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Well, for those of you playing along at home, you may have picked up on "Quitter" that I wasn't only referring to Camp Fire Girls and Job's Daughters but about my life. Raise a hand if you caught the barely veiled references to suicide. Anyone?

If you don't know it yet, I brought that bit of prose to my therapist and, on her very strong urging, I checked myself into a psychiatric hospital for Thanksgiving. 

I was in there for a week. The first two days I spent most of my time in my room. I came out to the Day Room for meals and meds, I was examined by a physician, and I went to a couple of group sessions. While the group sessions were fine, they were nothing earth-shaking. The meds were supposed to be what I brought, but the pharmacy apparently would rather bend me over provide me with their meds rather than use what I brought and somehow everything got messed up and I was off my two primary meds for three days, and off one of them for another two after that! So I was experiencing weird withdrawal symptoms as well as being in a strange place both spatially and mentally. 

Quitter

My parents used to call me a quitter.

• After a year or so of Campfire Girls, I didn't go back. It wasn't any fun and I have some very bad memories of it.
• I was in Honor Choir in 5th grade and I quit it to play softball. Because our lives revolved around my brother's sports, I thought I'd get some of the attention if I played a sport. (There is a whole, ugly story around this, but now isn't the time.) I wish I hadn't done this. I'd have been happier in Choir. But I was only 10 or 11.
• In 6th grade, I joined Girl Scouts. After about five months, all we had done were a handful of crafts. We didn't go anywhere or do anything. I had joined with two other girls, and they were also bored and unhappy. They made me the spokesman to tell the leader we were quitting. She cried. I was 11. My folk began calling me a quitter to my face.
• I was forced to join Job's Daughters when I was in 7th grade. Didn't want to, but the family had promised my dying grandfather (and given several things, I certainly felt no compulsion to follow that promise). I stayed for a year and a half before being able to leave it. My parents again accused me of quitting, of never being able to stick with a thing.

Not Enough

Today was my mother's birthday. She would have been 72.

I'm doing particularly badly today, but have been doing generally badly for weeks. I've done virtually nothing on one of my jobs; I'm sure they are just so glad they asked me to do it.

I'm so miserable and I don't know what to do about it that I'm not already doing. I think it wouldn't be a bad thing to be dead on almost a daily basis. I hurt and there is nothing that gives me any reason to think I'm going to become appreciably better. I have no family. What friends I do have are really just friends: none of them will ever come to visit me here or make me truly part of their family. And I haven't made any constant friends since I moved here. Given my experience, that's likely to remain the case.

Anyone who's reading this is already thinking "oh you should have hope" and "you don't really mean that" and "you don't know that's the case" and all that other optimistic stuff. And I wouldn't be able to convince such people — even if I bothered trying — that I have done and thought and felt all the hopeful, positive, productive things anyone has ever told me about, asked me about, or that I've read about or even thought of independently and none of it has worked.  But nobody ever believes me about that anyway. Just call me Cassandra.

11.11.11 — Welcome to My Party

Depending on who you listen to, today's binary date brings either great evil (Zombiepocalypse anybody?) or great good (The Rapture, if you are of a specific belief system; The Rapture, if you are the rest of us). All I know is that I have fallen many steps backward in my journey out of the Abyss. As I told a friend last night, I'm just a goopy, weepy mess right now. Kind of like a puddle in the Abyss. A goopy puddle. And this is my Great Big Goddamn Pity-Party.

I'm stressed about all the stuff I still haven't done, especially the Estate bills so we can close out and I can get my damned money (you would think that would motivate me; maybe I procrastinate so the others won't get theirs?), and the manager/coordinator job, which I haven't done much at all with. I feel guilty and I beat myself up over it. And no, the apartment is no better ... it's worse. It's almost a year since it's been entirely clean. Almost a year since the carpet (which is not entirely visible) was vacuumed. I'm afraid to look under some of this stuff — I know there will be dead (please oh please oh please no) bugs under it, or in it.

Getting fatter, not getting stronger. Eating junk with lots of sugar, something I have such an addiction to that I seem powerless in the face of it. If I have sugar, then that's all I want. It's overwhelming and compelling. I'm not walking, nor am I exercising. At my age, I need to change this. I need to be as strong and flexible and mobile as I can be; there is no one to take care of me in my old age.

I feel lonely, in that "I have no family" sort of way. No family, no partner, not even any friends who love me enough to invite me to be with them during xmas or New Year's. Except my BFF, but if the others don't seem that interested, there's no point in flying all that way. And feeling unloved. My BFF and his whatever-she-is are nice enough, but exceptionally dysfunctional (pot? kettle?) that it's sometimes uncomfortable to be with them. And BFF and I have minefields galore. And I have no friends here who are so close that they will spend significant (if any) time with me, much less holidays. I love my online friends, but that's what they are: online.

I need to touch and be touched. I desperately need to be held; I have had little of that since Mom died. I need it for comfort and to fill a physical need that connects me, to the ground, and to other people. I feel so inexpressibly alone.

All of which leads me to the goopy, weepy mess. Fat & flappy? Check. Self-pitying? Check. Weepy? Check. Sliding backward, erasing months of progress? Double-check.

Thoughts (which Karen the Therapist would tell me I should address with Cognitive Therapeutic thoughts, but I just don't feel up to it, or even deserving of it):

• If no one else cares enough to take care of me, why should I care enough?
• I'm going to disappoint everyone eventually; might as well get it over with.
• I'm going to live my life alone. I'm going to end my life alone. So what's the point of it? I'm not suicidal, but some days the thought of slurping down the entire bottle of one of my meds seems attractive.
• Maybe some people are right and mental and emotional problems only get worse as we get older — never better. That would suggest that I am engaged in a futile waste of energy.
• I cannot have the man I love. I have seen him less than 5 times this year. It's not entirely rational, but I feel unloveable and always second-best. Hell, the guy I lived with for a few years even chose computer games and video recordings over me. Given my experience — decades of it — I have to conclude that men just don't want me particularly. They don't value me particularly. It's all written in invisible neon lights over my head.

Well, that should provide a selection of what I'm thinking and feeling. I'm a mess. I'm weepy. And I am gloopy — disgusting and flabby and disturbingly sticky.

I don't like myself. I don't like my life. I want out. But I don't see any way to like myself or get a life I like, so I'm stuck. I don't see anything — possible — that I want or that is more satisfying that what I have.

If you are still reading, then thank you for attending my pity party. Time to go now. I feel another cry coming on.

A Cry for Help in the Darkness

Anger, resentment, discontent, desire, scarcity: these feelings fill my mind and my heart far more than any positive emotions. I tried very hard to develop more positivity in my thoughts and was doing pretty well, I thought. 

Slowly, stealthily, the positive thoughts and constructs leaked out of my mind and the dark, negative thoughts slid in. I didn't even notice, the dark ones feel so familiar. I feel consumed by the unfairness of life, grief, and loss. There's a positivity-sized hole in my mind: how do I stop it so I can keep my mind balanced and positive? After all, a friend spent an entire week writing about positivity in response to my desire for validation for my less-than-positive reality.

My mind is not a happy place to reside in. I cruise my usual blogs, but comment seldom because the useful- and/or positive-comment area of my brain is empty. All around me, fairies are falling to the ground and kittens are crying. I can feel my hair and my clothing turning black. What's the music Emo kids listen to these days?

When my mind is filled with sadness and despair, my body hurts. One of the joys of fibro, but it's also a side-effect of depression. My sleep is affected and pretty much everything sucks, thus completing the feedback loop that says the Universe is a dark and dreadful place.

It's like a prison. I want out.

It seems I am always saying — and asking for — help. This case falls under a request for help doing or learning to do something. I want a coach to help me regain my positive frame of mind, my reality-tinged optimism of former days. A coach who is sensitive to what I've gone through, the validation I need, and who won't go all perky and chipper on me. But I expect that, as usual, I will be left to do this all alone. Again. I honestly think this makes the process go much more slowly, leaving me depressed and and full of darkness for much longer. I can't see how this helps me. But then, it's not the Universe's place to be helpful or play fair. The Universe is just what it is. 

But maybe the force and energy that is Life will help me out a little. Something, someone, please give me some help here.

Sometimes

Ya know, sometimes it's just not possible to be positive. And sometimes I want to be negative, or at least not-positive. This has been an ungodly shitty year, the latest in a life punctuated by unexpected and tragic losses and other traumas. (I am the poster child for fibromyalgia, which is thought to develop as a result of one major physical or emotional trauma, or repeated ones. I'm in on all counts.) Sometimes I need to acknowledge the shit.

I need to acknowledge that my life sucks right now and that the non-sucky part is still somewhere past the horizon and that it's quite possible that my life is going to suck even more in the very near future unless a series of miracles occur.

To me, being positive in the face of these things or, even worse, about these things is like saying they don't matter or they aren't real. It's unrealistic and irrational. Bad stuff must be acknowledged. Pain and fear and the very real possibly of going stone broke — even having spent my jars of coins on food — is right before my eyes. I can see it. That's not being pessimistic, that's being rational.

Acknowledging the bad doesn't give it extra power. I think that ignoring it gives it power; the power to overwhelm you because you were so busy positively ignoring it that all the realistic things you might have done you didn't.

Sometimes, when I'm trying to be all bright and hopeful and positive, I'm really on the edge of tears.

This has been my life. This is my life. If things entirely out of your control repeat in your life, is that a lesson? If so, mine appears to be that life is about pain and helplessness that slowly whittle you down to nothing over time.

I guess the main thing I'm trying to say is this: sometimes being positive and pushing the bad stuff aside invalidates the very reality of the bad stuff and the pain that has been happening and that is happening right now. And just because something good happens or I have a good day does not negate everything else that continues to be Not Good in my life. I've been doing all that I am able to do, from when all I could do is crawl out of bed in the morning and back into it in the evening until now when I can wash my breakfast dishes as well. I have not been capable of looking for a job in an organized or energetic or even useful manner if at all, so no money is coming in. All the affirmations and visualizations in the world have not brought me money through other means (bequests, lottery tickets, philanthropy, whatever). Reality says that if I don't become stone broke in the next 6 weeks, then I'm going to miss it by only a hair and that missing it might as well be luck.

So, this being positive thing. Don't take it to extremes. Doing so feels disrespectful and invalidating. I rather need some validation now and then throughout this terribly shitty time. I need some now. Just because I can manage a smile doesn't mean I'm not in hell.

Motionless

Our bodies are made for movement. To whatever extent a body can move, it needs to move. Recent articles tell how all kinds of non-good and even bad things happen to and within your body when you don't move it.

I have barely moved in 10 months. My muscles are shortened and tight. My body hurts, yet walking causes pain as well. While I fear what I am doing to my body, my inner paralyzation controls me more than that fear. As my therapist says, what you do depends on which fear is strongest.

My life has been motionless as well. I haven't looked for work (and even if I'd had an interview, I don't think I'd have managed it well, given how messed up I've been). I haven't pursued help for financial problems. I've been a little mouse in a little hole who fears a cat is waiting right outside the hole.

This is not how I want to be! I used to climb trees and ride my bike. I also used to lie on my bed and read for hours. When we had a swimming pool, I could swim laps for hours, enjoying the feel of the water and the movement of my body. (And one time, when no one was around, I swam naked, which is the most blissful feeling in the world.) I used to dance in my house in the evening with my stereo turned up and the only light the flickering of candles.

Of course, I felt safer then. When I was a child, I didn't have to worry because my parents took care of us. After Dad died, I felt the beginnings of the instability of life. Later, I usually had enough money to get by. Even when I had no health insurance, I was healthy and young and didn't need it. I had work, I had enough friends, I had comfortable homes, even if I did move rather a lot at first. For all the problems I had and the traumas and griefs I endured, I still felt a measure of safety that allowed me to move.

Then, in my mid-30s, I had my first immobilizing depression and anxiety. I eventually overcame them, or they went away, and I recovered. I had a few other times that weren't quite as bad, but still I moved less than before. But none of those times of immobility were as long as this one, or as completely paralyzing as this time. Even at the worst of those times, I would get up and move — dance just a little, go into the garden and pick something to eat, walk around the block or on the beach.

I'm old enough that everything I do physically is more significant for my future than anything I've done until now. If I want to be physically fit and in good condition so I'm self-mobile and can take care of myself for a long, long time, I need to move now. I need to exercise now — not the run-a-marathon type or the body-builder type or the gym-rat type. However, I need to be able to walk long distances, briskly, while holding a conversation. I need to be flexible and strong (yoga, pilates perhaps). I need upper body strength as well as lower-body and, most of all, I need to enjoy moving my body, and to move my body because I enjoy it.

Maybe part of my immobility comes down to enjoyment: I don't do what I enjoy. My mind is a strange and sometimes unfathomable place, even to me — it wouldn't be impossible that I am punishing myself for some perceived fault. Fear or punishment, does it matter? I hold myself motionless, strapped down with invisible bonds — and not in the good way. I've emptied my life of so much I enjoy, other than the hurtful binges of fat and sugar that only mimic pleasure, that I'm empty of almost everything but fear and pain and grief and longing ... and the memory of everything good.

Years ago, when I owned my first home, I bought an orchard ladder: a very, very tall three-legged ladder made for people picking fruit from tall trees. I've had a fear of heights since I was a child, but it was my house, and my fruit. As I told my friends and myself, "I will not live my life controlled by my fears." For some time, I lived by that credo. Even a few years ago, when I made a major, unbelievable change in my life, I chose to do so in spite of my fears.

The incalculable grief and loss of the last year, all the changes in my life that I had absolutely no control of, the feeling of falling from a high cliff toward rocks many miles below — through them I forgot how brave I am. I forgot my credo from many years ago. I forgot me.

I'm still walking a tightrope with no net below me and each day is scarier than the last, with my continued unemployment and my dwindling resources and my beloved safety net gone forever.  But I can do it. I can do this. I have endured and overcome so many, many things in my life and I have come up from the Abyss again and again to smile, love, and enjoy my life. I need to remember: it never wins.

Remembering this, I must get up again and smile and love and live. Because pain sucks and just existing sucks and if I run out of money and have to go live in someone's basement it will suck, too.

Smiling and loving and living won't hurt me any worse than I hurt now. At least they will make room in the fear and pain I've surrounded myself with so I can move. And the next time that I get knocked down, get my feet wet in the Abyss — because it will happen again and again in my life — the voice inside me will remind me that it never wins and I'll get up and walk and dance my way out of that damned Abyss, out of the paralysis of fear and I will win, because I have done so before. If I can do it as many times as I have, there is every reason I can do it again.

So move.

Deep thoughts #2 --- Going ... up?

Do you ever find, after having been terribly sick or terribly down for a long time, that you resist feeling or seeming or accepting being better?

For example, I have bitten my nails most of my life and over the past decade and a half have managed to slowly make time periods between biting them longer and longer. Then last summer, when the troubles began to get worse, I began biting my nails again. I bit all of them, at some point, to the point of pain. 

A friend recently pointed out how they are growing again. "No they aren't," I said, pointing to the shortest one. "I bit this off just recently." "Yes," she said, "but I see white on all of them."

I wanted to argue with her. I'm not letting my nails grow. I'm still biting them because I'm Not Better Yet! I'm not getting better!

Why? Why would I resist any sign that I may be rising from the Abyss? Why would I want to continue to be or appear to be suffering or ill or unbelievably depressed?

Maybe I'm afraid that if I seem to be getting better, then no one will have patience with me if I'm not completely better — Now! — and all the time hereafter. Or maybe they'll think I was malingering: how long do you have to be in a Bad Place or State before you have legitimacy?

Or maybe I'm afraid I'm doing a disservice to my mom's memory by getting better now. Or maybe to myself in some odd way: if I'm well now, was I really that down and unreachable or was it really just ... all in my mind. Nerves. All those things that say I'm just a hypochondriac or just trying to get attention. Or maybe that I'm actually crazy. But something.

I have honestly turned the corner and I want to live now. That's an amazement in itself.

I'm still not doing my homework regularly, but I believe that my sleeping sickness over my vacation trumps that. Once I have the sleepiness under control and am feeling more me-normal again, the new "better-ness" will be more perceptible.

I'm going to show it off. Let others make their own judgments. I've been down to the Abyss yet again — my third time? my fourth or fifth? — and I beat it yet again. How many others can say that?

Therapy knocked me down and made me cry

Yeah, that therapy is a big ol' bully. Makes me cry. Makes me look at things that hurt me. Knocks me clear on my butt and leaves me sore and tired all the rest of the day. Sheesh.  Therapy is a mean muthuh.

What made me cry? Well, we talked about Mother's Day. I didn't get teary or even emotional yesterday. But I cried on Saturday because someone told me she was aware that this, my first one without Mom, would be extra hard and that she was thinking of me. No one else said anything to me, until they read the blog. Not my oldest friends. Not my mom's friends; not even her best friend who was supposed to adopt me. I felt ignored and that the people who say they care simply didn't think about me or felt it wasn't important. I felt even more alone and isolated than ever.

So when Karen-the-therapist and I began talking about it, I began crying. The more we talked about it and how I felt and why, the harder I cried. I even became inarticulate from time to time, I was crying so hard. It just wouldn't stop, all my feelings of loneliness and missing Mom and feeling that my friends don't think of me (whether they do or not, this is how I feel) came flooding out. 

I was a mess.

I read something in a blog comment today that really bothered me. Someone had written in about how isolated and hurting she felt, and how hard it was to see how well the blog author was doing after a year and the woman who wrote in felt she'd made no progress. 

One of the commenters was trying to be helpful and going on about how the only person you can count on is you, that only you can do this stuff, and you always have to do it alone. Except, I don't think the commenter is all alone. I think she has family. When you have backup, even if you are doing things yourself, you are not in isolation. It bothered me because I truly am doing things all alone and I'm not doing so well or quickly. It's harder than the commenter made it out to be. But I didn't want to be mean on the blog, even though I didn't think it was good advice to the woman who had written in.

So many of my buttons were pushed in therapy: loneliness, abandonment, fear of total isolation and friendlessness, anger that someone has diminished my experience. And therapy caused me to live through and describe each one, which hurt like hell.

That's how therapy beat me up, knocked me down, and made me cry.

Stole my lunch money too, but you have to pay for the privilege.

Melodramatic Me

Today I'm doing something completely different. Today I'm sharing something I wrote for my previous therapist a few years ago. It is not out of date — it is the most articulate statement of something I have felt off and on for my entire life. I'm sure there are many simple and complicated reasons I am sharing this with you right now, but I don't have any interest in exploring them.

Warning: This post contains raw pain and a point of view that most people that most people would rather not see. It is a bit melodramatic, which I am somewhat ashamed to admit is part of my make up — I would much rather be practical and down to earth. It is honest, sad, and dreary. It's also very long. So read at your own risk. It's okay to skip this one.

Exploring pain

Therapy was rough today. In fact, it hurt like hell. And this is going to be a very long post explaining why.

I told Karen that she needed to be the leader, because if left to my own devices I tend to wander, especially if I dread the topic of the day. So today we jumped back into the trauma therapy and continued to read the first section I'd written about.

Now, this first section only covers from the point I found out about Mom's cancer to the point where I got on a plane to fly home.  There is a lot more geography to cover, hills and valleys and even fruited plains (truly — there were clover fields between Mom's house and the cancer center that we watched go from green to greener to magenta to ... mowed, and I didn't manage to get a photograph, even though I passed those fields five days a week). Given such a small section of the whole, it seems reasonable to think that there could be only a small amount of emotional trauma to discover. Even as I read through what I'd written, I felt little emotion ... until near the end when I spoke of the fear I felt. That's when I began to weep.

I expected that, from our last session doing trauma therapy. Weep a little, recover a little. Before we began, I grabbed a tissue because I knew I'd need it.

Then Karen began working me deeper into my experience and my feelings from that time, almost a year ago. I went through a second tissue and started on a third. She asked about my mom and about our relationship and meaningful conversations we'd had. We laughed at one or two of my stories.

I had no idea how deep we could go, how far back emotions can connect and resonate. We reached the topic of how I feel with Mom gone, how mothers can be anchors, which mine was for me, and so on. What came to mind for me was what happened from time to time when I was a child. 

Did you ever wander off in a store as a child? Did your parents panic when they didn't find you, or did you? I had a tendency to stop to look at something more closely, or to keep going when my parent(s) stopped. Eventually, I'd look up and not see my parents. A touch of panic would grab me right away. I'd look in the next couple of aisles and not see them, then the real panic would set in. I never called out, I never cried, I just felt dread and fear squeeze my insides as if wringing out a wet cloth. 

I always found them. They would be looking at something and had no idea that I'd gone "missing." They'd even tease me about worrying. "We're here," they'd say. "We wouldn't leave without you." But I'd always end up doing and feeling the same thing.

This panic went deep. Even within the past few years, if I lost track of my friends in a store, I'd feel the panic and look for them. This sense of being lost and alone generally led me to stay close to them, whether what they were looking at interested me or not. In fact, that behavior has become routine for me. If I am in a crowded situation with someone, I will hold onto a piece of their clothing, if I cannot hold their hand, so I don't get lost.

"So how do you feel now," asked Karen. "Now that your family is all gone?" All the fear and the sense of isolation and panic and the knowledge that my fear I would end up alone has been completely validated surged up and out of me, first in words then in tears and finally in sobs that shook me so I could barely breathe — I don't know how long that lasted. I do know I went through two more tissues.

I knew this work was going to be difficult, and I knew I would cry. I did not know that I would actually sob my heart out in this woman's office; I have only done that in front of one person ever in my life (at least in my memory). I hate feeling this much pain, I hate crying, and I particularly hate sobbing where my body shakes and I can't keep noise from coming out of my mouth — the part of me that stands aside and observes always comments on how stupid those noises sound. I hate them. Doing this in front of another person simply added to the intensity and distress.

We talked me down and I was calm and tear-free when I left. I even took a walk at the park. But I'm going to have to figure out a different strategy: I also went to the grocery store because I needed a few things. Unfortunately, not only do I not manage lunch before my appointment, I also feel a sense of need for comfort after pouring out my tears. I bought goodies. And ate them all. Even if I'm burning off calories by crying and by walking, they aren't enough to balance out the comfort foods.

After an intensely emotional event, I generally move to a phase of "reduced affect" where I feel and display very little emotion. I have a polite and civilized aspect, I think. Given enough of these events over time to think about them, I've concluded that the follow-up phase functions both as a self-protective mechanism and a control mechanism. When I experience such intense emotions, I fear that I will lose control completely, and then what?  Therefore, after such events, my mind and body shut down to limit me and protect me from that intensity for a little while so I can recover. After today, I wouldn't be surprised if I shut down for the next week.

Cognitive therapy has nothing on trauma therapy. Nothing.

Trauma Work - Week 1

Warning: this is an extraordinarily long post. And it's kind of tedious.

I've been promising to tell you about my therapy. Today we began the trauma work, and it was every bit as painful and difficult as you might imagine. And yet, my therapist contrarily makes it easier to go through the trauma. 

I cried today, a lot. I normally do not cry in front of people, including myself. I hate to cry. Not just a little hate. Hate with a fervor reserved for rival drug lords. However, I felt comfortable crying in front of Karen. My stomach didn't clench. My shoulders didn't tighten.

By now you are asking yourself, "Sure, sure, but what the hell is 'trauma therapy'?"

I believe that now I begin the end of my anonymity among those who know me IRL.  As long as employers and clients do not find me --- and I'm not sure how they could --- that is fine with me.

By mutual decision, Karen and I decided to start with my latest and most debilitating trauma: the death of my mother. Her death resonates with earlier deaths, but I believe I need to deal with Mom's death first.

I began with the beginning, because I am OCD enough to like to do things sequentially. Beginning with when I first found out she had cancer, I listed what I consider the major points from beginning through her death. Then I wrote the facts for each point, including my own feelings and the dates of those facts where I have them.

Today we began the next step: I read the points for one portion of the story. And as I read, my emotions came flowing up, along with tears. Karen interrupted here and there to question feelings and to tell me how she felt and to mirror my feelings back to me. After I finished reading, we continued talking about that portion of the story and my emotions. She continued to mirror back and to question for further depth my emotions, and to tell me what she felt and thought as I read. I told her feelings I haven't told anyone. We talked about the multiple layers of how I felt. And I continued to cry. I even hit the point of gasping. Thankfully, I avoided sobbing, but I can see the potential for this. That will suck big time.

We switched to a more intellectual perspective that allowed me to calm down before I left her room. I may have had red eyes, but there were no tears pouring down my face.

As I drove away, I found that I felt odd. It seemed that I felt lighter and calmer, but I questioned those feelings. Still, that was how I felt. As I walked from my car toward the grocery store, I found myself walking differently, looser, and feeling a bit like my old self. Could just one little bit of this therapy truly have that much of an effect on me? Not sure.

Perhaps I'd still be feeling and wondering, if it weren't for the buzz kill. When I got was in the store, I received a call from my apartment complex office. Checks had been stolen from their drop box, and the boxes of the nearby complexes. And my check was among them.

I feel angry. It's as if the universe is keeping a very close count of my happys and sads and making my life balance on a very tight schedule. This happened after I jumped off a bridge and felt strong and confident --- five days later my car slid on the ice and ended up half in a ditched, totaled, and that event stole those feelings from me, leaving me feeling fearful and powerless. A year and a half ago, my mom was finally free to travel and do anything she wanted, mostly with me --- then she died of cancer.

Yes, I feel angry. And my world view that the universe has it in for me has not changed. Sorry, Julie. Maybe later.

Time passing

When you spend your days trying to ignore them because they hurt, time just seems to slip away. You think I need to do this. I'll do it later, then suddenly the day is over and it's time for bed. Even if bedtime comes at 2 am.

How did it get to be April? Why is my life still so dark and painful? Because I'm ignoring my life. When I pay attention, I feel the pain. My pain. By not owning it, by ignoring it, I won't get past it. Oh lord, I hate to cry.

I forget things easily. If I don't return a text message immediately, I immediately forget it. Same with emails. In addition, I've let my email on the server pile up so high, the friend who so generously hosts me on his server is going to become cranky quite soon.

I wish I didn't have to handle all of this alone. Although I have friends, they are online. Even though I have some friends who live nearby, they are busy or we forget to finish creating plans. Thus, I am handling my life and all that is rough, unfinished, or painful alone. I don't think I'm handling it too well, either. Handling my life alone points out how alone I am, how solitary my life is. I don't want to be solitary. I want a full, active, joyful life, surrounded by people I love and who love me. This doesn't seem too much to ask, but the Universe seems to disagree.

Finding the positives just seems like too much of a burden right now. It feels like an impossibility.

Another over-stimulated day

Exhausted again, which also means an early(er) bedtime, which I hope will lead to an earlier wake-up time.

Lots of sunshine, and my car's sun visor is missing a screw, so I cannot effectively use it on the side. That doesn't matter so much because the sun was hitting my arm more than my face.

Then there was the large amount of people contact. Loud people contact. In breaks during that, I received two phone calls that I really wanted to take, including an invitation to lunch by a good friend, to go to our favorite restaurant. ::Sniff::

In addition, I'm experiencing some body sensory overload. Pain, tiredness from being on my feet for a large part of the day. Even my skin feels overstimulated, possibly in part due to the sun, sunscreen be damned.

I want to be quiet, but my home needs cleaning. And I'm hoping the not-lunch friend wants to go out adventuring one day this weekend. The clutter and dirt makes me tired, going out in the sun and who knows what will also tire me. I hope it will be a good tired. Besides, this friend is one who gives me energy when we are together.

No major insights or progress tonight. Just a body that is ringing like a bell.

Hibernation of the Soul

I feel as if my spirit is in hiding. The true me, the authentic me, went underground years ago and I'm excavating, trying to find her, hoping she's neither dead nor fossilized.

I've experienced a lot of shitty, horrible things in my life, but for most of it I remained bright, positive, cheery, sunny. I had energy and I didn't have impulse control, especially toward eating. I was healthy and active and at a comfortable weight. I rode my bike or walked because I wanted to, because I enjoyed it.

Sometimes, I walked or drove or rode as far as I could because I was trying to escape the pain that chased after me, the pain from those shitty, horrible things. I kept going because I knew that happy existed and that, if I could figure out how, if I could escape the pain, I could be happy again.

The geologic layers that cover my true self have grown thicker over the years, and my back is sore and old from shoveling. I still have hope about finding my self, but I admit the hope is dimmer and more desperate.

I am very tired.