Like Haunting Something I Used To Know

I'm not at peace yet with "New Normal."

This morning, my daughter and I have appointments over at my husband's dentist office, and I'm dreading it.  Not because of all of that stuff about going to the dentist.  We're just going for cleanings and check-ups.  

It's because I haven't stepped foot in the building since before the Shutdown, at all.  I was always used to striding in as though I own the place, flittering around the waiting room if I wanted to, wandering in to my husband's office to update my phone and computer, and socialize with anybody I wanted to while there.  And my daughter was even more of a butterfly over at that place, seeing if she could befriend anyone after her appointments were over.

Now, we will not be striding in as though we own the place.  We have to sit in our Jeep and call to check in with the front desk.  Someone will come out and take our temperature and ask us a bunch of COVID related questions.  If we pass muster, we get escorted inside.  

And from there, we're taken right to our chairs in the hygiene department, and we have to stay in them until we're escorted from the building.  There will be no bee-bopping around for my social butterfly daughter.  We live in an endless game of "You've Got Cooties!" and we have to avoid, avoid, distance, and avoid, and since we have a particularly vested interest in this game, because it means our safety and the safety of our employees, and the livelihoods of us all, we have to do our part, whether we like it or not, whether we think it's the thing to do or a whole bunch of bullshit.

I hate this New Normal.  I didn't think of myself as a People Person in the days before Pandemic Purgatory, but I guess I really, really was.  I smiled at my fellow shoppers.  I'd strike up conversations with the people who were waiting in the same lines as me at restaurants.  All the little social interactions added up, and now that we're all behind masks and acting afraid of each other- even making eye-contact, I think, it all makes me want to come out of my house less.  Which I think is the very thing "they're" angling for us all to do, to be honest.  (Where's my tinfoil hat?!)

It isn't just the dentist's office that has me bothered.  I'm just particularly bothered by that one because I've been used to interacting with that place a certain way- as an extension of my home - for the last fifteen years.  I'm not the dentist, but that office is mine, too.  And when I've visited places I used to know before Quarantine that I have less of an attachment to, I've been extremely unsettled by the social distancing measures.  I think today is going to be a very hard day, going to something as quotidian and timeworn as a cleaning appointment at our very own dentist's office.

I don't know about you, Friends, but since we went Green (and it feels more like a lemongrass green.  Maybe a pea green, not a True Green), I feel like a ghost caught in a machine I used to know.  I'm half-unseen, unheard most of the time, but here I stand, bewildered at what the world is right now.  And I honestly don't want to get used to "New Normal" if this is "New Normal."  I'm hoping it's more of a "New Normal for Now," getting us through this moment in time and we can get a handle on this virus and how to deal with it, and this will all become just a story we tell here in a little bit.  

One Rainy Saturday Morning

Rainy Days and Mondays...don't really get me down at all, actually.

Saturday morning, when I got up at five, the sky was a dark and murky cobalt blue instead of the shimmery powder blue-teal-orange-pink of the sunrises I've been accustomed to being distracted by so early in the morning.  

It was raining.

It's been a while since I've woken up to a rainy morning.  And I can't remember when it was so dark when I woke up.  I could have almost mistaken Saturday morning for a wintry dark morning if it weren't for the sound of birds chirping in the rain.  Birds sound a little different in the rain.  There's kind of an echo effect to their song.  

It was kind of a refreshing change of pace, to be honest.  We've had so many sunny mornings for so long, I've forgotten when the last time we had a rainy early morning.

Back when we were in the thick of Quarantine, I remember musing on this very blog that I missed Mondays the Way They Used to Be.  In a Sea of Saturdays, a little Monday morning every few days was like a bracing lemon sorbet after a days-long gorge on hot fudge sundaes.  

Rainy Saturday morning was like the same thing, after days and days of stretching sun.  It felt like everything outside and in the air was getting cleaned off, watered, refreshed.

This spring changed everything.  Like the song says, rainy days and Mondays used to bring me down.  Now they're a welcome restart.

Too Too Much INTENSITY!!!!

Sometimes, I'm just a little too intense for my own good.

So I realized something a few days ago, and hold onto your pocket protectors, Pals, because I'm about to get real geeky on ya.  If my husband and I were defined by our similarities to species in the Star Trek universe, he would be a Vulcan (like Spock), and I would be a Klingon (L'Rell is the only one that quickly comes to mind in full Klingon Woman glory).

In case you aren't familiar with this particular dynamic, Vulcans like Spock achieve mastery over their emotions so that they really don't display emotions.  Klingons, the guys with the ridged foreheads and long black hair and angry demeanor are intense.  Like on a scale of one to ten, they're a fifteen.  Even when they're not angry, they look and SOUND angry.  

I've always wished I could be more Vulcan and less Klingon.  

Well, because I understand where the Klingons are coming from.  People think they're angry even when they're not, and they react in kind.  So, a Klingon could say, in their big, booming, enhanced indoor voices, "IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY OUTSIDE!" and the human nearby would not hear the words, but rather the manner in which they were conveyed and perhaps would tell the Klingon to calm the frak down.  (Look at that, I threw in Battlestar Galactica, too!)

And guess what effect telling someone to calm the frak down has!  IT DOESN'T MAKE THEM CALM THE FRAK DOWN AT ALL, DOES IT?!  No!  It does not!  In fact, it probably lights a fire in them.  And after a few minutes of this type of exchange, even though the Klingon wasn't angry before, now it is Game.  On.  The Birds of Prey would be scrambled and the scimitars would be drawn.  And then it's an arms race between the Federation and the Klingons, because the Klingons are so angry and they love war.  And maybe they do.  

But as someone who skews more toward the Klingon temperament than human or definitely Vulcan, I wonder if the Klingons didn't start out not being such a war and killing enthusiasts.  Maybe they were just intense, and after thousands of star-years of their intensity being read as HOSTILE!!! they just got sick of it and said "okay, FINE, we're HOSTILE!!!" and it was off to the arms races.

I think that's how I got to where I am today.  Growing up, I could go from being excited or agitated about something else to having a full-on tantrum in moments.  It would start by me having a bad day at school, or being upset because I got a bad grade (for those keeping track at home, this was anything below a 92) or falling out with a friend, and coming home and telling about it.  I'm not really big on using a well-modulated voice when emotional as an adult, let alone when I was a kid.  So the message of what I was saying would get lost in the manner in which it was delivered (pertineer yelling), and I'd get called out for being sassy or angry or basically intense, and a tantrum would ensue, and I'd get the fly-swatter (I grew up in the 80s- we all had our asses whooped by fly swatters, belts, and willow switches), get sent to my room, and would enjoy an earlier bedtime for the next week or two.  

As an aside, I got sent to bed early so much as a kid that by the time I was in high school, I'd just take myself to bed by 9PM on school nights and most weekends.  Whatever.

Since I was little more than a kid when I met my husband, and he was only two and a half years ahead of me on the way out of being a kid, he definitely saw this dynamic I had going on at home.  I'd be intense, the intense tone of my voice would shout out the message of what I was trying to communicate to the point that an argument over my demeanor would ensue, the message would be lost, and I'd be punished and sent off to lick my wounds in the quiet of my own room without anything about my original message being addressed.  

If you think that dynamic didn't carry over to our relationship and our home, even after we both were adults, you'd be wrong.  Except I don't get the flyswatter or that kind of thing when my Klingon-esque ass is "intense" around my Vulcan, Spock-like husband.  Hell no.  If he ever would have tried to pull that shit on me, I would have ended up kicking him through an othertruckin' wall.  I'm little but Rage makes me stronger, as the cool kids say.

No.  What happens instead is that he hears the intensity in my voice rather than the message of my words, and he shuts the efffffff down.  Which naturally incites and inflames me.  Our therapist says this is stonewalling, and that he's really, really good at it.  I think he comes from a long line of champion stonewallers.  

So roll my original emotion from whatever got me in an intense state to begin with into the anger and inflammation kicked up by the stonewalling, and I look like Donald Duck when he gets good and mad, while the husband sits there, cool and composed in his chair, dismissively uttering "Go ahead.  Keep it up," and just stonewalling the fluck out of the situation until I reach critical mass exasperation and storm out, slamming every door I walk past.  

And now I'm mad, and he's mad- I guess, because I was yelling at him.  And still, I never did get to be heard around whatever it was that stirred up the intense emotions in me to begin with.

Figure in 20 years of this same pattern, and I've gotten, rightly or wrongly, so that I really don't expect anybody to hear me when something sets off a strong emotion.  Because after all, I'm too sensitive.  I let things get to me too easy.  The message of my words gets drowned out by the tone of my voice, so I just ruminate on the issues myself.  And pardon the Anglo-Saxon derivative here, but this is a fucking lonely way to live.  It makes a broad feel utterly unheard and totally unsupported.  

Also, without a sounding board, the same issues swirl around in my head for YEARS, which frustrates the husband.  "We've already talked about this hundreds of times!" he'll exasperatedly say, throwing up his hands and ending the conversation.  "Unless you have anything new to tell me, I've heard it all!  Enough!"

Yeah, well... he heard, but he never listened.  He never offered insight.  He'd get hung up on my manner instead of listening to my message.  I was the aggressor and the problem, and all he was trying to do is live a peaceful life.  

I've been working with a therapist for months now, and the thing I have consistently begged for is a way to be less intense, less quick to anger, less quick to let my voice raise. My fondest dream in the world is to be calm, cool, collected, not at all intense, able to just shut down any emotion.  Aloof like a Vulcan.  I feel like if I were more peaceful and serene, the way I interact with my husband and my family would be more peaceful and serene, instead of me feeling like I was mailed to the wrong address and have kept winding up at wrong addresses my whole life. 

Since anger is really a secondary emotion, I can't help but wonder if all along the Klingons have been misunderstood and lonely, and sad because they're misunderstood and lonely.  And maybe they kind of hate themselves because none of the other people in the universe really get them.  They all just want to make the Klingons the common enemy to work together fighting.  And the lonely and misunderstood and sorrow combine with their general propensity toward INTENSITY!!!! and it just comes off as angry.

If that's the Klingon experience, then I guess I get it, 100%.  And I'm wondering how I can master myself into being composed like a Vulcan, or maybe if I'd be better served saying screw it all and developing a taste for blood wine for when the Klingon Mothership swings by to take me home with them.

Critter Brain and Sweet, Sweet Self-Sabotage

This is what it looks like when Critter Brain is runnin' the show!

Friends, I do this thing where I do really well working out and eating, and I see a little victory on the scale or in the way my clothes fit, and guess what I do- 

If you guessed I reward myself by holing up in a closet with a giant tub of Nutella and a giant spoon, you, sirs and madams, would be correct!

Or if it isn't Nutella, it's like 4 bags of Peanut M&Ms.  Halloween candy.  Chocolate chips I bought to make something out of.  Marshmallow Fluff I bought in a moment of weakness.  Freakin' brown sugar straight from the bag.

Is this behavior really in line with the goals I work so hard to achieve?  No.  Is this normal?  Yes.

Yes, it is.  This is a thing humans do.

It's definitely self-sabotage, and while we think we sabotage ourselves because we lack willpower, that is not what's happening here at all.  Without getting too technical on you, we have three parts to our brain that work together to make us who we are.  One part of the brain is the part that loves to learn and grow and think higher-order thoughts.  This is called the Cortex, in case you'd like to give this a Goog one of these days.  Then there's the Limbic System, that supports emotion and behavior, among other things.  

But it's the third part of the brain that's driving here.  The brain-stem, the most primitive part of our brains.  This part of the brain is affectionately known as "Critter Brain."  Isn't that adorbs?

Well, ol' Critter Brain is all about keeping us safe.  And safe means status quo, even if status quo doesn't make us happy or let us grow.  And Critter Brain pops up after you've made some changes to make yourself better, and it looks like they're really going to pay off.  When you're sailing along toward success, coo-coo-katchoo, who shows up but good ol' Critter Brain, ready to do whatever it takes to keep you right where you are, or right back to where you started.

And it does this by making you do things that sabotage your efforts to be better.  For me, it's overindulging on all the sugar.  All of it.  Apparently my Critter Brain is afraid we'll die if I can wear jeans that are a single-digit size again.  

Critter Brain doesn't just like to keep us safe from weight-loss success.  Critter Brain also doesn't cotton much to us bettering ourselves professionally or in other personal development-type ways.  Procrastinate much?  No follow-through on ideas or opportunities?  That's Critter Brain.  

So to calm that guy down, you have to acknowledge it.  Remember Critter Brain's trying to keep you safe, even if "Safe" sucks.  So you say "Thank you, CB for keeping us safe this far.  Let me take this one and show you it's all gonna be okay."  It takes practice.  You've got to go gradually to get Critter Brain to stand down.  But when you approach your Critter Brain with compassion, empathy, and kindness, it relaxes, and you can sidestep the roadblocks to success that it keeps throwing down to keep you safe.  It helps keep Critter Brain on its leash.

And don't beat yourself up if you tussle with Critter Brain and Critter Brain wins every so often.  You wouldn't be the first person in the world to ever hole up in a closet with a big tub of sugary fatness and a giant spatula....

You Can Knock-Knock Me Over...

...I...will...get...back up AGAIN!!!

One of my favorite kid-movies of recent is Trolls.  It's about a buoyant pink troll princess named Poppy who's trying to save her friends and family from a trollier species called Bergins.  The Bergins eat trolls because they think it makes them happy.  

Poppy has a can-do attitude and kind of goes headlong into her quest with more of a wishlist instead of a plan.  She sings this song about not giving up today, while all sorts of calamities befall her.  

You can knock-knock me over, 

knock-knock me over...

...But...

I... will... get... back up AGAIN!

  When I first heard that song, it was like the mothership calling me home and playing my own personal anthem on the mothership eight-track player.  I've always imagined motherships with eight-track players and those groovy, crazy Seventies pinstriping and paint-jobs.  And that song seemed like the song that's been in my soul all this time, and I just didn't know enough to let it out.  

I've taken a bit of a detour these last few months.  There have been times I have been very close to giving in to the despair.  Like when the spider bites Poppy and wraps her up in the spider-web and it looks like it's lights out for our plucky heroine.  But.  I have got back up again.  

Next time it happens, and there will be a next time, I WILL get back up again.  

The thing of it is, without this gnarly Bergin of a year that 2019 and 2020 have been, I wouldn't have been moved to come out of my safe little troll-cave and head off on this new quest.  I'm not trying to save my people so much.  I mean my people aren't in imminent danger of being eaten by big, fugly Bergins. 

I do worry about what the fallout from Everything That's Happened So Far is going to do to us all, though, Friends.  So there's that.  And while I'm no pink Troll Princess named Poppy, I did notice striking similarities between me and her- a penchant for scrapbooking, a way with words, aggressive positivity.  

And when everything looked like it was going unimaginably wrong, it hit her hard, and she drained of all her color and fire and glitter.  Just like I did. 

And Branch and her friends loved her back to herself.  Just like mine have.  (thank you)  She was re-energized and had renewed focus for taking on her quest, befriending the enemy and changing even their lives for the better.

But we've all kind of been through it this year, haven't we?  And we're all still standing.  So this thing about how you can knock-knock me over, but I will get back up again isn't unique to me.  YOU'RE getting up again from being knock-knocked over, too!

This Bergin of a year can knock-knock us over, Friends, but 

WE WILL GET BACK UP AGAIN!!!  Yes we will!

April Blake, Big Fat Fake!

I feel as qualified to do the things I do as this lawn dart is to be a microphone... or a lawn dart!

There's this thing called Impostor Syndrome, and it makes a person doubt their qualifications and accomplishments and feel like they're going to be exposed as a fraud.  

In my head, my whole name should be "April Blake, Big Fat Fake!"  

Well, it's because I'm certain that I'm not good enough, smart enough, or gosh darn it, qualified enough to do any of the things I do.  Writing, being a mom, driving probably, definitely school board member, friend, cook-at-home-type person, life coaching, editing, bookkeeper, public speaker...

Everything I do, I feel like I'm wildly unqualified and just messing it all up. 

In fact, if there's one thing I feel patently qualified for, it's being the poster girl for Impostor Syndrome.  

The thing is, we all have Impostor Syndrome from time to time.  Even when it comes to things we were trained for, and we kind of know we're good at.  Because this is just how human nature is.  We have access to our own outtakes and blooper reels and self-doubt, while only getting to see everyone else's highlights.  

There's a time all of us SHOULD feel like impostors.  I mean, I totally deserve to feel like an impostor if I were trying to be a dentist.  I didn't go to school for that!  I don't have a license!  Also, I have been invited not to come to work anymore at the dentist's office like three... four times!  Patently unqualified for that line of work, I am.  That's not me being mean to me.  That is the truth.

It's hard to shake the feeling that you're a fake, though, isn't it?

The important thing to remember, all of us, when we're feeling like frauds and big fat fakes, is to remember that just because you're having feelings doesn't mean they're facts.  You FEEL like a fraud.  Unless you're trying to do a job that has actual, concrete qualifications that you have to have and YOU DON'T have them, the feelings you're feeling are just that.  Feelings.  And they'll pass.

You've got this!  I, too, probably got this!

Hurt

I will let you down... I will make you hurt.

I had a free-association writing assignment last week for therapy, in which I needed to write stream-of-conscious around something we’re working on, and see what comes up.  There's been something I relive over and over again, on a continuous loop, and we're trying to break the loop.

  

I’m not sure I really nailed the assignment.  S-O-C was never a favorite writing exercise of mine.  It’s too messy.

But the thing that kept coming up is that I kept hearing “Hurt” in my head as I wrote.  Nine Inch Nails did the original, and Johnny Cash covered it.  Both versions are fantastic, and if you’re not familiar with the song, give it a listen.  

There are particular lines in that song that have been on repeat in my head for decades.  The first time I heard the song, it stopped me in my tracks and brought up discomfort I wasn’t quite okay sitting with yet:  

You can have it all

My empire of dirt

I will let you down

I will make you hurt...

If I could start again

A million miles away

I would keep myself

I would find a way

I let a friend down once, or more accurately, a lot of onces over a length of time.  And I lost a friend.  I can’t get them back or apologize for being such a cowardly and ignorant shit-bird garbage-person when they needed me most. There is no making amends for this.

This changed the way I am friends with people.  I am always on guard.  I'm always looking and listening for some indication that something's Wrong.  I cannot let myself miss a warning sign or a red flag, so when I’m around people, friends, I’m always at least a Threat Level Orange on their behalf.  If something’s really wrong and they’re thinking thoughts, I’ve got to catch it.  Try not to let them down.

The closer the friend, the higher the alert I'm on around them.

It reads as clingy, I think.  Neurotic.  I check more often than I should, probably, if someone's okay.  I really try to let people know how much they matter to me.  I am so afraid of letting my friends down, making them hurt, that I get to be Too Much Friend, I think, and there were a lot of years I put myself in kind of a dome and just kept everyone at a bit more of a distance.  If I'm not a close friend, my way of thinking went, and goes a little, I won't smother you with friendsiness, and also, maybe I won't let you down. 

It isn’t really a good way to live.  I don’t think it’s fair for anyone.  Intellectually, I know that I won't be able to change what happened in the past by smothering innocent people in the present with my neurotic friendship.  And probably if I were on the flipside of being friends with me, I'd take like six huge steps back.  

This is where it's coming from, though. I'm really working on this.  It's hard work, and there are days I just burst into tears from overwhelm, from embarrassment.  Something will trigger me, and I can't shake the feeling that I missed a sign, and something terrible happened to someone I love.  And I will wish I could be just maybe a little more normal, a lot more aloof, back under that kind of dome that kept everyone at a bit more of a distance.

Because I feel like if you're my friend, if you depend on me for anything, I will let you down.  I will make you hurt.