Month: June 2021

My sister’s boyfriend keeps buying me flowers

Every few days I come home and there they are. He freshens them up, he adds more, it just doesn’t seem to stop. They’re just always there. 

It’s not what you think. He knows how much I love flowers, how they make me instantly smile, how the smell lifts my spirit when I’m not noticing. He’s watched me deteriorate these past couple of months and he thinks of me and cares about me and wants to do something, anything, to help. Sitting helplessly by as I cry and sink further into depression he reaches for the only thing he can do with impunity. Buy me flowers.

This man who has no connection to me except that he loves my sister. This man who has had more problems and abuse in his life than seems possible. He thinks about me and goes out and picks a beautiful bouquet because, “Kathy needs a hug.” 

And when I walk into my room and see them I immediately start crying and think, “I am so not worthy of all that trouble.” That is absolutely what I think, no exaggeration. And I immediately start thinking of how I can “make it up to him”. As if I’ve done something wrong in allowing my grief to overtake me because now he has to do something about it.

Jordan Peterson’s Big Five personality assessment says I’m in the 80th percentile for Agreeableness, 66th percentile for Compassion, and 85th percentile for politeness.

The positive(ish) side of these three dimensions is that:

  • I’m  nice, compliant, nurturing, kind, conciliatory, cooperative, warm, considerate, forgiving, accepting, flexible, gentle, patient, empathetic, caring, have a noticeably soft side
  • I look for the best in others, am interpersonally tolerant, do not like to see other people’s feelings get hurt, and am much concerned about the emotional state of others.
  • I’m interested in the problems of other people, and other living things and am concerned about helping other people avoid negative emotion.
  • I make time and do kind things for others (even when doing so may interfere with fulfilling my own needs and interests).
  • I am deferential to authority, generally obedient, respectful, and hate to appear (or be) pushy.
  • I am uncomfortable challenging other people and will try diligently to avoid conflict, and have a more intense desire than average to steer clear of confrontations or fights.

The negative side is that:

  • I am naively trusting, have a tendency to avoid conflict (which leads me to dissemble and hide what I think), and can be taken advantage of.
  • I will lose arguments (or even avoid discussions) and tend not to be very good at bargaining for myself or negotiating for more recognition or power (which can lead to resentment and hidden anger.
  • I tend to avoid or reduce conflict (and will sacrifice medium- to long-term stability for the sake of short-term peace), which means that problems that should be solved in the present accumulate counter-productively across time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these things and how spot on they are. I can see the whole span of my life spent doing these very things. It’s unnerving to see myself so easily pinpointed by a simple quiz when I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure myself out. And even more upsetting is that I can see with ridiculous clarity how, based on these traits, I got to where I am now. Even as I child I can see how these traits guided every decision I every made.

So the other day I was at the car wash sitting on a patio chair waiting for my car to get cleaned, when a very good looking man passed by me and said, “You have great hair!”

I immediately thought of my tendency to be agreeable, my reluctance to graciously accept flowers from my sister’s boyfriend and countless other ways in which I try not to be pushy or selfish or will deflect compliments onto others so that I don’t seem arrogant. And instead I just look straight at him with an honestly appreciative smile and said a very heart-felt, “Thank you.”

He found a chair too and sat there waiting for his lime green Lamborghini to get detailed. I didn’t feel the desire to make small talk or to capitalize on this opportunity. I had been sitting there reading old emails from my ex and trying very hard to hold back the tears and was in no shape to be talking to anyone, least of all a handsome man with a nice smile. I barely made it to my car before the tears started falling as it is. But when I drove away he waved at me and I waved back and for the first time I thought that maybe this was doable. Maybe I could turn my personality around given enough time. And for that one moment I felt content, confident and happy. I pulled over and texted my sister, “Am at the car wash and some guy passed by me and said, “You have great hair! Yup, I still got it.”

To find my way back

The recent breakup I endured had left me no choice but to describe myself as traumatized. I do not like admitting that what I went trough was a trauma because it scares me tremendously. But I can no longer deny that it has left me beyond my ability to cope with daily life. I can’t sleep, I can’t concentrate, I cry uncontrollably 5 to 10 times a day. Weeping, sobbing, wailing. Anyway you look at it I am destroyed. 

And it scares me because I’ve never felt this way before. This feeling of worthlessness of misery of sadness to deep I can barely cope. My sister has watched me deteriorate and is helpless to assist in any way. Hell, even I don’t know how to fix this.

So, I have embarked on a hard target search to better understand why my brain works the way it does, why I make the choices I do and more importantly why I feel things so strongly. I have taken three personality assessments (The Big Five Personality Test, The Highly Sensitive Person Test, The Attachment Style Test) to figure out how to improve my life. And to my great shock I have uncovered the what I would call the blueprint for the course my life has taken. It’s not anything that really came as a surprise to me but to see it all laid on in writing like that… I’m not gonna lie, it’s hard to take it all in because the implications are overwhelming.

I’ve laid out everything over several documents and have begun researching the results of these personality assessments as well as the theory of Learned Helplessness with the goal of altering the traits I possess that have taken my life down its current path. While none of what I’ve learned comes as a surprise, piecing it all together has allowed me to clearly see the patterns that are so necessary to understand in order to create real, sustainable change. The discovery of just how badly I’ve allowed my physical, mental and emotional life to deteriorate (consciously as well as subconsciously) has left me speechless.

I have set, and continue to meet, daily goals to read the books I’ve bought, watch instructional and informative videos, and write in this blog. The information I continue to learn as I do this has led to very painful insights.

In addition, based on everything I’ve learned (and continue to learn) I have begun the arduous task of daily mental and emotional corrections, which are needed steps to keep my depression from returning. These are, at the moment, proving to be very painful and very difficult given the depths of misery, sadness and worthlessness that my partner’s elimination of me from his life has created.

There are 2 goals I am currently focused on. The first is the hourly realigning of my thoughts as I attempt to drag my mind back to the present every time my emotions, memories or ruminations veer in the direction of my relationship with Him. The magnitude of this task is proving to be beyond me at the moment, as I have very little control and fail 50 to 100 times a day.

The second is to control the sadness and despair that overwhelms me and which both drags me down into misery and depression and causes me to cry uncontrollably. These are two things I am experiencing that are drastically and negatively impacting my waking hours and causing me to only get 4 to 6 hours of sleep a night, even 5 weeks after the event.

I have never been this motivated in my entire life and I’m upset to have to admit that the biggest reason for this motivation is the distraction it gives me from my emotions, which are very negative and severe right now. When I concentrate on this search to find my way back, my mind does not have to remember how little I meant to this man.

Here we go again

It’s been almost 5 years since I wrote in this blog. In that time may things have happened. At the time I had nowhere to live, no job, a dying car and was living on food stamps. But, I also had a boyfriend and some close loyal friends.

I’ve come a long way since then. I got a job, a new car, I moved in with my sister and her boyfriend and most importantly, I started enjoying life. I am polyamorous and so was my boyfriend so as the years went on he and I started spending more and more time together and we became primary partners. I am not a sexy person and have never been someone who men chase after. So to have someone desiring me and using me the way he did was heady and thrilling. (I say “using me” in a very good way. We were both kinky and engaged in a consensual power exchange with me at the bottom and him at th top.)

So things definitely improved for me. I was happy as I’d ever been and I absolutely loved and adored this man. He was my world. Unfortunately the things I’ve written before now about my debilitating personality traits as well as my physical health have not seen much improvement. But my depression I, thankfully, have been able to pull myself out of. Don’t ask my why because i still don’t know.

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that my boyfriend recently dumped me. After 7 years I was brutally cast aside in favor of someone younger, healthier, more successful, cuter, petite, demure, thinner and sexier than me. I was told that my services were no longer needed and I was cast aside. This breakup so devastating that it has left me barely able to get through the day.

The despair and worthlessness that overcame me as I struggled in the weeks and months that followed this event were beyond anything I could have ever imagined possible. Words cannot fully express how crippling this event was to me. Made worse by the fact that because I thought I was a strong woman, the possibility of such debilitation had never even occurred to me. I was not prepared. And as a result had little defences under my belt to counteract what happened.

There are many people out there who have suffered this type of emotional upheaval. We are the walking wounded, the ones people make jokes about. But isn’t this the case with anyone who has not walked in your shoes? If you’ve never known the abyss of addiction, you find yourself impatient with friends whose lives continually falter because of their own doing. They’re just weak aren’t they? After all, if we can do it then why shouldn’t everyone be able to do it? This is an ignorance I cannot abide. There is no one more impatient, self congratulatory and smug than than the person who has succeeded in life.

As I’ve made my way out of this miasma of despair I have learned some very eye-opening and also very sad things about my nature, who I am, why I do the things I do, and how my mind works. These discoveries have given me hope but also have filled me with desperation at how I’ve allowed my life to deteriorate and, more importantly, how much work I have ahead of me.

I’ve tried so hard throughout my life to improve, to be a better person, to create a happier life for myself and those around me. I’m here to tell you that I have failed miserably. At 55 I have very little money in the bank, no real career, no house of my own, no retirement fund and very little marketable talent. I am fat, wrinkled, have varicose veins, cellulite, small sagging breasts that point to the floor, blotchy and blemished skin, brittle nails, body and facial hair that needs near daily elimination, skin tags, ugly feet, a double chin and on and on and on.

I say all this because I am done. I am fed up with not being able to speak my mind and having to curtail what I say because it might offend someone, because it’s not proper or it’s not positive thinking, or it’s depressing or “you’re in your head too much, Kathy” or “why do you have to show every emotion you’re feeling” or ‘what’s wrong with you will you just stop talking already”.

If you’re reading this be warned, I give zero fucks anymore. You don’t like my writing, you think it’s not productive, you think there’s too much talk of sex, nudity, orgasms, the ugliness that is me? Well there’s the door my friend. I am done. This, is Verbatim Anarchy, and here is were I speak my mind.