Barber: agnus dei
It's easy to turn a good line, and I almost had myself convinced back there. Unfortunately I ommitted to add the caveat- that simple isn't the same as easy. I have it on good authority (a mathematician Phd with a penchant for irish folk music, since you didn't ask) that very high level pure mathematics has a certain elegant simplicity about it, and I'm sure said mathematician would laugh at the simplicity of the differential equations I turned myself inside out over at school, but I can tell you with a fair degree of assurance and a battalion of bad exam results behind me that simple it might be but easy it bloody well isn't.
Now it's sunday. I'm communing with my cats, my sofa, and my hangover. The air in the house has the metallic tang of blood and there is a weakness about my knees which says that although blood may be present, it isn't where it ought to be, viz., in my veins. I feel moderatly disgusted with myself but, more than that, I feel ashamed and disappointed. I've failed again, and I was doing quite well there for a while. I know what happened- I got too ahead of myself, ran too fast again, and then fell, bump, onto something sharp. I should learn to more quickly mistrust that glint in my eye.
I'm feeling pretty fraustrated with DBT. I'll tell you why, and I'll admit it's quite petty. I'm fraustrated because I'm not very good at it and I hate things that I'm not very good at. I'm a reasonably bright lass; there haven't been many times in my life where I couldn't understand, where I wasn't moderatley able. We're discounting sports here, because obviously I was shit at those. I've always been reasonably good at therapy, for the certain values of 'good' that therapy takes. I'm cooperative, I show willing, I talk, I see the links and profess to renewed understanding every now and again. The fact that I've never really got anywhere never really put me off, because deep down I thought I didn't really need it. What were they going to tell me that I didn't already know or couldn't read in a book? It was an intellectual exercise, and I would be able to do those standing on my head, if I could stand on my head, which I can't because, like I said, I'm shit at sports.
Now I find myself in the same position I did when I got an unclassified in a maths exam and realised that I had reached the point where blagging wasn't going to help me and, scary as it seemed, I was going to have to do some fucking work, much of which would consist in staring at a list of letters and funny signs and wondering what the shit I was supposed to do with them. I never did understand how you could change the direction of gravity in mechanics problems. Surely gravity just goes, uh, down? All through my life I have felt that human interaction was some sort of mechanics problem; it has rules, but they don't make sense to me, and I can never keep them in my head long enough to be able to apply them adequately. No matter how hard I try, I always get the direction of gravity wrong and get in a mess and yes, I do know that golf-balls can't travel faster than the speed of light but that's the answer I keep getting.
Now, someone is willing to teach me all these things I ought to knowbut don't. For two hours a week I go to skills training and a woman with a white board patiently explains to me about the necessity of balancing your needs with those of other people; how to tell when demands have to be tolerated and when it is appropriate to make demands yourself. She draws a picture to illustrate to me what happens when you put people on a pedestal. I'm good at that, because in my head each new person is clean, frash and unsullied- a talisman for me, the person who is going to make me normal. People aren't talismen, though, and so each new person fails and I am the one who gets hurt and angry because all that is broken is my skewed view of life. Again.
I sit and listen, and I want to cry. I want to have an all out tantrum like you haven't had since your first day at primary school- the rolling on the floor hammering your fists on the ground and refusing to get up sort of tantrum, because I just can't fucking DO this. Every neuron in my brain screams out against being forced to work in new paths. I come up against a stark and unpleasant truth: that my intellect and my emotions are out of kilter. The former compensates almost entirely for the latter, and now, for the first time, I am forced to put weight on my emotions. As a child I had a lazy eye and I used to wear a patch over the good one to make the lazy one work, and it hurt, and I couldn't see properly, and I looked like a prat. This feels the same.
If someone breaks your back then the muscles on one side grow large to make up for the wasting on the weak side. Other people might not notice; you can walk straight, just, and only you know the pain you are in. Pride and the fact that you are mannaging, sort of, stop you getting help. If, for some reason, you are eventually forced to go to physiotherapy, your props will be removed. You will be stripped bare and all the weaknesses of the damaged part will be exposed. They will make you fall again and again. You will be unable to walk; you will be like a child again and you will be so fraustraed that you will want to leave, because your body willl just not do what it is told. I want to leave. I've managed to opperate normally for years, hiding the things that I'm bad at behind repartee and an ability to talk about the theory of psychoanalysis. There was no conversation I couldn't turn to the general, to some area which I could deal with according to my intellect. And now I find myself faced with a woman asking me how I felt before I cut myself, and although I can give her psycho-social chapter and verse she just repeats the question and I can't answer her, because I don't know. I am wordless. I can't name even one emotion.
Simple isn't the same as easy. Simple is being able to follow the theory through with my mind and know the answer. The other bit- the living the theory, the putting weight on my emotions and hoping against hope that they grow stronger because this just hurts too damn much- that's hard. If it was maths I could walk away. I could walk away anyway, but, oddly, it is the very difficulty which makes me stay. Because I'm stubborn. Because I'm a persistent bitch. Because I'm buggered if I'm going to be beaten. And, mostly, because I know- have known all along- that the weakness is there, and covering it up has exhausted me, and I don't want to do it anymore. There have been so many times when I wanted to tell someone, but I have never known how; I don't have the words and I find it hard to cry, and I was desperate, and self harm was the only thing I could think of, and mostly people discounted that, too, because I'd pulled off the charade so well- don't I seem so bright and in control?- surely nothing could really be wrong? There is a particular horror in being voiceless; I dream about it a lot- about screaming and not being heard. I didn't know how to tell people how scared and desperate I was. Finding someone who can see that- who can see through the smoke and mirrors I've erected to live, to the bit of me that is essentially a bit shit- is humiliating, fraustrating, and cross-making, but it's also a releif. In the dark hours I have wanted nothing more than to be helped. Now there's a woman with a white-board who says she knows how. What have I got to lose? Apart from my dignity, and that was, truth be told, pretty sullied already.
Now it's sunday. I'm communing with my cats, my sofa, and my hangover. The air in the house has the metallic tang of blood and there is a weakness about my knees which says that although blood may be present, it isn't where it ought to be, viz., in my veins. I feel moderatly disgusted with myself but, more than that, I feel ashamed and disappointed. I've failed again, and I was doing quite well there for a while. I know what happened- I got too ahead of myself, ran too fast again, and then fell, bump, onto something sharp. I should learn to more quickly mistrust that glint in my eye.
I'm feeling pretty fraustrated with DBT. I'll tell you why, and I'll admit it's quite petty. I'm fraustrated because I'm not very good at it and I hate things that I'm not very good at. I'm a reasonably bright lass; there haven't been many times in my life where I couldn't understand, where I wasn't moderatley able. We're discounting sports here, because obviously I was shit at those. I've always been reasonably good at therapy, for the certain values of 'good' that therapy takes. I'm cooperative, I show willing, I talk, I see the links and profess to renewed understanding every now and again. The fact that I've never really got anywhere never really put me off, because deep down I thought I didn't really need it. What were they going to tell me that I didn't already know or couldn't read in a book? It was an intellectual exercise, and I would be able to do those standing on my head, if I could stand on my head, which I can't because, like I said, I'm shit at sports.
Now I find myself in the same position I did when I got an unclassified in a maths exam and realised that I had reached the point where blagging wasn't going to help me and, scary as it seemed, I was going to have to do some fucking work, much of which would consist in staring at a list of letters and funny signs and wondering what the shit I was supposed to do with them. I never did understand how you could change the direction of gravity in mechanics problems. Surely gravity just goes, uh, down? All through my life I have felt that human interaction was some sort of mechanics problem; it has rules, but they don't make sense to me, and I can never keep them in my head long enough to be able to apply them adequately. No matter how hard I try, I always get the direction of gravity wrong and get in a mess and yes, I do know that golf-balls can't travel faster than the speed of light but that's the answer I keep getting.
Now, someone is willing to teach me all these things I ought to knowbut don't. For two hours a week I go to skills training and a woman with a white board patiently explains to me about the necessity of balancing your needs with those of other people; how to tell when demands have to be tolerated and when it is appropriate to make demands yourself. She draws a picture to illustrate to me what happens when you put people on a pedestal. I'm good at that, because in my head each new person is clean, frash and unsullied- a talisman for me, the person who is going to make me normal. People aren't talismen, though, and so each new person fails and I am the one who gets hurt and angry because all that is broken is my skewed view of life. Again.
I sit and listen, and I want to cry. I want to have an all out tantrum like you haven't had since your first day at primary school- the rolling on the floor hammering your fists on the ground and refusing to get up sort of tantrum, because I just can't fucking DO this. Every neuron in my brain screams out against being forced to work in new paths. I come up against a stark and unpleasant truth: that my intellect and my emotions are out of kilter. The former compensates almost entirely for the latter, and now, for the first time, I am forced to put weight on my emotions. As a child I had a lazy eye and I used to wear a patch over the good one to make the lazy one work, and it hurt, and I couldn't see properly, and I looked like a prat. This feels the same.
If someone breaks your back then the muscles on one side grow large to make up for the wasting on the weak side. Other people might not notice; you can walk straight, just, and only you know the pain you are in. Pride and the fact that you are mannaging, sort of, stop you getting help. If, for some reason, you are eventually forced to go to physiotherapy, your props will be removed. You will be stripped bare and all the weaknesses of the damaged part will be exposed. They will make you fall again and again. You will be unable to walk; you will be like a child again and you will be so fraustraed that you will want to leave, because your body willl just not do what it is told. I want to leave. I've managed to opperate normally for years, hiding the things that I'm bad at behind repartee and an ability to talk about the theory of psychoanalysis. There was no conversation I couldn't turn to the general, to some area which I could deal with according to my intellect. And now I find myself faced with a woman asking me how I felt before I cut myself, and although I can give her psycho-social chapter and verse she just repeats the question and I can't answer her, because I don't know. I am wordless. I can't name even one emotion.
Simple isn't the same as easy. Simple is being able to follow the theory through with my mind and know the answer. The other bit- the living the theory, the putting weight on my emotions and hoping against hope that they grow stronger because this just hurts too damn much- that's hard. If it was maths I could walk away. I could walk away anyway, but, oddly, it is the very difficulty which makes me stay. Because I'm stubborn. Because I'm a persistent bitch. Because I'm buggered if I'm going to be beaten. And, mostly, because I know- have known all along- that the weakness is there, and covering it up has exhausted me, and I don't want to do it anymore. There have been so many times when I wanted to tell someone, but I have never known how; I don't have the words and I find it hard to cry, and I was desperate, and self harm was the only thing I could think of, and mostly people discounted that, too, because I'd pulled off the charade so well- don't I seem so bright and in control?- surely nothing could really be wrong? There is a particular horror in being voiceless; I dream about it a lot- about screaming and not being heard. I didn't know how to tell people how scared and desperate I was. Finding someone who can see that- who can see through the smoke and mirrors I've erected to live, to the bit of me that is essentially a bit shit- is humiliating, fraustrating, and cross-making, but it's also a releif. In the dark hours I have wanted nothing more than to be helped. Now there's a woman with a white-board who says she knows how. What have I got to lose? Apart from my dignity, and that was, truth be told, pretty sullied already.
posted by tattybluetrees at 7:12 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home