Feeling….something

I’ve been alone all weekend. W is at a family reunion and The Boy is visiting his grandmother. I was sick most of the weekend, and today is really the first day that I have felt vaguely human again. Stupid sinus cold!

Anyway, so all day today I’ve been….feeling something. I’m not sure what it is and I’m doing my best to just sit with it, but that’s hard to do when you have no idea what it is you are feeling. I’m doing great about not covering it with food or anything of that sort, but I do find myself disassociating in front of the computer or escaping into useless things like television. I know that is not the most effective use of my time and I feel like maybe if I could figure out what it is I’m feeling, I could do something to work with it, instead of having it work so hard against me.

Well, I sat with it awhile longer. And when I couldn’t shake it, I decided to employ some DBT skills and do some opposite action.

I just wanted to sit on the sofa and just dwell in the feeling bad. So I got up and started doing some cleaning in the living room. Having been sick all weekend, the house had gotten a bit out of control mess wise. In fact, it was messy to the point that I can’t believe it got this bad with just the dogs and myself here. How in the world? Anyway…..it really needed to be done and it was *something* I could do.

While I was cleaning, I realized what has been going on all day.

The house was a mess.

Yep.

That’s what it was. With my family out of town all weekend, my plan was to really thoroughly clean and organize the house.  Both W and The Boy have ADHD, so organization is very difficult and I need a free weekend occasionally to give all of our systems a tune up and revamp the things that aren’t working for us anymore.

The cold that I had been fighting off all week started getting pretty crappy on Wednesday night, and was a full blown sinus infection by Thursday at noon when they left. I started taking antibiotics right away and figured I’d be better by Friday or Saturday at the latest. Here it is still Sunday evening, and I’m still pretty miserably ill. I feel significantly better today than I have in the past few days, but I’m still sick. Probably too sick to be doing house work. And here’s where the crazy emotions come in…..

When I was a kid, my mother never believed me when I was sick or injured. I had to beg her to take me to the doctor when I was as young as six. so, when I became an adult, I began lying about being sick in some weird attempt to get attention. I feel incredibly guilty about it, but I know there’s nothing I can do about it other than change my behavior now and not do it ever again. But I do feel an incredible amount of guilt and shame. And so, even when I am really sick, I feel like people are not going to believe me and that I’m really just being lazy. That guilt and shame consumed me today as I looked around my messy house and realized that my family was coming home tomorrow evening and I hadn’t done a single thing that I had told them I was going to do.

They would never expect me to do the work while I was sick, but I set these expectations of myself. Feeling disappointed in myself for not living up to my own expectations, coupled with feeling guilty and shameful for being sick…..well no wonder I felt so shitty earlier.

*sigh*

Now I’ve identified the emotions. (Guilt, shame, disappointment)

I guess the next step will be to figure out how to validate my emotions when they rational, because obviously in this case (illness and a messy house kind of go hand in hand), my emotions were perfectly rational.