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Thanks, guys (Mark Shar)...there's more to it

Posted by chdurie2 on October 11, 2000, at 18:11:15

Mark & Shar:

As I said, thanks, guys. I don't know if Pritzker is coming back or not. Her second-to-last posting (which I didn't see before I wrote) suggested she might be receptive to these things, and perhaps I pounded the nail in haste. Nonetheless, I'm not sorry.

First, thanks Mark, for your compliment on my writing. That from the guy who is probably the best writer on the board (don't take offense, Phil!) I take as a real compliment - as an aside, do you write professionally? I used to be a journalist, and I can tell you that you write better than 95 percent of the journalists out there. (Your treatise on depression turned me into mush-not hard to do.)

And Shar, I'd be interested in hearing about your "start-again" at 48, and what you said about reflecting on your defenses and what they cost you - we probably have at least a bit in common.

but...back to Pritzker's situation. After finishing my cry over Mark's piece on depression while in the shower an hour ago, I realized the reason I poured so much time into this.

And I must confess that there is a little bit of Pritzker in me, an aspect that i was talking to my p-doc only yesterday. And that is, there have been times in my life - some even recently - when I have wanted to be someone else - I mean, specific other people. I've never taken as far as Pritzker has, but there have been specific other people that I have sought out, partly for the pleasure of their company, and partly in the hope that some of them would rub off on me. I've also been too needy in relationships/friendships with both men and women, needing them to approve of or affirm my worth - feeling that I was "less than" or nothing without it. I've wanted what they had or seemed to have, as if I had nothing myself. And I've done this so much that I don't know who I am - and have only recently begun to have the courage to try to find out. (Other people could describe me, but I was dependent on their descriptions, good or bad or neutral, for my own self-definition.)
For example. I used to want to have my p-doc's life, not such a stretch geographically, because he lives practically around the corner from me in a small town. (He practices in a much bigger place, and I became his patient shortly before finding out from a friend that we were practically neighbors.) But I went as far as once driving down his block to check out his house and asking my friend what she knew about him personally.

I guess the fact that I no longer want his life (not because of its quality) but I'm more curious about building my own is a sign I'm making some stride in therapy - that from someone who has changed little, despite almost too many years in therapy. So I can identify with a germ of Pritzker's misplaced envy taken too far and her stubbornness in wanting to pursue her way.

On Saturday, I re-saw the movie, "Single White Female," which is about a woman who becomes roommates with other women in order to take on their identities and later kills them when life tells her she cannot "be" them. It's a horror-suspense movie, but to me, the real horror was in the psychosis of liking yourself so little that you would actively try to become someone else.

So, you see, although I reacted very strongly, underneath, Pritzker really hit a sensitive nerve of mine.

And Shar, please do write back, either here or in e-mail about your attempts to start a new life at forty-something. It's so weird when my acquaintances have kids in college, and I feel like I'm just growing up for the first time (my p-doc would agree with that.)I'll tell you one thing I keep reminding myself - that my doctor, when I was in my 20s, one of the best I ever had, told me then that he started med school when he was 49. And he told me that in 1975, when he was in his early 60s; so he did it before it was acceptable to do such things.

BTW, my e-mail address is chdurie2@aol.com


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poster:chdurie2 thread:988
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