I do envy Suzee. I know her circumstances aren’t perfect, but to be able to achieve the sort of integrated long term happiness she talks about seems to me to be wonderfully fortunate. My options seem to be either a dull, mustn’t-grumble resignation or fluctuation between mildly manic highs and mildly depressive lows, occasionally subsiding into seriously depressive lows. I say ‘options’, but that implies that I have some choice in the matter, which, if that is the case, I have no idea how to exercise it.
When I was bubbling over about being flirtatious last week, I guess I knew at the back of my mind that it was all too good to last. When we had a meeting on Tuesday, I felt awkward to start with, and things just went from bad to worse. Probably I had just built something up in my head that didn’t really exist outside of my imagination, I don’t know. But I got more and more despondent as the evening wore on. I could feel myself sliding into a fit of sullenness (is there such a word? I can’t think of a more appropriate one). The other people around me must have wondered what the hell was going on – or probably they didn’t, because why would they take any notice of my feelings?
I felt my ideas were being sidelined, which I find very frustrating when I’m talking about something I actually know a lot about – does that sound arrogant? I suppose it does, but it’s the Cassandra syndrome. I really hate confrontation, and most of the time I will keep quiet, unless there is something where I am absolutely sure of my ground, and then when I can’t convince people I get so frustrated because I think, well, should I just give up and let them have it their own way, knowing that it’s wrong and will probably cause problems down the line? Or do I try to think of other ways to convince them and probably end up becoming incoherent and getting angry with myself and convincing nobody? Then, when I’m proved right further down the line, I worry that I should have said something more forceful to have convinced them at the time and stop them making the wrong decision in the first place.
Anyway, that’s all by the by, really. What happened was that I continued to get more frustrated and feel more pissed off, and I couldn’t think how to make things better. And afterwards I reflected over other situations and wondered, how can it be that sometimes I can find the way to be so charming and even sexy, and have people around me (men and women) loving me and hanging on my every word, and how wonderful and powerful that feels, and then at other times I can completely lose touch with that and feel isolated and lost and frustrated (sorry, I’ve got to use that word again because I can’t think of a substitute) and like a sulky child? Which becomes self-reinforcing because I know I’m doing it and get angry with myself, but don’t know how to stop.
That has just reminded me of something – and probably it is just me going all pop-psychology again – but I thought about when I was a child, and how whenever I was upset about something and tearful, my father’s reaction was to get angry and tell me off, which of course upset me even more, and made him even more angry. His attitude was that crying was a deliberate act, something I had control over and, I suppose, that I was doing to defy him, when to me it was an uncontrollable expression of sadness and shame. I remember even as a child thinking how bizarre it was that he should think the way to stop me doing it was to make me feel even sadder and more ashamed.