The Cat's Tail

So the cat’s tail didn’t fall off and slowly slowly the world is going back to normal. The black fog rolled away again and today I can just about make out the sound of birds singing in the distance. My 44 year old self knows to wait for this to happen, to pull the curtains, to let the minutes and hours just drift by and to wait for the calmness and positivist to come back. My younger self would let the fear take over and I would kick and scream at it until I had drained the demon out of it and the life out of everyone who had caused it. Now I hear the fear and I know to wait, to walk away from those people, to nurture me and not fight them. I hear the voice inside now that says ‘its hurting me’ and I tell that voice it’s going to be okay, that I don’t have to panic and react.

That voice came last week after a row with my son over my asking him to help with the fencing, it was the last straw in a week where everything came at once, as things have a habit of doing. I could feel my throat tightening, my instinct to fight growing and I calmed it. I closed the door, physically and metaphorically on him and the events that were threatening my peace of mind and told myself, no, they will all wait until I have decided what to do. The world pushes you to act now, to make a decision now, that everything is urgent. It isn’t.

Sometimes I go to a very deep, dark place, it frightens me but I’ve been there before, several times and although the panic makes me wonder each time if I can climb back out, now I try to keep calm and I wait. Another voice inside me says that there is so much happiness and beauty still to come, that the world is a magical place and I have still got so much to see and experience. That voice is really quiet at first, sometimes I can’t even hear it but I give it time to surface. I give my voices time to talk to each other and I go into a kind of trance and just wait. A sleeping, sofa laying on, TV watching trance and I wait, I wait until that energy kicks back in and my inner voices are singing the same tune and my subconscious mind and soul figure it all out. I trust myself now and I let it happen.

I can do this of course because I live in my own house and I don’t live with another adult that is judging, pushing, intolerant to any disturbance, even when it is disturbance they have caused. If I had had this skill before now and it’s a skill my counsellor has helped me nurture, then calmness would have helped me walk away from situations that weren’t good for me much earlier and I wouldn’t have inflicted so much damage on myself. Yes I take full responsibility for that. The actions of the people weren’t good but it was my choice to continue to expose myself to those actions and that was not the other persons responsibility it was mine. By exposing myself again and again to something that had caused pain before and by continuing to have the same fight reaction with no positive result, the outcome was only ever going to be the same, more pain. I can see, reading back over my diaries of years and years, that I was half way there. I was doing the talking to myself part but only after the initial meltdown reaction when rawness and a natural instinct to ‘get back to normal’ was overwhelming. Like a child whose been smacked by a parent I ran straight back into the arms of the smacker so that love and normality could be restored.

I’ve also learnt that I’m an ‘endurer’ I put up with and live with and paper over the cracks of things that I should walk away from because they don’t suit the me inside. I try to change, to fix, to nurture and battle on with in the hope that the bits I don’t like will all melt away and my world will be sparkly and perfect.

Now I don’t have the time or the energy to fix anyone else, to put myself through it and endure. I have gravitated in my life towards people with issues, many caused in childhood and I have given all of my energy over to supporting them and excusing them and trying to heal them and I’m not doing it anymore, not partners and also after this last week not my son. I’m sure those people would tell you I did nothing for them, as they have told me over and over again when I was with them. Those sorts of people are spongers, soaking in and draining out all of the energy of the people they have chosen to be with to make themselves feel better but they don’t care what effect that has on the person they are with, they don’t even see the damage they’re causing and nothing you ever do for them is ever enough. I’m not prepared to be anyone’s clown again, anyone else’s sparkle and I’m certainly never again going to try to be anyone’s healer again. Now I’m fixing me and you can all go away until I’m done. 

I asked my councillor if I was in danger of alienating everyone in my life and that one day my door would stay closed and curtains drawn for good. She pointed out that I have lots of people in my life, some of them I have had for a very long time and she asked me to tell her what behaviour each one was displaying that I really shouldn’t tolerate, that wasn’t compatible with the me inside and that I should in my new calm logical state walk away from. That was a revelation, as I realised there were people that I had really healthy relationships with, people that hadn’t hurt me at all and that I had no inner instinct voice telling me to walk away from. I had relationships that weren’t hard, draining, a work in progress, they were just ‘right’ as they were. I wasn’t hurting those people because they felt I hadn’t given them what they needed, they were perfectly happy with me, most of the time, because they had chosen wisely too and nothing about me and my personality, morals or goals was giving them any real cause for concern.

Wow this is a new understanding, new ground for me and I love it. Sometimes the developing that I’m doing isn’t on the house, it’s on me and like I said I’m building us both back up to be structural sound.