OffKilter

How many of us hate the thought of disappointing someone that we care about?   I've been meeting fairly regularly with a psychologist - it began as a way for me to figure out how to get back to work with at least the illusion of sanity, and it's becoming more and more like an  archeological dig - each session digs away and we find another layer, another plateau, and another look at the reasons for my choices... made either consciously or unconsciously.

At the end of today's session, the psychologist asked me to think about something - and she said, "if you don't think you can, if you feel like it's not right, don't hesitate to tell me.  You won't disappoint me.  You don't have to do this to please me."  Thud. I felt it like a lead weight dropped from my head to my gut.  Don't worry about disappointing someone else?  About not pleasing them?

Beyond that she wouldn't judge me, lies this place where it would be okay for someone to be disappointed in me.  I built myself into this unsustainable place of trying so very hard to never disappoint.  Only to find myself failing, and crashing and careening around in these vain attempts to be this perfect version of myself.  And, the joys in life can get ruined by the shoulds that come before or after.  I SHOULD have planned something better.  Been kinder.  Be thinner.  I SHOULD find a way to be a better mother.  A better wife.  A better role model for my children.  My house SHOULD be cleaner.  My car SHOULDN'T be filled with doggy foot prints and unwashed saddle pads.  My bathrooms SHOULD be painted by now.  I SHOULD be able to get my butt into work every day like a normal person.

How I wish I could be this 'should' girl.  This girl who doesn't run into this wall of fatigue.  Who can get everything that she wants to get done, done.  Can do all the right things.  And, still carve out space for herself.  

And, who doesn't have to get angry to stand up for herself.  Who doesn't have to be pushed past her limits and turn into "the bitch" just to advocate for herself.  

I have a sneaky suspicion that I am far from alone.  A big part of this 2.0 version has been to actually believe something that a dear friend spent a year trying to get me to hear, much less believe.  Over and over he would say "it's a problem, but it's not your problem'.  And, over and over I would nod and pretend to listen, all the while trying to figure out how I should help, what I should do, what I should not do, figure out whose fault it all was.  After all,  if I wasn't helpful, who was I?

Leaving that behind has been frustratingly difficult.  It's like the christmas lights that you just threw in the box and they are all tangled up.  And, so you need to carefully tease it all apart.  Just when you think you have one strand free, another knot appears.  Mine are called Responsibility.  Fear of Disappointing.  Guilt.  Anger.  

If you need me, I'll be curled up in a corner praying for patience as I untangle 50 years of crossed lines. 

Two years ago, right when I was diagnosed with cancer, several Doctors suggested I read Gabor Mate’s book, When the Body Says No.  I wrote about the book then, about how the book made me feel like it was either my fault or my parent’s fault that I had cancer.  At the time, I couldn’t hear its message because the lines it drew were too straight, too direct.  They painted my inability to cope with stress as the reason for the Big C, and my childhood as the reason I couldn’t cope with stress.

In my blame seeking state, neither were acceptable answers.  And, I couldn't see anything but blame. Understanding without blame, without judgement was a concept my head might have been able to understand but was a foreign language to my heart. 

But now I’m finally open to hearing the message of this book – the message that we live in our bodies, and these bodies of ours are driven by our emotions.  How we see the world relates directly to how we were raised in the world.  

As the child of imperfect parents, as an imperfect mother and an imperfect wife, I have always rejected the notion that we can or should escape our accountabilities by blaming our upbringing.  But that’s been my longstanding misunderstanding, for you see, you don’t have to be a blamer to try and understand yourself, and understanding yourself starts at the beginning.  And, understanding doesn't automatically make you an unaccountable victim of circumstance, with no part in the play.          

If I’m honest, I've struggled with myself since my mother died.  And, railed against myself for being so weak.  Even writing that down makes me feel…insufficient.  Everyone’s mother dies.  Why should I be so special, so dramatic about the natural order of the world? 

Only now am I beginning to understand that it was because of the pedestal that I as on from the time I was a child, the one my mother loved to see me on, the one I clung to at all costs, that blocked my ability to listen to my body, to listen to me.

My pedestal of being the ‘good’ daughter, kind, hardworking, successful, helpful to the extreme, made even more necessary to compensate for being the ‘fat’ daughter… It was what I thought defined me.  And, whenever I would feel myself slipping off, I would clamber back up.  Brush off the dust and bruises, ignore the aches and pains – the migraines, the rashes, the asthma attacks, the hives -  all of these were just my body betraying my need to be my best and most idealized version of myself. 

My pedestal cracked to the core when my mother died.  Not only because she was the eyes through which I saw myself, but because my pedestal was built on a tripod – of my mother and father’s love and my husband’s undying commitment.  That was my base – I had my girls, my friends, I had my work – but their perception of me was my core.  Without my mother, made worse by my feeling that I had let her down in her last days, the pedestal started swaying.

Some time and spackle later, I thought that I was finding my way back.  Only to lose the next leg of the tripod – when my husband became ill, and his commitment to me wavered, my world spun.  And, I couldn’t understand why – I shielded myself in anger, I found enemies (some just, some unjust) to fight and I dragged myself forward.  Still unrelenting – still clenching my jaw and ignoring my body whining and moaning at me – I pushed through and tried to clamber back up on my tarnished and swaying pedestal. 

Is it a surprise then that I spent that year, with a growing sore on my tongue, ignoring it…wincing when I brushed my teeth but not googling what it could be?  Not saying a word to my Doctor? What could have been a simple nothing the previous year turned into surgery and radiation treatments and lifelong (albeit mild) effects. 

The Big C and recovery from treatment sent the pedestal rocking so hard that I finally had to get off.  And, it’s taken me a couple of years and lots of help to understand, finally laying BLAME aside, that the effort of understanding the WHY, understanding what makes up this pedestal I clung to, is probably the most valuable thing I’ve ever done for myself.

The pedestal has no place in my 2.0 Version of myself.  So even though I often want to clamber back up, and sometimes pop up there without even thinking, I am trying (and sometimes succeeding!) at spending more time listening to the voice I'm so used to ignoring and testing my limits with kindness instead of a stubbornly clenched jaw. 

PS.  Dear select reader - I went a wee bit off topic on this post, it was supposed to be mostly about stress... but blame and understanding your stress is at the bottom of it all and that's where I went.  But for anyone who hasn't watched Dr. Brene Brown on blame, the link is below.  I love her and she makes me think... often.  And, I've also linked Dr. Gabor Mate's book, which is insightful.  And scary.  

http://drgabormate.com/book/when-the-body-says-no