Walking the line…

I have a toothache today. Another tooth that I noticed was a little off over the past few weeks but suddenly I can’t bite on it at all without pain.😞 I can’t schedule an appointment until Monday, maybe Tuesday. if Veteran’s Day affects hours. I have put off going to the dentist for a while and I haven’t been in terrible need of one but it seems I always have immediate dental needs right on the cusp of going away. I am at least not nearly as afraid of the dentist now that I know more about dental implants and have had decent experiences with dentists lately.

I am learning that when I am scared of something or it feels unconquerable taking tiny steps in the right direction, finding out what I don’t know and what action steps would take me closer to where I want to be, helps a lot, even if the obstacle feels really insurmountable. If I don’t understand an overwhelming body of knowledge, I can learn it. I feel capable in a lot of ways I never have before, thanks to some great teachers, whether they meant to be that for me or not. I just read about the Feynman Technique to comprehending a subject: explain it as though you were explaining it to a small child and then find out what your gaps are and fill them in. That sounds like a really interesting journaling technique too.

Today I keep hearing in my head a line from a song: “I believe in whatever you do.” It is a comforting line, a healing line. It is also paradoxical because it could be the very source of your inspiration doesn’t believe in you at all, and you don’t know how to make sense of it, of being inspired by that which might hate you. There are lots of people who will not believe in how I choose to approach things and that’s okay. I have been living with someone who has been very supportive in many ways, but as far as believing in what I do and how I do it, I don’t exactly get that here. The ways I am expected to do things do not make sense to me a lot of times. I haven’t let it get to me much and he has good intentions but he sure says the words “you ought to” enough. He is a physicist and engineer who went to MIT and Cal Tech and I guess that is also just an engineering mentality: you see from your own perspective what needs to be done and make prescriptions on how to fix it. You are probably just soooo much less likely to be successful if you do things the way others want you to rather than trusting your own intuitions, and that includes following the “you ought to”‘s of individual others, but also following the collective mentality. “The economy is in such and such a state, you ought to…” but I don’t think it works like that. I am doing a lot of things in ways that a lot of others think can’t be done and I have no doubt I will be successful doing them my way if I commit to it. This doesn’t mean I am mot flexible or don’t take feedback but in the end I am my own authority.

I want to get to the bottom of why I was sooo upset when someone I trusted once recommended a counselor, unsolicited, and without any indication whatsoever as to why this prescriptive “you ought to” was being made. If I could make one “you ought to” I’d say you ought to avoid these kinds of prescriptions. It still does not make sense. If instead of saying this, she had talked to me like a human being capable of reasoning and all that, and I knew what specifically her concerns were rather than being totally in the dark about it, it would have at least been peace of mind. I might have been able to see what it was she was referring to and have been able to make my own determination on the matter. Instead I became irate: you think I need a counselor, oh, well, I am sooo tired of being in a box, I’ll *show* you that I need a counselor! And so I got in my own way for a very long time. I meant to express my pain but to be silly and playful, too, though I am sure none of it lamded with anyone the way I had hoped.

I think I just did not trust my own autonomy to make decisions about what I need for my own self-care. Now I realise it was just another “you ought to” that perhaps I needn’t have taken so personally but I did. The truth was that I did know what I needed better than she did but I was at war with myself over the sense of my power and right to make decisions about mtly own life being taken away. I cannot see that a counselor would have made a difference for me then. What I needed was a friend and to know that I have the power to decide what my own needs are; that is maybe the core of it, and it is what I have learned: I don’t need to let others’ ideas about such things bother me. I can take what helps and leave the rest. I wasn’t open to friendship either especially with these fears of what others must be thinking about me. I needed to defend myself and put up really bug walls but I probably alienated a lot of potential support and for that I am regretful, though now in a way it is like my space is cleared, and I can begin with full power over my own understanding of my own life and what to do with it.

If I hadn’t taken it personally I likely would have gotten out of my own way a lot sooner but maybe also there was a part of me that needed to differentiate and claim my own capacity to *know* what I need for myself which is something I didn’t trust at all and a counselor would not have helped with that, or anything in really needed, actually. It would have been a wasted resource and wasted time. But I couldn’t stop hearing the voices of others thinking they knew what I needed and more and more I felt like my life was being dissected and everything I said or did was wrong. So I was at war with different parts of myself: a superego type structure telling me I needed something I knew I didn’t which kept me from seeing clearly or at all in a lot of ways what obstacles were in my way and from seeing what I *did* need to empower myself… since so much of my energy was taken up by thoughts of what I did mot need but which nonetheless I was at war with myself about. Somehow I was just in so much disempowerment over… I don’t need that! I needed empathy and understanding and I needed someone to affirm that what I needed was something I could discern for myself and accomplish in my own way. I did not need that kind of advice out of the blue, especially in the way it was given, and in the context, having recently experienced all sorts of horrible things in my life, I resented it. I could do things my way and they’d work out just fine but I didn’t trust anyone else to believe that or to believe in *anything* I do so I suffered a lot. I felt like I had to throw them all off of me.

Now what I would like is for someone to believe in whatever I do; though I am sure the way I presented myself, I created a lot of doubt in people about everything I do, and I can understand that. Yet, I have burned the bridges I have burned, and reality is reality. Now I *do* have the chance to build connections with people who offer that kind of encouragement that helps me feel so supported, and maybe people who have seen me at my worst are not the ones who will be capable of really believing in me at all. So I know the struggle to be seen when I am clearly not from the beginning is not worth my energy. I needed to define my own social circles and stop trying to fit in where there wasn’t a fit, to stop cowering myself to others’ limited beliefs about me.

There were some ways I really wanted to be believed in mixed with other ways Inwas being intentionally absurd so as to guarantee that no one would believe in me or maybe even know what I was talking about. But the inner conflict around that is over.

Maybe no one who witnessed any of that process will be able to believe in me but it is still possible to find that kind of support: I believe in whatever you do. It takes friends who believe I am a good and capable person. I was in a bad situation I didn’t know how to get out of and there was maybe no advice anyone could have given me that would have helped me to see what I ultimately had to see for myself.

It is the support that would have let me live into doing things in ways that let me believe in myself. Instead it was like, you don’t believe in what I’m doing? Well, I’ll show you. And ‘showing’ thrm meant probably confirming their perceptions about that and somehow is what felt ‘good’. If they didn’t believe in me I needed to throw them off my back. I could have just been like, whatever, and did my own thing. What I needed was to be like, whatever, and forge my own path, regardless of what other people thought, to have more energetic freedom and inner space to feel and believe in my own decisions. I was so frustrated to feel that nobody could see that that was the issue and the source of so much pain.

I could write about life lessons from certain songs. I feel so torn like probably I should just not write about these things anymore. I don’t want to hurt anyone, by having things written about them, by someone they don’t want to be associated with at all in any way. I have to discern and intuit what to do if I want to write more about these kinds of things. I have gotten my rampages out of me which I could have done in a better way but I felt like I had to be obnoxious in some way to let go of all my fears and resentments around crafting a professional persona or whatever. Now I feel no more need at all to test the edges and write in ways that trigger my fears if having crossed a line; I am more aware of where my lines are *and I feel no need to cross them or be unproductive about it just for the sake of expression.

I can say everything I need to say while being, not necessarily one who does not rock the boat, but that can come out of courage rather than cowardice. I can trust my own standards of what is professional behaviour now, whereas before I just wanted to rebel against every line just because there was a line, and I wanted to throw chaos and static around everyone’s perceptions of me for reasons that were not at all clear or well thought out. Yet I fear that to say anything about certain things is too much… and maybe ai have done that here. I don’t know.

I know that the concept of being able to write so freely and expressively in a personal diary or journal has been so exciting but then applying it to Open Diary… this site came along and I got the idea that sharing everything about everything would be a good thing, but… maybe I share way too much about what is going on inside of me. Maybe I share way too much about what my struggles are and what my plans are and it is better to be more private. At one point I was even like, oh no, all these absurd thoughts and fears are going through my mind and I have to share them!!! Even when I knew it would not do anyone, let slone myself, any good to share such things and it amounts to no more than self-sabotage.

For a while I couldn’t help it. Like I knew I should not be revealing certain specific information about myself but I was scared of it and so paradoxically needed to know what would happen so I could stop being so scared of it or something. It is easy to overshare too when you don’t have anyone to share the deeper things with directly, and also when you dontry to share things orivately with yourself you either lose it because you don’t care enough about it because it is not public ir your privacy is invaded anyway… and it tends to come out all squirrelly. Certainly if I had had safe spaces where I could share deeper parts of me I wouldn’t have been so undiscriminating here, like feeling the need to share everything just because someone might be reading, even presented in the worst possible way. I kind of regret not being more private about what is going in in my life but I want to share a lot and share openly too and as far as that goes I still do not know how to find a balance… it is hard for me to sense how *not* sharing might be beneficial and healing but it feels like, in some way, if I could intuitively grasp it, it would be. I have found those lines but is it still too much? What benefits would I see in choosing intentionally to be more private about things and then what parts of me should ai hold back on sharing and oh gosh is it too late? I really don’t want the whole world to know everything about me, and maybe there are infinite depths and they never will, but I still hate feeling like I am giving away too much…