When I feel low, I want people to give me presents. Heck, I'm even happy when I receive a "present" I've ordered for myself: I lurve the UPS driver, the FedEX driver, ... basically whoever hands me the "present."
And yes, my family frequently used material things to say I love you. We hugged and kissed and said I love you, but there was just enough gift-as-love/affection to make it into my psyche for a lifetime. So when I feel depressed or lonely or even just blue, I want to receive presents.
I have no books due to come to me until January (Ms. Lucy March!). My apartment is too messy to even contemplate buying a tree and decorating it ... or decorating anything. I've got to stop buying ice cream as a present to myself. And I told my friends not to give me anything for xmas when I go stay with them all up in Seattle. So ... sigh ... no presents are due.
This is an issue. This is an issue I need to work on and I have achieved a lot of progress (like, I am aware of it and can often sidetrack it). But, given how things have been lately, and even, hell, for the past couple of years or so, my love-basin is feeling quite empty and dry (kind of like most of the lakes, rivers, and bayous in Texas, as a matter of fact). So it's a lot more difficult to sidetrack that presents = ♥ feeling.
I don't have any ideas that I'm sure will work. Distraction, the old stand-by, of course. I have tons of yarn and crochet thread, so I can work on a project to give myself. And I do have to buy a few things for myself, which will at least fulfill a retail-therapy aspect.
That should help. I hope it does. It will be so humiliating to ask the people I know to "give me this book/ring/knicknack and pretend it's a gift from you to me."
I think that any good friend has done it themselves at some point. It's not so different from the "tell me that this will all get better" because it's better coming from someone else, rather than yourself. Or my insistence that the coffee/tea in the morning is better when made by someone else rather than me.
ReplyDeleteAlso why one day J joked that I should feel really loved because Toby (our cat) had left me a giant present :)
Were I closer, I'd happily give you a bookmark. ;)
Presents mean I thought about you enough to get you X. Even when its a dutiful present you still have to think about it and make it happen. So, yeah, I totally get the presents = heart. (How did you make that little heart?) The best presents are the ones that come out of the blue, that you didn't ask for and someone finds you something that you really love. The best present I ever gave was a bear to my niece when she was a baby. Fourteen years later she still sleeps with it.
ReplyDeleteNow that I have a blog, getting comments feels a bit like getting a present. So here you go - I cared enough to come to your blog, read it, think about it and comment on it. ;)
@Karen: the heart comes from an HTML code: &heart; (ie. ampersand-heart-semicolon, in case it doesn't show in what I just wrote). I like your perception of this. And thank you for commenting. I love when people comment on my blog!
ReplyDelete@Bethany: Thank you for the virtual bookmark! My cat was a barfer and she left me gifts All. The. Time. I learned not to get out of bed and wander in bare feet.
Aw, Skye. If I had cashola, I'd totally buy you an organizer/cleaning lady so you could stop stressing about how messy your apartment is. Then I'd get one for myself, because Day-Um! But I can't, so here's a little comment love and some FGBVs instead. <3
ReplyDeleteSo glad it's not just me! :-D I have this deep love/hate thing with materialism and money. It complicates the fact that I too associate presents with the 'thought behind it'.
ReplyDeleteDitto on the 'if I had the cashola' I would totally send you a big bulky oversized weirdly shaped something just so the FedEx man would have to make a special effort to get it to your door and then of course he would have to stay a minute to chat you up about it and hint that he was dying to know what was inside!. :-D
In the meantime here is my Comment Love!