Gordian Knot
I remember the first time I heard the story of the Gordian Knot. The knot some large and complex no one could untangle it. As Alexander entered the story I knew exactly what his solution would be.
Why am I mentioning this though? Because that's my brain. Every fact, detail and story I tell you is only a piece of the story, never the whole. I've written hundreds of pages in this journal over the last 13 years or so, and at no point have I ever been able to explain everything. And at no point does any single entry explain any one facet of my problems in their entirety. It's not for lack of trying, really.
Sometimes I think the only thing worse then feeling no one reads these entries is that people read them and respond with helpful advice. Something about unsolicited advice makes me feel irrationally angry, probably overly defensive too. Mostly because it always feels like I'm being talked to like I'm an idiot, though I can hear my therapist asking if I even want to get better, the insinuation of which also makes me very angry. That's its own hang-up regarding how my family disregarded my intelligence despite them emphasizing its growth. People offer their sincere solutions as if I'd never considered them before.
There are multiple problems and each of them feeds into one another. I can't even keep it all straight in my head on its own. It's only as people pose solutions can I remember the reason(s) the idea won't work. I've had a number of conversations with those get outright belligerent and I've been accused of playing games or just being difficult for the sake of it.
An example of not being able to remember everything. Take today's earlier entry about confidence and self-worth. I intended to include another section but forgot entirely. i suppose that comes from not working with an outline or writing in a stream of consciousness way.
In some ways, I am glad I don't have confidence anymore. I've a history of repeating the abusive behaviors done to me. And part of that is I look for power in any relationship. I love to be able to look down on someone and judge them for not having their stuff together, being unwilling to listen, being undisciplined or lazy. It's not everyone and it's not concocted reasons. I don't mind people who're ignorant, it's not their fault. I don't mind people who try and fail, they need support, not judgment. But people who knowingly and willfully choose to be ignorant, hurtful or reckless - it bothers me a lot.
In the past several years, I've changed a lot, grown in therapy. But I've also caught myself in short periods where I felt myself getting a foothold again, a surge of confidence. And all those bad habits return. I hear the dialogue in my head and sometimes the words slip out as well. There's almost a compulsion, whereas the rest of the time there isn't even the temptation. All the old anger, arrogance and abusiveness're still there, just buried under shame.
Only in my weakened state do I feel like a decent person, too weak to do any serious harm. To feel good about myself is to see a return to willpower and stubborness, the personality that drives through obstacles and is righteous. And yet those things feel really good, intoxicatingly so.
I was chatting with Josh last week about a particular scene in a show he had seen and we could talk about. There's a character who has been tasked with something evil that he feels guilty doing but also feels compelled to do. He gets paralyzed in a fight and as he's in bed, he comments how he's glad this happened to him, because now he can't do the evil thing he was supposed to. I suppose this is why that scene struck me as it did.
It is core to my nature to be a generous and caring person. But when I am proud and confident, I'm also destructive. I build with one hand and tear down with the other. When I lack confidence or any self-worth, then I am too poor and isolated to be of much help to anyone. Generosity requires one has something to actually give. And caring requires you to not be alone. I'm not willing to be the former, and the later is to be useless.
And yet, this brings up something Bev asked about me learning to become a therapist. I don't have the patience to let people figure things out at their own pace. I tell them things they're not ready to hear and badger them to accept it. Josh can attest to this, as our conversations over the years have been more like arguments and me trying to drag him along when he insists on moving at his own pace. And at one point I stopped speaking to him for about a year because he moved too slow for me to be ok with things.
Second, the problem isn't that I lack an activity that gives me self-worth...that itself is a flawed premise. Self-worth is supposed to be intrinsic. Doing more of the thing that gives me this feeling doesn't change that I don't have any self-worth, that it is still conditionally and that I always need to earn it. That's sort of the definition of a band-aid fix. For those who are of the fake it till you make it belief, then this is a step towards a solution. I'm not a practitioner of that idea and I used to berate Shoshana for it all the time as it was really the entirety of how she functions.
To return to the beginning. There are very few points in the knot that can be pulled at to start to untangled the knot. I've been able to identify a precious few, but sadly when I communicate them to people, even the those who profess their desire to help, don't seem to recognize them for what they are and don't take note of them. Which itself makes me distrust the very people who sincerely believe I should trust them. To date, I don't think anyone has ever consciously figured out a piece of string that's good to pull on, and yet it is my vain hope that somewhere in these writings the answer is there for someone to see. I want to say the answers aren't that difficult with some time and thought, but I can hear Warren reminding me people don't think like I do. It's all about keeping track of multiple threads, how they interconnect and often go past one another. And then I remember that is how I wrote rpg plots and no one can remember all the details for those either.
*Edit*
Because I forgot the purpose of the metaphor. There is a way to slice the knot, but it is not through the intellect, but through emotion. And anytime it's happened, it is an accident, not something one can choose to invoke. But it's become increasingly more difficult for that to ever happen again.