Sept. 22, 2012--Part II: Crazy Drivers

I came home shaking today and holding back tears. The drivers here scare me. They're aggressive and impatient and seem to be a bit self-centered. The incident: I was driving in my neighborhood, cruising down a small neighborhood road at fives miles ABOVE the speed limit when the large black SUV behind me becomes impatient, shoots into the opposite lane of traffic, and passes me.

What was that all about? I thought to myself.  I wasn't driving that slow. After that, I'm so jarred that I have to slow down. This causes another car behind me to honk and I just become even more panicked. So I turn into a driveway just to get myself off the road and away from these people. At this point, I'm so shaken that I can't drive much anymore. I manage to make it home but then I collapse into the couch, uncontrollably shaking. I've already hated driving for years, and driving in this area just makes me all the more anxious. I call Matthew and he tries to calm my fears.

"I think I'm just anxious," I say. "Maybe I should take some medication for it."
"Sweetheart, I want you to go to a counselor," he told me.
"I don't know, Matt," I hesitate. I wasn't exactly rich and counselors weren't exactly cheap.
Matt keeps reassuring me, telling me that he also hates driving up where I live. "It's irritates me. You remember the ambulance?"

When Matt and I were driving around, we witnessed several cars continuing to drive along the road, preventing an ambulance from making a left turn. "It's an ambulance!" Matt growled in frustration. I understood his frustration; drivers around here seemed too wrapped-up in their own silly little lives to even let an ambulance through.

It's strange because I get the feeling that these people are actually nice whenever you meet them in public. It's just when they start driving that they become these impatient, aggressive road rage machines. It's scary. However, I do think part of the problem is just me, that I'm overly anxious about driving and their "assertive" attitudes don't do well for my already high levels of nervousness.

Sept. 22, 2012

Today, I realized—my parents must be manically lonely. I mean, they have been married for over two decades and they don’t talk much (unless you count fighting), and they don’t spend much quality time together (again, unless you can count fighting as quality time). I wonder what that must be like—being married to someone and ending more like resentful, detached roommates instead of spouses. It’s like Mae from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof once said, “Living with somebody you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the one you love doesn't love you.”

Now maybe my parents still love each other in a way, but passionate love or intimate love has definitely fallen to the wayside. It’s companionate love. It’s dead companionate love. It’s more like they’ve been together too long without doing anything exciting, constructive, or intimate together. It’s like everything has just gone out of it, like a balloon deflated, a light bulb burnt out. Or Woody Allen would call it a “dead shark.”

My father works night shift and spends his days alone and drinking. Sitting on the porch and drinking. Sitting in front of the computer and drinking. Watching documentaries and drinking. And my mother? Well, she escapes into religion. That’s her addiction. That’s her drug. Escaping into church and prayer and Jesus Christ. Escaping into what she calls “the only thing to ever really love her endlessly and unconditionally.” She spends her days at work and her nights with her lord and savior. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with religion. Or even drinking, but it’s when people look to that for sole companionship…it gets sad.

As for a social life, my parents don’t spend time with friends very much. They don’t have many hobbies to pursue. My dad will practice singing every once in a while (he’s actually pretty good at it), my mom will go read her prayer books and maybe do gardening. They go to work, they go to church together on Sunday, go out to eat…and then what? Back to the daily grind? Back to the crushing loneliness and the total alienation from friends, family, and meaningful social activity? And the other sad part is I don’t want to go back to them. I don’t want to come home and have to be their companion. I can be their daughter and their friend, but I’m not their life partner, nor should I BE their life partner. They chose a life partner, over two decades ago, and now they’ve become detached roommates, casual acquaintances, strangers passing in the night. These two people who are never going to divorce, highly unlikely to separate, and probably not going to fall back in love with each other…what are they going to do? I now see how a marriage takes work. I see how a couple can fall into a routine that then becomes a rut. And from a financial, cultural, and practical standpoint, I see how hard it is to go separate ways. I mean, how could they ever go to counseling? Would they be able to find someone who speaks their language? Understand their cultural values? Take the time to get to know them and the hardships they’ve been through? If they didn’t live together, how would they fare? My mom would need someone to translate for her. My dad would need emotional support, nurturing. They rely on each other financially and practically. And what would their friends say? They live in a culture where spouse separation is a big deal, and they don’t want to lose face. They don’t want people talking. Besides, they got married because that’s “what you do.” They had kids because that’s “what you do.” They stayed together because that’s WHAT YOU DO. It’s what they were raised with…and everything they’ve ever known.  And then what would they think of themselves? It’s not so easy to make it on one’s own. Would they able to survive?

In either case, I don’t think they’re going to separate, but conversely, if they stayed living together, would they ever take steps to improve anything? Would they ever renew a commitment to having a marriage and not just having a “dead shark”? What will happen?

I’m curious to see, a few years down the road, how my parents are doing, both individually and as a unit. Will their relations ever improve or will their marriage slowly corrode from the inside out, making them drift further and further apart until there’s nothing there but an empty void and the whisper of a marriage that once was…

Sept. 21, 2012--Emotional Overreactions

I was reading a book today and it said that emotional overreactions are indicative of unconscious conflicts. Now I know that it sounds very psychoanalytical, but I think they had something there. Maybe overreactions really are clues to some kind of repressed conflict or insecurity. It's hard for me to explain, but I can't shake the feeling that they're at least partly right about this. So, I'm going to carefully monitor my overreactions from now on and see what they tell me. Maybe exploring why these reactions are not in proportion with the triggering event will give me a glimpse into what really bothers and I can start to figure out why.

October 3, 2012--Part II

On Learned Helplessness

I was reading something in my textbook yesterday and it said that some people have "learned helplessness." This is a concept in which people have tried many different approaches to solve a problem, but it doesn't work, so they "learn" to be helpless. They sort of give up. Then I started to wonder if I had "learned helplessness" and if this related to the fact that I was easily discouraged. Could it be connected? Could it be that in my past, I've encountered so many failures (real or perceived) that has caused me to acquire learned helplessness? I don't succeed on something, and I think that it's better not to try at all--driving, washing dishes, making something out of myself. I'm already a highly anxious person and with the added perception and rumination on all of my failures, I learned to give up, to not try, to not hope. Could helplessness be connected to hopelessness? I wonder. This will be a facet of my personality I will explore more in-depth as the year goes by.

Be back with periodical updates and insights. 

Sept. 20, 2012

Today, I was at my internship when a fellow intern came in to talk to me. She wanted to vent about her trouble trying to graduate. Apparently, something was amiss with her schedule and she had to end up taking one more class in order to get her degree. The problem was she already had so much work to do this semester that she either had to cram the extra class into her already busy schedule or she had to take another semester of school. She was angry and conflicted and confused. "I really, really wanted to graduate in December," she told me. "And I told everyone, my friends and family, that I was graduating in December. Now if I tell them I'm graduating in May, they're going to ask, 'Why? What happened? What did you do?' But I have so much work to do and I don't know if I'm want to take on another class this semester." 

"I'm going to tell you three things," I told her. "First of all, life is going to throw you curveballs and sometimes, it's better to take them. You can't always mold life to you. Sometimes, you're going to have to mold to life. Second, take this as an opportunity. You already have so much to do this semester. One more semester isn't going to kill you, and graduation in May is lot better because more people will come out."

"True," she told me.

"Thirdly, you ever seen a horse race? In real life or on tv?"

She nodded. 

"You know how they put blinders on the horse so they can't see their competition? That way, they just run their race. Don't worry about what other people are going to say. Just run your race." ***

 Josephine nodded. "You're good," she told me.

"I hope so," I added. "I'm going to have to be someday."

 We ended having lunch together and working together the rest of the day. It was nice. 

When I was walking home from my internship, I passed by a restaurant that had one of those dry-erase boards where they wrote out their specials of the day. The board was propped up on the sidewalk and I did a double-take as I walked by. The board was advertising: "Flan with a shot of espresso." Interesting, I thought to myself. I should try that. Then I remembered that I hate both flan and espresso. Why would I want to try a combination of the two? Still, I thought about it the rest of the day and regretted not trying it. I'll try it next time, I promised myself. It was probably going to be one of those things where I think it's a great idea at first until I put the flan with espresso into my mouth and realized that it wasn't a great idea at all. We'll see. 

***The comment about the blinders and the horse race is not an original idea of mine. It came from the movie "Head of State". Just so you know. :)

Sept. 19, 2012

We did a diversity training exercise in class today. The basic premise was to have the class stand shoulder to shoulder in a straight line. Then the teacher would read a bunch of statements and we would take one step forward or backward, depending on whether the statement applied to us. For example, "If you come from a middle or upper-class family, take one step forward. If you come from a working class family, take one step back." The statements referred to privileged or oppressed statuses in American society and at the end of the exercise, my fellow students and I could see where we stand in relation to oppressed or privileged statuses.

When we were done with the exercise, I was the one standing at the back, with most of my classmates standing three or four steps ahead of me, indicating that I was the most disadvantaged and oppressed out of everyone in my class. At first, my teacher thought that I would feel bad about ending up at the back, but when she asked me to share my thoughts and feelings, I said,

"Actually, I felt proud of myself. I felt proud that I had conquered all these disadvantages and oppressions to come all the way here to grad school."
"So you felt empowered." she said.
"Yes," I replied. "BUT..."
"But...?"
"But as we talked about it in class, I realized an insidious truth." [pause for dramatic effect] "I realized that people like me are used to justify a meritocracy. The American Dream. The American Dream isn't real. The American Dream is an American myth. Everyone thinks that this is the land of opportunity, but it isn't. Justin over there mentioned, 'If there are so many disadvantaged groups, then what about Oprah Winfrey? Or Barack Obama?', but the thing is, for every Oprah Winfrey, there are a million more black women who ARE discriminated against. And I wasn't without discrimination. I faced sexism and racism on my way here. That's when I realized: people like me are used to justify a meritocracy."

I don't know why, but I started to shake halfway through that speech. I felt like I should have been on a pulpit saying that, pronouncing all these harsh realities that the privileged group are so willing to ignore, dismiss, or even endorse. After that, I shut up for the rest of the class. I withdrew into myself and thought about why I reacted the way I did. I suppose I had a lot more invested into my views than I realized.

I don't know. I'll explore it more later as I go along.

Sept. 18, 2012

We were talking about defense mechanisms in class today and I suddenly realized something:  I’ve internalized my parents’ sense of my inferiority. For a significant amount of my life, I had to put up with my parents calling me “stupid as a cow”. I’ve had to put up with my mother telling me that I wasn’t "girly" enough. I had to put up with my mother and my brother’s jabs about my chubby stomach. I had to put up with my parents’ disappointment that I did not “make something of myself” after college. I realized that all those years of feeding myself negativity and of swallowing my family’s acid, I’ve internalized their view that I am inferior. 

This has powerful implications for who I am now. As a self-aware adult, I am better able to think about others' opinions of me and whether or not I incorporate that into my own self-image. However, when I was a child and an adolescent, I was much more sensitive to the opinions of those I deemed important and hence, my identity is more subject to being molded by their views. This may explain some of my low self-esteem and neuroses. I am also not a particularly resilient person and I’m very easily discouraged. This translates into being someone who takes criticism too personally and too much to heart. I generalize my flaws to all aspects of my life and all aspects of myself, thus influencing my mood, self-perception, and how I attribute my successes and failures. As my own worst critic, I tend to attribute my successes to being a fluke. Conversely, I attribute failures to some inherent, deficient part of my personality and I tend to see these defective parts of myself as enduring, global, and unchanging. Lastly, I tend to minimize my successes while magnifying my faults. Now, I know that all this does not just come from living with negative parents and, but I suspect that some part of it may be attributed to them, possibly even a significant part. As Judi Hollis wrote once: “Fat is a Family Affair.”

I know that these thinking patterns are not very adaptive and that’s why I want to correct them. Now that I'm away from my fault-finding family, maybe I can rebuild my self-esteem and become someone new. Reinvent myself, in other words. Maybe I can learn to stop feeding myself negativity as well. It’s like my teacher said, “If you don’t want to be friends with someone who says nasty things to you, then why do it to yourself?”