Tripping myself up again -- a work and anxiety setback

I've been away from this blog for a little while because of broadband issues (all fixed) and work busyness (ongoing, although workwise I'm in a state of suspended animation at the moment.) But while I haven't been writing the blog I've been dreaming up possible blog posts. And every time I think I have one ready to write, something in my life changes and I have to rethink what I was going to say.

The most recent change was a little 'setback' I had in a work context recently. And this has made me take a fresh look at how I approach my life in general. Even as I'm writing this I'm not sure how to change. I just know I have to.

When I have a setback such as the one that occurred (perhaps later I'll be able to describe it in more detail, but it's too close at the moment), a familiar process follows. I go through a a day and night of utter self-loathing and despair. I become a dual personality -- the 'naughty', shamed child who sabotaged a combined parent-and-adult figure, and the angry parent-adult who sees the child's 'misdemeanour' from the point of view of a shocked, judgmental world. The 'parent' feels the shame but has to somehow bear it, and try to mediate the consequences of the sabotage.

As I write this, I understand that the anger of the 'parent' is part of the problem. I also know that the 'child' badly wants attention. But how do I square my psychodrama with the need to appear adult to the outside world? I know I'm supposed to love my inner child, but what does that actually mean when it has an embarrassing 'tanty' that appears to threaten my already limited professional life (and certainly my image)?

What baffles me is that, despite all the self-growth I've undertaken over 25 years, this dynamic -- a neurotic need for attention that becomes a sabotage -- hasn't changed all that much. (I think this blog entry itself is becoming a bit of a tanty!)

The fact is, I'm extremely high maintenance, and I do try to lead a balanced life, but I probably need to manage things better. This is what I think I'm struggling with. I've been avoiding starting to meditate for months now, and even do a very relaxing mindfulness exercise instead, but there's no substitute. With my many problems, meditation helps me on so many levels. Not doing it is part of a more subtle self-sabotage.

Blood sugar is also an issue. It affects me not just by increasing anxiety, but lowering my self-esteem when I'm vague and forgetful because of it. My diet is limited but I put little if any effort into trying to make it strict but interesting, rarely cook anything remotely appetising, and I've been getting a bit slack lately with the kinds of foods I eat. So it's time to take stock, literally, and start looking after myself in that department. What I've been avoiding, I think, is the realisation that I probably need to eat more meat. As an animal lover I don't like the fact that I have to eat meat at all, but I have more energy and focus when I do.

The other things to do -- and these are the hardest -- are: refuse to beat myself up; talk to myself kindly; and be nice to myself.

I'm sorry that this entry is so self-obsessed. I have planned and half-written entries on other issues. But sometimes I'm shocked into the realisation of my vulnerability, and at such times I need to remind myself of the need to ramp up my self-care -- again!

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On the loneliness of dogs

It’s almost two years since I started walking my sister’s cocker spaniel, Jordan, three days a week. Predictably for someone with social anxiety, we stick to a rigid routine – 11.30 to about 12.15 Monday, Wednesday and Friday (going at other times, and encountering an unpredictable mix of people, would be traumatic, although very occasionally I do a Saturday instead).

I’ve mentioned before in this blog some of the ways Jordan has changed and helped me, not least by simply being a companion to take to the park. And he’s a great distraction when I’m chatting to someone – if an awkward social moment arises, he’s liable to do a pooh, sending me scrabbling for my trusty plastic bag.

But being Jordan’s friend is not without its own problems. Least of all the sadness I feel at his closed-in, often miserable little life.

I’ve complained in this blog previously about how little his family care about his emotional welfare, all too happily piling into the car without him and zooming off to some child- and in many cases dog-friendly destination. He’s left pining for hours on the front porch or, if the weather’s good, barking desperately at innocent strangers as they walk past. The family is too lazy to train him so when they have guests they simply tie up the poor little bugger.

It would be easy to query why my sister and her family, obviously not dog people, have a dog at all, and why they keep it, having discovered the effort involved. Wouldn’t it be better to relinquish it humanely, for example by placing the dog with a rehoming program, or trying to find a new owner among friends or family? But I think the answer isn’t that difficult.

For a start, that so many non-dog people do indeed have dogs illustrates just what joiners we humans are. Non-dog people who get dogs do so because other people, often their friends, have dogs. And because they are non-dog people in the first place, once they have the dog and have begun to neglect it, they don’t really care much about the effects of their neglect on the dog.

It’s therefore logical for them to keep it languishing, just as one holds onto an expensive designer dress one has bought on sale and never wears. (Of course I know that many people do abandon their dogs in cruel ways and this represents another level of callousness altogether.)

I’m being a bit unfair. There’s often, as in the case of Jordan’s owners, a great deal of affection for the dog. My nieces love Jordan, and he gets cuddles and inside-time at night, as well as some inside-time during the day when my sister’s not working, at home for a while and not too busy.

But it’s a selfish affection. Apart from the narrow obligations of providing food, a place to sleep and basic veterinary care, neither my sister nor my brother-in-law feels, or fosters in the children, a sense of responsibility towards Jordan. My nieces are never made to feed or play with him, for example. An opportunity to teach the children about reciprocal love is wasted: the dog gives love, and the family benefits from that love, but they’re not particularly interested in how their own lives and love could benefit the dog. This kind of love for a pet is ultimately narcissistic.

I see that narcissism in myself sometimes. I’m gratified by how much Jordan loves and needs me, by his refusal to judge me for coming by just three times a week, taking him to the park for a frolic and then effectively abandoning him to his loneliness. Truth is, I’ve had to learn to be callous to keep going on in my limited role. And often when my bucket of concern threatens to overflow to every chained-up, filthy mutt, every overweight, underloved pooch, every dog I see staring out with a mixture of gloom and wretched hope from behind a suburban front gate, I must empty it out for my own sanity.

But I’m not trying to make out I’m a saintlier person than my sister; perhaps I’m just more self-aware. Although I’m a dog person, I know myself too well to take on a pet full time.

I also know that, paradoxically, it is easy for me to spend time with a dog, whereas it’s more of an effort for non-dog people like my sister. Truth is, I could sometimes spend hours patting, comforting and playing Fetch with dogs. It’s so easy to make a connection with them: to see in their pining, eager eyes the simple language of need and love. And it’s not hard to make a dog happy, to answer that need, even if momentarily – all you have to do is scratch it under the chin, stroke its neck and tell it what a sweet and good boy or girl it is. Humans are so much more complex (although perhaps I am made momentarily happy by giving love to a dog).

Recently I wrote a letter to my sister detailing my concerns about Jordan. I was trying to make her understand that incorporating Jordan into her life (including giving the children some responsibility for him) was better than seeing him as a separate duty that she would get to when other priorities had been dealt with, and would actually help her and the family as a whole. All it would take to include Jordan in the family to a greater extent, I urged, was a little bit of planning.

It went down like a firecracker during a monsoon. In fact, there was no response to the letter at all until I broached the subject. This was when I went to pick up Jordan for his walk on the last day of the school holidays. He’d been playing with my nieces outside, but now they were off somewhere fun, and he’d be home alone as soon as the walk was over. We all stood in the backyard, Jordan already on the leash. My sister did not want to talk about the letter, except to say ‘please don’t do things like that’.

‘He’s clinically depressed!’ I yelled as she walked towards the car.

‘Aren’t we all’, she replied.

Dogs are a wonderful resource that our local communities could benefit from in ways that also assisted the dogs themselves. We don’t need more dogs, in fact we probably need fewer, but we should make better use of existing dogs. This is not simply being dog-centric: I think we’d become a more caring society as a whole. Just as retired people can do countless good in the community, lonely dogs could be utilised for many purposes.

So how could we improve the situations for dogs, and make things easier for their busy owners? Below are some suggestions for drastically reducing the amount of bored, unhappy, unhealthy dogs in our community (some a bit outlandish, I admit).

Some suggestions for a dog-friendly world
It should be much harder to own a dog than it is at present. In a screening process as is used in adoption, you should have to prove your suitability, that of your home, and that you are able to spend a certain percentage of time with the dog. If not able to spend enough time at home, prospective owners should have to guarantee the regular use of dog-minding or pet-walking services and prove they had the money to spend on such dog services.

To compensate for the difficulty of dog ownership, dogs could be seen as community assets, and moves made to share them among the community. A non-profit service could be established to link people who like dogs (including older people) but don’t want or can’t afford their own with people who can’t walk their dogs due to age, illness, disability or busyness. These would not simply be casual walkers but would have the opportunity to establish a relationship with the dog, eg playing with and walking it several times a week. For example, disadvantaged families without a parent at home during the day, such as single parents, could form a relationship with a dog that they took out on weekends.

Puppy farms should be banned and pet shops not allowed to sell animals.

All dog breeders should need to have a licence and their premises be subject to regular inspections.

A free service for new owners, rather like the maternal and child health nurse but ideally made up of volunteers, could be established. These trained volunteers would pay a once-off visit to the home to help the family adjust to the puppy or dog by offering expert advice and guidance. They would check that sleeping arrangements and diet were suitable for the size and breed of the dog, and offer advice and help with issues such as house training.

Governments could fund the use of dogs (and other pets) as therapy in prisons and aged care homes, with these institutions having their own in-house pets where possible.

I know some of these suggestions are a bit 'out there', but it's time to think outside the off-leash area of the park! The dog walking and day care industries would flourish if there were tougher rules about leaving dogs alone for hours, the dogs themselves would be happier, and so would the humans who love them.

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The mysterious life of the psyche: on watching United States of Tara

I hope this blog doesn’t turn into a cut-price television review column, but I’ve been watching the new comedy drama series United States of Tara and had some thoughts about it I just had to share. That Tony Collette recently won an Emmy for her knock-’em-down performance in the series only adds to my need to comment on this innovative show.

For those who don’t watch it, United States of Tara is a US series about a woman and her family struggling to cope with her mental illness – dissociative identity disorder (DID). It’s currently screening on the ABC in Melbourne.

Apart from ‘herself’, Tara’s psyche contains four distinct characters or ‘alters’, one of whom she may temporarily transform into at any time. Each dresses, speaks and acts in their own unique way but most are aware that they’re inhabiting Tara’s body; meanwhile she herself disappears, mentally speaking. Any one of them is most likely to appear when Tara is under stress, and while they are incredibly disruptive, their behaviour indirectly expresses Tara’s own feelings, conflicts and motivations.

Although the show’s makers consulted extensively with DID experts and patients, it does not pretend to be an accurate portrayal of the disorder. The workings of the disease can be more subtle than the obvious ‘switches’ made by Tara’s psyche. And Collette’s depiction of the multiple personalities is highly theatrical; in contrast, alters, apparently, are created by the sufferer as a kind of emotional shield, so tend not to draw attention to themselves.

As well, Tara's alters are always perfectly reflected in her appearance, with meticulously appropriate costumes, props and hairdos, to an extent that it would be impossible for any individual with a complex mental illness to achieve. For example, where did the latest alter, Gimme, who appears to be all Freudian id, get the bright red plastic poncho?

However, that’s all by the by. As even the mental health experts agree, it’s meant to be entertainment.

The reason that I find the show compelling is that every Wednesday night at 9.30 pm I see a woman’s dodgy unconscious causing mayhem in her own life and those of her loved ones. And I see a human being and her family doing their best to cope with the after-effects.

Tara is never portrayed as stupid, weak or childish. She’s a fully fledged person with a career (she paints indoor murals) a family, and the usual concerns of an adult. Her mind, or aspects of it, causes her and her family great difficulties but she is never blamed for them in a lasting sense (her children sometimes blame her momentarily, and her needy sister, Charmaine, sometimes has to be reminded that she is not simply seeking attention).

The subtext seems to be that the kids – Marshall, a sweet, sensitive 14-year-old and Kate, a promiscuous, prematurely tough 15-year-old – will sometimes act out and indeed may suffer psychologically, but in the end have the maturity to keep loving their mother despite her sabotaging alter egos. And Tara’s cute, beefy husband, Max, has endless buckets of concern and love to offer her.

It’s a pretty good model for viewing mental illness in our society. The sufferer is not morally weak for succumbing to illness, just unlucky. Family members are affected by the illness but in the end rally around and some semblance of order is maintained.

But the series is even a bit more sophisticated than this in its portrayal of mental illness.

It’s very common these days to portray psyche disorders as being purely biochemical in nature, with little if any basis in past experiences. There are many instances where this may be the case, particularly when it comes to illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar. But in many other cases, I believe that mental illness has its own logic and is caused by predisposing factors interacting with particular life experiences.

The form that the illness or disorder takes may be determined by the fact that it performs a particular function for the sufferer (for example, enabling psychic survival), rather than being an accident. But the illness is not merely a product of the past – it interacts with the sufferer’s current circumstances as an out-of-date coping mechanism that takes on a life of its own.

The accident, if you like, lies in being predisposed to this form of coping, or even highly sensitive, and having the particular life experiences that led to the original need for such a mechanism. Again, the victim is not to blame. (I’ll reiterate that I don’t think all mental illness has this meaning and function; I’m just worried that all disorders now seem to be portrayed, in the media at least, as being due solely to biochemistry).

Thus, Tara’s disorder is a result of trauma she experienced at boarding school (which incidentally neatly lets her parents off the hook!). Presumably she had a predisposition to the kind of disassociation of which the disorder is an extreme example, but her recourse to alternative personalities is an attempt to deny as well as manage this past trauma.

Yet Tara’s illness also has meaning in the present as a way of dealing with the various difficulties she encounters as an artist, a wife and a parent. If she’s feeling under stress in her parental or domestic role, Alice, the perfect 1950s housewife, rocks up to restore domestic harmony. If her daughter’s acting up, Tara turns into T, the pot-smoking teenage nightmare, forcing her daughter to assume the role of carer. And if her relationship with her husband gets too complex or her children need defending from predators, Buck, the boozy, gun-loving Vietnam vet, makes an appearance.

Again, this doesn’t mean that the sufferer of mental illness is weak or bad. Instead, like all of us, they have an unconscious mind with its own agenda, one that may be contrary to that of the ego.

There are things I don’t like about the show, and my criticisms about it risk sounding hopelessly old-fashioned. But I think what I’m actually opposed to is a kind of solipsism in the characters that poses as sophistication. In trying desperately to be cool, the show wants the characters to be at various times self-obsessed, socially inappropriate, rude and offhand.

There’s heaps of swearing, for example. Don't get me wrong, I’m happy with strategic uses of ‘fuck’ and other expletives. But for me they lose their potency if used too often. I also don't like the disengaged way Charmaine and Kate talk about sex. In the presence of Marshall, a shy gay kid who at this stage is yet to have his first kiss, Kate says of him that ‘he’s chasing cock’, and neither Tara nor Max reacts negatively. The character of Charmaine is particularly narcissistic in the face of her sister's illness, in a way that the show sometimes seems all too happy to endorse (at one point she co-opts a family gathering by pulling her shirt open and displaying the results of a botched boob job).

I know that the show is trying to demonstrate that underneath all this ‘attitude’ the characters are struggling, that they act out in order to cope. It’s also trying to be naturalistic and to avoid being overly sentimental in its portrayal of modern life. And it’s understandably opposing itself to the pious, idealised image of family life peddled by America’s religious right. It must be acknowledged, too, that Charmaine's inability to comprehend that Tara is ill is a common reaction of siblings to mental illness.

But what's actually being portrayed here is the way that pornography and digitisation have combined to produce a new, sexualised uber-consumer, with Kate and Charmaine its most obvious avatars.

This new subject is not confined to the US -- the UK hit movie Love, Actually also portrayed elements of it. But I think in United States of Tara it's combined with a US tradition of straight talking and individualism in an unfortunate way, so that the characters are sometimes applauded for verbally abusing each other (this occurs to a much worse degree in the comedy film Knocked Up -- I don't for a minute believe it comprises an accurate portrayal of Americans, which makes it all the more disturbing). It's a shame, because at times the show is in danger of making some of the characters so unlikeable that I stop sympathising with them.

Still, I’ll definitely be watching United States of Tara for the rest of the series, and hoping the ABC buys the second series. (The story line is continuous, too, which keeps up the suspense). In so many ways it’s infinitely more enlightened than a thousand silly sit coms.

(Oh dear -- I've just realised that although I'm more or less the 'disordered' one in my family, I'm much more like the attention-seeking Charmaine than Tara -- eek! Perhaps that's why I dislike the former so much.)

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A cafe rendevous: my internet dating adventure continues

Slightly Nutty recently got back into the internet dating saddle and wrote in this blog about a prospective meeting with an unattached Gentleman. I promised to provide a ‘date update’, so here goes!

The Gentleman and I arranged to meet in a café in the inner eastern suburb of Camberwell last Saturday morning. His choice of café was inspired: it was quiet, with upmarket but soothing décor, a fire in a closed grate that emanated a silent warmth, next to an intimate, cushioned conversation nook. A delicate morning sun outside. Blessedly no upbeat, irritatingly superfluous music to batter the ears.

Even the timing was good; he entered seconds after I’d sat down, and put out his hand for me to shake. All four people in the establishment stared and must have realised immediately that it was some kind of pre-arranged and probably internet-inspired first date, which I jokingly told him off for, but really, who cared?

Another good sign: he ordered peppermint tea. That’s exactly what I’d been planning to order and I’d been determined not to mention my food intolerances, initially at least. Such relief not to have to explain why I was not scrabbling for a coffee hit.

The Serepax was working beautifully. I’d taken it the night before, planning to capitalise on the double advantage of a good night’s sleep and the anxiety reduction that, for me, continues well into the next day. (I’m an extremely strategic user of benzos and may write a blog entry about this in future.)

I knew the Gentleman had a South African accent and, as it’s not my favourite accent, I was (at the risk of sounding racist) worried that I’d find it too strong. But it was a soft version that sounded almost English.

So what actually happened? How did we get on?

The Gentleman and I are very different – he’s a ‘financially secure’ executive who devours books on world politics and economics, I’m a delicate would-be writer struggling to carve out a living as a part time editor/copywriter. But there were commonalities. I love solving the problems of the world, as he does, and we wrangled with that for quite a while before going into detail about the kinds of films we both liked and why we liked them.

He sat opposite me with his half-smile, a sureness and strength there that I liked. He had solid, meaty shoulders I could imagine cupping my hands on. A goodness of heart, and no anxious desire to impress. Perhaps he is too strong for me but maybe I can throw some conversational punches at him that he won’t be fazed by.

Throughout the chat, in my benzo-induced calm, I struggled with feelings of disappointment: acknowledging them, and wondering what they meant. He was clearly not my soulmate: there was no perfect click, no pure and joyful meeting of minds. I had not found the ultimate home of my soul and my heart, the place at which I could finally rest my head, metaphorically speaking.

I’m embarrassed to read that last paragraph. My last post suggested that because I’d met the Gentleman on a dodgy site, my expectations were going to be lower and I would not be disappointed if we did not find ourselves so dizzily in love that locating the second date at a registry office would be an inevitability.

Bullshit. I brought to the meeting all my deepest desires, and every single girlish hope and fantasy I’d ever harboured.

But here’s the thing: they were tempered with the realism I’ve painfully acquired. I’ve come to a point in my life when I am prepared to compromise to a greater degree than ever before, but only if my intuition – my gut feeling – wills it. I can finally let myself follow that flow in matters of the heart, but I’m also intellectually able to recognise the reality of what’s out there for me now, what someone at my stage of life, and in my work situation and state of mind, can reasonably expect. If I can bring these two things together, intuition and a realistic outlook, it may be possible for me to strike a balance between my youthful dreams and the reality of some kind of relationship, even if that relationship does not live up to society’s current ideal, and cannot fulfil every single need I harbour.

But that’s all still just a possibility. The Gentleman and I will probably have a second meeting. And that’s as far as things have got at this juncture.

One step at a time.

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