One of the most frustrating things about having a background in psychology and a fairly in-depth knowledge of my own behavior and why I act the way I do is that it doesn’t make it any easier for me to actually do anything about it. In fact, it makes it harder sometimes because then I will berate myself on top of not doing what I need to do. I can sit there with my (last) therapist and say, “I procrastinate on doing what I need to do because I dread the negative consequences if I mess it up.” I make a lot of sense when I talk about my issues, and before my last therapist, I was able to snow the three or four therapists I had before her.At the end of the last post, I mentioned that it was hard to fix my bad behavior, even if I knew what I was doing wrong.
This is not a humblebrag, by the way–me saying that I could run rings around most of my therapists/counselors. It’s a flat-out brag. Or rather, it’s the truth. I am really fucking smart, especially when it comes to people and motivations. Including my own. I’m a bit of a Cassandra in that I know what is going to happen before it happens, but people don’t want to/can’t hear me. Then, I have to watch the shit happen as I predicted without hollering, “I fucknig told you so!” afterwards.
My mother on the other hand, not only doesn’t know her own issues, she denies she has any. That’s not completely fair. She knows some of her issues such as that she’s anxious about everything, but she has an excuse/reason for it all. She justifies her anxiety, even when I point out that it won’t help anything to be anxiaus about her situation. It’s not as if I don’t have compassion. I have anxiety as well, and I have a hell of a time keeping it under control. Well, I used to before my medical crisis. It’s not as bad now, but it’s slowly creeping up again.
The difference, though, is that I try to mitigate my anxiety whereas my mother does not. She displaces it by dumping it on my brother and me–repeatedly. Ironically for a therapist, she has every excuse not to see a therapist herself. The only time she did was when she had to for her practicum. She still talks to that woman as her mentor (my mother’s mentor), but they no longer do therapist/client sessions. As far as I know. I have mentioned to my mother more than once that she should see a therapist. This was usually at the point where I was about to snap because I could not take it any longer.
Today, I’d like to talk about sleep and summer, two things I really dislike. Or rather, one I hate with the heat of a thousand suns (the latter, which is ironic, don’t you think?), and one that hates me (the former). Let’s start with sleep with a quick primer on my sleep background. I never went to bed before midnight, not even a tiny person. I tricked my parents by stuffing the crack under the door with a towel/t-shirt, then reading for hours. In college, I had a 7:45 a.m. class, and I could never fall asleep before 3 or 4 in the morning. Needless to say. I wasn’t at my best for that semester. My favorite story is how I was looking for my alarm clock one morning (small, purple traveling alarm clock), but it wasn’t where I kept it. I looked everywhere, but couldn’t find it. I shrugged and opened my mini-fridge to grab my morning Diet Pepsi and guess what was in it? You got it, the alarm clock. I put it on the sink across the room from my bed, which kept me from putting it in the fridge again. Any time I would go home from college for a vacation or break, I would sleep fifteen hours the first day I was home and get sick.