I love the old folk tale about Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby. Brer Rabbit comes whistling around the road, humming a merry tune, when he sees, Brer Fox's Tar Baby waiting in the road for him. He greets the Tar Baby, like a fine upstanding Southerner should, with a warm, good morning and nice weather we are having... The Tar Baby says nothing, it just stands there all cute and sticky. Brer Rabbit gets offended and swipes at the Tar Baby, the more he fights the more stuck he gets, till he is well and truly stuck.
The whole thing with Roger and Fluff, as well as Roger and ...and....and.....has really got me well and truly stuck. I can't get over the insult to my ego. I can't see the path to letting go. My mind is a rubick's cube, of tangled and thorny thoughts not much unlike a "strangler vine." I try, but sooner or later I find myself back at the part where I am stuck. It's not as if I am in love with Roger. I'm not. I don't want him back. It's how the marriage made me feel, the conclusions about myself that I have drawn as a result. I am immobilized by feelings of inferiority. I obsess. I agonize. I am the queen of feeling less than. The Queen of Feeling less than Fluff. It's a world of my own creation. In this world, she's younger than me, prettier, thinner, cleverer, better in bed, superior in every way.
There must be a way to escape.I feel sort of Alice in Wonderlandish - the darker Johnny Depp version of course. All it would take would be a small hair fine trigger, that will boost the escape hatch. I can't find it. Perhaps I am losing hope that there is a way out.
Sharon Saltzberg, knows something I don't. She said ' In the midst of devastation, something within us always points the way to freedom." If you say so lady. I agree the answer has got to be around here somewhere. If I can only do something about these weeds I've let swamp the vegetable garden of my mind.
When Brer Rabbit was finally good and well caught by Brer Fox's Tar Baby, Brer Fox emerged from the bushes licking his lips, ready to make a meal of Brer Rabbit. However Brer Rabbit was not deterred, he finally managed to outfox the fox and scampered off into the briar bush albeit still a little sticky. Indomitable. That Brer Rabbit.
I suppose, this land I have created is a place of my own creation, which is key. A woman who had a great self esteem may dismiss her filandering husband as trifling and no good, she may never think his behaviour had anything to do with her, she would walk past the tar baby of self doubt and inferiority, without giving it a second glance... and she would be quite right. No need to embrace a tar baby of your own making.
I'm never going to find the validation I seek, by obsessing over how Roger chose Fluff over me. These demon's I wrestle were there before Roger. In fact I used Roger to mask these feelings. If HE loves me...I must be someone...When HE didn't love me anymore, I suddenly noticed that Self-Doubt and Low Esteem, had grown. Only because I fed them the steroids of self obsession and the growth hormones of a fortified inferiority complex.
I have to live in the world of my interior landscape. It could do with some weeding and some careful landscaping. The only difference between your landscape and mine is what we put in it and what we choose to grow and nurture.
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