Heart like an Empty House
Oh my gosh, I had some TERRIBLE abandonment dreams last night. Usually when I have bad dreams, they tend to be either creepy nebulous stuff like screamers for the brain, or screamingly angry subconscious rage about my family trying to control/ruin my life, but this is one of the first times I’ve ever woken up ready to burst into tears.
The first dream was more generalized hallmark sentiment. It involved some poor orphaned homeless kid whose only friends and source of love in his life were a stray dog and cat that were kind of like his pets. At one point they all got caught in a warehouse fire, and while the kid could have made it out of the fire, his dog and cat were trapped, so he willingly decided to die with them rather than be separated from the only things in the world that loved him. When the emergency services finally found him, he was curled around his poor cat’s body. They eventually buried him in a strangely lush gravesite with a statue of a dog and cat standing at either side of his gravestone. ;x;
The second dream was far more personal, tho. It involved my family moving out of the house I grew up in. They had finally gotten fed up with the neighborhood, apparently, citing some bullshit about no longer feeling comfortable with the neighborhood (middle-upper class bullshit code for too many minorities in the area). I was really upset about this, because even though I’d moved into my own apartment, they were just sort of stripping my old house of everything that made it a home to me. They were taking all the familiar furniture and rugs and pictures, and just leaving me this barren empty soulless shell behind, so much so that it didn’t feel like it was my house any more. All the rooms felt too small with the stuff inside them gone, and it felt like the one place where I felt comfortable and safe was taken away from me. It was like that cold, unhappy feeling I get when I see how my parents worked my bedroom when I moved out, but amplified a hundredfold.
I think both of these dreams are a good reflection of my subconscious fears of abandonment. I know that I like to foster the image that I’m strong and independent and that I’m generally okay with being alone most of the time, up to the point where I try to convince myself that I’ll be okay if I never get married/paired up with someone permanently. I want to be a good, strong, self-sufficient person who doesn’t put people off with vibes of desperation. But I guess deep down, I really am pretty fragile, and easily frightened by the merest suggestion that the people I love and respect will leave me, for whatever reasons. Through my childhood, most of the affection and approval I got came as a result of my performance in school, and I don’t think I was ever really complimented on just being an interesting, unique, or merely a generally good person. Thus I place a lot of stock in maintaining “good behavior”, because I’d been trained to think that love and acceptance was a function of what you did and how you performed, rather than being a result of someone just liking who you are. I’m struggling to overcome that, and I need to get my head around the idea that it’s possible for me to do or be into different things than the people who like me, and still be able to trust that they won’t run out on me.
I need to give my friends more credit for being able to see the real me, it’ll probably help me to be better able to see it myself.
The first dream was more generalized hallmark sentiment. It involved some poor orphaned homeless kid whose only friends and source of love in his life were a stray dog and cat that were kind of like his pets. At one point they all got caught in a warehouse fire, and while the kid could have made it out of the fire, his dog and cat were trapped, so he willingly decided to die with them rather than be separated from the only things in the world that loved him. When the emergency services finally found him, he was curled around his poor cat’s body. They eventually buried him in a strangely lush gravesite with a statue of a dog and cat standing at either side of his gravestone. ;x;
The second dream was far more personal, tho. It involved my family moving out of the house I grew up in. They had finally gotten fed up with the neighborhood, apparently, citing some bullshit about no longer feeling comfortable with the neighborhood (middle-upper class bullshit code for too many minorities in the area). I was really upset about this, because even though I’d moved into my own apartment, they were just sort of stripping my old house of everything that made it a home to me. They were taking all the familiar furniture and rugs and pictures, and just leaving me this barren empty soulless shell behind, so much so that it didn’t feel like it was my house any more. All the rooms felt too small with the stuff inside them gone, and it felt like the one place where I felt comfortable and safe was taken away from me. It was like that cold, unhappy feeling I get when I see how my parents worked my bedroom when I moved out, but amplified a hundredfold.
I think both of these dreams are a good reflection of my subconscious fears of abandonment. I know that I like to foster the image that I’m strong and independent and that I’m generally okay with being alone most of the time, up to the point where I try to convince myself that I’ll be okay if I never get married/paired up with someone permanently. I want to be a good, strong, self-sufficient person who doesn’t put people off with vibes of desperation. But I guess deep down, I really am pretty fragile, and easily frightened by the merest suggestion that the people I love and respect will leave me, for whatever reasons. Through my childhood, most of the affection and approval I got came as a result of my performance in school, and I don’t think I was ever really complimented on just being an interesting, unique, or merely a generally good person. Thus I place a lot of stock in maintaining “good behavior”, because I’d been trained to think that love and acceptance was a function of what you did and how you performed, rather than being a result of someone just liking who you are. I’m struggling to overcome that, and I need to get my head around the idea that it’s possible for me to do or be into different things than the people who like me, and still be able to trust that they won’t run out on me.
I need to give my friends more credit for being able to see the real me, it’ll probably help me to be better able to see it myself.