The mystery of "Himmmm"

Good news: I have been very kindly sent things like shampoo and vitamins and about four pounds of oatmeal by some people here. Yay! Thank you! I now have a slightly greater volume of rat food than I have of actual rats, and they have some high-quality Amazon boxes to destroy. They will have a happy Ratmas no matter what. They are all slightly grompy that it has gotten cold outside, and I am not willing to jam their dinner bowls all the way into their cozy nests where I will never get them out again, but they will get over it when they realize they are getting warm grains and peas tonight.

Bad news: Les Fromages need more medication, probably chronically; I have no idea how I am going to pay rent at the end of the month; Boston has developed a certain climatic lability lately that has bounced me straight into a migraine with every sudden bout of precipitation. Boo. I wanted some pretty snow for Christmas, but I didn't want it delivered so quickly it did my head in. 

The only other notable goings-on is that the SOJD is giving a workshop somewhere outside of my home studio. I can't use my credit there, and I'm seriously debating spending $20 of grocery money on it. If you've never been in a spot where being less unhappy for a little while is more important than eating, I envy you. I feel like I should feel bad about even thinking that, but I am so far in the hole that $20 will not get me in any more or less trouble than I was in before. It's just the difference between ramen and things other than ramen. Which is reason enough by itself to want a couple hours of escapism.

This is going to be long and rambly. Brace yourselves.

That whole thing still makes me death-spiral. I have not written much about it here -- or, rather, I have not posted much about it here, because every time I write anything it turns into detailed multi-page recounting of Things That Happened, as if I need to justify everything I think. I delete it for being pointless. One, none of you are going to get an objective recounting of anything, because I am blogging here and he is not. Two, I don't need to justify my thoughts and feelings; that's a desperate, anxious habit held over from childhood, where nobody seemed to understand why I did anything, nor did they appear to care. I don't think I'm going to get anybody to agree with me if I've drawn the wrong conclusions, I'm just trying not to get yelled at for doing any of it on purpose if I haven't. And three, if I've gotten anything wrong, all of my "reasoning" is just going to be an embarrassing reminder that I don't really need on the internet, where Google and the Wayback Machine remember everything forever.

The specific thing that sets me off here is the combination of really wanting to feel like I click with someone, and feeling like I am, in a situation where we couldn't easily avoid each other if it turns out they don't feel the same. If neither of us care? Great. If I like someone fine but don't care if we're close? Totally good. If I try being friends but they shoot me down right away? A little awkward maybe, but I don't freak out. 

But if I meet someone and think I'm making good progress in understanding them -- and that they're pleased with that, because they want to understand me -- right up until I find out I'm not? And that really they'd prefer it if I could just be cordial from over there thanks? That is awful. Having to put my public face back on around someone who made me feel like, just for a little while, I could take it off is painful. I understand that nobody likes rejection, but that circumstance is triggering. Not in the watered-down tumblr sense of 'oh that made me feel uncomfy and that's bad', in the actual PTSD sense of booting me back into intrusive thoughts of the entire childhood I spent like that, to which my caregivers' response was basically, "Yeah, it's too bad you'll never be able to relate to other humans, but that sounds like a you problem and I need you to shut up about it now." The pain is so intense it becomes physical, and it fucks up my ability to function. I don't eat or sleep, and say goodbye to concentrating well enough to do more than one very simple thing at a time, if that. At that point, my only options are 1. curl up and sob hysterically, 2. laser focus on literally anything other than sobbing hysterically, and do a shitty job of covering it up, or 3. drug myself into a stupor so I can stop sobbing hysterically long enough to get some sleep.

This is less than ideal. Most of the time it means that I choose not to reach out to people under those circumstances. I also don't tell anybody about it, because all that ever got me was lectures about confidence. Everyone seems to be under the impression that I think I'm guaranteed to fail at all my friend-making endeavors. Obviously I don't, because I do have friends. I'm also never guaranteed success, and in light of that, I have to assess whether I have enough resilience to soak the damage it'll do if I swing and miss. I operate on very thin margins most of the time, often above capacity, and I still don't quite survive on my own. I literally cannot afford to have a breakdown. I do need a support system, but rarely do I need that specific person in my life so much it's worth the risk. I'm sorry if that sounds mercenary, but I've managed to spend an entire pandemic not presenting myself to the ER for emergency Xanax, and I would like to continue that streak.

Have I tried therapy? Yes. Does it help? No. The only thing anybody will ever offer me is cognitive behavioral therapy, which makes this particular thing worse. The idea behind CBT is that your thoughts drive your behaviors, which produce results that dictate your emotions. Think better, do better, feel better. I'm not knocking CBT; it was really helpful in my early 20s, when I was trying to disentangle and unlearn a bunch of terrible dysfunctional crap I had lodged in my brain from my terrible dysfunctional family. It's really good for when you're dealing with people who have a lot of counterfactual ideas that persist even after multiple blunt-force blows from reality. The semi-Socratic argument technique is great for reminding yourself that people who insist Result A will happen even though historically Result B has always occurred are wrong and can be ignored.

It fails hard for the kind of trauma I'm dealing with. I've seen it said that anxiety disorders make you fear things that might happen, while trauma makes you fear repeating things that did. And the thing that I'm afraid of here -- that I am making someone else uncomfortable, and I don't know because they're doing everything in their power to avoid letting me guess -- happened to me constantly until I was a young adult. It was a product of being raised by wolves. My mother had some bizarre ideas about how people worked, and one of the big ones is that you are obligated to pretend everything is dandy to people's faces even if you spend all of your time bitching about them behind their back. She demonstrated this regularly, by  agreeing to sleepovers and carpools and being nice as pie to everyone whilst they were with us, then unleashing vociferous complaints about people who couldn't be bothered to feed/watch/transport their own kids as soon as they were gone. And she told me this explicitly, opining that "people don't really care" whenever the subject came up, and once telling me, after I'd been invited to housesit with one of my friends for a week, to not "overstay [your] welcome". 

This was genuinely her worldview. She thought she was preparing me for life. I spent a lot of time paranoid that I was missing fuck-off signals from people who weren't sending them, but because I also knew I was never supposed to let on that anything was wrong, I would walk a narrow tightrope of 'everything is fine' while constantly afraid that this was the moment I was supposed to make a polite and graceful exit, and I was missing it, making the other person increasingly frustrated and angry in the process. In this paradigm, there is no way to avoid my presence actively making things worse. The only way to minimize damage is to ask nothing of other people -- have no needs, seek no validation or support, and always give them an out if they don't want to waste more time with you. 

My mother is batshit insane, but she is unfortunately not unique. I was trained in playing this game, so I ended up tangling with a lot of people just like her. I knew I was supposed to pretend that none of this was happening, which coincidentally kind of works on normal people who don't know this stupid game exists, but was extremely stressful; and inevitably the people who did work this way would get mad at me for not telepathically knowing the moment I was supposed to go away and snap, and would do a lot of damage on their way out. 

CBT doesn't work on this. The idea is that you can refute negative thoughts and self-concepts through rational argument, proving with evidence that the bad thing is not true. I have plenty of historical evidence that the bad thing here is sometimes true, and that I can sometimes avoid the consequences if I can just be alert enough to catch the signs. That's enough reasonable doubt to make the process useless. 

In a more generalized sense, CBT doesn't work at all if the root problem is not negative thoughts, which here it is not -- it is a knee-jerk panic response based on many years of things that start out looking just like this hurting me a lot when they play out. I don't start imagining bad consequences for no reason; I recognize that good things and bad things start out looking exactly the goddamn same, and the human brain is way, way more persistent at flagging things that might damage you than things that could potentially turn out kind of okay. It's more primitive than logic. You'll probably survive if you avoid gathering that one patch of berries. There are other berries out there. You won't survive being eaten by the saber-toothed tiger that hangs out at that berry patch.

So why did I risk it with the SOJD? I kind of didn't. He was very persistent about talking to me at first. I just figured he was an extravert who had gone slightly mad over lockdown, and being the receptionist, I was a captive audience. He came in while I was away from the desk a few times, and actually called my name from his studio when he spotted me coming back down the hall. Clearly he wanted to be on friendly terms with someone he saw on a regular basis, and there was no reason not to go along with it. 

I also have an excellent view of our front stairs from the desk, and I spent a lot of time watching him walk in looking very stressed and settle his public 'I'm fine' face on before coming up. I know how much this sucks, and he was being very nice, so I started doing something that I do a lot, which was directly acknowledging his unspoken state of mind. Being hypervigilant, I'm often better at spotting things people are trying to cover up than I am at noticing they are trying to hide something in the first place. Other people either don't see it or feel intense pressure to pretend they don't, and it becomes an Emperor's New Clothes sort of thing. It sucks a lot to feel like your distress is invisible to everyone else. There's very little risk to me, as I'm not asking for anything or telling them anything about myself, but it can have a big impact if I just say the quiet thing out loud and then go along with whatever they seem to want to do about it. Nobody ever really notices that it's all about them and never about me. I'm very good at misdirection.

In this case, both the SOJD and my very normal coworker were surprised at my comments, but while my very normal coworker was surprised and confused, the SOJD was surprised and dismayed, which told me that he was accustomed to his camouflage working. He generally admitted when I was right, which was most of the time, and definitely didn't stop talking to me, so I just sort of... kept doing what I was doing. It did seem to be having the effect I wanted, which was to make him worry less about keeping up appearances around me.

Where it started to feel dangerous was when I realized I was reading his mood not based on what I knew of other people, but on what I knew of me. If there is one thing I have learned, it is that people still do not really get how I work, no matter how much explanation I give them. They accept that I do what I do, but they have no instinctual grasp how or why it happens, and any suggestion that they do gets met with, "Er, I think there's been some kind of misunderstanding..." Whenever I feel like I'm finding that kind of mutual comprehension, it is time to stop and figure out at what point I have wandered off into hopeful projection, and smack myself until I see reality again. 

My accepted role in life is to speak the things that go unspoken, so it fucked with my head when I was not the first one to point this out.

A lot of what goes visibly wrong with his day is a chronic pain problem about as bad as mine. He covers well for the most part, but it's obvious if you know what you're looking for. I do, because I see it in the mirror all the time. I acknowledge it whenever I spot it, because he likes to ignore it, and being in pain with no support is a very lonely place to be. He tried to tell me once that it wasn't that bad, he was totally okay! How could he not be okay? He had plans to go out that night!

I crossed my arms, looked him dead in the eye, and translated: "You're not okay, and you're going to go anyway."

He deflated a little bit, the mask slipping, and very softly said, "Yeah." Pause. "We're the same."

I'm not used to any of this being acceptable. I'm used to be destabilizing. I try to be destabilizing in a good way, getting people to question why they're so mean to themselves, or why they think they're incapable, but I'm also aware that people have a limited tolerance for this, and I am always on pins and needles watching for signs that I've gone too far. I never start unless I have an exit strategy to use if the reaction is bad. I don't have a plan for when someone else thinks this is a fun and meaningful game and volleys back.