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stay with me
2005-01-09 - 4:13 p.m.
Today I feel good. Yesterday I spent in the depths of my old guilt-and-avoidance cycle but I managed to redeem the day by doing some good work for a few hours before going to bed. Today I decided not to do that; I decided to work first and worry later. I love it when the happens because of course if I work first it's not necessary to worry. So, now I feel good, just a nice, relaxed feeling... contentment. I think it might even be something to do with the temperature; in here right now it feels just perfect.
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The other day I was talking to my sister about the way I am in relationships. I was saying how I always seem to end up with someone who needs me more than I need them, I end up feeling suffocated and so on and she said some quite insightful things. Partly because she said she was one of those people who tends to do the opposite; as soon as she becomes romantically involved with someone then her expectations rocket up to very high, quite unrealistic levels. Whereas I'm always more inclined just to take what's given, not to demand what I think I need or expect... she said that in a way that's actually quite a sane way to be and perhaps she's right. Perhaps the problem isn't so much that I'm cold and distant and... see, I used to have this theory that the people who are never without a partner are the ones who really, really need to have a partner and therefore do whatever it takes to get one... also, they find people who are emotionally complementary for them more easily because... yeah, I dunno, I guess because such people know how to find each other. So, my thinking was that it was my ability to function without other people that made it so hard for me to find someone and then made me cut myself off from them when I did. But, what she suggested was that maybe there's something about me that actually makes me seek out people who are going to end up being dependant on me. And it occurred to me that, yeah... see, I remember thinking something like this but I basically turned it into this big shameful mea culpa thing... like, my evil unconscious mind wanting me to hurt and humiliate women by rejecting them in the way that I'd been hurt and humiliated by a woman (my mother) in her rejection of me. But these days I tend to think of the unconscious as a benevolent thing for the most part and our efforts to defend ourselves from it as the source of many or most problems... so anway. I think there is in me a generous impulse; I like to help people who are in need. I feel good when I'm being useful to someone who can use my help. This is not really an evil tendency, on its own. Not really evil, no. But, the problem comes in that I don't know or haven't yet fully learned the art of saying "no" having once said yes. I've been reading a book about therapy and whatnot, parts of which I agree with and parts of which I don't, but it's an interesting book nonetheless, and one of the very insightful things in it was about the illusion of dependency as love. Many people, the author says, think that being totally dependant on a person is the way that you show your love for them, or that vice versa, allowing someone else to be totally dependant on you is the most loving thing you can do. But, as one of his chapter heading says, Dependency Is Not Love. So... maybe what's happenning with these relationships where someone becomes dependant on me and I then tear myself to bits trying to support them before finally being unable to do it anymore and pushing them away... maybe it's more that I'm not adequately disciplining my good impulses than that I'm filled with evil impulses which need to be more thoroughly repressed. Um. There's not a lot of clarity here but, well, when has there ever been?
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"Good feeling
Won't you stay with me
Just a little longer?" - Violent Femmes
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