Does This Striptease Make Me Look FAT?
Feb. 7th, 2020 08:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraAll week long, I’ve been actively looking for reasons to feel insulted.
And finding lots of them!
This kind of thin-skinnedness is not typical of me (I hope), so I can only suppose they’re indicative of some vast inner continent of drifting discontent, fueled, in part, by the weather and in part, by income limitations.
I have a pretty keen emotional intelligence when it comes to sussing out other people’s psychological states, but none whatsoever when it comes to deciphering my own. This is not uncommon among those of us who were reared by parents with borderline personality disorder. Constant monitoring was called for! Hypervigilance was called for! But what we felt ourselves was always pretty irrelevant because it wasn’t going to change anything.
Consequently, I’ve always had a very hard time figuring out what I feel at any given time.
Sometimes, I’ll find myself crying and think, Wow! I must feel sad!
And when I add up the evidence, I think, Right! And I have reasons to feel sad.
###
So, yesterday, someone told me I do “psychological stripteases” online.
Like I said, I was looking for reasons to get offended.
It’s always bizarre to get a glimpse of oneself through another person’s eyes. If you’re feeling unsettled, if you're feeling momentarily ungrounded, you will always embrace whatever caricature has your name tag on it.
So, this person thinks I’m an exhibitionist. Trotting out train wreck after train wreck for the delectation of some vast, invisible television viewing audience!
Uh huh.
Of course, this person was wrong. What I’m really doing is putting messages in bottles.
Hoping to make connections that will override space and time.
###
Anyway, I have been working waaaay too much in between doing selfless, altruistic TaxBwana-ing. This is because I want to shove money at RTT and pay for his dentistry.
It dawned on me yesterday that within the past six months, RTT has really maxxed out the stress chart. The Big Four on stress charts are always Death, Divorce, Job Loss, and Moving; RTT has had three of those things.
I do know what that feels like.
If only I could focus hard enough to dematerialize here and rematerialize in that casino parking lot, I could mug that guy from yesterday before he had the chance to gamble away thirty-three thousand dollars! I could give it all to RTT and say, Here! Travel! See Southeast Asia and Indonesia and Bhutan before they close the borders on those places for-evAH!
But I can’t.
So, I slip him what would otherwise go into the New Car Fund to allay some of his present financial worries.
“My dentist—she’s very nice—told me she thought I should see a psychiatrist,” RTT told me glumly yesterday. “I grind my teeth at night. She said it was stress.”
“Yes. Well. It’s the family curse,” I said. “I grind my teeth, too. So does your brother. Your brother, by the way, finds Wellbutrin very helpful. It doesn’t have the side effects that are associated with other antidepressants. All that dope you’re smoking is an attempt at self-medicating, you know. If it’s not working, there are other options.”
###
This weekend I start socializing and having some fun again.
So, you know.
That will be good.
And finding lots of them!
This kind of thin-skinnedness is not typical of me (I hope), so I can only suppose they’re indicative of some vast inner continent of drifting discontent, fueled, in part, by the weather and in part, by income limitations.
I have a pretty keen emotional intelligence when it comes to sussing out other people’s psychological states, but none whatsoever when it comes to deciphering my own. This is not uncommon among those of us who were reared by parents with borderline personality disorder. Constant monitoring was called for! Hypervigilance was called for! But what we felt ourselves was always pretty irrelevant because it wasn’t going to change anything.
Consequently, I’ve always had a very hard time figuring out what I feel at any given time.
Sometimes, I’ll find myself crying and think, Wow! I must feel sad!
And when I add up the evidence, I think, Right! And I have reasons to feel sad.
###
So, yesterday, someone told me I do “psychological stripteases” online.
Like I said, I was looking for reasons to get offended.
It’s always bizarre to get a glimpse of oneself through another person’s eyes. If you’re feeling unsettled, if you're feeling momentarily ungrounded, you will always embrace whatever caricature has your name tag on it.
So, this person thinks I’m an exhibitionist. Trotting out train wreck after train wreck for the delectation of some vast, invisible television viewing audience!
Uh huh.
Of course, this person was wrong. What I’m really doing is putting messages in bottles.
Hoping to make connections that will override space and time.
###
Anyway, I have been working waaaay too much in between doing selfless, altruistic TaxBwana-ing. This is because I want to shove money at RTT and pay for his dentistry.
It dawned on me yesterday that within the past six months, RTT has really maxxed out the stress chart. The Big Four on stress charts are always Death, Divorce, Job Loss, and Moving; RTT has had three of those things.
I do know what that feels like.
If only I could focus hard enough to dematerialize here and rematerialize in that casino parking lot, I could mug that guy from yesterday before he had the chance to gamble away thirty-three thousand dollars! I could give it all to RTT and say, Here! Travel! See Southeast Asia and Indonesia and Bhutan before they close the borders on those places for-evAH!
But I can’t.
So, I slip him what would otherwise go into the New Car Fund to allay some of his present financial worries.
“My dentist—she’s very nice—told me she thought I should see a psychiatrist,” RTT told me glumly yesterday. “I grind my teeth at night. She said it was stress.”
“Yes. Well. It’s the family curse,” I said. “I grind my teeth, too. So does your brother. Your brother, by the way, finds Wellbutrin very helpful. It doesn’t have the side effects that are associated with other antidepressants. All that dope you’re smoking is an attempt at self-medicating, you know. If it’s not working, there are other options.”
###
This weekend I start socializing and having some fun again.
So, you know.
That will be good.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-07 02:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-07 02:14 pm (UTC)Presumably, they're what you've been reading for the past X months.😃
Say! Does this striptease make me look FAT? 😃
no subject
Date: 2020-02-07 08:26 pm (UTC)1) HA!
2) What does it say about me/other reader, if I appreciate reading what you write?
Also, doesn't the remark need to take into consideration the notion that your primary audience is yourself? (IIRC you've noted something to that effect, that blogging is a way for you to track your own thought/experience progression; us other people are more of a secondary audience)
Hmm, all possible responses are liable to be fraught! Is that what would make someone make that type of remark?
no subject
Date: 2020-02-07 08:51 pm (UTC)This particular person has some alpha issues with other women, I suspect.
Although had I not been in a super-sensitive mood, it would have bounced right off me.
It's not a big deal. Just something I was thinking about in my one-hour scribble time this morning.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-07 03:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-08 01:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-08 04:48 am (UTC)I too wish RTT could have that $30,000 :-\
no subject
Date: 2020-02-08 01:16 pm (UTC)Anyway, I'm over it.
For me it is about narrative, not self-disclosure. Self-disclosure, though, is unavoidable when one is storytelling one's own narrative.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-08 01:24 pm (UTC)... I mean, does she understand what "vignette" means? Of COURSE you're only revealing small details.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-08 07:57 am (UTC)Would fucking hope so too. Join the club. :) (It's just I'm better at it than anyone else. Loki's children have a certain, er, um, something about them.)
Please be insulted in the nicest way possible.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-08 01:23 pm (UTC)Thing for me is that narrative is the thing I'm obsessed with, not attention. I tell stories whether anyone's around to listen to them or not. All day long, I walk around telling myself stories. It's just for the hour or so I spend scribbling here—practicing scales as it were—there's an audience for them.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-08 01:58 pm (UTC)I mine narrative from personality and circumstances. Sometimes there is a McGuffin, sometimes a Maltese Falcon; mostly it's about the sort of folk I know something about doing things I know something about.
But I suppose I'm not as bad as Henry James in this.
However, when it comes to me, me ,m e
I'm as dislocated and fractured as any e e Cummings poem
but still
it's all about me; or someone with
the same attributes
somewhat amplified
but with a different name.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-08 02:11 pm (UTC)You're lucky. You write well, but you're also a musician.
Why do you play music? Is it for the attention you get from playing music? Or is it because, on some level, music is the purest expression of some inner contract you have with the Omega Principle? 😃
Well, of course. It's both those things. And I don't actually know you, so it would be most unwise for me to make any presumptions about what drives you. Still. I imagine the latter is the stronger drive.
And even if that formula isn't true for you, it is for me. 😃 Storytelling is the purest expression of who and what I am. My yoga, you might say.
In everyday life, by the way, among my small circle of friends, I'm known for my tactlessness and blunt truth-telling. So, though I'm a storyteller, I'm not exactly a card-carrying member of the Loki tribe. 😃
no subject
Date: 2020-02-08 02:37 pm (UTC)I must desist with my childish braggadocio; "self" is important as a lens, a position, an opinion - a personal mote in the eye of God/Omega/Whatsitsface. I assert self precisely because of that. Children of Loki are beloved to Omega because of the endless possibilities of their impudence. If you are going to pull the tail of god you have to have a certain brio; even in failure. Not that such is my lot, obvs.
[edit] Obviously I couldn't resist the psychological striptease. :)