bewilderation and confusement
Friday 2 March 2007 | I like a cookie
So yesterday was the first of March. So I should feel better, right? So, apparently not. [Illustrated with murky portraits, taken capriciously by my cellphone, from and often of the inside of my handbag.]
It started out okay. I woke early, at Pyewacket’s insistence (6 am) and had tea (Tazo Passion with honey) during lightbox time. Then made a flyer for the Brujo’s upcoming show, and tweaked the twenty pages of my professional site until every single one validates (since this site never will, thanks to the minute but plentiful weirdnesses generated extravagantly by the Wordpress user interface).
By this time it’s around 11 am, and I should have stood up, stretched, taken a shower and done some work on the Dying Book before group at 4 pm. Mandarin even called, helpfully, initiating our now-daily and intensely helpful writing check-in. She’s ABD and I’m broke, and we both need to finish our projects around April 15—and both have similar tendencies to do Everything But, cleaning the bathroom floor with tiny pieces of loo roll and preparing endless absolutely necessary sustaining snacks and suddenly deciding we just have to Google this guy we knew in 1987, etc. She called, we went briefly over her résumé and got our respective balls rolling; she promised to call back in an hour so we could check in again—which probably sounds like excessive hand-holding but you know what? on a good day it really works—and then, and then, and then I don’t know what happened. I bonked. I sat for forty minutes staring into middle distance and then, I can’t explain it, I called the group leader and told her I wouldn’t be there (”it’s nothing to do with you guys, you’re all great, it’s just for some reason I’ve regressed to being a Stage II client, I feel like crap and my car’s still wonky and I’m just not coming”) and then I. Went to bed. Just went to bed. Turned down the answering machine so I couldn’t hear incoming calls from the curious, the mystified, the disappointed; and went to bed. Took my journal and pens with me, hoping for some kind of redeeming activity, and promptly fell asleep.
I woke well after six, when the Brujo let himself into the house. Py, who’d been sleeping happily on my feet, merrtled and leapt up and hid (a man entering the house is scary enough when all the lights are on, but when you can’t see him—). He flopped down on the bed next to me in the dark. Yesterday, I told him plaintively, I was fine. I’d helped with some office organizing for a fellow group member; we’d listened to hysterical baroque and classical violining and kept pace, filing madly; broke for a lunch of salad greens with parmesan and apple slices, chatted amiably throughout about the ten thousand things; he showed me pictures of his recent yachting excursion in the British Virgin Islands and made quips about the music (”You know, nothing says ‘let them eat cake’ quite like a bassoon duet”). And I’d felt fine. So why today? What had gone wrong? Why did I totally and completely bonk?
I was upright and dressed and we were in the car on the way to Trader Joe’s for a frozen pizza before I started unpacking some of the tangled stuff I’m feeling around Mandarin. About how I used to be able to finish her sentences (potentially an annoying habit anyway) and now I can’t, not without being gently redirected. About the involuntary polarization that then takes place—the more warm, sweet, open, joyous, uncorrected and expansive she is, the more sharp, contracted, terse, bitter, brittle, snappish, rigidly practical and literal I become. And because that’s my own shadow, that sharp-tongued dark heart, that version of my exasperated, overwhelmed and more or less completely unconscious angry young mother, I hate myself when I’m like that. She makes some small soft reference to the fact that she’s had An Experience, and there’s a sound inside me like snap, and then I fly up into the corner and perch there screeching and cackling, the personification of Jacob Boehme’s winter, harpy/shrew/crone. The word “bitchy” nails it to the wall inside me, and I feel ill and ashamed even before I hang up the phone. And thusly sickened and disgruntled by my own actions and underlying feelings, I don’t know what else to do, so I revert to familiar behaviors and climb underneath the duvet.
Thank God the Brujo spent even more years wallowing in Jung than I have, because all I have to say is “polarization” and he immediately gets it. I also throw in that I have Chiron transiting through something or another for the next year, and am therefore advised to work through my moldy old parental stuff so it doesn’t get expressed distortedly in other relationships. Since historically my inner work near Mandarin has been almost entirely about seeing and releasing warped mother-hangups, this makes sense. By now we’re at the Brujo’s eating quattro formaggio with goat cheese and red pepper and walnut salad. We stand companionably over the trash can together finishing off crumbly vanilla cupcakes (”they’re almost like Morsas!”—a deadly Bimbo junk-food thing to which I became addicted during Baja), listening to Jimmy Smith’s impossibly laid-back twelve-bar funk. I feel better enough to send Mandarin an apologetic text message before we fall asleep.
So now what. It’s Friday and I’m going to run errands using the Brujo’s car while he naps—picking up meds from the Cool Psychiatrist, depositing a check, filling my Allegra prescription (because it’s spring, people, so I wake up sneezing), getting wormer for the cat, and buying some brocade scraps while they’re still on sale (occult purpose of which to be divulged at a later date). Exciting stuff that should give me a chance to think and muse on all this some more. My typical approach would be, make it conscious and then hope it goes away of its own accord. But a behavioral angle? I don’t know what that would look like. Maybe I should actually call the DBT for coaching. Or practice emotion-opposite action until I feel less shrewish or until my head falls off, whichever comes first.
When Mandarin had her Experience last April, she dazedly or limpidly reported: And I was crossing the street and it occurred to me, this could be the thing that undoes our friendship; but I wasn’t upset by the thought. I however was sufficiently rattled to have long conversations with the DBT and the Brujo, both of whom reminded me that my friendship with her wasn’t based on mutual suffering, and that it would certainly withstand happiness. Because, I wanted to say to her at the time, why would your joy ruin our friendship? Unless she was implying that I begrudged her that joy? Or unless what she really meant was, My or your belief that I’ve experienced a thing you haven’t but need to, or should, or will, or can’t possibly understand, could be the thing that undoes our friendship—? In which case I would agree. But probably she would say she hadn’t meant anything; that it was just another thought that bubbled up, surfaced and then liberated itself, being as insubstantial as all the rest of this wild and precious life.
Or, it may be that my blogging about my confusion and occasional acute pain over all this will undo our friendship. But Mandarin 2.0, as I call her teasingly, doesn’t often take serious offense; because how can she, when no thoughts are real. And I’m grateful she’s now more easily and fluidly spared that suffering which many of the rest of us must laboriously unsnarl and set to peace. I can trust her more than some Mandarins of the past, not to take my process personally. Now to see if I can take it less personally myself.
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