Afraid of going backward
4/30/07 Mon 1744
I’m feeling a little disoriented, just out of sorts. I used my whole time that the boys were at school today trying to track down something I heard on the news the other night. It’s funny that I don’t recall having been very struck by it at the time I heard it, but now it seems important to know, and it’s hard to believe I didn’t take more note of it at the time. It seemed like a couple of men may have been responding to questions in a hearing or something, and it was a public hearing, because they said anti-war protesters were there. There were two analysts talking about it, and they said that the audience had expressed shock at what one of the men said, and then he said something even more provocative…The gist of it was summed up in him saying basically that he only cares about Americans, not anyone who’s not. This was a few days ago, and I remember thinking I’d return to it later, but it seems that I just didn’t quite realize the implications as much as I do today.
So I spent ages with the search engine, trying to find the right key word that would take me to this so I could see who it was, who he represented, what audience he was addressing and what he meant when he said he could care less about anyone who was not American.
So I’ve just felt disoriented today. I didn’t write down a fairly strong dream I had last night and I just feel sort of behind on everything. I’ve let the news slide the past few weeks, because I was pursuing the project of writing in here when my time was free. Now I see over the past several days I’ve missed some stories that seem important. I feel like I want to listen to those, but I’m not sure which ones. I feel behind on taking care of some of the details of the house. I’m wondering how all THIS fits in to this new way of living I’ve been describing the last several weeks. I just feel less aware of the feeling of That, and again I’m anxious. Oh yeah, Gary hung around here a long time this morning too. I guess at heart I’m wondering if all these out-of-sorts feelings, and often because of things I haven’t done—I wonder if they’re a symptom of becoming ‘unconscious’ again.
I guess an answer could be, “So what? It means I went unconscious again. Is there something to dread in that?”
Let’s see, other ‘symptoms’ of being out of sorts: feeling very hungry and eating with anxiety and a sense of fatalism.
Is it something to be ashamed of, if I do go unconscious sometimes? I guess that’s part of my dread, that it’s confirming some sort of moral shortcoming.
I’ve engaged in letting something Gary said or didn’t do disturb me and then speak out of that sense of grievance. Therefore I’ve been reactive to him.
Yeah, I suppose the worry is that I’m going backward. I suppose the ultimate worry is that the ‘This’ I’ve been writing about for all these weeks isn’t big or strong enough to help propel me out of often feeling woeful and hurt in to a change in attitude and independence. Really, credibly, to change my perception of life and way of being in the world with it. I fear that it isn’t possible and I have to continue an experience of life that has people asking too much of me and overstepping their boundaries and then getting mad because I was hurt. And thus being somewhat at the mercy of others—and at the mercy of the extent of their ability to be reasonable, and honest about their own parts in something. That really was the kernel of the deal in my family—I was at the mercy of their ability to understand and take responsibility for their own behaviors. I needed someone like that in order for my nervous system to have been soothed as a child, and my parents didn’t/couldn’t do that because they were products of how they were raised and what they’d done with how they were raised. Consequently I was with people who would often exacerbate rather than soothe. They had a limited range of ability to respect emotions and feel empathetic toward children, and so I’ve spent my life dealing with the self that was built around responding to the jabbing of that situation. I learned things that I thought worked, tho I didn’t realize they weren’t in my best interest.
My dream last night:
It’s in some ways as if I am the husband of a woman I met through roller skating, Amy. In the dream, she is a child of some sort of Slavic family (I keep thinking of it as Russian) that are immigrants, and live in an area that’s mostly populated by other Russian immigrants. It’s a tight-knit community, that tends to discourage contact with ‘outsiders’. She is beholden to her parents, even as a married woman. We may even live with them, or next door. It is a time of year of some sort of family reunion. Maybe something Christmas-like, a Russian Orthodox version of Christmas. Her parents are hosting it and it is taken for granted that she will be assisting. However, on the day of the reception her/our baby is born. I’m very worried about her thinking that if our baby has just been born, she shouldn’t be having to do hostessing duty. She should be laying down in bed. In fact, there is a feeling that her duty to her parents is greater than her duty to her baby. There’s a feeling of desperation that the newborn baby may be needing to nurse, and her mother is not available because of her obligations to her family. In the dream I get worrieder and worrieder about her because she’s looking very pale and at times I think is going to faint. I urge us to go ‘home’, but home is a very tiny apartment right off of her parents place, with no room to lie down. Sterile white colored, and spare. It’s supposedly a house, but smaller than an apartment. I’m thinking of a place we’d had and was wishing we could be in there. I go into the market to get something. Now I’m femal. I look from the level I’m on and see a flat roof below me. There are 3 flat boards, like 1×6’s, and they’re just broken pieces. But they’re down on that roof and somehow it’s because of me. I decide I should pick them up, though I have a sense inside that it doesn’t matter; it would really be going further than the extra mile to clean them up. But I override that and I do, finding it was the right thing to do because the people who lived there were old and couldn’t have picked them up. They are a Finnish couple, and I try to say in Finnish that I was sorry and hadn’t meant to put those boards on their roof. I was feeling glad I hadn’t blown off the idea that I had an obligation to pick them up and just left. Rick is there and he smiles in approval when he hears my sincere and respectful tone, and hears my sincerity in trying to address them in their language. It’s like he’s seeing that there’s something true in me and remembering why he had been in love with me.
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