Friday, July 18, 2014

Untitled, 7/18/14

I should have known it was a lie. Not an intentional lie, but a lie nonetheless.  I thought I'd always have them, that they would be there to help me. I made myself believe that. And that we were gonna have this messy little life but that it would be together. That my crazy was gonna be just fine with them and that the dynamic was the best one for us. Now I feel so alone and my crazy is too much and the dynamic is too much. Im trying to find a place all on my own when the only place that I might be able to afford with the job that I'm just praying I get is one in their building! Jesus FML! And I didn't do anything super psycho. I had myself convinced that as long as I didn't do something psycho, I would be fine. They wouldn't leave or not want me. I can't believe I forgot the first rule. Even before House's Rule ("Everyone lies") is my rule- Everyone leaves. I don't know why I thought it would be any different here. Stupid girl.

Monday, July 14, 2014

Two country songs and a Barenaked Ladies Ballad? Must be a breakup

How we feel when we want to end a relationship but we don't want to hurt the other person:
Bad Goodbye- Clint Black (feat. Wynona)
http://youtu.be/XLA8sUvCLeU

I've been bound to leave you,
We've known that for awhile
I'm sure it's something I can't do
If I can't leave you with a smile
I don't know how far I'll have to go
'Til I'm sure those eyes won't cry
And in my mind I've left enough to know
that I can't leave you with
A bad good bye

Goodbye, easier said than done
Goodbye, there's no good when you're the one
Whose goodbye you swore would never come
And in my goodbye you're finding none.

I'm still bound to leave you,
I surely don't know how
My heart won't let me put you through
What my mind says should happen now.

I don't know where we'll go from here,
there may be no way to fly
And the cloud I'm in just makes it
all too clear that I can't leave you
With a bad goodbye.

Goodbye, easier said than done
Goodbye, there's no good when you're the one
Whose goodbye you swore would never come
And in my goodbye you're finding none.

How can we be so far between
Where we are and one more try
And any way I look,
I've only seen that I can't leave you
With a bad goodbye...

How it feels to know that someone has been putting off breaking up with you:

Break Your Heart- Barenaked Ladies
http://youtu.be/11AnXGIwXa4
The bravest thing I've ever done
Was to run away and hide
But not this time, not this time
And the weakest thing I've ever done
Was to stay right by your side
Just like this time, and every time
I couldn't tell you I was happy when you were gone
So I lied and said that I missed you when we were apart
I couldn't tell you, so I had to lead you on
But I didn't mean to break your

And if I always seem distracted
Like my minds somewhere else
That's because it's true, yes it's true
it's this stupid pride that makes me feel
Like I have to follow through
Even half-assedly, loving you
Why must I always speak in terms of cowardice?
When I guess I should have just come out and told you right from the start
Why must I always tell you all I want is this?
I guess 'cause I didn't want to break your heart

And you said
Whatcha think that I was gonna do,
Curl up and die just because of you?
I'm not that weak, you know
What'd you think that I was gonna do,
Try to make you love me as much as I love you?
How could you be so low?
You arrogant man,
What do you think that I am?
My heart will be fine
Just stop wasting my time

And now I'm over you, I'll be OK,
and that I've got what I want,
and that's rid of you
Bye
And it's not 'cause I'll be missing you
That makes me fall apart
It's just that I didn't mean to break
No I didn't mean to break
No I didn't mean to break
Your heart

And how it feels when you're still standing there afterwards:
What Makes You Stay- Deana Carter
http://youtu.be/PgB0Iuui3w4
Look at me
I'm in a place
I never thought I'd be

Don't have the strength
To fight anymore
Or a reason not to leave

So tell me why I still keep holding on
To something I just cannot see

What makes you stay
When your world falls apart
What makes you try one more time
When it's not in your heart
At the end of your rope
When you can't find any hope
You still look at him and say
I just can't walk away
Tell me what makes you stay

I'm not afraid
Of living alone
I was alone before he came

I've been in love
Many times before
But this time's not the same

I've always been the first to say goodbye
Now it's the last thing I can do

What makes you stay
When your world falls apart
What makes you try one more time
When it's not in your heart
At the end of your rope
When you can't find any hope
You still look at him and say
I just can't walk away
Tell me what makes you stay

When it goes this deep
And feels this strong
I can't convince myself
That this love is wrong

What makes you stay
When your world falls apart
What makes you try one more time
When it's not in your heart
At the end of your rope
When you can't find any hope
You still look a him and say
I just can't walk away
Tell me what makes you stay

Friday, July 11, 2014

Gonna Get An Apartment And Never Come Out

I think I'm going to get an apartment and never come out.

Ok, so that's an exaggeration.  Of course I'll come out to go to work. I mean, I'll have to in order to pay for the apartment. But I think I'll be doing a great deal of staying in. Read all my baglog of magazines.  Read all my books so I can get rid of the ones I don't think I'll reread. (Hahahahaha. Like I'm ever going to get rid of them. See, I haven't lost my sense of humor.) I'll keep my hulu queue down to one page. (Again, hahahaha.) I'll try to work on my Netflix queue too. I'll watch all the movies on the top 100 lists and all the movies that have won a best picture Oscar.

Notice what isn't in there? Dating or fucking or romance. That's because it isn't going to be. I've hit that point today where I feel like I'm never going to be able to change enough to have anything close to a functioning long-term romantic relationship. I can be the kindest, sweetest, compassionate,  most generous person I can possibly be and I can even be with people who I love and who truly do love me but I will never not be too much.  Find a sane person and they'll either never understand or I'll make them crazy. Find other crazy people and I'll make them crazier. I can try to hand the times that my feelings are unjustified on my own but I won't always be successful. I'm not sure I'll ever not be more upset by more things more often than most other people. I work hard for these times to be further apart and less intense and to take them out on the people in my life less often. But I will never be a normal person. I will probably always need more handholding, more reassuring, more sex and play, and more tolerance. And in the end, no amount of those good things about me is going to make up for that.

So I'm going to stop trying. I'm going to try to sublimate and forget.

Maybe I'll use all that energy to keep track of my calories,  down to the last one, eating healthier and smaller. Work out daily. Go for long walks in my new neighborhood, no matter how good or not good it is, refusing to be afraid to walk around my home again, but also not allowing myself to be vulnerable again. No skirts or heels for me. And no pink.  Even if I get thinner, I will try to make it so I am also stronger.

Or maybe I'll eat as much as I want of anything I want. No one looks twice at the disgusting fat chick, right? I'm still not seen as the first & easiest target. Well, except for a mugging, since it's not like I could run after you. But I won't have to worry about sex or romance then.

Maybe I'll go back to devoting much of my time to caregiving for my family. My step-father's parents will be moving here in August and his mother has dementia and lung cancer. I'm sure they'll need help. If I devote myself to that, I won't have time for romance. And no one really wants the baggage that comes with that situation anyway. I don't remember if I missed having sex while I cared for my uncle. I was usually able to get it with TyRoy when I was in his area, but it's hard for me to remember what I did or didn't feel, especially during the time I was on the Lithium.

Recently, I've told other people that what I appreciate about DBT is that it doesn't really ask you to focus on the bigger picture things because right now you are probably having a hard enough time just getting through this minute, this hour, this day. It seems to be if more use to me than other things I had learned. I remember when I was 15 the therapist my parents' sent me to asked me what I would want on a deserted island with me. Since no one told me it was a trick question,  I answered honestly. I wanted some books and some cds and my cd walkman and some batteries and a journal and some pens. (I didn't say it then but I had read Lord of the Flies and the book they made into the movie where a teenage Brooke Shields has sex with her brother because they are the only ones on the island. I know that you can find food and water on deserted islands.) He acted like I was the dumbest kid ever. He pulled out Maslovs Heirarchy of Needs and told me how I needed to focus on the bottom layers, Physological Needs (food & water) and Safety & Security Needs (shelter) before I focused on the top needs. This was entirely unhelpful at the time. I was 15 and my parents took care of my food and shelter needs.

But right now, I think I need to combine the two, DBT and Maslo. I need to work on getting a job and my own roof above my head, as the time I will be able to depend on others is quickly running out.  And when I get overwhelmed, I need to do whatever I can to get through the next minute, next hour, next day, until it is bearable again, at least bearable enough to work on getting those base needs met. Right now, that is venting here until I can go to a movie with my friend Marcy so I can stop crying for awhile. Then, it will be time to take my night pills, including a sleeping pill, then I'll try to get up early and work on those needs. Maybe I'm overeacting about the state of my current relationship or about my future relationship prospects, so don't hold me to it. But then again, maybe I'll get an apartment and never come out. Don't say you weren't warned.

Monday, July 07, 2014

Loose Associative Links

"I've been thinking about a problem." Moneypenny and I are sitting in his living room, while I'm on my visit to larger Midwest City from Smaller Midwest City. "If you are working from a many worlds theory, where everyone's life is their own world, then you basically create your own world. What do you think people would do differently if they realized that they created their own world?"  I wasn't sure if this was a poke at how I had been feeling all weekend, so mired in the lack of a clearly, overwhelmingly good decision that I feel unable to make any, or was coming from his own place of wanting to make a better life for himself. Either way, it still put me on the defensive and I went on a five minute rant about how no matter what changes in life or attitude people may make there would still be things in their life that they couldn't change and that would still suck anyway. Then I felt guilty for not being able to add anything to his conversation. I ended up leaving an hour earlier than I might have originally because I couldn't stand to sit there anymore as I fought both being angry and wanting to cry.

These kinds of thought experiments used to be fun for me. Even when I couldn't completely understand or envision them, the seemingly kooky ideas that pop up in quantum mechanics always blew me away and I loved thinking about the possibilities they presented. When I was studying Buddhism and how we create our own realities, I could easily get carried away in those possibilities as well, the ability to unravel so much of the suffering that we have created in our own lives. Stone-cold sober, he and I could have the kind of conversations that people are only supposed to be able to have when they are on some sort of mind-altering substance.

But in recent years, I've drifted further and further away from those kinds of discussions and, on the drive home, I was plagued by the question of why. I used to love those kinds of thought experiments, would come up with at least half of the places we would start on my own. Now it rubs me the wrong way to even things of them. I'm trying to work out why. I'm going to try to arrange my thoughts as best as I can, but I'm not sure how good of a job I'll do, so bare with me.

I think part of it is that with the stuff that has happened in my life, it has felt less important. Who cares about the possibilities of the multi-verse or unravelling the cycles of suffering in our lives when we're caring for ill and/or dying family members? Or even when we are just trying to get by, paycheck to paycheck? When you're spending all your time trying to figure out how to pay the next bills or how to afford to move out or you'd be able to someday go to school to be able to get a better job so you don't have to worry as much about paying the bills, you don't have as much, if any, room in your head for thinking about more esoteric things. Or at least I don't. We had all these conversations when I was 21 and in college. Yes, I only had a part-time job and I had to think about my schoolwork and being able to pay bills, but there were much fewer of them and I was convinced that soon I would have a decent enough job that I wouldn't have to worry as much about paying bills. I was convinced that my near future looked brighter so it wasn't as much of a chore to worry about the bills then. Now I'm 32 and I'm hitting this wall where my future doesn't look any brighter, where my best case scenario is having a future that is this same shade and not a shade darker. As much as I might want to, I just don't have it in me to give a shit about that stuff any more.

But I think that a big part of it is the crazy. I read this article last week from the Atlantic's website that was about the link between creativity and mental illness. Near the end of the article, she writes about talking to another colleague about creativity and schizophrenia (emphasis is mine): "Heston and I discussed whether some particularly creative people owe their gifts to a subclinical variant of schizophrenia that loosens their associative links sufficiently to enhance their creativity but not enough to make them mentally ill." Her end conclusion in the article is : "Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John Nash, are both." This really hit home with me. Now, I do not have schizophrenia, or a family history of it, nor have I ever been a creative genius, but I do think that the ways in which I think of things that many others might not come from a different way of associating things. But I think that that much of this is tied to letting the crazy drive the train more. Now that I am not letting her drive the train as much, the less I have that. It is not as bad as I had hoped that it would be when I first started down this road of improving my mental health, but it is there and it is enough of a difference that i notice it. I also have to deal with the long-term side effects of psychiatric medications. My memory has never been the same after I took lithium. Being on a mood-stabilizing medication that wards against the brain chemically induced suicidality as well as bringing up the low parts of the low side and down the up side of the ups means that I don't have those periods of creative hyper-energy anymore. (You know, mania.) As we speak, I'm also having weird things happen which I'm not sure are mental illness or medication related (or neither), like spacing out and losing time, and increased light sensitivity and black floating spots in my vision occasionally. But if you take this and add it up what you get is less memory to cull from, less energy to make associations, and a quieter and more orderly brain with less loose associations. And a woman who is very sad and more than a little angry that she has to make the decision between living life at all and having an interesting brain, though she is pretty sure what decision she will keep making day after day, even though it means she doesn't get to have those conversations anymore.

Friday, July 04, 2014

The Slippery Slope of Day Drinking

I think that some days are just meant for a person to drink from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed. Most days, I like a cup of coffee or an energy drink with my small breakfast, usually taken as I walk run out the door to work. Though even then, with the coffee, I like the Bailey's Irish Cream Creamer over the French Vanilla or Creme Brulee, though those are good too. On the first anniversary of my uncle's passing, we all gathered at his neighbor's house for a get-together, a potluck and firepit. His boyfriend made "Antifreeze" and I drank from the time we arrived, at about noon, until the time we left, maybe 8. I might have also drank when we got back home. I probably would have drank on the ride home as well, as I think my mom was driving, but she has a whole thing about not driving with open containers in the passenger compartment and following the law and all that bullshit.

It feels like today is one of those days, where you drink all day. It's the Fourth of July, after all. Most people start their bbqs in the early afternoon. If they are smoking meat, like the Professor's friend who's party we are going to a bit later, they start much earlier in the day. And nothing goes with bbqing like drinking, right?

Of course, I'm writing this at a quarter after 1pm, so I've already wasted a good portion of that drinking time. Sigh. Trying to be a good girl. I actually just started a cup of coffee-hot cocoa mix-creamer and I'm working on a 24 oz bottle of water as well, so I won't get dehydrated later. But the red, white, and blue jello shots that I've been working on since yesterday are calling me. (Note to self: next time, fill in more blue on each, so less shots overall, which will end up with a wider white section and fuller shots overall.)

The key to drinking all day is not getting too drunk though. I imagine it is the same for smoking pot continuously throughout the day, as opposed to just getting really stoned at the end of the day. Sadly I wouldn't know because I'm still trying to 'get high.' But you want to be able to function, maybe even drive a bit if you needed to, so you want to stay a bit buzzed but below the legal limit for much of the day. You also don't want to get dehydrated, so you need to have some water in there too.

I grew up with my grandfather drinking during the day on weekends and my uncle followed in this proud tradition. I definitely remember weekend days where my grandpa was having a beer at the kitchen table before he was properly dressed. Now I will say that I never saw my grandfather drink and then drive. My uncle really only did that after he moved out into the country where you could drive the gravel roads for hours, never get above 30 mph, and never run into anyone. He and his neighbor even had a name for it, "country cruising." (Don't get me wrong. I am very opposed to drunk driving. I try to be very careful about my alcohol consumption if I know or even think I might be driving later on. But sometimes we all do stupid shit and sometimes we can't stop the people we love from doing stupid shit.) Honestly, while it isn't as if he didn't have issues before he moved out into the country, I think that having a friend and neighbor who was (and still is) basically a functioning alcoholic did my uncle no favors. I am pretty sure that if he hadn't passed away, my uncle would have had to deal with some serious alcohol dependency issues. It seems to run in our veins, though. Many people on both sides of my mother's family have had chemical dependency issues.

It isn't like I blame them though. Everyone on both sides of the family were either poor or, at best, working class. Some of their kids reached middle class, but, as the middle class is shrinking year by year, I'm not sure most of them will stay there. A month or so ago, a friend texted me, forlorn about the state of his personal economy, that even though he makes what to me is a really good wage, he isn't making as much as he thought he would at this point in his life, he's had to go into debt over medical bills, and he doesn't know how he would be able to be married and raise a child on his current wage, especially since he would rather his child not be put in daycare but to have one parent stay home during those pre-going-to-school years. I sent him to a country song, Tip It On Back, by Dierks Bentley:

I see main street closing
Miles of “For Sale” signs
And them fields ain’t growing
Fast enough to get us by
I feel the sweet release,
Of a Friday night
For a couple of hours we can run this town
Till it runs dry

Tip it on back, make it feel good
Sip a little more than you know you should
Let the smoke roll, off your lips
Let it all go whatever it is
And tip it on back

I don't think he found it very comforting and, honestly, I guess it wasn't supposed to be. Shit sucks. For most of us, no matter what high ideals we had in college about not working for the man and not being like our parents, guess what? That's what we're gonna do. And most of our parents actually started out better than most of us because going to college was much cheaper back then, whether you went right after high school or went to night school. I'm not saying it was easy but there were somethings that were easier or cheaper for them. And our parents still smoked, drank, did drugs, were sometimes shitty parents, got divorced, etc. (Not all of our parents did all of those things, but you get what I'm saying.) A few weeks after I let him in on the harsh reality of what the rest of his adult life was probably going to look like, I had it myself. I was doing my budget and I knew I couldn't even get by working as much as I possibly could in the job I was at, where working close to full-time hours broke me, so how could I possibly imagine that I could do that and also go back to school for anything that might get me a better job while also working? But I had to do this everyday to pay bills. And this, folks, is why you drink once you are out of your twenties, once you stop partying.

Now there are some people who don't have this urge to escape when things are shitty. I know maybe one or two of them. I was in a fark comment thread (or was it a fetlife comment thread?) the other day that had something to do with alcohol and there were several people who asserted "Why would I want to not be present in my life and in control of myself?" It must be nice to be those people because, even though I know and, in reasonable mind, agree with all the DBT and Buddhist stuff about being present and participating and being mindful, I also know that life fucking sucks and I can't always deal with that, so there are a great many times when I would rather veg out in front of the tv or drink til I am buzzed (or beyond) or try to get high, or some combination of the above, than deal with what is in front of me. Now someday that might not be the case, but it is right now and I try to tell myself that it doesn't matter as long as I do the things I need to do before I start drinking, or if I can comfortably do it the next day and if I get up and go to work when I'm supposed to. But I also know that, for me, day drinking could become a slippery slope into alcoholism. You know, because things suck everyday so if you accept that there are days that just call for drinking all day then why don't all days call for that?

Anyway, here's a picture of my shots: