Wednesday, October 01, 2008

So Much Navel Gazing, I May Be A Citrus Fruit

Back in late July I twittered this little gem:

Therapist says I’m funny because of some deep and lingering psychological damage and a rapacious need to be loved. “Yay! I’m funny!”

I followed that up a week or so ago with:

@cleversimon then there are those of us who tell jokes to get people to like us while also keeping them emotionally distant. #therapy_baby!

So guess what I’ve been doing for a while?

Yeah, I started therapy about a year ago.

I’m not going to write about exactly why, but I will say this, I have hated almost every second I’ve gone. (Standing appointment every week, thanks very much; I take that unending, unswerving frequency to mean that I’m chuck full of screwy, though I’ve missed a few appointments here and there.)

Seriously. Hated. It.

I hate going. I hate the reasons why I have to go. I hate how long it takes to get to her office. I hate her stupid People and Fish & Stream magazines in the waiting room. I hate cracking open my brain every single time. I hate how I feel while I’m there in a session, pouring out all my emotional blather and letting it spill onto her ugly industrial carpeted floor. I hate writing the check out at the end of the hour and handing it over. I hate replaying back everything I said on the drive back to work. I hate thinking about all stuff I dashed out in the time between appointments.

Which is not to say that it hasn’t been enormously helpful to me.

Seriously.

I just might have figured out a whole lot about why I am the way I am and all kinds of other stuff. If therapy were an Ebay auction, I’d give it feedback of “A+++++++ Highly recommended! Would divulge deepest emotional drivel again!” I’m a big fan of therapy, though frankly, I’d rather be telling other people to go, rather than being there myself. Every. Blesséd. Week.

Again, I’m not going to delve into the depths about why I decided to start going to therapy or any of the reasons for my emotional blather, but I do want to tell a story and then ramble on for a while longer about what it all means.

Last week we left the kids with my Mom who recently moved here to Salt Lake and we went to Colorado Springs, CO. Reha had a week long conference that kept her busy during the days, but we got to play at night. And by play, I mean that we got treated to enormously expensive (and tasty) dinners in the company of her office colleagues, bosses and other important people.

At the end of one of those dinners, after an evening of pleasant conversation and very good food, and me generally on my best behavior, the server began taking dessert orders. He started at the opposite end from me. Everyone, the bosses and the bosses’ spouses said they were stuffed. People hemmed and hawed and ordered “a small scoop of ice cream,” a dessert with “two spoons please, we’ll share” or no dessert at all, “I’m so full, thanks!” The waiter came to me, and by this time the full table of twelve had gotten inexplicably quiet and essentially everyone was staring at me.

I looked the server straight in the eye, cleared my throat and ostensibly loud enough to be heard all the way at the other end of the table full of somewhat stuffy and stilted lawyer types said, “I’ll have the largest creme brulée in the restaurant, please. I’d like an entire vat of creme brulée brought here to me as soon as humanly possible. You can just bring it out in a trough, I don’t even need a spoon. Thanks.”

Did everyone at the table laugh?

Yeah. It killed.

But.

Here is the thing that bothers me.

I had almost no control over whether I popped off like that. To call it a compulsion wouldn’t be going too far. Though I didn’t look around the table, I somehow divined that all attention at the table was on me. I also realized in the instant the server came to me that no one had really ordered a “real” dessert. My brain just put it all together and blew out with a relatively funny quip. I’m not sure I could have just ordered dessert like a “normal” person.

Really.

I had to make my dessert order funny in some way.

On the one hand, “yay, me! I’m somewhat quick witted” and made everyone laugh. But on the other hand, sweet cracked caramelized sugar over custard, do I find the whole thing fundamentally disturbing.

I’ve always known that I use humor as both a disarming tactic to get people to like/love me and as a wall to protect and shield myself. A part of therapy for me has been realizing how just how high those bulwarks have grown over time and coming to grips with the fact that my entire being is built on this defensive shell, fashioned primarily out of humor shaped bricks and mortared with an urgent longing. I don’t even know exactly what I’m protecting myself from, though I’m pretty sure it has to do with (pardon me while I whip out my “therapy-speak” translation manual), “being emotionally connected with other people.” My inner core of emotions is so barricaded that I only know how to protect them, never long trot them out to peek at the rest of the world. I rarely allow myself to feel emotions, even ostensibly good emotions.

I talked to Reha about it later in the hotel room and how mortified I was.

“Well, I’m not sure I would have ever said that in front of my bosses and co-workers and their wives, but it wasn’t that bad. Everyone laughed. I might have preferred that you not do stand up comedy in front of those specific people, but it wasn’t too awkward or horrible.” [ed. note: like my public “performances” can be sometimes. (OK, oftentimes.)]

“Right, of course not. You are normal. That’s a part of my point. It wouldn’t have occurred to you to start riffing, but I’m freaking out over this realization that I don’t think I could stop myself.”

Though this is a way over the top metaphor, right now I feel a bit like I’m Abraham strapping his only and much loved son Isaac on the altar. In my somewhat sacrilegious parable, my humor has to be sacrificed in order to show lasting fidelity to emotional health. A giggling Isaac gets sliced open.

Oy vey! Drama much, Jon? Is this not the very definition of a “First World,” self-absorbed blogger type kerfluffle?

Well, yeah. Except that this is a big giant deal to me. Seriously, that’s how it feels to me. I’ve spent my entire life building this “funny” persona (for some decent reasons, I might add, though again, not dipping into those reasons now), but in order to be, I don’t know, a real person, I have to stab that humorous persona dead on the altar. This thing that happens where I only know really how to be funny and quippy has been a wonderful and warm and comfortable cloak to wear out in the world, such that I don’t even know how to put on different clothes or even if I own other jackets stored away deep in a box, hidden away and buried under layers of fortifications, but that cloak has ceased to make me happy.

Plus, the cloak is pure wool and it’s incredibly itchy.

See what I mean? This may be impossible for me.

I’m breaking this fit of highly personal emotional histrionics into two (or three, heaven help me) posts. More later. Though if I keep this up, I’ll have to re-direct Ransom Note Typography over to an emo-friendly LiveJournal account. *rim shot*

Anyway. Conclusion coming.

Jon scribbled this mess on 10/01/08 at 01:14 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

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