Previously: So my challenge personally seems to be about what I can do to stay in the moment when lightning hits the fault line. How will I slow down, find a virtue in being deliberate, and not confuse it with procrastination?...Go back and read the parasympathetic benefits thread again.
It's the wrong question, I realize, as I edge to the edge of the dark, as my climbing partners dole out the climbing rope. I'm nowhere near the edge, so this feels a bit like the Monty Python skit about climbing the North Face of Uxbridge Road. But you start where you are.
View attachment 15292
In today's adventure, I started innocuously from a chat room exchange about affirmations and a comment about my frustration with selfish sentimentalists confusing yearning with love. (For the record, no one other than myself is responsible for what I do with what's said/written to me. Even if I'm reacting badly. In fact, especially then. Just sayin'.)
Went for some dialectical therapy. Chewed my knuckles waiting for work to come back from review.
Too much time on my schedule is never a good thing. My brain starts to chew on itself. I've spent all week identifying and pushing away the offerings of the Hanging Judge. That effort qualifies as meditation, according to the coach of my Mindfulness class. It doesn't feel like the soothing experience I hear people ascribe to meditation. It's more like wrestling Jacob's angel.
Perhaps my form of meditation is actually the all-absorbing active contemplation during voice coaching. There is no other place to be than present when my coach is whooping at me like a manic crane to force me into the octave I claim I can't reach.
It turns out I am wrong about that, too.
Going down Uxbridge Road, going down the rope, going down the scale, I find that my depression is not just a fault line, it's a coping strategy, just like scaling up anxiety to arrive at panic as a control strategy. Underneath depression lies anger, beneath anger lies fear, and beneath fear lies hatred. My depression is a protective cover for my self-loathing, and I had no idea that relationship even existed. It's a depth I didn't believe existed.
Deathcake is a truffle compared to this.
As I write, I notice that I am not only thinking about how I feel, but I'm feeling how I feel about these thoughts. They feel sound. My boots are pressed firmly against the face as I descend. The rope holds. Above me I can hear the climbing team.
Asperger's. Aspergic. Acerbic. I can't find the page where I remember a definition and its suggested synonyms: bitter, angry, harsh, malevolent. It's making me crazy, not finding the page. I have been through the web history for the last seven days and I cannot find it. I found asperges, the flicking of holy water as a blessing.
I slide a bit suddenly down the slope. Wasn't expecting black ice on the way down. Memories flit in and out. I remember Anne, who remarked that my comments are like a dash of cold water that killed a comfortably self-congratulatory discussion by the Church Ladies in our regular bible study. Listening to them was like having to bathe in honey. Asperges, indeed; we stayed on track after that.
There's a Chinese proverb that medicine tastes bitter, but has sweet effects. And there's a Biblical Proverb that observes that a liar's words taste sweet going down, and has bitter effects.
Nadador, or gonz, or somebody remarked on snappishness to NTs. If that was about me, it's not the NTs per se, it's their bloody smug self-satisfied judgments, their selfishness, the ease with which they assume the fix is in. I sincerely doubt that's a function of NT-ness.I think that's entitlement.
But does pointing out their presuppositions make me "malevolent?" I don't think I meet that standard. So--I notice the H. Judge at work, but so far she's not doing anything unreasonable.
I look up the rope, and notice how like a hanging this could be, if I'm not careful.
I need my friends on the line. But how am I going to keep them?
I can be myself in a place like this, and people detect my self-hatred in three months. I need my self-loathing banished or transformed. How does that even happen?
Maybe it starts with a shorter crawl through a smaller space. I brace my boots and start, slowly, back up the rope. My hands burn and freeze as I scale the dark, backing up to Uxbridge Road.
It's the wrong question, I realize, as I edge to the edge of the dark, as my climbing partners dole out the climbing rope. I'm nowhere near the edge, so this feels a bit like the Monty Python skit about climbing the North Face of Uxbridge Road. But you start where you are.
View attachment 15292
In today's adventure, I started innocuously from a chat room exchange about affirmations and a comment about my frustration with selfish sentimentalists confusing yearning with love. (For the record, no one other than myself is responsible for what I do with what's said/written to me. Even if I'm reacting badly. In fact, especially then. Just sayin'.)
Went for some dialectical therapy. Chewed my knuckles waiting for work to come back from review.
Too much time on my schedule is never a good thing. My brain starts to chew on itself. I've spent all week identifying and pushing away the offerings of the Hanging Judge. That effort qualifies as meditation, according to the coach of my Mindfulness class. It doesn't feel like the soothing experience I hear people ascribe to meditation. It's more like wrestling Jacob's angel.
Perhaps my form of meditation is actually the all-absorbing active contemplation during voice coaching. There is no other place to be than present when my coach is whooping at me like a manic crane to force me into the octave I claim I can't reach.
It turns out I am wrong about that, too.
Going down Uxbridge Road, going down the rope, going down the scale, I find that my depression is not just a fault line, it's a coping strategy, just like scaling up anxiety to arrive at panic as a control strategy. Underneath depression lies anger, beneath anger lies fear, and beneath fear lies hatred. My depression is a protective cover for my self-loathing, and I had no idea that relationship even existed. It's a depth I didn't believe existed.
Deathcake is a truffle compared to this.
As I write, I notice that I am not only thinking about how I feel, but I'm feeling how I feel about these thoughts. They feel sound. My boots are pressed firmly against the face as I descend. The rope holds. Above me I can hear the climbing team.
Asperger's. Aspergic. Acerbic. I can't find the page where I remember a definition and its suggested synonyms: bitter, angry, harsh, malevolent. It's making me crazy, not finding the page. I have been through the web history for the last seven days and I cannot find it. I found asperges, the flicking of holy water as a blessing.
I slide a bit suddenly down the slope. Wasn't expecting black ice on the way down. Memories flit in and out. I remember Anne, who remarked that my comments are like a dash of cold water that killed a comfortably self-congratulatory discussion by the Church Ladies in our regular bible study. Listening to them was like having to bathe in honey. Asperges, indeed; we stayed on track after that.
There's a Chinese proverb that medicine tastes bitter, but has sweet effects. And there's a Biblical Proverb that observes that a liar's words taste sweet going down, and has bitter effects.
Nadador, or gonz, or somebody remarked on snappishness to NTs. If that was about me, it's not the NTs per se, it's their bloody smug self-satisfied judgments, their selfishness, the ease with which they assume the fix is in. I sincerely doubt that's a function of NT-ness.I think that's entitlement.
But does pointing out their presuppositions make me "malevolent?" I don't think I meet that standard. So--I notice the H. Judge at work, but so far she's not doing anything unreasonable.
I look up the rope, and notice how like a hanging this could be, if I'm not careful.
I need my friends on the line. But how am I going to keep them?
I can be myself in a place like this, and people detect my self-hatred in three months. I need my self-loathing banished or transformed. How does that even happen?
Maybe it starts with a shorter crawl through a smaller space. I brace my boots and start, slowly, back up the rope. My hands burn and freeze as I scale the dark, backing up to Uxbridge Road.
