Loyalty Circles

This week was a little better: I once went 48 hours without crying, I ate a full meal Thursday night, and I slept almost the whole night a couple of times. There has been almost daily conversations with Cypar, which usually helps. Sometimes I get myself all worked up (not "for nothing" of course, but maybe out of proportion) and then it's still difficult to regain equilibrium.

My therapist this week wanted me to talk about my family and we drew a big map of all the relationships. Her board wasn't really large enough for everything; I wonder what she does with a person who has a bigger family? Mine is so small. She also included people I consider close friends (that made me sad because the list is so short). She let me just describe each person in whatever way came to mind, and it was pretty stream-of-consciousness. She asked how I knew those people loved me and I tried to think about that. At one point I said something about how I didn't know what I was going to do, going forward, and she said "what has changed?" That question has stuck with me all week. Okay, so I know some things I didn't know before, and they are unhappy things, but is anything actually different? Well...yes and no? I don't know. My brain says nothing has changed. I'm the same person, doing all the same things. I don't feel the same, though. I feel sad, hurt, and scared.

I was trying to talk about this with Cypar afterward. I often visualize my relationships as concentric circles (not necessarily coplanar, though, more like the orbits of planets and comets around the sun). The smallest, closest circles are the people closest to me (do I need to explicitly state that I'm the center of the circles? okay I am), who I feel the most responsibility for. So Cypar is in the first circle, and there's a separate circle for people in my family, and another circle for my department colleagues. I feel different levels of loyalty and responsibility for people in different circles. For example, the guys at work I feel responsibility to take care of their needs because I'm their chairperson. Even when they are acting in ways I dislike, I still feel protective of them. But faculty in other departments are not my responsibility and mostly I am fine letting them fend for themselves. I once tried to explain this to my Dean, when she was first hired, because at the time there was a discussion of whether the sole physics faculty person would be a department of one or combined with my department.

I was just trying to say that I need to know what circle that person belongs to, so that I know how much energy to devote to thinking about their needs. The Dean basically blew me off. That was the last time I tried to talk to her about anything personal.

Anyway, the point is that I feel deep loyalty and responsibility for the people in certain circles, but not for people in other circles. When a new person enters my life I guess I try to figure out which circle they fit into. People can move between circles, for example a person I met recently can become a closer friend over time. I have chucked people out of circles, rarely. I don't like to do that. I always try to keep those people in some kind of circle as long as I can.