recap & examination

It wasn't so bad. (The night at work, I mean.) A couple of my co-workers managed to cheer me up enough to get me through.

And the experience made me look more closely at a hard truth. The truth about why I said "Okay." Even though I didn't want to. Even though I was rejecting the idea with every part of myself. It is the story of my life. My fight-or-flight response mechanism has been brutally maimed. I'm more of the play-dead type. It's how I survived the horrors. So when I have a visceral response to a situation that tells me it is not good, I also have an ingrained, counterintuitive voice that kicks in and immediately tells me I better just brace myself and shut the fuck up, because if I don't accept the situation as is, it might get even worse, and I can't risk that.

So, it went like this: I was in an environment where I was emotionally overwhelmed, though I hadn't quite registered that fact yet. My phone rang, and even though I had promised myself that morning not to answer if work called, I was feeling so off balance by that point that I decided to go ahead and pick up. I was asked to come in, and I absolutely did not want to. And here's the kicker! Because I absolutely did not want to, I believed, somewhere deep down, that I had to.

I hate this thinking. It makes me feel deeply sad and angry and nauseated and a little dizzy all at the same time. Because even though this was a fairly harmless situation, mildly annoying at worst, in the moment, emotionally and spiritually, it felt so much like my childhood. My power was gone. I laid it down because I believed I had no other choice but to do so. But thankfully, giving up my power made me angry. It has always made me angry, which is why I think I survived this long with my soul intact. If it didn't make me angry, I would have given up on life long ago. I would be scattered to the four winds. I would be dead.

I am grateful for my introspective abilities, and that I did not, in this instance, betray myself in some unforgivable way. There are worse things than picking up an extra shift at work. At least I will have made an additional $20 or so on my next paycheck. It's just the way it came about that irks me. The regression brought on by stressful circumstance. The broken promise to myself, an echo of so many promises broken before.