I Want To Talk About Jealousy, I Want To Talk About Praise
7. The Recovery Diaries
I want to talk about jealousy.
I want to talk about praise.
Those are the two lines I wrote this week, one after the other, as prompts to a post I was yet to figure out.
In my Complex PTSD brain, praise is transactional. If it’s given, I must work to keep it. If I’m not grateful enough, it’ll be withdrawn. It’s precarious, not a gift out of nowhere from a stranger or a friend, no strings attached but something intimate that intimates threat, a cold wind about to blow, a high pedestal from which I can be knocked. I think shit, now I’ve got to work to keep it and that person hates me or is about to. It’s immediately weaponised. It becomes a matter of isolation and I react to it like risk turned up a notch.
I’m jealous of other lives. Mick Jagger makes me depressed, Helena Bonham Carter makes me lonely and Giffords Circus makes me certain I’ve taken a wrong turn. I compare my insides to their outsides as if they have no trouble or pain. I objectify them and de-humanise.
This is what my outside and inside look like:
My outside is relatively organised, and I can list easily my achievements and pieces of luck, the aspects that make up what people know of me and see. My inside looks like a Francis Bacon painting.
The truth is that my life was stolen, to the extent that abuse is theft. The experience causes the survivor to imagine there’s another path going on into the distance without them, another life, the one they were supposed to have. That sensation gets translated into false pictures. I watch a Rolling Stones documentary and think there it is, the life I was supposed to have! and I get depressed. And the same when I meet Helena Bonham Carter at a party or hear about Giffords Circus, I think I may as well give up now. I’m not a musician by the way. Or an actor or an acrobat. I’ve never aspired to any of those lives. I don’t know why they get it in the neck and not Margaret Atwood. It must be the sheer fame that they represent, the stellar height, their imagined untouchable-ness. They must in some way represent safety for me.
It was the grooming that got me into it in the first place, the position where something precious could be stolen. And that’s how these paths converge, where these two ideas meet, these lines, these lives that rattled around my brain this week – I want to talk about jealousy, I want to talk about praise. There’s the connecting tissue. The outsides of people I don’t know, the insides of misdirection, the idea that anything can be got wrong, praise as threat. I’m avoiding ending this on something pithy about destiny, about how there’s no other life but this one, how all experiences make us but I’m not convinced I’m succeeding.
"The truth is that my life was stolen, to the extent that abuse is theft." says Eleanor. Indeed ...
You're succeeding in the writing. No question about that. .. Others: Read her!
Don't we all do it ??Or am I damaged too ....must be , if you look at my life it has been a wild ride !