Writing Marathon - Day 6
The biggest thing bothering me about all this writing is the sheer time investment. On average, each entry is 2 hours of writing. At the same time, all it's costing me is time not spent playing Warcraft, so I don't feel that's a bad thing.
I wrote so much about Andrea and in such detail I forgot little points I wanted to make. For example, the whole reason I went into such an extended story about how we met and started dating, was to say that we never really spent time being friends. In some ways, we didn't have that to ground our relationship. We had very little in common. And yet I always wanted to find a way to be frends if things ever ended. I once told hee maybe 6 months into the relationship I was confident we were mature enough to be friends if things didn't pan out. Initially after the breakup, she felt I was too distant and shunning her as a friend, neglecting to consider I might need some time to handle things emotionally after being dumped, when it was clear she'd had time to consider her decision and adjust. And at every point after it's been me trying to reach out and being ignored or politely rebuffed.
*
In the past few years I've been hearing this saying that failure is part of success, not the opposite of it. It makes sense, humans learn by doing. We don't just suddenly walk one day, we spend a lot of time falling down before we get any decent at it, and we consider that normal. Most anything new we learn has a learning curve. Yet when it comes to performing in life, we don't see failure as practice, rather as a judgment. It's a mindset we're trained into that's difficult to break out of, allowing ourselves to fail and slowly learn. I think depressed people fall into this trap a lot. I'm sure plenty of non-depressed people do, they just don't do anything challenging enough to fail at to risk depression. The man who does nothing makes no mistakes.
Yet our confidence has to be grounded in something. And maybe even self-worth. You're supposed to get that from a support network of friends and family. I can't think of a depressed person I've known who was getting that support. Sometimes there's a token level people offer us, but it comes across so disgenuine. I'm all too aware of how fragile my confidence is these days. One bad night of performance in a raid and I feel awful. I don't consider myself worthless, but I certainly feel like I'm more of a screwup who is out of step. Those off nights bother me for what they represent, how little else feeds into my confidence that the loss of something so trivial damages it.
*
There was a lot of talk in therapy a few months back about my controlling nature. I mostly hit a wall with that after awhile with any insights to dredge up. I'm thinking these notes I jotted down represent the last of that train of thought, rounding out the edges.
How much control do I ever really have? At various points I feel like my unconscious and conscious mind are at odds with each other. Certainly the periods when the depression felt random, I felt I had no control. Over time I learned to listen to my emotions before I could shut them down and could see that my self-control was part of the problem. It felt like my unconscious mind was acting out to get my attention because I didn't listen any other way. It still feels like that sometimes because there's things I haven't figured out yet.
Whenever I start feeling better, I feel like I have more control and I begin hoarding it, trying to preserve the good feelings. I also think there's a lot of ego involved in it, that I know best. It makes therapy difficult during those periods. Part of me knows I'm still operating under false beliefs that're causing me pain, but the other part of me is convinced each belief is right because I've checked my logic over and over. It's difficult to quiet the later impulse and sit still during therapy, try to listen to my therapist tell me I'm wrong even though I can't see it. I know he's right, but I don't see it yet, so I need to keep going until I do. I know if I was right, I wouldn't be in the situation I'm in. I know I'm thinking clearly entirely, but it's impossible for me to tear myself away from what I do see. Our sessions can get more argumentative during these periods as I get more rebellious. The good feelings fuel my ego and belligerence. It doesn't help that I'm sick of still being held down by these problems, so it's my patience wearing thin. It takes awhile to settle back down.
The need for control is from the PTSD. I couldn't trust my parents to not hurt me, so the world is a threat to be managed or wrestled into submission. People I associate with are measured in terms of how easy they are to control. But that controlling behavior gets out of hand, ramps up too much and I become oppressive to people around me. There's times I could see that be a response to other areas of my life becoming threatened, but I'm not sure it always lines up that way. It makes sense that it should, and I can recall a few times when that lined up, but I can't recall the other times clearly enough to know if it always does. This is me just wondering if there's other causes, but part of me worries it's just intrinsic to my nature at this point. That was one of the takeaways from Daniel moving back in. He felt I was oppressive and rather then talk to me about it, he left. I want to be angry for being abadoned, I want to be angry because he gave up so easily when he knows I struggle with this stuff and am actively working on it. But I don't know if I went above and beyond, because I don't see a trigger, or maybe my basic tendencies are just too problematic to begin with.
I may've said this last part before, but I mentioned how I've always seen the depression as coming from external causes. If it's external, then that prompts me to control my environment. If it's internal, then it's chemical...and I have no control. The need to be in control is premised upon believeing you can be in control. Without that, there's lashing out because there's no way to cope with fear or pain. So, I have a need to believe the depression can be fixed and fixed by changing my life.
*
I have this belief, it's also a feeling, that tension from resistance is what comes before inspiration. I want to say it's a requirement, at least for me, or that's how it feels. I first became aware of this dynamic as a teenager and started to seek it out. I'd intentionally get into arguments in order to provoke a greater understanding. Force people to say things they didn't say, test and refine my own beliefs about right and wrong and the world. I wanna say I got addicted to the emotional high after that breakthrough, that aha moment - if such a thing is possible. I spent years picking arguments with people, many of whom did not want them. Eventually that behavior started to calm down, though I'd be hard pressed to say when. I'm not sure it was always a receding trend, but ebbed and flowed at different points. Certainly when I first got into the larp group, there were many all night conversations/debates with willing partners. Later on the debates become bitter divides.
I never feared getting into these fights until the last few years. I stopped trusting people not to walk away. Taking responsibility for Hitmouse really hampered this as well because I needed to hold people together, not risk alienating them. I wanted Hitmouse to be based on cooperation, so I emphasized understanding instead of pushing the limit. That seemed lost of people and I lost them by inches anyway, and it really ate at me. I spent so much effort trying to do things a better way and got the same results. It felt like people only took advantage of my new approach to walk all over me...feeding the desire to control things and the resentments I held towards people as I clamped down my desire to control things.
I've felt some of these tensions come up in therapy in the past year. As I longer have the confidence to risk, it's difficult to claim the reward. One of the things I tried to drill into Shoshana's mind was that your desire to win has to outstrip your fear of losing. Which is a slightly better phrasing of, you can't win until you're not afraid to lose. Part of me knows if I let an argument go too far in therapy, I'll walk away and ruin the relationship and trust, making it difficult or impossible to come back. I'm also afraid that I escalate things, my therapist won't feel I'm serious about being helped - that doesn't feel far fetched as my control is an issue there and it's been questioned at times if I really want to get better. I've never been able to put into words that my avoidance of such conflict and not letting myself bring my angry side there, is my way of showing I'm serious. And yet I also feel like holding back does hinder things as well because I can't show my therapist a complete picture, repression isn't good and I avoid the potential gains of tension. In the past several months i feel like we've stumbled into the proper dynamic a few times, where my therapist has provided enough tension for me to have an aha moment, without things getting too serious. But secretly, each time I was afraid things woud get out of hand.
I miss not being afraid of that anymore. It's the ability to walk on the edge and not be afraid to fall. After losing Shoshana, Andrea and Daniel in a 6 month window, I started being afraid. But to be fair, that was just the straw that broke the camel's back. In college I began to accrue guilt for such things. When I first joined the larp group, I spent the first few months doing my best not to make waves. i used to tell Shoshana I was just someone warming themselves by the fire, I wasn't a permanent fixture. The unspoken part of that being that if I was a permanent fixture, I'd see it as within my right to change things to better suit my tastes. Which is another way of saying I'd look to control things. If I'm a guest, it's not my place. Once it's mine, I'll insist on control. But that isn't just me, both Warren and Josh grappled with this issue in Hitmouse. The problem always being, they couldn't imagine having control without having total control - the idea of compromise and balancing the desires of all just didn't register. It always had to be this all or nothing state, which always ended up as nothing.
*
One of the most important changes to my thinking, maybe breakthrough in communication is a better way to put, in therapy of the last several months is how I approach the question of "what would it feel like if that happened?" To my therapist's chagrin, I don't answer questions well about how I feel or would feel. I can give flat or generic answers, but there's meat on them. I had to rephrase the question internally and then expand on it. What would this scenario look like? What would actually happen? Then I can go on to answer what it would feel like. I need to conjure the full picture before I can answer how I feel and then look for nuance. I have to dig for my emotions because I bury them. But ultimately it's asking the question, what are you afraid of and why? And that's where I think the conversation goes somewhere.
*
I have written down in my notes about how much I'd locked down emotionally after Daniel moved on, and how that had really sunk in over time. I'd closed off enough emotionally where I go numb. I stop being able to connect to people around me. I know it's bad when I can't even fantasize about connection...things going south with Andrea had a hand in that. There's certain conditions I'll allow myself to fantasize about things. In a sense, there's a limit to how much I can pretend. I can only fantasize about things that feel like they could possibly happen. Granted there's a few fantasies that've always been impossible, but there just needs to be enough room to not contradict the underlying feelings.
But I've been in this period for awhile now where I'm still numb. The idea of intimacy no longer feels real, which is to say when I try to imagine intimacy in the present with anyone, even a theoretical person, there's just nothing. By contrast, in the weeks leading up to the final letter to Andrea, I was getting random memories of our relationship pop up that were quite vivid. As painful as those memories could be when they'd be dashed by reality setting back in, they were still fond memories to hold on to.
In talking to Susan, she's made she's going through ths, but it's a lot harder for her. I steer clear of commenting on this with her because it's something I've been grappling with for years now. I feel like if I told her how I felt, she'd see it as more reason to give up hope. It doesn't bother me as much as it once did because I know in time it'll pass. There'll come a point when I can relax a little, begin to trust my surroundings again and unclench my need to control everything including myself, and there's spontaneous and warm feelings again to look forward to. I just focus on biding my time and feeling other things. Feeling may not the right word though as since I lock down feeling, I let the cerebral part of me do its thing. I focus on the things that tickle my intellect more, the analytical, curiousities and insights. It works for me because I've over-developed that side me over the course of my life. I have no soothing words to get her through this period because I think she relies more on feeling than I do.
I wrote so much about Andrea and in such detail I forgot little points I wanted to make. For example, the whole reason I went into such an extended story about how we met and started dating, was to say that we never really spent time being friends. In some ways, we didn't have that to ground our relationship. We had very little in common. And yet I always wanted to find a way to be frends if things ever ended. I once told hee maybe 6 months into the relationship I was confident we were mature enough to be friends if things didn't pan out. Initially after the breakup, she felt I was too distant and shunning her as a friend, neglecting to consider I might need some time to handle things emotionally after being dumped, when it was clear she'd had time to consider her decision and adjust. And at every point after it's been me trying to reach out and being ignored or politely rebuffed.
*
In the past few years I've been hearing this saying that failure is part of success, not the opposite of it. It makes sense, humans learn by doing. We don't just suddenly walk one day, we spend a lot of time falling down before we get any decent at it, and we consider that normal. Most anything new we learn has a learning curve. Yet when it comes to performing in life, we don't see failure as practice, rather as a judgment. It's a mindset we're trained into that's difficult to break out of, allowing ourselves to fail and slowly learn. I think depressed people fall into this trap a lot. I'm sure plenty of non-depressed people do, they just don't do anything challenging enough to fail at to risk depression. The man who does nothing makes no mistakes.
Yet our confidence has to be grounded in something. And maybe even self-worth. You're supposed to get that from a support network of friends and family. I can't think of a depressed person I've known who was getting that support. Sometimes there's a token level people offer us, but it comes across so disgenuine. I'm all too aware of how fragile my confidence is these days. One bad night of performance in a raid and I feel awful. I don't consider myself worthless, but I certainly feel like I'm more of a screwup who is out of step. Those off nights bother me for what they represent, how little else feeds into my confidence that the loss of something so trivial damages it.
*
There was a lot of talk in therapy a few months back about my controlling nature. I mostly hit a wall with that after awhile with any insights to dredge up. I'm thinking these notes I jotted down represent the last of that train of thought, rounding out the edges.
How much control do I ever really have? At various points I feel like my unconscious and conscious mind are at odds with each other. Certainly the periods when the depression felt random, I felt I had no control. Over time I learned to listen to my emotions before I could shut them down and could see that my self-control was part of the problem. It felt like my unconscious mind was acting out to get my attention because I didn't listen any other way. It still feels like that sometimes because there's things I haven't figured out yet.
Whenever I start feeling better, I feel like I have more control and I begin hoarding it, trying to preserve the good feelings. I also think there's a lot of ego involved in it, that I know best. It makes therapy difficult during those periods. Part of me knows I'm still operating under false beliefs that're causing me pain, but the other part of me is convinced each belief is right because I've checked my logic over and over. It's difficult to quiet the later impulse and sit still during therapy, try to listen to my therapist tell me I'm wrong even though I can't see it. I know he's right, but I don't see it yet, so I need to keep going until I do. I know if I was right, I wouldn't be in the situation I'm in. I know I'm thinking clearly entirely, but it's impossible for me to tear myself away from what I do see. Our sessions can get more argumentative during these periods as I get more rebellious. The good feelings fuel my ego and belligerence. It doesn't help that I'm sick of still being held down by these problems, so it's my patience wearing thin. It takes awhile to settle back down.
The need for control is from the PTSD. I couldn't trust my parents to not hurt me, so the world is a threat to be managed or wrestled into submission. People I associate with are measured in terms of how easy they are to control. But that controlling behavior gets out of hand, ramps up too much and I become oppressive to people around me. There's times I could see that be a response to other areas of my life becoming threatened, but I'm not sure it always lines up that way. It makes sense that it should, and I can recall a few times when that lined up, but I can't recall the other times clearly enough to know if it always does. This is me just wondering if there's other causes, but part of me worries it's just intrinsic to my nature at this point. That was one of the takeaways from Daniel moving back in. He felt I was oppressive and rather then talk to me about it, he left. I want to be angry for being abadoned, I want to be angry because he gave up so easily when he knows I struggle with this stuff and am actively working on it. But I don't know if I went above and beyond, because I don't see a trigger, or maybe my basic tendencies are just too problematic to begin with.
I may've said this last part before, but I mentioned how I've always seen the depression as coming from external causes. If it's external, then that prompts me to control my environment. If it's internal, then it's chemical...and I have no control. The need to be in control is premised upon believeing you can be in control. Without that, there's lashing out because there's no way to cope with fear or pain. So, I have a need to believe the depression can be fixed and fixed by changing my life.
*
I have this belief, it's also a feeling, that tension from resistance is what comes before inspiration. I want to say it's a requirement, at least for me, or that's how it feels. I first became aware of this dynamic as a teenager and started to seek it out. I'd intentionally get into arguments in order to provoke a greater understanding. Force people to say things they didn't say, test and refine my own beliefs about right and wrong and the world. I wanna say I got addicted to the emotional high after that breakthrough, that aha moment - if such a thing is possible. I spent years picking arguments with people, many of whom did not want them. Eventually that behavior started to calm down, though I'd be hard pressed to say when. I'm not sure it was always a receding trend, but ebbed and flowed at different points. Certainly when I first got into the larp group, there were many all night conversations/debates with willing partners. Later on the debates become bitter divides.
I never feared getting into these fights until the last few years. I stopped trusting people not to walk away. Taking responsibility for Hitmouse really hampered this as well because I needed to hold people together, not risk alienating them. I wanted Hitmouse to be based on cooperation, so I emphasized understanding instead of pushing the limit. That seemed lost of people and I lost them by inches anyway, and it really ate at me. I spent so much effort trying to do things a better way and got the same results. It felt like people only took advantage of my new approach to walk all over me...feeding the desire to control things and the resentments I held towards people as I clamped down my desire to control things.
I've felt some of these tensions come up in therapy in the past year. As I longer have the confidence to risk, it's difficult to claim the reward. One of the things I tried to drill into Shoshana's mind was that your desire to win has to outstrip your fear of losing. Which is a slightly better phrasing of, you can't win until you're not afraid to lose. Part of me knows if I let an argument go too far in therapy, I'll walk away and ruin the relationship and trust, making it difficult or impossible to come back. I'm also afraid that I escalate things, my therapist won't feel I'm serious about being helped - that doesn't feel far fetched as my control is an issue there and it's been questioned at times if I really want to get better. I've never been able to put into words that my avoidance of such conflict and not letting myself bring my angry side there, is my way of showing I'm serious. And yet I also feel like holding back does hinder things as well because I can't show my therapist a complete picture, repression isn't good and I avoid the potential gains of tension. In the past several months i feel like we've stumbled into the proper dynamic a few times, where my therapist has provided enough tension for me to have an aha moment, without things getting too serious. But secretly, each time I was afraid things woud get out of hand.
I miss not being afraid of that anymore. It's the ability to walk on the edge and not be afraid to fall. After losing Shoshana, Andrea and Daniel in a 6 month window, I started being afraid. But to be fair, that was just the straw that broke the camel's back. In college I began to accrue guilt for such things. When I first joined the larp group, I spent the first few months doing my best not to make waves. i used to tell Shoshana I was just someone warming themselves by the fire, I wasn't a permanent fixture. The unspoken part of that being that if I was a permanent fixture, I'd see it as within my right to change things to better suit my tastes. Which is another way of saying I'd look to control things. If I'm a guest, it's not my place. Once it's mine, I'll insist on control. But that isn't just me, both Warren and Josh grappled with this issue in Hitmouse. The problem always being, they couldn't imagine having control without having total control - the idea of compromise and balancing the desires of all just didn't register. It always had to be this all or nothing state, which always ended up as nothing.
*
One of the most important changes to my thinking, maybe breakthrough in communication is a better way to put, in therapy of the last several months is how I approach the question of "what would it feel like if that happened?" To my therapist's chagrin, I don't answer questions well about how I feel or would feel. I can give flat or generic answers, but there's meat on them. I had to rephrase the question internally and then expand on it. What would this scenario look like? What would actually happen? Then I can go on to answer what it would feel like. I need to conjure the full picture before I can answer how I feel and then look for nuance. I have to dig for my emotions because I bury them. But ultimately it's asking the question, what are you afraid of and why? And that's where I think the conversation goes somewhere.
*
I have written down in my notes about how much I'd locked down emotionally after Daniel moved on, and how that had really sunk in over time. I'd closed off enough emotionally where I go numb. I stop being able to connect to people around me. I know it's bad when I can't even fantasize about connection...things going south with Andrea had a hand in that. There's certain conditions I'll allow myself to fantasize about things. In a sense, there's a limit to how much I can pretend. I can only fantasize about things that feel like they could possibly happen. Granted there's a few fantasies that've always been impossible, but there just needs to be enough room to not contradict the underlying feelings.
But I've been in this period for awhile now where I'm still numb. The idea of intimacy no longer feels real, which is to say when I try to imagine intimacy in the present with anyone, even a theoretical person, there's just nothing. By contrast, in the weeks leading up to the final letter to Andrea, I was getting random memories of our relationship pop up that were quite vivid. As painful as those memories could be when they'd be dashed by reality setting back in, they were still fond memories to hold on to.
In talking to Susan, she's made she's going through ths, but it's a lot harder for her. I steer clear of commenting on this with her because it's something I've been grappling with for years now. I feel like if I told her how I felt, she'd see it as more reason to give up hope. It doesn't bother me as much as it once did because I know in time it'll pass. There'll come a point when I can relax a little, begin to trust my surroundings again and unclench my need to control everything including myself, and there's spontaneous and warm feelings again to look forward to. I just focus on biding my time and feeling other things. Feeling may not the right word though as since I lock down feeling, I let the cerebral part of me do its thing. I focus on the things that tickle my intellect more, the analytical, curiousities and insights. It works for me because I've over-developed that side me over the course of my life. I have no soothing words to get her through this period because I think she relies more on feeling than I do.