Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Where are those damned squeezers? April 19, 2014


After two weeks, she finally posted something again.

But it wasn’t worth the wait, reverting back to old writing patterns that avoid disclosing the real struggle she must be going through.

It comes off as clever, but not deep, though it tends to reveal (largely by accident) how desperately she clings to the program and how she’s not getting the answers she wants.

Perhaps suggesting lack of faith even after months of spouting the necessary platitudes.

It is what other people expect her to say, rather than what she really thinks.

The essay related a somewhat tragic panic over her search for a squeezers she ultimately found in her cosmetic case, a somewhat comic episode but not funny, and an indication of the unconscious conflicts she has to deal with, which she called operating an auto pilot and obsessed behavior she is going through.

Her life seems to be a series of fads into which she leaps gung ho and then later, when discouraged by them, abandon, a repeated pattern that she might well trace to her childhood, putting faith in situations or people that don’t deserve it – such as with RR.

I don’t know how deliberate any of this is, but it always seems to follow the same routine, starting out as a novice (cub) and rapidly rising to the level of expert, until the whole thing comes down around her ears such as with the chef, who she had misread as someone successful and who later turned into a stalker.

After nearly three months engaged in her therapy, she seems poised to move on again, but needs to send a message to someone that she toed the line. Who this is, I can’t even begin to guess, and whether or not it involves her getting onto the bottom rung of yet another ladder to success.

In looking at herself at this moment, she questioned her focusing on what people tend to do routinely every day, like losing a key etc.

But she notes that her affliction of more than 20 years has set patterns in her life she cannot easily escape, habitual behaviors she is suddenly starting to become aware of.

She connects her lost squeezers to the therapy she is currently going through, as if this obsession with lost squeezers was connected to her eating disorder, a web of interactions, and which may hide the real problem.

There are other elements here, such as the concept of guilt she may feel.

Sometimes people need to free themselves from guilt in order to finally find a way out from under the mess they’ve made of their lives.

This may seem like an excuse to justify not taking responsibility for her actions, and yet, there is more than a grain of truth contained in it. You can’t constantly attack yourself and expect to recover. She says it is like putting her healthy mind out of sight.

She does conclude on a more positive note, hoping that with treatment she will become more self aware to recognize displacement as a symptom of the more serious problem.

What comes out at the end of this is anybody’s guess. I hope it is for the better.

 


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