Beware of this and that

Where do the weeks go? This week went faster than last week, I think, because I wasn't as tired. I'm still tired, but it's not as bad as it was. I mentioned my fatigue when I talked to Judy yesterday and she suggested that my hemoglobin might be low. We'll find out when we get the results of next Monday's labs. If it's my hemoglobin, I can take an iron supplement and that should help. I don't eat red meat, and I don't think I'd be willing to eat a slab of cow flesh just to get some iron in my body. I eat lots of dark green leafy vegetables, but maybe that's not enough. We'll see.

There's not much to report on the Interferon front. I'm beginning to feel that the title of this blog is misleading. My week was fairly interesting, if not packed with incident, but nothing that happened had anything to do with Interferon or Hepatitis C. I seem to have developed a labial cyst, which will probably need to be lanced, but that's not a terribly interesting topic. I'm wondering, though, just how many medical conditions I can pack into one month. I may have more to say on it next week, after I've endured the pain of having the thing lanced, but for now it's in the future and may not happen at all so I'm not inclined to think about it much.

What's been occupying me for the last week is my latest fourth step. The fourth step of Narcotics Anonymous is, "We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves," and that's what I've been doing, once again. I use the Narcotics Anonymous Step Working Guides for my step work, but usually I prefer to work step four from the information pamphlet called Working Step Four in Narcotics Anonymous. I don't like the way step four is laid out in the Guide. I'm using the Guide this time, however, because my sponsor insisted. I don't know why she thinks it's better than the IP, but I'm willing to take direction from her. The first section of the Guide is on resentments. I wrote about my resentments and then answered the questions related to them. One question was something like, "Do I see any patterns in my resentments?" I cast my mind over the resentments I'd listed and came up with the interesting conclusion that what pisses me off the most in life is feeling unconsidered. I hate to be treated like I'm invisible. The way I feel about it, if you're going to hurt me, I want you to look at me while you're doing it. I don't like feeling that I'm simply collateral damage in somebody else's war.

Nearly every resentment I've ever had in my life can be filed under this category. When I'm driving, nothing infuriates me more than to be cut off by someone who was simply oblivious to my existence. I even get angry when I see that happen to other drivers. If someone cuts me off deliberately, I don't get nearly as angry. At least they saw me. I wasn't invisible. That's a petty example, but it illustrates what I'm talking about, and the pattern I see emerging is that I continually find myself in relationships with people to whom I don't matter, people who, on a fundamental level, are unaware of my existence as a separate and real human being. What I'm exploring in this fourth step is the origin of that, way back in early life. I won't go into too much detail, but what this is about is having been emotionally abandoned and rejected by my parents, although it's not so much about what they did as how I responded to what they did, and how I continue to respond to it in relationship after relationship, with friends, lovers, teachers, even pets.

It's a commonplace in recovering circles that if a person is drawn to emotionally unavailable people, it's because that person is emotionally unavailable, but those are just words. What I'm exploring is the roots of my own emotional unavailability. It's territory I've explored over and over as I've worked the steps, but it gets deeper each time. My addiction is the part of me that wants to stay sick and separate, that wants to isolate me from the warmth of human companionship and from a connection with a higher power. So the way my addiction responded to that early rejection and abandonment was to tell me that I wasn't important enough to care about, that I didn't matter to other people, and I went through a good deal of my life believing that. It wasn't conscious, but now that I'm looking for it I see it all over the place. I was labeled a rebellious and defiant teenager, but I didn't feel defiant. I simply didn't recognize that my behavior had an impact on other people. I didn't feel important enough to have an impact, so it never occurred to me that my mother might worry about me when I stayed away for weeks at a time, not even when she told me she did. I just did whatever I felt like doing and assumed that no one was paying attention. Slowly, over a long period of years, that conviction lost much of its power, but it's still been operating under the surface, particularly in romantic relationships.

What's coming up now is the pain of that early abandonment and the anger it aroused. I never felt pain over it. I even felt a bit defective because of my lack of emotional response to something which would universally be recognized as painful. But I learned in infancy how to deflect and bury my emotions, so I never became consciously aware of the pain. Until now. The way I see it, we're born knowing what we're worth, but that knowledge gets buried under the avalanche of human experience. For some people it's deeply buried and for others there's just a thin layer over the top, but by the age of five everyone has had experience, to some degree or other, with rejection, ridicule, derision, injustice and any number of similar things which erode the self-worth we arrive in the world with. It's still there, though, under the surface, and I'm now seeing just how angry I got with my parents for having treated me as though I didn't matter.

They didn't. Of course they didn't. At least, they didn't mean to. There were extenuating circumstances. They were dealing with the death of my four-year-old sister, who was hit by a car two months before I was born, so naturally they didn't have much to give to the newborn infant who'd just arrived on the scene. It wasn't anybody's fault. It's just the way it was. Nevertheless, the damage was done, and it pissed me off to feel unconsidered. It wasn't personal, of course, but the question that comes to my mind is, Why the hell not? It was personal to me. And so I've gone through life getting pissed off every time I feel that someone has treated me as though I were invisible.

I see the contradiction. I seek out people who are unable, for one reason or another, to see me, and then I get angry with them for treating me as though I were invisible. That's the story and the box it came in. I'm sure that there are many schools of thought on this sort of subject, but my particular bias tells me that it's my addiction at work, trying to keep me sick and separate, trying to reinforce that original response. And the answer to it is to allow this wound to be healed by my higher power. Steps six and seven should be interesting this time around. Recovery is never dull. The endlessly fascinating spectacle of my own inner workings can keep me occupied, amused and entertained for the rest of my life.