Deflection

Well hello folks! I feel like it's been a while! Admittedly, I have started journaling again recently and it has helped me feel like I have less to talk about here because I'm expressing it elsewhere. Which, is healthy for me. But, it's also just been the holidays and I don't believe in spending much time on tech when I should be around family if I can help it. So, here we are! I'm still working on my New Years Resolutions, which I will share with you when I feel like I'm all done, (weird that I'm still working on them, I know... but I also feel like the fact that it's less centered around the first of the year, and more centered on taking the time I need to flesh out how I can best grow and succeed, is what's best for me, so, it's okay that I'm late ;).

Anyway, I have been doing a lot of introspection lately! That is the word of the day! It helps that I drove for 5 hours of our trek to Utah for the holidays... and I had about 4 hours of driving time earlier this week for the trip to and from a doctor's appointment for my son. Driving long distances like that definitely gets me thinking. Sometimes that's why having a roadtrip buddy can be fun, as my mother in law reminded me the other day, because you have a lot of time to flesh out some fun conversations you might not have otherwise had! But it can also be nice to have that alone time to think. And my kids were pretty quiet so I had the blessing of being able to think.

I don't have the time to tell you all the things I realized about myself, or the dots I connected regarding my childhood... and really... it's okay for some of those things to remain only in my head ;) But it was really healthy for me, and I really appreciate having connected those dots. The one thing I will talk about, is that I realized in the last week or two that I have gotten really skilled in the art of deflection. It seems so bizarre to me to look back at myself in some of my therapy sessions and observe just how much I used humor or self deprication to deflect... to keep from feeling vulnerable, to keep myself from crying, to keep myself from feeling too sensitive. Some of my most tender memories with people are times when they just held me as I cried, or even just sat there and listened to me despite how much my body was shaking. The idea that I have so instinctively learned this kind of deflection to keep myself from experiencing those things seems so weird. My therapist said people often tend to close themselves off a lot more around the age of 25.. but it still feels foreign. I understood that I had created a bit of a wall between myself and a lot of my emotions... I understood that I had created that distance, but I suppose I hadn't realized that I had figured out how to stop those emotions in their tracks even when they were right at the door so to speak. My therapist mentioned that our bodies don't necessarily differentiate between physical and emotional pain.... they merely attempt to devise ways to prevent future pain, and it seems I've gotten pretty good at lying to myself or not taking myself seriously in order to keep that distance from how I feel.

I made the connection the other day when I was talking to a friend of mine. Through the course of conversation, it just so happened that it came up that there were a few years of my life where I had one of about 2-3 recurring nightmares (or variations on a theme) just about every single night during that stretch of time. For me, at this point, it mostly just feels like an understandable factoid within the context of my life. But she started asking sincere, probative questions about it, which, no one has ever done. And I caught myself coming off really insensitive about it. Like it was something meaningless that didn't have any effect on me or my life, and that the subject matter of these nightmares was trivial... and I had to stop and apologize to this friend along the lines of "sorry, I don't mean to make light of this, I think it's just how I have learned to distance myself from how much it used to hurt" She understood, and I knew she would. But it did prompt my continued thoughts on the concept of deflection.

Anyway, I don't have a whole lot more to say about the matter. Clearly it's a defense mechanism... But I do want to lessen it, so that I can increase my ability to be honest and genuine, and allow myself to be vulnerable more often again. So, I give you permission, if you catch me deflecting in some way, to call me out on it, so that I can have a second chance at being more genuine in that moment, and letting you get closer to me, by seeing a more real emotion than just me trying to keep my emotions in the bag. And it may be that I end up saying I'm not ready to broach the subject further in that moment, whatever the subject may be... but at least that is more honest than me hiding behind sarcasm or self deprecation, or humor, or laughing at myself. And ya'll deserve that honesty. And I also need to be more honest with myself. That is going to be one of my themes for this year... being honest with myself, about my weaknesses, about my pain, and about my potential.