I guess that doesn't matter, then 🤬

[dorchadas]

I didn't realize how extremely annoyed someone telling me they would do something, putting it off to a later date when I asked about it, and then completely blowing it off without any acknowledgement or apology would make me. I spent a bit of time today thinking that I was overreacting, and then I realized that no, I'm not. It's reasonable to be annoyed at someone for failing to follow through on their soft commitments and not even apologizing or offering a reason when I mentioned it today to try to reschedule. The reasonable conclusion is that they don't care

This is a bit of a flash point for me, because I spent thirteen years being unable to trust whether something I was told would get done would actually get done (it was about 80% chance it would happen). Sometimes I was told it would get done four or five times, and only when I got annoyed enough to do it myself would it actually get done. It was all of those comics about emotional labor except with the genders reversed, which means I have a pretty hard time relating to the people who post them sincerely as-is. I also spent thirteen years suppressing my annoyance about it, because schoolpsychnerd treated any time I was angry as me being angry at her as a person, rather than angry at her actions, and then it turned into a debate over her fundamental worth as a human being. So eventually I squashed down all my feelings to avoid having a discussion about chores or about something that bothered me get refocused onto her yet again.

I told my therapist that sometimes I had the urge to laugh during our arguments about how terrible she was and I felt really badly about it, because I certainly didn't think it was funny. Now I realize that I was trying so hard not to feel anything that my body didn't know what to do with its sensations and decided on laughter.

You know, I guess that's one facet of what they call "dissociating."

So now I'm annoyed, and that's healthy and reasonable. The part that's not healthy or reasonable, that I need to work on, is the urge to immediately cut them out of my life completely. This is not a particularly serious incident and that would be an overreaction. But I am allowed to be angry.

Edit: The main thrust of this post is still true, but now I feel a little sheepish because they contacted me after work and arranged to drop off the boxes, so now I can go back to packing without any problems.

Comments

[omnipotent]

My initial reaction was to say, "don't feel sheepish about your previous annoyance", but in keeping with you re-learning how to feel and getting in touch with all of your emotions, I feel it would be in poor taste to say that. So I will say there's no need to feel some type of way about having felt annoyed. It's nice that the person contacted you, but this person ALSO could have done the things that you felt were reasonable (offering an explanation, not putting it off in the first place).

[dorchadas]

Thank you. Not having to come up with an iron-clad justification for my emotions is definitely one of the things my therapist was working on me with, since it doesn't really help. As the saying goes:

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
-from The Sayings of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan

Logical arguments are intellectually satisfying, but they're not actually convincing. And I don't need a "good reason" to feel what I feel.

...I tell myself, and most of the time I believe it nowadays! So that's progress.