But that was terrible. Needing to not care about things that are actually happening is a survival coping skill and it’s for emergency use only. The feeling of needing to endure without responding, or using only a certain range of responses, is the basis of a lot of repression. It makes things so high-stakes, and it denies you the option to make things be different. It makes every related choice unthinkably hard, because what if I do this once and I’m forced to do it this way forever. What if I make a choice and never get a chance to try any other option that I might have liked better? What if I choose something dumb or crazy and everyone knows that I’m wrong? What if this is the thing that eventually kills me, because I didn’t make the right choice to protect myself?

It’s a hard way to live. Most of you are lucky enough to only sometimes be stuck in survival decision making. Some of you — like me — spend a lot of time there, because your whole life has been survival training. While I’m far from immune to panic I have trained my whole life to be able to communicate clam to people, so that if I can get them to pay attention to me I can show them that I don’t think the situation is dire. If I can get them to see my emotions I can often help them understand that whatever is happening isn’t high-stakes and isn’t a survival risk and can wait long enough for them to breathe.

But of course I don’t know how to make people pay attention to me. I rarely know how to pay attention to myself for that matter.

When your experience trains you to believe that you can’t even get reassurance from anyone when the stakes are high — that help only comes from within — the only safe option is withdraw and try to prepare yourself for the worst. But maybe we can train each other to do something better. Maybe when you’re stressed you can look at my face, and see that I’m not worried, or at least that you’re not worried alone. And maybe you can poke me when you see that I am, so that I don’t have to spend so much time there myself. I don’t want you to be nervous to talk to me when you see I’m stressed, I want you to feel like talking to me might help me get out of it. And I want to do that for you too. I’m already trying, but I need your help to be better at it.

I always want these to come to a clear point. To share a feel and have a moral and all the other story parts. But I also want to do them most days, and I can’t make all those things happen ever 24 hours. It used to be easy to imagine these as incremental and not episodic, but lately my brain hasn’t been there. Maybe I’ll have to accidentally click send on a few more to break the cycle.

ZiB