Comfort and Repression
When I was about eight, I used to love the Disney version of Robin Hood. I loved it so much, in fact, that I used to attend my Saturday morning bowling league as my alter-ego, Prince John. I would parade around the adults whom I knew and demand payment of the taxes I had apparently levied without their consent. At first they would smile and fake-laugh, a sort of "oh how adorable [but not really]" reaction, until they saw me still standing there with a "well?" expression on my face. After a short burst of incredulity, they would muster up some sort of spare change, candy, or anything a child would enjoy just to get me to leave them alone. I suppose that was the sort of thing Prince John would have done, so I felt accomplished. One my favorite payments was a little toy purse filled with plastic coins of varying denominations. Enough taxes for a short while, I supposed. One day, I got a little mesh bag filled with golden coins in amazing detail. Granted, they were chocolate-filled, but I still felt wealthy. I think I stopped after that, and after my mother told me to.
I thought about that tonight because I realized that, despite my fierce independent mind, I can't deny the fact that I like, in some way, being cared for or watched out for. Every time an opportunity presents itself, I feel like I'm downplaying it because it is viewed as weak or indicative of some apprentice succubus.
I don't like logically knowing something is completely okay but be emotionally devastated by it. I think that has to be one of my biggest problems, as well as one of the most dire hindrances to reconciling others' pasts with my present. I am thoroughly aware that "the past is the past" as well as aware that there are things other people do that are completely none of my business, and I wholly recognize that...rationally. Emotionally, I greatly struggle with various feelings of resentment, anger, disgust, and jealousy. A seemingly reasonable solution would be to, like any emotional problem, talk about it in a structured environment and try to remove the cause, or at least abate it. Nothing could be worse than muting it and burrowing it deep into the recesses of the gut where it festers and ferments. My problem isn't expressing it, it's that the emotions themselves have no basis in reality, and so expression yields the same results as repression: nurturing a perverse hyperbole of the original emotion. This leads me to believe there is something in my lesser consciousness feeding these feelings.
I worry a bit that as I shed the drapery of negativity and seclusion that I have come to find warmth and solace in, I will be faced with an onslaught of these perversions and will subsequently risk the destruction, or at least the severe handicapping, of relationships I've made.