in which Aunt BeaN waxes neurotic

I don't know if you can tell from the few posts I've done over the past month or so, but things have been a bit rough for me lately.  For one thing, I've started having headaches again.  Lots of them.  In the past four months, I've had almost as many days with headaches as without--sometimes just a low-level irritating ache, sometimes full-on miserable migraines.  It's frustrating and irritating and makes me grumpy as hell.  Just ask my family.

I want to be able to overcome them through force of will.  Other people don't have chronic headaches, so it must be some flaw in me that makes this happen, right?  So if I do everything right, get all my ducks in a row and avoid caffeine and sugar and make sure I get daily exercise and take my vitamins and meditate daily and and and, then they'll stop, right?  I can control them.  I know I can. *grits teeth and mutters must. be. in. control.*

But it never seems to work that way.  Doing everything just right seems to work for some people, but for some reason it doesn't work for me.  Dean is naturally one of the people who can accomplish pretty much whatever he wants through force of will.  But when I try it, first of all I can never quite manage to get it 100% right-- there are always those moments of weakness where I choose the iced latté or I forget to meditate or I just freaking don't want to exercise today.

But also it turns into a kind of moral perfectionism--an insistence that if I do what I'm supposed to do, I've paid my dues and everything in my life should turn out just right, because damn it I'm doing all the things I'm supposed to do so I deserve the life I think I should have, a life that fits in with some mythical standard in my head of what it should be like.

And that never works.  When I state it baldly like that, the flaws in my logic are clear-- bad things happen to people who are doing everything right.  There are no guarantees.  Just because you go to church and say your prayers and pay your taxes doesn't mean you get a guarantee that everything will turn out fine. And anyway, what I "should" want has absolutely no bearing on anything.

The frustration for me comes because it looks like other people can get this to work.  They do what they're supposed to do, and it works--they're healthy and happy and functional.  When I do all the things I believe I'm supposed to do, I am restless.  (Suddenly we aren't just talking about headaches.)  I want to be like everyone else.  I'm willing to lop off arms and legs and ideas and dreams to fit into my idea of what my life should be like.

But then I get the headaches.  And I'm not happy.  No matter how badly I want to be able to be happy with the things I think I'm supposed to be happy with, I'm not.  Maybe I should be grateful for the headaches, yes?  And maybe I should recognize that I don't know what the hell is going on in anyone else's life.  When I look enviously at someone who looks like they've got everything going the way they want it, it may be a reflection of my own insecurities I see, my need to beat myself up, not anything real.

Is this making even the slightest bit of sense?  Funny, as I'm thinking back over times in my life when I've had bad bouts of headaches, every time it has served to nudge me out of a rut of determination to make myself fit into someone else's life.  (or my idea of what someone else's life is like.)  And no one does this to me--it's my own determination, my own self pressuring me.  I'm fricking fifty-one years old and I'm still figuring this stuff out.  This seems like something you should deal with when you're 25.

See?  measuring myself by a mythical Someone Else's standards.  There's a phrase going around on Fitocracy and Facebook these days that I should have tattooed on my wrist so I can see it all the time:  Comparison is the thief of joy.