Friday, February 19, 2010

Reflection: Situational Strengths

I put a couple paragraphs on my squid blog, too, about yesterday's attack and having been dragged still hanging onto the purse. Alex first interpreted my description as having frozen and that was why I wouldn't let go even when someone was dragging me; I wrote back that that wasn't quite the case, that the keys belonged to the office at the apartment and I had obsessively drilled into myself not to lose them. It seems that in a moment of crisis I protected what I had obsessively drilled into myself to protect, and that took precedence over fear that I was or should have been feeling. I can't remember experiencing fear except in connection with maybe losing the keys. It's kind of bizarre that I was in that zone and hung on so tightly to the keys, which are so much less of an obsession than a human attachment or pet...

I will say, though... A lot of people see my obsessiveness as fear-driven, and it certainly can be, but there tends to be something underlying fear that is larger than the fear, and that something is attachment. Maybe it's because people don't see the attachment driving the fear that that they get surprised by the crazy levels of strength that can pop out.

I am thinking of somebody who told me once to grab his wrist and "hang on tight" -- and then did this tai chi thing where he spun around and broke my grip... or would have except that I was still holding his wrist. That kind of floored him, so he had to do the whole thing over again. (He did the same thing six more times, and I did the same thing six more times.) See, it was because of who the person was that the symbolism of the whole thing wasn't lost on me -- that it bacame more than just a party game to me. I got this notion that if I could just hang on everything was going to be okay, and I was going to hang on tight, so help me ---!

I sure don't like to get in the kind of situation I did yesterday, but I will say that a part of my attraction to obsession in other sorts of situations is because I've tasted before the kind of strength that "This I will protect if I bleed" can find in me.

Yesterday I made wrong choices; I am kind of puzzling over how much danger I might have put myself into. I also imagine that I should have let their professional fix the knee. I said it wasn't any worse than taking a fall, but I was overlooking that I did get once an infection from a fall that I took a few years back.