Berrybean

And sometimes it's really hard to distinguish between the two - fir me anyway. Lol. Mad isn't it.

Hope your back is easing up. Not good in your line of work x

BrendaChenowyth

Yeah, I need to get some weight off. Part of the problem was sitting too much, part was.. I needed a new bra. LoL. I feel better but when I was on the treadmill today my back started to bother me but it was at the end of my 2 miles. Doing anything beyond that, for now, is just going to be based on how good I feel.

But anyway, I got a new job today! Not officially yet, but my old boss? She had started her own company, and when I called her today, she had a case in mind, it's a 12 hour, on a Saturday, which is exactly what I want. So next Tuesday I'll go in and square away all the paper work. And then go from there.. I haven't made any moves regarding my current job yet, but I will be having a lot more wiggle room, and just the fact that I took the first step and opened a new door, I feel much, much better already...

So I did that, I voted today, I went to the gym, fixed my burned out headlight.. Decided to try to get together with a friend to go to the casino soon.. *nodding* Looked like a good day. I think I need to get a new hair cut to go with all this new stuff in my life.

All of which.. yes, had to do with my original post. I was just checking to see if I'd gone completely off topic. No, this is me getting comfortable with my new world. But I can probably let the thread fall off the first page

BrendaChenowyth

It has come all the way around... I don't feel like I fit in here.

Dee74

you mean here at SR or wider, BC?

D

BrendaChenowyth

I think that maybe the disconnect I feel is between my new self and my AV.. causing me to feel less connected here on the forum I've spent so much time on.

I get on better with some folks now. My real life personality has caught up with my online outgoingness. I now click extremely well with both of my parents! I clicked with someone I had just met... actually, the woman I replaced at my current job, at the residence where I work as a caregiver, I took over for her when she quit on account of the insane family circus.

I noticed something today that I keep going back to... I now speak my mind with less of a filter. That is to say, I am appropriate to the situation or the topic. I can be firm and to the point. My tone today while talking to someone must have been so much of a departure from my normal sweet, nice, agreeable, cheerful tone, that her response sounded irritated.. I noticed enough of a tonal change to think that I had caused it. I likely did, although to me, I was complaining about a situation in a tone that was appropriate to how I felt about the situation...

What I'm getting at is that when someone you know has come to expect a certain personality from you, a certain easygoing tone.. probably bordering on airhead pushover, which I was.. Suddenly you being more stern registers to them as you being bitchy AT them.

Someone who met me now would know me as an outspoken person, and either feel very at ease with me because what you see is what you get, or feel ill at ease because I wasn't being kiss-assy. I want to be around the kind of people I can be real with and be respected for it.

It's just becoming increasingly clear I will continue to clash with the people I currently have relationships with.. Again, I am not being mean or inappropriately pushy! It is more that I am being clear about what I am thinking, and interceding when I need to (ie, safety), instead of being standoffish for fear of offending or upsetting.

Over the past year I split days taking care of this lady with another caregiver, older than me, who everyone thought was very pushy.. My new eyes can see that she was never that, she simply had self respect and backbone enough to do the right thing and not back down... She would speak her mind especially over the phone and smart enough to resist the urge to engage in an argument, would say her peace and then say "You have a blessed day, buhbye now" and hang up.. and everyone thought it was so rude.. it wasn't, she was really just wishing them a blessed day.... which was much better than arguing, cause face it, she wasn't in the wrong usually lol

I want to be that kind of person.. but it won't work where I am at and I gotta get out and move on.. I don't think I will get along with everyone I meet but I KNOW I will end up in ugly situations with these people...

BrendaChenowyth

I'm sorry I just had to thought-dump.. it was a long day and I'm running on 3 hours sleep from last night.

If there's one thing this election has taught me it's that I benefit more from guarding certain choices or opinions... even denying when I need to deny if I think the truth is going to hurt someone I care about.

Berrybean

Personally I found that people just took a little getting used to the more direct BB. Once they'd ceased stopping in their tracks and staring at me nonplussed whenever I was firm and didn't get all emotional about everything, lots of people commented how 'well' I seemed. Including my boss and the school inspector lady who comes in to monitor us and who gives each of us a short 'meeting' when she does so. I'm still not someone who gets overly involved with the social side of things at work, mostly because I don't enjoy being in large groups. But people have occasionally sought me out to ask for advise or dicuss their own problems and worries which isn't something that had ever happened to me before.

Loved your observations about that lady (ie how you saw her then compared to now). I do think that we have a shift in perspective as we start getting weller. Some days can switch back to crazy-needy though for me, and they are the days that I know I've missed doing something in my program or not taken care of those HALT triggers.

Every day I start with this prayer, based on Mother Ts 'Do It Anyway ' prayer ...

God, help me to accept that people may be unreasonable and self-centred. Let me forgive them anyway.
Help me to accept that if I’m kind, people may accuse me of ulterior motives. Let me be kind anyway.
Help me to accept that if I find happiness, people may be jealous. Let me be happy anyway.
Help me to accept that the good I do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Let me do good anyway.
Help me to accept that I may give the world my best, and it may never be good enough. Let me give my best anyway.
God, help me to remember that it is between you and me. It was never between me and them anyway.

Glad you're feeling well-er BC. Keep on keeping on, and Do It Anyway xx

BrendaChenowyth

I still haven't made a move at work... It's work, it's my income, I don't have to make an unsure move with that... This is mostly me talking to myself lol

There will never be a time when it is appropriate to tell the person on the other side of this codependent relationship that they have been treating me wrong. They may get angry, deny it, argue, get depressed, or go back and forth between all these before accepting. They may never accept it. They would truly be grieving the loss of something they counted on for a year now. They really counted on me being there in the capacity I have been...

I can, however, stick up for myself appropriately in situations that come up as we go forward. My current exit plan? Starting with the new company, and dropping the old one at such a time that the new company give me full time hours.. They will accept cases based on having a caregiver who lives near them, and I can go to them.

This is just going to be my dumping ground for thoughts... Since I have accepted that I will never be able to approach these people about my feelings and thoughts, I am afraid I will find myself being passive-aggressive... The cat brought a field mouse up on the porch and I saw it there and could have removed it but left it for HIM just 'cause! :P

I feel like I need ways to vent.. hopefully I will do it more constructively...

I hope I don't slip and say things I shouldn't. I have become comfortable being myself and I am a loud mouth. The one niece of the lady I take care of is really childish a lot of times.. I envision myself just calmly saying "You must be very much at home in your second grade classroom". Maybe if I dump it here, I won't dump it on her in real life. I was going to say it very nicely!!

I have been ragging on a lot of people responding to the Clinton loss but ***** footing around it.. measuring their words and clearly avoiding saying what they mean.. SHUT UP AND SAY SOMETHING REAL!!!!

I have found I have no more tolerance for people who were the way I was before.

Example from the past: I was talking to two women and suddenly they had a funky face on. It was hard to read, it could have been disgust, or confusion, or offense, or I don't even know what, lots of things that weren't good.. it just wasn't a nice face. I didn't know what to say, I suspected perhaps they might not have heard me.. I had made that same face at people before when they got my name wrong or said something I couldn't hear, because I was afraid to say "My name is..." or "I didn't hear you".

Why are we afraid of something so simple to do? Why do we want to risk offending or confusing the issue by just making an ugly face and not speaking up? 'Cause let me tell you something, who I am right now, if I ran in to a stranger and they gave me that look, and I was in a particularly bad mood, I would have smacked that look right off their face. That would be an off chance, but in general I would just out right say "What's the look for?" I would have no problem with that. Would I get offended if someone said to me, however nicely, "What's the look for?" Yeah I would if i were insecure or in a bad mood. Do I care if I offend someone without meaning to? No, because I am just trying to facilitate clear communication.

Why can't more people speak up and communicate effectively?? Wouldn't we all get along so much better??

BrendaChenowyth

I talked to a really close friend tonight, we had a long talk, we hadn't talked in two months... I didn't bring up my number of sober days but he could tell I was doing better and I told him as much...

One thing I found was that he wasn't aware how low and insecure I was, he couldn't see that in me, no matter if i was drinking or not.. he does understand the positive changes that happen when we stop drinking. He is also an alcoholic.

I didn't ask him about his sober time but during our phone call he was distracted mid-thought by his fiancee walking in to the room to check if he was drinking. The conversation had been good and he'd been expressing himself very intelligently as is usual.. After that happened, he was unfocused, lost his train of thought a lot and couldn't really string together his words.. When we got off the phone he said he needed (needed) to go watch a movie he really likes.. because it's stupid and mindless and he's watched a million times and it lets him shut his mind down. And my thought was... Do you think that when you're still in it, when you're still struggling, when your partner has just come to check on you and see if you've been using, and you need to take your mind off THAT and move forward, that you should be doing something mindless and habitual that keeps you in low consciousness and addictive thought??? So that was my thought, what I said was, I wonder if it's best to do something habitual and mindless, I find a lot of times I feel more positive and get farther away from where I don't want to be, by doing something I haven't done before, changing something small, being engaged.. Just a thought I hope stays with him..

And I hope that as time goes on he gets well but he's been in and out of rehabs of all kinds and seems to be in a really low place.. his humor protects him from showing it, but I saw it near the end of call... I hope we can always maintain a friendship based on mutual trust, which we've had, and bond over shared strength, rather than shared struggles... I fear he won't find me relatable as time goes by...