Fortunate

I ate Chinese food entirely too much this weekend, and have felt like I'm paying for it today. No, this isn't the authentic stuff, but the greasy Chinese food that comes fried and delicious in sugary sauces. Despite feasting on a 3 item combo from Panda Express on Friday night and Saturday lunch, I ended up being dragged to more junky Chinese food for dinner on Saturday night with C and his friend. And at the end of the meal, the fortune cookies arrive, and I read my fortune aloud, then C goes to read his, and his is the same as mine. Down to the lotto numbers on the back. I don't think that's ever happened to me before.

Company of Friends

I will be the first to admit that I'm kind of in a crappy mood because I'm busy at work and I just started my period and I pretty much feel like yelling at someone most hours of the day. Well, the hours I'm awake anyway. And going out to dinner last night, well, ordering the "light" item on the menu didn't help, since it reminded me very much of a Lean Cuisine dinner. A $10 Lean Cuisine. Thank you, TGI Fridays, for making your light menu item so unappetizing. Okay, I'm super cranky because it wasn't really that bad, and only part of the side broccoli wasn't warm, and the canned mandarin oranges on the top of the chicken were pretty good. At least I did manage to split a brownie sundae thing with someone, so it wasn't a total culinary loss.

Anyhoo (and can I just tell you that I hate that word), the dinner was successful in that everyone who said they would show up did, including this one woman who had all but stopped going to therapy. This woman is married to a guy who, from her descriptions, sounds very controlling and possibly emotional abusive. That she tried to leave at some point and he badgered her into staying. Well, I have said in the past that someone should beat him in the parking lot, when she would describe a particular injustice in our group setting. Last night, she brought up that I had said that before, like it was some terrible thing because he wasn't really all that bad, he just didn't understand that women like to talk to other women (completely ignoring the fact that we weren't just talking, but it was in therapy) and that his wife would want to have anything to do with people other than him. And so she couldn't get away for weeks because they were getting along so well and he wouldn't understand her wanting to have activities outside from being with him (they are both retired).

Honestly, hearing that, I started thinking that his actions aren't really the whole problem. And not even most of the problem. I felt angry at her, because I think her staying in this relationship isn't really good for her, and in a way, I know that's her choice and it's her life. But there is something about having the therapist there that makes people examine these things, or I am not just sitting there silent with an attempted neutral look on my face. Because, if someone I liked, someone I saw socially, told me this kind of thing in real life, I would ask them about it and challenge it or at least show them that there are alternatives, that I've been in a relationship with someone controlling (though never as bad as this guy) and there is a whole life outside of that. But I can't really say that to this woman in a non-therapy setting, and even in therapy, she didn't want to listen to me anyway. And if all she thought that therapy was, a bunch of women sitting around and talking, she missed out on the fact that it was actual therapy for most of us, and that many of us (including myself) made progress.

Everyone develops differently, and everyone deals with their issues differently, but I don't really want to be friends with someone at the level that she's at. Because it pains me, sitting there next to someone who is talking about her relationship and just thinking how toxic it seems to be. I just sat there, feeling like arguing with her or saying something and realizing that I can't really say anything and it's not like she'd listen to me anyway.

Workin' Overtime

I had to put in some overtime on Saturday. Yeah, that happens only a few times a year, but it seemed like such a big deal this weekend. I felt like I really missed being at the Humane Society, and missed having some extra time to be away from work. This time of year, work gets really busy and complicated, and I feel like I'm going to need all my free time away from work just to refresh and not feel like yelling at people who annoy me.

Have had an idea for a post percolating for a week or two about how men and women communicate differently, and also I'll have another therapy group dinner to recap after Tuesday. More later.

Tell Me Lies

Have you ever known someone for a really long time and always trusted what they said is totally true? And then you find out something that doesn't quite match up, maybe calling it a lie would be a bit of an exaggeration, but what they said before and what they say now isn't matching up. If you were one of those people with too good of a memory for minute details, like me, you'd start to wonder. Was it a lie to spare your feelings? Was it a lie at all? And then, how many other things are there that don't match up, maybe not lies, but exaggerations or embellishments or obfuscations? Kind of makes you wonder if you can trust anything that has been said. And it makes you re-examine things in a new light.

This sounds a lot like some crap we used to talk about in Lit classes in college, the whole concept of unreliable narrators. And it wouldn't bother me so much if I wasn't one of those people who prides herself on being truthful (perhaps too truthful sometimes, try to blunt it but maybe it comes out cruel). And I wonder, just what was the agenda here? Do you confront someone with this knowledge that they are contradicting themselves, or do you just let it go and figure it isn't worth digging into? Because if you start digging, what else will you find?

Knowing my paranoid mind, I should probably just let it go. I think I've read way too many complicated mysteries and thrillers and often expect that Miss Marple or her modern ilk is going to come out and explain the whole story and what really happened. And maybe it was just nothing. But maybe there is a smoking gun buried behind the pottery in the living room.

Can't Say No

It wasn't the first time it got me into trouble, but my inability to say "no" to things meant that I ended up being a bridesmaid four times. In a very short period of time, like less than three years. I also ended up going to five other weddings within that time period. It was something like eight weddings in two years with that final wedding the next summer. I have a few pairs of dyed-to-match shoes, four dresses in the closet (which are probably in all different sizes), and a total distaste for anything wedding related. At the most, I can barely stand them, and will occasionally look at Tacky Weddings and laugh, but that's about the minimum I can really deal with the subject. And when I hear about people getting engaged, or people getting married, I am struck with a desire to run screaming from the room. Not like I don't want people to be happy or whatever, but I just don't want to hear about the nuptial details. So why, when a friend of mine who is getting married next month, said that she needed to get a dress for her wedding, did I volunteer to go with her?

Started thinking, trying to unpack my feelings about weddings. I don't think I necessarily hated them before I had to go to so many, but that was definitely an overdose. But I never really cared about them. I didn't have girlhood fantasies about having a big wedding with the big white dress, the flowers, the cake, and all that crap. I probably thought about being married, as I think about it now, as something that I would like, but not necessarily wanting to go through the wedding process with all the expense and hoopla.

I will admit that I've been to some fun weddings (open bar and a short ceremony go a long way), and getting to go to Hawaii for my stepbrother's wedding was pretty nice. And I wouldn't even say that I've ever been to a "bad" wedding or anything, though anything with an hour-long ceremony definitely pushes it. Oh and I don't like the getting up and kneeling down stuff. But I'll say this with all honesty to all the brides out there, no one is going to have as much fun at your wedding as you are, honey. Because it's all about you. It's not really about the other people who are attending. I mean obviously we aren't being flogged and forced to eat horse-turds, but it's not the guests' "Special Day!" Yeah, sometimes it is about the bride's mom or other family members, but it's not about the people attending (except maybe in a, "I'll show them," kind of way, ha ha).

When I was attending and participating in all of these weddings a really dark time in my life. I was dating someone who was an abusive asshat. I don't talk about it as much here, because really, it's something that I'm dealing with and I don't want to make things in my life about my ex and what he did and said, but about how I want my life to be now. But there is that, I was dating someone who had the power to make me feel really shitty about myself, someone who reinforced my own internal thought that no one will ever want to marry me because I just don't measure up. Not thin enough, not smart enough, not good enough. And while I was attending all these weddings, I saw my own future of being with someone who would never stand up in front of a bunch of people and say he loves me. My ex probably wasn't able to love me in that way, or maybe love me at all, because of his own issues, which had nothing really to do with me (even though he would have liked to believe I was the root cause of them all).

In the meantime, in dealing with my ex, I was also struggling. With my weight. With my anxiety. With my depression. With a lot of other issues and other stressors. And it's really hard to be happy for other people when you are so damned unhappy with yourself and your own life. But I'm in a different space now, so I can just go to this wedding, attend, bring a gift, and leave and have it just be another event I go to and not be so irritated by the whole process.

Graduation Day

That title reminds me of the Buffy episode at the end of season 3. The evil mayor wants to eat all the graduating seniors as part of his ritual to become a demon, and Buffy and her pals have to stop him. Which they do. High school is left behind, essentially destroyed in a big explosion which finally kills the demon-mayor.

Whereas, my last day of my therapy group was nothing like that. So I realized that I had been going there for four years, four years in which we went from having 3-4 people to sometimes having over a dozen, to having meetings in a small office in the old building to a large conference room in the new building. To me being in a relationship that I jokingly described as soul-sucking to me being single for a while and then meeting someone new. Oh yeah, and I moved once, started volunteering, got two cats, and started a blog. So a lot of crap happened externally, and a lot happened internally as well. Maybe more than I even know or realize.

And that's the weird thing about graduation, is you kind of feel like you need to sum up your whole experience in a pithy speech. Last night, when other people were talking about wanting to restart the group with a different therapist, wanting to all go to some other groups, wanting to just stay in therapy with the same people, I said that I was wanting to move on. That I think I've done enough group therapy, for awhile or maybe forever, that I was, if not cured, then close enough. For years, I've seen this sort of far away goal of being ... what ... perfect or sane or something, and I've realized that it's more of a golden fantasy than anything else. It is not a state of being, but a state of striving towards it. And I'm starting to think that I'm okay where I am now.

Though really, I still feel like I have issues I want to work on, to address, and things that I have to focus on. I know that me backsliding into depression isn't an impossibility, and I know that there isn't really a "cure" for things so much as I'm in remission. Not to say where I don't have feelings of depression, but I don't have days of depression either. Not that my thinking never gets distorted, but that I try to be aware when it is distorted and mentally talk some sense into myself.

While I'm done with group therapy, I'm not necessarily done with the group. I setup another dinner for a few weeks from now, and I did say offhandedly that if they got some other group organized, I might pop in every so often. And I made one of those "I'm available to chat with people and hang out" kind of statements that probably no one will take advantage of, but at least I opened myself up for that possibility.

Resting on the First Day

Happy Labor Day, Goodbye Summer. I remember being a kid and not really looking forward to the end of summer because that meant going back to school. Then sometime in college, I probably started looking back to it. Now, I am ambivalent. I am looking forward to it being cooler because I got a new pair of warm pajamas and I like my comforter cover for my heavy-duty comforter best.

I am having the weird experience of having a day of nothing setup to do, no real plans. I got up latish, had breakfast, looked at crap on the computer, painted my nails... then around 3:30, I took a shower and now am running some laundry. Eventually I'm going to vacuum. And I think that before I started dating C, well, in between living with the ex and dating C, that was my Sunday almost every week. Now it's an unusual occurrence, and I feel a little bit melancholy and maybe lonely, but not lonely enough to want to pick up the phone and talk to anyone. I realize Sundays are the only day I don't have to wear a name-tag, and even on this faux-Sunday, I am tagless.

I feel kind of like I'm sussing out some feelings with C lately, and I don't really have anyone to talk to about it. I might very well be the problem, not really good at talking about stuff anymore. Despite my medications, despite my years of therapy, this is such a gray area for me and I realize I'm prone to distorted thinking. Not like I haven't dated before, not like I haven't had boyfriends, but I definitely feel like I'm trying to be better now, saner, about the whole thing, and it's just a different ballgame. I am trying to date like someone who has high self-esteem, and that's hard to do because I don't always value myself in that way, in the way where you say to yourself, "wow, I'm such a catch."

In the last month, I figured out why I don't view myself as a catch. The pattern starts with a woman's relationship with her father, and I realize that my father himself has no self-esteem in this regard. My dad is very funny but mean, and very, very critical of other people in a way that seems like it hides his own self-criticism. My dad, like most people, would be helped with therapy, but in the meantime, he carries his childhood around, a childhood of not being special but being different, being an outcast, being nagged by his mother, and ignored by his father. And someone like that can't really give the kind of love to his daughter that he should have, the kind of love that makes the daughter feel like she deserves to have a man love her for herself, not because she does things, but inherently.

The next question I suppose is, what does one do with that realization?

Setting Goals That Don't Involve Yelling At People

I've really wanted to post something in the last day or two but in addition to being supremely busy at work, I've been in a super pissy mood. I do think most of it is hormones, and I think I've talked about that before ad nauseum. Kailyn and I were talking the other day about reviews at work, and I suggested that "not choking the shit out of anyone" could be a good "goal" to set. Because some days, when it seems like everyone is pissing me off, I'm just thinking that I should be thankful that I haven't ripped someone a new butthole. And instead of dealing with my frustrations with yelling at someone or consuming mass quantities of chocolate, I've been trying to fly under the radar.

So hopefully I will have some time to talk about my dinner with my therapy folks this week, maybe tomorrow at work, when we hopefully won't be so busy.