11/28/06 Tuesday 14:32

Very perplexing. I went to the airport with Gary to pick up Joy M coming back from Argentina. Gary left for Asia, so killed two birds in taking him. But I never found Joy, and I’m puzzled about it. I just don’t what to think; I wonder if she got hassled by customs agents in Texas? Made her miss the connection?

Anyway, so that was a good part of the morning, and much of the afternoon. Kids get home in an hour, so there’s no time really today for prolonged quiet time. So I don’t know how to choose between just transcribing, or writing my current thoughts. I am beginning to realize I think that I am in fact a high anxiety person, even if I’m outwardly calm. I think the fact that I feel stressed because there isn’t much decompressing time til the boys come home probably demonstrates that I am high anxiety. I’m framing high anxiety as being something undesirable, as in personal flaw. If considering myself a high anxiety person is to be looking at it thru terms of a personal flaw, couldn’t I also ask if it isn’t normal, having 2 high energy kids at a time that I’m low energy—wouldn’t it be normal that a person who just lost the time she ordinarily uses to do just that would feel stressed about it?

I really do need to get a handle on anxiety, though. I don’t know that it’s a character flaw in itself, the ‘flaw’ is manifested in how you act that anxiety out and what you do to try to get other people to reduce it? I suppose it’s the expression of that internal given.

I feel deprived when I don’t have 5 days in a row to rely on for solitude. I feel anxious about that deprivation; and I’m trying to explore the shapes of it a little. It’s made up of lots of strands: it’s kind of like something leaping out of something. I’m unable to stay connected with …stuff inside. I have a sensation of my consciousness bouncing and not staying grounded. Like a drop of water on a hot, hot pan. That’s what I think the experience of anxiety boils down to. There’s some sort of a forceful disconnection of my attention. My awareness bounces all over the place. I feel a leap in my awareness, a big bounce, just to think of Gary’s mom. I mean a sky-high spike in that ripping of my awareness away from its ground.

I think that’s what drew me to Jeff. He had a very solid grounding within himself, and he was helpful and kind at helping me begin to locate that in myself. He met me in a place of authenticity that many don’t go to. But, it’s true that my anxiety level was always heightened around him. Mainly it was about wanting him to like me, by wanting to be more like him. Couldn’t, though. Maybe if I’d had the grounding then that I do today. I wonder what he’s like. Now, I mean. In some ways it seems possible that maybe he was bipolar; the stuff I write about the difficulty of being with him sort of hints that might be possible. It’s interesting to think that I honestly knew very little about him, except that he had parents near the Naval Hospital in north east Long Beach—the house wasn’t far off the 605 fwy. That he had several brothers, ‘all of them artists in some way’ (per his mom), that he was originally from New Jersey, had left high school and lived in Berkeley with one or more of his brothers. That his relationship with his father was very fraught. That he played music. That’s really all I knew.

But that’s moving away from the topic about the individual strands of anxiety; its component parts. One part of the experience is that I feel my consciousness leap around erratically, and a sense of gaps in my grounding, short bursts of discontinuity. That’s what it feels like. And it seems the only thing to do is at those times FOCUS especially on the place where doing comes from. I felt a sense of that in the store a little while ago. I could feel that weird staccato feeling inside—that’s what it’s like. Staccato. Not rhythmic? It just feels like an internal goad. Poke poke poke. And it really is as if my awareness is being ripped away from something I’ve been calling “the ground”. Ripped away and tossed about. It’s a bird trying to burst out of a cage? Maybe that’s not right; it’s more like something chaotic, or…frantic? Yeah, there is an inner part of myself that does…feel frantic. Like a core that’s vibrating very quickly. A sense of urgency all the time, which I suppose is also manifesting in being sharply aware of time slipping away, or needing to ‘finish’ something or be unobstructed.

Anyway, it makes sense in many ways what Paul says in the New Testament about being “anxious for nothing”. I wonder if that’s a direct translation from the original language.

It’s very pretty here. The snow on the trees remains, so I’m looking out on frosted limbs and branches. The sky is blue, with some nicely lit clouds.

Darlene did something nice for me. She sent some recipes from New Seasons on things to do with l/o turkey that actually sound quite good. And I’m pretty sure I have everything. So I’m going to have to call and thank her. Yeah, she’s reached out 2 other times too. Once to leave a message and thank us for T. dinner, and say she wanted to have us over for Christmas; yesterday to tell me about something on the radio she thought I’d be interested in listening to. She was right, I was planning on listening to it later. So, I do need to at least thank her for the recipes and thinking of me when she heard the broadcast. Courtesy demands that.

So she’s made several kind overtures. Since taking me to lunch for my birthday where she also asked about being “more like friends”. I feel a little anxiety about whether I’m wrong or not in the face of these overtures to still feel like I just don’t like her. Back again to the question: is this just nursing a grudge, and I do have more choice over it than I’m letting myself be aware of? Who but a creep could still withhold her liking from someone who’s been doing several nice and thoughtful things? So anyway, I suppose this is another strand to my anxiety and Gary being gone for 12 days has something to do with it, too.

11/30/06 Thursday, 12:54

Joy left just a little while ago. We had some intense talks, about feeling with our ‘energy’—it actually was congruent with an experience the other day where I felt myself engaging life from a deeper and more intimate place, which I guess is me engaging a more intimate part of my Self with living. I usually AM engaging from a couple levels out of that. And I think that’s what the experience I noted about my attention leaping is just that. My Attention is always there;, it’s that core. My ME is rapidly engaging and disengaging from that Attention. That’s why I often feel scattered, I guess, because I’m really not “with” my Attention. To the degree I disengage from it is the degree to which I have less ability to act as a partner with…life. And be able to participate with equal influence. {Which brings to mind a question: Why WOULD I disengage from my Attention? I imagine anxiety separates me from It, and then, ironically, I feel anxious because I’m away from my Attention and feel slightly out of control. I asked that question in a flash in my mind, and I think the answer was fear—that living closely with my attention would “make me” behave in ways that ‘aren’t permitted’, namely sexual? Could all this having been pulled away from my attention all my life been about the early sexual shaming I felt? Existential shaming—shamed for feeling and expressing of a child sexuality; so it was for ‘what is’ as opposed to shaming by having sex forced upon me or suffered direct injury as a result of someone’s sexual aggression. I suppose in some ways, the ‘right’ for a sexual being to exist may have been injured, since it was an existential hurt. Again, looking for a way to understand and maybe influence my unreliable libido.}

I really got it from tango analogy; that is the joining of energies to express what music inspires. And therefore movement from that very intimate space, where the energies are intersecting. So anyway, extending that analogy a little, I was going to laugh at myself for assuming that I have ‘the woman’ role in The Dance; the follower vs the lead. Still, in a sense Life is the Lead—since it is out of my control. Then I get an inner conflict about whether life is the lead, or if I should be ‘the lead’. But think of being ‘the lead’ (and I suppose this is about my secret shame of being passive) creates a bit of a pull away from my attention. So that would probably be an indication of which is the more desirable direction. I kind of understand the expression that Bill, Sharon, and Annie used to say to me about ‘lifting up out of yourself’. It seems there has been an enculturation to that—that reaching inside to be in harmony with something you didn’t really feel, because everyone around was doing it. Best exemplified to me in the minister leading prayers in church: the change in language, voice, tone—it was like putting the Love of God on like a garment, and it looked like everyone else around us was doing it too, and so I thought I had to do it—that this was the criteria by which I’d be judged as a ‘good person’ or not.

The analogy I’ve been groping for is the notion of my deeper self, being in full contact with my life; wearing my life like a glove. Letting that Attention fill my whole body, so it’s operating as a hand in a glove; intimately connected. To have some ability to let this Attention wield me? Maybe so intimately that I’m like It’s skin, the outermost layer, so there’s no longer a glove between Me and reality; I’m the skin.

Funny. Joy and I were relating on an extremely deep level. And I felt a faint dismay that I didn’t FEEL LIKE we were relating on a deep level. I guess it’s because it was a natural as breathing, and sort of a given between us, so I no longer experience it as ‘special’ to be having that experience with her.

So, perhaps this is the insight I’ve been spending my life looking for: Just be intimate with my own life. Be intimate with my Attention. And I suppose that’s Truth, is in being in engagement moment by moment with my Attention. I have a feeling that when I rip away, and that’s how I experience it, as a ripping, it’s fueled by anxiety, or of being stuck on what’s immediate and not seeing it over its long term. Like I can see with Joy now—because we were estranged roughly 10 years ago, yet our friendship and feeling for each other lasted beyond that moment. So over years the shape of our relationship in the long haul is very different from the shape of that shorter interval. And it takes a certain amount of slowing down inside to see that…and that’s the Attention. To engage life with my Deepest Self; to expand the heart of tango to be a metaphor for living a life. I’ve grown up able to see parallels—something that applies at any given phase of one’s life. I just had flashes of a vision that something happening in that present had bigger applications; was an apprehending of something true and a glimpse of other dimensions of living too.

In a sense, then it makes me wonder if ANY phenomenon that we observe to be a truth in the natural world is something that can be applied over infinite dimensions.

I’m getting tired of writing, but I want to say that there is something in the image of talking with Joy…and us touching for the first time last night the rift that had happened between us and the fact that she had lived her truth in that, and that I’d lived mine, and how part of what happened was a result of truly not being able to see from each other’s eyes. So we weren’t using the same markers, but we were operating from the assumption that we WERE using the same points of reference. That’s where I can see that for Joy it was perfectly legitimate for her to want the expression of my love to be in my willingness to ditch John; and for me it felt like a CHOOSE situation. We were both living our truths; and I guess the only thing that could have been done differently would have been if we could have taken one more step and see what the other person was using to steer by. The love remained, though and here we are again, but it’s sad that we lost 5 years. Fortunately; no, geez, actually it was about 7.

OK, more later.

After doing some transcribing from June 1977, I see that I’ve always been plagued by a suspicion that I’m ‘really just fooling myself’. And it’s been on the basis of that that I’ve second-guessed myself my whole life. It’s still kind of a fundamental anxiety, that somehow any step away from loyalty to my parents’ teachings is only for selfish reasons. To gratify selfish impulses. To be deeply WRONG if I step away from it. So that’s been the fundamental tension in my life: between whole-heartedly committing myself to my own steering landmarks, or to abide by the conventional ones. And any step away from the conventional one was fraught, because there was a conflict between the direction of my Self, and the fear that I was doing wrong, knew it, and was trying to use any means to justify my position. That’s been my fundamental rift. So I think I probably CAN commit to the one ice floe I’ve been only halfway on, with another foot on the other floe. I CAN reference myself (Myself)—I can look to my intimate self to steer by, rather than agreed-upon landmarks. The agreed upon landmarks are based on a perverting of the original purpose of landmarks by making them an end in themselves.

1/12/05

Yow, that feeling is so strong, the feeling that time is slipping out of the hour glass. It makes me feel anxious to see anything but a huge swatch of untracked time ahead of me, and I start to feel anxious about its passing, almost immediately. Already it’s almost 1;30, a little over an hour before I go get Scott, and it feels so not-enough.

It occurs to me to tell the truth here—I mean, to summarize in writing what I see the truth of this situation as…to try and get it down into as bottom line, bedrock language as possible.

How I see my marriage to Gary, my relationship with his mother, my own family.

I guess start with me and Gary. I see us as not being very good partners for getting things done. And the bottomline issue underlying that, which makes it unrecoverable, is that we have no mechanism to talk about it. His default is to resent, and get back in passive aggressive ways later. What I need from him is for him to have the capacity to observe himself, take note in a moment that he’s upset about something, and say it respectfully. Not ACT it, in irritated disrespectful tone of voice, or eye-rolling…or in making a negative remark later, under his breath, as he’s passing me. Yes, it’s a hook, yes I suppose I’d be better not taking it—BUT WHO THE FUCK IS HE TO INTEND TO HOOK??? Doesn’t he have a responsibility as well, being the person who starts something? I think what I react to is the underlying discount, and dislike that would give him the permission to treat me that way. This is not the way one acts toward someone that is loved.

OK. So put us, in with those communication strictures, in a situation where we have to cooperate with each other, and communicate with each other—to have to use words to bridge a misunderstanding, to get understanding, and if necessary, healing. We can’t do it. Time and time again, from something as simple as getting ready for a camping trip, to child raising, if we cannot agree on something then we have no language to negotiate it. For me to even use words offends him. He feels harassed by them. He will do something negative, out of something that he’s mad at me about but hasn’t told me. I call him on it, and he tries to brush it off. He doesn’t acknowledge that he just did something hurtful, and often, unreasonable.

Here is a place where I can change my behavior. I can refuse to call him on it. Let it pass. Then the argument that comes from him stonewalling when I call him on it (and then stonewalling on THAT, layer upon layer) will not be born. It’s just that it seems SO WRONG that he do what he did that I’m not able to be silent.

So, basically we are a married couple with no tools at all for handling conflict. Well, I have tools, but I might as well not because I need him to have tools, too, for these conflicts to be able to be worked through healthily. But he goes to his default, each time. Clam up about something he’s angry about or wants a change about; show his anger in unrelated ways, later.

I was thinking about this in terms of Peter Kramer’s talking about “differentiation”. I was first thinking about what this means, his theory that couples seek someone who has a similar level of differentiation. I was thinking that that’s not true, in Gary’s and my case: I have the tools to communicate, work things through to resolution, and heal. Gary does not. In light of that I think that I have more differentiation than Gary. Then it occurs to me that the way I express my lack of differentiation is in being susceptible to the passive aggressive things Gary does and says. My being unable to let them pass.

I’ve got to think about that.

Another bottom line I see in our relationship is his capacity to deny that something is wrong. How terribly far he has to be pushed before he looks at his responsibility, before he takes action. And how he chooses inaction, consistently. Even when he says something like, “This year, I need to win back the boys’ respect and yours too (I’m not sure he said that)” he means it in the moment, but then puts it away. He accepts a tremendous amount of pain in his life-enormous losses (a viable sex life with me, respect of his children, love of his wife) by refusing to acknowledge that he’s in pain.

These two things, the inability to communicate and his unwillingness to face facts, are things I see as bedrock in our relationship and I’m thinking that it’s not possible to feel love in a relationship like that. Oh, you can do what my family does: You’re supposed to love your family. Therefore, you DO. That means that you don’t acknowledge the things that are painful between you. You don’t acknowledge when something isn’t working, because to give voice to that is to NOT love you. It is better to have the appearance of loving, the agreement of loving, then to have the underlying intimacy that love springs from. The trouble is, to get to the intimacy, people have to go through what they’ve been denying. It really is like the woman said in her book: “She couldn’t see. But she believed she could.”

And I know we can’t. But the willingness of my parents, and Gary, for that matter, to be able to face certain fears about themselves, and pain they’ve locked away…is very unlikely. So I have to love on THEIR terms: which is, don’t admit that there’s not really much intimacy basis for the love that is professed, don’t admit that things are wrong.

Perhaps Al anon really would be a good place for me.

My boys are suffering from living in a relationship like Gary’s and mine. Gary may want to do something about it, when he thinks about it or I bring it to his attention, but he doesn’t follow through. I can’t model a good back-and-forth-using-words-to-resolve-differences example when my partner in communication doesn’t have the tools. It’s like trying to dance with someone who absolutely can’t dance…but thinks he can.