Therapy Revelations for Zombies.
I need to start writing again, even if it’s privately, to keep track of things. Work through things, if you will. I know this blog served me well in the art of inflection and self sabotage so many times in the past and for that reason I really have withdrawn from faux-anonymous transparency and honestly I’m sure I’ve lost whatever edge I ever had when it comes to writing as a form of self expression.
As with most of the things I consider art-for-survival at this point, it really did get washed away.
I’m the zombie.
I’ve been married for almost 7 years now to yet another sociopath. This one deviant in his own way, one far different from the one before, and just as invisible until he wasn’t and scarier because he was. I’m working through why this has happened again and genuinely have come to some pretty serious revelations about what cPTSD looks like and how it masquerades in plain sight. I’m kind of shattering my OWN stigma about domestic violence and what even I have lazily dubbed patterned behavior in victims who seem to “keep picking the bad ones” or “keep attracting the wrong people.”
I will not delve into the particulars for reasons that are both personally humiliating and legally detrimental as very much of this involves an open criminal case, but I will say this… it will never happen again. Under any guise, on any planet, in any emotional state. Ever.
I’m once again in therapy, but under a much different set of boundaries than before. A conversation was had up front about the ways in which I was utilized by my psychiatrist and how damaging the break down of that doctor patient confidentiality was to whatever shred of me that longed to heal back then. Assurances were made, and with those and my own understanding that trusting those assurances and being confident that once again this could never happen is foolish on my part, I return to the scene of the crime both jaded and guarded but still needing to do this despite it. So, just as I made this mistake before and destroyed my own sanity and any trust whatsoever I had in psychiatry, I will again blog my way through this because I feel like it may help someone else someday.
{In fact, if my CURRENT therapist(s) is reading this, I honestly hope that the things that I forget to say during our sessions still find their way into your studies. For science. I’ll never be an oblivious guinea pig again regardless.}
I am looking at this from an angle that is no longer about “understanding” and picking apart the significance of everything that I could deem the cause for ending up where I am in this moment, or for my children ending up here along side me, and instead focusing on something larger and more ambitious than surviving and moving on with life donning an armor of self-awareness that is somehow supposed to break a mythical cycle. Sure, the repetition of abusive relationships and trauma are not being dismissed… but they are also not a part of some unavoidable cycle that can only be hindered by grinding down to rubble and figuring out why it’s all my fault.
What the heck am I even talking about? I’m talking about the fact that I am NOT ignoring red flags, or attracted to toxic people because “they feel right” or “it feels normal” and likely if you were dropped into this sticky room by the talons of a #triggerword and you’re one who is caught in a similar holding pattern that you’ve dubbed a vicious cycle… you aren’t doing it either.
We can do hard things, boys and girls. Inflection is exacting. Open wounds are agonizing. Sewing those up while continuously poking raw guts back through the seams is like battling a hydra made of sinew. Bearing those scars and fighting the need to explain them to anyone that you ever get close to is taxing. Hiding them feels like betrayal to self and is of the loneliest places. These are all “hard” things. These are all the things that we think we must do to survive.
But what if… what if we don’t have to survive?
What if the person who all of that burning hurt belonged to actually succumbed?
What if by dedicating whatever of ourselves that we are able to bring to this futile fight, we are allocating that dwindling flame to light a room devoid of oxygen?
As good at it as I know I’d be, I’m not writing a song to suit the chord of melancholy… I’m saying what if we really ARE just dummies about this whole thing?
I am not a doctor, I am not a scientist -however mad- and I am just throwing this out there as hard as I can for my own notetaking.
WHAT IF THE WEIGHT WE FELT SO UNBEARABLE, THE HURT SO UNSURVIVABLE THAT WE THOUGHT ALL WAS LOST AND WE’D NEVER BE OK AGAIN… KILLED US?
By “us” I mean who we were… not our bodies. Visibly scarred or not, are we actually trying to resurrect corpses and calling this surviving?
This isn’t some boastful little rant about being further along in my journey to heal than anyone. I’m not any better off than I was when I was sitting in a chair being triggered and prodded into remembering repressed horrendous things about being sexually abused as a child, or raped, or the epiphanies that would burst forth from the aptly named by my former self’s “fuck-shaped-boxes” when I learned what gaslighting was. It’s not me popping out of a DeLorean in a wizard hat and spurs with the freaking recipe for moonshine and the secret to complete and total spiritual well-being. I’m completely without a lamp to light this path… but I think I might know where some matches are stashed.
All of the aforementioned parts of what we have convinced ourselves is what most of us are taught comes next after trauma. Surviving it and healing as best we can and being as “normal” as we can while we try to never end up back in that hell are “hard.” As much as I have always wanted to believe it, they aren’t just that way because of they effort and energy they demand; they are that way because they are actually IMPOSSIBLE things to accomplish. It’s like picking up limbs from a minefield and zapping a monster composed of the blown apart pieces because it’s supposed to be able to raise kids and hold a job without being a burden or making anyone else uncomfortable. Anyone who’s been through severe trauma of any kind knows that they’ve been blown to proverbial pieces. We may not be able to pin it down yet, or ever, but we know we aren’t who we were before. Neither is the monster. Everything’s there, but it’s no longer the vessel of who it was before it tripped, tippy toed, or titty slapped that detonator.
So why, then, have I always felt like I was SUPPOSED to resurrect the corpse of the girl who existed before it all only to have her walk through the rest of her life a zombie? Eating and functioning to a degree but surviving on instinct alone. Not LIVING.
That’s what I’ve come to feel like maybe cPTSD really is. It’s the sum of parts that are pointlessly being held together just so they can keep moving around as they are supposed to, but being perpetually reminded that they aren’t. They are constantly afraid that it’s obvious to everyone else and completely certain that they aren’t whole anymore. Metaphorically, we can’t do the hardest thing of all if we can’t look down at what we’ve reassembled and know it is dead. Step out of it. Let it fall to the ground and rot as it should. We can’t do that because we don’t feel like we deserve an actual do-over. We don’t deserve a brand new life and we can never have one because we are broken now.
Guys. Let’s just get really dumb, since we are zombies or whatever, and take all of that imagination that we dedicate daily to the LITERAL BULLSHIT that we can’t have or don’t deserve something because we’ve got so many scars and just re-allocate the huge amount of bandwidth used maintaining a totally fictional set of rules fueled by self deprecation and imagine a reality where we are actual phoenixes and not just people who use metaphors when we feel tough or are trying to convince others that we SURVIVED.
YOU AREN’T THE PERSON THAT YOU WERE BEFORE TRAUMA.
YOU ALSO AREN’T THE PERSON YOU WERE AFTER WHO’S SURVIVED AND IS NOW FIGURING OUT HOW TO LIVE AS NORMALLY AS YOU CAN.
“YOU” DIED. The you that all of that happened to, they died too. Stop walking around in their bodies. Do the hardest thing at all and love yourself enough to be a mad scientist that isn’t trying over and over to breath life into a cadaver. That’s the real cycle. There’s the real insanity, by definition. Instead be the doctor who’s literally fixing your own injured brain so that it’s no longer convinced that it lives in that body. Then look in the damn mirror and see the brand new person who exists as of that exact moment and be who that person would be if they never met the other one and if anyone in THIS person’s life wants to keep calling them by the dead one’s name you tell them once, then never let them make you feel the need to tell them again.
YOU ARE REINCARNATED.
INCARNATE OR WHATEVER.
LIVE.
If Mother Nature had PTSD
Having a brain that is forever scarred by experiences is like dead wood carved into by the world around it with no roots to nourish it as it regenerates it’s bark.
A mind covered in little ditches that pick up every drop of water, every reminder, every little vapor in the air around it all of the time becomes a bountiful tributary because water always finds it’s way to places it’s already been. Once a place floods it floods every time there’s a hard rain, but what if the rivers were physically sucking the water from the air and coursing it downstream constantly? Flash floods would be happening whether it actually rains or not. That’s how this works. It’s not driven by thirst or draught or gravity. It’s not driven by anything other than the inability to stop soaking up the world around it so it never misses a drop, just in case it’s THE drop. We can not protect ourselves if we aren’t always in battle mode. But hoarding stimuli, like never letting a drop of water soak into the earth, causes flash floods and suddenly we know nothing of dry land and can only see and feel the water in which we are now drowning all over again.
Even in the places where the Earth has changed due to natural disaster, the waters still recede and the bark still grows back.
We don’t know how to navigate PTSD because it is so insanely unnatural, not because we are weak.
Hiding under the blankets.
I’ve been apprehensive to say a word. Not even a peep. Still am. But I’m here.
Gods children, oblivious ballerinas.
I wrote this two Octobers ago, I found it in the notes of my phone…
I think that demons are at play in so many ways that we fail to acknowledge, if we are being honest. I believe that ones soul bares scars that are visible to the “in between” and are like lighthouses to those who are particular to the type of torment that has hollowed those places in you. They come along and fit the void like puzzle pieces and feel familiar bc of this. They take root in you and consume you. It is rare that someone is able to truly break this. Completely. It is a supernatural bondage over the human spirit. We give little credit to the divinity of the air. We really fail in respecting those things bc we lack understanding.
I’m certain of this. I’m the lucky or unlucky one, whichever you prefer to think of it, that was born with an understanding of these things. I’d love to legitimately study, to read what has been written, but for now I speak from my own limited interpretation of what is. I just know, from somewhere deep, that the spiritual warfare they scream about in churches is such an intricate faceted thing within which we are all very deliberately spun. Until people acknowledge that they are not only their own, that we are a part of this eternal ballet, and that our souls are the weak currency in a constant ebb and flow of power between darkness and light, we will never ever be enlightened and reach our great potential in the time we are each allotted.
We are doomed to repeat ourselves until we get it right. Hell is not a place. Hell is an absence, a distance from God. I really believe that.
I might add to this that hell is also something that I will never have to worry about seeing. Thank you, Jesus.
Passionate things are just that.
As writers and artists, of every kind, but especially those of us who are without discipline, we run a perpetual risk of judgement for our honesty. By honesty I mean, of course, our selfish need to vent at all costs, and by judgement I do not mean criticism. I mean judgement. I mean that we will, inevitably, tell our own truth as we know it to be and we will absolutely hurt someone else by it. Be it the ego, the absurdity of our perception, or the complete exposure that our diary-esque rooftop rantings beget, blood will surely trickle if not spray from the proverbial throats of those who we take with us out into the open. We dump our panty drawers from skyscrapers and you can only hope that any of your love letters we had stowed in there years ago had long been burned before we ever hit the stairs. To you I apologize. Any and all of you, who ever dared get near us at the risk of becoming our muse. Flattering in theory, the truth is that you will most certainly hate us for being the exact thing that you loved and wanted about us back when you loved and wanted it. So I say this with sincerity. Please do not take offense to passionate creatures doing what we do. We love you. Sometimes we love you threadbare. Sometimes we love you in 1000 volts of fleeting white hot pops. We don’t want to hurt you, but we might. I apologize. To the rare few who know how to love us despite this, who can bare to see parts of themselves in our work as the honor that it sincerely is, you are saints.
I want to say it all just once
It’s not fair that I will go to my grave without having ever said all of the things, calmly, that I want to say to the two men that I loved the most, and who both destroyed me. I can’t help that I have a such recurring fantasy to sit in solitude, somehow safe, across a folding table in metal chairs and just say everything. Everything.
“No-means-yes me, baby!” A love story.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/09/rush-limbaugh-on-consent-for-sex-no-means-yes-if-you-know-how-to-spot-it/
{now I realize that he is not “advocating rape” per say, I just feel like making light of, dancing around, and generally attempting to water down a topic such as consent by blurting lines and tossing around bullshit hot air about romance and seduction being lost arts is a generally pompous stance to take on a subject that has affected so many people. He loves to trigger. I know it’s a slight overreaction, but he loves those, and it just felt like a good time to write a romantic short story on his honor.}
In this one case, can I hope that someone no-means-yeses him right in his pooper? No drinks, no dimming the lights, I want complete coherence, the shake of the head, the bead of sweat down his pasty brow as he, in slow motion, bellows “NOOOOO” like a Bassett Hound and The Gimp gives him a knowing nod while committing a B&E on his back door.
On the nightstand lay a crumpled piece of hotel stationary with “your welcome” scrawled in rudimentary cursive. The Gimp was never one for good grammar or good byes and the blinds cracked back sharp as Rush released a thick sigh, much like the hot air he was notorious for contributing to the atmosphere, but slightly defeated and laced with just a pang of butt-rapey longing. Much like his asshole, his heart was somewhat inside out and he would never again look at the news or sauerkraut in the same way. The sun began to peek over the tops of the china berry trees and the muffled cry of an illegitimate baby found it’s way through the walls as he lit a cigarette and wept gently into his shit-stained hands. Yes… he thought… no means yes.
Domestic Violence, oh how trendy
You’ll never find a snake where a mouse didn’t already dwell. Maybe we should stop pointing out all the snakes and figure out when we allowed ourselves to become the mice that attract them.
Lazy lazy lazy
Dog, ya got a point. I’m with Matilda.
I think it’s safe to say that a reboot is in order.
Block.
I have the worst case of artists block EVER!!!! So much to do. It’s crickets.
Yeah right, I wish it were crickets.
My brain is dead air. I am in a very chemical place. Earth to Ambam. Tomorrow I walk a big job, one that’s not like anything I’ve taken on before and, honestly, I’m beating myself up because I don’t exactly believe in me today. Frustrated and stagnant.
Seriously serious shit
I’m an artist. A real one. I need to stop pussy-footing around the fact that through all of this, I have put a pretty heavy heel on the tail of my dream. So here’s to dreaming.
This is what I’m doing.
https://www.facebook.com/Annie.Bianca.Art
I don’t have a formal website or a real portfolio, but it’s a start. Now it’s time to hold myself to a promise that I made to a buck-toofed little copper haired kid with a mullet in the second grade.
I Deserve to Live
It has been too incredibly long to simply leap into things without acknowledging that I stopped writing.
I stopped writing.
There.
While this blog has been candid to a fault, so much so that it’s put me in a position in which I have had to defend myself and go on the literary lamb, I do not regret anything I’ve ever said here. What I do regret is that at one point, under the instruction of my then-husband, going in and edit/removing quite a few posts to his satisfaction in order to portray him in a more flattering light, as the other option I was given was to delete my entire blog, a place I’ve come to scream and wallow safely for so many years. For this, I sincerely apologize. I was a coward for a very long time. I feel like saying that does not absolve me of it, but it certainly does score me a point or two for the whole “admitting I have a problem” segment of whatever bullshit therapy this serves as for me. So not that I have so many eyeballs with baited breath awaiting my every post, but if you read this, and for whatever reason care, I’m sorry. I will never, ever, EVER, for any reason, dilute or whittle down any part of myself for another person in my life. I fucking swear.
What triggered Susie-Psycho to whip out the ol’ laptop, you ask? Are we manic? Are we needing to vent? No.
In fact, we are, very simply, saying goodbye to something. Officially. We are bidding a codependent fool farewell.
I found a journal today. A journal I started before I met a man who would, because I would allow him to, destroy my life. I found solid evidence of something I already knew and that was that several years ago, at 27, I lost myself entirely. Even as I blogged away, trudging through the darkness, seeming to have at least some grip on who the fuck I was, I was completely absorbed in a very brutal, sick relationship. I read every page of it. It wasn’t much because upon it’s discovery, like all of my other outlets, it was no longer mine, but his, and everything in it from that point was written to cater to and outcry in regards to his ego.I struggled all afternoon about destroying it, even though it also harbored so much insight on just how warped my reality was at the time, made sense of the madness that would swallow my family, my life, my complete sense of self, and I decided that it would only prove that I didn’t have the courage to face what I had done. I allowed another person to absorb me, because I was so desperate and pathetic that I was willing to accept whatever bullshit version of love I was able to make it in my mind. In doing so, I hurt my children. I brought a serpent into our home that struck not once, but four times. I will never forgive myself.
So what this is, is not only an apology or an admission but perhaps a bit of a plea. Please, I beg you, no matter how lost you are in your storm, know that they all end, and do not settle for anything short of what you deserve. I follow that with an affirmation that we all need to say to ourselves, whether we believe it or not, until we do, and that is “I deserve to live.”
Fresh
I think it’s time for my fingers to wake up. I can’t talk about so many things for legal reasons but what I can say is that I’m alive, inside and out. Let freedom ring.
There is no such thing as irony
My core is white hot magma.
It was always for this moment.
It was always this mushroom cloud.
My seedlings will flourish in your ash.
We are His beautiful orchids.
True Story
Once upon a time…
There was this happily miserable girl. She was everything and it felt like nothing. She just wanted to be something. Something that wasn’t everything all the time. She couldn’t love herself.
She smiled a lot. No one was the wiser.
She had some babies. She loved them. They made her feel like someone else. It felt beautiful. It saved her, it made her understand, it gave her a reason to want to be something. She got stronger, but still felt like everything inside was broken. A lot of broken nothing.
She smiled a lot. Everyone smiled back.
She met a boy. She loved him. He made her feel wanted and under control. She got scared. How could he want someone who was nothing? He assured her constantly that she was broken, but that he loved her despite it. She was willing to accept whatever love she could get. He knew that she was something but he didn’t understand her, only how to keep her wings clipped enough to have her. She felt as though she was too broken not to be thrown away. They loved and hated one another passionately.
She smiled a lot. No one was the wiser.
Someone called her on the phone. Years of madness spilled over. Splinters pushed through.
She finally cried. They took her to the Doctor.
She took the blue pill. She took the red pill. They strangled her. Dust settled on blank canvasses. They made her nothing. They took away the joy of her children. They took away her love for the boy. They took away her love and her hate. She could not live without either. She threw the pills away and that made her anything but something. Something worse. Much worse.
She hid a lot. Everyone pretended to worry.
Her children loved her in her sadness. They loved her in her darkness. They did not give up on her. The nothingness drifted slowly to the bottom. Silt and ashes. Forgiveness.
She wrote a lot because she hurt. She wrote because she had to.
Once upon a time there was a girl who tried to fix herself because she felt like nothing.
Then she realized that she was exactly where she was meant to be. She realized that all she had to do was trust God’s plan for her. She realized that she had only needed to accept.
Even if though she was broken, she was loved.
She was happier than she’d ever been in her life, because herself had dissolved in the fray. She was happier than she’d ever been because she’d quieted the storm. She was content for there was nothing left of her to whittle.
Meanwhile little broken spirits were the penance being paid to the sweetest smile she was sure she had ever seen. As it turned out, it was her everything that was nothing. I’m sorry, babies.
I didn’t want to be a person today.
Especially not me.
Not today.
But I was anyway.
It turned out alright.
🙂
Ahem…
I do not know what to say. So much. In fact I am afraid to begin. I suppose today I shall approach things in an “update” sort of way. Just to get it out so that I can start smearing brain garbage all over the place.
I honestly have to look and see what my last post was… I have no idea where I’ve even been.
Ok…
So…
I was sick. Like really sick. For ever. EVER. It’s all a blur and I yet I still feel deeply within my still-recovering innerds that I am a seriously huge dick for even calling myself “sick” at all. People have cancer. Since my last post, more people. Just now… more people. I found out a few weeks ago that my Paw Paw has it. Extensive Multiple Myeloma. Yeah… google it. I don’t even know.
Beep Beep Beep.
Finished my taper off of Seroquel for the SECOND horrible time in October-ish. The WD during that three month dwindle were horrendeous.
When you taper you think that the taper is it. You believe, because you have to, that the taper is the withdrawal. That your last day, your last half of a half of a pill is it. It feels like victory. I had never tapered back into myself entirely at any point over the past few years. I’d gone from one thing to another, mostly all related poisons, and never just been… well… naked. When I quit the Seroquel I also quit Abilify cold turkey. I went from “withdrawals” back to the pits of hell that are the Discontinuation Syndrome that I preach and preach about. CRACkK-FUkKiNG-HEAD. Twitching, itching, awake for weeks. Miserable. I ticked, I chewed my face to pieces, I paced, hyperventilated, cried in the dark. The whole nine yards. During this, my body, which was already caught in a downward spiral, gave up. I was depressed, sick, and totally over it.
Things I thought I knew how to manage: Bipolar, Schizo, ADHD… yada yada, Diabetic, Fibromyalgia, G.E.R.D., RLS, and just basically feeling like shit all day every day.
Chronic, seemingly incurable, Sinusitis and Bronchitis. Now going through withdrawal and not sleeping.
Needless to say, all of these things, and the attempt to tackle all of these things individually, were killing me. I gave up on my brain. Trying to fix my brain was killing my body. I’d like to think that my body keeps my soul within its fleshly confines and therefore might be important. It just might be. I figured we should forfeit the sanity and save the body, maybe at least it could be sent for groceries and asked to do a dance or two for someone’s entertainment and serve a purpose before it got struck by lightening. IDK. If nothing else, I like to think that I would make a mighty sexy chalk outline on a sidewalk someday and I may never survive long enough to get somewhere with sidewalks if I didn’t at least try to make it.
Funny how someone who so often ponders her own demise could even care about making it, but I have some pretty rad kids to chase around and it takes a pulse to do that. Nobody can chase my kids like me. Fact.
That all said, I fired my Doctor, middle finger in the air, when he offered me yet another round of antibiotics to “fix my wagon.” Really? “Chronic Sinusitis” is what he insisted. This was, of course, because my sinuses APPEARED to be draining, which was really just a result of my desperately weeping in his office begging him to figure out why I’d spent the past two years coughing until my ribs would break and in what I felt to be hell. Despite my asking him over and over to stop seeing me as a runny nose and a cough and acknowledge that my BODY is sick, that I, AMBER, am sick, that it is not JUST sinuses and to please, for the love of God, TRY to figure it out, the man sent me away with another “gorilla-cillin” shot in the ass, some prednisone, and another round of amoxicillin to throw on top of the six previous rounds of oral antibiotics, three rounds of steroids, and three other shots of penicillin. I could not take it anymore. I’d been in bed for two months. I was sick of being sick of being sick.
I called a new doctor, an internal medicine doctor. Before I could make that appointment on Jan 9th, I officially, completely finished throwing my back out on New Years Eve by walking across a 20 foot lawn and got to make a few trips to a few ER’s and ride in an ambulance… by the way, ER will ignore the SHIT out of you until you are healed by Jesus in the waiting room. They will also completely ignore the fact that you are in more pain than natural childbirth and send you home with a prescription for Alieve and discharge papers stating “arthritis pain” in a 31 year old who was paralyzed from the waist down for seven hours and screaming in agony alone in the waiting room while the girl with the recurring UTI who knows all the security guards gets hooked up with free Dr. Pepper. By the time I made it to my previously scheduled appointment with the Internal Med. Dr. I was homicidal.
SO. The new Dr. is wonderful. He immediately referred me to a Sinus Specialist but said that he felt it was definitely not “only” a sinus/respiratory issue. He totally acknowledged that I have Fibromyalgia and that it was being aggravated by all of the infection that was showing up in my blood-work. The Sinus Specialist figured out by looking at my vocal chords that I was not being diagnosed with the type of Reflux that I really had and that it was the culprit for my sinus issues and the bronchitis that kept turning into pneumonia because of my not being properly treated for infection. A trip to a wonderful Gastroenterologist and an endoscopic surgery later and we find out I have both G.E.R.D. and L.P.R.D. as well as several ulcers. So… once those things are under control, guess what, it’s a miracle. Chiropractor three times a week, tons of omeprezole, lots of other fun stuff… anyway I freaking survived. I. AM. ALIVE.
Now… back to the other junk. The Discontinuation Whatever-it-is lasted until the first week of March. I have been off of Adderall for about a month as well, which was another fun time. I was taking 90mg a day. I am now officially only taking birth control (which may also be jacking with my little body) and Requip to help with my RLS. Back to not sleeping for days, hearing invisible wind-chimes, watching little gremlins dart around the house… but feeling better on the outside for a change.
Moral of the story is, the day I started trying to “fix” me is the day I started to kill myself. I have NO idea what advice to give in this matter other than to trust yourself. If you start taking medication and are hearing your doctor say “you have to weigh the benefits of the medication over the side effects and decide whether or not it’s worth it” and you feel like you are dying… don’t overlook it. Don’t be so desperate to “fix” yourself and let yourself fall apart because you are ignoring the obvious. If your body is sick, your mind will follow suit and all the Seroquel in the world will never fix the fact that you are simply killing yourself by accident and not on purpose. I don’t blame Seroquel… although when I began taking it the drug warnings about blood-sugar were not listed and I have to say that I would have rather lived an insomniac’s life than a diabetic insomniac’s life… in fact, I do blame it, but that’s a story for another day. More than anything, I don’t blame, I am just pissed in general. Don’t be pissed in general, kids. Don’t let someone that has spent 45 minutes watching a clock and barely listening to you give you something that can/will possibly change your life entirely and just put it in your mouth like a fucking sheep. I feel like psychiatry in general feeds off of desperation. Nobody goes to a psychiatrist because they aren’t feeling out of options. No one calls and makes an appointment and utters the words “something is wrong with me” that is not desperate. I can only beg of anyone who has a shred of hope in life, be so careful with yourself. Be so so careful.
Starting at the Finish Line.
Is it assumptuous to “name” your post before you ever write it? Or is it irresponsible and cocky to dive into a post un-named?
Do you taste the peanuts or the chocolate first?
What IS the McRib?
Why have I been SICK AS FUCK since September?
These are all questions that 2011 aparently shall leave unanswered. The enigma never ends, I tell you.
Recap:
August I finished tapering off of meds. Miserable hell ensued. WD was insane.
Insomnia beget exhaustion.
Exhaustion beget Bronchitis which started in September and has never gone away. This has branched out into the flu, which then became pneumonia, back to bronchitis, paired with a stomach virus, back to pharyngitis and bronchitis, back to the flu, and now I’m “getting over the flu” with Bronchitis. It’s the end of December. Basically I’ve felt like donkey shit since the first week of August. That’s five straight months of feeling like crap. I am 31 years old. On top of that, the symptoms that I have feared for years to be Fibromyalgia have become somewhat rampant but who’s to say that’s not just “I feel like crap” in general going on, you know?
SO…. I find myself closing a year that’s been, for the most part, pretty crappy wondering this. WTF 2011?!?!?!
That said, this is a far cry from my “all the things I’ve learned this year” post that is sure to come. This is more of an “I’m not dead, guys, if anyone cared” post.
When I am capable of spouting forth thought not saturated in DayQuill, I will do so. In the meantime, let’s get through this year intact.
My paintings were hostage, but at least I feel better.
Things are dying down inside of me. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. A lot of quiet observation. I don’t feel like talking. I’m not quite myself yet, but then again “myself” isn’t really who I want to be either. This is such a touchy time of year for me anyway, being in the downswing of detox and just off of meds in general may or may not be the safest way to get through another fall. I haven’t been to therapy in a long time. I kind of feel like I may never go again. I know that’s not good, but I’m really in a weird place. I’m just a little past “fuck it.” Just a tad. The itching has really decreased over the past week and now that I’ve filled my script for Ambien and started pounding Melatonin, I am getting a few hours of sleep at night. My dreams, of course, have been mighty vivid. Mostly about water, lots and lots of water. I have this itching need to paint again but can’t quite start. It’s almost as though I feel good… but I won’t go overboard. I’m kind of content. It’s odd. Like I said, feeling very quiet. The pings and chimes and little chirps are slowly creeping back into my silence, like slowly turning up the volume on a room full of cuckoo clocks. Images flashing in my mind, little by little, willing me to break out the sable and open some windows. I almost feel like I am just waking up, all day long. I get really agitated some evenings, the day having been just too much, and I long for bedtime. I just want to lay awake, unseen, in the dark, and listen to my noise in the quiet. The puppy has been interesting, she takes the “alone” out of alone. Driving in my car has always been my worst time. It’s when I get emotional, the long drive home every day. I cry a lot in the car. I don’t know why. It seems like after work, after whatever the day has brought on, and before I become “Mom” again is my most desolate point in the day. When I mean nothing. I have no purpose. I am a girl, in a car, and who cares where I am going. Not that I am so selfish that I need unwavering attention, I actually look forward to that 20 miles of un-neededness, I just want to be alone without being alone. I can’t explain it. The dog sleeps in the car. It’s not like she sits and stares at me, or wants me to talk to her. Sometimes she barks at me when I sing, she is especially bothered by my rendition of Angie by the Rolling Stones, but then she doesn’t know that I can’t help but sing to that one. I don’t know, I am not going to confess that adding another mouth to feed, another creature needing care, someone else’s shit to clean up to my plate was some shot at replacing the need for therapy, but then again I’m not going to entirely deny it either. I honestly don’t know what I’m even talking about right now. Just ramblin’ on. Like the song. That’s me. Ramblin’. But you have to say it like “Ramble-in” or it’s not as cool.
If I were to go home, drag out my easel, and just put a canvas on it, just put it there, to walk past every day for a week or so… sigh. The Cheshire Cat shut down. Yeah. Imagine my despair. I drove past a few times, the lights were out, although it was mid-day, and I thought to myself, “hmmm, wonder what’s going on there?” Then a week passed, not a soul to be seen. Doors locked, lights out. No signs, nothing. Just not open. I started to panic on the inside but kept telling myself that maybe there’d been a death in the family, some tragedy, something. No reason to freak out. Two weeks went by and then one day, driving past, I see that the windows are empty. Now it’s time to panic. I’d called the store countless times. I left message after message. Never heard back. Called the owners of the buildings, couldn’t get any responses. Look in the windows, empty, except for my paintings. There they stood, propped against the walls, in the darkness. Glass and locked doors in between and there were my guts, abandoned, and no one would answer the phone. I thought they were lost forever. The store was closed, and while my artwork wasn’t STOLEN, per say, it was trapped. I had no idea what to do. The Police Department referred me to a judge in town. They said just MAYBE I could get access to the empty store to collect my work, if I could prove it was mine. How in the hell do I do that? I had other paintings, with my signature on them, maybe that would work? No idea what to do. Would I just have to lose it all? I mean fuck, nobody wants it anyway, right? No, who cares if anyone wants it, it’s my work, right? I was really torn between my low self-esteem and giving up on it and fighting. I didn’t want to make a scene over ugly paintings. I mean would I have to actually SHOW a judge my other paintings to prove that I painted them? What if he thinks my stuff sucks? What if he laughs and is like “you call that art?” No, a judge wouldn’t do that, that’s dumb. Then then again what if the whole thing is dumb? I should have made a contract with the store owner, but I was so excited that she took my stuff that I just trusted her. What if they won’t even let me talk to a judge? Sigh. So all felt lost, then my husband made a late night run up to the store, to try to get a number off of the window, and he caught them. Eleven o’clock at night, there they were, the store owner and her husband, making trips to clear out the store from the back alley. It was an ambush. He called me to come to the store, which I did, in my pajamas, and there we stood, the store owner and I, in a dark alley. She apologized to me over and over, saying that she’d had to give up the store for financial reasons, and that she’d meant to call me. Blah blah blah. I guess I should have been mean to her but I couldnt’ do it. I just took my paintings and went home. Now there they are, in my studio, stacked up, just as they were before. Having had some sort of adventure I reckon they may never see the light of day again. That’s it. That’s how it ends, I guess. I got my shit into a shop. The shop closed. The end. Boo. I don’t like that story at all. Tell me a better one.
Since I love talking to myself…
I just wanted to say, I feel a little better today. Not so tired and run down feeling. Slept more last night than I have in weeks. This is the direction I was hoping to go. I know it’s only one day, too early to get excited, but just MAYBE I’m on the upswing? Please? Ha ha ha. Feeling better about life in general today. Maybe I’ll make it after all.
Charming Aberration 