I have a lil' parking lot document with topics I want to yap about on the internet, but for today...I want to talk about yesterday. Because it was a beautiful cross-section of My Deal Which I Fucking Hate as it relates to social stuff. And I'm having a bunch of feelings about it and I want to write it out and hopefully that'll help, yeah? Yeah!
Let's go. Oh - background information: today is my third day to be on Bupropion. So far so pretty good and I'm down to 2-3 cups of coffee a day with that in my system which is wild because that's down from...like...five.
The tarot card I pulled yesterday was Justice. So I was trying to keep that in mind yesterday. But I didn't dig deep into what Justice means and I want to do that a little bit this morning too.
I dropped L off at school yesterday but it was volunteer appreciation day so the kids were all just running riot on the playground - bit of a drop-and-go moment. I didn't go to the volunteer appreciation breakfast because...I thought it would be too much for me. I have issues with social anxiety? With groups that are kind of like parties? With settings that have non-specified roles? Where I don't have A Person I feel solid about? As I said, the Bupropion is working pretty well, so I went about the rest of my errands for the day. I picked up fairy lights from Target for an event tonight, got gas from Costco, decided to pick up my final tips from The Siren and that I wanted to pick up some malasadas to take to the kids there because damn. Things been rough lately. I got a box for an event I was volunteering at later that morning too.* So I...did all that! Tips: check. Brown sugar cortado: check. I was running early so I went to campus a little early because: why not?
I hung out in the back for admitted students day and listened in a little before a panel at 10:45. I don't know if I did a good job with it. But there were three other students there and I think among us we had some good (if somewhat intense) feedback about the program. After that I took a sandwich and left to run two more errands before heading home.
S is back-back (and things have overall been going well; I am still not a hundred percent, but sobriety has been helping and he's still going to therapy consistently and has pivoted to things like going swimming with us when we go swimming, helping with pickups and drop-offs and taking the lead on enforcing boundaries around screen-time), so he picked L up from school for Early Release and then to his parents house so she could sleep over.
Last night was a Big Event for school that I did almost nothing to help coordinate or execute. So my plan, inasmuch as I had one, was to help strike. I probably should have helped setup, but I didn't. I thought my errands would take much longer than they did or that I should spend time with my daughter before spending 4+ hours away from her at night, but in retrospect it would have been fine.
So basically all I did before the event was listen to some lectures, fold some laundry, and get ready. I thought I would take a nap too but that just...didn't pan out. So I do the makeup and get dressed. We go by my in-laws' house to see L before because I miss her and want to see her. That's all fine, but then there's some mild anxiety around parking and where to direct my parents to park for the event.
We're hella early. We're the first ones there. The waitstaff is pretty jazzed about that because apparently they thought the event was supposed to start at 5:00 and so had been there since 4:00. Ope.
From there on out...the vibes were just...off. I wasn't greeted by...almost anybody? I went up to someone a couple of times and smiled, asked for a task, executed the task, and went back to my table, but overall it just felt weird. Like I was being depersonalized. Despite being at an almost-empty table no-one in my cohort came to sit with me. No teachers came to speak with me. I didn't get up and go talk to them either? Some OT3s came to sit with us and it was nice to talk with them and catch up a little bit, but overall the weird vibes just compounded over the course of the evening and by 9:15 I was ready to go. I had an upset stomach, I didn't feel very festive, I wasn't masking very well all day anyway and I sure as hell couldn't mask anymore by the end of the experience.**
There was a tremendous amount of sadness. Of feeling not good enough. Of feeling like I just don't connect with people very often in a deep friendship way and that makes me feel like there's something wrong with me. Feeling like the hope I felt when I first entered the program was misplaced - like I was not, in fact, seen and understood and scaffolded and watered and turned towards the sun. Like this is my fault because I didn't do enough. Because I wasn't enough. Many of the same feelings I felt at Belhaven. They didn't know what to do with me. And here...I don't exactly know what the problem is. Except - me.
To be clear: I am going to be an alright-to-good OT. Maybe even a great one, eventually, if I find the right fit for my skills and temperament. One event doesn't define me. But it does make me sad. Because maybe this is forever. Maybe it just be like that most of the time. Maybe it's just the 'tism (which I will now a hundred percent not pursue a diagnosis for due to all the talk of a registry). Maybe I'm just not a good friend/classmate/family member. Maybe I'm not only not for everyone - but not for most people. And I kind of have to be okay with that.
At the end of the night I had an upset stomach and had to run to the bathroom. This gave me an out when they asked if I was going out afterwards.
It did make me miss the burlesque company, oddly. Those unicorns of humans have lists and tasks and schedules and it's so much nicer in many ways to be bullshitting with the ND while un-crumpling ones than wondering what's expected of you and whether you're okay-enough with the NT.
Could I just ask about expectations? Yes. Did I? Also yes. Did I gain clarity? Nawp.
Okay. I feel better about all that now. The protocol that worked:
PM of: cry, chew gum, S independently apologizes for not being supportive the past two years, sandalwood incense, sleepytime tea, weighted blanket, cat on lap, playing Dordogne x20 minutes, watching North of North x1 episode, 5 mg melatonin, binaural sleep sounds w/ rain
AM after: 16 oz. instant coffee, noticing I don't want to go out to eat so respectfully declining to do so, instant oatmeal with collagen and peanut butter, more cat, journaling, crying, lemon-lime Waterloo seltzer, more sandalwood incense, "My Tiny Tarot Practice" episodes about Justice and the Queen of Wands.
"Justice is not black or white thinking, it is not necessarily the force of the law. I think of justice in the tarot as the forever effort to align our actions with our values. And the attention paid to the space between how we act and what we believe. Because I think for so many of us (for all of us in fact) we are forced (or choose) to act in ways that are not aligned with what we say or believe to be most important in our lives. Under the oppressive forces of the world that we live in we are often forced into bad decisions. We are often given choices that are not, in fact, free choices. But it's not simply the systems or structures of our society that cause this, it's also the ways that we fail to know ourselves, to understand our motivations, to articulate what matters most to us or the values that we want to live our lives by, and therefore we can't act in alignment. We can't be balanced in our inner and outer worlds. And so, Rachel Pollack in 78 degrees of wisdom asks, 'If we don't understand ourselves, how can we expect to make a free choice?' And she argues that we have to see and accept our past in order to be able to step into the present and the future justly. So when this card arrives in a reading I'm often returned to my core values. Where am I acting in accordance with my beliefs? Where am I failing to do so? Justice sees all. And as Maria Menez [sp?] mentioned, identifies those energetic leaks. Because when I'm out of alignment and I'm acting in a way that's not aligned with my values, my life force leaks out of me. I lose integrity. And if I had to choose one key word for this card that's what it would be - it would be integrity. To me, integrity is that alignment between the value and action. Between inner belief and outer behavior. And I think that that's what Justice is seeking and calling forth from us." - Amelia Hruby
* This is way more executive function than is typical for me and all before 9:30 AM, mind you.
**And I think some other factors that contributed to the overwhelm were:
- my parents being there (I don't know if it's fair to say we don't get along, but it is fair to say that we stress each other out)
- S being there (a couple of members of my cohort and a couple of professors know bits and pieces of what's been going on and there's a disconnect between the level of [emotional] support that I think everyone else in my cohort had probably experienced over the past couple of years that he just...didn't/wasn't able to do? And sitting there while D was thanking all the spouses and SOs for snacks, support, encouragement and taking up the slack was just...not as applicable to me and that didn't feel good)
- guilt for not doing much of anything to help with this event
- the emotional release of this being it; we're off on clinicals in three weeks
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