Gah.

My mind keeps running around and in and through and over and under places I don't want it to go. Bad mind. No biscuit.

There are several things I would like to do--make some useful phone calls, for instance, or write an interesting and intelligent post here--and it's not happening. Can't pick up the phone and can't make my thoughts go where I want them to go. My mind's acting rather like a puppy that hasn't been housetrained yet and just ate something that disagreed with it.

I hate when this happens.

Coincidence?

Immediately after writing an entry with a puppy metaphor, I go to Yahoo Mail and see an ad for dog food. I don't remember ever seeing an ad for dog food there before.

Come to the dark side?

Over in daisydumont's journal is a post about the Shadow, keeping it in the basement or letting it out for tea and cookies. I wrote as a comment: "I'm all in favor of talking with the beast (or beasts, since it's quite easy to have more than one), giving it a name and trying to come to terms with it. Unfortunately, my most prominent beast these days is an uncooperative one that wants to cower in the shadows and keep me chained with it. It's not very talkative. Mostly it just whimpers."

Some people have anger as part of their Shadow, a part of themselves they won't allow themselves to consciously acknowledge. I haven't had much trouble recognizing my anger, though I must admit to a bit of wrestling with it to keep it under control.

Other people have sadness as part of their Shadow, yet I've never had the option of not acknowledging mine (though it's true that my crying has always been frowned upon by the relatives). Still others won't allow themselves sexual feelings, but I've always been allowed to want sex even if the actual having is problematical. And some people aren't allowed to love themselves or have a high opinion of themselves, but that's no problem for me.

So what's my beast? I'm not allowed to need help. I'm supposed to be able to do anything and everything on my own. "You can do anything you want if you just put your mind to it and work hard enough." Not allowed to have to ask for help, though not at all sure where I got that idea. My brothers share the same attitude, so it must have come through in our upbringing somehow; yet I remember my father wondering why the heck I refused to ask for help when I needed it and why I was such a perfectionist in college who had to work so hard all the time, alone, without much of a social life at all.

Anyway, the part of myself I most consistently try to repress is the part that knows it's not possible to do everything all by myself. And every time it has the chance to come out--when I finally realized that I can't get a job, for instance--it has to make up for years of repression by telling me that not only can I not do everything by myself, but I can't do anything at all ever and will always be a useless pathetic lump who is never very important to anybody except as a burden and a parasite and a waste of space.

I'm really sick and tired of this damned whimpering Shadow of mine.