Small update: I feel much better (meaning I no longer feel sick, just tired). No training tonight, instead Maryse and I will go to one of our favourite restaurants, but I’ll likely return tomorrow. Then, who knows? The priority will be resting.
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Hello My Lovelies,
In post one in 2020 we offered to publish anonymised comments from people if they wanted to raise issues in an anonymous manner. Today I received such a request.
You will find it below,
Anonymous Post
Marriage is hard.
Getting married is hard. Staying married is hard.
I think we were comfortable with each other twenty-five years ago because we were similar. We’d both been hurt. Attacked, emotionally and verbally, by people in our past. We both had wounds and low self-esteem. We kind of got each other, and we wanted the same safety buffer between in our relationship.
The difference is, I saw my hurts. I talked about how the bullying in fifth grade had affected me, how I was still afraid in certain situations and still angry about it. She didn’t see hers. She almost scoffed at me, said the teasing had never bothered her. She said her family’s fighting was a sign of how secure they were with each other – they could fight and still love each other and it didn’t mean anything. She often told me how dysfunctional my family’s conflict was, and I used to believe her.
And here we are. Over the last 20 years I’ve grown. I’ve healed. My family has healed and worked through it all. Things have changed. And I’m beginning to understand that she’s still back there.
She says, “you are enough, you are enough, you are enough” to our kids, subconsciously desperate that they might believe it and I can see that it’s her that doesn’t know it. For me, one of the most healing moments of my life was when I acknowledged “I am not enough.” Listening to the theme song from Scrubs, go ahead and laugh. How freeing to see that, to own it, to let it be ok.
I’m not enough. The kids aren’t “enough,” in this sense. They are loved. They are exactly what they need to be. And they’ll fall short and fail and succeed and overcome and break some things they didn’t want to and only be able to put some of them back together. That is enough. That’s ok. Being told, or telling yourself, that you are enough while facing down daily failures that tell you you’re not – that tension is crippling.
You’d like to think that someone suffering from low self-esteem and past wounds would be approachable. You love them, you can draw near and comfort them. Reassure, encourage, take a first step with them, experience some victories with them. Yeah, that’s sometimes how it is. I’ve now learned that other times people have an aggressive manifestation to low self-esteem. Like a bear in a trap. It’s hard to maintain an encouraging, supportive approach when you keep getting clawed or bitten. I could, for a while, and it really did help. But I’m not enough, I couldn’t keep it up for the duration needed with all the blood being drawn. I can’t do it. And each time I fail, the failure overwrites any support I was able to give.
There’s also past trauma. Not her fault, but hers to carry. An aggressive father who was stubborn with a quick temper. Kids make rules to keep themselves safe. I did. I’m not free of those rules, either, now that I’ve grown up and my mom has healed and I don’t need them anymore. But it seems like she is still governed by hers.
Don’t let anyone around you get angry. Fight back, overwhelm, the best defense is an overwhelming offense.
Don’t allow mistakes. Not in yourself, not in anyone around you. Mistakes are an opening for them to attack you.
Keep a door at your back (emotionally). Always be ready to leave.
There might be another one, don’t let someone else make you feel bad. Which has a lot of good uses, but when you are attacking your spouse and children and then getting angry at them for being hurt because it makes you feel bad, the tool has broken.
I’m not perfect. She says I think I am. I don’t. I’ve had to divest ownership of a lot of the above because I can’t own it and I can’t fix it. And I get how that divestment can feel like self-righteousness, though it’s scope is limited to these things. It’s like high tide – yeah, I’ve got lots of rocks but the water is so high it’s hard to see them. It’s hard to tell what they are affecting underneath this overwhelming flood. When (if) the tide ever goes out, I’m under no illusions that all my rocks will still be right there. And maybe they’re already there, and bigger than I think. But I see how she interacts with her kids, with her own family – I’ve tried fixing myself and fixing myself and fixing myself and it’s not working.
She says I’m conflict averse. I used to think that I was. A therapist disabused me of the idea when she asked why I kept bringing it up. And she helped me see I’m not really – not at work, not with friends, not anywhere else. Just with my mother and my wife. It’s specific to things about these conflicts. And I think, now, it’s because there’s no point in having conflict with someone who just wants to hurt and to win. With someone who’s terrified of the conflict themselves. The conflict doesn’t help anything, as it’s supposed to.
It’s so hard. It’s always tangled up. It’s never just one thing or just one person. But after years of pondering I don’t know how much I can do about this.
We broke up once while dating. About a week. Big fight (on valentine’s day), hard talk. Agreed to take a week off and scheduled a call for the next weekend. The next weekend I apologized, we talked a long time about her grievances. Once that was settled, she was ready to hang up. I asked, “What about the stuff that hurt me? What about the things I asked you to think about?” She said “I don’t remember what you said. I didn’t spend any time this week thinking about you.”
I should have known.
We almost called off the wedding once, too. And early on, when I was talking through troubles with a friend, he told me I was describing an abusive relationship.
I remember being deeply unsettled during premarital counseling as well, with all the things they brought up that I didn’t have answers for.
I think about these a lot, lately. I was too young, too wrapped up in problems myself back then to see and to understand.
Now, present day – I’m hurting.
I’m not leaving, not thinking about it. I will not share the kids. And I’m not ready to torch things. It’s not me. But I’m hurting and I don’t know what to do.
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For what it’s worth: big hugs. Big digital hug, but hugs nonetheless.
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This sounds like a complicated and sad situation. I hope that writing it out helped bring you some clarity or at least a bit of a release of the constant tension that seems inevitable given what you describe.
I’ve had therapy many years ago. In my case it was mostly me shouting into the “void”–talking at the therapist who listened and barely said anything. I was definitely feeling pain at the time–albeit a very different situation from yours–and it worked for me to talk it out. But there was a professional on the other couch who asked some very pointed questions.
You mention having had therapy yourself at some point but the situation seems to have evolved from that? With what you describe, the only advice I feel I can give is too seek professional help–again.
But beyond that, if writing about it helps you, this thread is here… so please feel free.
I hope you can find a way forward with less pain.
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Whoever you are:
Big, big hugs. I hope writing all that helped. Naming things has power. It makes them real, and real things can be addressed.They can be fought against, or nurtured, as the case may be. But first, they must be made real.
I ran into someone training a few weeks ago, who’s going through something similar to me and we both, I think, realized something at the same time: Very, very few people think of the caretakers. They think of the victims. The sick, the injured. Their mind goes there immediately. First. Sometimes only. I don’t think any less of them for it. I get it.
But we need to talk too. We struggle. We need help. And it’s easy, SO easy, to lose sight of that. To… I don’t know, wrap yourself in helping the other one and forget about your own issues. But you need to. You deserve to.
And if nothing else will do the trick, and I know it might not, because I needed to understand this, nothing else got through: If you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of someone else.
So take care of yourself.
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Sending you love
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My partner told me last night that she doesn’t believe I will ever succeed as a writer.
I mean, she’s probably right. But it really, really hurt to hear.
It is making it very difficult to edit my next novel past the mocking laughter of everyone in my head right now. If my parents don’t believe in me… if she doesn’t believe in me… what am I even doing?
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That does sound like a disheartening conversation 
At the risk of sounding flippant, you’re already way ahead of everyone who “has a book in them” but never actually writes it.
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Ouch. OUCH. Talk about having your legs swept out from under you.
FWIW, I remember the first chapter of the first Caitlyn Morcos - the opening, the characters, the pacing, the voice, it was really top notch. You’d shared here about your process - lots of cycles on the first parts and then hurrying for a deadline through the rest. But I saw in that opening what you can do when the text gets all your attention.
I think you can do it.
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Agree 
% with this - all I have are two half written things from the 90s and 2-3 stubs of ideas. You have already done much more.
And I know that doesn’t deliver the ‘success’ bit of the argument if you are looking for money or infamy, but it does deliver it if you are looking for following your muse. But the only way to follow through is to keep writing, keep improving, keep finding an audience - you never know what might hit!
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I can’t even write a contents page. That’s how bad I am
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Day 4 of vacation (not counting the weekend) and man, I could get used to this… Just 9 years to retirement…
Only bad thing so far is that my hips are killing me. It’s been very humid lately and my joints don’t like it.
But I’m resting up and that’s so wonderful I could cry.
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I have only managed 1 book before I went back to my old kind of job (for my brain code writing is adjacent these days). Writing fiction is as hard a job as I am doing as a software dev and for the most part you get far less feedback and fewer pats on the shoulder for your contribution. Plus I can tell you it is hard even as a side gig… I am unable to write any fiction after my dayjob, howevermuch I wish it was not so.
At work, I get quite a bit of admiration for having finished that one book from all the people who haven’t written one even though they have never seen the struggle. Most can’t even imagine themselves writing a book.
I think for the people around you it is much harder to retain that admiration because after a while they only see the struggle. But without experiencing it themselves.
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You’ve already succeeded as a writer way more than 99.9% of people who want to be a writer - you are actually a writer. You’ve written stuff and are writing more.
I must say, it seems a somewhat unsupportive comment. But unless she’s an enormously experienced editor/publisher specialising in your genre, she certainly doesn’t know. And even if she is, she might be wrong!
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Nonsense! You’re already a success as a writer! I have The Hunt for the Wind’s Howling Rage and it’s a great read: rollicking good fun.
Keep at the editing. I’m off to buy another of your novels immediately in protest.
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I did some hardcore tax stuff adulting today.
It’s a one time thing. But this was the most difficult thing I’ve had to find energy for in ages. Why is adulting so hard? My work really isn’t all that easy but this is waaaayyy more difficult.
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Why is adulting so hard?
I stumbled upon this video the other day, and I think it might be one of the most useful things I’ve ever watched.
Right at the outset it describes things that I’ve always struggled with in terms of brain chemistry with an explanation that has never been given to me before. I’ve not yet tried to verify what he says, but if it’s broadly accurate then it might be explaining the precise manner in which I sabotage my own efforts to get things done (which can be summarised as “postponing the hard thing you need to do by doing something you’d prefer to be doing is not merely delaying the hard thing by that same duration, but additionally is actually making it physically more difficult to gather the motivation to do the hard thing, making it more likely that you’ll fail”).
The rest of the video is more or less “well that sucks; what are some ways in which we can try to work with our biological constraints to get the outcomes we want?”.
This is probably old news to some of you, but it’s information I didn’t have previously, and I found it a tremendously enlightening watch. The presenter is really good, so I believe I’ll be watching more from this channel.
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That is a really good video. And I didn’t know most of these things. Especially not about the dopamine levels.
But I can tell you that after I sent of the documents today, I was yelling happily that I was done for a whole minute.
I already tend to schedule the hard tasks for mornings. There is a German saying “Erst die Arbeit, dann das Vergnügen” (work before fun) which has been a personal mantra for a good while. But his explanation about “fast dopamine” activities is complete news to me. I haven’t been scrolling since my reddit app on the phone shut down but I have some bad food habits that I only managed to break in the last two months–or at least I hope I broke them. It still requires quite a bit of discipline to not be a person “who begins snacking when they are stressed out”. Maybe I can figure out a better way to frame that from the video…
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I’d forgotten I’d posted this. The whole thing has been sort of disturbing, with some longer lasting effects.
For a week or so after this. I had reduced range of motion in these muscles (which are mostly involved in ankle movement as you walk), and vastly reduced strength endurance. I had to walk a couple of miles three or four days later, and about halfway through, I couldn’t lift my toes so I had to do a goofy knee raise to keep from tripping over my own foot. (It didn’t help that I was wearing dressy shoes that squeeze my toes together.). I had a similar experience on a hike on our end of summer vacation, fortunately right at the end, and not on top of the “mountain”.
It’s only in the last few days that I’ve had the same strength in both feet. One of the weird exercises I do for ankle mobility is a tibialis squat, where I squeeze the ground with my toes and use the tibialis anterior to pull myself into a partial squat. (I do this while brushing my teeth, because I’m usually already barefoot, and what else is there to do?). I do it standing on one foot, alternating, and couldn’t do it at all on the left side until now, while the right was fine.
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I now have an 18 year old
He’s in Berlin so an hour ahead. About to go clubbing for the first time
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