Validation

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Sometimes I forget what this blog is. Sure, it started out as a way to share info with friends and family as I made my way to where I ended up. But I ended up somewhere, then this was a blog about my new home. And, when my life fell completely apart, it became a journal, a place to process what I worked on and discovered within therapy and without, and a place to vent my raw feelings and thoughts, without need to censor or be tactful.

It remains a journal, and I am very grateful to those of you who visit and comment because I enjoy what you have to say and I feel uplifted by your support. However, I began to crave comments. As someone who has long sought for validation externally, it took me long enough to figure that out. I realized this week, maybe Wednesday, that I feel bad if only one person comments. In fact, I feel inadequate if fewer than four people comment. (Weird, to have a number, but I do.)

At such times, I worry that my posts are too long, too boring, too negative, too sad, too much about myself. I wonder if I should change my posts to please my "audience". I forget, in other words, what this blog is.

**Allowing the laughter to subside**

I guess this is a good Learning Moment. It's pretty sorry that I need external validation so badly I consider changing what I write in my personal journal to try to get more comments.

**Quiet moment for obligatory shame**

I hope to remember this moment and this realization. I forgot it about five times over the past couple of days, luckily remembering it again each time. I'm staying up late to write this before I forget again. It's worth remembering.

Will writing this post help me learn to find my validation from within rather than without? On first consideration, it wouldn't seem so. It's just a blog post, right? But given what I, and all of you, have seen on this blog in the past almost three years (I know!), writing these posts has become part of my processing new information and making it possible to internalize changes. So, yeah, I think that's what writing this post will lead to: greater movement toward my finding my validation within myself. (That's a lot of "my's".)

It's hardly fair of me to put all of that on all of you.

Claustrophobia and Freedom

"I'm feeling lousy," I told my therapist. "I'm not sure I can any longer tell if I'm feeling depressed or anxious or both. It's been so long and they are so mushed together."

I've been feeling like curling into myself. I want to hide, to be small, to wrap myself into a tight little package. I could feel the muscles in my neck pushing my head forward and the muscles in my chest pulling my arms inward. And I wanted Michele to fix it.

So we talked. Mostly, I talked and she listened. Then I would pause and she would ask a question or make a comment that would lead me in a particular direction or spark another idea that I then followed.

I ended up talking about my housemates and my living situation. (From now on, I'm going to give them non de plumes, to more gracefully refer to them. They shall be Griffin and Sabine, which suits her more than him.) About how while I am truly grateful to Sabine for not allowing me to pay room and board — I only have to pay my own personal bills — and for buying me things, like the sweaters and warm socks she's just purchased for me so I will be warm this autumn and winter, I hate being dependent. I hate not being able to provide myself with these things.

And, in a way, there is a price for these wonderful things. Nothing that is expected or demanded of me. No, it is a situational and emotional price. Because my housemates' issues unfortunately trigger my worst issues and are making me want to be invisible and making me want to hide. I'm caught up in their issues and the blacklash of my own, and it seems that the result is that I'm focused more on those dramas than on myself and my own needs.

For example, Sabine is super-sensitive to noise. She also has anger issues. So the other night, when I was trying to manipulate a hot dish from the microwave, one without handles, using silicone hot pads, I was making lots of glass-on-glass noise. Eventually, Sabine exploded, took the dish with her bare hands ("It's hot!" I said. "I know," she said.), removed the lid, and set the dish on a cutting board. She continued to be angry and everything inside of me shrank and shriveled, even as I kept repeating to myself "not my issue, not my issue". When she calmed down later, she apologized. But the damage was done for the day.