feeling so damn good!

ok. i've been whining for months now. and i don't know how it happened, but i had a little epiphany over the weekend, which i'll share with you now:

i am getting upset by my new boss because she is changing things and doesn't like how my previous boss ran things. she chooses to communicate by blunt honesty and negative body language. what got me so upset was how she chose to communicate those feelings to me.

everything in my life has been built by myself to be in control - this is how i survived my mother. i know this now. i needed everything to be in control, planned, not too risky... have the exit plan before you go. this new boss is in control now, and the change from the previous boss, who i had finally learned to read, threw me for a loop.

so what if she wants to change everything? who cares if she thinks i've been doing a lousy job? what's important is what i know: i know i do my job well. i know that i am competent and capable. she's only been working with me for one week - so how in the world can i expect her to know that yet? why in the world am i letting this get me into a depressive funk? it's not worth it. it's just a stupid job! !!

which leads me to the next subject. my brother spent 40 minutes yelling at me on the phone last week to tell me i need to get a life. and he said it just like that. he said i'd go crazy if i kept stressing about work and had nothing else to do, even to the point of obssessing about work on my weekends (which i totally do.) why am i wired to be married to my job?

the more i think on this question, the more it goes back to survival. i survived my mother's latest break by jumping whole-heartedly into my job. working there keeps me from worrying about her. all those customers and coworkers keep my brain utterly free of thinking about my mother. my work friends became my pseudo friends, and before i knew it, the past 5 years have been nothing but work, work, work, succeed, get a promotion, work. as i've said often, this is no way to live a life.

so i'm taking my brother's advice. i'm getting a life. i'm moving on from this crap that is just in my head, and getting out of my own head. i'm going to find an orchestra to join. i'm going to take a continuing ed class. i'm going back to weight watchers and finally lose the weight that i have put on while feeling guilty/unhappy/stressed/emotional. i'm going to lose the weight, but gain myself.

i'm feeling so damn good and optimistic.

i'm not even going to think about the last will and testament that my mother forwarded to my address. i'm not going to read into it all. i cannot lose myself again. i'm more important right now.

this sucks.

my new boss is awful. not crazy like the last one, but completely unfriendly and awful. why can't i ever win?

nothing ever quite works out for me, and i'm tired of it. i know that no one has it perfect but really? not one thing can go right for me?

i'm a sad little face tonight.

admitting it.

i'm acknowledging all the feelings i'm having right now about my boss 's last day.

i am scared.

i am nervous.

but perhaps most surprisingly, i am sad. she drives me crazy, but lately, working with her has been kinda fun.

for better or for worse, this woman has been my other half professionally for the past year and a half, and that relationship has now ended. i have to get used to someone else now. someone else's preferences, habits, wording...

i really dislike change. it makes me feel out of control in the situation, and if there's one thing i learned as a child, it was to be in control. meh.

change is hard.

i'm rereading "my parent's keeper" by brown. a few things have happened in the past 24 hours to make me feel that this is a necessity.

1. i'm becoming more and more active in NAMI. they sent out a story on a high school in waukena, wisconsin that did a dance routine that mocked the mentally ill. i was so triggered by memories of myself in high school, coming to terms with my mother's hospitalization, that i sent an email to the principal of the school. i was pretty honest in my anger at the routine.

let me reiterate here that it is VERY unlike me to confront people about this kind of thing. it's easier to do through email, where life is inpersonal, and you can yell whatever you want without having to be there for the recipient's reaction. to my utter shock, the guy asked me for a phone number to have a conversation today. he even called me. the conversation was a good one, but it left me feeling even more confused by my own reaction to it than the actual dance routine situation. that school is a thousand miles away from me - it has no effect on my life. but i know there are students there who might be just as traumatized as i was, or who may be mentally ill themselves, and might need someone to advocate for them.

is this a hint as to something i feel passionate about? more passion than i do about my job? i find myself fantasizing about starting a national organization for ACMIs like myself, and taking our message to young students across the country who might be as affected as i was at their age.

2. i have two days left working with my boss. if you go back to some of my older posts, you know that she is someone with whom i feel a very weird connection. i hate working for her. she reminds me of my mother, and she has turned my working life into an echo of my personal life.

but lately, i'm starting to worry about the new boss. the situation now might suck, but at least i know what to expect and how i need to cope. i'm being thrown into something new, and it's scary as hell. i feel... nervous.

which brings me back to brown's amazing book. the excerpt i want to think about:

"in order to break through this vicious cycle of anxiety and inhibition, you need to see through your adult ways of clocking your insecurity and look into the mind and feelings of that child within you. if you can begin to do this, you'll be able to soothe yourself by seeing that there isn't nearly as much at stake in this situation as that child believes. that hungry, unloved child in you is seeking all the care you never got - and expecting all the rejection and abuse you did receive. approaching any new, unknown person in your world revives that craving and that specter once again."

continuing the isolation (?)

i was reading some of the old comments left on some of my entries. there's one that is just playing with my mind at the moment, and i have to let out everything it stirred up just now.

"Our souls came in stronger than most, we children of these parents. We are a silent type of warrior; our anger is often misplaced, our loyalty is often misplaced and our love is often left unfulfilled."

i was supposed to go home to my friends today to watch the superbowl. somehow, i wound up at work instead. i spent the entire day feeling bad for myself that there would be no one to watch the game with anyway. and true to form, i left at 6 pm, just for kickoff, to sit and watch the game with the cats. i suppose i could have gone all the way to my hometown as planned - drive the hour and see who was around and where. but i didn't really want to bother.

i have to make some friends around here, or this is never gonna stop.

i went to visit my brother and his wife last weekend, and i'd be lying if i didn't admit that i've been thinking of just jumping ship entirely and moving down there near them. given that the rent there is half what is here, i could probably pay my way just finding some odd job and starting all over again. but i am sooo c l o s e to promotion again. is money all that will make me happy? will moving somewhere else make me any more happy than i am here?

one thing is for sure - all of the future plans i had for myself seem to matter less and less lately. when i switched careers four years ago, i convinced myself that this company was the only one i wanted to work for. that i wanted to retire from it. that i wouldn't be satisfied until i was first in command, and entitled to all those yearly bonuses. lately, however, i'm starting to wonder if i really want to do this even in ten years. my job takes me away from everything good in life, like normal weekends, normal hours, family time, regular holidays off... and i've dealt with it so well, i believe, because my job took my mind away from the personal junk going on in my head. i could lose myself in 10,000 customers a week and 300 employees to manage and being really, really good at it. but the cost is becoming clear. my lifestyle is unhealthy. my heart is empty. i'm living an hour away from my family and friends simply for the privilege of being #2.

wouldn't it be nice to just say "fuck it" and leave? i've started from scratch before. i could do it again. and this time, my brother would be there to save ME.

"our loyalty is often misplaced" - has my loyalty been to job and company, before family and self? all i ever wanted was some normalcy and a retirement package. is it worth it? is it really "normal"?

running away won't change the hurt. it won't fix me magically. it won't fix my mother. but it sounds so good right now. sigh.

nightmares.

i've been sick with the flu. it's really not fun. being sick on your own just sucks. no parents to bring home the cough drops. no roommates to ask to get stuff to make soup. you have to suck it up and do it on your own, while feeling like utter crap. i will say that being sick on my own is perhaps the worst feeling i can think of - except for having nightmares.

i'm not sure what the trigger is, but something from my childhood obviously stuck with me - i can't watch scary movies. or movies with grotesque violence. i can't watch anything with depictions of violent crimes, guts being spilled, big sharks eating people, aliens eating people. there is something about them that profoundly freaks me the 'eff out. i can give three examples of me trying to watch them: 1) as a senior in high school, some friends were hanging out and decided to watch "the exorcism" - i ran out of the house in tears. 2) when i saw the matrix for the first time, i had nightmares for three days straight about fields of human babies being taken care of by machines. 3) on a school trip, they played some bad movie where it's a haunted house that used to be a mental institution. a character was given electroshock and i got so upset and freaked out that they had to turn it off to keep me from getting hysterical. i couldn't stop crying. (of course, that response is completely normal, given the fact that i know my mother has had electroshock therapy twice in her life.)

i get physically uncomfortable, nervous, nauseous, anxious... i can't do it. my friends still tease me that if we go out to the movies, it better be a romance or a comedy or i won't go with them.

so why, oh why, when i already had a fever and a headache, did i choose to watch a marathon of "criminal minds" yesterday? there were episodes about rapists, serial murderers, pedophiles, and of course, shizophrenics. it's just a crime drama on tv, with mandy patinkin (who i LOVE), but for some reason, the episodes made me feel just like scary movies do. but i kept watching them. i KNOW myself better than that. and just as i would have predicted, i had nightmares all night about rapists, serial murderers, and children being hurt. i must have woken myself out of them at least 5 times throughout the night, and i am still shaking when i think about them.

i was describing this to someone this morning, complaining that i should have called my father after the first one, damn the time it was... but i couldn't do that, right? it's childish. i know it's a tv show. i know that there isn't a rapist in my house, or that a little boy is being held captive on my floor.

and as i said the words, i realized that this must be what it's like to be my mother. she lives with these kinds of visions in her head all the time. her most common delusion is that children near her are being hurt by a murderer, or that she must save children being abused - frequently, her visions are that her own children were murdered and that the ones currently alive (me and my brother) are actually stand-ins or actors, put there to keep an eye on her or harm her.

if i had been a little kid, i would have told my father or mother about the nightmares, and they'd soothe me, and probably lull me back to sleep. but no one was here to lull me back to sleep. i kept falling back asleep and waking up again from another nightmare.

i'm not saying i'm like my mother. only that last night gave me a new insight into what it must be like to be my mother. i feel a lot better today. i told my friend at work about the dreams, and he laughed at them and gave me a hug, and i spent the rest of the day feeling better. i know i'll sleep a bit tonight.

but my mother doesn't ever get the "hug" and the reprieve. once again, i'm left feeling so sorry for her. and sorrier still that i cannot help her.