Thank you for sharing Frick!
I've been thinking on your post and this thread since I read your reply. I know I have a lot of work to do on myself.
I have a really hard time explaining how I feel a lot of times and always feel like I'm coming up short with my words. I tried to draw a parallel to it...
It's like knowing I'm capable, intelligent and artistic enough to take a trace by number picture, connect all the dots and turn it into a masterpiece of my own. However I seem to always hit a bump somewhere in the middle where there's a bunch of dots or numbers missing, and I get lost in the great white void of personal interpretation. I can see the beginning, connect the dots to such a point and build up my own steam, then I get utterly lost when left to my own devices... even if I can see the path or the ending clearly. I get engulfed by the void, can see little else, can make no sense of the nothingness, I try and retry doing the middle in different ways eventually, only to be left angry, unsatisfied, frustrated. I can start it over only to get stuck again, I can start from the end and work my way back. I can try doing it in pencil and making multiple copies. I can sit there and think and plan and analyze, I can get group input, I can forge blindly ahead and tear right through to the end. And then if I'm left with anything. If I haven't given up and walked away, I'm left with a senseless mess and total waste of time and work.
This is what my head feels like all the time. Every day. There's a piece missing- more than just a void I'm trying to fill- that I can't quite 'get it'. There's a disconnect that occurs for me so often. A switch that turns off on my head. Like when I look in the mirror what I see is disconnected to how I work internally. Trying to maintain not even a positive or productive thought pattern but just a functioning one is a huge deal for me every day all day long. It's exhausting and extremely frustrating knowing that I'm a capable, mature adult who is completely out of control of her own thoughts. The black and white, paranoid, shifting on a whim thoughts and feelings are also tiresome and frustrating.
I know a lot of it has to do with the abuse I've put myself through and been put through.
It's kind of good getting this out before my therapist appointment. I may email my posts or print them and bring them with. Therapy ain't cheap... I hope that I manage to get some safeguards in place to keep myself going. I have a long standing habit of seeing nothing through.
Unfortunately all this stuff is having a huge impact on the relationship with my kids. More on that another day.
It's extremely uncomfortable writing this all out.