This is kind of funny: When i read your post, first thing that popped
into my head is "If you call John I will f-king kill you".

On 08 Apr 2004 09:30:45 GMT,

I don't know what it is, when I panic or I am under high high stress and

feeling very guilty and bad about myself, I tend to want to call. It is

child who keeps running to the same parent who will ignore them and not

them.

There is something there... some kind of cognitive distortion, some
sort of reaction to stress that sends you scurrying to something that
your mind perceives as... I don't know. Safety? It seems
inconceivable, but it's something like that.

I kind of understand this.

Here's a possibly unrelated story. I was invited to this luncheon
today. It turned out that everyone else at this lunch was the
president of a local bank, except for the people who were federal
government officials, and, it turns out, the mayor of the very large
city that I live near. A little out of my usual league.

But this was ok, weirdly enough. And I talked to these people, and
actually was one of the only people willing to speak up before the
room in the after lunch discussion. I was pretty damn impressive if I
say so myself.

But my immediate reaction, after leaving the lunch, was to more or
less fall apart. I had a few errands to run, and I was testy and
irritable and impossible to please, and I ended up skipping the other
errand that I really needed to do because I just needed to get the
hell out of the city immediately. Doing well with this... rather like
what's going on with you... didn't make me feel good. It made me feel
bad.

Someone said to me years ago that I had equally strong fears of
success and of failure, and while I suppose that there's a kind of
truth to that, it's also sort of facile. Sometimes I think that when
things go well, I start putting an unsustainable amount of pressure on
myself to be someone who I don't know how to be any more, whom I can't
deal with very well. And so I leap back to old patterns, old neural
pathways that are well-worn and easy. I can't really explain it. I
haven't quite got it worked out in my head yet. But what you were
doing seems like that, too. For whatever it's worth.

Nina

Sweetheart, with this wonderful return to teaching right within
your grasp, the very last thing you should be doing is talking to
John.