Posted by:
Cold-Dodger
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Date: September 17, 2021 12:47PM
Woke up on the right side of the bed today or something, but this is a zero anxiety or guilt morning. I’m often feeling one or the other usually for complex reasons or for seemingly no reason. The dream I had last night was interesting, though. I was with my parents and we were trying to figure out the tags on my car. The DMV woman suddenly informed me that I’d once parked somewhere without permission, and as a consequence I had to go to prison for ten years. I was shocked, because absolutely nothing in anyone’s demeanor in the dream suggested that that was a reasonable possibility to expect. I had a flurry of familiar negative emotions I’ve had in bishop’s offices and reinforced in close conversations with parents and adult figures, only in a context that was bizarre — the DMV over parking violations. I started to get emotional to think my life was over over something so stupid, and the woman looked sorry for me, like this punishment was steep but was in place for the benefit of the individual mostly. She adjusted by some minor fraction which left me as despondent as before. I looked towards my parents, and they were initially shocked but they were holding hands now and had that happy-sad smile on their faces that whatever I was about to endure, it was for my good and would make me a better person. There was a feeling in my bosom like everyone around me was completely insane. The DMV woman said I was free for a certain amount of days before I had to surrender myself to authorities to begin the sentence, and I had the thought that this system is not very well designed at all. I could have out of emotion assaulted the woman or gone outside, jumped in my car, and drove it down to Mexico or anywhere where they don’t care about that sort of thing. I only had to serve the sentence if I stayed in this place or anywhere near my parents. So I went outside, got in my car, and just left them there with that crazy DMV woman. No ceremony. Not a whole lot of feelings except the absence of the bad ones. Then I woke up to my alarm telling me to go to work. As the dream lingered on the edge of the Memory cliff of early morning, I thought about it and kept it while I resumed the feelings I had the night before about the culture impact of the War of the Worlds novel on the USA. I had beautiful emotional clarity this morning after a moment. No thoughts of anything that make me flinch or gasp with anxiety. No ominous things on the horizon. There’s nothing wrong with my life except for what Mormonism and my codependency fueled by my odd relationship with my folks puts in my head, but I’ve stopped associating with them and I’m cutting neural pathways connecting me to that cPTSD trapped mindset, and it’s working? That’s what the dream seems to represent, or it’s an expression of certain emotions in an illuminating alternate context.
Is it my fault that those feelings are inflamed around my folks? Whenever I achieve a health mindset and hold it for a day which allows me to be emotionally available for the day, the first toxic thought threatening to topple my little achievement is that I’m just a basket case and all my troubles are of my own making and I keep afflicting people who love me for no reason. But I know that when I give into that codependent thought, all the symptoms of codependency manifest again but the guilt of being “private” goes away. God, that really is codependency isn’t it? How does this happen? I don’t know; it’s just good to feel it diminishing. Am I a basket case? I feel like a sane person with a cognitive disorder or two who was raised by psychos. I had severe untreated ADHD and also possibly some undiagnosed ASD, and I had these challenges with the worst parental and religious set up possible, which created a storm of mental illness that raged for decades and should have taken me, and yet I’m still here. I think I’m still here because I have a cold consistent logical presence in my frontal lobes even when the rest of my brain is freaking out emotionally. Is that what sanity is? What do people even mean when they talk about sanity? I have a firm grip on the ability to tell facts and reason on what they mean, but I have been existing in a space where that’s insane to care about facts and truth. I often don’t know how to socially or emotionally orient myself, but I have a north star in the body of facts and thoughts I accumulated trying to prove Mormonism is true and then failing.