{"id":5278,"date":"2013-12-09T11:30:41","date_gmt":"2013-12-09T18:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/?p=5278"},"modified":"2013-12-09T11:50:06","modified_gmt":"2013-12-09T18:50:06","slug":"and-now-back-to-your-regularly-scheduled-melodrama-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/?p=5278","title":{"rendered":"And now back to your regularly scheduled melodrama"},"content":{"rendered":"

I didn’t see or talk to anyone in my family Thanksgiving day.\u00a0 I couldn’t find it in myself to be the bigger person and call:\u00a0 Hey sorry I hand-grenaded your holiday plans!\u00a0 Let me call and bask in how not-family it was for you.<\/em>\u00a0 When no one called me, I let it molder.<\/p>\n

Two days later, I called my mom and apologized.\u00a0 We hardly remembered it was Thanksgiving,<\/em> was my mother’s breezy answer from across the country.\u00a0 I spent the day sorting out your grandmother’s estate.\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0 Which might not sound that bad, unless you know my mom, in which case you also know that doing accounting\/legal\/bills drudgery is her most reviled task, taken to new lows since it involves the death of someone she loved.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, my MIL came to our house.\u00a0 She was perfectly kind, made a turkey, played endlessly with the kids.\u00a0 I could hardly bear it.<\/p>\n

Ideally, one should be, you know, thankful<\/em>, for every scrap of goodness during this particular holiday, especially when segments of one’s life are going shitty.\u00a0 Failing that, one should at least have the decency to fake it reasonably well for the joy of others.\u00a0 Instead I was an inconsolable, moody asshole.\u00a0 I couldn’t even muster the grace to offer an explanation to my MIL.\u00a0 To do so would have been implicitly or explicitly asking an adult to forgive me\/ tell me I was OK\/ etc. The idea felt like drinking poison.<\/p>\n

I spent a lot of time considering what it would mean if my own approval is good enough, if I stop twisting my life in order to win someone else’s OK.\u00a0 It made me realize how tied up in approval seeking I am, and how those are perhaps good skills for a child, or even an adolescent, but not for a woman who turns 39 this month.<\/p>\n

To be motivated primarily by acceptance, for me at least, is to be in a constant state of hiding, of being ready to jettison aspects of myself that don’t meet someone else’s cut.\u00a0 It feels incredibly lonely, and weirdly incompatible — by always seeking acceptance, I’m painfully aware of how the whole of me never actually sustains OKness.<\/p>\n

I’ve been frightened about where my place in the world will be if I let go of all these approval-seeking behaviors.\u00a0 Will I be one of those angry middle-aged women who (I previously thought) embarrass themselves with their outspoken ideas and their lack of toeing the social graces line?\u00a0 Eventually, though, I always come back to this:\u00a0 I could continue to think like a little kid, but that does not keep me safely in the position of being a little kid.\u00a0 It doesn’t keep me youthful\/ beautiful\/ acceptable.\u00a0 It just makes me a weird middle-aged woman who never matured.<\/p>\n

Recently, Middle’s had an ongoing health scare, my BFF (who knows I am Anne!\u00a0 Gak!)\u00a0 separated from her husband and is moving away, another friend is going through a horrible divorce and has to move, an acquaintance my age who had a low-level cancer issue went to surgery and they zipped that person right back up without taking out anything because HOLYSHITCANCEREVERYWHERE,\u00a0 something I spent a lot of time working on failed, and a distant relative died.\u00a0 So pretty much, my world right now has a thick smog of GENERALLY NOT OK hanging over it.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m just sitting here trying to breathe and be OK with the NOT OK, and not to slip back into asking for someone besides me to say if it’s OK.\u00a0 (It doesn’t take a genius to see it’s not.\u00a0 Not OK is OK.)\u00a0 (That is my mantra.)<\/p>\n

It’s incredible to me, that before I saw this damaged, approval seeking aspect of myself, some part of me must have understood 1) how to be healthier and 2)been looking out for me.\u00a0 This blog is my jettisoned personality traits.\u00a0 Instead of truly losing that part of myself, it got saved.\u00a0 Better, actually — it’s been nurtured by all of you.<\/p>\n

Like I said, I turn 39 this month.\u00a0 I want to put myself together and be OK.\u00a0 So.\u00a0 My given name is Natalie.\u00a0 My real name is Anne.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I didn’t see or talk to anyone in my family Thanksgiving day.\u00a0 I couldn’t find it in myself to be the bigger person and call:\u00a0 Hey sorry I hand-grenaded your holiday plans!\u00a0 Let me call and bask in how not-family it was for you.\u00a0 When no one called me, I let it molder. Two days …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-imcomingout"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5278"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5287,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5278\/revisions\/5287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annenahm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}