dictation's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- if I can't be the Queen of the Universe and have everything behave just the way I want it to, I'll have new socks! Remember my neurotic need to have new socks? I think I might be over it. I haven't bought socks for a couple of months now. Sure, I catch myself in the hosiery aisle of Sears, The Bay or Holt's, examining and wanting the new socks, but the sane part of me reminds the insane part that I have a hundred pairs of socks at home and cannot justify buying more. In the past couple of months, I've managed to leave the sock dept. empty handed and proud of myself for beating that compulsion. I don't know what it is about socks...I just prefer to be wearing a new pair all the time. When socks start fading or getting little pills or pulls in them, I figure they're only fit to wear to the gym. Ditto for underwear. I have a zillion pairs. These start out in the 'new and therefore worthy of handwashing and tender care' drawer and eventually, find their way into the 'has been but not quite wrecked enough for the trash' drawer. The newer pairs I wear to work or out; the older pairs I wear around the house, to the gym, or during my period. The older ones I launder in the washer, the newer ones are handwashed. It's so dumb. Underwear is marched into the 'old' drawer when the waistband begins to pucker, which is about a month into wearing them. When this ridiculous neurosis developed is anyone's guess. I have no idea - right this second - what it relates to. I suppose I need to figure it out, relate it to something to get over it. It may seem a harmless indulgence but when you consider the cost of socks and underwear these days, it can get pricey. It shames me to admit I used to wrack up credit card charges in underwear and socks. I'm in control of my credit card though and I'm pretty sure it's one of the reasons I find myself overcoming these compulsions to buy new all the time. I simply can't afford to be neurotic. Now that I think of it, the socks and underwear obssession is the last remnant of extreme neuroses I had as a teenager. When I was fourteen I started bathing 5 times a day. (Sexual abuse victims, I learned later, never feel clean and this was certainly true of me, though I wasn't cognizant that there was anything odd about bathing so much.) I don't know when I stopped bathing like that...probably in my early twenties. I wouldn't wear anything that had the slightest flaw in it. I still have a Nazi mentality when it comes to perfection in objects (and people), because my family was so completely out of control. I'll examine every inch of something before I buy it. If there's anything wrong with it, I won't. Finally, I seem to be wising up. I know rationally even if something starts out being perfect, it will soon deteriorate. I have trouble coping with this knowledge as, you know, I expect the world to be a pristine kinda place. Not that I'm a clean freak. But I need to feel as though I'm in control, and damn it, if I can't be the Queen of the Universe and have everything behave just the way I want it to, I'll have new socks! Or something like that. It's probably about as simple as that anyway. Our sensitivities aren't peculiar, but because we tend to be guarded and hide who we are and put a spin on what's happened to us we end up compensating in the strangest ways. 12:12 p.m. - 2004-04-12 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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