Bunny Butt

Everybody Else's Feelings

 Herself speaks.

This is a tricky point in personal history right now, as lovely Daddy's decline continues apace. The members of my Family of Origin (brother, sister, mother, Daddy, and I) are all coping in differing ways and with varying degrees of success with the current state of affairs and the shadows of Things To Come. Emotions are colored by half-a-century-or-more of relationships, old hurts, current states-of-relationships, imported feelings from external relationships beyond the Family of Origin, and more. It's a lot. Beyond the emotions, there are the mundane conversations: how many days of home health care are necessary? Beyond necessary, how many more should there be, to ensure safety and sanity and peace of mind for all involved? Who is capable and willing to do what? We would all do everything if we could. We cannot. Resources must be deployed to fill in the gaps and bring everyone literal and metaphorical comfort. 

The hardest part for me, is that everyone else's feelings are nearly Deafening. I can hardly hear my own over everyone else's. I need to listen to mine, but others are SO LOUD that I cannot. It is frustrating. Frightening, even. I am terrified that someone is going to hand me their wailing, screeching Feelings, and I will have to somehow tend to them. No thank you. I cannot. Please do not make me. 

If it happens, I will do what I must, because I always do. Do what needs to be done. What will be the cost? Only time will tell. 

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As a youngster/teenager, I never learned how to help other people with their emotions, because in truth I did not have help with my own. I did not have a good example of how to acknowledge someone else's Feelings, how to help someone to feel Feelings safely, how to come out on the other side of an emotional difficulty and move forward. 

Even as a young adult -- or even as an adultier adult -- validation of Feelings and assistance with moving through them, has been sparse and hard-won. I feel like I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to explain my Feelings to the very few people with whom I am comfortable discussing such things, and even then I feel as though I have limited success. It's extraordinarily painful. I often don't even want to try. But I still do, because even after all this time, I still long to be understood. To be Seen.

Somehow, I am always surprised when someone is nice to me when I am experiencing Feelings.  

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I don't really know what else to say at this juncture. I am putting one foot ahead of the other, one day at a time. I don't know how much, or how little, time there is. I don't foresee anything getting easier any time soon. If I am silent, gentle reader, it is because everything around me is So Very Loud. 

We'll get there. 

Please keep my much-loved Daddy in your thoughts. 

Thank you. 

Christmas

And that, of course, is the message of Christmas. We are never alone. Not when the night is darkest, the wind coldest, the world seemingly most indifferent. For this is still the time God chooses. 

- Taylor Caldwell

Revealed

Current Mood

Buck at the Park Down the Block

Neat!

Tarot

In the spirit of Taking Myself To Go Do Things, I went to a nearby artsy-craftsy fair at a local park. There were a lot of "mystical" booths and wares, which I always find mildly interesting. I'm not a believer in the powers of astrology or crystals, but I am willing to hear out those who are, out of scientific/people-y curiosity. 

At one booth, the gentleman hawking the wares informed me that the nearby young woman was their local Tarot reader, if I was interested in a reading. I declined politely and moved on, but thought about it later. 

On the one hand, I think the idea of Tarot is fascinating, because it requires in part a level of people-reading skills that would be extremely useful to have, not to mention a level of imagination that would be interesting as well. It would be fascinating to see that in action. Could I be "read" by a stranger? Probably. How on point would it be? And if so, how alarming would that be? 

On the other hand, I realized that my first specific thought in this specific situation was to decline a Tarot reading because I didn't want to subject the Tarot reader to any bad juju/intense aura/weird planetary alignment/karmic whatnot that I am currently experiencing. I had this sense that I'm just too much right now, it might be harmful to her or she might need to 'smudge' herself or her Tarot deck or otherwise cleanse her aura after interacting with me. I wouldn't want that for anyone. 

There's a lot going on inside my head -- some migraine-related, lots emotion-related, with various emotion-related bits having to do with various people in various amounts of intensity at varying times -- and I'm choosing to let it all percolate and sift itself through rather than to try to actively sort itself out right now. Given that I'm already a slightly odd and relatively intense individual anyway, the combination means that I am more likely than ever to be a bit much for another person to experience even tangentially. That's why I'm keeping myself pretty tightly contained right now.

Maybe that's why I've had more migraines lately. Hmmm.

On the other hand (so many hands), that's probably all silly. I'm not so special. My feelings are not likely to be qualitatively much different from those of any other human being's. Surely I'm not bad luck or a dark cloud. Right? 

I just want to protect other people in the way that I do not, at the moment, feel protected myself. And so I try -- despite where I am inside my head -- to foster light for others like lovely Buela does.  By shining enough light for others, perhaps I can find the way out of my own darkness, too.