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Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Whatever!

I have been doing a lot of good work in therapy. I am getting better daily, and then a day like today happens and I feel as small and bad as I ever have. I fucked something up, forgot something important, which I have been doing a lot since menopause, and really angered someone. I was threatened. I was criticized and attacked at the very center of my being. I was basically told I am pathetic and a loser who needs to get a life and grow up. Ok, fine, I do need a life and to grow up, but not the way this person meant it at all. Her words were spiteful and hurtful. I’ve never said I am a mature, well balanced person. Indeed I know I am socially lacking in development, needy, nerdy, depressed, distracted and distractible, lonely, and a lot of other things. I know I have a long way to go to be a functioning person in society. There are actually people who meet “me” and see a very confident person, blah, blah, blah. But that person is not me. It is either an alternate personality, Moe, or the persona I adopt to look unafraid when I am actually so anxious under the surface that just about anything will make me cry or blow up in anger. I guess what I am trying to say is that I may certainly be as fucked up as this person said, but I have never claimed to be anything else. I am fucked up and I make mistakes, big ones, often. I drive people away from me. I have no filter. I do and say things I shouldn’t. I talk to the wrong people about the right things. I hide my true thoughts and feelings because they are too bizarre. So I am all of those things, but I am also a person, with feelings, and thoughts, and a heart. I have a great capacity to love. I do things for people I hate doing because I am afraid to say no. I am a work in progress. I am not the fake that this woman said I am. No trained therapist can be fooled by a fake. My disorders, multiple disorders, are real, as real as my eye color. I can change my life, my reactions, I can grow and learn, but I can’t stop being me. I can’t make memory any better in women in menopause, it sucks having Swiss cheese memory. I literally forget what day of the week it is, which is what I did today; I thought it was Sunday because I don’t remember having a Sunday this week. I didn’t set an alarm. I stranded this woman and it pissed her off with good reason. In what universe does the phrase, “I was wrong, I am sorry,” actually work? No matter how many times I say it to anyone, I just get further lecture on how I was wrong, and what my wrongness cost them. In cases like this one, I often get a lot of unsolicited criticism of who I am, what I am, etc. I take comfort in the knowledge that she is an angry, mean spirited person, making her a kind of ugly you can’t see in a mirror, and I am not.