1973—FLU Part 1: HEALTHY OR NOT, I’D HAD NO CONSCIOUS CLUE OF REPRESSED FEAR DEMANDING MORE STRENGTH THAN I'D HAD TO GIVE

1973—STORY PART 1:  HEALTHY OR ILL, I’D HAD NO CONSCIOUS CLUE OF REPRESSED FEAR DEMANDING MORE STRENGTH THAN I'D HAD TO GIVE

First things first—this story was penned several weeks ago, and as I've decided not to change a word and as intuition, which writes my posts, tends to dash, back and forth, across my life's personal time line, I'll preface changes in time periods with dates—so here goes:

2018
Though both infections (flu and bronchitis) have bitten the dust, my brain still feels faint when I stand up.  Good thing I’ve learned to respect my limitations so as to think twice before demanding feats of myself that prove above and beyond my current ability to fulfill as that had not been the case in the past due to this fact:  Over most of my life—until my 60th year—I’d no conscious clue that my repressed fear of disappointing others served as the kryptonite that smote my smarts so as to have weakened my self worth, causing my super-human strengths to collapse, leaving the strong spirited person I’d believed myself to be as flat as the gingerbread man, who, having failed to outrun his fatal flaw, found himself out foxed and eaten alive.

However, few were the wiser as to how flat my spirit had become, because the magnitude of this monumental change took place silently behind the stoic mask of my persona, where no prying eye could spy the heights to which my re-emergence of latent anxiety had spiked.  And thus, like the gingerbread man, whose ego had tripped him up, my greatest failing had been not knowing myself, through and through, suggestive of one whose defensiveness had need to focus only upon emotional strengths while dismissing vulnerabilities that snuck out whenever I'd felt too afraid to look inside and clearly see both sides of myself.   (Well, guess who is adding insights to that which was written several weeks ago—what a surprise—NOT!)

As this story tells of an illness that incapacitated all of my strengths in 1972, I'm relieved to note that my reaction to my most recent physical illness has, over time, developed the intuitive clarity necessary to differentiate between the re-emergence of yesteryear’s unresolved anxiety and anxiety based in a near and present danger, today.

Thank goodness, I've learned that the eruptive nature of emotional reactions has no concept of time passing, which is why my repressed fear of feeling unlovable (unless I was well enough to satisfy the expectations of others) had focused my conscious awareness primarily upon fulfilling the needs of others, leaving my basic needs hanging on the line, rain or shine.  And it's important to note that though no one expected me to meet their needs when I was physically ill—that did not stop unidentified anxiety from rising within me.

In short, I’d pushed forward to deliver the mail, no matter the emotional weather, until my transportation vehicle (my body) broke down or my spirit simply ran out of gas.  And since I'd delivered with a smile, no one had a clue as to when their expectations of receiving the mail from me far exceeded my ability to deliver without stretching too far for my own good.

So where, you might ask, do these unrealistic expectations stem from?  Well, mine stemmed from misperception concerning self worth when I was three years old.  And as to expectations that others had of me?  Well—give away everything for free , beginning at the age of three; watch expectations continue to grow; you know what I mean:  Give’em an inch watch human nature push for a mile.

One downside to habitually feeding the egos of others is the fact that their sense of entitlement, to which they remain blind, grows ever more bold.  Stop feeding the egocentric needs of those you love, and watch their defense systems bite hungrily into your cloaked (but now naked) vulnerability without checking to see why you can’t deliver that which had seemed no problem, before.

I know this to be true of human nature, because at those rare times when my spirit was so low as to be unable to muster the inner strength necessary to satisfy my loved ones’ emotional need of me, their expectations grew so angry as to fling subtle yet pointed insults (which felt like jagged bricks cast at the ego that calls my head home), and the weight of these assaults (attacking my most admirable character traits) were so passive-aggressive in manner as to cause this world class pleaser to silently hang her head in shame (because my self assertive voice had not yet developed the courage or clarity to reply:  I want to keep serving your emotional needs, but I've surpassed my over achieving, personal limits of endurance).  Why shame?  Because repressed guilt, directly associated with repressed fear, arose, suggesting my Partial agreement with assaults that crushed traits of which I'd rightfully felt proud.  In short, there's only one thing more confusing than loved ones hurtling bricks at your heart when you’re down for the count.  And that's the swirling sense of inner conflict that transforms intelligent thought processors into head spinning churns.

And so in silent (emotionally churning) response to each unexpected attack upon my character, I'd felt as if the injured portion of my ego had need to step aside so as to free my intuitive powers to burrow yet another layer deeper into my subconscious whenever a hot spot, where latent anxiety awaited to leap back to life, was pierced, anew, causing me to feel like Henny Penny, running around without her head, crying:  “OMG!  The sky is falling, and I've been such a bad girl, again, that when everyone finds shelter in which to huddle together for safety, I’ll be left all alone in time out!” Oy!  Needless to say, this is not what I'd thought.  This was a feeling that triggered unidentified and thus unresolved anxiety to strike, repeatedly, whenever the frightened little girl, hiding behind my adult persona, had been given reason to awaken feeling lost in a repetitive nightmare, anew.

Pleasers of the world, identify your role in your family so as to unite and calm your fear of not doing enough when, in truth, you very rarely fail to produce a super duper share of that which proves to be above and beyond whatever is actually needed until your vehicle of transport (your conscious mind or healthy body or both) runs out of gas, and you hear yourself called:  Weak.  Or fragile.  Or worst of all:  Selfish!  Geez!  (If anyone actually listens when you finally admit to and voice emotional exhaustion, and if that person's defenses do not tune you out then I call that person a true friend.)

Once it had been my experience to grow aware of my need to separate those who'd 'used' me from those who'd truly befriended me, my intuitive powers flipped the switch of its spotlight on so as to illuminate strings of insight that enabled me to save my sanity from feeling sucked into a swirl of emotional confusion, feeling all alone in my own private, deeply confounded, darkly despairing, spiritually depressing, solitary cell in a Hell, which had proved unwittingly, partially of my own making until I'd acknowledged need to seek out professional help from well-trained individuals who'd coached my conscious awareness ever so gently toward identifying and reconsidering my unhealthy, subconscious guilt-ridden thought patterns, and thanks to their astute diagnosis of PTSD, my spirit, drained of energy, began to sense sound reason to fire up anew, one spark of insight at a time, until I’d felt self-inspired to work conscientiously at identifying my primary need to rescue my sense of clarity from the dark clouded misjudgments of loved ones (who had feared identifying both sides of themselves), and thus did I work to save my sanity, beginning at the advanced age of 60, by fact-checking details, which encouraged me to embrace attitudinal changes for the better before I'd stumbled blindly off of the cliff where the bottomless pit of Never Never Land had been waiting to swallow my self esteem whole ever since my baby sister died when I was not quite three—and as lasting character traits develop between birth and five years of age, professional guidance proved essential to resurrecting early life memories, which having been repressed—suggests how courageously I'd had to work at restoring the hindsight that eventually redirected the existential nature of my intuitive path—pointing to the fact that between birth and three, I'd experienced sound reason on both sides of my family to develop a strong-spirited, inner sense of personal worth!  Therefore, peeling away at all of the layers of insecurity, which had piled up over the next 53 years was key to uncovering and unlocking the self assertive voice, which had been buried alive along with the sassy side of me.  (And as life long habits are hard to break, even today, my need to consciously get a grip on my line of emotional control knows to take an immediate time out on the spot to calm down anxiety that threatens to erupt before my self assertive voice feels free to clearly speak its mind to certain people, today.)  *And now you know why children, who have suffered traumatic loss, have need of professional guidance no matter how sweetly compliant they ‘act’ on the surface ...

If you’d like to know why I chose to end the paragraph above with the suggestion that my intuitive powers are credited with enhancing my brain's capacity to spotlight insights concerning my inner need to reconsider personal misperceptions, concerning my injured self image, please tune in tomorrow when hindsight will offer you glimpses of me, zooming back and forth across my life’s personal time line so as to collect memories, which may turn up in a disorganized fashion so as to need to be re-assembled like puzzle pieces in order to construct the bigger picture that heightened my self awareness concerning inner strengths and vulnerabilities, thus making up today’s composite nature of my whole.

And if you ask why these memories may be caught up into a net in a disorganized manner, I’d reply:  It's not unusual for the subconscious to cough up insights in disarray, causing our intuitive powers to throw that net and fish around until we come to see how one detailed experience leads us to react to those that follow, which—seeming similar in some way to the first—line up, one after another until a pattern of emotional reactiveness has been set in place.

In short, we’ll see how easily and often a fearfully defensive mindset confuses apples with oranges, because they’re both fruit of a similar size and shape and both grow in groves on trees, suggesting that both have so much in common that on a darkly cloudy day, one grove can be mistaken for the other.  And thus do we come to see why each gain made in terms of emotional clarity is akin to taking a step toward logically saving our sanity.

PS
When we come together, next, please be certain to straighten your thinking cap for this reason:  Though I’m going to do my best to simplify emotional complexity as my story unfolds, it should come as no surprise if an important detail or two doth not get scooped up into the net where insights, jumbled together, await being lined up in such an orderly fashion as to build an element of logical objectivity into an experience, which had originally been subject to emotional over-reactiveness on both sides ...