These are not first–(or almost-first)-thing morning pages today, and this feels like Monday, which in a sense it is as yesterday was a holiday while today it was up at 6:30 and at ’em. Not feeling too well, seem really to be coming down with a cold. Feeling overwhelmed, somehow. Have things to do, don’t want to do them, have a headache (sinus infection in the making?). I just feel flattened and thoroughly “what’s the pointish.”
In meditation, the prompt was to visualize someone you have difficulty with or don’t like. I let a face I know creep in, and the first thing I noticed was that it had a pert yet also miffed expression. An odd mixture, it made me think of passive-aggressiveness. But it was a true fit for the face of the person I now had in mind. And as I visualized that face, I felt how angry it made me. That is, not she whom I was visualizing was making me angry, but her facial expression itself set me off. It’s one that this person has used while shutting me down during times when I tried to assert myself. And feeling my anger over pert-smug-miffed face made me realize there was a connection to the frustration I felt around my mother, around the absence of “good” mirroring. The anger I felt was my frustration over wanting her to feel something, to have a genuine emotion for once. And then, unsummoned, my father’s face, which could freely mirror emotions that were real, including not just, say, his insufferable choleric rages, but genuine and gentle liking-ness, too. As in: I see you, I like you. And I guess what makes me angry about the people I dislike and/or have difficulty with even this late in my life is that they don’t see me, and their emotions seem unreal to me. Of course they have emotions that are real to them. But from where I’m sitting, it looks like they’re playing a bullshit game, and not just with me but with just about everyone.