|
Today was spent flailing. I flailed at Norm, who was very calm and
reassuring and even told me that the flailing I was doing (the nth
revolution of 'Am I making this all up' with a new twist -- but more on
that below) was healthy. Then I came to work and flailed through
testing exciting undocumented features and answering sysadmin questions
and admiring really bizarre problems with the latest build which are
probably Not My Fault. Soon I will go home, to play Dungeonkeeper and
hang out with Marith for a while; Jim is somewhere in San Mateo
enduring training, and after that he's going to try cornering Czr for
dinner.
The new twist on my flailing was the need to hear from Norm exactly
what he thought my problem was. I'm actually pretty solid on the fact
that I'm not making up the existence of problems -- I do space out
constantly, I do have bizarre memories (and lack of memory), I do get
triggered, I do have evidence of weird behavior patterns in my past...
and so forth. The problems are real. But do I really believe that
it's my awful (mostly unremembered) experiences of childhood abuse
which have caused these problems? Isn't it possible that I'm just a
Lame Person? So I asked Norm what he'd say if, say, I moved across the
country and had my new therapist call him to get his opinion. "Well,"
Norm said. "I'd say that you'd been sexually abused as a child."
Pretty straightforward, isn't it? It's not like I don't know
this -- I have enough memory fragments to know this. But it made an
immense amount of difference to hear it from him, as his professional
opinion. He told me I could ask him for it as often as I needed to,
and that it was good that I was asking. He had some stuff to say about
how the fact that I was asking meant that I was ready to hear it,
whereas before I wasn't comfortable asking him for his opinion. This
is probably true, but I still felt silly for asking.
Writing this I realise how distanced I still am from everything. I can
say in my journal that I know I was abused, but that doesn't mean I
feel like I know it. Intellectually, sure, but emotionally I
don't have a sense of the reality behind those words. I've read in
various autobiographical things of people making a breakthrough where
suddenly they realise that these things happened to
them. I'm still some infinite distance away from that.
Should I even be writing about this in my journal? It seems bizarrely
inappropriate, like the sort of thing which will make the anonymous
'you' quit reading. But when I spend so much time doing therapy,
reading books, reading web pages, reading Usenet, talking to people...
it's hard to avoid writing about it. The only method that works is not
to write in my journal at all, which explains the scarcity of entries
over the last few months. Or maybe it's just another excuse, I don't
know.
|