My favourite song in the world is Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run", and that's not a coincidence.
I'm not sure when my almost compulsive need for privacy and control over my own life came into being. Probably it was there all along. My Mom tells me I was a classic Indigo Child; intelligent, caring but distant, energetic but always serene, "knowing" to the point where I scared adults, because I looked at them and saw straight through all the surface stuff. I can neither agree nor disagree on this score, since I didn't start analysing myself until I was 8 or 9. But one thing I can say for certain is that I was always the horse in the granite (to use a Maine-ish saying that I'm quite fond of). Always everyone's mother - even my Mom's at times. Always the one who looked after everyone, always the comforter, always the one who kept control of herself. I can remember maybe ten or twelve occasions in twelve years of childhood where I cried.
Some of the reasons for this are obvious. My parents lost my brother Michael when I was a toddler. They were separated; had been for several years, and my two brothers lived with my Dad, so my Mom was pretty much alone after he died. If she hadn't had me, she wouldn't have survived - and that's not melodrama, that's a simple fact. She told me enough times throughout my childhood.
So anyway, I went through my first twelve years being everyone's caretaker, and somehow most of my own troubles got pushed to the side. This was easy enough to do, because until I got sick, I didn't really HAVE troubles. I was a very very happy child. Mom getting together with Brian (who wasn't quite sure what to do with me at the time) was the worst thing I ever had to go through, and although I was admittedly quite bratty about not having her attention 24-7, it wasn't a huge crisis.
Teenage years were harder. I got hepatitis, which turned into ME, and although for the first time I was the one who needed people to help me, there wasn't much point in asking for it; nobody believed I was ill anyway. That was probably when I learned that I had to take care of myself (emotionally, anyway, and physically in some areas) because nobody else was going to. And over the span of my teenage years, I dealt with whatever life chose to throw at me - a painful illness, a boyfriend who tried his best to get me addicted to drugs and subsequently killed himself, various minor crises - and always did it alone. Being an incredibly stubborn person helped; after the age of about 15, I learned that I actually preferred being happy to being depressed and nihilistic, and my stubbornness allowed me to cling to happiness, tooth and claw.
I've given you the highlights, but it actually happened very gradually. And that gradual-ness has made it difficult to see where my tendency towards aloofness actually became a compulsion. But whenever the change occurred, here I am at the ripe old age of 24, happy (most of the time anyway), generally wholesome and healthy emotionally - but completely incapable of giving up control, even to the people I love.
I have family that I get on with well enough. I have friends, a couple of them close. What I don't have, and if things stay this way will NEVER have, is a significant other. Oh, don't get me wrong. I date. I've had boyfriends. I've even been in love. But they don't last. Because sooner or later, whether it's a couple weeks or months or a year into the relationship, I get itchy, and then I run. Because I have this ridiculous need for emotional distance, at all costs. Even if it costs everything.
When I was 18-19, I dated Richard. I loved Richard with every fibre of my being. I'd never been so deeply in love before. But with him, I fell so hard I got tunnel vision. He was my universe. I didn't care about college. I didn't care about seeing my friends. I still did the things that I considered "responsibilities": I attended classes, I worked, I visited Zia in the hospital. But I couldn't think of anything but getting home and being with him. Even Curt, who was undoubtedly my best friend and who I'd had a huge passion for previously (although we never got together - bad timing) didn't hold much interest for me.
And it terrified the hell out of me. So I left.
Not physically. I was still there. But I distanced myself. And that hurt him a great deal. He couldn't understand why I was being so cruel, and I couldn't explain it to him, because I didn't really understand it myself. If I could talk to him now, I still don't know what I would say, beyond telling him that there was never anything wrong with him, that it was never about him not being good enough. It's just...me. You hear that all the time - "It's not you, it's me." And usually it means, "You're a great person, but not the right one for me." Yet what scares me is the idea that maybe one of the ones I pushed away WAS the right person, and I wouldn't let myself see it.
When Curt and I tried to get together, I did the same thing. Different things, but all the same in the end. With Curt, my problem was not so much with distance as with self-control, and my inability to show when I was hurt or needy. Sometimes I got the impression that towards the end of our "relationship", he actually did things to deliberately hurt me, out of this desperate need to elicit a reaction from me. When I consider that the whole 4th of July mess - and everything that followed it - could maybe have been prevented if I just let myself show that I cared, that I wasn't completely indifferent to the things he did (whether good or bad)...well, that just breaks my heart. Not because I still love or want Curt, but because I know the pain that everyone - not just me - went through, and I wish that I'd prevented that.
Or at least I wish I'd tried.
It amazes me that I run from relationships, because I don't run from anything else. Ever. I'm tough, emotionally and physically. People don't always see this, because I'm generally such a sunny happy person, and I look like a fluffy marshmallow. But just about any other situation I can face head-on. Even when Obie raped me I didn't panic and fall apart. Although possibly that too is due to my extreme self-control, who knows. But whenever something goes wrong, I grit my teeth and set my jaw and face it like the granite that I am. And usually, I do it not just with courage, but with grace and humour. Most everything that happens, I manage to retain my inner joy, as ridiculously new-age as that sounds.
At the end of Christopher Pike's book "Sati", the book I was named after, it says of the title character, "Some might say she was indifferent. I know now her ocean of joy was simply too vast to be disturbed by any one wave." Which is all great when you're a girl who thinks she is (or maybe IS?) God. But I'm not, I'm just an average girl who has friends and boyfriends and needs to learn how to let them close.
The thing that brought this whole long post on was my horoscope today. It said:
No one feels comfortable sharing intimate details with a snob. Even though you hope people trust you enough to reveal any relationship insecurities they might have, you sometimes come across as aloof. Show your softer side.
And I thought, could this BE any more accurate?
I know that I have to learn how to be vulnerable, because it hurts people that I don't. It certainly hurts guys who want to know that they're needed.
But I don't seem to know how.
*sigh* I need to think about this some more. I don't know why I wrote this all here. Sometimes it just helps to get your thoughts out, I guess. So all I ask of you guys is to keep it in the back of your mind that I DO care about you a great deal, and although I may not *need* you - or may not appear to - you certainly make my world a lot better.
I'm not sure when my almost compulsive need for privacy and control over my own life came into being. Probably it was there all along. My Mom tells me I was a classic Indigo Child; intelligent, caring but distant, energetic but always serene, "knowing" to the point where I scared adults, because I looked at them and saw straight through all the surface stuff. I can neither agree nor disagree on this score, since I didn't start analysing myself until I was 8 or 9. But one thing I can say for certain is that I was always the horse in the granite (to use a Maine-ish saying that I'm quite fond of). Always everyone's mother - even my Mom's at times. Always the one who looked after everyone, always the comforter, always the one who kept control of herself. I can remember maybe ten or twelve occasions in twelve years of childhood where I cried.
Some of the reasons for this are obvious. My parents lost my brother Michael when I was a toddler. They were separated; had been for several years, and my two brothers lived with my Dad, so my Mom was pretty much alone after he died. If she hadn't had me, she wouldn't have survived - and that's not melodrama, that's a simple fact. She told me enough times throughout my childhood.
So anyway, I went through my first twelve years being everyone's caretaker, and somehow most of my own troubles got pushed to the side. This was easy enough to do, because until I got sick, I didn't really HAVE troubles. I was a very very happy child. Mom getting together with Brian (who wasn't quite sure what to do with me at the time) was the worst thing I ever had to go through, and although I was admittedly quite bratty about not having her attention 24-7, it wasn't a huge crisis.
Teenage years were harder. I got hepatitis, which turned into ME, and although for the first time I was the one who needed people to help me, there wasn't much point in asking for it; nobody believed I was ill anyway. That was probably when I learned that I had to take care of myself (emotionally, anyway, and physically in some areas) because nobody else was going to. And over the span of my teenage years, I dealt with whatever life chose to throw at me - a painful illness, a boyfriend who tried his best to get me addicted to drugs and subsequently killed himself, various minor crises - and always did it alone. Being an incredibly stubborn person helped; after the age of about 15, I learned that I actually preferred being happy to being depressed and nihilistic, and my stubbornness allowed me to cling to happiness, tooth and claw.
I've given you the highlights, but it actually happened very gradually. And that gradual-ness has made it difficult to see where my tendency towards aloofness actually became a compulsion. But whenever the change occurred, here I am at the ripe old age of 24, happy (most of the time anyway), generally wholesome and healthy emotionally - but completely incapable of giving up control, even to the people I love.
I have family that I get on with well enough. I have friends, a couple of them close. What I don't have, and if things stay this way will NEVER have, is a significant other. Oh, don't get me wrong. I date. I've had boyfriends. I've even been in love. But they don't last. Because sooner or later, whether it's a couple weeks or months or a year into the relationship, I get itchy, and then I run. Because I have this ridiculous need for emotional distance, at all costs. Even if it costs everything.
When I was 18-19, I dated Richard. I loved Richard with every fibre of my being. I'd never been so deeply in love before. But with him, I fell so hard I got tunnel vision. He was my universe. I didn't care about college. I didn't care about seeing my friends. I still did the things that I considered "responsibilities": I attended classes, I worked, I visited Zia in the hospital. But I couldn't think of anything but getting home and being with him. Even Curt, who was undoubtedly my best friend and who I'd had a huge passion for previously (although we never got together - bad timing) didn't hold much interest for me.
And it terrified the hell out of me. So I left.
Not physically. I was still there. But I distanced myself. And that hurt him a great deal. He couldn't understand why I was being so cruel, and I couldn't explain it to him, because I didn't really understand it myself. If I could talk to him now, I still don't know what I would say, beyond telling him that there was never anything wrong with him, that it was never about him not being good enough. It's just...me. You hear that all the time - "It's not you, it's me." And usually it means, "You're a great person, but not the right one for me." Yet what scares me is the idea that maybe one of the ones I pushed away WAS the right person, and I wouldn't let myself see it.
When Curt and I tried to get together, I did the same thing. Different things, but all the same in the end. With Curt, my problem was not so much with distance as with self-control, and my inability to show when I was hurt or needy. Sometimes I got the impression that towards the end of our "relationship", he actually did things to deliberately hurt me, out of this desperate need to elicit a reaction from me. When I consider that the whole 4th of July mess - and everything that followed it - could maybe have been prevented if I just let myself show that I cared, that I wasn't completely indifferent to the things he did (whether good or bad)...well, that just breaks my heart. Not because I still love or want Curt, but because I know the pain that everyone - not just me - went through, and I wish that I'd prevented that.
Or at least I wish I'd tried.
It amazes me that I run from relationships, because I don't run from anything else. Ever. I'm tough, emotionally and physically. People don't always see this, because I'm generally such a sunny happy person, and I look like a fluffy marshmallow. But just about any other situation I can face head-on. Even when Obie raped me I didn't panic and fall apart. Although possibly that too is due to my extreme self-control, who knows. But whenever something goes wrong, I grit my teeth and set my jaw and face it like the granite that I am. And usually, I do it not just with courage, but with grace and humour. Most everything that happens, I manage to retain my inner joy, as ridiculously new-age as that sounds.
At the end of Christopher Pike's book "Sati", the book I was named after, it says of the title character, "Some might say she was indifferent. I know now her ocean of joy was simply too vast to be disturbed by any one wave." Which is all great when you're a girl who thinks she is (or maybe IS?) God. But I'm not, I'm just an average girl who has friends and boyfriends and needs to learn how to let them close.
The thing that brought this whole long post on was my horoscope today. It said:
No one feels comfortable sharing intimate details with a snob. Even though you hope people trust you enough to reveal any relationship insecurities they might have, you sometimes come across as aloof. Show your softer side.
And I thought, could this BE any more accurate?
I know that I have to learn how to be vulnerable, because it hurts people that I don't. It certainly hurts guys who want to know that they're needed.
But I don't seem to know how.
*sigh* I need to think about this some more. I don't know why I wrote this all here. Sometimes it just helps to get your thoughts out, I guess. So all I ask of you guys is to keep it in the back of your mind that I DO care about you a great deal, and although I may not *need* you - or may not appear to - you certainly make my world a lot better.
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