Pathology

I woke with a panic last night again.  I’m guessing this is related to the ongoing presence of my mother in my life for this last week and a half.  From talking to a counselor at an addiction treatment facility (again, not her primary problem!) to considering what her now being in a half way house in Boston means to me, it has been on my mind a lot lately.  The counselor told me my mother wants to reconcile and make amends with her daughters.  Whatever that means. 

Last night, my mind was swirling.  Thoughts formed and built on each other without words and so I had difficulty putting them into sentences this morning.  I want to try to put some of them down right now, so as to purge, so as to see if I can connect my dots again, so as to keep a record and to see if there is some clarity and insight I may gain from these swirling thoughts.

Are these thoughts that hit you like a lightning flash moments of clarity or moments of emotional detritus buildup wreaking havoc?  It either feels like something I should take careful notice of or dismiss outright.  I'll try to sum up my thoughts here:

When I delve into sociological thought I feel like a spectator of life, sitting on the bleachers, notebook in hand, criticizing what I see.  On the more positive side, I feel like my aim is to hold up a mirror to a dysfunctional world and point out its problems and then to, ultimately, help the world heal and get better.

This pretty much exactly mirrors my thoughts about my mother: hold up a mirror to help her see her dysfunction and then help her.  How much of my path is derived from this origin?  I know a lot of it is, but how much? And does it matter?  Is it a way that I am not truly being myself but rather still that child of a borderline mother who is trying to make the world a safer place to be?  So scared about how messed up things are that I seek to set about fixing them for fear that sitting back and allowing them to persist would allow it to swallow me up?  As if I had any control of it to begin with.  

Like my propensity to clean my house after an interaction with my mother, I seek control, for when others have had it things haven’t always gone so well. 

And how much of this echoes my mother’s own journey?  And how much does that send a shiver down my spine? 

My mother went into psychology, instead of her true passion of journalism she has said, to become an expert, a person in control, a person with the power to help her avail her feelings of helplessness with herself having a mentally ill mother. 

And here I am.  Try as I might, I am a person who is affected by my world and my path defined largely by where I have been thus far. Despite my childhood fascination with superheroes, I haven't come into my superpower quite yet and find, somewhat disappointingly, that I am just a regular person.

As through my work I always hope to find those instances where people’s futures are not defined by their past, I hope to find the same for myself. Yet, ironically, sometimes I feel I have not only removed myself from this family legacy I have actually continued it on with unfettered gusto.  And while I seek peace with my origins and experience (the good and the bad) and the fact that they are indeed a part of me, I worry about the trajectory of this path.  

Part of me wants to say, so what, yes I was fueled by demons to pursue this career...am fueled by demons...but this doesn't mean that dueling with them will destroy me.  But the other part of me screams that any interaction with the demons, whether running from them or attacking them are part of the problem and a life removed from them as much as possible is what will bring me peace.

So I struggle. I struggle with this off and on as I contemplate my decisions in life and I struggle mightily in the middle of the night when the ball feels in my court in actual dealings with my ill mother.