April 2, 2023 Realizations

After countless years of what passes for “therapy” everywhere, I’ve never had one of those dramatic breakthroughs that are rampant in the movies. I have now been without one of those creations of the modern mental health scene since mid-2019. I finally gave up, or perhaps I just broke free.

It turns out that with therapy, it is a case of someone encouraging you to fix yourself, and always through the same method – meditation. I suppose my impatience, or actual boredom with the process, discourages me. The act of driving puts me in a reflective mood, however, and it is while I am heading down country roads, or my personal expressways of same (no other cars and no cops), that I have realized many things. These realizations come in stages and any materialization into action on my part happens the same way. Things that I already knew but did not realize would come upon me suddenly during my excursions, leaving me in guilt-ridden tears at times, at others in spasms of grief.

I suddenly saw myself as my children must have seen me, and experienced their childhoods with me. That brought tears of guilt but also hope that I could somehow show them I finally understood, that I finally felt it. I wanted desperately wanted to make amends for my errors and behavior in such fashion that they would accept me as part of their lives, finally, and perhaps even forgive me. Unfortunately, because the fits and starts of my efforts was either not on their timeline or inadequate in some way that I never understood, all came to nought. They have never fully understood me, just as I have never fully understood them. Being as they still do not understand my limitations when it comes to reading people, they never actually told me what they needed from me to allow me to earn a fresh start with them. Because of that, I think, they have never really forgiven me.

They are hurt, and get upset whenever I put the responsibility on their father for a lot of my troubles. That last was too big a pill to swallow, especially as they drifted closer to him and his “second family” and further away from me. Perhaps if they had, at least in part, accepted that their father’s actions towards me were unnatural, they would feel disloyal to him. Or was it just easier to ignore me, take offense at everything I said or did, easier to disregard me, easier to disrespect me, easier to just not care? Unfortunately for me, “There is no worse punishment than having your child talk down to you all the time” Record of Youth.

We have all given up on each other, as has been written about before.

A painful realization caused me to experience grief for my losses as a human being. While I knew that I had only one orgasm in my life after I finally had one in the early 2000s, that fact had never sunk in to the point where I realized that I missed out on a basic human experience until twenty years later. That grief still stays with me. Perhaps it is because of that realization that I have given up trying to find a partner for what remains of my life.

Unbidden thoughts also suddenly bombard my consciousness. Most of them are variations of “I hate myself” or “I hate my life” At times I talk back to that first thought: “Don’t hate yourself; other people will do that for you”. To that second thought, I have been stumped. What life do I want to lead? I know what I wanted my life to be as it had been previously constructed, i.e., before my Ex completely drove me off the rails. There is really no point even contemplating that life anymore.

I still wonder what it is I truly want my life to be. One therapist told me that “my life is only today” whereas I adhere to the truth, that your life is composed of all the experiences you have had. “Our lives are nothing but looking back from a point where time has ended” Miss Oh. Time has not ended for me yet, but someday it will, and the scenes that will flash through my mind will be nightmares. I have finally realized that I hated the majority of my adult life. I sometimes worry about karma. What will my next life be? In this life, I won the lottery of being a late Boomer, born white and into the upper middle class. I knew prosperity, I knew freedom, I could have some dreams for my life, but not others. In high school, I wanted to be a park ranger; that was not possible because I was a female.

I wanted to be a writer until discouraged by a high school English teacher. I wanted to be a veterinarian until my mother took me to a vet where I watched a minor operation. I wanted to be an architect, but was discouraged by my continual failures in math. I wanted to be a dancer in a ballet company until I realized that I was just not good enough. I kept up my studies for many years afterward, though, because the forms and movements gave me comfort.

I wanted love and to be comforted by someone. I suppose that did not hurt me deeply until I started noticing that TV characters had that in their lives. Does it happen in real life? It did not happen in mine. In fact, right now, and for all the time I’ve been suffering from Anhedonia, I wonder whether I have ever had anyone who loved me disinterestedly. That, according to Jane Austen, is the only love that matters. I agree. I now feel doubtful that I have ever had that kind of love for anyone. I had fallen in love with boys in high school; or had I merely fallen for the hormone-driven emotion that I thought was love?

Lately, I have also been wondering what it would feel like to love myself; an extremely pertinent question given those unbidden thoughts of self-hatred. I asked my psychiatrist what loving yourself feels like; his response was along the lines of “it is the same feeling towards yourself that you have towards other people”. For now, I remain unclear whether I have ever loved anyone, including myself, in Austen’s sense. In my current state, the answer is no, with one posssible exception: my friend of nearly 60 years.

I find myself exhausted writing this post.