Personal Life Update
Lately I was re-reading one of my favorite books, Glory Goes and Gets Some. The main character, Glory, is describing the new state of her life. After climbing out of drug addiction and coming to terms with her HIV status, she decides to try to start dating again. Eventually she finds an awesome HIV positive dude, they get married and settle into a little house, and she starts laying back and enjoying her life. She says something like, “The painful part was over. Now I just had to live.” Then things, inevitably, start to fall apart, which she introduces with the line, “Never assume the painful part is over.”
Oh. Well. Shit.
During one of the lowest periods of my life, I was working as a barista (working as a barista was not what made this the lowest period of my life). This was during the six-month window between when I told Flint things weren’t working and when I finally left him. His abuse accelerated dramatically, and I was in a mire of guilt and shame and fear and confusion over the end of my marriage, what seemed like the entire end of my life. The café I worked in was a secluded little place that allowed me to be out of my house, away from Flint, eight hours a day. There were very few customers, and lots of time to write and re-write the death of Mary Turner, something I was nursing a morbid obsession with. The café was also full of all sorts of little implements I could use to injure myself, which I did more than I care to admit.
I remember standing in the back one day, shifting my hands from a bucket full of ice to a basin full of near-boiling water, over and over, while watching out of the corner of my eye a couple drinking their lattes. They were laughing and chatting about nothing much. Every now and again, one would pick a piece of lint off the other. After a while, one of them opened up a magazine and the other one opened up the paper, and they read quietly together, occasionally pointing out articles and discussing them. I felt like an alien from planet Fucked In The Head, conducting a sociological field study. Thoughts were running through my head, things that I knew weren’t normal, yet they were painfully honest and genuine. How did she know how to laugh like that? How did she know when to laugh? Why did he touch her arm right there? Was that a nice thing to do? How did he communicate it was nice? How did she pick out that magazine? Wasn’t she paralyzed at the magazine stand, wondering which magazine she should read, what it would say about her if she read this one instead of that one? What if he asked her why she was reading it? How would she answer? Oh my god they’re kissing. How do they know to kiss right now? How do they know they both want to kiss? Did they make a secret signal?
You are a goddamn alien, I told myself. You don’t even know how to act like a human. You’re not even smart enough to figure it out from observation. You’ll never be a real person. Thoughts like those kept me on the hunt for new sharp edges or hot objects that wouldn’t be missed or damaged. I felt if I could just destroy the part of me that wanted to be human, everything would fall into place.
The café had a few regulars, the same eclectic variety that show up at any business. Taxi drivers, retired couples, creepy guys who want to eye-fuck you, teenagers pooling their pocket change for a nuclear blue slushie drink. There was one older woman you could set your watch to – let’s call her Owl. She came in every day at the same time. She ordered the same thing. She showed a significant level of distress if, for some reason, her usual items weren’t available. She had a paper. She had a messenger bag. She sat at the same table, laid her paper out in exact formation, creased just so, laid pens out in an exact order next to the paper, and commenced to read and eat at the exact same rate. First page of the paper, 1/4th of the iced latte was gone. Second page, half. And so on.
My manager (my foster sister) told me that Owl had been some kind of wunderkind in college. Dean’s list, honor roll. She went to law school, skated along at the top of her class, then had a nervous breakdown. Never recovered fully. Now she lived down the street in a small apartment, sometimes visited by her sister. My manager said that sometimes she worried about what would happen if the café shut down; it was obviously such an anchor to Owl, a fraying thread into the real world that she clutched with both hands.
Owl’s story was frighteningly close to mine. I had been a star student in college. I had grades good enough to get into Harvard Law, and that had been my plan. Finish school, spend the summer volunteering, go into Harvard Law. Finish law school, get an internship. Have a baby. Get my first job. Between my first and second job, have a second baby. Then have a nervous breakdown, spend a year in a psyche ward, get back out, go back into my career. Have a third baby. This was honestly how I wrote out my life plan; the nervous breakdown was slotted, very practically, when I was sure I would need it most. It was a pretty optimistic worldview, all things considered. Just when do we get what we want just when we need it most?
Instead, at the tail end of college, Flint had an accident that caused a debilitating injury. He didn’t have health insurance, not because we couldn’t afford it, but because he had been too lazy to sign the papers. We went 30k into debt. I dropped out of college before finishing (I had – and still have – one course left) because he needed 24 hour care. We moved in with his parents. He spent all day crying about how he couldn’t smoke pot anymore, couldn’t find a job that used his skills (he had barely graduated on academic probation). I went to work as a soda jerk, and later as a barista. Rode my bike eight miles to and from work, always pausing over the bridge, thinking in a grotesque amount of detail about Mary Turner. Couldn’t say why. Didn’t even bother trying.
I didn’t look at Owl and become terrified for my future. She was already my present, and I was grimly resigned to it. I saw that same hungry look on her face, that same fighting look. She had watched the world carefully and knew all the right steps. She would come to the café in the morning because that is what normal people did. She would drink a coffee while reading a paper because that is what normal people did. She would have a pen and she would write things because normal people have pens and normal people write things. She would go through the motions, every day, because normal people do.
That was honestly all people like her and me could see when we looked at normal people. We saw them go through motions. I did not believe it came naturally, unconsciously. It was all learned. For every thing a person did, every meaningless gesture, there was a conscious choice behind it. I knew this, because I had never learned these things. I had never learned them so quickly and effortlessly and so young that I was fooled into thinking they were natural. I knew it was a choice, to flick your wrist just so in a benign social interaction, or to stab yourself in the palm with a fork under the table. Each motion had a reason, a purpose, a message to convey about who you were and how you were to be treated.
There were two things that separated people like Owl and me from normal people. The first was that we knew the lie behind the belief that people behave in public in some organic and natural way. All behavior has to be learned, over and over again, and perfected, and forced, and consciously chosen. If that was the only thing that separated us, we could have been, more or less, normal. But the second thing that kept us from an ordinary public life was how very difficult it was for us to choose the right actions. A normal person can decide to choose a new blend of coffee today, snug in the security that this does not say anything damning about their personality, safe in the knowledge that they will not be punished, or hurt, or abused for this choice, and relatively sure that it will be an okay coffee and their day will proceed apace without an overwhelming need to inflict severe harm upon the body to punish it for choosing the wrong coffee.
That was not something I was capable of doing. I could go to the café and order a coffee because that is what normal people do. But I would have to go to the right café, order the right coffee, what is “right” being based on a strenuous effort of observation and dissection of those around me. I could not just go to the café and order a coffee because, hey, I feel like a coffee this morning. I did not have those impulses. I was too broken to want anything simple and pleasant, to even conceive of those things existing for me. I could do those things as a cipher for another – if Flint felt like a coffee this morning, I could go acquire one for him – but the part of my brain that could operate independently, for my own pleasure, and with any strength of conviction, was atrophied to the point of non-existence. It was easier not to want anything at all than it was to want a coffee this morning.
That is the most broken I ever was. If it had gone on, I probably would have ended up like Owl, unable even to work in the simplest of jobs due to the crippling and overwhelming fear of doing everything wrong, of exposing yourself as an alien. I cannot say there was any one given thing that changed it all for me. I left Flint, which was an unbelievable wrenching, tearing out the very roots of my reality. I don’t know how or where I found the strength for that, except in small and slow doses, in re-learning how to flinch and eventually run from pain. Leaving Flint wasn’t any guarantee of a better life. I had the space to think and feel, without surveillance or interrogation. His, anyway. I still had mine, built in, chattering away, beating myself up from the inside out. But I had been hating myself and hurting myself since my earliest memory, which is me toddling into the kitchen, eyes barely counter-level, opening up the knife drawer, pulling out a butcher knife, holding it to my throat, and trying to come up with one compelling reason why I couldn’t. I was young enough then to be swayed by, “You’ll get in trouble,” which turned out to be the overwhelming theme of why I did or did not do most things in my life. In any case, my own self-hatred was nothing new or spectacular. It was even like an old friend, sometimes. Without the need to hide it from my husband or my husband’s friend, with a full apartment all my own to lose my goddamn mind in, I found that the madness eventually passes, and it does not destroy me.
When I went through my first round of therapy, I was like a dry river bed. My therapist only had to insert small questions into my unceasing dry wind-howl – “I LAUGHED AT THE WRONG TIME YESTERDAY AND I LAUGHED KIND OF WEIRD AND THAT IS GOING TO MAKE EVERYBODY HATE ME” “Harriet, should you care?” “UMMMMMMMM DON’T I HAVE TO?” “No.” “Oh. ‘Cause I don’t, I guess.” – and I sucked it up so greedily. I DON’T HAVE TO CARE. I don’t have to care if I’m normal. I don’t have to care how I look to others. I am alone now and it is not so bad and I can stay this way, if need be. It is a lot better than having a husband and friends, I can tell you goddamn that.
When I went through my second round of therapy, I was a little more together. I had my first level of Maslow’s pyramid set – I knew with about 99% certainty that I was, in fact, going to live – and so I felt I was strong enough now to deal with the “real” issues. I told my therapist, point blank, that this time I was coming to see her because I had to learn how to make friends.
“Do you?” she asked.
And that was the end of that.
I have had an overwhelming need, my entire life, to be perceived correctly. I am sure I have made real friends in my life, people who really truly liked me/loved me and enjoyed my company. I could never feel it, never touch that. I could never believe anybody could actually like me, rather than liking the motions I was doing an exceptionally good job of going through. But having friends was one of those motions, and it was a constant source of shame that I didn’t have more, that I couldn’t connect, couldn’t feel those things other people professed to feel about friendship (although I didn’t –- and honestly still don’t – think most people really mean those things; I’m not the only person in the world savvy enough to identify the motions). Even the times in my life when I have been surrounded by people, and in retrospect can say many of them really honestly liked me, I have still always, in my head, identified myself as somebody who is utterly friendless.
My therapist got me to a place where I was okay accepting that. She told me I deserved a break from the “need” to socially interact. She gave me permission to be a recluse. I did need permission, because I was going to do it anyway, but without permission I was going to do it secretly and shamefully. Even if I couldn’t admit or accept what I needed, my psyche obviously could, because it was busily pushing people away from me, making up excuses about why sitting at home in my underpants drinking Silk Chocolate Soy Milk and vodka and watching The L Word was actually “some chores I really gotta get done, so I can’t hang tonight.” Having my therapist give me permission to be such a lonesome sop gave me time and space to deal with my own issues without having to navigate the complexities of others, without having their needs bleed over into my own, until I have convinced myself that I need what they need, that I should be going through their motions instead of my own.
I think I was hoping, in the back of my head somewhere, that it would stay this way. That I wouldn’t ever need to deal with social stuff. I wouldn’t ever need to deal with friends. I could stay in my underpants the rest of my life.
And I can. I mean, that’s a choice I can make, and if it works for me, awesome. But I’m having one of those things right now, those times when the universe keeps banging me over the head with something. I keep reading lines in books, or having strange interactions, or having a blog meltdown, or a fight with the bear, and all these things are whispering to me, “Harriet, it is time.” It is time to deal with this stuff not because it MUST BE DONE IN ORDER TO BE NORMAL, not because it is the motion to go through at this time. I have finally, though it took years, reached the organic reason, the real and independent need. It is time for me to deal with my social anxiety because I want to. Because I like people more than I thought, and I am sad every time I recede from them due to sheer terror. Because I want to be able to pass through my day without the fear that somebody will ask me how my bear is and I will stumble and stutter and freak out and run away because I don’t have a pre-prepared answer to that question. Because I crave a real connection with other people. Which is new. I’ve always viewed other people as, well, sort of as objects. As creatures that possess the things I desperately need – approval, a sense of self, love, status – and will only give these things to me if I do exactly the right dance with exactly the right steps. And if I do not, they become the creatures what hold my awful doom in their hands, who can mete it out with a few annoyed sighs or eye rolls. I have never viewed people as complex beings whose wants and needs and feelings and desires are something I can connect with, rather than something I can imitate like a robot. I have never viewed people as things I want to connect with. Finally, that’s changing, and with it comes the frustration in realizing how ill-equipped I am to meet this need of mine.
I have these huge defense mechanisms that have been lying dormant during these years of reclusiveness. Big war machines ready to roll out with the “HARRIET YOU MADE A SHITTY JOKE ABORT ABORT ABORT GO CUT YOURSELF.” I dismantled machines very similar to these during my long slow period of learning how not to hate myself. So while I’m annoyed to find them again, in a new corner of my brain, I know I’m not entirely unable to take them apart. I’ve done this before. It took forever and drove me nuts and made me so damn sick of life and health and everything, and made me feel as vulnerable as spun glass. But I’ve done this before.
Never assume the painful part is over.
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good luck, lady. i hope you find one or two nice friends in your city that you can count on or just have an easy fun time hanging out with.
i spent most of my life thinking people were my friends only because they were scared not to be, like I’d kill them or something if they decided they needed to get me out of their lives. people only said nice things to me to make me feel better (which is true, if you think about it, so that is very, very confused). therapy helps, but no, the painful part never does seem to end, not even after 8 hard years of work on it.
I wanted to tell you that thanks to you and your blog I finally made and kept a dr. appt today for an annual exam, which I almost never do because I dissociate so badly and have speculum-induced flashbacks. today I did not dissociate, and I told the dr. ahead of time that I’ve been raped and abused and told her the things I needed her to say and do to make me feel safe. so, thank you for being alive and writing and (despite no real effort on your part) helping me find the strength to take care of my health.
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I’m so glad!
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This made me so sad.
This is the first I’ve heard of Mary Turner. What an awful story. People are horrible, huh? Kind of makes me not want to have anything to do with them.
Anyway, if it makes you feel any better, lots of internet people think you’re awesome.
Because you are. Be kind to yourself, dear.
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“I felt like an alien from planet Fucked In The Head, conducting a sociological field study.”
OMG, that’s how I feel 100% of the time! And I love that you can say it in a way that makes me laugh about it.
One of the things my abusive mother and equally abusive ex-boyfriend adored doing was try and convince me that I am a crazy person. And every time I would experience anxiety and distress induced by their treatment of me, they’d jump right on that and point and go, “See? You ARE crazy!”
Now I pretty much feel like this weird Fucked In The Head alien more or less constantly, but laughing about it helps a lot.
“She gave me permission to be a recluse. I did need permission, because I was going to do it anyway, but without permission I was going to do it secretly and shamefully.”
I kind of feel like I got that permission from reading about your own reclusiveness and OK-ness with it. I always felt that I had to push myself to be social, because then I would be less of a Fucked-In-The-Head-ian, but I crave being alone in a quiet space more than anything in the whole world, ever.
The last few weeks, I have been *soaking* in it and it’s so awesome.
“I’ve always viewed other people as, well, sort of as objects. As creatures that possess the things I desperately need – approval, a sense of self, love, status – and will only give these things to me if I do exactly the right dance with exactly the right steps. And if I do not, they become the creatures what hold my awful doom in their hands, who can mete it out with a few annoyed sighs or eye rolls. I have never viewed people as complex beings whose wants and needs and feelings and desires are something I can connect with, rather than something I can imitate like a robot. I have never viewed people as things I want to connect with.”
I kind of view people through both of these lenses. What makes me get tired very easily when I am around people is that if I put a foot wrong, they’ll fucking obliterate me with an emotional flamethrower. Even people whom I trust to be benign and non-abusive still scare me in this manner and sometimes when I come home from spending time with friends, I am hyperventilating and can’t do anything until I’ve spent 2 hours looking at cat pictures on the Internet. (Thank god for cat pictures on the Internet).
But I also do connect with people and have a couple of friends for whom I feel goofy, mushy and strong feelings of love, just for the way they are and for their simply existing. And I treasure having moments of not being alone, of the sense of having company in life as a whole, that I have had with those friends.
But it’s a rare thing, I’ve only had a handful of friends like that in my whole life. If it’s just casual hanging out with casual acquaintance-type people, I always get all knotty and out of breath and want to be at home in my underpants.
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Please, for the love of all things good and holy – get outta my head, lady.
I heart you so hard. Is that even possible for people like us? To heart stuff and things? Hard? At all? Meh. I spend too much time lurking, and no time supporting. Sorry.
Harriet, I got a dog. He thinks I’m Queen Shit of Turd Island. Every single day. Wow. How do I tell him that I will be sure to disappoint? I will, at some point, be paralyzed by fear, or paralyzed by my own navel-gazing, or paralyzed by the boogie-man, or paralyzed by traffic, or paralyzed by bright lights and shiny things, or paralyzed by… I don’t know. I don’t think he particularly cares what frightens me, enrages me, or bores me. He thinks I’m too cool for school. Especially when I feed him. It’s just that easy.
Get a dog, girlfriend. It provides me a safe, easy topic to dialogue with other people about, and provides me with a super convenient excuse to avoid people (“Sorry, gotta get home to feed/wash/crap the dog. Look, I’m totally NORMAL”). Total win-win.
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“Do you?” she asked.
And that was the end of that.
I think I love your therapist.
I grew up in a house where expressions of hungers, desires, emotion were always questioned or corrected. In a recent journal entry I wrote this:
My therapist would often ask me a question: “How are you feeling right now?” And I could never answer. I could describe what I was thinking. I could come up with some things I might be feeling, or that someone in my same shoes might feel or could feel. But the question “what are you feeling?” could stop me in my tracks, because usually, I don’t know.
“…I don’t think I’m a sociopath, but I do think I learned a lot about how to behave and interact with other people the way sociopaths do – by figuring out the feeling or reaction that other people expect and imitating it to get through the situation.”
I had the near-nervous breakdown at 25, and since then I also went through several rounds of therapy:
1st Round: Boundaries and how I should learn what they are and how to have them.
2nd Round: Expressing desires, needs, hungers directly and without apology.
3rd (Current) Round: Emotions, and how to feel them without simultaneously repressing them or telling myself I shouldn’t be having them.
You’re not the only alien, Ms. Good-Writing Internet Acquaintance.
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I love this blog a huge love. I am an eccentric recluse of long standing, except when I am just a plain old shattered madwoman. The whole Recluse Thing has been made somewhat complicated for me by slow realization that with most people, what you see is actually all there is; breathtakingly shallow and stupid seems to be the norm. So, although I regret my self-loathing, my anger and fear, I regret even more having tried to suppress those things in order to be pleasant and socially acceptable. I am lucky in that I do have one perfect and indispensable friend, whom I got by luck, not by doing anything right. Also, for those of us in the runaway slave predicament, the Internet community is a life saver. After years of loneliness and bleak singularity, I have found a comforting number of people who eloquently describe having experiences and opinions I share.
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Harriet, you are awesome. You have so much strength, and I am so impressed and moved and in love with your writing. No need to respond to my comments. Just know that you’re not alone in your alien-ness.
When I was a teenager I used to remind myself, “‘Normal’ is weird, and ‘weird’ is more normal than people think.”
Part of your hermit-ness might also be that you are a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). Here’s a self-test: http://www.hsperson.com/pages/test.htm. This was eye-opening for me.
Since I have learned about this, I have actually become a lot more comfortable with other people — because I can recognize my limits, I understand why being around people wears me out, and I can now easily give myself permission to be “anti-social” because I NEED recovery time!
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Harriet,
I’ve wanted to write something to you for a while. I discovered your blog about a month ago and have been deeply impressed and moved by your insight and style. What follows is a rambling explanation of why your voice really resonates with me.
I too am an alien. I have spent years awake bloody worrying about what I did wrong when how badly what they think now how much of a dick I am whether I came off weird or on the wrong tangent or if I’m just a horribly annoying but essentially harmless inadvert etc etc ad nauseum.
I have had two ‘Flints’ (though I married neither, thank fuck – came close both times). I’ve been sexually assaulted. I haven’t worked through those properly yet. I have worked in the women’s movement and identify as a radical feminist. I go to uni because having a degree is what ‘normal’, valid people have. Also as a reactionary act of self-protection from the System that enables the preventable (but kind of necessary and objectively fascinating) hurts and knocks. In my younger years I did a fair amount of self harm, through actual acts of self injury and through high-risk behaviour. I maintain some of the proud (:/) traditions of that self harm to this day, in the form of smoking (pot and cigamahols) and compulsive internal self-torture (guilt shame pressure guilt worry panic guilt anxiety embarrassment guilt). I spend weeks inside in my nice safe place hiding out from the clamorous horrors without. Which means I spend a bit of time working on the horrors within. Mirror halls of implication.
I can’t tell whether what you write is just so spot on to my ways of seeing because your magnificent talent, wit and empathy impels EVERY reader to identify with what you say, or whether it is the literal fact that you have had many experiences comparable to my own and therefore approach your writing and thinking from a similar, or at least, er, translatable, perspective to my own. I am also not quite sure if the preceding makes the right kind of sense. Once I have pushed ‘submit comment’ I will spend the next couple of days thinking back over it and mentally editing what I’ve said, berating myself for not being clear enough/ being too open to a stranger/ coming off as a dick/ someone not aware or attuned to the ‘realness’/ socially inept/ weirdo/ dumbass.
Enough of that though. I am perfectly aware that those things are my problem for me to sort out and I didn’t want to write in some act of therapeutic disclosure (or perhaps slightly.. but not in a way intended to pass the energy and responsibility across to someone else, if you know what I mean). I’m the only one who is ever going to be me, so I’m the only one who can try to suss it out. And I’ve come a long way. But I know now (Really Know. I think there’s intellectually knowing something (by reading/ being told), knowing it through experience and then a kind of mix of the two plus a teaspoon of I do not know what that is that Real Knowing. A kind of frontal/ emotional equivalent of unconscious aptitude, that knowing that allows you to operate a car or play a piano better when not looking directly at it. Bit of a tangent sorry.), that however much I work on my weirdnesses and not going down the dark passageways wherein danger lies, I will always be me. I will always be fighting the black dog and the guilt monster and the social phobia. And as much as it’s a fucking pain in the arse to not be able to just live in the blissful mire of ignorance and carelessness that everyone else appears to occupy, I’d still rather be me and I’d still rather have to deal with this shit every day.
Because some days I find a peace (for want of a less religiously loaded term). Just a moment, the kind that slips away when perceived, like trying to gaze directly at a star. And I well up with the hopeless absurd brutal joy and horror of the whole thing (life, in case I’ve wandered too far) and feel the need to make some kind of physical expression of that elation. Which usually comes in the form of some awfully embarrassing adolescent poem about eating the sky or being the mountain.
But anyway. Interesting stuff.
You seem to have the magic and the realness. And that is fucking rad.
If you are ever in New Zealand you should let me buy you a coffee. I know a very safe secluded cafe where they make a mean flat white.
Cheers for your writings and your awesomeness.
lex
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Oh, yeah, I was also going to recommend a pet. They are so immensely great for unconditional love, non-threatening companionship and a sense of connection with another living being. And if you are upset, they soothe you and make you play totally dumb and utterly fantastic games like Chase and What’s That Wild Thing In The Closet and Pretending To Eat Mama’s Fingers, Ooh, U R So Scary. Animals are so awesome. It makes dealing with their poop daily completely worth it. For the intermediate to advanced recluse, pets help like whoa.
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I have often wondered am I from another planet. For different reasons than you do, but I think THAT feeling is just the same.
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I am currently going through friendship dramas, in a quiet way. One of my best friends has turned into a drama machine, and the drama is always about me. There are semi-valid reasons for this (loooong story, and I ain’t sharing here) but none directly provoked by me. And every time she calls or emails I go into shut down mode. I am becoming very distressed about it because no matter how hard I want not to, I still go into shut-down, push-away mode. And I’ve stopped wanting not to now, it’s too hard.
I still feel traumatised by the shit that’s happened in the last year, and I am running on my emotional reserves. Any extra emotion – even if it’s good! just sends me over the edge. I just can’t. Not right now. Sorry. I have never been a hugely emotional person, but I’ve never been this tapped out, never not had the resources to PRETEND that I thought all of my acquaintences are lovely and shiny.
I’d say I’m pretty normal. Maybe I straddle some border there. I’ve always known those things were learnt, but I learnt them easy enough to be able to pretend that they weren’t. I’m at step one with you and Owl, and not step two. Usually. But I’ve never made friends easy because to me, liking someone genuinely and being their friend are two different things. And when it comes down to it, I feel that being a true friend is being willing to give a part of yourself, to drop everything when you’re needed. And I am rarely willing to do that. So I don’t make friends. Not really. THEY think we’re friends. I know we’re not, not really.
And turns out, even when I do, I still put myself first. I feel bad about that, you have no idea, I feel like a horrible person, but I have started putting myself first automatically because the alternatives are too horrible, and I am trying to be glad about that. It’s not going so well today, but I’m trying.
Maybe the fact that I’m sitting and listening to the phone ring and I know it’s my mother and I didn’t answer it has something to do with why it’s not going so well. Oh well.
Man. I used to think I was one of the normos. Not that I especially liked that, but… Is there room for me in the plant of fucked in the head? Yesterday I thought to myself ‘I remember thinking about being happy, but I don’t remember what it felt like.’ I remember thinking ‘the sun is shining, what a wonderful day!’ but I can’t recall the feeling. I am absolutely positive that I will, again, possibly soon. But most people don’t wonder about that, they just go out and buy something. Whoops, slipped into bitterness
Good luck.
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“I felt like an alien from planet Fucked In The Head, conducting a sociological field study.”
YES. All the time. THANK YOU.
Beautiful post. I got nothin much to add, so I’ll leave you with a quote that I kept in my head when I got to the point of needing a bit more from life than just lots of underpants time:
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
Anais Nin
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My partner is almost entirely like that. They don’t self harm about it (well, at least I hope not anymore x_x), but they do tend to hide and self isolate and then feel like shit about it.
That going out to get friends thing, take it slow. Social anxiety is a tough nut to crack and honestly, fight that fear of looking abnormal.
A lot of us are abnormal and its a relief to know that not everyone is a social robot. You’ll get much better friends that way.
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Ms. Wonderful Harriet, to follow up on my earlier HSP comment:
In your quest for “normal,” you might also look up info about introverts. You sound like one. It’s no bad thing to be — but our culture is set up to value extroverts:
“With their endless appetite for talk and attention, extroverts also dominate social life, so they tend to set expectations. In our extrovertist society, being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable, a mark of happiness, confidence, leadership. Extroverts are seen as bighearted, vibrant, warm, empathic. “People person” is a compliment. Introverts are described with words like “guarded,” “loner,” “reserved,” “taciturn,” “self-contained,” “private”—narrow, ungenerous words, words that suggest emotional parsimony and smallness of personality.”
(From Caring for Your Introvert, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch — a good read.)
Notice that he says “being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable” — it’s considered normal, not IS — so tell the internal censor to shut it when it starts to yell at you about what you “should” be like. Staying home in your underpants is a valid choice — a valid NEED for an introvert. But relationships with worthwhile people are also a valid need — just in smaller doses than extroverts think is “normal.”
In looking for the link for the above, I ran across this story: http://kingdomofintroversion.com/2009/06/19/extrovert-malfunction-in-foreign-societies/
It makes me laugh.
Favorite paragraph: “As an introvert studying abroad, I found that I had an enormous advantage over the other people in my group. I had spent all my life in a society that had made me feel an outsider. To feel that I had no stake or say in the surrounding society seemed for me the most natural impulse in the world. That I had to adapt to what others were doing, even if I didn’t agree with it, was so obvious it didn’t need thinking.”
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Harriet, thank you. I come from an entirely different planet (although still not what most would call normal), and your writing helps me greatly to understand (or at least comprehend) the reactions of people who’ve been through stuff similar to yours. It helps me be a better friend to them, to better recognize when they need to be left alone for a while, and when they need an encouraging word.
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Harriet, word. The only thing that you gotta realize is that Planet Fucked in the Head is the one we’re all living on. It’s base state for a lot of us. Every once in a while, you’ll see a woman like Owl who is actually, visibly, as screwed up as the rest of us secretly are. And that’s scary. But there’s a solid chunk of the population who are also ready to commit hari-kari over a shitty joke and who go hit walls after spending forty-five minutes making stilted conversation and feeling like idiots.
The socially ept are the aliens. They’re nice aliens, don’t get me wrong, and they tend to enliven parties, but they’re aliens. In my (alien-free) family, we all get together and read our own books. In the same room. That’s our big social hangout activity. Your people are out here, trust me. We’re a problem to find, because we’re all in our undies in front of the computer (me, now, for example), but we’re here.
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I would hug you but honestly I am not that good at touching people
I became a recluse when I was with my husband, I just couldn’t handle other people, his health problems and my sucky job at the same time. His answer to it was to try to force me into interacting with people, even though my psychiatrist said I was unable at the time.
I was a mess, finally he punched me. I left, came back, left again after he started trying to force me to have sex with him and did a good deal of the time.
Since I got out of the situation I have found the ability to be in the same general area as other people. I still deal with anxiety attacks when I am stressed out, I am still awkward and I still cancel more times than I keep plans with people and I do feel like an alien entity myself most times.
It is always tough, but at times it is worth it and I am lucky to have friends that have been with me through all the shit and know me and love me, odd critter from space that I am.
Anyway, I wish you luck, you can do this if it is what you feel you are ready to do. All the socially awkward people in the interwebs are pulling for you.
And fuck, I really want coffee after reading this.
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“How did she pick out that magazine? Wasn’t she paralyzed at the magazine stand, wondering which magazine she should read, what it would say about her if she read this one instead of that one? What if he asked her why she was reading it? How would she answer?”
Yep, this is me, too. I’m working on it, but there are so many times when I can’t be sure I made a particular decision because *I* wanted to, or because my brain had quickly and efficiently done the calculus of how-does-this-reflect-upon-me? As difficult as this journey is, it’s nice to know I’m not alone.
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My social awkwardness has never been as severe. I don’t see other people as aliens and their actions as preplanned, for example, but I am very wary of many relationships. It seems like so many friendships I see out there are superficial, more about shared interests than any real connection.
I was never in an abusive relationship, but I’ve always been very sensitive to criticism and to how other people perceive me. (It doesn’t help that I’m very good at picking up other people’s emotions.) My peers in middle school picked apart EVERYTHING I did or said to the point where I was terrified of saying anything. If I heard derisive laughter in school hallways, I was always afraid it was directed at me. The sad thing is that my paranoia wasn’t unfounded. Then there was my father who would aggressively mock me every time I did anything wrong. (It’s really amazing how effectively bullies identify sensitive people.) It took a long time, but I eventually learned to give myself permission to be an idiot and also learned to forgive myself for making mistakes.
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Harriet-
You. Are. Amazing.
And yeah, you’re in my head, too. How do you do that? I’m wondering if there’s some weird Cosmic thing going on, that I found this blog about a month ago and then started reading all the posts, and then you put up these, and then I realized this blog is like a mirror into my life right now.
I’m 42 and I’ve been around enough. And been through a lot of what you’ve been through, with some extras. I gather you are quite a bit younger than me. And I honor you extra for that, because you appear to be processing at an amazing rate, and you are both reminding me of things and teaching me new things every time I read a post.
Thank you.
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I just wanted to say that wow, I am glad you are writing this blog and also glad that I found it. You say some fucking brilliant things. Some of your writing articulates some fuzzy yet uncomfortable intuition that has been floating in my head for I don’t know how long.
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THANK YOU.
This is one of the best descriptions I’ve ever seen of the mindset of someone who is intelligent, capable, and beaten down by an abusive relationship. I think a lot of people assume that only stupid women end up in abusive relationships, and that the really smart ones are smart enough to just “know” that the guy will be abusive.
Whatever. There’s no way to tell how a guy will act when he’s worried about losing his “possessions.” Smart girls still want to be loved and cared for. Smart girls will still get with guys who aren’t perfect but are ok enough. And smart girls will still get trapped in a marriage with someone they thought they knew. I still feel that marriage is nothing more than the legal recognition of the male’s possession of another human being.
Yes, I’m still broken. I’m still an alien, watching my friends and asking all those questions you were asking about the couple. I still wonder why people do what they do, how they know what they seem to know, and why I can’t just see the world they do. I still can’t believe that my experiences aren’t the exception, rather than the rule. And I still believe that everyone is dealing with it in the same ways I was–hiding how bad things are and pretending that everything’s ok.
I wonder how people get better and are able to have healthy relationships. I don’t think I even know what a healthy relationship *is* anymore. But I still have to try to believe that it’ll get better someday, even if I also believe that it’s a stupid thing to try to believe.
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I wish at least half of the books on my shelf were written by you. There’s definitely a spare room for you here if you ever needed it! (Isn’t it great that you could be harboured and bought coffees all over the world? I think it’s amazing).
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Hey there:
I just wanted to let you know, it’s very possible that you are much farther along than most people in being self-aware and seeing other people as real human beings. Most “normal” people don’t, but the main difference is they don’t care to do the work on themselves it would take to get there.
I know random internet affirmation isn’t really incredibly valuable, but that’s all.
Bella
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For an alien from Planet Fucked in the Head, you have the most touching, sensitive, nuanced, and are I say, loving insight into a sizable portion of humanity than, well, most of humanity does. (I “pass” for an extrovert, and often am, for short bursts…till I’m out of gas and need significant downtime to recover. Call me a bubbly introvert.) Learning that it’s okay to be by yourself and take care of your own needs is a lesson that people in general, and women in particular, often never learn until the breakdown happens.
My heart just isn’t big enough all by itself to wish you all the peace you deserve, but I’ll kick in my share, FWIW.
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Harriet
Not relevant to this conversation, but you need to read this.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/14/when-getting-beaten-by-yo_n_286029.html
Domestic violence as a “pre-existing condition” for medical insurance. That’s f*cked up on so many levels.
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One more voice of “wow, yes”. When I read your second-last paragraph, I felt a deep, ancient tension in my belly begin to release. The feeling of relief was almost painful. It’s okay. Other people have done this. I can do this, too. It will hurt, but it’s okay.
Thank you.
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Thank you! This explains so many things that I feel but do not have the words that allow me to express them. “You have done this before, and you can do this again.” These are words I have been using as a mantra for awhile now. They aren’t working so great thus far, but amazingly enough I *am* getting through. Despite all of the desires to hurt myself, to pull away from all social situations, despite the depression that is drawing me down, I am doing it. My hope for you is that you will continue to find your way as well.
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I don’t think my issues were as severe as yours. But last January, my coach/therapist asked me to draw a map of terrain I already covered, and to indicate which steps I had already taken, which skills I already acquired.
That was a major shift in perspective for me.
Humans have their good sides. I’m just saying.
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OK, this is not at all life-affirming or anything like that, but… I had this period in my life where I was on the verge of being paralyzed by social anxiety. Only I tend to be sort of prickly and cerebral and prosaic and totally turned off by the touchy-feely flowers-and-rainbows type of therapy, which was the only thing available to me at the time (to my knowledge). And I was starting grad school so I pretty much just had to deal with it or bail out on a kick-ass opportunity. Also, I tend to be fairly sarcastic and cynical. So it occurred to me one day that it’s frequently the case that all the people you’re interacting with in a given situation are so self-involved that they will barely even notice that you laughed in the wrong place or said some weird thing. And if they do notice, they’re probably too self-absorbed or not self-reflective enough to give it much thought. So strangely enough, this was my lever. I developed this inner dialogue that countered those “I LAUGHED KIND OF WEIRD AND THAT IS GOING TO MAKE EVERYBODY HATE ME” thoughts with a wry and sarcastic response about how self-involved I was being to even think that all these self-involved people would notice or make much of it. Over time I sort of got over this worldview (kinda sorta), but in the moment it totally worked for me. No doubt it wouldn’t work for everyone. It’s likely this wouldn’t work for anyone but me. Poking fun at yourself is probably not very therapeutic for most people. But sometimes it’s worth putting it out there, if only for the self-indulgent thrill of writing through an old experience and reliving a small victory for a moment.
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Holy crap. It is like you’re reporting **from inside my head.**
(Sorry I don’t have a more coherent or illuminating comment.)
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