Writing that post this morning was awesome in just the way I love about writing; that way that shows you something… not new, exactly, but true. That way that takes something I’m hiding from the rest of the world because I’m not sure it’s right and puts it in the light and makes me think, “well heck, sure that’s right, and what a relief.”
I’ve lost my entire readership. I haven’t been posting at other people’s blogs, and I’ve backed almost entirely away from writing about mental illness as it relates to myself. Instead, the past several weeks have been about an experience so personal that I doubt most people find it interesting at all. Cleaning house? Not feeling good? Where’s the exciting stuff?
But they’ve been exciting weeks to me – very exciting weeks, and in ways that I haven’t gotten around to trying to envelope in a story, yet.
But back to this morning’s post, and to the events of the weekend and yesterday that came before it…
When we were in the thick of cleaning, on Sunday, I found myself in a panic. It wasn’t a panic that was limited to the amount of cleaning everything about our house really requires at this point, and it wasn’t specific to my health. It was a generalized anxiety that had to do with having been so purposely quiet about the things I’ve been so quietly trying to resolve in my life, lately. How to explain to David that the mess our house is in isn’t something that just suddenly crossed my mind? How to confront the problems in my life that I have so determinedly ignored for so long? How to even take myself seriously about getting healthy again when I’ve done nothing about just that for so many years?
At one point, Sunday evening, David found me simply laying on my back, staring at the ceiling, in our new bedroom. He hugged me and kissed my cheek, and I said, “I keep telling myself this is just a start. We will keep cleaning. We will get the house fixed. We will get rid of some of the stuff around here that never gets used and that’s falling apart and just gathering dust.” It was such a relief to have him hug me and such a relief to say this when all the anxiety was threatening to yell and blame, instead. However… my words pushed him away as literally as if I had put my hands on his shoulders and shoved him.
“You’re only allowed to fixate on one thing at a time,” he said, standing up and trying rather unsuccessfully to smile.
“Wait, what do you mean?” I asked.
“You can fixate on cleaning. Or you can fixate on mold. You can fixate on dust. You can fixate on furniture. But you can’t fixate on everything all at once.”
“But it is everything,” I tried to explain (as he turned his back and left the room). “It is everything all at once. It’s too much,” I added to thin air, as he left me.
And I did feel left. But I felt that it was all my own fault, too. I remembered our very first real date. We’d gotten together casually a few times, but this was the first date where he came and picked me up and took me somewhere. It was my first ride in his car. I remembered the first time I ever saw his apartment, and I remembered moving him out of the same apartment when we moved in together. I remembered the house on Avenue H. I thought about my own housekeeping habits and how they’d started to fall deeply apart a year or two before I met David, and I wondered if I have a tendency to hoard, and if I do or not why I picked someone who does. I thought about the fact that I’ve always gotten rid of most of the things I’ve ever owned and I counted (again, I’d been doing it all day) the things I could see in our home that are actually mine and not hand-me-downs or things that came with David: my clothes, my toiletries, my desk, my art supplies, my books, my boxes of stuff from my last real office, my boxes of diaries, my silverware, my small chest of drawers and 2 chairs from Pottery Barn. The rest – everything around us – came from David, or David’s mother, or my parent’s, or my relatives. We have no room for anything of our own because we are storing everybody else’s lives.
Sometimes I feel that I don’t have room for my own life. I am busy being what other people need or want me to be – and failing (I think, anyway, since they don’t seem happy or they are dead). Before my brother died I was busy trying to be what I thought a boyfriend wanted me to be – and failing (definitely failing miserably). I have a history of people rejecting what I want my own life and self to be. I have a history of people loving me for what I am willing to be for them, although they don’t seem to realize that’s what I’m doing. Sometimes I feel this way and then I feel guilty and weak. What woman doesn’t live her life for someone else? If I’d ever succeeded in having children my life would certainly be about what they needed me to be. And how could anyone ever be a partner without acknowledging and trying to fulfill her partner’s needs? What child wouldn’t want to help her parents in any way she could, even if she couldn’t (or didn’t) help them very well?
And who wouldn’t feel guilty, and anxious… who wouldn’t feel “But it is everything,” when she finally tried to open her mouth to explain that this all felt very wrong… even though she kept that a secret almost all of the time? Guilty because there’s nothing wrong with saying no. Guilty because there’s nothing wrong with saying yes. Guilty because there’s something totally dysfunctional and terribly wrong about saying yes but thinking no for years and years and years… and then, suddenly, saying no.
When I was cleaning on Sunday I felt all of this, and I said that thing to David that I mentioned and he reacted in that way that he did. And then I thought to myself that this time, this time I will not do what I know does not work. I will not sulk and sink in to an easier role as victim, and I will not yell and fly off the handle in to a temporary, injured snit. I will not expect the people I love to suddenly accommodate a frame of mind I have never communicated to them. I’m not sure what I will do, exactly, except that I will take it slowly and, as much as I can, considerately.
In life there must be yeses and nos all over the place. Not all one or the other and not silence. Life is a series of decisions and expecting to live without making them is like expecting to get to New York City without turning corners.
Expecting to change without changing – and without discomfort or pain, and without triumphs nobody but me even knows about – is like expecting to get to New York City without turning corners.
So I’ll have hard days and nights, but along the way I’ll also have days like the one I had today. I slept so grandly, so peacefully and deeply and well last night, and I awakened to bright, lingering sun and warmth. When I got to work I had an email from someone at work I hardly know who asked me to apply for a job that’s a step up from what I’m doing now – and my manager told me I could apply even though I haven’t worked there for an entire year, yet. My stomach cut loose in a way it hasn’t done in nearly two months. My sinuses began to clear. I scheduled a vacation day for tomorrow. And I visited the fabulous personal website I created a year and a half ago and fondly remembered all the technical skills I do still have that are actually in short supply, even though I don’t remember how to get a job using them anymore.
David seems rather withdrawn, perhaps a bit pensive but more like kind of angry in a slightly defensive way. I don’t feel angry with him and I think this will pass, so long as he doesn’t see me revert in to the sulking victim role I have when I’ve given up on trying to be happier in the past. I know my husband, knew him well when we married. It’s myself I’m trying to change here, and not him.
Along the way to whatever I’m changing in to I’ll have times when I’ll feel like I’m suffocating in the dust and debris of my life… and then days like today, when the world is bright and I’m breathing easy. I’m sure of it. Counting on it. Depending on it.
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