SILLY RABBIT
The past three nights, I've been having these dreams about an exboyfriend. The emotional context has been wrapped around a place, a city, a house, something that was his and then was mine and then becoming his again. I was afraid, worried, wanted to call the place mine but knowing it was his, wondering what he would think of me when he found the little sippy cup stains on the carpet or dust behind the couch.

It seems pretty transparent, the meaning behind the dreams. I have these kind of dreams now and then about him, a dream like I am living in his town, and I am worried he might find my house, and then he is moving in, and the shutters are falling off or the lawn needs mowing.

It is fairly close to the way it was with us, the way I think about him now, so the meaning doesn't bear a mystery for me. The reasoning is more of the mystery - why now, why so often?

Yesterday a sudden strong desire came over me to write to my favorite professor, the one whose job I wanted to have one day, the one who wrote letters of recommendation for graduate schools that turned me down, one after another. I wanted to have the same degree he has, have the same kind of influence, the same kind of life. It was my plan for my life, until my plan got derailed, and I've been reluctant to contact him since then.

I really wanted his opinion, though, so I sent him an email, told him what I was doing and if he could meet with me or carry on a conversation over the email about some questions I had.

He sent me a delighted response, and in his email, he stated that he remembered me, having dinner with me and Temple Grandin. He had invited me to his house to eat and talk with him and Temple, who is the "Numero Uno big dog" in the field I wanted to pursue, and who happened to teach graduate studies in Colorado. She and I outlined a plan for a PhD dissertation project, talking about funding, and then....I never applied to her school.

My reasons were complicated. Later down the road, I tried to get back on that horse, but instead of trying to go through her, or through my professor, I tried four other schools where no one knew me. Turns out that was a bit of a problem. Apparently you have to know someone on the inside.

Today, I was thinking about what he said in his email, that he remembered feeling sad at the time that I wasn't choosing to pursue graduate studies there with him.

When I had read that line, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. He had believed in me, he had wanted me to be his student. I remember talking with him one day, towards the end of my final year, and he gave me kind of a sideways glance over his glasses as he mumbled something about an open position with his department, a job for someone who would be interested in going to horse auctions (I mean, yippee! That is my favorite kind of place!), and I knew it was his way of inviting me to stay on, and I knew he also knew I was leaving. I wanted to go to Colorado so bad, I couldn't see the forest for the mountains.

Later, I cursed myself for not taking his offer. Oh sure, I already had a horsemanship position secured in Colorado. Sure, it would have taken some rearranging to do it. I had already given up my apartment, made moving plans. My boyfriend, the one I have been dreaming about, was all for it. It was perfect, he said, I could move in with him, and then surely the job would turn into a graduate student position, and I could get my PhD, and we could get married, and....

Hold on right there. That's right. I know without a doubt that if I had stayed on, I would have made my dreams for my life come true. I know my boyfriend wouldn't have let it happen any other way. He would have been there urging me on and pushing me ahead and holding my hand through every bit of it. I also know that he would have become my husband and that thought really scares me....

I had a dream about him once, when I lived in Oregon, that seemed rather poignant. In it, he brought a rabbit into the veterinarian's office where I worked. We had worked on his rabbit, some kind of back surgery, and then his estranged brother brought the rabbit back in, because now it couldn't hop. The rabbit wasn't perfect before, but now it was nonfunctional. It couldn't even move. I went to tell my doctor about it and she just looked at me like I was stupid and said, "Of course. That's the side effect of the surgery." I didn't get it. This phrase kept repeating in my mind, and still I think of it:

Why was the cure worse than the disease?

Hearing my professor voice his emotions, though, made me realize something. I made him sad. I did that to him, and in any effort to apologize, I should explain it wasn't an affront to him. He probably wonders what the heck happened to me, and sometimes in the course of the years when I have contacted him, I've glossed over a brief explanation, "I was raising my family and put my academic aspirations on hold for the meantime", but I know that my flimsy excuses don't hold water. They are probably as transparent as the dreams, although the reasoning probably warrants a mystery.

I don't want to tell him the real truth, the real truth on why College Station makes me nervous, why I never asked him if he could just let me in his program after all this time and wanting the things that never happened for me. I don't want to tell him because it makes me look really crazy to say something like look I constantly felt my parents never loved me, I felt rejected by them, not good enough, which caused me not to believe in myself, although I covered it up with a thick line of bravado, you see, so that no one would ever guess how really pathetic and worthless I felt, and I couldn't apply to your school or her school or any school that might offer me a chance of success and satisfaction, because I never thought I deserved it, so I just kept running away from what I really wanted, but several counseling sessions later, I am a much better person and no longer intentionally sabotage personal relationships that offer a chance of happiness and no longer choose escape patterns but face these inadequacies directly, which is why I am here now.

I know it is, in part, this background I have that makes me good at what I do. I am empathic to animals because their true wishes and desires are hard for them to express to humans. I want to be their champion and stand up for them, be the voice for those who cannot speak for themselves. I want to wrap my arms around them and tell them it's okay, that somebody loves them, that someone is going to look out for them. I want to make them as comfortable as possible and treat them with kindness. I want to treat them the way I want to be treated.

My true talent with animals is in calming the anxious animal, because I see in them parts of myself. I know what it is like to live with anxiety and fear, to want to run away and be unable to. This is why I chose my horse, as he was an outcast and headed for a rough ending. I sensed that underneath his explosive interior, he was a bundle full of nerves. We spoke the same language.

We had a fear-aggressive Newfoundland dog where I used to work who was frequently boarded and needed his ears cleaned often. He had severe chronic ear problems that gave him great pain, and previously, he was dealt with by a combination of being drugged and held down with force by several technicians. I didn't want that for him, so it became my goal to be able to work on him unsedated, solo, without any stress. It took some work to get him to trust me and allow me to touch the painful places, but we did it, laying in our quiet corner of the clinic. These are the things I am good at that no one ever sees. Give me a growling Rottweiler and I'll make it golden, give me a frightened monkey and I'll get it eating out of my hand.

This is where I get confused on my own issues, because I know my worth, and I know I have value. I know I have skills in this way, and that these skills are a result of my education, my background, my perceptiveness, and my intelligence. I know the understanding of animal behavior that I possess is worth something, if not a PhD, than at least more money or acknowledgement. So what am I still afraid of?

At one point a few years back, I thought that maybe I needed closure with this old boyfriend. I thought talking to him again would stop the dreams from happening, and dissolve that heavy knot of tension I had every time I went through College Station. I was driving through the town often around this time and I wanted to not experience the anxiety that the possibility of running into him caused. We opened up a dialogue, but he shut it down a few long emails into it, saying that it brought back old feelings for him. He's married now and he didn't think he should maintain a friendship with me because he couldn't help revisiting the emotions that a remembrance of our relationship caused. I kind of understand, but it makes me angry sometimes, too. Why can't he compartmentalize like I do? I tried to shut him off at that pass by downplaying our connection and focus on the friendship we had, but I think that hurt his feelings. This dialogue did nothing for the dreams and the anxiety, though.

When I think about the possibility of meeting up with my old professor to further discuss some of these ideas I am asking him about, and consider applying for his program at this point in my life, I think about College Station, driving to College Station, and suddenly I am a rabbit looking for a hole. I'm scared.

It makes no sense to me. Is it that I know I am good enough, but I worry they will think I am not? Or is it that I worry I am not good enough, but they know I always was?

I can't get away from the fact, though, that sometimes my escape maneuvers hurt people, leave them disappointed in me, maybe because they saw so much more potential than I was allowing, or that they wanted me to be happy and successful. Although it is unintentional, collateral damage, I know it is not right to hurt people, and I shouldn't do that.

Starting with myself.

A Well-Examined Life
I was thinking today, as I am prone to do, about certain people in my life, and how their lack of self-awareness has caused tension in our relationships. I will always stand by my conviction that introspection is key to understanding one's life, that a well-examined life is the only one worth living, that spending some time in honest self-exploration is time valuably spent.
Sometimes I have difficulties getting along with other women. I was thinking about two of those women today, one whom is a crucial element of my family and one who is an old friend. I was thinking about certain situations and trying to understand why they acted the way they did in that situation.
I suppose I was thinking about this because my birthday is coming up, and I had mentioned that maybe we would invite this old friend of mine to come celebrate it. I was thinking back on some birthdays I have celebrated with her. She has been a part of my life for over ten years, and at one point was my constant companion. However, the last time that she came out to celebrate my birthday with me, there was this incident. The only way I can see how things unraveled in the way they did is if she was talking about me behind my back when I went to the restroom. I thought about that, and questioned if I would ever do that to one of my friends. There are many things this girl does that I would never do to a friend. I have a little bit more loyalty, or maybe I just try not to ever hurt anyone, which is ironic in a way because later this girl told me that "everything you say and do is designed to hurt people's feelings", which is completely off base.
Anyway, while reflecting on what I know about this friend in an attempt to understand her motivations, I developed this hypothesis. My hypothesis is that when this girl is confronted with something that makes her uncomfortable, instead of internalizing it and trying to understand why it makes her uncomfortable, she immediately rejects it and says there must be something wrong with this thing, this thing that makes her feel bad. She attributes the way she feels to something about that thing (person, object, situation), and not to some inherent condition about herself.
This friend has been extremely competitive with me in the past. She was especially competitive with me for male attention back in the days when we were all single. She would get irritated if I would "win", and that would compell her to behave in ways that were completely obnoxious to me. I think that a little introspection, a little exploration of her feelings, would have led her to the conclusion that the little victory had nothing to do with her or with I, and was really not worth the tension in the house over it. It is like she would be bothered by me, without ever really trying to understand why it was and gain some acceptance of it.
Since I spend so much time with dogs, I try to relate everything back to them. My theory on her behavior reminds me of the warning against using a shock collar to train a dog to stop behaving aggressively. In dog behavior, especially these days, they talk a lot about "arousal levels", and warn that you should not use an aversive training technique (like a shock collar) on a highly aroused dog, or one that has potential for aggression, because it could backfire and make it worse.
As an example, say your dog is barking and lunging at the fenceline, behind which is another dog. Let's say you had a shock collar on him and you zapped him. The dog could erroneously come to the conclusion that the dog behind the fence caused the shock. It kind of makes sense, really...if every time you come close to this thing, you get zapped, then you might start thinking that that thing is what causes you to be zapped, if you are the dog. It would be hard, in fact, to make the leap that your behavior, in fact, caused the zap, and not the thing itself. It might be hard to understand that if you feel bad, that badness is coming from someplace inside of you, is internally motivated, and is not in fact caused by the external stimulus, even if that badness only comes in association with that stimulus.
So I guess I can understand that it could be hard for her to understand that if she feels bad around me, maybe that bad feeling is internally driven. Having known this person for a long time, I know she is more action-driven than thought-driven. She is not one to sit around and explore her feelings. I know that she has "issues" with my complicated romantic situations, that they never seem to fit her idea of what is right in the world, and usually that is the driving force behind her obnoxious behavior towards me. As a mutual friend said once, "she will never understand you, because she thinks only in black and white, and you are so many shades of gray."
I think, though, if she took some time to explore her inner world, it might make our relationship a lot easier. For instance, if she realized that what was bothering her was really these decisions I make with men, but that really it was my life, and it wasn't her decision, so she didn't need to necessarily have an opinion on it and respond to that opinion in a mean-spirited way, then it might really help us to get along.
Maybe that is what it is with the other woman I mentioned, too. If they would both just come to terms with the fact that my decision doesn't have to be their decision, too, and let me live my life without that kind of judgement, then we would all get along much better.
Can't we all just get along?