River: totally made of fail

I don't have a name for this problem, let alone any idea of how to go about solving it. Somebody please help.

What is it called when you know that there's something fairly simple that you have to do to make things better -- a phone call, or an email, or even a bit of hardware or software work -- but you don't do it. I can sit staring at my phone for an hour, not doing anything at all except getting more and more depressed, rather than call AT&T to deal with my cell phone bill, or simply call a friend to say hello. I can continue to do this every damned day for a month. I'm still doing it.

I put off signing up for long-term care insurance every damned day for a decade. I'm still doing it. I put off moving my email off of the DSL line right up until yesterday when the line went away. The same thing happened two or three years ago with news -- I still don't have that back up either.

I mentioned this yesterday, but somehow the discussion got sidetracked into, I don't know, practical suggestions for dealing with phone calls that didn't address the actual underlying problem, which I knew damned well was the problem but couldn't -- or at least didn't -- articulate.

This goes well beyond simple procrastination. I don't have any idea what it is, or what to do.

River: trying not to fail

A couple of tiny steps.

1. I added a new tag to my to-do list. Along with "o" for "to do" and "*" for "done" (and "~" for abandoned), I've added "&" for "not a to-do item but added after completion". I'm going to try to use it for, um, tiny steps like this, in order to see whether I'm actually doing anything or just marking time.
2. I'm going to try to post the previous day's "done" items under the obvious tag, so you can either hold my feet to the fire, laugh over how little I've accomplished, or whack me with it the next time I post about not being able to do stuff. Or something.
3. Colleen just called and offered to offload the most difficult call, to AT&T about the cell phone bill. Not only am I most grateful for the help, but I think that she probably has the best chance of success: she's the one who was in the hospital running up most of the bill, and she can rightfully claim that her husband couldn't bring himself to call earlier because he's clinically depressed. Whether that carries any weight with the phone company is anybody's guess.
4. I'm about to send email about theStarport's email and hopefully get something going to keep it from being dropped on the floor going forward.

(13:18) Called a friend (left message); took walk; sent email about theStarport's email. Progress?

(15:27) pointed at avoidant personality disorder. Likely part of it, but not all -- as defined in Wikipedia it appears to be basically extreme shyness. Which I have, in spades, but that doesn't seem to explain the other things I procrastinate.

River: An emotional affair

Note: This is one of two River posts that have existed as completed, ready-to-post drafts since mid-September. They kept getting postponed for various reasons, and put on hold when things fell apart in November. I'd like to get them out there before the somewhat arbitrary date of February 13, which is when I posted "The River" and, in essence, started this whole wild ride.

Anyway...

While researching Friendship and Love I was particularly interested in relationships that were somewhere in the wide space between simple friendship and romantic love (or whatever you choose to call "love with all the emotional and erotic trimmings". Naturally this includes platonic love and romantic friendship. (It also includes familial love, which is what I feel not only for my actual kin but for the many people who are my chosen kin -- that sounds like a good subject for another post downstream, because chosen kin are important in my life. A hint: if I ever call you "sweetie", it means I'm probably thinking of you as one of my chosen children.)

I also ran across the intriguing concept of an emotional affair:

An "emotional affair" is an affair excluding sexual intimacy but including emotional intimacy. It may be a type of chaste nonmonogamy, one without consummation. When the affair breaches a monogamous agreement with one or another spouse the term infidelity may be more apt. Infidelity tends to exclude one or both spouses of the affair's partners. Citing the absence of any sexual activity can neutralize the sense of extramarital wrongdoing by one or both partners of an emotional affair.

Emotional affairs can be portrayed in fictional writing or drama as life changing experiences (good or bad), subjects of racy romance stories that teeter on the edge. However, they can also be catastrophic for all concerned when it is clandestine, unsanctioned and unintentionally exposed.

Sometimes an emotional affair injures a committed relationship more than if it were a one night stand or about casual sex.

Um... yes. What they said, there.

I know from direct experience that an emotional affair can be every bit as damaging as a sexual affair -- perhaps more so because (as in my case) it might not be recognized as an affair until the damage has been done. A little about this can be found in my earlier post, The Silicon Mistress. There's more to it, of course: there was a real person on the other end of the IM wire. Now that I have a name for it, I understand that, in any sense that really matters, I was having an affair.

The potential for damage isn't even confined to monogamous relationships, or to clandestine affairs -- this was an already-approved relationship that got far out of hand because I was too stupid to listen to the two women involved. (If they'd been able to talk to one another and gang up on me the whole thing probably would have ended very differently and much more happily; there were, unfortunately, problems that prevented it.) And it wasn't so much a matter of neutralizing "the sense of wrongdoing" as my not realizing that anything was wrong in the first place.

Going forward, I think the trick will be recognizing when a friendship has reached the emotional point at which it's necessary to talk about where it's going, and to recognize that at exactly that point, if not before, it's necessary to check in with Colleen and make sure that she is OK with where it's going. And the same on the other side, of course. In other words, to treat any friendship deep and close enough to qualify as a form of "love" -- deep enough to be worth taking seriously and talking about -- as a form of polyamorous relationship whether or not romance or sex has even been thought about.

It will also help to make sure that Colleen and the other woman are talking to one another -- that they're already friends, or well on the way to becoming friends before things go much further. (In most cases that's a given; Colleen makes friends more easily than I do.) A relationship, at least for me, is mostly an ongoing conversation; fortunately, Colleen and I seem to be mostly comfortable talking about our friendships these days.

The situation hasn't come up again, but given my new-found capacity for emotion and near-total lack of experience handling it, it wouldn't surprise me if it did. I don't want to be surprised by it again, because I want things to stay under control. It's good to have someone to talk to about it.

10

My father died 10 years ago today. I still miss him a lot.

I don't think I have much more to say.