NOTES FROM A GROUNDHOG

....................by Stanley

....I am trapped in my story. Every day I tell the same tale. Oh yes, things change outwardly, superficially. But me – I never change. I am the same me as yesterday, and the day before. I know. I can remember myself. Each day defines the next one; each day the only day of my life.
.....What is this ‘me’ that keeps repeating? Who am I that I can’t escape and tell a different story? My efforts to escape, to change, are all part of the eternal repetition.
.....I come home to myself and have to admit that I am not a very nice person. I am ungrateful, disloyal and self-centred. I always have been. I try to shift the responsibility, but it doesn’t work. Even though my mother never showed affection I always knew she was on my side. I was three months old when she was widowed and later married a horrible man just to give us a roof over our heads. She never had any more children. I was the only one; and how did I repay her? I left home as soon as it suited me, never to return, abandoning her to her fate. I know who I am: I am ungrateful, disloyal and self-centred. I never change. That’s me; and Groundhog Day is every day.
......I try, and have always tried, to alter the story, to paint myself in a better light. But inflating one’s ego doesn’t work. Nothing beats coming up against the truth. But it is a strange and disturbing paradox to step outside your story, look at it, and know it’s true; to remember my dead mother and wished I could have stood by her, wished that I could have been the kind of son that she would have wanted – as loyal a son as she was a mum. But I couldn’t, didn’t – didn’t want to. I had to kill her and be sorry; and for the rest of my life know that I am ungrateful, disloyal and self-centred.
......I never knew I was that guilty; but there is nothing better than knowing what you really and deeply believe. It’s such a relief.
......Knowing the full strength of what you believe about yourself, however bad, is better that struggling against what you didn’t know you believed. The struggle against the unknown is problem.
.......For some people the situation can be the opposite of mine. If you had a family that made you no good, you might struggle against the unacceptable truth that you are OK. You don’t get guilty for being a bad person; you get guilty for feeling good. Self depreciation keeps you belonging to those who defined you. You might be angry with them, but you stay in their space. To really get that you are OK would mean rejecting the family – loss and alienation. Better to be the black sheep of the family, than to have no family at all.

THE TURNING OF THE WORM

.............A truthful fiction in the first person
....................................by Stanley

......I am a worm that has turned – thoroughly sick of being used. All my life I have been helpful, listened to other people’s problems and wished them well. But how rarely did anyone ask me how I was – except in a perfunctory way when it was obvious they didn’t really want to know.
......My cry of rage came when it hit me that my kindness and generosity had been taken advantage of for too long. Enough already!
.....I had suspected that most of my friends and colleagues took me for granted; taking, but seldom giving. I knew it, but something always prevented me from rebelling. I made excuses for people, wanting to think the best of them. I was fixated on being helpful. But somehow I knew that I had got myself into a bind where their expectations of me were perfectly justified: yes, I had always given the impression that my selflessness was perfectly natural to me; so what more natural than that they should believe in the impression I had always given them.
......And what more natural than that they should be shocked when I rebelled, when I made it clear that I existed too. Mind you, when I did make it clear, my inner rage came through. I wasn’t very nice when said I had listened to their problems far too long. In fact, I was quite nasty. And when they criticised my abruptness, I lost it – oooh temper, temper! I came away shaking and doubting myself.
.....My former ‘friends’ started to drift away. I didn’t seem to be the flavour of the month any more. They must all have thought I’d changed for the worst for some unknown reason. They were right in thinking I was not the person they thought I was.
.....I discovered there is no way you can change from being a people-pleaser to being-real without rage. This is because rage is what I felt all the time, deep down. When I was being so nice to everyone I was hiding my rage, even from myself. Rage at my long neglect. My real self was raging so I had to be nasty to be real. There’s no way of skipping that stage. Of course I was nasty, rage is never reasonable. To try to rage reasonably or raging alone is to still fear showing anything else but the nice person. The nice, helpful person was my trap. And now the one thing I fear is being in social situation where my former self will trap me again. I can’t tell you the anxiety I feel about slipping into the nice person again. I know myself. I am not so far out of the woods: certain kinds of people can turn me into an agreeable, smiling nobody. I will lose myself again. The dread of being taken over by my old self is quite frightening.
......I know how it all came about. As a young person I learned that the only way to get even a modicum of approval was pretend to be what they wanted. I deleted myself and substituted a clone and it has taken me 40 years to recover. But with the encouragement of my therapist and some new friends I know I will make it. I can already feel the difference.

..........(The above is not a biography or autobiography but a fictional composite)