The band Placebo made a nice song in the 90ies called “Protect me from what I want”. I’ve been thinking about this for a bit. A while back I went to visit an old friend of mine. it was a nice visit. although my ulterior motive was that they would tell me what to do, I’m having a little bit of a thinking-doing issue, life wise. And over thinking. Of course, as a nice good friend they spelled it out for me. I need to decide what I want and then do it. Not care about what other people think or what I think they expect me to do.
It all sounds so easy. A few times I think about my upbringing and the consequences that it has had for the adult me. I’m not the person who goes “it’s due to my upbringing” as a blame, and it took quite some time in therapy to accept that “upbringing explains a lot of your present day choices” without having a blame connotation. Nor am I the person to complain and say I had it bad. I didn’t. And most of all, I don’t want to go into it in too much detail in a blog post since I’m still working on the “personal but not private”. I will make it more about the saying from Al-Anon “it’s hard when you grow up/have lived as a co-dependent to sort out what you want”, since your feelings haven’t really been the focus. It’s all about someone else primarily.
One of the best things I’ve done in my life was to work on a support phone line while at uni. I worked Friday nights and Sunday nights. These were the nights when people called in. Fridays when they were feeling alone and not going out with friends (“I have no one to go out with and nothing to do”). Sundays when they were regretting things that had happened over the weekend and having to face them Mondays (“I think I hooked up with that guy/girl and people know about it”). Like today, Sunday that is Valentine's day - It would've been a phone fest from all the people who didn't have a valentine's date, didn't have the perfect weekend, didn't know what to say tomorrow and most of all, trying to deal with all the emotions of being good enough and fitting in
It ties in to a conversation I had before the holidays. I mentioned then that my memory of the phone line was that a lot of people called in before holidays stating their concerns about going back home to their parents. Why? Because they weren’t doing what their parents have told them to do, what was expected of them. (it’s extra interesting to me nowadays since we didn’t have tuition fees when I went to uni - only having to get money to “live and buy books” and we had farely good deal on governmental loans. It wasn’t about the money per se, it was the dreams and hopes of the family that hung around.) They had dropped out from engineering or medical school since they wanted to study art history/anthropology/something else that didn’t fit with the planned idea and now they were scared what their family would say when they found out.
The idea that “do what you want” is not as easy as one would want it to be. Even if you have the financial means to do it. Or the thought that you are “free” to do it. A lot of us are carrying the aspirations and wants of our families. I’m not using it as an excuse, I’m mainly trying to explain. (Funny that I find myself defending myself, even thought I am not from a traditional “keep with your family wishes”.) A lot of wealthy people (upper class) as well as people from middle class with a family business or solid working class train their children to know what’s expected from them when they grow up. No funny business.
This all factors into my, and my friend’s, life. It’s not as easy to know what I want, and what I’ve been taught what I should want. At the same time these other expectations have been spelled out since we were small and half of the time, maybe you don’t think about it too much. You just do it.
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