dailyprompt-1878 – Stories That Are All True

Daily writing prompt

What strategies do you use to cope with negative feelings?

I have always used music as a strategy to deal with negative feelings, because I don’t indulge them. Music changes my mood to what I’d like it to be versus what it actually is. I think it also depends on the quality of the negative thinking. Am I looking at a hard reality of a situation, or am I committing “doomscroll of the mind?” First, I have to decide what is valid. The feelings that are valid can stay, but music is what helps me decide what’s signal and what’s noise.

I love complex rhythms, driving bass, and Nashville-studio tight harmony. Not all of the music I listen to is country-infused pop, but those anthems tend to have the most complex chord structure. I drive down the highway listening to music that has touched me for many years, such as “Prayin’ for Daylight” by Rascal Flatts or “Cruise” by Florida Georgia Line. But country/pop is nowhere near all of me. It’s just the quickest way to put me in a good mood, remind me of my Texas roots and all that.

My toolbox for getting rid of negative emotions gets way more ridiculous than Nashville. If I am having a really bad day, I need to refocus with ABBA and Aqua. It is a whole mood:

Mr. Jones (changed to “Dr Jones” for Martha- it’s a Doctor Who thing)
Take a Chance on Me
Barbie Girl
Lay All Your Love On Me
Cartoon Heroes
Dancing Queen
Fernando
Take a Chance on Me (again, because I love it so much)

These are the songs I listen to when I am feeling the most anger or rage, because it quiets it instantly by making me laugh at myself. Even “Lay All Your Love on Me,” the modern Bach-like chorale, makes me laugh with its dated sound.

It’s me. I’m dated.

The main point is that I don’t sit in negative feelings. I try to find a way to exorcise them so that they don’t last very long. Or I’ll say to myself, “self, it’s okay to be sad about this. You have three minutes and 14 seconds to get it together.” So I fall apart for one song and one song only, then go about my day. There is nothing like a full and complete breakdown in the middle of the day, and with mental health issues you do not focus on shutting feelings down. You just focus on containment.

Right now, I am dealing with the harsh reality that I am loved as a product but not always as a person. People are drawn to what I can create (whether it’s writing, singing, or prompting an AI), and it gives me a halo I do not deserve. It is a large pedestal from which I will fall. I have seen it happen so many times and it always makes me sick to my stomach when people have the realization that art is magic, people are not. My writing may be profound, but inside I’m still three little boys stacked in a trench coat.

Writers spend their whole lives figuring out how to hide those fragile children.

One of the reasons there’s no one else for me besides Aada (until further notice) is because we’ve already been through that hellacious cycle of both putting each other on a pedestal and both violently falling. We are free to just be people in the world. Of course I am open to other relationships and will seek them out. I just know what I want, and I won’t settle. Whoever is coming after her does not have big shoes to fill in the “I’m trying to replace Aada” sense. It’s that anyone who wows me has to wow me to that level. I want to be absolutely smacked over the head with your brilliance, no matter who you are.

I’m thinking about that today because someone contacted me on Facebook dating and said, “what’s up, the antileslie dot com?” It collapsed my writing identity into my dating identity, and I instantly saw red flags. This is because of nothing this person has done yet. It comes from someone else asking me out on a date, reading three years’ worth of entries before it, and treating me like my current answers to questions were all lies because I’d said something entirely opposite three years before, as if thinking is not allowed to evolve once it has been written.

And honestly, that was a problem with Aada as well. She tended to treat this blog as a set of stone tablets instead of a foundation built on shifting sand. That everything has a cycle, and nothing stays above the fold for more than a day. It allowed Aada to feel that my words were stone and hers were sand just by the very nature of mine being written down.

She is right about that, I suppose. That history belongs to those who write it down. But what I did in this blog was present Aada as a thinking surface, the person I bounce ideas off of, the person I told all my trauma to, the one who experienced the fallout of it all and still wanted to send me birthday presents afterward. I did not deserve them.

There were moments when I was a bloviating asshole, but that came from such a limited understanding of myself. There are so many things I wish I could go back and change.

Aada would like to believe that she did nothing and I betrayed her out of nowhere. The reality is that she built a structure, didn’t nurture it, and was surprised when the house fell down.

On both our heads.

My choice is to rebuild trust and create new boundaries. Her choice is to pretend nothing ever happened and walk away. It kills me because so many changes are happening in her life right now that I just hear through the grapevine and wish I could exclaim with her. I don’t intentionally try to get information about her or anyone around her- it is the ethereal nature of social media. The only choice I have is to be at peace with all of it, because there is no world in which her ghost does not visit.

In these moments, I reach for orchestral themes that mix eastern and western music:

This is the new song on my radar that makes me think of Aada, because it’s as full and beautiful as she is- mythic and deeply textured. And all of this is about my journey away from her, because I am only hoping that this is a time of interim and not the close of show. There have been so many periods of interim in the past that it is seriously not for me to know whether this is really the end. The only thing I can do is be clear about what is going to happen on my end:

I will not be mercurial.
I will listen to understand, not to reply.
I will listen more than I talk overall, because I have this space. If it needed to be said, I probably already said it.
I will build toward a future instead of focusing on the past.
I will do better at letting Aada know when she is forgiven, but there is an aspect of the conflict that needs exploring…. that it is not a matter of continually punishing her, but that thoughts run through my head without organization.

These are the things I can take with me into all new relationships that aren’t dependent upon Aada. I already know that while my scalpel is accurate, my bedside manner needs work. The longer I go without contact from Aada, the more I know that it’s time to take the lessons I’ve learned and feed them to someone else, once they have actually asked me for food.

Because the truth is that anyone who is in partnership with me is going to have all the same problems Aada had…. and all my friends/partners before her. When I write about my life, my friends retreat. I have more success writing about AI than anything else, because then my friends aren’t afraid to share me in mixed company. But it doesn’t actually help me in any way to write about more than myself. The introspection is the point. These few minutes I spend every day in self-reflection help me to be a better person in a way that writing about topics doesn’t.

I understand me. I understand that when my moods are bad, I need music to change them. I understand that for most people, I am a product, and I have to guard against it. I have to have rules, like “I don’t date fans.”

I have always said that I wanted to be with someone who was completely unimpressed with my writing.

With Aada, I did a bang up job in making sure she’s never impressed ever again.

And that thought leads me back to more music, because only melody and harmony can act as bandages for that particular injury.

What strategies do you use to cope with negative feelings?

My childhood was a series of stuffing down emotions, both positive and negative, because I was in show mode. So, until I was about 17, I didn’t have any coping skills for getting angry. I didn’t have any coping skills for other people being angry at me. Sometimes when I’m in meltdown, I still don’t, but I have a better shot now than I ever have. Mostly because I’m old enough now not to react just because someone says I should.

Sometimes, when people are angry, I dissociate now. It is easier than feeling myself get upset because I don’t like me when I return fire. It may look like I’m not standing up for myself, but I feel like I get a lot more accomplished just by letting people say whatever it is they’re going to say and “holding my applause until the end.” That’s because even if the problem is me, the solution is not going to come from me.

The solution is going to come from letting them have their feelings out, making them feel heard, and validating that what they’ve said is emotionally, if not factually true. Emotions are not logical, yet none are invalid. It’s a tough road to walk, but easier than getting defensive. I have a fragile ego and a stunning vocabulary. I don’t need “short fuse” added to the list because no one needs my anger. It’s hard to get people to listen to you when you’re not angry, impossible if you are.

People don’t see passion about something if you’re angry. They get defensive and double down. It’s much easier to get what I need if I wait until they’ve had a chance to get whatever it is they need from me off their chests. I stay quiet until the yelling is over, because people are extraordinarily pliable after they’ve yelled at you. The emotional energy in the room feels lighter because their anger is gone. They’re in a space to actually talk.

A lot of people use this pliant stage to manipulate people into getting what they want because they know the other person feels guilty they got angry. I use it to be able to talk in the quiet instead of in the heat of the moment, because I’m not going to get another chance where your ears are this open….. at least, until after the next blowout I don’t want to have.

In essence, while I sat there and waited, you wore yourself out enough to be vulnerable with me and I know it.

It reminds me of Supergrover’s letter, honestly, because in the beginning she really let me have it. It was the best thing ever. My girl was back. She took me on like a prizefighter, and I let her because she needed it. She’d saved up all her negative feelings for years and just blew me away in one page…….. and then she started talking about why I e-mailed her in the first place, and all her anger melted into the woman I know and love. The velvet hammer. Outset Boudreaux has nothing on her.

So, was it more important for me to respond to the part where she was angry at me with fire? Or was it more important to realize that she’s angry and to let her have her moment? Be silent. Take it all in. As I told her in my reply, “I find that I have more questions than anything else- that it’s time to listen and not to talk.” I don’t know what will come of it, but I know I used the best coping strategy for negative emotions that I have- which is just to let go.

I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future because we both want the safety and security of knowing what’s going to happen without doing anything to help it along. We’ve wasted more time than we’ve gotten along and I’m so tired of it.

Our personalities are so opposite because I want to talk about everything. I want to know why my writing hurts her, because until I do, I can’t fix anything, thus limiting my ability to make her happy. It’s better that I don’t know how to make her happy, I think, because if I did, I’d lean toward it, perhaps even without realizing it….. convincing myself that this was my blog when really it’s “everything I do to walk on eggshells.” I’m not having that relationship ever again….. with her, or anyone else. I was able to pick out the pattern because I’ve been in it so many times. Nothing about this relationship is exclusive to her, because I know how I work in relationships and a lot of this is my fault.

We’re just not using our strengths. For instance, our age is nebulous. She does not see me as older than she is emotionally, but I am…. by a lot. I don’t see her as older than I am chronologically, but she is……. by a lot. It’s not a slam, it’s inversely proportional. I got emotional tools she didn’t. She got logical tools that I didn’t. We make a good team, but we’re armed to the teeth without any trust left at all.

Except there will always be a bridge where I stand and work on my negative emotions; I cannot think them through with the hope that my beautiful girl will see what I’m doing and respond. What I can do is recognize that working through all these things will prepare me for something else down the road, and who knows what that might be? I need her to listen to me. She’s dead set on that not happening. So, when she doesn’t listen to me, I do what I do best.

I listen to me.

It’s how I deal with negative feelings.