Recently, I’ve had some days where I felt well here, bringing summer relaxation from Europe and keeping the bubble around me. Not all days, and right now I am not doing well.
- Positive: part of the feeling of overwhelmedness has to do with having too many serious interests. That’s actually nice. (I know one is supposed to prioritize, choose, and so on but that leads to repression. People who succeed and are happy actually allow themselves to do the things they want to do.)
- Key insight: I deserve to do the work I’m doing. (So many of my issues have to do with the idea that I’m not a real person and don’t deserve to act in any way.)
- I don’t want to work because of the stress-related headaches it gives me. But these are not from the work itself, which is actually calming, they are from what I transfer onto it. (I am so used to being harassed about work, from elementary school on, that I’ve internalized it and harass myself. I only don’t if I’m abroad where I think the harassers don’t see me. Then I don’t harass myself, either.)
- “What would I do if I loved myself?” (How would I feel if I listened to people who love me?)
- When I was accused, 34 years ago now, of “not feeling my feelings,” I understood this to mean I was repressing pain I should be noticing and should therefore take action to increase pain so I could explore what was in it. To increase pain I cut exercise, sleep, and outdoor time as much as I could, and then dwelt on anything negative anyone could project into me or hypothesize about – or anything negative that had in fact happened. The fashion was to own that thing, to say it was your fault, to find out what characteristic of yours had caused it, and then to try to rein that in so as to avoid new disasters. All of that is ridiculous, as we have established, but I still try to increase pain for the purpose of diminishing self or not developing self (because if I develop, I will be killed, as we know).
All of this is to say I shouldn’t prevent myself from feeling well, don’t need to transfer pain onto work, don’t need to say I don’t deserve to do this, and don’t need to give up some of the things I like for others. Let’s do this.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 