So, This is What Anger Feels Like!

Shit shit shit.

Anger: When something you value is threatened or diminished one can feel the urge to be hostile towards any responsible entities.

Paranoia: The fear of having valued things in one’s personal domain diminished, and the over concern that others have set out to accomplish just this. A preoccupation with abuse and potential abuse.

Anger: A bodily response to threat. The urge to retaliate against the threatening entity. The Fight part of Fight / Flight.

……..

So it seems the assertive part of me has woken up.

I’m unfortunately going to have to make a large part of this post private. I don’t like doing that, in the off chance that my reflections are of some use to someone, or that someone comes along and comments, which can be very useful to me, considering the content and medium. That said, some things just can’t float around cyberspace, and I do worry that if I say too much it’ll come back to bite me.

The rest of the post is private. Ah, too bad, I really tear into someone. Well, just hope I get over it and never unleash it on the undeserving. Anger though, not vitriole, but still volatile!

Just woke from a dream a few minutes ago. It’s 1:11 am.

In the dream, I went out on some errands with a house-mate / friend. Maybe we saw a movie. I had a couple of minutes while he was in a store, so I went into a cheap, but huge grocery store and convenience. Like one of those gas-station shops, but with a real grocery as well. I saw they had Mellow Yellow, so I picked some up, and a cup of ice. I poured some in the store because I was really thirsty. At checkout, the girl said: “That’ll be $5.05”. I paid and said I thought she was trying to start a fight. She agreed that the price was ridiculous. I left.

Outside, I must have added rum to the soda, and then had another, because later in the dream I was drunk. But now the dream transitioned. I’m in Charles Village, at home. I decide to take a ride on my bike around the neighborhood. Its late afternoon, and a beautiful day. I ride through the heart of the neighborhood, looking for fun places to ride and play with the bike, and see people. I’m at the grocery store (Eddies). There’s an outdoor produce section. Well, it has automatic doors, but its not fully sealed. Its like a produce tent with a front door. I ride around in there and see that they’re closing up. There’s not much produce left on the tables. There’s one clerk taking their time cleaning up, and they don’t mind me riding around in there.

I ride up to the auto-door, and it opens while I’m balanced on the bike. I ride out. I decide to do it again, maybe because I saw two other people in there just before leaving. They’re standing on the far side of the tent from the store, where there’s a flap that lets the farmers take their produce in and out. Maybe they’re farmers? I ride in and park my bike next to them, and stand over the bike and look at them. The younger woman, a blond about my age, says something like “Wow, that’s a nice bike”. And she gives me a genuine smile. I ask her on a date, on the spot. She agrees. Another sweet smile, and I feel totally comfortable with her immediately.

We go outside, and after we both look at my wheels, we agree that we’ll need other transport if we’re going anywhere. I say: “I have my car here as well, lets take that”. My car is magically right there, and we start to get in. She says that she has a place for us to go: a party or dance of some kind, downtown, “just past Chase Street”. I drive us out onto the main road, which turns out to be a country road.

Soon, the country road becomes snowy. Its getting dark. I realize that I’m drunk. I can’t seem to slow the car down to a crawl, and keep carreening around the cars in front of me, and the oncoming traffic. I do this twice and scare myself pretty badly. She gives no hint that she’s scared; only happy to be with me, and concerned that I look anxious. We have some conversation in which I realize that she’s my unconscious princess figure. So its partly a lucid dream. She is beautiful, genuine, warm, exciting. Love itself.

I tell her that I’m drunk and being terribly irresponsible, and that I’m pulling over. Would she drive the rest of the way? She will. She says “Perhaps thats a good idea” when I tell her I’m pulling over. No anger, no judgment of any kind. Just a quiet but powerful advocacy for our happiness. I apologize several times, but she doesn’t respond at all. She just smiles. She doesn’t take the bait. She knows that I know that I’ve put our lives in danger, so what’s to say?

I think I suggest that we end our date there, because I then transition ‘home’, which now turns out to be a house on that country road, where I have roommates, perhaps 4 of them, all bachelors. As I recount the story of my day, my good friend at the house tells me how stupid I was for having 2! rum and yellows (musta been what I made at the grocery earlier), when I know I should only have 1, at most. (apparently I’ve been an ass before. Am I an alcoholic?). Just as I’m starting to explain how I know that this woman is a Goddess, our landlady pulls up in a stationwagon. She’s our mother’s age.

We all come out of the house onto the porch to greet her. Apparently we’re expecting her. She pulls a washer-dryer set out of her trunk. Its connected by a solid hose. Its so small that she can hold it in one hand, by the connecting hose. I think, but don’t say: “That has to be a joke!”. Someone thanks her for the thing. Apparently we’re going to install it ourselves too. She drives off.

I see that at the end of our sidewalk we have a single ground-lamp. The sidewalk goes out to the country road, parallel to our driveway, but 20 yards away. I say to my friend: “You know, it would be funny if we put another light down there so that it looked like our sidewalk was our driveway. People might turn into it by mistake and crunch into the steps”. He agrees that this is funny.

I feel angry at the landlady. I feel excited about the young woman. I see now (in the dream) that I have been living in the wrong manner, that I have to live to be a prince, to honor this young goddess in the same way that she honored me.

I wake up.

………….

I lay awake for awhile thinking about that last part. To live with deep compassion and love of others. Presence, care, advocacy without judgment. Is that Witness? It feels powerful.

And I had a hard lesson regarding my careless attitude towards my health. It seemed to me that my being drunk, smoking, and driving a ratty car (after a ratty bicycle), are all ways to tell other people that I am ashamed of myself. They are shame symbols of some kind. I have to think more about that too.

Though I wasn’t quite ready for our ‘date’ in the dream, because of the above frailties, the whole thing was a step in the right direction. I recognized the woman as a powerful being. I didn’t shrink from the connection, though I felt weak-kneed in her presence for certain. I began to see how she was in the world, and that although I was currently incapable of reciprocating, that I really could, and want to see her again. I don’t even have to wonder if I’ll see her again. I know that I will. But I shouldn’t take this lightly. I have no right to her affections, and she’s been incredibly generous with me so far. And though she knows that we are one and the same person, she’ll never dishonor herself or me by ‘Chase’ing me (Chase street, in the dream, apropos?).

So there was something in there about realizing that there are plenty of wonderful people in the world. The real world. And that I have to bring respect and curiosity and awareness on my own in order to see them, share space with them, and connect. I could start to see the obstacles to this in the dreamscape. And maybe how I have on some level been ‘waiting to be rescued’, though I have not been conscious of this.

The landlady appearing in the dream, and the house full of bachelors is so obviously symbolic that its funny. So I’m in a little boy’s world, hoping to be cared for by someone else. And of course its pathetic, but its important to see more clearly for what it is. I’m alive, and I can now see the false kings and false queens, and most importantly, the princess.

So when do I realize that I’m the prince? How do I get from the unconscious bachelor-boy world to the realm of the hero? It seems a long leap from here. But every time I see the princess I realize that it isn’t so far as to be impossible. Its as close as reaching out a hand.

And I have a few more hours to sleep yet tonight….maybe I’ll understand a bit more… Dreams can be so rich.

Just a little update:

I’m at a new place, a house in Charles Village, Baltimore, MD. Charles Village is basically Johns Hopkins East. Its full of students and professors. But my ‘hood is so much more. I’m really enjoying it here. I ‘should’ have a roommate, seeing as I have 3 bedrooms, but I don’t. I’m still too much into enjoying the space.

I went to Sandy Spring Friends School’s 20th highschool reunion last weekend. The party part. It was actually really worth the trip down to Bethesda, MD to see 6 of my classmates (class of 52 graduates in 1988). A friend with whom I’d recently made contact and I tried talking over the noise (the classes of 1983, 88, 93, 98, and 03 were there), and we managed to share a salad and some conversation.

Working long hours on a house on Mainfield road, Lauraville, Baltimore. Perhaps more later….

-GF

The Flying Fists of Growing Freedom

Intro: I’m living at my mom’s house until my new apartment is available in 3 weeks. This is going to be a long 3 weeks.

 

I punched a door today.

I punched it 12 times, hard.

It cracked.

Its a solid wood door, and I shivered it with my fist. Felt damn good too. A couple of bloody knuckles was worth finding out how I was feeling.

Yes, I mean that. Its not figurative. I’d just retreated, baffled by my annoyance, and had decided to ‘forget about it’ and move on with other things. Then I asked myself: “What is it that I’m feeling?”, and WHAM……WHAM.WHAM.WHAM……WHAM.

“Oh.”

I tell you, I wouldn’t want to be friends with me right now. I’d be scared of that inner rage, pain, snarled je ne sais qua that is hiding from its owner. When is that going to pop out on me?

And I don’t mean that figuratively either. I let go of one friend for just this reason. He started to frighten me with his potential boom. It leaked out when I disappointed him, and I saw how big the bottle was that held that genie’s fist.

I don’t want to be around that kind of threat. But I suppose that many people have both the capacity and some content to the rage bottle. Hmm. Well, I can’t un-befriend myself, nor would I want to, so I’ll just have to deal with it and hope I can understand.

……

Backing up, the flying fists of Growing Freedom were prompted by an incident with my mother. I’d been to my therapist earlier in the day, and was feeling pretty good. Hopeful even. I felt a bit closer to taking that big next step and really trusting the guy with my shamed and hidden inner core, wherein coexist both my greatest and truest self, and also my most irrational and defended false beliefs or ‘working models’ of the world.

I was just going to watch the Champions League Semi-Final with Man U. and Barcalona when she came home from martyr duty. I’ve started to think of all her projects as martyr duty. She slaves away for everyone else and has piss poor relationships with her flesh and blood. I understand her motivations though in the ‘free labor’ department. I unfortunately inherited them. Though thankfully I’ve become somewhat aware of what its all about, and am less prone to scurrying around ‘helping’ everyone.

So, she comes home, and this:

Mom: “Any messages for me?” (slightly annoyed look on her face)

Me: “No, I just got home as well. Maybe on the phone, but I’ve not checked. What have you been up to?” (genuinely interested in finding out how she’s doing, letting her vent if need be, so that it doesn’t come out sideways….on me)

Mom: “I was painting all morning for Friend X” (looking more the martyr part I know she loves, but also looking more annoyed in general)

Me: “Wow, well, I’m just getting some lunch here….”

Mom: “I’m off to more martyr duty (church this time) in a bit….”

Mom: “By the way…” (oh shit, that is never good)

Mom: “You owe me BIG time. I had to take out the recycling this morning”.

Me: “Sorry about that. I got home too late from my own martyr duty to get it done” (I was helping a friend with stream data gathering)

Mom: silence. She neither acknowledges my reply, nor offers a way for me to repay this BIG debt. Right, whatever. She doesn’t want resolution, she wants to covet her anger and lord it around as a reason to be a bitch. As if martyring herself isn’t enough. Well, of course it isn’t, because shame isn’t healed by becoming a busy body do-gooder. And it certainly isn’t healed by relishing superiority over others, which is what her brand of martyrdom is all about.

Me: angry

……..

Yeah, a nothing scene. I know. I thought so too, but man was I angry! I still am to some degree.

I came up with a tongue in cheek saying today for therapy patients with mommy issues: “Well, at least I know I’ll always have her disapproval”.

Anger. Hmm. Does it always cover pain, or is it a primary? Does it always mean that we want something to be different?

I started to ask myself these questions. I went and drove out to a beatiful pond in Hunt Valley, MD. I took my journal, but I just sat there thinking, listening to the red winged blackbirds, cardinals, catbirds, and buzzing bees. So what is it that want, that my anger is about?

I want to be respected, not used as a garbage bin, not bullied to relieve a parent’s own insecurities and fears. I want to have a parent that I can share my weakness with, and not just guard against.

But I don’t have parents like that.

I never did.

So why do I not move on? Why wish for something that is never going to happen. Each of my parents has demonstrated again and again that they are not good trust objects.

But this wounding cycle continues, and I know that I must live through it and not run from it if I’m ever to find and keep better relationships, good relationships, enduring and flowering relationships. The anger clouds keep me from understanding what they are hiding. I cannot lash out. Well, I can, but that just rachets things up, and if I leave them with anger, I don’t think I’ll be able to really move on in spirit.

If you abandon a baby in refuse dump full of predators, that’s child abuse, right?

If you bully a baby with fists and feet, that’s abuse, right?

But what if you do these things to your child with words and perpetual pressures, anger and threats?

What if you abandon someone in spirit, but remain in body? Manipulate by witholding from them their most basic needs, in order to satisfy your insecure need for power and control?

In the end I do not think there is too much difference. Physical wounds may be healable, or they may be fatal. Wounds to the spirit, mind, and emotional development of a person are just as greivous.

How many teenagers kill themselves, or abandon themselves to complete irresponsibility in lieu of death? Do you really think that these young people are the murderers of themselves?

How many people are free of neuroses, and can live their lives steering by passion, caution, will, calling, belief, and love? And aren’t the others, those trapped by history and caged by normalization, like lemmings over the cliffs of their own lives?

………

I know I can find out. I can uncover the broken pieces of my inner world and make a mural such as the world has never seen. I feel the sparks of that potential future falling back through time.

There is a time to hold on, and a time to let go, and though the waves are wrecking further the shattered pieces of what I thought I had, it is time to cast off and swim for it. Maybe I’ll ride a friendly shark to shore, or find a lighthouse beyond.

Insight into my stuckness: I’m caught in a moment where assertion isn’t a seeming option, where my own needs are denied. Its a waiting pattern in that though I do not consciously know what I’m waiting for, wishing, hoping will come to pass, I remain entangled in early relationships, keeping proximity in exchange for knowledge. Perhaps I think that if I just wait long enough I will be noticed, accepted, seen, loved?

I realized this after feeling great relief at some approval thrown my way by one of my primary objects. I didn’t think I cared, but the feeling was real. The horse and rider are switching places and I’m now willing to really listen to the horse and adjust the rider.

If the unconscious has deep channels of need, its the rider’s job to address these, not pretend they don’t exist. This is like a horse that needs soothing, food, water, combing, shodding, etc.. Ignore those things at your peril, as both horse and rider depend on the horse, whereas only the rider depends on the rider. IE, the horse comes first.

It is difficult knowing that I’m stuck in a longterm pattern but being unable to understand it or address it. That is part of the pattern of course….

So I have a couple of dreams that need writing down. Unusually, they have stuck in the craw of my mind since waking with them yesterday. “good” dreams usually fade fairly quickly, but I was somewhat sick yesterday so perhaps the dream-state was closer and more able to continue reminding me of goings-on in the underworld of me, the unconscious.

There was a girlfriend dream, a moving into a house dream, and one longer dream earlier in the week with my whole family on a hillside. Somewhere there is a fourth dream, but it has finally slipped away.

The girlfriend dream was about tenderness, friendship, and intimacy. And it lead to the house dream. She has dark medium-length hair, is fairly short, rides an old bicycle (like the kind you find on college campuses such as Oberlin), wears boyish clothes, but has an undeniable femininity. We are leaving a Frisbee party and making plans for later. It is late afternoon in autumn, but it is really warm. As I come outside and see her sitting next to her bike…on the ground, or on a short bench of some kind, I run over and smother her in an embrace, which gets us both laughing. She’s tying her shoes and I tell her that I love her and that she is amazing. She’s been herself again, and won my heart again. There is a moment where we lock eyes and know the depth of joy we find together.

….

Later, I’m moving into this house that I’ve been moving into for months, in the dream world. Each time its fairly boring because there is really nobody there, or there are roommates that seem strange and distant. But this time, as I moved in I realized that I really liked my roommates. We’re having a party on the night I move in.

I’m exploring my suite. Its actually rather huge. First floor, left side as you enter the deceptively large house from the street. The front room of my suite seemed at first like all there was. But its only a parlor. Through curtains, bathroom on the outside wall, small hallway, then the second ‘parlor’, with a really nice desk and computer setup, comfy couches, tapestries and artwork everywhere. I realize that these things are mine, but don’t remember decorating, let alone owning these things. As I continue back through the suite I see it splits off. On the right is a private hallway with a private staircase up to a second floor room and back-of-house-second-floor-deck. On the left is a massive livingroom / bedroom.

My hammered dulcimer is already setup. I dimly remember setting it up earlier, but I had not appreciated how great a house this was then. I’m happy. I hear people in the rest of the house laughing and realize that they are my friends and that we’re going to have several great years here together as a family of sorts. A family of choice rather than accident of birth.

I test out the dulcimer, playing a few licks with the padded side of the ornate but comfy hammers. It seems the old tunes are coming to me easily. A few missed notes, but mostly right on target. I try a few flams and arpeggios, and then a chord progression comes to mind. I hammer it out. I like it. I do it again with variations. I find a melody. Its very much a rhythmic, driven, rock song of sorts. I start really wailing on the dulcimer and loving it. Josh Jones / John Smith comes in and turns on the amplifier after catching my eye. I agree: This would be cool to blast around the house.

I’m rocking out, knowing that I’ll soon have an audience and get some dancing going. Where did this improve talent come from? I think its from joy. Its from feeling at home, finally.

And this is all a Very Good Thing as far as my real life goes. I wake up.

…….

I hike with my brother. We meet our family on a steep hillside by a river. We explain that we have to keep going to get to the good parts of the river and park. The family tries to say: “No, this is it!”. We say our goodbyes and Tom shows me that the path goes away from the river and up the hill, to bypass some cliffs. I know that we’ll come back to the river soon, and I’m not too sad about having to leave the parents and other siblings behind. They would never be able to go further downstream, and its time to accept that.

……

The other day I was at a Rite Aid, buying toiletries. As I entered I saw a middle-aged woman with pretty long brown hair. Some gray hairs in there, but something about her seemed young, from the back. She turned around and stared at me with the widest-eyed expression I’ve seen short of terror. Her eyes were probably blue, but what I really noticed was some light grey sheen over her whole face, more of an impression or aura than anything real. I smiled. She kept her expression and passed me.

I found my razor blades and soap and such and came to the checkout, where she was talking with the cashier about how she wanted extra bags to bag up her purchases, which were: 4 matching hideous green-yellow-swirled goblets, like the kind you serve iced tea in in the south. 4 matching hideous plastic plates that only sort-of matched the goblets. A plastic complicated pump-spray toy of some kind in the usual cheap-toy packaging.

Apparently she wanted each plastic goblet in its own bag so that they wouldn’t bump and scratch each other. It was fine, and the cashier understood, and I was in no hurry, but she suggested she do the rewrap herself so he could ring my purchases up. Fine.

It was then that I noticed that her red leather pocketbook, on the counter, was greasily stained and worn from many years of use. It was of a 70’s style. Her purse was also old. Mid-eighties brown leather with big faux gold loops joining the strap to the bag, which had an almost patch-work leather look to it. I never notice these things, but this woman was interesting.

The old items and new plastic purchases together, her care over the plastic, but slight personal disarray. These things told me something about her that I could relate with personally. I didn’t feel I was projecting, and still don’t. She’s stuck in a half-finished psychological house. She’s probably 42 or so, but lives in a world that was defined when she was 8, 14, and 22. No relationships have impacted her development since those times. She’s terrified, but has a few strong comforts. She’s somebody’s crazy aunt, but to me she’s a sister in a world that has brought lonely traumas early enough to disrupt full maturation of the personality.

Not that normal people are mature. But there is something I share with this 70s woman that is tragic. A quashed soul that is ever tethered to the past, a past where love was misshapen and trust destroyed such that it holds us in those long-ago moments and so rarely lets us come to the present without the elastic of poorly shaped but strong early impressions (universalizations, normalizations, trauma).

………

Other events in another post. I’m moooooooving on.

Epic dream last night. The myth is rearranging itself. I cannot remember anything but the end. I cause something to shatter and the glass disks, like contact lenses rip through the air. Two slip into the queen’s eyes and sever them. One eye, blueish, pops out onto the grass. The other is mostly severed, but hangs on by a thread. And though I’d done this intentionally, it wasn’t rathful, and I felt her pain and loss.

I approached and talked with her, and she asked me to pick up the blue eye on the ground and place it in a jar. Then we decided to pull out the green eye (her right) and also put it in the jar.

It was at this point that I realized that the characters in the internal unconscious kingdom were changing. I felt the dream for what it was, and woke up.

Ultimate hurts so good…

Getting that ‘get organized’ feeling, only now I can see the (a?) fork in the choice to motivate along these lines. I’m not getting organized to feel accomplishment, achievement, worthiness, etc.., but to lower the hurdles to future action.

There are usually flashes of “I can’t”, “I don’t want to”, etc.. Typical resistances. Today, though I still feel a little off from yesterday (sore, sick, weary, lost), I also feel potential. Its sort of like hope, but a little more concrete. I sense that where I follow the softening, warm, human impulses, I may get traction rather than excuses for defenses.

…….

About the frisbee chick that I talked with. She did say one hurtful thing that has stayed with me because it hit a sore spot; But it was odd, and I instantly knew it was a reflection of her reaction-formation to connecting with me, rather than something she said with any conviction. As we talked, another chiquita asked when I graduated highschool. “1988”. “Whoa, but you look so young! You’re really old!…..Lets see, that makes you …. 37?” “Yep…. its an advantage of being immature…you also tend to look younger than you are…”.

“Yeah, I did X and Y and Z after majoring in X and Y and Z. Then I did A, B, C… And my work now is o.k., but I really still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up…”

“You don’t have to worry about that.”

“What, because I’m never going to grow up? I don’t know about that…(mutter mutter)”.

(Blush, gather backpack). (more conversation, then everyone goes home, but blusher goes first).

I think… I think that Blusher just blurted that out sans conscious control. She finds herself attracted to me, excited to talk in a relaxed way about semi-shared experiences (highschool) but defends heavily with a set of rigid rules about what people should be like. I’d noted this earlier when discussing the academic weakness of our highschool and how she’d had to transfer out to have any more classes to take.

The ‘immature’ bit was too tempting for the inner rule-maker not to take the bait.

But I’ll admit that even knowing this at the time didn’t prevent the sting. I’d also been enjoying myself and knew that this would be ‘conversation over’ unless we could get past the rule-maker and embarrassment therein.

It stings because I am immature in some ways. And even though I’ve freely chosen a course away from the mainstream, a lot of those choices were because I felt I couldn’t possibly succeed in life within the mainstream. Too much inner rebeliousness, too claustraphobic. And though now, older, I’m almost proud of how I’ve resisted joining the herd, I secretly know that subjectively I felt insecure and not a little jealous of those who could play the conform-compete-network game so naturally and with so little inner resistance.

Those long lonely years of pre-teen and teenage angst are unresolved to some degree. And when I’m called on it, even by someone’s reaction-formation, it sometimes stings.

I can’t explain it, but I can enjoy it, nurture it, sense it. There is some shift happening within, and a day like today amplifies and concretizes some new inner base. Or maybe its just a first step in a long series of steps. I don’t have any metaphors really, because it is just raw feeling. Language is always post-facto to feeling, never encapsulating it, only pointing the way.

Played a fun few games of Ultimate this afternoon. I have the cuts and bruises to remember the day. Maybe I’ll take a picture. Kinda gross. Our field is terrible.

Got to talking with one of the female players after the game and it turns out we went to the same high school, though at different times. It was so great to just feel comfortable telling the truth about my life, my experience, and to share a connection in reminiscing about old teachers we both remember fondly.

The feeling was there all day though. Just a relaxed friendliness. An appreciation of the new players we had out today, and an enjoyment of the ad hoc team banter.

Whatever has held me asleep for years is loosening its grasp. There are moments of sunshine and aliveness now that are hard to deny, hard to forget in favor of some re-collapse of spirit and awareness in the face of anxieties and old habits.

Thats it really. I want to live before I die. I think I will. I think I’ll just go ahead and live.