...to bring you these Tales from the Time(less) Crypt!
First, two journal entries from January of 1999:
“[Parker], if he's not jealous of my person, is jealous of my my time. He thinks school eats up too much of my time. And [Scott] eats up my time, too, and the fact that I've an adorable 2 year old son doesn't help either – I feel a bit stretched thin. But I don't begrudge any of these people my time. I love being at school, being with [Scott], being with [Parker], and being with [Denali] – so who loses? I think maybe I could just never sleep. That's one solution. Too many different lives to be living at once. (Right now, as I write, it's late at night, [Parker]'s gone to bed, it's the 1st day of my last semester as a Master's student, and I'm supposed to be reading Querrelle.)”
“Absolute insanity. I wasn't kidding about never sleeping. Been keeping up with schoolwork, but just barely. [Parker] said to me the other day, 'Do you realize you're the center of the universe? Everyone wants you.' This feels a bit too close to the truth for comfort. Don't worry; this isn't going to my head because I'm completely inadequate for that position & I know it. Still I do feel like I'm stuck there, if only for my requisite 15 minutes of fame type thing, so I'd better make the most of it – not sleep, just go go go. Maybe I need some amphetamines or something, ha.”
***
So, what made me go digging up the past today? The fact that there are some uncanny resemblances to the present there.
Last night, I called up Travis to say that I didn't think it would work to get together tonight after all, that I was feeling out of balance and overwhelmed. “But we could have lunch on Friday, instead, and we can have a sleepover on Sunday, after dinner – oh, so, Lilianna and Rick and their girls are coming over for dinner that night; but you're invited too, if you want to come,” I said. Travis was, understandably, not pleased: just last week, we had a whole conversation about how he sometimes feels like he's a line in my dayplanner, or a little box on the calendar.
My friend Cate, with whom I sometimes process issues like this, said she knew exactly how Travis felt. “Being your friend means having a relationship when you have the time,” she said. I winced at that one, for sure.
No one wants to feel like an appointment. I get that.
So I told Travis that, if I were him, I'd be feeling exactly the way he's feeling. At his suggestion, we played a little switcheroo game, in which I pretended to be the one in his position: he was too busy to see me all week, and then he went and made plans on Sunday night without consulting me. “I'd feel upset. I'd wonder if I was important to you, if you even wanted to see me at all,” I said. “Okay,” he said, slightly mollified, “Well, maybe you should just think about this for a while.”
“Um, could we maybe try it the other way around?” I wanted to know. “Could you try on what it might be like to be me?”
“Okay,” he said, with a slight laugh. Silence.
“Alright, then... pretend you have, oh, I don't know, at least seven other people, all of whom want you to do something with them this week: one of them has a birthday party and you're supposed to bake the cake, one of them is leaving town and you're in charge of the farewell party, one of them said to you the last time she saw you, 'Hello, my distant friend'....”
“You feel overwhelmed. You feel pulled in different directions.”
“Yeah, but it's 'you' we're talking about, not me, right?”
“...I would look at the situation and prioritize, cut some things out. I wouldn't have gotten myself into the situation in the first place.”
Well okay, then. Travis is himself, and on some level, I'm incomprehensible to him. My need to feel important to people (and this takes various forms, some more narcissistic than others: I like to feel desired, needed, appreciated, respected, admired), along with my discomfort at having to say “No” to anyone I care about, leads me to over-commit myself. Habitually. That's a negative way of looking at it, but if I'm trying to own my own stuff, it's an accurate assessment of my inherent pathology. (Maybe there was something to my mother's “addiction” accusation after all: isn't it always the shard of truth in the load of horseshit that really slices us up whenever we find ourselves feeling unjustly maligned?)
But this is me – this is my life. Of course Travis wouldn't have gotten himself into my position – he's a different person. In accordance with his nature, he has chosen a very different path for himself, one with a lot of autonomy and a fair amount of alone time.
[cont'd, several hours later]
As usual, after some time has passed, and some good conversations have taken the wind out of my assails, I'm feeling calmer.
Parker wisely pointed out something I often forget. He said that my life is full of people who will let me know if I have been neglecting them, and that there are also those who don't advocate for themselves, and who depend on me to make time for them. As it happens, I have a child in each category.
Sienna, my two-year-old, knows how to advocate for herself. Witness this hot-off-the-press interaction:
Sienna (sitting on the kitchen table, eating toast with honey): Mommy, stop hula-hooping.
Me: Why? It's exercise. It's good for me.
Sienna: No! Don't exercise again! You don't love exercising. You like feeding me toast.
My son Denali, on the other hand, would like to believe he would be happier without me around to nag him about cleaning his room, eating something more healthy than noodles with butter, or cutting down on the time he spends on facebook. But I know that he needs time with his mother, at least every so often.
Then Parker added, “But there's also someone in your life -- I can actually only think of one person in this category -- who has no advocate.”
“Oh, shit,” I thought, “Who am I overlooking?”
And then Parker went on to spell it out for me: “It's you.”
I realized that he's right: I have just about zero time to myself, time in which to pay attention to my own thoughts. Maybe that's why I started this blog. Maybe that's why I have been fantasizing lately about living in a cottage by the sea all by myself, with no one to answer to...for about three weeks, by which time I would be thoroughly sick of solitude, impatient to get back to my people.
I also had a good conversation with Travis this afternoon, in which he agreed that he hadn't done a very good job of trying to put himself in my shoes. He concluded with a characteristically off-the-wall-yet-right-on-the-mark comment: “Sometimes we just get stuck down one of our emotional cul-de-sacs and bang up against the ticky-tack houses that are there. You know?”
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