Saturday, January 29, 2005
Update on the Barn Fire
Cause I know you're all dying to read the account from the newspaper, cute quotes and all - - such as this one....So that was that. So it was a rude awakening, someone beating
on my door telling me my barn's on fire.
As soon as I looked up, I could see: 'Yes, it's definitely on fire.'"
lyric at post:
..all I've got here is books and music
I used to have exercise but I outgrew it..
Friday, January 28, 2005
wish you were here
Just wanted to say thanks for the emails and comments, all. It was a nice thing to see after a few days with the big black screen blank. It's stopped seeming quite so accusing. I'm doing alright, the changes are having a positive effect and that's a nice thing.And Jen, the sirens you could hear? Barn fire.
And quite a nasty one at that, they had to call in reinforcements.
I'm not sure whose, but the weekly newspaper lists all police and fire calls when it comes out. The anticipation is overwhelming.
This is what passes for excitement in a place where the fire siren is actually the call to the volunteers to get the hell on down there.
Monday, January 24, 2005
Away Message
There is a fine line in the human being that separates one half of a person from the other. Without its existence, life as we know it could never have existed. It is a space that allows out only what is taken in. It is a void that must remain open and free, lest an emergency descend upon us. Though it is often the cause of many struggles, we must learn to appreciate it - and so, I have gone in search of my butt crack. For, without it, I am nothing.A "Slightly" Longer Explanation
(Also, Happy Australia Day)I don't really know how to explain this or how well my point will come across but I'll try to do my best in as few words as possible.
Because that would be a miracle and it would be nice to leave you with a miracle. Yeah, right. At least you know the thought was there.
I haven't seen my doctor in 9 years (he recognized me right away, how sad is that?), so we had to spend some time catching up with each other. Because I do not have a cute little acronym for him, yet, for now I will just call him "the doctor". Eventually, he got me to do a stress test, you know, those ones that total up the amount of stressful events in your life in the last year? The levels are something like:
0 - 150 = you're totally unstressed. or dead.
150 - 350 = yeah well, yanno, everyone has rough years but you're alright.
300 + = you *should* be dead. or heavily medicated.
Anyways, it's no big surprise I'm sure that using only the last 10 months, I hit over 470.
We talked about the drugs and how much of a struggle it was for LFD to get me on them in the first place and how much I didn't want to be taking any more than I had to. Because, the other big thing with anti-depressants these days is that they mix up these little cocktails of them. To, "boost" or "enhance" the effects of whatever one they've decided you should poke in your face every day.
And, you know, I'm fine with that. It would be absolutely fan-fucking-supercalifragilis-tic to just jam in a bunch more happy pills and have this all go away.
Except, here's the thing.....
Let's just take the 15 years of shit brain chemistry right out of the picture and assume that I'm just this happy girl who's had a rough year. Who's suffering from accumulated stress of momentous and monstrous proportions. Would I be drugging myself? Or would I be trying to deal with the effects of the stress? What does trying to make it all go away really accomplish in the end?
The thing is, here, I'm not just dealing with Matt. I'm dealing with .... I'm not even going to make a list because you all know most of it anyways. I'm fully aware that if the drugs hadn't kicked in last summer and any of the rest of this stuff happened, I would have more than likely been non-functioning by October. I certainly wouldn't have picked up and moved here. Matt's presence created a buffer between me and well, everything. I'd never had that kind of support and what that support gave me was a sense of being able to.... what did I say before?.... walk towards anything on earth and not be afraid.
So, I did. And I wasn't. And it was easy and wonderful and scary but not in a bad way, it was just another adventure. I suddenly learned what it was like to not have to rely on myself for everything. To have someone to ask advice of who was right there with me, on the inside. He didn't even do anything, really, he just hung about being witty and smart and cute and thinking I was great and maybe I have friends that do that but we all know that it's a different thing. That's a different responsibility. A different level of support. And oh, I can't tell you how much I've wanted that, how much I didn't even know it existed - and how it felt to have it.
And then, having just found it, it was gone.
Like all along there'd been this invisible roof holding all of that stress away from me for all that time and when Matt left he'd had the crucial support beam tied to his leg. And the roof of my world came crashing down on me.
This isn't about Matt. This is about learning to rely on myself again. This is about finding a better way to deal with the stress so that the day they offer me the job is also not the day that they tell me if I can't stop being mean to people then I'll lose the job. (uh, today). This is about finding a balance between what I can do and what I need to do. This is about taking a deep breath and thinking before I get angry. This is about taking ten deep breaths and stopping a thought before I cry.
This is about a loneliness that suddenly lives inside of me that no one can help. A desolate, sad place that cannot be filled by you, by friends, by crowds, the cat and sometimes I'm not even sure, by myself.
This isn't about recalling, reliving or examining the past or resisting imaginary pictures of the future that might have been had we continued down the same path. It's not about what Matt is or what we were.
It is about finding a way. My own way. It is about relearning something I'd forgotten so easily and so completely. It is about trying to get to a place where that void isn't so painful. A place where a ghost isn't beside me all the time. Where a hand that no longer exists but that I can still feel isn't touching me in that first moment I wake up in the morning. It's about me.
And, so what that means, is that I'm going to go offline for a little while. I have only so much energy and right now it has to go to my job. The new job, the job that symbolizes the means to an end, to get me to my goal and frankly, about the only concrete thing I've got right now.
Until I learn how to do this better, whether it be light therapy to make up for the sunshine I've lost by moving here, whether it be giving myself healthy food and getting more exercise, whether it be staying away from the ability to contact Matt or the temptation to come here and be sad, or wish that there really was something someone else could do. If there was, I know that I could ask you and you would give it to me if you could and I love you for that.
So, I'm going to take one thing off my plate for now and see how that works. I won't be far and it may not be for long, but for now, I need my job. I need myself. I need to stop trying to work something out in here that cannot, ever, be worked out.
The face that I turn towards you is a face that no one has ever really seen until the blog. But there was a face that turned towards Matt that no one else on earth had ever seen. Both of those people are me. All me. But one of them is more of the one I want to end up as. One of them is the one I am trying to make the core of me. The first reaction. The face that everyone sees. I need to get a little farther along the road to her doorstep before I come back because I don't need Matt to love that girl and do everything he can to keep her around, I need me to.
lyric at post:
..lighthouse man can’t help us all
some are saved and some will fall
he’ll show you where the danger lies
but he can’t help if you capsize
cause he’ll light your way but that is all
steer your own ship back to shore..
The Monday Bumper Sticker #4
Sunday, January 23, 2005
not taking my own advice
..because I've just spent most of the day in bed or on the couch. I'm angry. I'm deeply sad. I cried. I had a cigarette, which made it all worse, if only for the sheer fucking stupidity of lighting a cigarette after almost four months. Being disappointed in yourself just adds that extra layer of self-loathing.Thinking that my reaction yesterday has just as much to do with not seeing hope today myself.
I can't sit. I can't move. I can't watch TV. I can't read. I can't even think because thinking makes me cry. I'm trapped today in this circle.
I want to hold my boyfriend's hand. I want that hand to wipe away this tear. I want that hand to have been here so that this tear would never have been born. I want to roll over in the morning with a heart full of joy just one more time. I don't want to spend today trying to make this better because it's only me and I can't be everything to myself today. I can't be anything to myself at all today, most especially the things I need. I'm angry at being so weak. I'm angry for being so sad.
I'm unable to choose a direction to go because it feels like the only direction that will offer some peace will never be there again.
