Tuesday, March 20
Moments after I got onto Griff for disobeying me, I heard him mumbling in his room, "I hate me, I hate me, I hate me." We never have to discipline him harshly. He'll take care of that himself. But the self-loathing drives me crazy.Mainly, I suspect, because I know he gets it from me. I do the same thing.
He and I just had a discussion about how he has to learn to let things go, about how it's okay to make a mistake and about how we just need to learn from our mistakes and keep going. I really do give quite a lovely speech. I just can't seem to take it to heart myself.
I've got a double standard.
I can't let anything go. I could name wrongs I've committed against pretty much everyone I know... literally, things that keep me up at night sometimes. Things that I'm fairly sure few of them recall.
When I was a teenager, I was once grounded from using the telephone (as every child of the 1980s was, I'm sure), but I used the phone anyway when my folks were away (in the stone ages before cells). I vividly remember one night at dinner when, after my little brother ratted me out, my father asked me point blank if I was using the phone.
And I looked at that little face (he's seven years younger than I am, so he was probably the age Griff is now), and I lied. I hung the poor kid out to dry. Now, I have no idea if he remembers that or not, but if he came to me and said he just couldn't get past it, I would think he had a good arguement.
See. I'm a little nuts. If something goes wrong somewhere, I'm pretty sure it's my fault. Mike says I could find a way to make global warming my fault (I use aerosol hair spray), I would. If the computer breaks while Mike's using it, he assumes something is wrong with the computer. If it breaks while I'm using it, I assume I broke it.
That's probably one reason I'm feeling such stress at work. I fail to give myself credit for starting a job in a completely new and different - very analytical - field after 15 years in a more creative environment. I went from doing something I was really good at (now Linda & Aleece are free to disagree with my own assessment of my writing as they worked with it on a daily basis for years) to something very foreign to me.
So instead of telling myself that I'll get it in time (which is what my co-workers are telling me and what I, in fact, am telling the new group of people coming into this job - see? double standard), I tell myself that I'm not smart enough to get it or something similar.
I wrote a few days ago about something I am struggling with, and I haven't been able to decide if I want to post about it here or not. But I've always tried to be very transparent about myself here, and not talking about it seems like hiding. Plus, this is so at the forefront of my thinking lately that I'm pretty sure I either need to write about it or quit writing for a time. And that seems like quitting.
And quitting just feeds into this vicious circle of personal dislike.
So ... here goes.
Well, it'll go here soon. I'm going to go take a Chel's a Chicken break to do some laundry and figure out what to say.
[ posted by Chel on Tuesday, March 20, 2007 ]
[ 1 comments ]
1 Comments:
I am just reading this. ((hugs)), Chel. I'm glad you were able to figure out what to say. I know it's good for you. I think you and I are a lot alike, so I can completely understand a lot of the things you struggle with, as I do, too.
