Coping with Coping
"What's one negative quality that you would use to describe yourself?"
"I'm not ambitious enough."
"You're applying for a full time job and going to college, that sounds rather ambitious to me."
I got that job, but I still didn't feel ambitious. And honestly, I'm not. I don't feel ambitious. I really don't have a lot of drive. The main part of the problem being that I really don't have much direction.
Being the youngest child left with my mother while she sat about feeling sorry for herself and vented her feelings on didn't leave a lot of validations left for my own feelings. Neither did the obliviousness of my blanked out great person dad who just wanted to live his own life selfishly. This might be a big part of why we all came out with the emotional receptivity of petrified wood. Or heck, there's probably just some genetic factors there.
Still, my family has this tendency to exude disappointment and talk to me about bettering myself constantly with the very heavy implication that there's a lot that needs improving. It's lessened over time as I've just brushed them off, avoided or simply changed subject on them enough that the majority have given me up as a lost cause. Because I'm not interested in them making me what they think I should be or what they want to tell me I should do, I've been labeled as my mom 2.0 by my brother and father.
Literally, they liken me to my combative, literally insane, sorrow wallowing, grudge obsession, judgmentally insulting mother because I won't let them tell me what to do and then do it obediently. Shit. They keep forgetting I have a back injury and seem surprised when I mention it. I guess they're just too busy going 'fatty like ur mom' every time I speak.
"Normal people, if they bottle all their emotions up, it'll come exploding out. But Liz has some kind of black hole down there that sucks it all into oblivion."
I'll be the first to admit that I'm a bit emotionally muted. It's an interesting thing. Most of the time, I can consciously tell myself to stop bothering with a low grade of negative emotion and I can literally stop feeling it. Then I just feel tired. Stoic was what I was labeled in high school, before that I think I was more in the normal ranges of expression. Or at least on some kind of bell curve. I know I was a very expressive child.
Either way, it hasn't really made me the most beloved pick for great Christmas presents.
For some reason, though, it's historically made me both very intimidating to people and like a magnet for others. A lot of my friends don't have good coping mechanisms. I'm surrounded by people with huge amounts of anxiety. It can get frustrating because for the majority of people I kind of have to fake the emotional support thing through a filter of psychological and observational knowledge and it can get really exhausting. I'm not talking about my friends who I actually take a vested interest in, but other people expecting that supportive back and forth dialogue.
It's gotten even more exhausting since working with the animal rescue. The people I was the original contact for still think I run the thing so they contact me with their problems. They call me if they killed their cat, crying and screaming. Yesterday I had to talk down a foster who was overwhelmed because her partner is sick and just had surgery. What IS it? Is it related to the fact that 80% of people think I'd make a great dom including my JEWISH SUPERVISOR? I've been purposefully mean to people on the net who, instead of invoking drama and backlash, suddenly broke down and told me their life story. It's totally exasperating.
But a longer standing form of exasperation is in the form of the friends I've had who seem to get the idea that NOTHING bothers me and they don't need to bother with my feelings. I had friends who would dote on other friends who were miserable but if I showed the slightest desire for emotional support they thought I wanted to have sex with them. Half the time, though, I've been more of the maypole that everyone freaks out around. Which is an awful idea. I'm a pisces, I'm made of floundery fish pieces and a billion nervous habits, not solid stone.
"It is simple for someone with your aptitude, it shouldn't take any time at all."
The bad thing is, I STILL feel lazy, anyway. Talk about conditioning.
I'm not a type A. I'm nowhere in the same electron cloud level as a type A. But here I am working a full time net security job with no managing where shit changes constantly and no one wants to say they're responsible for anything. I've got forty hours of training to do between work over the next two months to keep my certification or else my job would be in jeopardy. I'm working reluctant nights at a medical office where I'm given like no direction either and they want me to take on MORE responsibilities because my brother's family had the surprising revelation that I'm actually smart somehow. Or, at least, the twin sister did. I'm pretty sure my brother's hot, type A wife still thinks I'm a deadbeat.
Sylvie would step back and let me run that cat rescue, HAPPILY if I did it. That's why I've been only keeping a peripheral eye upon it. If I touch it at all, she labels it as mine and asks when I'm going to drive across town to schedule an adoption visit and I just don't have it in me to keep doing all of that. Bad enough I can't get a single week without some cat related trip. Even worse is that she doesn't realize her one-up-manship. You tell her you're busy and she has to list all the reasons why she's BUSIER and JFC, I really knew that I shouldn't run a volunteer association so why act like I should HAVE to juggle it?
I STILL had to step in recently because one foster is dying of cancer, one is moving in with family because of cancer, one refuses to do anything else for their ill foster and one flipped the fuck out because her parents own the house- and she wasn't ADVERTISING enough for new fosters. For fucks sake, when people give you three weeks notice, don't wait three weeks to try to find a solution. *I* had to advertise because BTW I'm only going to be HOME for 11 days out of May and some cat who needs medication REALLY SHOULDN'T be getting taken care of by a pet sitter. It's no one else's fault that she has 25 fucking cats in her house, it's really not.
Then I still kind of run my own household. I walk around making a checklist of things that need to be done and it's like a constant drumbeat. There's SO much stuff that just never gets put away and it stares at me. Because I'm like some wizard and no one else can do it. And I do try really hard not to be bitter, and I'm really not, but god. Even playing games feels like work. Getting complimented for how SMART and EFFECTIVE and EFFICIENT and HARD WORKING I am just feels like code words for sucker.
I'm not taking good care of myself. I have no interest anymore for healthy food because it just seems tasteless and unsatisfying like everything else is. I know that's all stress chemicals and what not. I don't even want to do relaxing things I enjoy because so much crap still needs to be done. Then it feels like scheduling in some relaxation is even like work. I'm starting to zone instead of get things done. Even my showering is lackluster and half assed. I don't really cook much anymore and I used to plan meals weekly. The animals eat better than I do because I can't exactly stop their care, not that even that hasn't suffered some.
My car is a dying clunker, it's not going to last long. I'm worried about money peripherally all the time. Even doing projects I like feels like too much of a mental chore, much less thinking creatively. I can't even get the cooldown reprieve of loud music in my car on the ride home because I carpool with Mrs. I'm-not-racist-reverse-racism-is-true-because-I-went-to-a-school-where-black-people-were-mean-to-me-nothing-wrong-with-homosexuals-I-just-don't-want-the-liberal-indoctrination-teaching-my-kid-there's-anything-normal-about-it-Coworker while we ride silently to and from work to save money.
And it's like I'm a bull in a China shop because I know that even by posting this I'm going to be the cause of days worth of guilt and anxiety. I'm just tired of being responsible for everything.
"I'm not ambitious enough."
"You're applying for a full time job and going to college, that sounds rather ambitious to me."
I got that job, but I still didn't feel ambitious. And honestly, I'm not. I don't feel ambitious. I really don't have a lot of drive. The main part of the problem being that I really don't have much direction.
Being the youngest child left with my mother while she sat about feeling sorry for herself and vented her feelings on didn't leave a lot of validations left for my own feelings. Neither did the obliviousness of my blanked out great person dad who just wanted to live his own life selfishly. This might be a big part of why we all came out with the emotional receptivity of petrified wood. Or heck, there's probably just some genetic factors there.
Still, my family has this tendency to exude disappointment and talk to me about bettering myself constantly with the very heavy implication that there's a lot that needs improving. It's lessened over time as I've just brushed them off, avoided or simply changed subject on them enough that the majority have given me up as a lost cause. Because I'm not interested in them making me what they think I should be or what they want to tell me I should do, I've been labeled as my mom 2.0 by my brother and father.
Literally, they liken me to my combative, literally insane, sorrow wallowing, grudge obsession, judgmentally insulting mother because I won't let them tell me what to do and then do it obediently. Shit. They keep forgetting I have a back injury and seem surprised when I mention it. I guess they're just too busy going 'fatty like ur mom' every time I speak.
"Normal people, if they bottle all their emotions up, it'll come exploding out. But Liz has some kind of black hole down there that sucks it all into oblivion."
I'll be the first to admit that I'm a bit emotionally muted. It's an interesting thing. Most of the time, I can consciously tell myself to stop bothering with a low grade of negative emotion and I can literally stop feeling it. Then I just feel tired. Stoic was what I was labeled in high school, before that I think I was more in the normal ranges of expression. Or at least on some kind of bell curve. I know I was a very expressive child.
Either way, it hasn't really made me the most beloved pick for great Christmas presents.
For some reason, though, it's historically made me both very intimidating to people and like a magnet for others. A lot of my friends don't have good coping mechanisms. I'm surrounded by people with huge amounts of anxiety. It can get frustrating because for the majority of people I kind of have to fake the emotional support thing through a filter of psychological and observational knowledge and it can get really exhausting. I'm not talking about my friends who I actually take a vested interest in, but other people expecting that supportive back and forth dialogue.
It's gotten even more exhausting since working with the animal rescue. The people I was the original contact for still think I run the thing so they contact me with their problems. They call me if they killed their cat, crying and screaming. Yesterday I had to talk down a foster who was overwhelmed because her partner is sick and just had surgery. What IS it? Is it related to the fact that 80% of people think I'd make a great dom including my JEWISH SUPERVISOR? I've been purposefully mean to people on the net who, instead of invoking drama and backlash, suddenly broke down and told me their life story. It's totally exasperating.
But a longer standing form of exasperation is in the form of the friends I've had who seem to get the idea that NOTHING bothers me and they don't need to bother with my feelings. I had friends who would dote on other friends who were miserable but if I showed the slightest desire for emotional support they thought I wanted to have sex with them. Half the time, though, I've been more of the maypole that everyone freaks out around. Which is an awful idea. I'm a pisces, I'm made of floundery fish pieces and a billion nervous habits, not solid stone.
"It is simple for someone with your aptitude, it shouldn't take any time at all."
The bad thing is, I STILL feel lazy, anyway. Talk about conditioning.
I'm not a type A. I'm nowhere in the same electron cloud level as a type A. But here I am working a full time net security job with no managing where shit changes constantly and no one wants to say they're responsible for anything. I've got forty hours of training to do between work over the next two months to keep my certification or else my job would be in jeopardy. I'm working reluctant nights at a medical office where I'm given like no direction either and they want me to take on MORE responsibilities because my brother's family had the surprising revelation that I'm actually smart somehow. Or, at least, the twin sister did. I'm pretty sure my brother's hot, type A wife still thinks I'm a deadbeat.
Sylvie would step back and let me run that cat rescue, HAPPILY if I did it. That's why I've been only keeping a peripheral eye upon it. If I touch it at all, she labels it as mine and asks when I'm going to drive across town to schedule an adoption visit and I just don't have it in me to keep doing all of that. Bad enough I can't get a single week without some cat related trip. Even worse is that she doesn't realize her one-up-manship. You tell her you're busy and she has to list all the reasons why she's BUSIER and JFC, I really knew that I shouldn't run a volunteer association so why act like I should HAVE to juggle it?
I STILL had to step in recently because one foster is dying of cancer, one is moving in with family because of cancer, one refuses to do anything else for their ill foster and one flipped the fuck out because her parents own the house- and she wasn't ADVERTISING enough for new fosters. For fucks sake, when people give you three weeks notice, don't wait three weeks to try to find a solution. *I* had to advertise because BTW I'm only going to be HOME for 11 days out of May and some cat who needs medication REALLY SHOULDN'T be getting taken care of by a pet sitter. It's no one else's fault that she has 25 fucking cats in her house, it's really not.
Then I still kind of run my own household. I walk around making a checklist of things that need to be done and it's like a constant drumbeat. There's SO much stuff that just never gets put away and it stares at me. Because I'm like some wizard and no one else can do it. And I do try really hard not to be bitter, and I'm really not, but god. Even playing games feels like work. Getting complimented for how SMART and EFFECTIVE and EFFICIENT and HARD WORKING I am just feels like code words for sucker.
I'm not taking good care of myself. I have no interest anymore for healthy food because it just seems tasteless and unsatisfying like everything else is. I know that's all stress chemicals and what not. I don't even want to do relaxing things I enjoy because so much crap still needs to be done. Then it feels like scheduling in some relaxation is even like work. I'm starting to zone instead of get things done. Even my showering is lackluster and half assed. I don't really cook much anymore and I used to plan meals weekly. The animals eat better than I do because I can't exactly stop their care, not that even that hasn't suffered some.
My car is a dying clunker, it's not going to last long. I'm worried about money peripherally all the time. Even doing projects I like feels like too much of a mental chore, much less thinking creatively. I can't even get the cooldown reprieve of loud music in my car on the ride home because I carpool with Mrs. I'm-not-racist-reverse-racism-is-true-because-I-went-to-a-school-where-black-people-were-mean-to-me-nothing-wrong-with-homosexuals-I-just-don't-want-the-liberal-indoctrination-teaching-my-kid-there's-anything-normal-about-it-Coworker while we ride silently to and from work to save money.
And it's like I'm a bull in a China shop because I know that even by posting this I'm going to be the cause of days worth of guilt and anxiety. I'm just tired of being responsible for everything.