Q&A: Willpower

The sixtieth question for the Q&A section of this blog is: “With whom is your willpower weakest?”

I think the answer to this depends on what I’m trying to use the willpower to fight. For a lot of things, it’s certainly my boyfriend, but when I’m with Mike it would also be him, as we are very bad influences on one another…and, of course, my son can crush my willpower quite often as well, when he wants to.  It’s strange, because that makes it sound like I have pretty much no willpower, when I actually can have fairly good willpower…I guess I’m just well swayed by the people I am closest to in my life, which are definitely those three.  Lately, though, I think I would have to say it’s probably weakest with my boyfriend, as I don’t think I have ever turned down anything with him yet, no matter how much I knew I should.  …That sounds a lot worse than it is, but usually what he breaks my willpower on most is food. I know I shouldn’t eat all of everything, and definitely not a whole bunch of sweets, but there I am doing it anyway, because he either gives me those things or encourages me to eat them on my own,  giving me surprisingly valid excuses to do so.  And I think that’s all there is to say about that!

Check out Mike’s answer at http://emptystress.wordpress.com, and please feel free to post your own in the comments! 

(Next question: “What are the best and worst letters you have ever received in the mail?”)

Q&A: Recurrent

The fifty-ninth question for the Q&A section of this blog is: “What is the recurring dream that you most enjoy?”

This is a hard question for me to answer, because the only recurring dreams I can actually remember having were all when I was younger, and they were all fairly terrible.  Every single one of them involved death to some degree (murder or suicide, but never natural death), most of them involved some sort of trickery/deception, and they were always very dark and filled with imagery that would be the stuff of nightmares for most people.  For me, those dreams were a regular occurrence, so I never really felt very affected by them, but I know that most people having the same dreams would have been terrified of them.  So…I’m not sure I could really say I enjoyed any of my recurring dreams; I didn’t mind them very much, but I don’t think there were any I particularly liked…so I don’t think I really have an answer to this question, since there’s no point getting into the bad ones, as they don’t actually answer the question as it was presented.  Guess I’ll just leave it at that, then!

Check out Mike’s answer at http://emptystress.wordpress.com, and please feel free to post your own in the comments! 

(Next question: “With whom is your willpower weakest?”)

Q&A: Cruelty

The fifty-eighth question for the Q&A section of this blog is: “What is the cruelest thing a person has ever said to you?”

I spent a lot of time thinking about the answer to this, because I’ve had more than one abusive relationship, and figured the cruelest thing ever said to me must have been from one of those people…but when I really think about it, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.  They said some horrible things, and many of their comments were certainly intentionally cruel, but none hurt half as much as the comments my mother made to (and about) me a few years ago, when I had my son.  The absolute cruelest things she said were not actually said out loud, they were in writing in a notebook that I was not supposed to find (and only did by accident, while looking for somewhere to write notes on apartments I was viewing), so I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count…but the cruelest thing she said out loud to me was very much along the same lines.

In the notebook, she wrote that she worried for my (at the time unborn) son’s future, because I was “too selfish and self-absorbed” to raise a child properly, and she didn’t want him to have to go through what “everyone else has to go through” to be close to me.  She wrote more than that, but I can’t remember it all at the moment, and when I confronted her about what she wrote, she ripped the pages from the notebook…but yeah, it was mostly just about how horrible I would be as a mother, and how miserable my child’s life would be because I was just such an unbearable person to be around due to the fact that I cared about no one but myself, and I would surely be the worst possible thing for him.  The comments she made were ironic for so many reasons, and also based entirely on nothing, since she knew next to nothing about me at that point, which she admitted years later when she finally did spend enough time with me to get to know how I thought, felt and treated people in my life…but they were still very hurtful.

As I said, though, those things weren’t really said to me, they were written about me, just not denied when I confronted her on them…so with respect to what she said to me, the cruelest thing was probably a few months after my son’s birth, when she told me I was “just like my father”.  Now, my father and I have a relatively close relationship, but I am well aware that it is a screwed up one, and there has been no point in my life when I wasn’t fully aware of my mother’s view of my father, so when she said that, I knew exactly what she meant by it.  At the time, my son was not eating due to a breastfeeding issue we encountered (which I think I have mentioned in this blog before), and the situation was getting pretty bad, so I was basically completely distraught.  I cried all the time, felt like a complete failure because I couldn’t even feed my child, and started to consider that he might be better off with someone else, who could care for him better.  His father and I briefly discussed putting him up for adoption, so he might have a chance at a better life, but when my mother found out, she flipped.

“You’re just like you’re father,” she said. “Selfish, cruel, heartless, and unwilling to take responsibility for yourself or anything else in your life.”  I know she said more, but I can’t remember it all now…suffice it to say it was not a short conversation. She felt that my considering adoption was my attempt to get out of having to take on the responsibility of raising a child, and that I was more willing to ‘ruin’ his life by giving him up (ironic given that she’d previously written about how much *I* was going to ruin his life), because I was just oh so selfish, than have to “work hard at anything”.  You know, because I didn’t have a job since I was 10 years old, move out as soon as I graduated, go to college for two years, live in apartments for six years paying all of my bills on time without ever asking for any help from her, dad or anyone else, pay off all my student loans in two years (again, by myself), rendering myself debt free by the time I had my son, and so on, right?  Obviously, I’m just the biggest slacking mooch ever. And as I’ve said, I know what her views on my father are; if she thinks I’m just like him, she basically thinks I’m the lowest type of person you could ever hope to encounter.  So, yeah, that felt pretty cruel to me, especially since as I said, at the time she actually knew next to nothing about me.

She has apologized for saying those things since, and as I said, admitted that she never even knew me until this past year (and even then, I wouldn’t say she knows me well by any stretch of the imagination) and said that I am a good mother, yet every so often, she will still insert a little comment that makes me feel like I am going to screw him up worse than anyone else ever could.  Which, again, is ever so ironic.

So, there you have it!  This came off a lot more bitter than I intended it to, but the wound is actually relatively fresh yet again, for reasons I won’t get into here…so that’s why.  Happier topics next time! Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Check out Mike’s answer at http://emptystress.wordpress.com, and please feel free to post your own in the comments! 

(Next question: “What is the recurring dream that you most enjoy?”)

Q&A: Hard Love

The fifty-seventh question for the Q&A section of this blog is: “What is the hardest thing about love?”

This question is very well timed, as this is something I’ve had to deal with a lot lately.  See, I’ve been in many relationships in my life, but as much as I’ve been through and as much as I’ve thought I loved people before, I never actually had to face how hard love really is until now…because I guess I never actually felt it.  I mean, I loved the people I was with before, to some degree, but considering how significantly different I feel in my current relationship, and how much it has already changed for me, I have to think that there’s probably a pretty good chance that I was never in love before.  Or maybe it’s just that this is the first healthy relationship I’ve had in a long time, if it can be argued that I ever had one before it at all, so I’ve had to approach it completely differently than I did my previous unhealthy relationships.

Either way, as I said, lately I’ve had to face the fact that real love is not easy, but not in the ways I had thought before.  In the past, I let a lot of bad things happen in my relationships, because I completely misunderstood what people meant when they said that love and relationships weren’t easy, and that good ones took work.  I took that to mean that they required sacrifice, which is true, but not in the ways that I was sacrificing myself in the past…and that because a good relationship is worth fighting for, that that excused any amount of actual fighting that went on, because obviously we wouldn’t fight if we didn’t care about each other, right?  Yeah.  I was very naive, for a very long time, and things got pretty bad because of it. I let things get way out of hand, and stayed in situations I logically knew better than to stay in, because I thought that I must love these people if I was willing to give up so much of myself for them.  What I failed to realize was that if the relationships had actually been healthy, I wouldn’t have had to give up myself.

Anyway, what is the hardest thing about love?  Being vulnerable.  That’s not something I’m used to.  In the past, I never really felt vulnerable in any other sense than that I knew that the possibility existed that the people I loved (whether my partner, friends or family) could die (which was and is something that worries me a lot more than it probably should on a daily basis); otherwise, while I knew that my partner could leave me at any time, I never really thought that they would.  See, in my previous relationships, no matter  how dramatic or horrible they got, I felt a certain sense of security in them, because I knew those partners needed me (for one reason or another), so even if we weren’t happy, it was less likely for them to leave unexpectedly.  I also never really gave my whole heart to those relationships, both because they were never really my ‘idea’ (that is, I was not the pursuer, and in most cases I actually wasn’t even all that interested in the person in the beginning, I just gave it a shot because I knew it was what they wanted and I felt guilty) and because I was never really all that happy in them, so I didn’t ever worry about how much the loss of them would effect me until it was happening…at which point the upset I felt was more because of how much I had invested into the relationship (time, money, energy, etc.) and how much I hated that I felt that much further from finding someone to spend my life with, than it was because I was actually sad to lose the person.

Ultimately, I knew none of them were “the one” for me, as much as I wanted them to be so I could stop starting over in relationships all the time, so I guess I just never gave as much of myself emotionally as I could have had I actually been in love with any of them…though of course I didn’t know that that was the case until I met someone I actually did fall in love with, and could see the difference.  And the main difference, of course, is how vulnerable I have felt since being with him.  It’s been almost crippling, at times, to be honest…and without the amazing support provided to me by both my lovely boyfriend himself and the best friend anyone could ever ask for (Mike), I would have run away from this relationship long ago.  And that would be the single worst thing I could ever do to myself.

See, I’ve been through several abusive relationships, on top of a childhood that was largely good but also extremely screwed up in some ways (and, as I’ve learned, was perhaps even more screwed up than I consciously remember), so as a result, I have developed a lot of fear.  Fear of being cheated on, fear of being abandoned, fear of being left for someone better, fear of being abused again, fear of being taken advantage of, fear of taking advantage of others, fear of being abusive, fear of not being good enough, fear of annoying people, fear of being too damaged, fear of disappointing my partner, fear of confrontation, etc., etc., etc…I could go on for days with the things I fear.  The thing is, I didn’t realize how afraid I actually was until I was given someone to love who treats me wonderfully, because the fear of losing him is by far the single greatest fear I have ever had in my life, and has stirred up all those other fears so much that it’s been almost suffocating at times.  And yes, I have tried to run, and I am not at all proud of that, but at the time I didn’t know what else to do, and I thought it would be for the best for him if I left. Luckily, as I mentioned, my incredible boyfriend and best friend both stepped up and helped me see how much I was self-sabotaging, and have helped me find methods to deal with that, so I can move through the process of healing myself enough that I won’t be so scared and feel so vulnerable all the time.

Because, y’know, I really have never felt this vulnerable in my life.  This is the first relationship I’ve ever been in where I feel like I’m the one who loves more, and who is most definitely the pursuer and the one more invested in the relationship, and that is absolutely terrifying.  I am so afraid of screwing this up that even the slightest idea that he could be annoyed with or mad at me fills me with anxiety, and it’s only now that I have realized just how non-confrontational I really am.  I hate fighting, I hate drama; I just want everything to be happy and loving all the time…and I know that’s not possible, and I can accept that, I just really don’t want to do anything to make him leave me, and I’m so very aware, in this relationship, of how real a possibility it is that he will.  Why?  Because he doesn’t need me, he wants me.  There is nothing I can do for him that he can’t do for himself, and it’s very hard for me to accept that, because that means he’s only with me because he wants to be, because I make him happy, and…that’s not something I have ever experienced before.  I don’t know how to be with someone that actually wants me, and respects and loves me for who I am.  It’s 100% foreign.

So it’s a hard process, training myself out of past thought patterns and into better, healthier ones, and I know I’m going to feel very vulnerable and very afraid for a long time, but I also know he loves me, and I know he’ll always be there for me, so…I can do it.  It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it is also absolutely the most rewarding, amazing experience of my life, and I have yet to spend a single moment with him in which I wasn’t completely aware of how much I love him.  He is the most incredible person I have ever met, and I can’t imagine ever going through, with him, the things I went through with others.  Hell, we haven’t even been mad at each other yet, because we talk everything out so well. I can only hope to be lucky enough to make that last.  He is so worth it, and I am so grateful to finally be in a healthy, happy relationship.  It is more amazing than I even imagined it would be.

Sorry for the incredibly long answer!

Check out Mike’s answer at http://emptystress.wordpress.com, and please feel free to post your own in the comments! 

(Next question: “What is the cruellest thing a person has ever said to you?”)