I struggle

Today has been a bit of a tough one. I took the choice to engage with Scott over text.. it hasn’t been going well.. I end up having to defend my position over suspicion and mistrust and I am feeling a lot of resentment lately over things.. I know these ‘things’ are often just the way life rolls but my frustration at circumstances and underhand pressure to help comes out in a barrage. This boundary setting is new to me and when others get a case of the ‘poor me’s’ the adult part of me just wants to scream. “Suck it up” cause God no one in my life is helping right now and that includes Jasper..

It was touch and go taking him out to the lake today, I did so and he ended up rolling in a pile of something disgusting.. this is such a trigger for me and I lost it. but I could see myself loosing it.. I got him home and into the bath and just broke down in floods of tears he looked at me with concern and a drowned dog ‘sorry’. Sometimes it seems such a struggle in life all alone but I need to remember these are only first world problems.

Being alone has been the way forever.. Its been 3 fucking years almost of trying to help someone and when they expect more it kills me but part of me thinks “why not?” its what I was put on earth for and maybe its all just a case of the Universe attracting me to mirrors of hidden dependency needs. That said there is magical thinking and wrong perception. Maybe as an empath I can live a full life alone and I don’t feel like forking out money for alcohol for a bloody birthday celebration when I do not even drink. Part of me thinks its bloody selfish of him to expect it.. My therapist agrees.

Sometimes just writing helps me put it all in perspective. I am a bloody good person and I care but that can be my achilles heel, a lot of the time (this is apparently a Chiron in Pisces persons’ problem). I never got necessary empathy in all the painful years I struggled after Dad died, being sent to one side of the world only to return, move away again as Mum was busy and had remarried and then be judged by a sibling who saw me one day sitting in the gutter by the pub at 6 am on morning on her way to the airport in a taxi after a Sydney visit. God did they know how I struggling? How alone I was? How unsuited I was for the career Dad forced me into? At that point you did not argue with a father whose word was gospel. It was a different world and men fucking made the rules!!

Despite this I punished myself for years, even into sobriety. Apparently my wound was God sized and only God could fill it.. What bullshit. I needed empathy and help. I do believe in a higher power, I believe it got me sober but some of the rubbish I had heard in AA meetings and from older sober members does not make sense. That said a lot does.

Its interesting to read my early sober journal. In 1993 a few months after attending AA and starting on my 12 step journey I wrote my trauma history out in detail but it was an intellectual exercise, the healing had to come with therapy and battling through in a family riven with separations, trauma and long range attachment wounds fuelled by ancestral grief and the struggle to survive. Thank God for Al Anon that told me the alcoholic was NOT TO BLAME. And I put both alcohol and drugs down years ago.. But getting to grip with the hidden issues takes time…

Sometimes it feels silence is the best way to go.. If I get hooked by a text lately it pretty soon goes into a downward spiral. I doubt everything and that is my nature, I see it is my wound. That said what I have been subjected too since June 2018 has not been fair. I may be getting my money back but its not just about money.. As my therapist says, so often money is a stand in for something else and in our family money was not the problem (apart from the money Dad and my brother borrowed offshore that got them in so much hot water) it was more an issue of time and attention and connection.. missing all of the time

I know I can fill myself from within. And I don’t like it when I am having a dispute with someone I care about. That said I don’t feel I should have to carry all the burden at this stage. Don’t even know what the point is of writing. But I do just need to remember to breathe.. Despite washing Jasper there is a lingering aroma of duck pooh around me right now.. that brings a smile to me right now, really and I can even laugh a bit about freaking out.. but what is real is the simmering frustration and longing that comes out sideways.. maybe I will always live with it, always struggle in my closest human relationships.