You see it used to be that I had all of these different kinds of emotions swirling about that were difficult to manage as I processed my inbox. I am a fan of Getting Things Done and so I do care about “processing my inbox”, thinking through consciously what I am going to do with my e-mail and making decisions. However, I felt like I didn’t always know what to do with the feelings that would emerge from e-mails from some folks. I didn’t trust my feelings. I didn’t know how to cope with the negative feelings I would have about people and I felt obligated to them more than my feelings at times. This left me at a loss of how to be true to myself. I was still caught up in being pleasing to other people more than feeling confident in my ability to please myself and to communicate that.

I am considering how I want to go forward with this emerging desire to clear out my inboxes. I know for sure that I don’t want to just close my eyes and delete everything. I would miss out on the opportunity to get to sort out some of these old, swirling emotions. At the same time I don’t want to sit myself down and make myself do this so that I could have the satisfaction of just being done with this.

Instead I want to know that by Thanksgiving that I will have gone through all of my inboxes. That will give me time to do this but will also give me time to share and discuss with my therapist any noticings I have about how it is to engage with the confusions of the past that these e-mail brought up in me.

In the mean time I will go through my current e-mail daily, slowly and consciously, and perhaps even building the muscle for looking back at the past.

I am a little weirded out, meaning nervous, that I said that this morning, but I am less weirded out than I would have been in the past.  I am much, much more anchored in my private life than I ever have been before.  It’s a relief.

I probably need to stop writing this morning and go about getting into my home life rather than just reflecting and processing.  I am still figuring out how much plain old living I need to do and how that nourishes me and how much thinking helps me move forward.  I survived in the past by thinking things through.  So I totally default toward reflection, but I also know that getting what’s in my heart and trying to take shape into some collection of words helps me with the just living part, too.

So I guess I will keep writing.

I have been reflecting on something David Brooks wrote about in relation to Elena Kagan and her Supreme Court nomination:

About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.

If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic.

If you listen to people talk about Elena Kagan, it is striking how closely their descriptions hew to this personality type.

He goes onto elaborate how Kagan has not distinguished herself by taking controversial stands in her professional life.

I am not writing this because I agree with Brooks’ description of Kagan.  I don’t know enough to have an informed opinion.  But I do relate on a guttural level to his description of Organization Kids.  I relate to trying to do well, to please authority.  It often feels hard-wired in me.

This must be why I have been so fascinated this spring via my writing here with being a jerk.  I want this muscle so badly.  I want to be able to survive being controversial.  I so admire this in others.

I have also been reading my favorite writer on the emotional needs of children and adolescents and how to give them the parenting they need – Carl Pickhardt.  He won my heart originally with his insightful book The Future of Your Only Child, and last week I appreciated him all over again with his book Why Good Kids Act Cruel.  It’s about social cruelty and bullying, but it’s really more about the developmental tasks early adolescents need to face and succeed at in order to make it to healthy adulthood.  He explains how parents can help adolescents navigate this time of life.

Then this week in his blog he talked about popularity.  He concluded with this great summary of the costs that can come with being popular:

• Popularity requires pleasing – you must strive to be nice to people who you want to keep liking you.
• Popularity brings pressure — to belong you have to conform, being like, behaving like, believing like other members of your group.
• Popularity takes being current – you have to look cool, keep up with what’s happening, and stay cutting edge.
• Popularity is precarious – people can vote you in and they can vote you out, and “elections” can be held at a moment’s notice when you accidentally offend or someone “better” comes along.
• Popularity is partly unpopular – while some people admire you, others envy you, can get jealous, and want to bring you down.
• Popularity attracts imitators – people act like you so they can be liked by you, and liked by others by acting like you.
• Popularity breeds insincerity – you may often fake being nice to people, and people may often fake being nice to you.
• Popularity is confusing – sometimes you wonder if people want to be your friend because of who you are or because you’re popular.
• Popularity attracts attention – you are noticed more, judged more, your flaws and failings are more closely observed, and you are more gossiped about.
• Popularity is competitive – since so many people want to be popular, you have to perform your best against your rivals every day.
• Popularity can go to your head – popular people can believe their own reviews and act special or entitled, injuring friendships they thought secure.
• Popularity can be limiting – the more you invest in popularity at school, the less you are likely to invest in creating a social life outside of school.
• Popularity can be demeaning – people who pursue popularity will sometimes accept mistreatment from more popular people just to be accepted.

Most important, popularity and friendship are not the same. Popularity is political; friendship is personal. Popularity is about rank; friendship is about relationship. Popularity is more casual; friendship is more caring.

I look at this list and I cringe as I recognize how I have borne many of the costs of trying to be popular.  At the same time it is such a relief to see this all spelled out and know there is another way.  Out there in our culture there’s talk of “people pleasers” but I never quite got that that was me.  I was so steeped in it, but looking at this list I get it.

The cost above that really gave me pause was the one about popularity breeding imitators.  Over the last couple of years I have been noticing how I adopt other people’s habits – the phrases they use, the intonations, etc.  I am so influenceable.  I know I do this so that I can fit in.  I also know I did this as a child because I was looking to the outside world for how to act, how to behave.  Not a completely bad thing, but I’m an adult now.  I want to grow out of the habit of modeling myself after others so I can be liked and fit in.  I want to be able to hold onto what makes me, me.  I don’t want to adopt who other people are so I can fit in.  I know that I did this when I began my new job.

I also recognized parts of me in the statement that popularity is competitive.  He says that everyone wants to be popular and so “you have to perform your best against your rivals every day.”  I never consciously thought of other people as my “rivals” but I recognize the insecure part of me that has feared not being at my best because I might lose my standing in my world.  Oh.  That’s not a pretty thing to see in myself but it’s so true.

Andrea and I talked this week about how I learned working with customers in the family business how to get along with almost anyone and how I ignore people’s poor behavior toward me and relentlessly remember the good in them.  I know that this is often what happens to a lower ranked person in a relationship.  So I recognize that I have paid the price of being nice to people to keep them liking me as well.

I can see that I have been a victim of unpopularity, but I  hadn’t recognized how much I was living my life according to the codes of popularity and in doing so being a perpetrator, too.  In this way I really relate to what he says about popularity being fickle and that “elections” can be held and a moment’s notice and the tides can change.  This is ugly, and I recognize myself here, too.  Very well.  I know the instinct/desire to not be caught in an unpopular relationship or whatever so very well.

It’s such a relief to have him identify these things and just by being more aware unhook myself from this way of being.

I love the work of Robert Fuller who thinks deeply about the abuse of rank in his book Somebodies and Nobodies.  Pickhardt and Fuller’s work dovetail nicely together with Pickhardt reflecting on how to help kids develop as strong individuals so they can grow into who they really are and Fuller pointing out how in the adult world we are all somebodies and nobodies in different circumstances and we need to be very conscious of treating all with dignity.

My young parts have always been soothed by Fuller’s work, getting intuitively what he is talking about and grateful someone was taking a stand against poor treatment – completely unaware at the time how poorly treated I had been.  My young parts are now glad Pickhardt has shown her how she can step away from the kind of thinking that kept her trapped.

In my workplace I often feel like an early adolescent.  I want to be liked, I want to be popular, I want to be admired and followed.  I fear being excluded.  I fear being gossiped about.  I want to be with the in-crowd.  I knew I needed a year of relatively low stress work so that I could confront these kinds of feelings.  When I decided this a while back, I didn’t know what these feelings would be, but now that I am here I recognize them.

I am so, so glad to be right where I am in this life, learning what I need to be learning.

I wonder in another year how it will feel to be me.

Andrea and I first talked about this a couple of years ago.  I don’t remember how I received the news about this truth.  Perhaps with denial and a bit of relief.  Regardless, I keep feeling a ton of relief that I don’t have to get people to understand me.

Here’s what I’m finding about understanding and attachment.  In my old life I was not securely attached.  I didn’t have a strong, internal, safe home base to return to in my head and heart.  As I am beginning to feel more attached, I would even say in the past the cells of my body felt different.  I was simply more unconsciously nervous and anxious.  But of course I needed somehow to feel safe and secure, and being hopeful I looked to my work relationships which were the primary relationships of my life for that feeling of attachment.  (Working in the family business growing up, I also felt most safe and secure while working so this naturally extended into adulthood.)

But I remember to way back past times and to times just this past week when I would seek understanding from my coworkers.  I’d want them to know me.  I wanted them to understand me such that they would be nice to me.  I wanted them to protect me from feeling so alone, by having their companionship.  That last bit is very, very true.

Years ago Andrea pointed out to me that this kind of emotional orientation would make me more fused to the people in my life.  I would then become dependent upon getting them to understand me.  It could be really distracting and pre-occupying.  That was why, cultivating the secure attachment I never experienced as a child through our therapy relationship was so important.  Doing so would help me be emotionally robust.

This week I did something really dumb.  I left my keys on top of the car when leaving for work in the morning, we drove away, and the keys fell off.  I came into work and told the story.  But as I was telling it, I was telling it not just as some casual story.  Something had triggered me to tell it and seek comfort, safety, understanding, and approval.  It took me back to who I was ten years ago.  I was telling it to someone who works for me and that brought up a whole host of uncomfortable feelings about looking incompetent in her eyes, etc.  I also felt really vulnerable because my needy switch was turned on.  I started the morning needy and stressed, but another coworker can kind of bring out a weird feeling of incompetence through her excessive caring.  Not sure if that makes sense.

The long and the short of it is that I went home that night recognizing that I had felt really alone that morning and that I had been looking for my coworkers to help me not feel alone.  I mean here that I felt an existential kind of alone.  It was a relief to be able to see that I didn’t actually need to look to my coworkers to soothe me.  It wasn’t like the past where work was all I had, where home wasn’t a safe place to be, and I was incapable of soothing myself.  In the present my husband and Andrea are there for me.  I can count on them to help me.

So yesterday I was worn out at work, running ragged.  As I was being compassionate with myself, remembering all the reasons I am running ragged, it was reassuring to me that I no longer had to have my coworkers agree or affirm my compassion for myself or give me compassion where I had none for myself.  I could understand and be gentle.  And I could understand and be gentle with myself because Andrea and my husband are there to help me when I forget.

(I do want to say that my husband is not helpful like Andrea is.  It’s different.  He’s a guy and not a parent-like figure in my life as Andrea is.  Sometimes he says the wrong thing (Andrea does, too) or, appropriately, is not concerned with how to help me grow.  He’s into his own life.  Somehow this difference is a feature not a bug.  At the same time he can be so wonderfully supportive and it seems like I am learning more about how to open my heart to that and to him.  Hopefully more about this in another post.)

My point is that I LOVE that I am becoming less dependent upon those in the periphery of my life to understand me and able to use and take even greater advantage of my close attachments.  It makes life a lot simpler.

I paged Andrea because this was so huge that I knew I needed help.  As I often do, I had no idea how to get her help or have her help.  I was telling her things and then I stopped and said I’m so tired I just can’t tell you about all of this.  Then she said – ah, yes, you need rest, you need sleep.  That freaked me out.  I didn’t want her to leave me alone to sleep.  Of course I said something about that.  In hindsight I doubt she was going to hang up at that moment, but it’s in those moments that I feel anxiety that I will be left alone to cope.

At one point I want to tell her about being so glad to spend the weekend with my husband especially because something is different within me.  I start to get the words out and I begin to cry uncontrollably.  I tell her something like – this is good stuff I want to tell you even though it doesn’t sound like it.  She understands and I lose it for several minutes.

After the sobbing subsides she says something that made so much sense.  She said – sometimes it can feel so good for the crying to match the level of feeling we have inside.  Oh yes.  I really, really needed everything inside of me to have some form outside of myself.

Digesting this has been interesting.  I mostly feel very much at peace with his death.  I was aware as he was dying that I had begun this intensive and very focused time in therapy as I began to realize that I would not have his love and support, that he would die and that I would not have him as a ballast in my life anymore.  As he was aging, I was seeing my parents more clearly and that brought up significant traumatic responses within me.  It was a surprise, then, a few weeks ago when I found myself at ease with Grandpa’s passing.

I was most scared about seeing my parents.  Perhaps more on that later.

While I have not had existential anxiety related to Grandpa’s death, his passing is something that I am still assimilating.  It hasn’t hit me completely.  Last night it dawned on me that I would never again get to have an experience with him.  My real life experiences with him are over.  Of course, I will be re-experiencing him over and over again in my heart.

Just after I got back I was offered a job – a nice promotion over my temp job within the same department.  So that was a lot to absorb all at once.

And I feel like I am on the cusp of a deeper and more nuanced understanding of what it means to be differentiated from people.  My relationship with my husband is prime testing ground these days.  I am reluctant to blend too much with him.  I am feeling a need for distance I suppose so that I can know myself more and become close again without losing myself.

It’s an utterly fascinating time.

And a post memorial service e-mail from my dad had me reeling for a few days after months of not reeling from things.  I was blown away by the emotionally incestuous nature of his expectations of me.  I felt utterly responsible for him.  I felt fearful for his well-being.  I felt awful for turning my back and knowing that I indeed need to turn my back in order to be a healthy child.  I felt very enmeshed with him.  I felt scared for my own well-being.  I had a hard time finding myself again.  But then I did.

All of this sense of myself as being a separate person or not is also playing out at work.  I am watching closely when I feel the urge to fit in and be like everyone else.  I am so fortunate to have my own office with this new position.  The physical structure of having space of my own is helping me to remember who I am and that I am distinct from the mindsets that others have about themselves and the work.  It’s an odd experience to not be trying to compulsively fit in all the time.  I still catch myself wanting that in a reflexive kind of way – not that wanting to fit in is a completely bad thing.  To some degree it’s a great thing, I’m just finding when it is that I go too far with the desire to fit in.

I am also really aware that my work colleagues do not have to be my close personal friends.  It is enough for me that I respect their work ethic and their care for the department.  It’s a huge relief that that’s enough.

Another interesting thing is that I am aware that as time goes on that I am getting to know both their good points and their bad points more clearly just as they have a chance to get to know my good points and bad points better.  As I come to see them with greater clarity, I can feel my acceptance of them as they are – good and bad.  It’s a great feeling – that acceptance.  I love knowing that to some degree they will have to come to that same level of acceptance about me.  I say that because I see that they have come to some place of acceptance with their other coworkers so I know they will with me, too.  They may complain at times, but there’s both acceptance in their complaining and I can see that at least for one person her complaints are just a feature of who she is.  It’s also been a relief to be able to remember that people may not even be able to see meclearly – that I don’t have to agree with their assessments.  I don’t have to have them understand me.  They can get me wrong.  It doesn’t really matter.

Things are so different when I don’t have to compulsively look outside myself for validation and acceptance.

In my last conversation with Grandpa, I told him that I was happy.  I think I said something like it seemed like he stuck around to make sure I was okay and that he could let go because I’d gotten enough to a place where I was deeply, deeply happy.  I am so glad I told him this gist of things.  I wanted him to know without a doubt that I would be okay.  We never spoke about the challenges I had with my parents, but I think he knew.

I’ve got a lot of stuff I am wanting to experience and figure out this year, things that I hope that being back in the work world will help me to sort out.  I am so grateful for the stability and certainty that this  job will offer.  I am grateful that I no longer need to live with uncertainty about this big component of my life.

Anyway, it was really fun to be able to have that conversation with my co-worker and know who I am and not be ashamed.  I like my co-worker, too, so I could also say that I’m hoping in the coming year that I can practice being more of a jerk.  She assured me that if I stayed around here, I’d get my chance!

I even said that I would know that I’ve had a good year if someone called me a jerk behind my back.  Oh gosh.  Why do I say these things?  And then why do I confess them here?  Well, because I really do want to be free to be myself.  I really do want to stretch into places I’ve thought were off-limits to me or way too scary.  Of course, I want people to call me a jerk because I’ve done something I think matters but they don’t.  I don’t want to be a jerk just for the sake of being a jerk.  Maybe that’s not even true.  I really don’t want to be so careful, and sometimes I am going to flub up massively.  I want to prove to myself that I can survive being a jerk.

I must really want this jerk-dom because it sure pops up in these posts every once in a while.

What’s most embarrassing about it is that it is such a small thing – at work I want people to recognize me for what cool lunches I bring.

I just wrote about wanting to settle in more with Andrea, to experience how much I am cared for.   I think this is somehow all related.  Perhaps it’s related because I actually do know what it feels like via Andrea to be cared for and I want this with these folks, too, in this little way.  This feels right to me.  I want people to know me.  There’s a very young part of me that wants to be known for how cool I am.  This is different from being accepted.  Perhaps this is why I feel so shy about this.  It’s new and different.  It’s not about wanting to be accepted or fitting in.  I think I feel that enough at home and with Andrea.  I feel shy, perhaps, because it’s this new feeling of wanting to be known.

When talking about some of this last night with Andrea, I was also thinking that I want to be known for the crummy stuff, too.  It keeps being a stronger and stronger fantasy that people talk about me in front of me or behind my back about the stuff I am awful at doing and being.  I can picture myself being okay with that.  I imagine myself smiling and nodding.  I imagine myself being content with who I am because I do indeed know that I also have good points.

My husband had a colleague once who would purposely do things horribly that he never wanted to be asked to ever do again.  He would spend too money.  He would do things that obviously somebody else would think you shouldn’t do.  He’s so my hero in this regard.  He’s the antithesis of me.   Andrea and I were talking about him last night and she used the word arrogant to describe him.  Immediately, I laughed because in my therapy it seems like healing for me comes from embracing all the bad, off-limits things.  I so deeply want to become arrogant now.  I want the freedom to be arrogant.  I want it to be an option for me.

Well, that’s about all I can handle of arrogant talk for now.   Well, I will say that I asked Andrea if she would be there for me if I made a mistake and was too over the top arrogant – like I could ever even begin to try to be arrogant!  She said she would, of course.  Anyway, this is a topic for another day.

Maybe things are hanging together.  Perhaps I want to feel experience more how Andrea cares for me (as in my last post) so that I can feel the freedom to not have to be so careful, good, and non-offensive.  Still not sure how this connects to the young part of me that wants to be known for my great lunches except that I think she wants to be seen in more real terms.  I no longer just want to be accepted or to fit in.  I want to be known for who I actually am.  My lunches are a symbol of that.

Before signing off last night Andrea and I talked about how I hope to be able to feel looser in my relationships.  I told her that I go back and forth in believing that it will ever be possible to feel looser, to be able to be known for who I really am and be able to relax.  I said I wondered if I was just striving for perfectionism because where I am isn’t too bad but looser is really what I want.  What if I just am rigid?  She said that indeed I could have looser but that of course it’s so much easier to have what I want when I can accept right where I am.

So I sign off right now remembering how much better I felt a few weeks ago when I could say that of course given where I came from that I would feel ashamed.  Of course, I have felt rigid inside given my past.  Of course.  And this is me.  In my odd fantasy people can talk about me and say that there’s this funny rigidness about me that’s obvious at different times and in different ways.  Because that is simply part of who I am.  Along with making great lunches!

Things have been changing at home in terms of my attachability with my husband so I expect that soon enough I will feel it more with her, too.  It’s funny how I grow with these two.  Some times I can grow more with her and some times I can grow more with him.  Another good reason to not depend exclusively on a husband.  I also feel so grateful that I can grow in my relationship with my husband.  Anyway, I’ve noticed myself feeling more settled with my husband, more able to “find” him, know that he is there, know that there is a familiar road back to him.  This describes what I am seeking more of with Andrea.  Of course, I couldn’t get as far as I have without being able to “find” her, but I want to find her more.

Hmm.  It is kind of helpful to think of this through the metaphor of a road or path.  In the past it was kind of like I was dropped off in the middle of a clearing at the beginning of each session and I spent a lot of time looking for her.  She was there, but it was more like we were both in this wilderness area by ourselves but talking to one another by shouting, are you there?  That was probably on a good day.  Days when we were checking in.  I remember those days when she would want to engage me further, when she would be seeking to engage me by noting that it felt like I was doing therapy by myself and I couldn’t believe we weren’t.  I think I was just glad I knew she was going to be in the clearing with me, even if we were off by ourselves in completely different parts of the area.  That was enough for me.

But it’s not enough now.  I’ve been noticing this at home.  Sometimes on the weekend I want to enjoy my husband more and I get kind of cranky if I am thinking I will go off and do my own thing.  I don’t want to.  I do want to do whatever I was planning to do, but there have been times when I don’t want to do it by myself but I don’t even know or recognize that this is true for quite some time.  I have to get angry and perturbed and spend some time getting to the bottom of those feelings before I know that I just want to be with my husband going about daily life together.  Interesting.

There are pathways in my heart that I am getting used to traveling with my husband and even bits of my life that I do by myself but that I know my husband is with me.  I have been marveling about how neat it is that I go to work, this new environment, but that I get to go home to a place where people know me.  When I say “people”, I must mean my husband and Andrea.  It didn’t used to feel that way.  I was by myself.  I seemed happy by myself lots of time, but that was just because I didn’t know any different, but as I got older, happy by myself got to be very difficult to sustain.

So I think what happens more with Andrea right now is that I know how to find my way to the clearing.  The path there is worn.  I know how to find her in the clearing.  The paths we take together are more worn and clear.  What I hope will be different is how I feel when I find her, how I feel before I get to the clearing, and how I feel as we are walking those paths.  I think of those times when I take a hike and in my head I am all about the exercise but I haven’t stopped and let myself be with the beauty around me.  I haven’t settled in.  I want to keep settling in with her.  I want to relax more with her.  I want to fully take in how much she cares about me.

That’s just not possible right now.  But writing about all of this is a good sign that one day it will happen.

It’s been fascinating to wake up every morning and feel so different inside.  This morning, my third morning getting ready for work, I was most aware of how I am not existentially afraid.  At some point in the last couple of years I recognized that I had been waking up feeling scared every morning.  I guess I was aware that had happened as a child.  Perhaps a couple of years ago I realized I wasn’t waking up in existential crisis then.  It’s super reassuring that with a couple of days of work under my belt that I can feel so different even now, even returning to work.

I figure I need several weeks of adjusting to full time, in an office work before I start looking again for long term work.  I have a few applications out there and they just need some time.  I was saying to Andrea that my old instinct would be to let myself let out a big sigh and let go of the pushing toward a long term goal and then pick it up again in a forced kind of pushing way.  This time I’ve decided that I will slow down and just be where I am right now, with a different perspective than a big sigh might suggest.  I guess I mean the perspective of where I am is enough and so I can enjoy this rather than be preoccupied in the back of my head still with where I have yet to go.

I thought that the desire to look for a long term job would naturally build within me again and when it does I will go with it.  I don’t have to push myself.

This, I guess, is linked back into the feeling of not waking up in existential crisis.  I do not fear for my life and so I don’t have to anxiously look toward the next great thing.  I don’t have to wake up in the morning anxious.  I don’t have to expend energy calming myself down which really was about making sure I didn’t feel what I really felt including deep rooted shame.

My life is so much busier than it has been over the last several years, but it feels good.  Years ago Andrea said that it sounded like I wanted my life to hum, to be able to go about life without much dramatic interruption.  That was true.  My life is beginning to hum.

I say all of this to talk about shame and my twenty something self.  This morning was in bed, reflecting, cup of tea in my hands, and in a mindset where I could be compassionately with my twenty something self.  I’m in the middle of a job search now, and there have been times recently where I have been jolted out of the reality that I am not that twenty something person any more.  I should be making lots more money than she made.  I have incredible skills that were undeveloped, untested or unrefined back then.  I am really different from her.

It was making sense to me, though, that it was hard for me to see myself as different from her.  I do think that I was emotionally suspended in my twenties.  That’s what caused me to have to stop and take a look at my life these last couple of years.  I could DO all of these things and test those skills, refine them, develop them and all that in my thirties, but there was still this huge emotional intelligence piece that I was missing, that made all of these great things about me kind of moot.

That brings me back to the shame.  I was remembering this morning that my twenty something self couldn’t take some entry level jobs that she would have loved because she had to make a certain amount of money because she absolutely could not have a roommate.  I knew that I was so emotionally unprepared and unable to live with anyone else, except for someone I was romantically involved with (because there was hope that I would feel loved but that went miserably for me, too).  I remember thinking about where I would live and decided that it would be in the same complex as my boyfriend.  I was so ashamed that I couldn’t live somewhere on my own, but I now recognize that I was also so lonely that I couldn’t live in an apartment complex by myself.  I had no peers of my own in my life, just my boyfriend’s friends.  It was hell.  And the feeling I couldn’t let myself feel at that time was shame.  I also couldn’t let myself feel my loneliness because  then I would feel ashamed.  But if I had been able to feel how lonely I was, I might have been able to recognize that I needed help.  But then I was so ashamed that I couldn’t say I needed help.  This was true even though I was trying out therapists at the time.  I was so turned upside down inside.

So today it is such a relief to feel what couldn’t be felt before.  It’s nice to be able to know that there is a current me who is distinct from that twenty something self.  It’s nice from a post-traumatic stress perspective that I can distinguish that the present is distinct from my twenty something past.

My job search has helped me to confront that and solidify within me that distinction.

There’s a ton of growth that’s happening each and every day these days.  I’ve stopped trying to keep track or keep up.  It’s nice that I finally have this kind of momentum.  It’s nice to give in and just let myself be changed.  And it’s nice to pause a bit and write about a slice of what I notice happening.