LY: #20: Whiny, Pathetic, Narcissistic, Loneliness - 1988

A sad part of those 1988 Bendnotes is the shouting loneliness of the person writing them.  My young self had a strange idea that these long, digressive, overwritten missives were being read.  In the September 22, 1988 note she, I, write(s):

       "As I enter the second week, I shall continue to keep the old eyes peeled for interesting happenstance.  Since all but one of you have ignored my last set of notes, and that one merely commented that s/he thought it was well written (a sign more of my lack of style than of his/her perspicacity, I fear), I shall simply write what I think interesting."

In the following note, written in late October, has an opening more appropriate to someone who might be writing a weekly editorial, not a set of photocopied letters.

           "Well gentle readers.  Perhaps you have noticed the lateness of this episode.  Perhaps you wondered whether or not the woman you knew had given up her attempt to reconstruct her experience in this strange new world.  Perhaps you though I had abandoned you.

          "But never fear.  This process by which I hold back, hold off the reality of my experience by continually conceptualizing it as a construction I send to you keeps me from being truly caught up in the ineluctable substance of the moment.

       "At least it did until a short while ago. . .."  After that line, my use of metaphors and Monty Python references spirals out of control as I say that I've been watching too much television while I'm not at work.  I also refer to an old Wayne and Shuster comedy routine about television addiction which I'm sure none of my friends had even heard of by using the line, "the gal with the golden eyeball." 

If I look at these old letters with the eye of my therapist I see an Enneagram 4 whose "basic desire" is "to find themselves and their significance, to create an identity out of their inner experience." (This is from Riso and Hudson's The Wisdom of the Enneagram).   Or I could see someone with a "narcissistic wound," (this concept also courtesy my current therapist) who is caught up in the importance of proving she's just as important as she thinks she is.  What I've also learned about myself since two decades and 1/2 ago is that I score very high in "uncertainty avoidance."  Any situation that is unstable and unknown (like a brand new job) sends me into high stress mode and I see that too in these letters.