Archive for October, 2009

People on a pedestal will inevitably fall

October 29, 2009 at 11:23 am · Filed under Daily

I’ve noticed something in the recent months; one can pretty accurately measure the level of my happiness/level of content etc. with one look at  my apartment. Seriously. It’s almost hilarious in a sick sort of way. It wasn’t always this way. At one point I was maniacal about the cleanliness. My Kait used to be envious of the fact that I didn’t routinely have hair carcass in my sink, or on the floor, or anywhere else in the bathroom.

As of late I’ve noticed that when I’m unhappy about something…I clean. The intensity with which I clean is directly related to the intensity of my emotion at the time be it angry, sad, frustrated, what have you.

Right at this second in time my apartment is cleaner than it has been in probably six to seven months. I blame only myself for the extent of OCD-like behavior that has caused the cleanliness. There are a few reasons.

  1. Sometimes I don’t finish things when they maybe should have been finished (or should they have been?) mentally and emotionally. I have an issue with closure. A big red-flag issue with it. There are some things that I have not closed for whatever reason. Because I’m not done? Because I wonder if I made a mistake? Because I’m still upset? Because I’m still angry? Because I miss that thing? Because I’m resentful of what happened? I don’t know. For whatever reason (which probably doesn’t have anything to do with anything external as a matter of fact) there are things that I usually haven’t emotionally finished with, because I have a problem letting things go. This tendency makes it all that more difficult to ignore people when they happen to pop up again. I want to figure it out, I want to know why I can’t let something go…specifically when it pertains to old relationships and I’m in a current relationship position where marriage and all that entails has been discussed. That’s my issue. I’ll own it.
  2. When I have done my absolute best to always be honest with someone as it relates to information that they should probably know and that person still doesn’t trust me…there’s something wrong. And that something wrong probably doesn’t have anything to do with me.

That being said…I might have made a mistake in a current relationship by not saying something about something as soon as they may have wanted me to do so. At the time I thought I was making an okay decision by holding off for a few days considering plans that had been made. As it turns out…not so much.

Here are the problems. I realize that there was a different way to handle it when considering someone else…I get that. Had someone not violated my privacy prior to me being able to share what I was going to share anyways, they would have had an opportunity to express that to me. And I could have been more understanding than I was when things went down the way they did. However, all it took was one moment where something happened and someone took one action, to where I literally felt the same way I felt almost six years ago…like I had no right to my own space, privacy, or person. And I’m not sure how to get over that (in part because it has to do with my own issue). The other part of this whole issue is how does someone challenge me on ‘trust’ when they didn’t trust in the first place?

Not to mention that I may have, based on my history with relationships, placed someone on a ‘pedestal’, so to speak. This is probably its own blog in itself…but suffice to say that it’s my fault to have earmarked anyone as infallible so that I am that much more upset when mistakes happen. Because really, we all make mistakes. It just makes the whole situation that much more difficult when I try to place where that comes into play.

I don’t know what to do with it, I don’t know what to say about it.

And on a complete side note…I’m considering boycotting the holidays all together considering family fractures that have happened as of late. I’m not angry at anyone and I don’t resent anyone in particular. I completely understand people’s reasons for making certain decisions. I would likely have made the same decisions had I been in their shoes. What I personally resent is that I”m somehow in the same place I was when I was ten…that of feeling as if I have to “choose” between family members at important times, like the holidays that are fast approaching, and my birthday.

For some reason I always thought things would get easier as we got older. Every year I am proven dead wrong.

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Commitment.

October 9, 2009 at 8:23 am · Filed under Domestic Violence, Health, Men

I have commitment issues. I haven’t always had them; they developed to 100% fruition somewhere between my current relationship and the relationship prior to that. I haven’t yet put my finger on exactly why they developed (for the record, I don’t place the blame on anyone else) but sometimes, when the commitment issues rear their disfigured head I can’t help but try again to fully figure it out…usually to no avail. Although, today I may have hit upon a piece of the puzzle.

Today, in what began as a joking sort of funny conversation, an innocent remark was made that made my brain spin a little. It happened so fast that I didn’t really process it at all until I was on the way home on the bus (at a training this week and it’s just easier to avoid driving and spending a million dollars on parking downtown). It all started out during lunch while walking by the KCJ (King County Jail)…apparently it was their hour of ‘yard’ time; I learned this because I remarked about how it was possible that I could hear inmates whooping and yelling. Then I mentioned how glad I was that I had never done anything to land myself in jail. Then I took it further and mentioned how funny I thought it would be if my companion at the time ever had to actually bail me out of jail for something. Then he said that he hoped that if that was the case it would happen before we were married.

Wait. Just, a, minute…is what my brain did.

My mouth did better than my brain because I just asked why that would make a difference and the conversation went on from there.

To fast forward from there (through many poorly drawn stick figures and such for the training that we’re doing) I revisited the conversation on the bus. Specifically I mused about my silent emotional reaction to it. Then I started thinking about all the significant relationships that I’d had. Specifically for some reason I thought about how healthy or unhealthy each relationship was in relation to my level of commitment to it (really instead of commitment, at the time I was thinking about how much I felt I needed the relationship/person at the time I was relating to them). An interesting correlation took shape in my brain. It is best demonstrated in graph form:

Silly relationship graph

I think this makes me look crazy…but let me explain if I may.

I took all of the relationships that I consider significant as far as longevity, closeness, etc. and gave them all two different number values (scores, if you will). One score represented the level of how healthy I felt the relationship was/is; 1 being incredibly unhealthy and 10 being significantly healthy. The other score represented the level of need I felt for that person/relationship; 1 being the most unhealthy level of need ever and 10 being a feeling of not “need”ing at all (as clarification, in the brain of Kelly “need” = “unhealthy”). If I really wanted to delve deep into the motivations of my relationships with people I could have labeled “perception of need” as “codependent” (on my part at least), but anyway…

As you can see it starts out representing a relationship where I felt I needed the person sort of a lot and therefore the relationship was fairly unhealthy (for details I won’t go into here). It improves some with the second relationship where the level of need felt was not high at all and the relationship was fairly healthy (in terms of how someone treated me, honesty, etc.). Something important I need to add here…though the relationship was fairly healthy my level of commitment to it was not very healthy and not very high (come to think of it I should have added that line to the graph too, but oh well). Then you can see that it dips a bit with the next one in terms of both needing the person more and the unhealthy nature of the relationship. Then the outlier appears in the data and his name is George. That isn’t something that needs to be detailed at this time. Suffice to say I was malfunctioning at the time and felt that I needed him in order to breathe and the relationship was terrible…but eventually I got over this.

The rest of the data steadily improves and eventually demonstrates how I feel about my current relationship. It’s very healthy in terms of trust, kindness, friendship, love and all that stuff. In fact I can honestly state that I have never been treated better by anyone else. But the commitment thing still causes my internal thoughts to go a little haywire. After making a crazy relationship graph I think I understand why.

As we’ve already discussed my brain equates need with unhealthy because when I think of need I think of codependent, which has clearly been an issue for me in the past. Intellectually I realize that the most important part is “wanting” someone (for a myriad of different reasons) but this is where I get screwed up.

I don’t trust my sense of “want” and I think that’s where the problem lies. Having been used to operating on a “need” basis and then getting to a point where I vehemently throw that out the window after a number of poor experiences (one in particular) I’m just not used to basing commitment on “wanting” to do it. I don’t trust myself.

And I remain unsure of how to get to the point where I fully do.

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