The Ice Queen Cometh

Friday, April 4, 2008

I have this rather mysterious habit of not dealing with or acknowledging difficult things until months/years after they happen. I've been handling my life like this, in one form or another, since I was a little kid. For better or worse, when I *did* express passionate emotions as a child I was discouraged/ignored until I stopped. Since as early as I can remember I've associated having vulnerable feelings with being crazy/unloved/bad, an opinion that was only reinforced as I grew by most of the absolute winners I chose to have romantic relationships with. So I found other outlets for my feelings that were internal and private, which eventually became flat-out emotional hermitude- even toward myself.

I think that whether I realized it or not, self-repression was one of my main motivators for picking up a pen and starting to write poetry as a kid, and probably an instigating factor in my obsession with music. I could be carefree and easy to deal with in public to please others and then later, when I was alone, be myself on paper while music acted as my personal therapist. Of course as I got older, my hormones started raging and my problems got more complicated; even writing started to become painful for me. I started letting the wrong people in (see aforementioned winners) and had to go deeper and deeper down inside myself each time after to find that quiet, safe place I'd learned to rely on.

I've been this way for so long that it seems second nature to me. Aside from the shock of other people wrongly seeing me as a cold or otherwise unfeeling person at times, it's never really bothered me. Being misunderstood isn't a big deal. So it takes me a little longer than most people to face and work through my shit, so what? I used to feel that exact way, but I've noticed that as I've gotten older the span of time between events and my recognition of my feelings REGARDING those events is getting wider. I can tie in this change with the death of my grandfather 3 years ago, and all of this escalating more rapidly since then. I purposely ended an entire chapter of my life immediately after his death, moving on to an entirely new group of friends, abruptly ending a long term relationship, moving, even changing jobs; and I never looked back. Everything has seemed increasingly more fluid since then.

And now? It took me until my first trimester was over to truly grasp the enormity of my actually having a child. I didn't start to truly deal with any of what I went through in Oregon until a spring and summer had passed. And at this point, who knows when I'll *ever* realize everything I've experienced and dealt with in the past two months living here with my grandmother? I worry sometimes that by the time I'm in my 40's I'll be a complete sociopath. I worry about how it will affect the kind of mother I'll be.

I was thinking about this today because I haven't written anything in such a long time. It feels like I don't have any inspiration, but one look at my life is proof that isn't true. I know myself, I know I'm repressing. But the part of me that insists on giving itself all this time to relax and organize itself before even acknowledging all the shit on the fan almost seems to act as it's own, separate entity these past few years. David would tell me to become a being of light and love; God knows I'm trying.