Blue Sunday
Jun. 14th, 2015 22:11![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillI'm starting to see a trend here: Go to party. Have a good time. Wake up the next morning. Fall completely to pieces.
I realize that I had to junk most of my social-interaction habits, and I don't have much experience or modeling for how to build different ones, so a lot of that sort of thing is lacking for Sam. That includes making conversation with strangers, making new friends, flirting, and dating. So, for a while at least, every time I get into that sort of situation I'm likely to fall off the edge of my personality.
At the time, I just get what every other socially-awkward person gets: an uncomfortable feeling that I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing. I sort of wing it, usually, and trust that I'm not going to screw up too badly. Most of the time that works. It gets easier with practice, I imagine.
The added complication comes the next morning (for evening parties) or after the high of the party has worn off: whereas most people look at the awkward situation and maybe chew their nails a little (I hope they liked me), for a constructed personality, running into an unfamiliar situation can have a profound effect on the sense of identity itself. It's like getting an undefined function error in software -- for me, it tends to result in a massive traceback ending in a blinking cursor. At which point I look at my crashed psyche and say, "well, shit."
So I woke up this morning panicking because I had lost Sam. I had run off the edge of myself the evening before, and was left with something of an identity crisis. Since Alison doesn't really exist as a coherent whole anymore, when Sam disintegrates all I have is a mess of reactions based on old experiences, most of them negative, overlaid with a thin veneer of reason. My old abuse history said that I had screwed up every social interaction I had had the night before, and I would never have any friends because everybody will have forgotten me after they had a brief laugh at my expense. It shook any confidence I've managed to gain by being Sam, and I could feel the depression setting in. Usually, when that happens, all I can do is distract the hell out of myself until I can sleep again and reset my psyche.
I decided to bash the depression on the head and force myself through the day. As I went through my morning routine I contemplated the situation: if my distress was because I had lost my hold on my identity, then there should be some way I could re-center myself and do the equivalent of a soft reset. I wasn't sure how to do that, but I fished around for parts of me that I know are stable, things I enjoy, beliefs, that sort of thing. I got a trance track running in my head, which reminded me of Burning Man, and thought again about my decision to get there again this year. I remembered the Burn, and what I feel like when I'm there, and what I value about the things it brings out in me and other Burners. That got me on to my value systems, and I could feel Sam rebuilding around me. At the very least, it stopped the distressing sense of freefall.
By the time I was eating breakfast I was down to the nagging urge to scream, cry, and damage things, but I was otherwise fine. I localized that to the fact that Amy was throwing a temper tantrum for some unknown reason. I finally decided to leave the dishes for later and go for a drive -- I had work to do in Antioch anyway -- in the hope I could sort things out.
Amy, as it turns out, was horribly frightened by all the scenarios spawned by my running off the edge of Sam. She remembers being excluded from a group, and being lonely. I had to remind her that we're not in the schoolyard anymore, and I'm surrounded by compassionate adults now. I was nervous last night because I was trying to impress somebody I really want to have as a friend, but I pointed out that there are many, many other people who I can be friends with out there. (I can think of a pool of 65,000 for starters.) So if one doesn't work out, it's not my only shot. I told her we'll make it work.
I need to build modes of thinking for social situations, and contingencies for high-stress situations (such as when I'm really attracted to somebody). I need to find shorthand tokens that I can hand to myself when I start getting near the edge, which help me regain my balance and confidence. I can't prevent ever falling off the edge, since you never know where the edges are until you step over them, but I can work on thinking through some of these situations and finding strategies for how to stay centered in my sense of Sam.
And I need to keep an eye on Amy, since I may get triggered by cues I don't even notice at the time. Having my child-self upset can undermine my comfort and make me shaky.
I need the emotional support of other people to feel secure and fulfilled, but to get that I need to use social routines I'm not well-versed in. I need to make myself vulnerable over and over. Amy doesn't like that, though I pointed out that strangers don't know me well enough to really hurt me, and if they snub me, they probably aren't people I want to be with anyway. Hardest of all, I need to face my own loneliness over and over again, as each attempt to find someone to connect with makes me keenly aware of my current lack. That also will get better with time and success, but it's a hard thing starting out.
Something I should hold onto is the feedback I got last night. When I admitted to my hopefully-friend that they manage to short-circuit my confidence and calm and leave me jittery, they said that I seemed to be doing okay (and they said with great sincerity at the end of the party that we really need to hang out more). And a longstanding friend whom I don't see very often said that I seemed significantly happier with myself now, and that it was very attractive on me. I knew that Sam would have that effect, and said so... but given how keyed-up I was, and teetering on the edge of myself, it's good to know that the charisma was still noticeable. Bottom line, I don't have to be 100% together to be attractive/fun/interesting. I may not even need to be 50% together. After all, sheepishly admitting one's real feelings can be pretty attractive too, when more polished forms of interaction fail. I guess if I can't be smooth, I can at least aim for endearingly honest.
I realize that I had to junk most of my social-interaction habits, and I don't have much experience or modeling for how to build different ones, so a lot of that sort of thing is lacking for Sam. That includes making conversation with strangers, making new friends, flirting, and dating. So, for a while at least, every time I get into that sort of situation I'm likely to fall off the edge of my personality.
At the time, I just get what every other socially-awkward person gets: an uncomfortable feeling that I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing. I sort of wing it, usually, and trust that I'm not going to screw up too badly. Most of the time that works. It gets easier with practice, I imagine.
The added complication comes the next morning (for evening parties) or after the high of the party has worn off: whereas most people look at the awkward situation and maybe chew their nails a little (I hope they liked me), for a constructed personality, running into an unfamiliar situation can have a profound effect on the sense of identity itself. It's like getting an undefined function error in software -- for me, it tends to result in a massive traceback ending in a blinking cursor. At which point I look at my crashed psyche and say, "well, shit."
So I woke up this morning panicking because I had lost Sam. I had run off the edge of myself the evening before, and was left with something of an identity crisis. Since Alison doesn't really exist as a coherent whole anymore, when Sam disintegrates all I have is a mess of reactions based on old experiences, most of them negative, overlaid with a thin veneer of reason. My old abuse history said that I had screwed up every social interaction I had had the night before, and I would never have any friends because everybody will have forgotten me after they had a brief laugh at my expense. It shook any confidence I've managed to gain by being Sam, and I could feel the depression setting in. Usually, when that happens, all I can do is distract the hell out of myself until I can sleep again and reset my psyche.
I decided to bash the depression on the head and force myself through the day. As I went through my morning routine I contemplated the situation: if my distress was because I had lost my hold on my identity, then there should be some way I could re-center myself and do the equivalent of a soft reset. I wasn't sure how to do that, but I fished around for parts of me that I know are stable, things I enjoy, beliefs, that sort of thing. I got a trance track running in my head, which reminded me of Burning Man, and thought again about my decision to get there again this year. I remembered the Burn, and what I feel like when I'm there, and what I value about the things it brings out in me and other Burners. That got me on to my value systems, and I could feel Sam rebuilding around me. At the very least, it stopped the distressing sense of freefall.
By the time I was eating breakfast I was down to the nagging urge to scream, cry, and damage things, but I was otherwise fine. I localized that to the fact that Amy was throwing a temper tantrum for some unknown reason. I finally decided to leave the dishes for later and go for a drive -- I had work to do in Antioch anyway -- in the hope I could sort things out.
Amy, as it turns out, was horribly frightened by all the scenarios spawned by my running off the edge of Sam. She remembers being excluded from a group, and being lonely. I had to remind her that we're not in the schoolyard anymore, and I'm surrounded by compassionate adults now. I was nervous last night because I was trying to impress somebody I really want to have as a friend, but I pointed out that there are many, many other people who I can be friends with out there. (I can think of a pool of 65,000 for starters.) So if one doesn't work out, it's not my only shot. I told her we'll make it work.
I need to build modes of thinking for social situations, and contingencies for high-stress situations (such as when I'm really attracted to somebody). I need to find shorthand tokens that I can hand to myself when I start getting near the edge, which help me regain my balance and confidence. I can't prevent ever falling off the edge, since you never know where the edges are until you step over them, but I can work on thinking through some of these situations and finding strategies for how to stay centered in my sense of Sam.
And I need to keep an eye on Amy, since I may get triggered by cues I don't even notice at the time. Having my child-self upset can undermine my comfort and make me shaky.
I need the emotional support of other people to feel secure and fulfilled, but to get that I need to use social routines I'm not well-versed in. I need to make myself vulnerable over and over. Amy doesn't like that, though I pointed out that strangers don't know me well enough to really hurt me, and if they snub me, they probably aren't people I want to be with anyway. Hardest of all, I need to face my own loneliness over and over again, as each attempt to find someone to connect with makes me keenly aware of my current lack. That also will get better with time and success, but it's a hard thing starting out.
Something I should hold onto is the feedback I got last night. When I admitted to my hopefully-friend that they manage to short-circuit my confidence and calm and leave me jittery, they said that I seemed to be doing okay (and they said with great sincerity at the end of the party that we really need to hang out more). And a longstanding friend whom I don't see very often said that I seemed significantly happier with myself now, and that it was very attractive on me. I knew that Sam would have that effect, and said so... but given how keyed-up I was, and teetering on the edge of myself, it's good to know that the charisma was still noticeable. Bottom line, I don't have to be 100% together to be attractive/fun/interesting. I may not even need to be 50% together. After all, sheepishly admitting one's real feelings can be pretty attractive too, when more polished forms of interaction fail. I guess if I can't be smooth, I can at least aim for endearingly honest.
no subject
Date: 2015-06-15 16:14 (UTC)