Staying on My Side Takes Work

So last post I was going on about these friends I was worried about. Well, one called me back, she was away at a conference and I had totally forgotten about it. Much easier to catastrophize! I have to laugh at myself. Still not much news from my other friend so my unconscious is still making up stories. I can't remember the exact details, but I know I dreamed about her and her family last night, something about sharing a hot tub with her brother, and a distinct feeling about being in her house when I shouldn't be. I think it's a pretty clear metaphor about me being in her headspace where I had no business being.

Maybe I could give her another call when I finish this, and stop all this speculating. I know she's probably okay because she has a roomate who would have found her if she wasn't. It is quite amazing how preoccupied I am with her. I almost wrote her an e-mail last night and then something stopped me. I wasn't sure what to write. "Are you mad at me"? That just seemed too lame. But maybe I should.

When in fact I am still angry with her in some part of my brain. In some part of my brain I am mad as hell, even if I don't want to feel it. The wave of feeling possibly doesn't have a lot to do with the present. I think it's harking back to some early anger and fear with my parents when I felt emotionally abandoned by them. I have this vision of being some age around 10, alone in an upstairs room in this cavernous, somewhat decrepit victorian house we rented from my father's boss, writing this letter/journal entry being angry and sad and confused because my father was away on business so much. I felt abandoned. I also felt guilty about being so angry, like I was betraying my parents, making too much out of nothing. After all, materially I really wanted for nothing.

But emotionally, I wanted for a lot. I was starved for love and friendship. Enter food. Now that I'm trying to put food in its proper place, I am left with the wreckage of my stunted life skills. I don't know really well how to live here, so I have to rely on the twelve steps as a prototype for living in this world. It's really a how to for how to live your life more effectively, but it's not foolproof and I keep forgetting to do it this way. I keep circling back to my old ways of living: isolate and stew, which doesn't work so well, and then I grab back onto the steps, right myself again and try to resume walking straight again.