Boy
I was nursing Noah and thinking about this whole thing and why it has my attention. There’s a certain trainwreck quality to it, for sure, and it drags up a lot of the bad feelings from a couple of years ago.
But my feelings are also tied into my recent decision not to open my life to professional parenting blogging, and about a story that ties into my grief around Emily being out to another market. These are decisions I made with care, one in one direction and one in the other. If I publish something about grief and reviewers and readers shit on it (I should be so lucky to get the attention), I need to not go ballistic about it. And conversely, I think I’m right on my decision about blogging, but it means money my family won’t have.
So that’s why someone who’s known for at least two months that their blog was searchable going obsessive-bugfuck about it - someone who’s been on the ‘net for ages and really should know better - is really irritating me. But of course that’s not Terra’s stuff, it’s mine.
Today though it ties also into the big-word thing. Terra’s comparing people reading - reading! not commenting! - her blog to her feelings about being raped; to harassment and stalking. It’s so crazy. And she’s trying to make the facts fit, as if people spent a gazillion hours tracking her down. When in fact, for us, and I’m pretty damn sure for other people, we messed about on Google and found her journal - read a bit - stopped, remembered about it one day while breastfeeding, typed more terms in to find it again - clicked on it. Read some more. Rinse and repeat.
And Terra /knew/ this because she was told, by Jensco.
So why the drama? What the fuck?
And I want to say that it’s not understandable to me at all.
But sadly, it is: when our system was coming apart and we were just crazed inside that at any moment the world would end - a feeling that could be applied to almost any situation on the outside but really was just an internal free floating feeling - we said similar, crazy stuff. It makes me sad, for us and our past. It sort of makes me sad for Terra, because she’s still living in that headspace from what I can tell. (And I can’t tell much. But the way this exploded makes me suspect.)
It’s hard to describe: it’s like your brain is patterned for life-threatening fear, and if things aren’t going well in your life, the anxiety level rises and rises until something tips it and then wham! All the words and thoughts you couldn’t have growing up - that someone was actually raping and abusing you - seem to fit. In therapy we call it shadow-boxing, as in Jung’s thing about projecting the hidden shadow on other people.
And that is where as an adult you destroy and lay waste to things in your life. And those are the regrets you carry forward… if you can look at them. Some people can’t; they just continue to go on with a good year, and then a space where everything falls apart, and they need to move on, move on continually.
With everything we’re carrying now - fears about parenting, about career and money decisions, recent trauma around losing Emily, family stresses and concerns, plus the ups and downs of every day life - it would be easy to slip back into something like that. I recommit my energy to not doing that. Not just for me and us and Carl and Idaho and our friends and family, but especially for Noah. I so hope he does not ever have a reason to understand how crazy things can get, when pain and trauma are suppressed, and then haunt one’s life.
And I blog it here to remind me and everyone else.
I am so blessed with people in my life who say - okay, sure, but what’s the real problem? Including me I guess. But I have been shown the way. Thank you guys - I think you know who you are.
Comments
4 Responses to “Boy”
Leave a Reply
We love you.
None of it is rational. IMHO the paranoia they are exhibting over it is pathological and you can’t reason with that. :-/
ughmonkey.
I know… we told her right out… and the fuck? Seriously. Gave links and eveyrthing.
Wow. Drama-recycle.