Categories: uncategorized
Date: 14 April 2009 10:29:59
I got upset by a lunch box. It was a plastic lunch box, orange with a white lid, and small spikes on the lid with little straps on the side that fitted over them to fasten the box. I don't think I had it very long, and I don't recall being particularly attached to it - it was a lunch box, and nothing more. But one lunch time it broke. I can't remember exactly, but I think the lid shattered on opening. And for reasons that completely escape me now, I wept. I remember being comforted by the dinner ladies who pointed out, entirely reasonably, that it was just a broken lunch box and no big deal at all. And I think even at the time I could see that what they said was entirely correct, and that it really was no big deal, but that didn't stop the tears. In fact I think I was puzzled at the time at my over-reaction - part of me could see how disproportionate it was, yet the other part of me kept at it. I've been thinking about this lately because my son has been doing the same sort of thing lately - blubbing about the most unimportant things, and dissolving in tears whenever anything goes wrong. I've been struggling to react appropriately, and my over-riding desire has been to get him out of this habit. I suppose I felt I did it too much at his age and suffered for it, and would like to avoid him going through the same thing. But then I realized I was doing it myself. Not crying, but reacting disproportionately to any setbacks. Any problem, no matter how minor, would leave me convinced that I could never succeed at anything. That seems a fairly typical characteristic of depression, and less worrying for being acknowledged as such. But if I can look back thirty years ago and see myself over-reacting in the same way then, well, I don't know what to make of that. Perhaps I should have been popping prozac back then, or perhaps I should have found a longer-lasting solution to the over-reacting, that would have prevented me still being the same thirty years later. At least it gives me some insight into where my son is at, even if it doesn't show me how to respond.