i know i’m broken, don’t try to fix me

We all have our things, our story, our childhood trauma, that situation that makes us damaged humans.  If you want, you can deny it but deep down there is something that makes you who are you and it might not be good.  You don’t want to talk about it, not really. But if you do decide that you do want to talk about it, it will be with someone you like, trust, and have probably known for a long time.   Not someone you just met, who is judging you and deciding that they are going to, wait for it….FIX YOU!  Now is the time to bring out your inner socio to scream in horror!  I KNOW I’M BROKEN, DON’T TRY TO FIX ME!

This happened to me recently. It was very unexpected, and it came from out of nowhere, from someone who barely knows me.  They have known me for about 2 hot seconds and suddenly there they were, telling me that they knew me, knew I had something in my past that had happened that had hurt me. They were going to take the time to talk to me, really get to know me and figure out how to make my life better, telling me that I didn’t have enough joy in my life, and they were going to help me find my joy. WHOA! Wait, what’s happening here, I thought.  Who made you the joy fairy, dishing out little sprinkles of happy dust and helping all the damaged people “find their joy”?  What if I didn’t want to find my joy?  What if my joy had come, trampled all over me, left tire tracks on my heart, just before it peeled away like a bat outta hell?

Let’s pause for a second and break this down. There are lots of layers here. Is this about childhood trauma, finding my joy, or how someone who I barely know decided they had to fix me? Ding, ding, ding, door #3, the sheer arrogance that someone who barely knows me decides they want to fix me!  WTF!

What do you do in this situation?  I wanted to run screaming from the scene but that wasn’t possible.  I mustered up every ounce of restraint, patience, sheer will and closed my mouth.  At the same time my brain was on fire with ideas on how to handle this mental assault on my emotional private parts. I resisted the flight part of my brain and initiated the fight part.  I’m not saying that I don’t have childhood trauma or other situations that have happened in my life that created the inner socio that I struggle to hide on a daily basis. Yes, I have issues, we all do. If I want to talk about them, I can see a therapist or call a friend that has known me for more than 2 hot minutes. There was no way in hell that I was going to let this wannabe psychoanalyst help me find my joy.  (More like a psycho without the analyst part)

So, what happened? I listened, I pretended to care, I pretended to listen, I didn’t care. I might have blacked out; I wish I had blacked out. At the end of it all, I made it out alive.  I’m a survivor. There are new scars on my emotional private parts, but I survived the attack.  I didn’t run or scream, unless you count the emotional marathon that I ran in my mind or the inside bloodcurdling screams that still echo in my brain.  It was a lot and really very little to my inner socio. 

I guess at the end it is another trauma that I will add to my long list of traumas that make me the lovely little socio that I am, most days, some days not so much.