Temperance & the Tempest
“Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense.” ― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
If you’d like to eavesdrop on my inner monologue, consider letting me read to you—just press play on the voiceover above. Includes select footnotes, excludes headings.
This entry was originally drafted on 4/17/23.
Prologue.
Tonight I asked my husband, “What’re you doing right now? Playing your phone game?”
He said “Yeah, doing my dailies…why?”
I said, “Just curious.”
But that was a lie. Allow me to explain…
I’m the problem.
For context, I am a person who really struggles to prioritize my own needs, and today was especially challenging for me. It honestly wasn’t even that stressful of a day…but like…I didn’t sleep well, and I haven’t eaten a balanced meal in 30 years, and I’m PMSing and kinda constipated, and my cats are emotionally blackmailing me to go outside, and I’m having a midlife crisis, and being a homeowner is really overwhelming, and I’ve had like fifteen therapy break-throughs this year and it’s hard to remember all those lessons at one time.
My husband on the other hand never seems to see much of a conflict between his needs and other people’s needs, and he’s really good at prioritizing his own. So the question that had really popped into my mind was not “What are you doing right now?” It was in fact, “How do you put yourself first?” An honest question, seeking expertise that my husband has and I do not.
But then I thought (and this is a case in point): that’s a pretty weird question to ask someone…he won’t know what I mean, he’ll probably think I’m passive-aggressively accusing him of being selfish. I’ll have to explain. It’ll turn into a big weird conversation. He’s probably not in the mood. Maybe he’s playing his phone game and doesn’t want to be bothered. So instead I asked, “What’re you doing? Playing your phone game?” as if my entire purpose for saying words out loud was to convince myself NOT to start this conversation I kinda wanted to have.
Then when he said “Yeah, doing my dailies…why?” I fucking said “Just curious” as if a) I give a shit what he’s doing on his phone at any given second,1 and b) as if talking to me is some kind of an inconvenience…he frequently tells me it’s not, but I continue acting like it is, thus making it pretty inconvenient to talk to me. I’m also aware of this self-defeating pattern, which is why I don’t believe him in the first place.
To butcher a Taylor Swift lyric I have heard only once: Hello, I’m the problem, it’s me.
De-Railing the Tantrum Train to Meltdown Town (TM)
There’s more though, cause as soon as I said “Just curious” I also started crying. With rare exceptions,2 I’m a pretty controlled crier; my tears start small and silent, then slowly ramp up over a span of time—sometimes hours—in tandem with the internal tempest of Feels, crashing against whatever Thoughts I happen to be thinking about them. If I can’t manage to stall the emotional momentum, I will end up throwing a gigantic tantrum. “Just curious” was like the fourth time in one day that I had to plug leaks in my face, and the momentum was getting harder and harder to control.
I knew “Just curious” was a lie when I said it, but when I felt my body react (by crying) I realized the lie had hurt me in some unexpected way. I was surprised! The part of my persona that ‘decided’3 to lie, expected the lie to protect me but it had hurt me instead. Evidently, the needs of my organism had changed...
Anyway, I really did not want to take the tantrum train to meltdown town4 but I was crying again, so I had to find a way to get my shit together. Out come the tarot cards! This year, I’ve been heavily utilizing tarot cards5 as a way of getting ‘in touch with myself’ and I have found them really helpful in learning to hear my intuition. My closest friends have occasionally called me “very intuitive” and I have called them very wrong, but the tarot cards have taught me to see what they see in myself.6
When I’m feeling a lot of stuff all at once, I find it really helpful to look at the cards face up and choose the one to which I have the strongest reaction. This time, it was the card Temperance.
When I saw that card, I hated it. I literally wrote down in my journal:
“I hate Temperance, I hate it. It enrages me! It feels like a personal attack.”
But why did I feel that way? I started dashing words on to the page, not exactly answering the question, but dry-heaving up little bits of personal truth, never committing to any of it, never letting any single bit of truth get too long. I watched myself do this, and I thought of a line I read the other day in God Emperor of Dune:
“Beware of the truth, gentle Sister. Although much sought after, truth can be dangerous to the seeker. Myths and reassuring lies are much easier to find and believe. If you find a truth, even a temporary one, it can demand that you make painful changes.”7
I’ve been learning a lot of truths about myself this year, and they are indeed demanding painful changes. Reassuring lies no longer offer me any protection.
The True Truth.
I wrote more in my journal:
“I don’t know what I’m doing but I have to be honest and I have to not care and I have to be brave and LOOK at myself.”
So why? Why?? WHY??? does the Temperance card feel like an attack, and why am I so incapable of having a kinda-maybe vulnerable conversation with my husband?
Then, I thought of a recent ‘Office Hours’ from Story Club with
, which is practically therapy on its own. In my own words, the piece gave advice on how to allow yourself to not like a story that you think you are supposed to like and to figure out why you don’t like it. Literally the whole things is relevant and helpful to my thought process, but to quote the deepest heart of what I needed:“We are, really, using a given story and our reaction to it to develop our opinion on the form. When a story “offends us” (fails to captivate us), we have a golden opportunity to learn something about the form and what we expect from it.
This journey—the journey of trying to be more specific—leads us away from blurry, judging words […] toward precise judgements that, in their precision, become […] technical.
If I apply this advice to the stories (or lies) I tell myself about my own behavior, what can I learn? What do I expect from my own form and from others? Where do those expectations come from? How can I use specificity and precision to alchemize my harsh emotional judgments into a genuinely fulfilling existence? When I spin yarns in my head to justify my actions, to explain why I do the things I do, what parts of those stories ‘offend’ me?
Well, Temperance clearly offends me…why?
Its demand for balance, while refusing to define what that means is infuriating. No one ever congratulates you for being perfectly temperate or moderate, they only criticize you for not being enough of something else.
Sooo does that mean I want congratulations?
Hm, not exactly—but that concept of “enough” seems important. Maybe what I’m craving is reassurance that I did good enough or that I’m doing enough or just that I’m enough and I can stop trying so hard all the time! Everyone has an opinion about what I should do and I can’t figure out who to listen to! Everyone’s a fuckin’ expert, must be nice.8 But one thing no one is telling me is that I am already being or doing ‘enough’.
Okay, so what if I listen to my own opinions, then? Do I think I’m being or doing ‘enough’?
Ugh, enough for WHAT though?! How the fuck should I know?! I just want someone else to tell me I’m already doing fine on my own, so I know I can trust myself!
BOOM! The true truth emerges.
I definitely do not, and he already gives me blow-by-blow descriptions of his phone game activities.
Like, during the last episode of season 1 of Picard, I straight-up ugly-cried. There was no control there.
Not that it was really a conscious decision. Our behaviors, especially defensive ones, are pretty much automatic in my experience.
You guys, I am SO PROUD of this phrase! LOL
I love my current tarot deck so much that I have to shout it out: The Spacious Tarot by Carrie Mallon and Annie Ruygt. More info at https://thespacioustarot.com/
I previously thought ‘intuition’ meant knowing something without understanding why or how you know, and I don’t feel it’s even possible for me to “know” something unless I understand why and how I know it, even if I can’t explain why or how to someone else. Therefore I did not believe I could be intuitive, because I always know how I know something. But I guess it’s the stuff I (or You) can’t explain about, but we still know that makes us intuitive. I guess.
God Emperor of Dune is book 4 in the Dune series. Quote is on page 175 in my copy.
Iyk, get this guy a fuckin’ Puppers.