If you've read my previous post It's Official, I'm a Basket Case, you'll be aware that I find romantic relationships (or even interactions) challenging.
It took me 46 years to realise I had anxiety and 50 years to recognise that it is mostly (and always) triggered in my intimate relationships.
Can you imagine being that unaware of your own inner world?
As someone who spends days and nights poring over personal development books and loves nothing more than embarking on self-inquiry, the degree to which I was oblivious to my own anxiety is astonishing.
I put the awakening down to the fact that the terms depression and anxiety (as examples) are now part of the common vernacular, but I also credit it to a disastrous and traumatising experience of being bullied by a female colleague approximately 6 years ago.
People who know me comment that they can't believe I would/could ever be bullied. They said the same when I confessed to being on the receiving end of domestic violence.
"But you don't take shit from anyone," they said.
Except, as it turns out, I do.
Despite being reasonably direct (depending on the situation and who I'm interacting with), I have found myself more than once being stunned into silence. Under certain conditions I freeze and clam up.
I become about as direct as a jellyfish in a cyclone.
At other times I become my own awkward twin sister.
She has a weird vibe and finds it hard to speak properly. She doesn't seem to have access to the same vocabulary as me. I find her a bit embarrassing tbh.
Whenever she takes over I'm cringing from the inside as she clumsily attempts to speak to men she finds attractive or acts like a total idiot.
She's most awkward around men she's attracted to. She tends to 'pedastalise' them which makes her fearful of looking bad in front of them and consequently switches off her executive brain which means she becomes a bit, well 'basic'.
Who the hell is she and where does she come from? I wonder to myself as I walk away and reprimand her for not being able to perform in accordance with The Book Of How To Be Perfect – that nobody has written but everyone has read.
'She' ('The Other') is an outcast. Even I can't stand her. She has none of the polish that I, the ex-copy director has, she blushes inappropriately and she comes across as socially incompetent.
And she is the very part of me that I need to embrace and accept if I ever hope to come to terms with my anxiety.
She Is Me and if I reject any part of myself then I am buying into the story that says We Should All Be Perfect.
Except, there's No Such Thing.
The concept of perfect people is the biggest fucking lie we've ever been sold and it is slowly but surely crumbling as we begin to get in touch with the idea that to be human is to be messy, and to be messy is to be real, and to be real is to be anxious and/or depressed at times.
Anyone who says they are not or never those things is lying to themselves.
No-one is exempt from incompetence. No-one feels comfortable all the time (except maybe sociopaths which I'm fairly confident is not on anyone's Being Perfect list).
At times we will all fail. We will all clam up. We will all feel inadequate, afraid, uncertain, lost and out of our depth. If we don't ever feel those things then we're not living, we're simply existing.
And maybe mere existence is something that feels good for you, but for me, I need a raw and unpretty sense of aliveness in order to feel, well, alive.
Lucky for me, anxiety actually provides me with that.
Early on in my anxiety awareness I realised that it had always been there, I just hadn't realised what it was (beyond noticing that I would become incapable of speaking in an articulate way and that a certain low-hanging grey cloud would hover around me like passive smoke).
Like any insight, once we see it, we see it was always there, but until that moment, we will be operating from an unconscious part of ourselves and if we're lucky, the people we are close to will call us out on it.
Hopefully in a way that steers us towards the truth, but oftentimes, they are also inadequately trained in the stuff of shadows and rather than lead us through the work, they are likely to criticise, blame or dismiss us.
That's not their fault so this isn't about laying blame.
The point I'm making is that when two people rub up against each other (metaphorically speaking) there is a strong chance that at some point in the proceedings (hours, days or years) they will find themselves communicating from an unconscious place, and will say or do something they regret, or do not understand.
Every single one of us makes mistakes.
Very few of us make them intentionally.
This is why we have therapists and self-help genres.
Comentarios