Notes in the Margin

Back from the camping-weekend she had spent with friends, she reflected on her feelings over the weekend as she unpacked the quilts, blankets and pillows she had brought this year. Last year she had been sleepless, freezing in the sleeping-bag which claimed to be suitable for sub-zero temperatures, and she had been determined not to be cold in her tent this year.

‘What are we,’, she thought to herself, ‘but scripts running in the background of our mind, or perhaps in our subconsciousness?’ She thought about those pesky behaviour patterns programmed early in life that seem impossible to challenge and she could identify a few in herself. Somehow, they kicked in to preserve her from pain but how rarely were they effective. She grappled to find out what had triggered her withdrawal from the others this weekend, the slight aloofness and silence that meant to communicate the insecurity she was experiencing, but ended up with her, well, just being on the outside of things and enhancing her insecurity intensely. ‘How tiring it all is’, she thought as she pushed the airbeds in under the empty bed where her darling used to sleep before he died.

She had come to understand that this particular script, withdrawing, stemmed from a deeply seated fear of being abandoned, or rejected. It had become helpful to think of them as scripts running in the background of a computer. The computer is working away, doing its things. What we don’t see are all the things happening where it is processing the commandos we give and receive, using programs and scripts only few would be able to identify. Her own scripts were almost equally obscure. She would observe herself shutting down, feeling hot tears behind her eyes that would only be released in solitude when the fear that her self-destructive behaviour had finally pushed her friends away, that this was the last time they would put up with her. ‘Am I really the only person doing things like this, feeling like this?’, she wondered. She had never seen her friend do anything remotely like this. Everyone else seemed so well adjusted, so well-rounded and able to choose the right thing to do at all times and to, more impressively, be able to supress these basic reactions and override them, if they did experience them at all. How she longed for such simplicity in life. …