I’m managing to have more fun when it comes to Sigehold socials and social Empire roleplay but they are absolutely the thing that has written large to my psyche quite how disconnected I was feeling.
The wild disassociation of a mental break is like nothing I’ve experienced previously but negotiating what part of my psyche has caused what is complicated. It doesn’t help that towards the eventual and very noticeable snap last year I had limited processing power and was assuming that I was just autistic and this was situation normal for me. It clearly wasn’t, if I’d been able to map out my own functionality over time I’d have been able to work that out but I couldn’t even do that.
Several times the notion that I’m a people pleaser has come up, last year when The Fae Ref suggested that I’d said he was people pleasing only to reveal I was doing the exact same thing I just kind of accepted that that must be what I was doing with only a niggle at the back of my mind that this wasn’t quite right. This year when Lovely Coat suggested it I knew he was wrong but this year I’m desperately scrabbling to get my mind back whereas last year I didn’t realise it was wandering.
I don’t people please in a way that seems to properly correlate with what people mean by it. Or maybe this is just my desperate need to be a unique, special snowflake? I once stopped doing breakfasts for Sigehold at Empire events, I had a lovely time that year, going next year to get Dutch breakfasts from one of my lovely regular massage clients. She ran the food at The Artisans’ Arms. But I missed doing breakfasts, I’d stopped doing them because it seemed as if no one else got anything out of them. I think the behaviour that people think of as people pleasing is often my attempts to create community and I’m not sure that they are the same things. I want to make breakfasts for Sigehold because it gathers people in a group and we talk and I feel like there is a space for everyone to exist in. Is it people pleasing? I don’t think it’s as genuinely community building as it once felt, or perhaps it is and I’m still in this weird set apart place from it. I don’t think I can trust my own judgement when it comes to friendships, to connections and community ties. I think the self-gratification that I find in doing things to build a place and group of people isn’t people pleasing, but perhaps it is? Perhaps this is actually what is described and I’m not willing to see it in myself, I have to believe I’m doing something different.
But then there’s the other problem I have, I hear of a fault and must ascribe it as one I’m guilty of.
How the hell do I balance all these things wrong with me? How the hell do I fix any of them? It’s all too much, I wish I wasn’t so broken but it felt like I had a space to heal from and I fucked up in thinking that, I didn’t have that space but I got mid way through the work there and had to leave and now I can’t tell what’s real anymore or who feels any sort of way about me.
Tonight though, it felt a little better, as if I was really there, in the social doing things that I know I have enjoyed even if I feel still slightly divorced from them.