Picking my poison

There won’t be any poems tonight…just a rant…just to warn you.

 It was a long day at my job, and I am so tired.  My usual day to day work is all computer related, but they are having inventory this weekend, and today I was on my feet counting and lifting and counting…it was a brain drain.  And instead of eight normal people hours, I got to work twelve…I feel super puny right now.

Added to the long work day, I have been dealing with a big decision lately, one that has a lot of stress to go along with it.

I am not usually one to get stressed out.  I can handle a great deal of things and not freak out, but that being said, when I do get stressed, I DO NOT handle it well.  I love me some food, but when I get upset, even the thought of it makes me nauseous.  And all I want to do is sleep…sleep, and punch unsuspecting people in the face.  And that’s no good at all.

The stupid thing is, for my big decision, I know what I want to do.  It’s the doing it that’s hard.  Because there will be emotional confrontation.  I hate confrontation…I suck at it.  I have the annoying habit of people pleasing.  They must all like me!!!  And that’s just crazy.  When you people please, you know who never ends up pleased?  YOU.  And that blows chunks.  But I do it, I always have.

I grew up in a house with a meek mother and a father who was not a very nice person.  There was a lot of walking on eggshells.  Confrontation means yelling, yelling means I am getting hit.  My father left when I was 16, and I am now going on 29.  I haven’t been hit since my father left, but in my head, yelling will always mean violence.

And then emotion…ugh.  I can write it all day long, but to speak it out loud…that’s a whole different kettle of fish.  Emotion gets you punished.  I never cry.  Well, that’s not true.  I have cried a lot.  Usually in my house, locked in the bathroom with the shower running, just in case…but not in front of people, not since I was very small.  If you cry in front of someone, they will know your weakness, and weaknesses will be exploited.  The same is true if you have strong opinions…in my house, conviction meant that you would be beaten into submission.  Great lesson from my childhood, and I am a quick study.

And so here I am, almost 30 years old, afraid of disagreements, afraid of emotion, and afraid of standing up for anything.  And that is ridiculous.  I can’t live like that.  I don’t want to live like that.

Like I said, my father left when I was 16, and a few years ago he died.  And until the day he died, I was always afraid he would show up at my house.  I don’t know why.  My uncles had a funeral service for him, and I went.  They had pictures of him, much more recent than when I had seen him last. And you know what?  He was a frail old man…if he would have shown up at my house, physically, I could have kicked his old man ass.  He couldn’t have hurt me anymore…in the end, I guess he couldn’t even get out of his bed.

My mom once told me that my father’s biggest fear was being alone.  And when he died, he had no one.  No one believed his lies anymore.  No one could be bullied into submission anymore.  And the sickest part of it all, the part that makes me pity him now (it’s taken a long time to get to that point) was that it could have been different for him.  He had a wife and children who wanted to love him and he pushed it all away.  He wasted his life, and ruined a big part of my life and that of my brothers and sisters.  To this day, things that blasted old fart did have an affect on my life.

I don’t want to waste my life because I am afraid to stand up for it anymore.  I’m just scared.  What if I make the wrong choice?  What if I am being a fool?  What if the one time I get to be selfish ends up being the biggest mistake of my life?

I read somewhere: “I’d rather have a life of ‘oh wells’ than a life of ‘what ifs’.  But how sound is that logic?  Leap before you look?

The thing is this:  I don’t want my fear to stop me from living life how I choose, because after all, we just get one go round and we have to make it count.  But what if I choose wrong?  What if I hurt people who care about me, just because I desire something different and in the end don’t get what I really want from it anyway?

Do you live your life pleasing other people?  Do you do what you want and tell the rest of the world to go fuck itself?  Because at this point, I feel like those are my only options, there is no happy medium in this situation.  There is only the same as it’s always been or doing something I’ve never done…  I guess I am just having trouble picking my poison.