The hiding thing.

by Lucy Viret on 29/08/2010

Just a quickie tonight, really.

One of the hard things about my particular brand of stuff is that quite often I find it very difficult to figure out what it is that’s actually bothering me.

Today, I am feeling scattered and disjointed and confused.

This is a pattern – I’ve had this feeling before. I want to say that it’s an identifiable “comedown phase”, but I’m not certain that’s the actual truth.

What I do know is that I associate this feeling with the time immediately after the high of discovering something new or of being deeply into something. So that does suggest “comedown phase”.

I associate this feeling with a panicky sort of worry that it’s going to last forever. And my memories (which I don’t trust) do tell me that I can get stuck in this phase for very long periods of time.

More worryingly, I feel like the next phase after “scattered and disjointed” is “repress the fuck out of that” and the natural result of this is more and deeper depression. I’ve been severely depressed for a year, I’m still ill with it, and the last three months have been particularly bad. I don’t want two days of “oh wow this is a cool new thing” to turn into another three months of depression.

(They probably won’t. I have this irrational fear, though.)

So I wonder if I can help myself out by creating safety and boundaries for myself.

Perhaps while still respecting my apparent need for connection and like-minded people.

Of course, I’m wondering like mad how to actually do this. The things I do to keep myself safe don’t feel particularly productive or helpful, they feel like a set of bad habits. And they’re not particularly conducive to keeping myself connected to the world.

I’m talking about the “hiding thing”. Not posting on my blog. Not even opening Tweetdeck to lurk, never mind actually tweeting. Turning my phone off, or just letting it run out of charge (it’s been sitting on the shelf by the front door, turned off, for about 4 months now). Staying away from World of Warcraft, the Kitchen Table, and other communities where like-minded people hang out. Not arranging to meet up with friends. Not looking at Facebook. Not posting on Livejournal or Dreamwidth.

The list goes on and on and on.

The hiding is a great way of protecting myself and reinforcing my boundaries. But it starves me of connection (apart from connection with my parents, who I live with, but that on its own isn’t enough for me). It starves me of the like-minded people I need.

So how to interact with like-minded people while still keeping myself safe and respecting my needs for safety and boundaries?

There’s something amorphous here about wanting deeper relationships, and also being afraid of deeper relationships. A conundrum, that. I’m great at forming relationships that are briefly deep and intense, and then running the fuck away – in fact, that’s my overwhelming pattern. Relationships that are ongoing and actually work for me? Not so much. (Oh, and that’s epically hard in ways I can’t really explain properly.)

Perhaps the answer is making a friend who has similar patterns to me – the deep and intense followed by the breaks to recover – but there wouldn’t be any guarantee that our needs for intensity and taking-a-break would ever match up.

This post is incomplete. The thoughts are incomplete. But I’m not sure where else to go with it.

Once again I have no solutions.

Once again I ask for no advice.

Just writing this stuff down is, as usual, helpful.

Oh, and apparently, this turned into that post about the hiding thing, which I said yesterday I probably wouldn’t write. So there you go.

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