Head shrinkery

As you are all aware I have been talking to a shrink to manage some of the crap that has been going on in my head. The contents of my brain is dark and twisted at the best of times, but when it gets stuck in a loop there is no other option than to get that external assessment. Your friends can sympathise, but aren’t always qualified to help you plan your next move (though they may be more than willing to assist you in the disposal of a body).

In this respect having these appointments has been very helpful. Sometimes it’s not what's in front of you that is really the issue, or at least not completely. Sometimes it’s just the trigger. The trigger in this case was Ms L, and the implosion of our friendship. While the feelings of hurt (and my ongoing trust issues) are in no way insignificant, it is not the central issue. It boils down to two things: loss and grief. In part for Ms L, but mostly for my Pop.

My Pop died two years ago last January. He had been an alcoholic for much of his life, but had been sober for nearly 5 years. It was when he had stopped drinking that they found the cancer in his liver. I won’t go into his final stages in great detail, just the two important points: he died in my arms, and my family were at each other’s throats by the end of the funeral.

With everything going pear-shaped I didn’t really get an opportunity to grieve. It is one of my many (many) in-built flaws: when things go to shit I put my feelings aside and get on with what needs doing. Part of my problem is that I have been doing that for a very long time. As a short term solution it has its benefits. As a long term solution it’s about as helpful as serving bacon sandwiches at Middle East peace talks. Mmmmmmmmm bacon.

So while I was left feeling hurt and grieving the loss of my friendship with Ms L (who was the first person I really connected with since my Pop died), I was hit with the original grief that I hadn’t processed. The severity of my funk now makes a hell of a lot more sense.

Ms L is the only person who will ever know why she reacted the way she did (and as much as not knowing bugs me, it is something I will have to live with). I still miss my friend, but now I can at least understand my own reaction. Not bad for three sessions.

I may be sane by easter ;)

 

You can't unring a bell

Once something is said it can’t be unsaid. This is something we are all aware of. Sometimes it is truer than others, or rather it applies to larger portions of some people’s lives. We all have secrets. Little things, like forgetting to check the pockets of the clothes going into the washing machine (unless there’s a tissue in there, then it’s a big deal). Medium ones, like putting a scratch in your brother’s brand new car (which was completely deliberate, but you can’t remember now why you were that angry at the time). And the big ones, like being abused as a child, or being a recovering drug addict. There are some even bigger than that (which I won’t go in to), but you get the general idea.

How you feel about people dictates how much you tell them. It is worth pointing out that just because you feel like you can tell someone something doesn’t actually mean you would or should tell them. Once it is out there then there is no going back. Sometimes it is just too much of a risk. Sometimes the other people involved don’t want to hear it. Sometimes, no matter how hard we might try, things go totally pear shaped.

An ex of mine was big on the idea of save points. Think a conversation is going to end badly? Really not happy with your day? Opened yourself up, only to be stabbed in the chest? Go back to your save point and do things differently this time. There are a few times I’d really love a save point:

• The day I signed up for the army (seemed like a good idea at the time, but my body has never really recovered)

• Selling all my stuff to move to London (wouldn’t have been so bad if the girl I was moving for hadn’t known she was going to break up with me weeks before I got on the plane)

•  Falling in love with someone who couldn’t/wouldn’t love me for who I am (which I am embarrassed to admit has happened more than once)

• Trusting people with information that could have a seriously negative impact on my life (something else I have done more than once. I’m beginning to think I’m a lousy judge of character)

Everyone has something that they regret, and while these are examples of times when I would have very much liked to have had a save point, I don’t actually regret them. There are always things that we wish we could do differently, or change the outcome of. But  (for me) to actually regret something, is to not have learnt anything from the situation.

What I have learnt most recently is that I have awesome friends. We are all as fucked up as each other, but that’s ok. In fact, it is a blessing. In a world where we have to spend so much time being “normal” it is a relief to have people who don’t need the act. People who accept you for who you are. They could just be keeping me around for my baking and book finding skills, but I don’t think it’s very likely. Though for a minute there I thought Miss A was going to cry when I gave her that copy of the Iliad ...

shrink wrap

Ok, so the last post was about not sharing. More specifically, about not discussing Ms L with Miss R. Of course, given how much Miss R and I do actually talk about stuff, I explained my reason behind this. Not a short discussion. Not as traumatic as it could have been, but still no walk in the park.

By the end Miss R was strongly advocating that I go and talk to someone about this stuff. Someone professional. Now as anyone who has had to prove their sanity (and I have the little pieces of paper that say so) will tell you, I’m not keen on this. But the truth is, this Ms L thing isn’t getting better.

It is better now than say December, when things first went to shit. And it is better than January, when I was angry. But it’s now the end of February, and it’s still eating at me. Now I know that you don’t have all the information, so this isn’t going to make a lot of sense. For the sake of clarity, without going into detail, it breaks down like this:

 

• I told Ms L something very sensitive about my past. (It’s not something I normally discuss, as I have huge trust issues on this topic, but I told her because I did trust her. My mistake, obviously).
• Hours after this sank in I got “the email” from her about liking me, and how what I told her was too much in a boyfriend, but that it was ok for a friend. (Apparently I was only attractive until I had baggage).
• I sent the email clarifying that I already have a girlfriend, and was as gentle as humanly possible. I was also more than forgiving about the rejection part, (though I’m certainly not in a hurry to trust anyone with that information again).
• Then came the complete cutting of ties, the unfriending, and the refusal to talk to me in any/every way, shape, or form. (Was like being in high school all over again).

The fact that this is still bothering me, nearly three months after the event, would suggest that it’s not going to go away on its own. I’m not going to get any closure from Ms L, so I haven’t really got much in the way of options. You guys are all great, and patient (with only the occasional slap), but I think Miss R is right. It’s time to call in the big guns. Not really something I wanted to be considering now that uni has gone back, with the study, the home work, and the stair-rage (walk to the fucking left people, it’s not hard).

So, tomorrow I’ll make the call. I figure it can’t make me feel any worse.

A homily on forgiveness

As we round the 60 day mark since things went pear-shaped, I’ve been looking back and doing some cleaning out. My old laptop is almost officially purged. I just have to empty my inbox for two of my email accounts and all trace of my “relationship” with Ms L will be gone. While this cleaning house is necessary, I still miss my friend. I know this doesn’t make sense to anyone. I know many of you have wanted to slap me silly. Some of you even have. The most common question I get about Ms L is: how can you still want to be friends after everything?

The easiest answer would be that I’m stupid, or a masochist, or I have a thing for lost causes. Two out of three have been true at one point or another in my life, but I don’t think they apply here. I could be wrong. We all know I’ve been wrong before. Instead I like to think this is about forgiveness.

I have not always been Hawm of the infinite patience. I have been Hawm of the incredible (bottled) anger; Hawm of the impenetrable void; Hawm who falls off the face of the earth, and Hawm of the inexplicably complicated. I don’t think I’ll ever truly be able to shake the last one, I have managed to grow out of the other three. 

My relationship with my mother is probably the best example of this. I didn’t have the most brilliant childhood. There were more than the occasional beatings with the leather belt, there was the psychological warfare that existed between my Mum and my Nan (we were the both the prize and the pawns), the unresolved anger between my parents (divorced nearly 30 years now and it's still there), and the constant need to control our lives even after we ran away from home as teenagers. If you asked me how I felt about her then I would have been completely sincere when I said that I wanted her dead. 

When I came back from the army my perspective slowly started to shift. I was still angry, and the huge slices along my shins only added more fuel to the fire, but I started to fight back. Unfortunately fighting fire with fire, especially in my family, doesn’t improve things. It only makes for a bigger fire. So we didn’t speak. Not the best way to deal with a problem. Sometime the distance helps give us a clearer picture. Sometimes we need to have shitty relationships of our own to understand other peoples. I only knew how to have dysfunctional relationships, so I managed to rack up quite a few shitty ones. Until I figured out what I was doing. Well, that and I started having heart palpitations. Nothing quite like having what feels like a heart attack at 21 to put things in perspective. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. I had several attacks before I figured out that what was putting the biggest strain on my life was me.

My anger. Me being angry at everyone; my life, my family, lovers, work, the world in general. Being angry was fucking me up. And when anger is what has kept you upright for so many years, got you through all kinds of abuse, it is an extremely hard habit to break. Even now anger is seductive. It’s so familiar, the buzz you get from the adrenaline, the energy, and you just want to push everyone away and give yourself over to it. Giving into it never ends well, as my body made a point of reminding me early last month. I hadn’t even realised I was slipping until I was sitting here with chest pains.

The reason I no longer hate my mother, and eventually managed to love her (and my father too, though I don’t claim to be able to like the man), is that I was finally able to forgive them for being human. They were young, and made bad choices (which fucked a lot of things up for all of us), but they were trying to do the right thing. Raising two children on her own wasn’t easy for my mother, and she didn’t always get it right, but she looked at my two year old self carrying a bong to my pothead father and decided she wanted more for us. I can’t blame her for that. I didn’t understand why I didn’t meet my Dad until I was 10 years old. I didn’t understand why we weren’t allowed to get in a car with either him or my Nona if they came to the school. None of these things made sense to me as a child, but as an adult I understand. I may not always agree with the how or the why, but that doesn’t matter.

Forgiveness isn’t about right or wrong, it’s not about blame or recriminations. Forgiveness is about looking at a situation and recognising, with brutal honesty, that if we were in the same position there is no guarantee that we would have dealt with things any better. We’re human. We do the best that we can, and hope that the people we love don’t judge us too harshly. 

This is how I can think of Ms L and miss my friend. 

being the older brother

One of the responsibilities of being an older brother is trying to give useful advice to your younger siblings. Given how many siblings I have, and the varying gaps in our ages, this is something I've had to do a lot. Whether it's the best way to make french toast (1tsp of vanilla in the egg mix, soak the bread all the way through), or the correct way to shatter knee caps (a length of wood 2x4 between the knees, gaffa tape legs together above and below the knees, introduce sledgehammer to wood), I do my best to be as informative as possible. Something I'm sure would cause my parents and step-parents much consternation, if they actually had any idea exactly what the kids were asking.

Todays advice is about dating. I know, given what has been going on in my life of late, that this probably seems  ridiculous. However, if you can suspend your disbelief, at least for a little while, I think you may be surprised. My little sister, who will be 15 this July, is behind this post. For some reason she is under the impression that if you keep going back to a guy who treats you like shit, it only proves that you haven't given up hope that he will change. Apparently this exercise in futility doesn't make you stupid, just hopelessly romantic. It would appear that feminism, common sense, and self respect has missed this generation.

In order to be the best older brother I can I am posting my rules for dating below.

Hawm's Rules for Dating:

1. It you hit me, you're gone.
2. If you cheat on me, you're gone.
3. If it's a good enough reason to break up, it is a good enough reason not to get back together.

These are the main three. There are of course others, such as:

• Lie to me about big stuff,  you're gone. (I dated a compulsive liar. She put me through a rape/pregnancy/pregnancy with twins/miscarriage/cervical cancer. None of it was real).
• Read my email/go through my stuff, and I will cease to trust you.
• Steal from me, you're gone.
• Dependency on drugs (other than diagnosed medical condition) and/or alcohol, you're gone. (I grew up with alcoholics, and have dated people with drug/alcohol issues. Being subjected to drug/alcohol induced rages, having junkies breaking into your house while you're sleeping, getting raided by the police ... It's not worth it).

I'm sure you can add others. I know I can think of several more. The point is that even if you are prepared to compromise on some things (and compromise is a healthy part of any relationship), there are limits to what anyone should have to put up with. 

No one has the right to treat you like shit, and tell you that it's love.

/big brother advice