allow myself

Tonight not only did we have dinner, but I had the bestest time!

I had set out earlier this month, determined that I was going to uncover the table for tonight’s dinner (Thanksgiving). I got the table cleared AND oiled. The poor table hasn’t been “fed” for 6 months or more and when it gets oiled after that, it just sucks the oil up! So the wood stopped looking pale and wan and looked again like the tiger oak antique it is.

Then I threw this new (to us, I got it a thrift shop) blue and white plaid tablecloth on it, as well as various other dishes, sage napkins, a sage tray with the condiments, blue egg cups with candles, etc.

Almost none of this was bought together. Hardly any of it was bought new.

We had soup for dinner. The white thick bowl that it was served from is the middle bowl from a set I did buy new at Crate & Barrel about 15 years ago, right after we got here.

The soup plates we ate from came from the antique store last week, as did the bread plates. They ARE matched, they’re Buffalo Lune dinerware.

The candles were green votives I got at the dump. The candlesticks are two blue egg cups I bought when a friend’s boutique went out of business.

The large plates and the salad bowls are white Centura, what Corning did before Corelle, bought in a lot at a consignment shop a few years back.

The big blue dinner plates are also Buffalo Lune, bought at an auction 10+ years ago.

The tray is med. sage and came from a fire department white elephant sale last year.

The napkins are light sage and don’t match exactly. They came from a commercial laundry’s “yard sale” a few years ago.

The wine glasses were bought used, I don’t remember where or when.

The coffee mugs are Polo Denim (sage)...they came from TJ Maxx, cheap.

Most of the blue dishes matched, but the rest of it was just me liking what I like. In some ways, I’ve been working towards setting the table I had tonight for 10 years.

These are our everyday dishes. The “fancies” that I did were a putting the food on the table rather than dishing it up in the kitchen, the candles, the wineglasses and the tablecloth.

But this is NOT my best stuff. This was my everyday stuff AND IT WORKED!!! I just sat there tonight, enchanted by the table I had set of these pieces I had bought, on sale or used over 10+ years with a vague idea that they should all work together and by God they did!

Of course, I was so excited that I then got embarrassed and cried all over poor DH. He’s patient and tolerant of me and my quirks like this. (But really he has no idea how much this meant.)

It was neat, cheap, durable, practical, AND I LIKE IT!!! Not la-D-dah, not expensive, not frivolous. It was kind of feminine, but that’s tough, there wasn’t a frill anywhere!

This is pretty much an obvious rebellion to the productions my sister used to put on with her gold-rimmed French(?) china and so and so crystal, etc. Bleccch! Exhibiting how much money I can spend on something doesn’t make me feel better. Doing something I like and that I COULD mix my china (celadon green, German) in with…THAT makes me happy!

Anyway, my dinner plans changed as the turkey wings didn’t cook in time. We had the same menu we were going to, but had pumpkin soup instead of turkey soup, with rolls, salad, hard cider, and pie.

I gotta go wash the dishes.

I must be demented. I keep thinking I’ll go set the table again to just look at it some more. Boy I’m silly! =)

(But it feels great!)

jkd

and I ended up telling her about this goal and 43t.

-This is what I wrote as a first draft.- My problem with this is that it will blow whatever anonymity I have here, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. This WAS my first draft, but then it got tweaked and tweaked and added to and… in the way that writing happens. NOW it’s the current version of the piece!

I feel “safe” here,as much as I ever have. And to give that away potentially is not an idea I cherish.

Anyway, what I wrote is below. jkd

Allow myself:
-to take my wants and needs seriously.
-to be disciplined about my wants, without fear.
-to create the environment I want in my home, because I deserve it.
-to believe that others can truly like me as I am.
-to fulfill the potential I have.
-to get rid of the guilt, shame, and fear that keep me from
doing the other items on this list.

In 2004, I closed my brick and mortar bookshop and wanted to finish my novel. I asked the counselor who diagnosed my PTSD* if she’d be a life coach for me, and she said that she thought I had to deal with the PTSD, as that was what she thought kept getting in the way of my writing.

I lost most of my social contacts when I closed the store. I love my husband dearly, but I was used to seeing and talking with many people in a given day. Being alone with him at home while we both worked on computers was rather isolated.

In 2005, I found 43things.com by accident. 43t (as it is called) is a social networking site where you list goals and then comment on your goals and others’ and cheer each other on. My list currently has 42 things on it and I’ve marked 555 items as complete.

My manifesto (above) is the first item on my list…”Allow Myself.” I’ve written 28 entries on this goal, the basic goal has been cheered by 57 people (you can’t cheer more than once for a given entry). But the 28 entries I’ve written have generated 107 cheers and 97 comments since I first posted it, almost exactly two years ago.

Having others involved in my day-to-day life is rare for me, that’s not something we do in my family nor my husband’s, and something I’d always wanted. The 43t community have given me the support I needed to tackle the PTSD, abuse issues, and other struggles.

I am pretty sure that this type of emotional support is not what the creators of 43t envisioned when they started the site. But at least for me, it has been a unique support mechanism.

I’ve drastically changed my life in the past 5 years, in no small part because of the website and the people there. My PTSD flashback, which haunted me most of my life, is now simply something that’s part of me. I usually recognize it as it appears, but fear of it and triggering it no longer determine my behavior, as it has for most of my life.

Dealing with PTSD and/or any other long-term emotional change or altering habits is hard. It’s difficult, soul-searching work, requiring fortitude, guidance, and support. Between my husband, counselor, and the 43t community I found the tools I needed to help me to make the required changes. It wasn’t easy, but it very worthwhile!

I’m still working on my “manifesto” and may be for the rest of my life. I reread it occasionally to remind myself where I’m headed. Using a list of goals to better your life is what 43t is all about, and I have profited greatly from my time there and the 43t community.

*Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

if you’ve read my stuff for a while, you’ve seen this, but I needed to “bump” it back up to the top. This is the original Allow Myself list, and I’m doing it, but I needed to be reminded of where I started and why this evening.

Thank you for your indulgence!

jkd

Allow myself:

-to take my wants and needs seriously.

-to be disciplined about my wants, without fear.

-to create the environment I want in my home, because I deserve it.

-to believe that others can truly like me as I am.

-to fulfill the potential I have.

-to get rid of the guilt, shame, and fear that keep me from
doing the other items on this list.

I did something I haven’t done in a long time this morning. I worked on the living room some, that isn’t all that new, and God knows it needs it.

Then the dust started to get to me (I’m really allergic to dust mites.) and I came upstairs to be on the computer for a while.

While I was waiting for everything else to boot and/or start up, I opened the file for my memoir. I haven’t looked at this in months, although I should have.

The piece I read/edited is the first section,and is all but complete. What was different was that it really didn’t hurt to read that. I remember what I wrote, I certainly remember what I felt when the events I’m describing happened, but it didn’t push my trauma trigger this time, although it usually has in the past.

No flashback trip back to the greiving 3 yo, and that’s a relief! I remember her all too well, but it gets tiresome revisiting her anytime I talk about my past in depth.

After working on the livingroom and THEN reading the memoir section, I expected that I’d go into the flashback hard, but I didn’t!

Maybe, just maybe, I can get to be a 50ish woman and not have to pay for my lousy childhood on a regular basis someday…and wouldn’t THAT be lovely?

jkd

in the required ways, that is to say, doing the things on the “allow myself” list.

I need to get back to this. I did a freak-out when I found the bit about the camouflage being as much to protect me as it is to keep others out.

And, this really is one of those worm-eating-its-own-tail again things…. Which comes first? Honoring myself enough to allow myself and DH to live without the camouflage OR cleaning the place as a way of honoring myself? I don’t know.

What I do know is that it all leads, again, to my not feeling safe. I can clean up my office. I can even know that DH is not likely to steal from me, belittle my choices for stuff, etc. but I still don’t feel safe. And I suppose that’s part of the nature of having been raised by an alcoholic, the emotional abuse and the PTSD.

The alcoholic would (and did) change the rules whenever it suited her, and so what caused abuse day A did not on day B. The PTSD causes me to feel more likely to be victimized. The combination of the three means that I don’t really trust anyone completely, and isn’t that sad?

Except that I manage to go out and about and act as if the world is safe almost every day. I do this by ignoring the alarm bells and whistles that thinking about this causes….

Ah!

Okay. When I talk to others about HOW I can talk to others and try and tell them how to do the same, I’ve said, “If I think about what I’m doing, I’ll freeze. So, instead, I go on auto-pilot and assume that whatever I do will be not-bad.” or some such. If I follow my own advice about being in and around people and talking to them (and I do) then why is this so hard at home?

The only semi-rational answer that comes to me is that I expected people to attack me outside of my home, and so when they did I was ready. When I was attacked at home I kept believing that this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, and the abuse tape runs that the reason for that was that I am subhuman. [Hello abuser!]

In all my thinking about abuse I’ve noticed that there are a few things that seem to be usually true. One of them is that frequently the abuser heaps shame on the victim’s head by this catch-22, “If you weren’t x, then I wouldn’t need to abuse you.”

In my case, this runs something like, “If you weren’t so horrible, then your (father, brother, sister,grandmother, aunt, etc.) would care about you, but they don’t. They want to ignore you rather than take care of you. They hired ME to take care of you, and you’re such a brat no one else will put up with you. Your dad will be mad because no one else could put up with you. He’ll put you in boarding school until you’re in college and then he can get rid of you just like he did your sister.”

And so, every time my family ignored my pain, didn’t cheer me on, wasn’t interested much in the details of my life, I took it as validation of the abuse, rather than simply I was born into a family of self-absorbed neurotics.

I was born into a family of people who are much too preoccupied with themselves to worry much about me, especially as my job as the marker that declared “We’ve moved on!” for my parents to their ex-spouses was over the moment I was born.
However, I had the bad manners (?) I guess to keep living long after all the people making that point and their ex-spouses.

So, my family was negligent because I wasn’t really wanted as a person, but tolerated, and the abuser made use of that fact to “prove” that I deserved the abuse. Like all such proofs, it’s faulty logic and based on nothing. Intellectually, I know that.

So how do I use all of this to help me find the “I just don’t think about it and do it” place that I use when I talk to people?

There has to be a way. I have to find it, and soon! If you’re tired of reading these diatribes, I understand. But your weariness doesn’t begin to approach the weariness of the rat caught in the rat wheel, believe me!

Maybe I can chew through the thing rather than run around it…?

jkd

for trying to work my way through the stuff re the house! I don’t suppose that seems odd to any of you, but it seems extraordinary to me.

Most of my life the people I’ve lived with have pretty much just ignored what I attempted to do, was doing, or had done. DH of course has always been better about this than my birth family, but except for commenting on whatever I was talking about, he’s usually just watched and given me support when I asked for it. This was not a normal sort of response for him to make! Having someone I live with accept that what I was trying to do was difficult and being INVOLVED with me in whatever is very unusual.

Yeah DH!

jkd

DH took part of Friday off and I found myself cleaning out the car! When I thought about it, I got it; it’s consensus. When we’re in emotional contact, I have no problem with cleaning up the day to day or doing the clearing the place out stuff.

When we’re not close, I shut down. I play games, don’t cook much, don’t clean hardly at all, and basically want to just hide. Since DH has been working crazy, 12 hour days for most of the past 2-3 weeks, the house is NOT getting better (or wasn’t) and I’ve been feeling almost assaulted.

Not brave, not strong, not progressing, just hiding out, and numbing myself down as much as I could.

It’s one hell of a way to run an airline, much less a life. wtf!

jkd

Here’s where I’m at:
1 18/30
2 16/30
3 13/30
4 16/30

(updated last 4/23)

I missed a day because of being sick Good Friday. Also, last night DH did the dishes as I was wiped out and just went to bed after dinner. So, for me to have been doing perfectly I should be -13/30- 19/30. But all in all, this is NOT bad!

More, there’s a part of me that’s monitoring this, but I am NOT panicing. I can feel some resistance as time goes on, but I haven’t stopped yet. A few points: I’m not doing this all at one time, so I think that makes this easier. And, it’s not all about the same part of the house, which I think also makes this easier. The dishes are downstairs, the bed and bath upstairs. Maybe I broke it up this way unconsciously, but it works (so far)!

Yeah me!

jkd

I threw my back out today, DH is doing the dishes…bless him! jkd 4/21/09

It occurred to me reading the last letter to myself that I did, I’ve had a different name almost for all of them:

Judy when Mom died
Judi when I got engaged at 16
Judi/Jill when I got divorced/mental hospital at 20
Judith since around the time I was 30.

And I am all those people. It isn’t as important to me that people call me Judith now and it isn’t always the way I think of myself either.

Judy is somehow that happy kid, and it never fit well after Mom died.

Judi was adopted in jr. high when I was trying to be different and since my full name was Judith it always seemed to fit.

Jill was the persona I was going to become for the Christian fiance. She was a gracious lady, and I did not see myself that way at all, but she was NOT me, and that was terrible in many ways.

Judith is who I became when I moved to the east coast after my father died. I had struggled most of my life to be accepted as an adult because of the freckles, looking young, and being short. I could change none of that, but I could take on an adult name, and I did!

They are all me, or parts of me, and I’d never really seen that for each of those major phases of my life I adopted a different name.

Huh!

Judy
Judi
Jill
Judith
jkd (or whatever!)

I have started a goal, elsewhere, to try and help myself do this. The goal is comprised of 4 daily pieces:

1 make the bed when I get out of it
2 brush my teeth right after dinner
3 wash dinner dishes before I go to bed
4 log all of the above

for 30 days. Mind you, these get done, but not CONSISTENTLY. Sometimes DH does the dinner dishes in the a.m. when he’s making coffee. Sometimes, the bed doesn’t get made until late, or it doesn’t get made at all. Usually, I drag myself away from bed where I’m reading to brush my teeth before going to sleep. And of course, before yesterday, I hadn’t been logging any of this at all.

My idea is that these are small changes, tiny really. Most of them are a matter of timing rather than actually changing habits. All of them will lessen the stressors in my life, and that’s a good thing.

This is a baby step, but because I am UNCONDITIONING myself, the changes have to be tiny. It has taken me many years to really understand that I was conditioned, like a Pavlovian dog, about my home space, hence the irrational panic. I keep saying this, I was under assault in my own house, in insidious ways, and the lack of consistency is probably the most damaging overall effect I still carry. It has made ALL of the rest a quantuum leap more difficult than it would have been otherwise, something many people simply do not comprehend.

I asked my brother one time when he started a project, did he think about what would happen if he failed? He answered, “No, of course not! Why would I do that?” and internally, I thought, “Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” [I have spent hours/weeks contemplating the failure of almost anything I undertake. Big waste of time, huh? Stop it? I’d love to…. I’m hoping the consistency piece will help that too.]

So, here’s where I’m at:

1 11/30
2 11/30
3 10/30
4 11/30

jkd