all this itching....

When I was a little girl, I picked at scabs. I couldn't help it, the minute they started to heal, I would start to lift the edge to see how far I could get before the pain or ickiness was too much. Then it would heal and I would do the same thing all over. I suspect that nothing has really changed.

Sometimes things cause me pain and I leave them alone. Then, after a while when I realise that there is still the potential for pain, I go back for a bit more. It appears that unless something has completely healed and dropped off, I have a compulsion to route around to make it all last a little longer.

I have also started to recognise some other things. I am acutely over sensitive. When I feel over sensitive, I feel vulnerable and when that happens, large heavy doors of defence come slamming down and this is the point people assume that I am an emotional hard arse.

And I can be. Shutting out vulnerability is at times, a whole heap simpler than experiencing it. If I think someone is about to hurt me, my inner male appears as if by magic and I have the emotional responses of someone with a large degree of testosterone pumping around their body.

And this has happened several times this week. I am the emotional hard arse that is not fazed by anything or bothered by anyone. Except it is not entirely true. I am the emotional hard arse because if I had to put my sense of intuition on the line - someone would no doubt stamp hard on it - so I don't.

There is no question that I am strong. I can deal with most things, but I struggle with honesty and pretence. I struggle with people that pretend everything is okay when it clearly isn't. I struggle with people that cannot look you in the face, I struggle with people that suck you in and spit you out, I struggle with people that appear genuine and are not really and those that say one thing but who present body language that say's another.

I do not struggle with clarity and yet it seems one of the hardest things to obtain. What I struggle with most - is those that are as defensive as me. If you can get past the defensiveness, you get to the loyalty, if you don't - you get the emotional hard arse.

I thought last year, that I had met my match and I think I did. I had truly believed that they had been too good for me. They never were. But by the time I realised it, they had already started messing with my head. This is the point that the inner man started kicking in. I may well have met my match and he certainly had, but at this juncture of his life - he wasn't ready to get off the pedestal he needs to be on and I wasn't someone that would keep him on it.

Yet there was something there that left me vulnerable. There is no sense, no logic and it defied all reason. For someone with a long history of being an emotional hard arse, it truly irkes that I cannot make sense of my emotions being out of line with my logic.

Perhaps I met someone as defensive as me, perhaps a genuine emotional hard arse. Perhaps I met someone who is so wrapped in spin that he no longer has a real sense of self. Perhaps I my long standing guidance by intuition overrides logic. Perhaps I never heard honesty.

What has messed with my mind is the intuition being diametrically opposed to fact and this is what I need to understand. So rocked by the spiral of mixed messages and emotions, that my barriers are up and I am risking scaring everyone away with my extremely hard arse.Either way, there is something that reminds me of my rather unhealthy habit of picking at wounds as a child.

And yet I would rather die than voice that. My reputation and my defences depend on it.

Perhaps PR & Marketing is the only career for those that talk utter bull. In which case, I shall be very successful.