Thursday: Today I’m grateful for feeling…

Regret, sadness, and guilt that I’ve been letting my midday walks with Cubu fall far to the wayside. With my work and meeting schedule, I just couldn’t find a time to fit this ritual in but I know it’s important. I’ve now set alarms to make sure I take my work break and use it on our walks, I hope that fixes it. 

Frustrated at the uneven emotional labor I put into my relationship when it comes to communicating. If communication is key, and if navigating conflicts with open communication about emotions is the key to being Marriage Masters (at least according to the Gottmans), I’m the only reason we have these conversations. Being fair, I’m also the reason we need to have a lot of these conversations. I’m too sensitive for my own good, or rather I’m untrained in how to deal with the emotions I pick up. The worst part is when I know something is wrong with Cubu before he does. He’ll be treating me differently and when I ask him about it, he’ll tell me nothing is going on when something clearly is. Is it codependent to want to work through whatever that is, to make sure we continue communicating? Do I mind my own business and detach, just silently let him be a worse partner rather than insist he work with me on our relationship? We get there eventually, to the conversation about emotions where we talk it out and everything feels a lot better. But it is like pulling fucking nails to get there, like trying to make a mule move. What is my alternative? Without my pushing, if we were both not communicating, we would just break up like his marriage did. If we need communication to survive and the last thing he wants is to consider his emotions, how am I supposed to handle this? I feel confused and angry and lost and a bit of despair? I guess I just need to talk to him about it. Ugh.

Critical of myself, unkind. I feel like I “failed” my therapy session because I didn’t cry this time? It just wouldn’t happen, the tears wouldn’t come. I told her about the photo with my dad’s hands and I just couldn’t really feel much. Maybe because I processed it in that cry, maybe because I needed a break after that intensity, maybe because the joy of my mom made it hard to access that level of grief over my dad. So there are plenty of good reasons. But the perfectionist in me, the inner critic, that voice that tells me to maximize everything and I’ve failed myself if I haven’t, is not dying without a fight. It also mentions that I’ve wasted my therapist’s time, which makes no sense.

Angry at my dad for giving me this horrible internal voice. How could you talk like this to your child? What a crime against nature (among his other crimes against nature) to instill such evil into your own progeny. He didn’t talk like this to my brother, which makes me even angrier. I know he had it in him to be encouraging rather than disparaging because I watched it every fucking day we were together. Maybe I’m lucky I wasn’t a boy, he seems like someone that could justify beating their son “when he needed it.” But being a girl got me assaulted in other ways. So maybe the major injustice is being born to that man. 

Worried that I’ll never have memories like a “normal person”. All I have, all I seem capable of making even to this day are implicit memories. It’s a very rare thing for an explicit memory to be stored. It both scares me and makes me existentially sad. Cubu will mention experiences we’ve shared and I’ll have 0 recollection of. Or I’ll remember but my memory exists as a feeling rather than an actual sensory experience. I understand the science, that I’m caught in fight or flight and don’t encode memories from my frontal cortex. But what if I stay this way? What if I become an old person making no new memories and having none to fall back on? Who will I be? And my life, my precious life that’s flying by, I remember almost none of it. I guess the point has to be to live in the present and enjoy every moment, maybe I don’t need to have memories. I just feel a serious FOMO on what others seem to have and enjoy greatly.

Feelin’ good…

• Iridescent joy but not for her confession, for the fact that I discovered I DIDN’T NEED IT!!!!!! The inner work I’ve done, all the LIP stuff, it all worked! This apology that in my dream of dreams would have made me whole has found me already whole, made so by myself. It gave nothing in my current Self save the intense hope for my future relationship with her. I didn’t even know I had healed myself in that way already, that it was strong enough to be mostly unaffected in the way it seems I should be. A true testament to my work on codependency: I am whole regardless of the love I received from outside of myself.
• Had my first Power of Five (Po5) meeting for CODA! It’s me and a group of 5 (well, we have 6) people that will meet weekly. During each call, we will come prepared with the answer to a CODA question from this list they made just for the Po5s. It went well, everyone seems friendly, established in a program, and ready to recover together. There was tension at times since this meeting was a Group Conscience to decide what the rest of the meetings will look like. But in general I feel positive about it. I even asserted myself and offered useful suggestions! I have a hard time speaking up, feeling like my voice is worthwhile, so I’m grateful for the practice, proud that I took advantage of it, and grateful to be of service.
• JOY! Joy joy joy, my inner children are over the fucking moon and so am I. I am filled with light, I am beaming with it, overfilling. I had a call with my mom today for her birthday and she told me, on her own, with absolutely no prompting, out of the blue, that she is sorry for not being there for me growing up. That she “gave me more space than I needed” and that, ” I must have felt so alone and abandoned since my only caregiver wasn’t available.” Holy. hell. What have I done to deserve this, this absolute gem, this profound regeneration, this infinitely precious confession that so rarely comes. I don’t even believe in dessert. I’m grateful. I’m grateful beyond words for therapy, for my mom’s resilience and courage, for my loyalty and patience, for every little thing that needed to occur for us to share that moment. My mood is radiant and unburdened in a way that is completely new to me. At the age of 27, I think I might, maybe, just have a mom for the first time.