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The boiler that was installed brand new after the first flood in December of 2023 crapped out on Friday.  I should have figured it out in the morning when the heat wasn't on, but I wasn't paying very close attention and didn't snap to it until Friday afternoon.  Thankfully, it wasn't too late to have someone come out and look at it, but it WAS too late to have anything done about it before Monday unless I paid a whack of extra cash, which I decidedly can't spare on top of the already hefty price tag of the repair.  On Friday night, we put a space heater in the room where our parrot sleeps.  That night when I was in bed going to sleep, I was irrationally worried that it might not actually be safe to leave that space heater in the room with her.  I knew it was an irrational fear and was able to talk myself through it without getting up, but then I woke in the night to go to the bathroom, and then was thinking about it again and could not go back to sleep.  I didn't want to scare her or disturb her, but it was burrowing into my brain and finally, I had to get up and go check on her.  She was fine, of course.  When I lifted the edge of the sheet from the front of her cage I could feel her indignation at having her rest disturbed.  I was able to go back to sleep after that, but it stirred up many feelings about responsibility and worrying, about not being good at taking care of things and not wanting to have to.  I wish that I was a person who enjoyed nurturing and took pride in taking good care of things.  I think that all the ways in which I fall short in my own eyes boil down to that. 

san, as an EMDR therapist, do you think there's any value to be had from self-administered EMDR?  I'd love to try it with a therapist, but unfortunately the lack of both availability and money preclude that at the moment.  I have a friend who sent me an EMDR video with a dot that moves back and forth and a tone that plays, but I'm not certain how to use it or if there's any point.  If you have any thoughts on this, please share.

NK, I appreciate you so much 

When I was very young, my mother and her parents (who were a very big part of our lives, enmeshment) were very big on the idea of children being "mature" and "sophisticated for their age". I'm not sure exactly how I know that was prized by them. It might have been something I heard said about my brother, when he was being discussed among my mother and any of the other adults in our orbit. It was possibly even said about me at times, but I think that my brother was better at the act than I was. He was a little older and probably had more of a grasp on the concept. In any case, I was thinking about it today and  thinking about how I was never properly a child, but nor have I ever properly grown up. I think the thing that hurts most about my life right now is that on some level I am still back there, stuck waiting for some kind of permission to grow and achieve and become my own person that I've never really been able to understand.

I'm sorry.  I didn't mean to hurt you.  Please come back. 

I'm guessing from your recent lack of contact that the email I sent after you were unable to visit recently hurt your feelings.  I didn't mean to do that. When we talked a few months ago about your fear of my expressing strong emotions, you told me that I can do that in email because that you can digest it without having to react right away, so I thought an email would be okay.  I wasn't looking for drama, I simply wanted to let you know how something you said came across to me, and to suggest a way we might communicate more harmoniously in the future.  On reflection, I realise that the tone of my email was more aggressive than I meant for it to be, and I regret that.  I miss you, and I hope you will come back soon.

Today's version:

I'm guessing from your recent lack of contact that the email I sent after you were unable to visit recently hurt your feelings.  Grow up.  You've had a relationship with me for thirty years and yet you still can't give me even the slightest benefit of the doubt.  When we talked a few months ago about your fear of my expressing strong emotions, you told me that I can do that in email because then you can digest it without having to react right away.  And I believed you, more fool me!  I wasn't looking for drama, but you hurt me and I thought you might care enough to want to know how you could avoid doing so in the future.  The tone of my email was snippier than I meant for it to be, and I do regret that.  I wanted it to be calm and neutral, but I guess I was just too hurt, and man, I'm human too.  Can't I have a little grace, after all these years, after how much I've given you?  How much of our time are you going to waste with this silent treatment crap?  I hope that you honestly don't know how much it hurts me when you ignore me, because I'd hate to think that you would intentionally put someone you claim to care about through this kind of pain.

I'm guessing from your recent lack of contact that the email I sent after you were unable to visit recently hurt your feelings.  I didn't mean to do that. When we talked a few months ago about your fear of my expressing strong emotions, you told me that I can do that in email because that you can digest it without having to react right away, so I thought an email would be okay.   I wasn't looking for drama, I simply wanted to let you know how something you said came across to me, and to suggest a way we might communicate more harmoniously in the future.  On reflection, I realise that the tone of my email was more aggressive than I meant for it to be, and I regret that.  I miss you, and I hope you will come back soon. 

My idea is that if I liked myself more I'd take better care of myself. But maybe that's backwards. Maybe it's that if I took better care of myself I'd like myself more. Chicken/egg? I long to take better care of myself, but, plans, resolutions and positive self-talk notwithstanding, I just don't seem to quite be able to do it.

I always have this idea that "maybe tomorrow it will be different." Tomorrow I will feel better, do better, be better. I need, of course, to start making "tomorrow" into "TODAY". It could happen. Maybe that's what my theoretical positive self-talk tape needs to say.

Oh, san, thank you so much for your reply and for your understanding.  What you've written here is exactly what I'm talking about.  It's such a huge burden, that we have no choice but to carry.  So unfair!

About a year ago, I got some positive self-talk tapes (well, not really tapes, digital files, but Gen X thankyouverymuch), and have listened to them nearly every single day.  Of course I knew better than to believe that "You can change your life in just 30 days!", but still, I would have hoped for more improvement than I feel I've gotten after a whole year.  I've thought about putting the script into first person and making a recording of it in my own voice, but I'm afraid that if I did it would not sound sincere and that would make me feel even worse about myself.  I think the very phrase "self-esteem" has negative connotations for me.  I think that in my household it was sort of a putdown, like saying someone was egotistical.  And then there's the word "esteem", with which I realise I have a certain history.  Here's a weird one:  When my stepfather and my mother were first married, he gave me a copy of his Pulitzer-prize-winning book about something-something-American-history that he had inscribed "to (my name) With love and esteem, from (his name)".  What a strange gift to give to a small child.  What a strange thing to inscribe it with.  I was maybe 6.  I didn't know what "esteem" meant, although I understood it to be positive.  I know that when my mother and stepfather got married, she told me that he was excited about us being a family because he had three sons and had always wanted a daughter.  I think from these I got the notion that I would be appreciated and treated kindly by my stepfather.  Which of course I was not.  So perhaps I associate the word "esteem" with a broken promise. 

Thank you for the kind words, friends.  I wish I could see these things in myself that other people see.  All these years later, I'm still suffering from being a kid with parents who said one thing and did another.  I'm really tired of attributing everything that's wrong with me to things that happened over half a century ago, but the thing is, these things are true.  They happened and they hurt me, and I try and try but don't seem to get past them.  Maybe for a minute here and there. 

Right now I am really feeling those whole sections of myself that didn't grow up and are eternally still trying to please or appease a world of adults who didn't want me.  For a lot of my life, I thought that my mother was the bad guy and that my father was okay, but I have come to realise how gravely he failed me, in how many ways.  Aching right now are memories of all the times I did stupid kid things because I didn't know better, and instead of being taught, I was credited with bad intent and emotionally punished.  Emotionally punished, because nothing in the houses of my parents was ever so straightforward as consequences for actions. 

I have lived since young adulthood with "My mother kicked me out of her house and sent me to live with my father because I'd become too much of a problem to her", but it took me until quite recently to process that my father did a different version of the same thing.  After I graduated high school, he sent me away to a completely unsuitable university situation because it looked good on the surface and it was easier than figuring out a realistic option for me.  He then put me in a mental ward for three months because I committed one of the most classic acts of teenage stupidity that exists (getting drunk at a party and passing out on someone's front lawn looking for help).  After I was released from the hospital, he told me I could not live in his house anymore and sent me out into the world with a manual transmission car that he spent about an hour teaching me how to drive, a small monthly allowance and the instruction to find some kind of a job.  That within perhaps six months I had totalled the car and gotten and lost three or so jobs and dwelling places was covertly represented as my own fault.  I blame myself constantly for not doing more with my life, but honestly it's kind of amazing that I even survived the transition to so-called adulthood. 

Oh, what could I have been if I'd had even the slightest little bit of nurturing?  I was always told that I was smart, creative, capable, "gifted", whatever, and that with my putative talents I could do or be anything I wanted to.  But how the heck was I ever supposed to do or be anything when for my whole life, all I could learn was whatever I could figure out for myself (usually the hard way)? 

I've had the death-wishing voice a lot lately. That provokes my fear of death and my feeling of being trapped, as well as angst about my age and my worry that the rest of my life will go by in a flash and I will never change anything, never do anything with myself, never realise the mythic potential I have spent my life being told and believing that I have but being unable to tap. I feel it, I stuff it down, I push it away, but it comes out in weird yelly dreams and deep inertia.

I am trying to figure out how to stop regret and self-hatred from ruining the rest of my life.

Boy do I get tired of emotional control sometimes. Sometimes I really just want to have tantrum. A big cathartic explosion of chaotic and unreasonable feelings. A purge of everything I spend all my time and energy to hold back, transmogrify, warp, morph, justify, minimise, neutralise, intellectualise, contain. I want it out of me, all of it. Kicking and screaming. I want to disturb, unsettle, frighten, distress like I used to when I was a kid and there were no holds barred when protesting my unjust treatment and my unmet needs. But then be comforted, tended to, understood. Validated. Helped. Soothed.  Loved. Like I certainly never was back then. I want to be taken care of. I'm so sick of having to be an adult when I was never allowed to be a child.

Every single minute of every single day I'm struggling through life, pretending there's more to my existence than a constant battle to stay one step ahead of anxiety and pain and fear. I am so tired.

Thank you for these insightful and compassionate replies, friends.  I appreciate your perspectives, and have been doing my best to work with them.  It's really hard.  Everything is really hard.  I get so discouraged sometimes, feeling that nothing I can do is enough.  NK, I really like your idea about engaging with those bad feelings, standing up to them, but it's difficult to challenge those underlying negative narratives.  I think one of my inner children is actually my mother, always lurking, ready to attack and undermine me.  My own worst bully seems to be built into me.

The other day, I realised that I have actually been fairly successful in life relative to the things my mother implicitly (and in some ways, even explicitly) taught me were important when I was a child.  These things are, finding someone to take care of me financially, being sexually adventurous, and not being fat.  Thinking about that really messes with my mind.  I know I'm a "better person" (more compassionate, more self-aware, less narcissistic) than my mother, but that doesn't really seem like enough measured against the thought of all the things I could potentially have succeeded at if I'd had better examples to follow.