I haven’t done this in a long time. Experiencing life sober isn’t the only thing that’s strange. Here I am trying to actually fix myself aswell. Yesterday I regressed a bit, in the form of an hour of sobs and a couple more hours of anxiety. Ended up accomplishing nothing the entire day. Broke my streak of accomplishments. Until that point, I was facing my fears and emotions and I was amazed at the progress I could do. And now, here I am, the morning after failing myself, stricken with a generalized sort of amnesia. I have no idea what to do with my time.
False!
false!
false!
1- I did not fail myself, I made progress.
I am rebuilding myself from the ground up. This can’t be easy with how far I’ve fallen, or rather, how little I’ve grown at all, ever.
2- The pressure of Vipassana
I don’t feel ready. I won’t deny that this is the time during which I would most benefit from the meditation, however I do feel that their warning about it not being recommended to people with mental health issues. Meditation they say is not a replacement for psychiatric care. I don’t trust my mind not to drive me into a worse state of mind at all.
Confused inner dialogue
New mentality:
But tiff, you’re doing it again. I can’t because I can’t is a paradox. Your worst fears are in themselves paradoxes.Old mentality:
Yes but, I still exist. I’m still here. Should I be the one directing the monologue, you will suffer greatly at some point or other.New mentality:
we are the same person, don’t address me like thatCombination of Tiffanies: *dope* ( /amensia)
Old mentality: the attention deficite, regardless, will cripple you.
New mentality: I would rather oppose this idea, but I do infact agree. It has been difficult
Meditation & ADD
“Meditation is a form of focused contemplation that relaxes the mind and the body and centers your thoughts. Researchers say that in the long run, meditation increases activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for attention, planning, and impulse control.
In a way, meditation is the opposite of ADD/ADHD. The goal of meditation is to train yourself to focus your attention with the goal of achieving insight. So it’s a workout for your attention span that also might help you understand and work out problems.“
Here I am thinking of the meditation leave I was supposed to sign up for days ago. Way too scared to do this. 10 days of silence could break me. I don’t care much about breaking, except that the people at the center would! A hyperventilating, crying and panicking person talking to herself through a number of different types of voices is not something that they can handle.
I can stop these panics, I can, but the way that I do so is by getting the hurt out of my physical body. The emotions build up in my chest and I feel they need to come out. I sobed like a baby yesterday. A slow and volnurable and loud sob. The same sobbing I did, litterally, when I was a toddler or child. I was conscious the entire time, limiting my behavior to relevant emotional reactions rather than having it escalate, for once. And surely enough, crying my ass off was the only way I could get it out of my chest. It’s better than panicking, for sure, but if I don’t get the crying out, then I will begin to panic. My ability to think in these circumstances is highly limited. I am making an excuse for myself not to try to fix it, without denying it’s current stage however. If I could predict that I could slowly work that stage into something less and less bad every time, then i would sign up. But I don’t know that.
The emotion arises when I pitty myself. I pitty myself as soon as I see myself doing a good job alone.
Where as a regular person feels good about acomplishments, I feel a sense of victimisation. I feel (not think, feel) that accomplishing something on my own makes me pittyful because the truest truth is that I am infact indeed very truthfully and honestly lonely. That is what I feel that I naturally am. A lonely and scared person, an isolated victim of unequalness. I do not identify to success, or independance, I identify with nurture and safety.
However, there has to be a part of me that wants more for herself. I would say that yes there is, but how badly does she want it? Not badly enough to go through the sensation of abandonment every night for the rest of my life, that’s for sure. Who would ever possibly want this for themselves?
If I told you that you could live the life you wanted, but that in exchange, you would have to cry and be scared every single night of that duration, would you chose this, or would you feel safer chosing a comprimise?
Safety. Safety is tricky, I can not say this enough. Safety, bravery. Bravery is a real thing. Habbits are real aswell. And what is even realer than any of this is the fact that I am doing this to myself
I don’t want to do this to myself.
I also still have reflexes of feeling ridiculously uncomfortable in certain activities. It would be nice to be able to push that away, but the truth is I sencerely doubt that it can be done over night or in time for the meditation leave in 1 month and 6 days.
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My worst fear is that I will be there and begin to breathe quickly. Once the hyperventilation starts, the panic attack is not far off. How could I push the panic attack away?
For one, you’re not supposed to push it away. You’re supposed to observe it. It is my impression that I am supposed to understand it. I don’t know how to not try to understand everything in my head. To not do so would be to enter a hypnotism in which I do not exist… I am always looking to understand something or other.
My memory is highly damaged. I have bouts of amnesia and a very poor capacity to do exactly what I’m doing now. Writing helps me because I am reading the words I am speaking, and I can see the global ness of the sentances I am writing as I write. It gives me a visual representation, and more importantly, it filters the millions of voices into one, slowed down speech. I don’t know how to focus my attention otherwise. It’s difficult for me to sort the different voices out. Everything branches out quite quickly. I would like to be able to say that I can control this, but I do think it is part of the crippling ADD. Crippling because when I try to change it, it gets worse.
They say it’s because I beat myself up for things. I guess it’s because I’m distracted. It’s not very fair that deciding not to be distracted is not enough to make you concentrate on something. Just thinking of doing the act removes me from being inserted in the act I am trying to accomplish. When I look at a clock, I most certainly don’t look at the needles first. First, I remember that I have difficulty with reading a clock. Then, there is a sort of empty moment, an amnesia pocket, during which it’s hard to switch from that sentance to actually concentrating on the clock itself.
I’ve built a world of thinking about thinking. I cannot retain that much information, or multitask in this way. Perhaps regular people can, themselves, think of the command they give themselves and concentrate on that command at the same time? I’d imagine it be a basic human feature. Why can I not concentrate on more than 1 single thing at a time?
At work, i would often get confused. Even if it was quite important to me that I succeed at the job, refocusing my attention was ridiculously hard. Some days I was able to get in what my friend calls The Zone. If there were many customers, I could sometimes handle it with enough determination. But when something broke that determination, the embarassement and emotions I feel litterally ake away from my ability to concentrate.
I think I programed myself to be disapointed in myself because of the unpredictability in my dad being disapointed in me as a kid, which meant I would immediately be enduring physical violence and intentional terror-type punishing, with the heavy footsteps, angry face and loud male voice. (I cannot sit and listen to a man raise his voice without feeling seased and frozen)
This disapointment programing was reinforced by my environment at school. We had just moved from an anglophone town to a more francophone town. (bilingual areas have varying tendancies) My parents sent me to daycare and school in French for the first time. I couldn’t speak french, I could only try and fail miserably. I wanted to communicate with other children or understand what the teacher wanted to tell me, or defend myself against false blames, but because I could not properly do so, this is how my environment reacted:
– Teachers embarassing me in front of the entire class so that I would not repeat the same mistake (using negativity to have an impact on my behavior via my sense of self worth, which was actually becoming increasingly frail)
– Students not understanding what I was saying or the english-type humor I tried to share from my TV time at home. We didn’t watch the same TV, we were not raised the same, but all of them seemed to be french and they did not appreciate any advances I would do. Their reactions differed from confusion, disgust (I would wonder: why? couldn’t even understand what they were saying completely), intentional mean-ness and baffled-ness. Sometimes, they would pretend to understand, and seem very uncomfortable. Then they would hide from me.
When the students hid from me, I’d chase after them to play anyway. Sometimes I’d do that by laughing and running after them like it was a game. Sometimes I litterally thought it was, and that I was being socially accepted, only to find that they would run faster and faster and eventually push me or tell a teacher that I won’t stop annoying them.
No matter what I did, I was shunned. This never changed at any point in school, as this created a shyness that in itself seperated me from others. In addition, the schools I was in were always culturally different from me. In primary school, they were all french and I was the alien of the entire school because I spoke english, which might as well be chinese, and they didn’t have chinese kids in that town back then. If there was one chinese kid in the entire town, you would likely hear of it from someone who spotted them.
I would say that it was also reinforced by the private daycare I would regularly go to before the move. The babysitter was bitter, she didn’t hold back on pulling me away from the other children and telling me all about how inadequate I was. I would have rathered, at the time, she be nicer to me, but her method of communication terrified me. There was something cold in her, she was not nurturing at all. However, her opinion of me influenced that of my mother, who was my main source of nurture. In order not to have my mother be upset at me rather than excited to see me when the daycare was over, I had to behave a certain way. However, being scolled the way I was did nothing for my motivation. It just made me depressed and isolate myself from the other kids. Stay silent. Wait for the babysitting to be over. It was excrutiatingly long sometimes.
I began to have a fair social environment toward the end of primary school, but this form of betterment and healing was interrupted by moving to Laval and going to a highschool that was culturally diverse. I had converted myself from English to French in my behavior, and now here I was in an environment that worked on an entirely different set of cultural rules. Again, I regained some power, but the damage was done. It didn’t help that the mood swings had gotten bad enough that they made me fail my year. It was most certainly no better that we moved again, back to the land of the french, where I live now. They introduced me to cultural diversity, I didn’t want to return to the land of white toast and their excrutiatingly boring and similar lives. (trashy, too) So once again, my attempt to take control, weak at the start, was made pointless by the regression caused by the new seperation. I had to walk, take the train and take the bus to go to the same culturally diverse school the following year, twice a day, to and from, and this made it very difficult for me to get proper sleep or to socialise, and I was very very cold and lonely during the long trips to and from, especially in winter, when it got dark early and there were really bad blizzards.
Finally, it was reinforced by my grandmother. When my parents would mistreat me, I would call her up for a pitty party. My grandmother is an obsessive worryer regardless, and she would communicate to me that I had many wonderful qualities. However, she did so from the point of view that I was a victim, and she dramatised it allot. She wanted to call the police, which gave me the sense that my situation was infact an urgently unfair situation. How could I not victimize myself? Believe that I was different and disfunctional?
Which leads us to another reinforcement: TV. TV and movies tought me that my best hope for a support system that eased my victimisation was the idea of being innocent, beautiful and perhaps helpless. It’s the princess thing, you know. Watch any Dizney movie and you’ll see where I’m getting at. Every dizney princess was a damzel in distress at high peaks of drama, and characters very much take her distress seriously. They tend to that helplessness and in the end, she is surrounded by people who pay attention to her and love her. The end. (the end does not explain that the prince is a person of his own too, not just the extension fate created to take care of the princess)
It wasn’t just Dizney. In the 90s, any movie your parents showed you likely projected similar values… What female kid wants to grow up to be a knight, anyway?
I didn’t want to play mommy or daddy man! I wanted to be the baby every time, and refused the idea of settling for a rotation of roles. If I wasn’t the baby, I would cry till my crying was so inconveniant that they would allow me to take the role for myself, once again.
Then I started having sexual fantasies. The orgasms I was somehow able to give myself (????????) probably contributed to the victimisation programing in my mind. – Oh fuck, don’t get me started. Domination has been my thing since I was 4 years old man. That’s one heck of a fucked up kind of fucked-up! (hahahahah.)
The last contributor to my ADD would be giving myself excuses. I was clumsy, but so was my mom, and resembling my mother brought me praise. It was okay for me, because it was okay for me to be like her. It was cute. I was her mini-me.
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So what will understanding all of this do for me?
I don’t know that I can reprogram my emotions not to continue to require the type of affection I seem to quote on quote “require”. It seems that when this requirement is not met, I feel volnurable, scared, panicked, and lonely. It would be pretty neat to go on with my life despite this reflex, but the nature of the reflex is very much cripling in absolutely every area of my life. It is my disability.
My only, only, only hope – is that I can reprogram myself. I still don’t know that this is possible. I have a tendancy to believe so, till the buildup comes out in some form or other. If it isn’t within a few days, it’s after a few months. It always comes back.
It is a fear. A fear of what? A fear of being alone? Yes. I have a fear of being alone, or independant. I very much do. Maybe, I can fight this fear if I make myself completely alone and independant? No… my mental strength is not chisled enough. I most certainly do not trust myself to maintain that kind of motivation. Or rather, to word it differently, I do, but I don’t trust the other side. The wave of worry that blurs my thinking.
How can one think, if they can not think?
How can one thing, if they are over thinking?
The result is you either can’t think, or you’re over thinking. How can you force it to be otherwise?
They say don’t force it, observe it. That’s the point of the meditation. I don’t know that observing it is ever going to provoque anything in me but recognition that this is what I identify as subconsciously and that this subconscious sentiment is extremely strong to be coming back unconditionally the way it always, always, always does.
In the earliest years of my life, i was in fact treated very nicely. My parents did bring me to many places and did many activities with me. I guess I seek to be the star in that frame, again. Empowered. But I was never empowered alone. Only when others were around to tell me I was worth something. If I went back to my room, I very much felt incapable of things. (being spoiled before hand also did not help with this)
Once, I drew a picture of me as a person filled with poison. I pointed to the poison and wrote “mechant” which means “bad” or “evil” (I meant inadequate) – I thought if I showed it to people, they might be proud of my realisation, my consciousness. They were confused and disagreed, but I didn’t believe them at all. I thought if I pushed a little harder, if I said things like “comon, you know it’s true” “it’s true isn’t it, you can say it” – that they would eventually agree. They eventually got upset at me and told me to stop, I thought they were simply not remembering the part of them that agreed. I kept this reality in me.
Sigh. Enough writing for today.