"They don't sleep a single wink at night cause they're vultures"

 My psychiatrist's house was getting fumigated today so she brought her dog to the office.  This was awesome because Yay, adorable dog!  This was not awesome because it was a straight up silky terrier, which we're pretty sure was the majority of Buckets' lineage.  And I love my 50lbs of brown Nonsense muscle, but I also miss my floppy mess with whom I could snuggle and not lose circulation immediately.

 

We actually ended up talking about my sobriety (bringing my days cried up to five out of five) and how it's not a thing I've done, it's a thing I'm doing.  ((And how I should maybe look for a community of some sort.  Her phrase was that she wanted me to have someone sponsor-esque without needing to go the AA route.) And I know, I am very clear that I am in recovery, that recovered is a label you only maybe get after you're dead and you didn't relapse.  

 

And it taps directly into my need for praise and my fear of praise. I'm afraid of anything I want too much, it's almost certainly a trap or a weakness.   I crave so much validation and praise, i want to be seen, I want to be told I'm doing a good job.  hell, I   want to be good. But I can't accept good as a descriptor, because I'm not, I know what goes on inside my own head, so there's that.  

 

My father spent a lot of time telling me that crying wouldn't get me anything or anywhere.   And that there's always going to be something in your past that you failed at and something in your future that you're going to fail at.   Which, now that I think of it, make the whole living in six month chunks from MRI to mammogram was a lot like that, waiting for the next failure.  (and yes, even though I would never in a million years think cancer was in anyway a failure on someone else's part I think we all know I'd consider it a failure on mine.  After all, sickness is just weakness of will, right? After all it would actually  be my fault because I didn't cut off my already-defective breasts the moment I became aware of my BRCA+ status.  

 

And things that made me feel good always had to be tempered with the last failure and reminders of how precarious the good thing I did was.  After all, he had to make sure I didn't get a swelled head.  'cause look at my little brothers, they could be smart and athletic, and the only reason I wasn't was because I was a quitter who couldn't stick with anything.  Jokes on you, dad.  I stuck with alcoholism a lot longer than the boys stuck with lacrosse or hockey.  Though of course, heavy drinking was just a failure to deal with the cards I was dealt.

 

 So, I want people to tell me I'm doing a good job, and then I reflexively demur every single fucking time.  Well, sometimes I manage to just say thank you and then the demurral is internal.  I usually look for whatever it was I said that was obviously begging for acknowledgment because the only reason I might get acknowledged was pity and pity is bad so I should make sure I'm not saying or doing anything to get pity compliments.  Which shoots me in my own face, because that means I try to make sure I don't get compliments, because that seems like the only way not to get pity compliments.

 

The failed revolutionary in college once told me all I wanted from other people was pity.  This was useful because I hadn't realized up until that point that people could be wrong about me, I didn't understand that I existed apart from an observed phenomenon, that there could be an internal truth that other people's opinions didn't reflect.  Because I think pity is when someone thinks that they could do better than I did given the same circumstances and for all my inability to think well of myself most of the time, there's still a small stubborn part of me that thinks I did better than I had any right to do with my givens

 

I'm not really going to proof this one because iit feels like an impossible tangle and if I go back first I'll try to rein in the polysyndeton and then delete some more and then I'll just say fuck it and post to private and I don't want to do that either.