switcheroo

Okay, I got kind of paranoid about this journal, so I switched some things around. First of all, no more first names will be used. I made up silly pseudonyms for my kids, based on their favorite foods (of course!), and I'll refer to J. and myself by our initials. I didn't bother removing really old pictures of our family but I won't be posting new ones. And I switched my food journal to a new profile so there won't be connections between the two.

I can't really explain why I did this. Sometimes I fantasize about being completely myself with other people. I play it over in my mind, what it would be like to stop hiding so much, to come into the light. But then I snap back to the reality that I just can't, not yet, and maybe not ever. I'd like to keep this journal as private as possible given its position in the most public place on earth.

I think I've fallen off-track a bit from the original intent of this journal, which was to share my blatantly narcissistic essays. I didn't intend to post a lot of pictures, to play over the mundane details of my daily life, or to delve so deeply into my various psychoses. I truly do not understand why I continue to receive traffic, why you didn't give up on me long ago. But damn, I'm really glad you're here.

I made a new blog to post pictures for the edification of family members who don't get to see our kids very much, and also to have a place to store, and observe the progression of, my fumbling attempts at artistic photography. You can see that here, if you like.

a private life

So the truth of the matter is that I could certainly be diagnosed with social anxiety disorder if I wasn't so afraid to leave the house and see a doctor.

HA!

I don't have a lot of the physical symptoms - I don't blush or stammer or have palpitations. But I do tend to sweat. I do get the shakes. And one of my cardinal signals of social anxiety is that my belly clenches terribly. I don't even realize that it's happening until after the fact. Sometimes my abdomen aches for days after an interaction, even something as small as talking on the phone.


A long time ago, I eliminated all semblance of psychiatric interaction from my life. I had very bad experiences with psychiatry as an adolescent. I was wantonly placed on SSRIs that made me stupid and nauseous and numb. The SSRIs didn't seem to be helping what was diagnosed as depression and obsessive compulsion, so I was haphazardly diagnosed as having ADD - not instead of, but in addition to, my previous diagnoses - so my parents were encouraged to put me on Ritalin. A few years later it was decided that I was actually bipolar and needed an entirely new set of pharmaceuticals.


Those were the happy, hazy days of the '90s when it seemed that every new drug on the market had the potential to eliminate the mental illnesses that were invented every two minutes and subsequently diagnosed in almost anybody who thought to ask. The final result of my attempts with SSRIs was that I ended up suicidal. Hilarious! A treatment for depression that makes you want to kill yourself! I was one of those experimental near-casualties before the warnings came out that SSRIs might have this effect on adolescents.

And the therapy that is supposed to accompany these drugs? Nah, not really. It was mostly the drugs. But they had to go through the motions. And it was just as hit-or-miss with the therapy. One therapist blamed me for everything. Another told me to sin less, pray more often. And another was so ineffectual, so green, that I could identify which textbooks he was consulting between visits.

So I'm pretty cynical about pharmaceuticals and psychiatric care. I would never encourage somebody to end their reliance on one or the other. I know that both have been of tremendous benefit to many people. But for my own use, I can only operate from my experience. I mostly scoff at psychiatric diagnoses and I would not use pharmaceuticals myself unless I had exhausted all other options. Any attempt to label me with a drug-dependent diagnosis would certainly be met with the full force of my disillusionment.

But I must admit that my adorable tics, those strange, awkward traits that make me human, have become somewhat unmanageable in the last couple of years. I realized that I might have a real problem when I felt relieved to leave my friends behind in Utah. When I cancelled my plans to visit in August. As I increasingly indulge in the secret wish, If I don't get to know anybody here, I can be completely alone.

This level of anxiety is certainly not encouraging of friendships. It's become a sort of joke with my friends - that they don't depend on me to show up, to work it out, to make the trip, to call them back. I think some of them might be unsurprised when I make plans and then, at the last minute, cancel them for some dubious reason. I don't know why they put up with me. I am a really shitty friend.

I told you all that to tell you this: I'm worried that blogging is encouraging my disorder, if that's what it is.

There's this wall between you and me. There are unknown miles and two screens. And yet I share so much with you - I tell you things that I could never share with you in person. We have this intimacy, or the illusion of it. It makes it easy for me to avoid spending time with real people, or even with you, Dear Reader, as a flesh-and-blood person. It gives me an excuse to avoid meeting people in my new home. It even gives me a consolation prize to offer to people I actually know - so we don't hang out! You can still read my blog.

This illusion of closeness, of give-and-take - it's so delicious, so comforting, for a person who can't abide true human connection. It's that overwhelming fear of humiliation, of rejection, that makes it enticing to share myself in this way. You don't have to like me. In this, my most private space, I have all sorts of roadblocks preventing people from saying unkind things about me. If you get past them, I'll just delete your comment. I'll delete you. You're not any more real than the illusion of a statement created by pixelation. Or so I tell myself. (In reality, I dwell on cruel comments for weeks, if not months.)

What am I trying to say here? I guess I'm acknowledging that I have a problem. My little tic of preferring to be alone has expanded into a full-blown identifiable disorder. I've become uncomfortably aware of it since we moved, as I've relaxed into the freedom of no expectations from Real Live People. I'm not sure how to approach it. Cognitive restructuring, social skills training, that almighty psychiatric god of Exposure - blah blah blah. I know I won't follow through with that crap.


Every now and then, I manage to act like a normal person. In the winter, I went out for tea with a visiting friend and two new friends. I was so proud of myself for taking that step - developing social skills, exposing myself to a fearful situation, attempting to restructure my thought process - putting all that psychobabble into practice. But I never followed up with the new friends, even though I enjoyed our time together. And I was relieved when my friend went home and I didn't have to spend more time with her. (God, that sounds so awful. I don't know how anybody could hear this and not feel hurt. But it's truly not about you, not at all. In fact, maybe it's a compliment that I like you so much, I'm terrified that you'll end up hating me or that I'll humiliate myself in front of you.)

I still don't know where I'm going with this. But part of my point is that I don't know exactly who my readers are. Some of you, I know. I've met you in person; I've spent time with you, or tried. And maybe none of this comes as a surprise to you. But there are readers that I've never met. Some of them have never commented or otherwise made their presence known. And there are probably a couple of readers that I would be disturbed to discover. So many times, I've thought of making my blog private to avoid the individuals that I really want to avoid. (With good reason, not because of my disordered thinking. And they know who they are.) I thought it was a step of bravery, to keep my writing public, to put myself out there in this unashamed way. But now I'm wondering if it's really an act of cowardice to share myself so willingly with a mostly invisible public when I would never, ever say these things to a person I could touch with my hands. In fact, I'm often overwhelmed with humiliation when I meet readers, or when I communicate with friends who reference my writing.


Apparently, I haven't been going anywhere with this. I have no final statement, no wistful desire, no flagrant farewell. I'm not going to stop writing. I hope you will continue to visit and say hello when you wish to do so. I truly appreciate your comments and I try to respond to all of them.

The first step toward Recovery, so The Experts say, is to admit you have a Problem. I've done that. I suppose that my greatest fear is that I will continue to deteriorate. How bad could it get? And does this mean I'm really crazy after all? Were those wack-job pushers-with-Ph.D's right all along?

lessons learned

Now that we've moved, I'm not going to be working for a while. And this is really throwing me for a loop.

On the one hand, I'm tremendously relieved to be able to have some time to myself, to not be panting after every last dollar, to rebuild my relationships.

But it's true that I'm reluctant to give up this piece of self-sufficiency and become completely dependent on J. again. In retrospect, I realize what a precarious situation it is, to rely entirely on one person to provide for the family's monetary needs, and to have such deeply divided familial roles.

So I intend to finish school and open my business, and there's some possibility that, in order to prevent some inevitable incarceration by cause of stir-craziness, I might take a part-time job before I graduate. But I'm definitely not going to be working 60 hours a week again. I'm going to have time to do other things in life besides going to work, working, and coming home from work. I might have energy for something besides stressing out about work or being exhausted from work or complaining about work.

This past year has been very instructive for our whole family. I've learned what it's like to have to work to support the family (as opposed to working to support myself). I've had the dubious experience of working ungodly hours and getting a shockingly minuscule paycheck for my efforts. I've stressed about where our money is being spent, counting up the hours that contribute to a restaurant dinner or a new pair of shoes or a kitchen appliance. That's four hours of work right there . . . is it worth it? And that hopeless sensation of coming home from work and having little energy to do anything but peck my partner on the cheek and pat the kids on the head before plopping in front of the television? Yeah. I get that.

J. has discovered the insanity, the drudgery, the infinite exhaustion that is being a stay-at-home parent. He's seen that people expect you have nothing to do, so they just drop by whenever they feel like it, or they ask you to do things because they figure you have the time for it, since "you're not really working." He's had the experience of complete deflation when the working parent comes home and the house looks exactly as messy as it was when she left. And the judgment, "What do you do all day?" I imagine it's doubly as difficult for a man, because he doesn't have a real job, and he's letting his wife bring home the tempeh. J. might believe that this work is just as vital and relevant as making money in the corporate world, but society does not - especially for a man, who is supposed to be better than that.

Lessons learned from this experiment? Being the at-home parent sucks the big one. Being the working parent sucks the other end of the big one. Neither position is ideal. Carrying the entire brunt of finances or child-rearing is, at least for this family, unnatural, painful and divisive.

The conclusion? Equally-shared familial roles. But we already knew that.