Thursday, January 10, 2013

Finding an outlet when feeling ashamed

ARG!  I am just in a panic-y moment of having said too much and I am overanalyzing it!  There is a strange phenomenon where the more I like someone, the more tactless I become.  Here's what happened...

I invited Noah's friends over and told the mom that I was inviting them as a kind of consolation for the fact that someone else cancelled on them.  I FEEL SO SHALLOW!  But I totally LOVE this other mom so much so why would I say something that could potentially hurt her feelings?  You wouldn't do that to a friend!

Ugh, this depresses me.  Because all I can do is try to be better, but it's like this reveals myself to myself to be someone mean, that I don't like.  This is a battle inside my mind.  Because these friends are Noah's bestest, favoritest people and they are never second fiddle to anyone, so why would I say that?  It was a moment where she was saying how helpful it would be for her in the sense that she could get some time to do something she needed to do, so i had to chime in how it was helping me too because since this other friend cancelled I knew how bummed the boys would be and wanted to cheer them up.  WHY COULDN'T I KEEP MY THOUGHTS TO MYSELF?  I feel like I'm fourteen again.

so fricking human, i am.  all i have to do is forgive myself and say i'll never do that again.  but i just want to keep beating myself up over this silly ridiculous thing.  but that is not helpful to anyone, right?  just BE in the pain of the shame.  I want to put it away, hide from it, drink something, smoke something, but I won't.  I will just be in it fully so that I can appreciate the purpose of it, to treat people with care and love, not some kind of game.  It's silly to make so much of something so insignificant, unless the purpose of making something of it is to learn from the mistake.

yes, this is the way my anxiety depresses me.  i say something small but tactless and then make a huge deal of it to myself.  like when i would get in trouble as a kid and go to my room.  i would then stew over all that had been said or unsaid without any resolution.  the anxiety would just build up.  we never TALKED about stuff.  So now when I beat myself up over silly social mis-steps, I stew inside my mind.  My mind becomes like my room when i was a teenager, with the door shut, and the darkness outside the cold window.  And I don't know how to escape the feeling of shame.

That's how I started getting OCD.  I would be sitting in my room after some fight with my parents, with all these feelings of hurt and anger, or after a day at school where I said something that embarrassed myself, or felt bewildered socially, I would sit in that room with a kind of a trapped feeling.  The trapped feeling was not knowing how to deal with the mounting anxiety.  What to do with it, where to put it.  The ocd was a survival mechanism, a way to turn off the anxiety by switching over to an almost robotic, emotionless way of thinking.  I would pick at my skin.  Any little thing had to be excised.  It would have been rather pathetic to see from a distance.

The OCD and my tendency to smoke marijuana are totally linked.  The cannabis shuts off the OCD, for sure, but it also removes the "hope" part of my mind, temporarily.  It makes everything ok and mellow and soothes.  It helps me think about the big picture, and removes some of the knots and kinks in my mental flow.  But it removes a small kernel of hoping and wishing that accompanies my normal thought process.  Cannabis helps me say, "Yes you can do anything you want to do, but you are happy right here right now, so why bother?"  Which is helpful in times of anxiety, but I am starting to see how just a tiny bit of wishing and hoping helps me to connect with others in the sense of connecting over striving for a better world for our kids, or hoping for a good outcome for someone with an illness, or just trying to be better people, better parents.  It's a very small difference, and a fine line, but I noticed it the other day.  It's about reputation, and walking your talk.  If I say or do something that I realize was inappropriate or hurt someone else, and I just crumple at the feeling of my human incompetence, and then try to find something to distract myself until it becomes like water under the bridge, then I am refusing to give myself the dignity and self-respect of a person who strives for goodness and peace and kindness.  Then I continue to make the same mistakes, hoping for a different outcome.  But if I reflect and feel the shame and forgive myself and picture myself as that person who I imagine myself to be then maybe I *will* begin to become a person of strong character.

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