Thinking the other day about how my sister C is still very emotional about the rejection she felt from our mutual mother, and how I seldom feel like that now, I wonder. It is the kind of thing that used to make me very upset indeed, especially about this time three years ago - not long after she died. Then I started taking Citalopram - in August 2010 - and so began a long period of relative emotional calm - almost as if I had achieved the ataraxia - the state of being unmoved that the Stoics recommended and aspired to. During that time I frequently felt angry with my mother, and I occasionally felt that there was something inherently artificial and not altogether desirable about the drug. It is now - what? 4 - 5 months since I stopped taking it, I don't think it's having a residual effect, but I feel the same. I am probably a tad more irritable than when I was taking it, but I have stopped feeling those more introspective negative emotions, the sort of self-pity thing, don't feel pain at certain things - don't feel as rejected as I used to. Does this mean I have "got over it"? Whatever it was?
There were several different factors in the crisis of 2009 - there was my mother's death, the apparent imminence of my father-in-law's death (I was very fond of him), Mark's terrible illness and of course the mysterious reappearance of the LO, the sudden flare up of the writing and so on. Quite a year really - and most of these things rolled over into 2010 - so by the summer of 2010 I was in a fair old two and eight. So what happened? When I went into therapy and did come out better and wiser with greater empathy and understanding - my mother said "I don't think it was the therapy - you just got older." I thought that was just her general contempt for therapy and fear of what it would reveal. So perhaps we could say that since then I have got 2-3 years older and have survived these things and life went on, and I have had to survive more horrors - like the fiscal meltdown of 2011 - and the weekly fights to stay afloat financially. Maybe the distractions of that helped me to put the stuff that had/hadn't/could've happened in the 2009-10 crisis in perspective and in the past. So it's not ostriching exactly - but it is not dwelling on it, not wallowing in it. I could have gone into therapy - but I didn't. The Citalopram worked on my brain a little bit the way an anti-inflammatory works on muscle pain. The muscle tenses with the pain and that makes it worse, the drug relaxes the muscle, masks the pain and gives the muscle the opportunity to recover. In the same way my emotions were relaxed, the pain masked and everything got a chance to recover. That is how psychiatric drugs, well anti-depressants are supposed to work. It was easy to come off it and give it up and now everything is fine. I mean, that while the objective conditions are not fine, I am not buckling under with misery about them. In fact, I find it easier to get angry now - while my nearest and dearest may not think this is a great advance, it is meant to be more psychologically healthy than bottling it all up.
Actually, this is still not about my mother. I find it hard to write about her while I am still feeling quite angry with her. I wasn't allowed to be angry with her for 4 years because she was ill - and before that - well, it was different. I wonder why I am so angry with her, and why exactly? I think it's because she or rather her attitude to me, have given me all sorts of stresses and strains in my own persona, anxieties about so many things and a fundamental sense that people dislike me. I know rationally that the reverse is true - that people rather like me, find me interesting, want to be friends etc. But my mother's attitude to me since conception perhaps, has given me that feeling. And it is tiresome at this advanced age to find oneself endlessly justifying and rationalising about people's feelings towards you - imagined feelings I should say. I do not like being chippy/prickly - I would like to be a smoother person really. However, there is evidence I am recovering - the incident of discovering I had not been invited to a birthday party was a bit of a turning point. Years ago I would have agonised, why didn't they? I would have turned it over and moaned and groaned and worse still, seen it as further evidence that I was not really a nice person. Now I just think "how rude of them!" to invite A but not us... but then again, they are free to invite who they want, and I am grateful for their behaviour has liberated me.
I am feeling a lot freer about many things now. The other day I counted the number of women I could have coffee or a glass of wine with in Ramsgate, it was over 10. Of course that is "too many" friends in one sense, because I haven't actually got time to see them regularly - but if I see one a week I get enough society and gossip and deep meaningful discussion...but when I think how incredibly lonely I sometimes was in London, I feel quite amazed. And I didn't count the men friends...
There were several different factors in the crisis of 2009 - there was my mother's death, the apparent imminence of my father-in-law's death (I was very fond of him), Mark's terrible illness and of course the mysterious reappearance of the LO, the sudden flare up of the writing and so on. Quite a year really - and most of these things rolled over into 2010 - so by the summer of 2010 I was in a fair old two and eight. So what happened? When I went into therapy and did come out better and wiser with greater empathy and understanding - my mother said "I don't think it was the therapy - you just got older." I thought that was just her general contempt for therapy and fear of what it would reveal. So perhaps we could say that since then I have got 2-3 years older and have survived these things and life went on, and I have had to survive more horrors - like the fiscal meltdown of 2011 - and the weekly fights to stay afloat financially. Maybe the distractions of that helped me to put the stuff that had/hadn't/could've happened in the 2009-10 crisis in perspective and in the past. So it's not ostriching exactly - but it is not dwelling on it, not wallowing in it. I could have gone into therapy - but I didn't. The Citalopram worked on my brain a little bit the way an anti-inflammatory works on muscle pain. The muscle tenses with the pain and that makes it worse, the drug relaxes the muscle, masks the pain and gives the muscle the opportunity to recover. In the same way my emotions were relaxed, the pain masked and everything got a chance to recover. That is how psychiatric drugs, well anti-depressants are supposed to work. It was easy to come off it and give it up and now everything is fine. I mean, that while the objective conditions are not fine, I am not buckling under with misery about them. In fact, I find it easier to get angry now - while my nearest and dearest may not think this is a great advance, it is meant to be more psychologically healthy than bottling it all up.
Actually, this is still not about my mother. I find it hard to write about her while I am still feeling quite angry with her. I wasn't allowed to be angry with her for 4 years because she was ill - and before that - well, it was different. I wonder why I am so angry with her, and why exactly? I think it's because she or rather her attitude to me, have given me all sorts of stresses and strains in my own persona, anxieties about so many things and a fundamental sense that people dislike me. I know rationally that the reverse is true - that people rather like me, find me interesting, want to be friends etc. But my mother's attitude to me since conception perhaps, has given me that feeling. And it is tiresome at this advanced age to find oneself endlessly justifying and rationalising about people's feelings towards you - imagined feelings I should say. I do not like being chippy/prickly - I would like to be a smoother person really. However, there is evidence I am recovering - the incident of discovering I had not been invited to a birthday party was a bit of a turning point. Years ago I would have agonised, why didn't they? I would have turned it over and moaned and groaned and worse still, seen it as further evidence that I was not really a nice person. Now I just think "how rude of them!" to invite A but not us... but then again, they are free to invite who they want, and I am grateful for their behaviour has liberated me.
I am feeling a lot freer about many things now. The other day I counted the number of women I could have coffee or a glass of wine with in Ramsgate, it was over 10. Of course that is "too many" friends in one sense, because I haven't actually got time to see them regularly - but if I see one a week I get enough society and gossip and deep meaningful discussion...but when I think how incredibly lonely I sometimes was in London, I feel quite amazed. And I didn't count the men friends...
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