Crabby, crabby, crabby! -- a character sketch

I've always been a bit volatile emotionally: quick to anger, fast to the blush, easy to embarrass, and slow to calm down. I've carried slights and fears around for months on end -- years sometimes. What's changed over time has been my level of awareness of mood changes, and my ability to influence them. The biggest battle has been to acknowledge my own responsibilities -- to recognize that I can do something about it, and that I'm not merely the passive victim of brain chemistry and hormones.

This cognitive element -- the act of intellectual understanding, and thereby of partial mastery -- has come into play again recently, and taken me to a much happier place after months of being pretty miserable. (As an aside, I do find myself going to happy places, difficult places, interesting places a lot lately: that 'place' vagueness is a bit of a verbal tic, like that current (?) teenaged "...and stuff." suffix.)

Anyway, I remember -- or, at least, reinterpret ancient experience as -- mood swings from a pretty young age: moments of panic for no reason (especially the feeling that people were looking at me and judging me), and contrasting spells of unquenchable loquacity.

One upshot of this latter phenomenon was the frequency with which I got sent to sit on the stairs at Sunday tea-time, the result of my 'being silly, and chattering non-stop'. At infant school I was sent to see the headmistress for the same reasons, and one of my secondary school teachers commented icily (on my Russian language report, ironically) that I "could not refrain from keeping up a running commentary of silly remarks" in class. There's still plenty of truth in that, as any of my work colleagues will attest.

The darker side of my moods is suggested (in my head, anyway) by some of the names that schoolmates called me: moody, granite face, misery guts. Those echo with truth for long periods of my life.

I guess that when I was younger, these swings seemed perfectly normal (as mild mood changes doubtless are), and I didn't have the self-awareness, objectivity or critical faculties to do any comparisons, or make any rational judgments about "how I was". I think that there was something physical, an in-built mood-swinging tendency, embedded in my brain chemistry.

As a teenager, though, I started looking around at my peers, comparing how I behaved, how I was, how they interacted with each other, how they formed and conducted relationships. I saw that I was inconstant, and I judged myself harshly - I was found wanting in so many ways. In retrospect, I think that I didn't understand about neurochemistry, or about learned behaviour, and I concluded -- rather stupidly -- that I was somehow bad, unusual and -- critically -- unworthy of love. These conclusions hardened with every discouraging experience I had, crystallising into a set of unconscious rules that governed my responses and behaviours: "you're not capable, you're ugly [schoolmates reinforced this with the usual cruel teenaged comments], you're useless." These conclusions got buried really deep, and were so woven into my thinking and feeling that I didn't realise that they were artificial, learned conclusions -- rather, they seemed to be unspoken, natural, irrefutable truths. And I kept acting as if those conclusions were true, twisting every bit of counter-evidence to fit my distorted rules.

I did that for a long time.

As I got older, I found moments of lucidness, when someone said or did something that illuminated, just for a moment, a different truth that I could see and believe in. But they always passed -- sometimes after a few hours, sometimes after a few months. I kept returning to that part-natural/part-learned persona of the brittle little boy with no confidence and no self-belief. Escape into hobbies and habits (making things, reading, an over-reliance on alcohol and food treats) kept me in this self-constructed prison for most of my adult life.

There was a period, in the early 90s, when I found a more solid place to stand, and where I developed a far more robust sense of myself. It came after a revelatory consultancy course, where I started to understand that to feel these things, to feel the tug of contrary emotions, to feel small and frightened, was a natural thing, and was not the result of badness or weakness on my part: the very fact that I felt guilty about these things was evidence to me of my twisted thinking. What made me change was that I began to understand this intellectually. Once I did that, I realised that I could also choose to think differently, and choose to behave differently. I did that for a while, and enjoyed one of the happiest periods of my life: I was warm, loving, fearless, caring and understanding.

Then I fell into a state of unhappy, unrequited, obsessive love that was Proustian in its proportions. That unhappy passage of play stripped my of my confidence and self-regard, and I drifted back into the shadows, where I found solace in academic achievement, hedonism, and overwork. I (unconsciously) fell back into those bad habits of self-reproach, self-criticality and denial. I hid away from myself, and became hollow and brittle again.

Recently, though, I have broken through into the sunshine again, and this is again based on a sudden clarity and pig-bloody-obvious sense of reality. The act of understanding, of rational and systematic self-analysis, has once again helped me to uncover those erroneous rules that have been governing my thinking and feeling. And now that I know what they are, and recognise the feelings and behaviours those rules evoke, I can neutralise them, combat them, out-think them, and beat them.

It feels wonderful -- liberating and thrilling -- to be able to take control of myself again, to see myself as I really am, and to engage warmly and openly with the world, rather than being ruled by fear an and the threat of exposure. To have the power to save yourself from yourself...that's a beautiful thing. That's freedom.

:-)