A coil of rope worn over the shoulder by smugglers

Dear Internet,
Mania works like this, with ADHD added for extra charisma (+4):
Your mind is not in any one place. It is HERE. It is THERE. It grabs things in between and forces it into an imaginary motorboat that leaves your mind wet.
Things are started and not finished. You tell people you are forgetful not because you actually forget but because you have too much to remember.
Onlythebravewillaskyoutoslowdownwhenyoustartspeakingsofastthatthewordsjusttumbleoutofyourmouth. Mostwillpickupontheeveryoddwordtomakesenseofwhatyou’resaying.
Everything is shiny, but there is often long periods of boredom which is underpinned by how overwhelmed you are. So projects are started, dropped, picked up, dropped, started over. Add. Rinse. Repeat. You used to liken it as learning to play chopsticks and thinking you could then produce Beethoven in a fortnight.
You still think you can play Beethoven in a fortnight.
During mania, your confidence will teether on being megalomaniac. No, not teether – is megalomaniac. You are invincible. You are infallible. The world is your oyster. You can get, and have received, nearly everything you’ve wanted. You will take it by any means necessary. You are the BEST. You are the ONE.
You will do it your way or tell people who disagree with you to fuck off. You think those who are not like you are weak, and especially those who display low self-esteem. You laugh at stereotypes often applied to you, because your megalomania trumps normalcy. You do not fit into a perceived idea of what you should be, so you think you are a special snowflake.
You might be right.
Your mind does not rest. It is a painful  slow curve of a headache that stretches low across the forehead. Throbbing. Continuous. You’ve gotten so used to that feeling that not having it seems abnormal. Drugs can sharpen your mind from the fuzzy waters it treads on, but there is always a price to pay for the drugs.
Sometimes you rationalize you just cannot care.
You’ll shoot from the hip, your mouth smoking from the rapid fire comebacks, but that is just your way. You’re brusqueness, because you are economizing on time and emotion, most often repels people but you disagree with their assessment (of course you do) because if they can’t deal, then you think they are not worthy of your time. People will either love you or hate you.
(Truthfully, most humans are pretty useless.)
When you’re maniac, you can create a wondrous world around you and invite everyone to see, and all that do see seem to be entranced. You are EXCITING. You cannot decide if they are enraptured with you or think you’re a hot mess, but the truth doesn’t really matter. The dichotomy of your brassiness  is tempered with charm, so you at least recognize you’re an acquired taste but you hypothesize you’re worth the wait.
(Many do seem to agree, to the chagrin of a few.)
You’ve done a pretty good job of starving off most personal friendships. You cling to a few, but you are often too exhausted to expand your circle. Keeping your mask on to function does take its toil. If not emotionally, physically. But you pine for the groups and friendships that always seem to elude you.
You crave that normalcy, the days when your mind is not whizzing along at the speed of sound, when you don’t create tick off a list to keep your personality in check before you leave the house.
You do understand that day may never, ever come.
We have not touched upon bad life choices, indiscretions, and other vague regrets when one is manic, but that is okay. Those stories are better in one off settings when you’re preparing to entrance a new groups of people, to woo them to your lair.
You have become a modern day Schenzernade and it suites you.
There is also the lack of sleep, the existing on 2-3 hours a night that will happen if something is not put in check, whether by drugs or other. You think with that much open space, you would get work done, BE CREATIVE, SOLVE CANCER, but mostly it just turns into you wandering the internet late at night, wondering why you feel so alone.
You’re okay with everything because you’ve finally learned to live with your gifts and recognize when the crazy hits and how to react when it does. While you can balance the mania, and create a structure to keep it contained, what you most fear is the day when you will crash.
Because one day it will and then everything begins anew.
Stay thirsty my friends.
xoxo,
Lisa

This Day in Lisa-Universe: 2011, 1999

familiaritas obscenitas

Dear Internet,
I knew mania was upon me not because my brain was slightly throbbing or that I was feeling more invincible than usual, but when having lunch with work husband #3, I was keenly intent on the fish monger and his ice. So much so, I struck up a conversation with him about the habits of keeping the oysters and other delicacies chilled as they laid prettily in the case. I followed up my witty banter with some succinct comment on ice machines and what not.
Really, I am quite the charmer.
Sometimes I don’t know what is worse, curled up in bed in an attempt to keep the world at bay or when it flips and I need to fix all of the world’s problems right this very minute. And if it means staying up until the deepest witching hours to get started, then so be it.
Two weeks ago I was so struck with anxiety and despair, I could barely leave my hotel room while attending a conference. Earlier this week, I was so overwrought with rage that the only way to keep myself from falling apart is reading trashy literature. Then it shifts again and now I am HAPPY, HAPPY, HAPPY.
And making inane conversation with random fish mongers.
I used to long for normalcy, or even better, a chance of being more even. Now, as soon as this week, I’ve realised those are not the things I need, they are the things I want. What I need is a way to harness, if that is even more possible, and make the fan dance of moods work for me rather than against. Stop censoring myself, for one.
And if the darkness comes, and it has , then I need to surrender to it. As long as I don’t let it swallow me whole, as long as I remind myself it will pass (and it will), to be mindful as much as I can that this is cyclic and I will whirl around the peg board towards something else, then I can survive. To quote Neil Gaiman,

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

And even the very most important thing to remember, (somehow I have to create very visible reminder), to is to apply self-care. Generously. Without regret. For that is how we will slay the dragons.
xoxo,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe:

mondo bizarro

Pig, East Asian Museum, Bath, England, 2008.
Dear Internet,
Every week, like a dependable clock, I make it to Dr. P.’s office to talk about what is going on inside my head. Even if I do not feel like going, this is my weekly touchstone so I force myself to go because on occasion, a lot of occasions I should add, I am not a dependable narrator of my own life. I felt totally fine Thursday morning. A little manic in the brain, but nothing I felt like I could not handle. My plan was to wrestle over some ideas I had brought forth earlier, which we did, and then head on my merry little way to work for the day.
[It should be noted he tutted my fears of not having grown as a person. As he explained it, we will have similar feelings  at 15, 25, or 55. How we react with those feelings are the strength of what moves us forward as human beings.]
Instead  of taking the right fork off of Cascade Road to head to downtown, I took the fork to the left to head home. In the short drive from his office to that point, I had triggered myself into some kind of hyper mania mode in which I tried to drive 60 MPH on a residential street, Google a question on my phone, and make a phone call all at the same time. Coincidentally, none of the events are related to the other. Thankfully, I had caught myself right when this started, threw my phone down to the passenger foot well and put forth all of my effort into driving. My head had started pounding and I felt like I could not think behind the next breaths worth of words. I was snapping in and out of forgetfulness of what I needed to do (stop at the light, slow down, do not hit the car in front of you, put the phone down).
I needed to get home. Now.
Once I was safe, I called in sick to work with the complaint of a migraine which was not that far off from the truth. The spinning of thoughts and the need to do all the things at once can happen with the speed of a whirling dervish. At times, the  incredibly intense headaches start pulsating so hard, there have been occasions where I have felt faint or sick.
After coming home and unpacking my work stuff (God. What a waste of war paint.), I grabbed a big cup of tea, the heating blanket, took a Klonopin and read for most of the day in bed. I started and finished one book and put in another 100+ pages split between two others. I knew if I looked at any electronics, the mania would intensify. Case in point: I had nearly $500 in my fab.com cart with the intent of purchasing before realizing what I was doing  and putting away my iPad. Shopping, aimlessly shopping for no other reason then to get stuff and spending money, is another symptom of my mania.
As the afternoon ticked on and thanks to the Klonopin, my mania began to subside. I started feeling better, not immensely better, but better. The world started coming into focus a bit more, I did not feel like I could barely speak, and the steady stream of tea and print books filled in the missing bits of the puzzle.
The dog snoozed at my left hip, I dozed in and out of sleep myself and around 5PM, I was feeling strong enough to sort out some afternoon chores. If I could make it through those simple tasks (unload and load the dishwasher, wrap a few presents, get food stuffs ready for tomorrow), I could give myself permission to read, write, or do whatever for the rest of the evening.
Edited note: Morning interlude. Dinner last night was pizza, which I greedily consumed after eating Benadryl and Lactaid before the gooey cheese hit my mouth. An hour after dinner, while I was writing this, the Benadryl kicked in, coupled with the effects of the earlier taken Klonopin, I almost fell asleep with my hands still moving over the keyboard. I kissed TheHusband goodnight, who yelled as I left his office to not forget the bocce ball tournament in the morning with the ladies from the home (his joke on my age). I shuffled down to our bedroom, set the alarm for 6AM as I had to be at work at 7:30AM this morning, took my contacts out, set the heating blanket on 3, turned on Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, and was asleep before the blanket had warmed and the opening credits were done rolling.
I woke this morning on time and feeling fantastic. Not mania fantastic, just regular fantastic. But sleeping for nearly 10 hours, in a lovely drugged  effort that allows for no brain interruption can do that for you. I have been rebooted, for the moment.
I edited this piece before publishing to clean up the debris from the night before. Writing when I’m manic, even subdued, reads as if I am concocting my own language. Words are out of order, incorrectly used, or are missing altogether, punctuation has gone to the wayside, and my word retrieval is fucking awful.  When I am depressed, it is the complete opposite – suddenly I’m laying it thick like T.S. Eliot and Hemingway copulated and I am a product of that copulation.
Welcome to my inner world.
xoxo,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe:

in which: lisa gets confused

I’ve been sitting here moving like a sloth today. In fact, if i moved any slower, I’d probably be dead. I’m paying homage to the slugs i saw last night when I was outside at midnight varnishing a chest to hold my linens in. i got these flash brilliant points of light when i was varnishing that i could turn this hobby of one into a project in case i left my job. which is on my mind, a lot, losing my job. it ranks up there with leaving, moving, and being sexy. some would say my train
of thought seems to range down the pretty shallow range. I’d say it’s pretty human.
i just watch a pretty dreadful movie, Kate and Leopold. If you haven’t seen it, I don’t recommend it and the only cute thing was Natasha Lyonne playing Meg Ryan’s admin assist and she gushing over bodice rippers. I love Natasha in just about everything she’s done, except But I’m a Cheerleader!, because that was simply crap. Art house films for the most part seem to be filled with subversive need to push the boundaries because they can not because it actually means something. Modern art does not speak to me, however I like Kandinsky. Go figure that one out.
I have this thing about smells, always have. This weekend I went walking around the mall and was opening up bottles of cologne to sniff to see if i could find a new scene for myself. Foolish counter girls at the stores. Why is it that they assume that if you look like a bum you can’t buy anything? I could buy/sell their damn counter several times over. I did it a few weeks back before my birthday party when i bought out Clinique counter and the woman was amazed (and hooked me upon some free crap as well, which is a good thing considering how much i spent).
i wondered around and sniffed.
CK


—-
it was your smell
that’s all i could remember
laying
down on the sofa, on the
bed
closing my eyes and thinking
of
you
—–

about a girl

i was crying this morning while i was making coffee.
Considering that i had scratched and punched Paul on Saturday, that is somewhat of an improvement.
let me backtrack:
For the last few weeks, mentally, something had not been going right inside my head. I started coming home from work, eating dinner and almost promptly going to bed. Stuff like school, writing, NaNoWriMo, my journal, etc all went out the window. I felt like I was being dragged down into this cesspit of despair but nothing externally had changed. Paul and i were still, well Paul and I, my mother still hadn’t gotten her SSI yet and I was still supporting her and everything else gosh darn remained the same.
But then stupid little incidents started setting me off. Customers who were dumber than a box of rocks (nothing new, however, I seemed to be taking a new path on how to deal with them which wasn’t good), people on mailing lists I would blow up on and use this foul language that bothered even me. The woman who ran me off the side of the road on Saturday, every little slight against me sent me into this fury that pissed me off so much I was shaking physically. I was/am spinning out of control and I do not know how to stop it.
On Saturday, I was sitting at my computer all nonchalant like when Paul asked me to fix the printer. He was prepping the list for us to go shopping for Thanksgiving dinner and I just blew up at him. My movement was so fluid, that I had no time to think or to react. I got up, and started punching and scratching Paul. I threatened to stab him with something. All the while he is looking at me like “What the fuck are you doing?” I started screaming at him about why couldn’t he fix the printer himself and i tried to force open said printer when he started yelling at me I was doing it all wrong. Once I got the printer opened, I took the color cartridge out of its place and shook it all over him, leaving drops of blue and red ink on his white T-shirt. I just did not give a flying fuck. At some point, I went and laid down, to help calm down, and that did not seem to help either. All I kept thinking about was sliding a knife down my arm vertically and just fucking ending it all. Fuck you, fuck the world, fuck my mother and my family, fuck work and most especially fuck Paul.
But I didn’t grab a knife, I just laid down and slept for a few hours hoping that the monsters would go away.
They of course, did not.
Sunday morning, I woke up after a few hours of sleep and went to the massage therapist. All the work my chiropractor had done on me for the last year had gone to hell in a handbasket as all the pain i started suffering came rushing back within the last month or so. I can’t sleep, I’m angsty and i feel like stabbing someone. really. Charisma (yes, really, that is her name) started working on me and i felt myself tense up and eventually relax. By the time I had left her an hour later, my body was like rubber. However, later on that day, I was back to being pent up, angsty, angry Lisa. Nothing was working. Not massage, not going to the chiropractor, not drugs, not relaxing, nothing. zip. nada.
I’ve never thought of myself as a cutter and have prided myself on being ‘too smart’ to follow through with cutting myself or attempting suicide, but, I’m telling you, the idea felt warm and safe in my head Saturday and this morning, the fact that all this frustration and anger came welling to the top, I’m this close to wanting to hurt myself. I’m literally hanging on by a thread.
in over a year of being with my therapist, not once can i honestly say that i wanted to hurt myself until recently. Oh, i had bouts when on new drugs that the idea seemed to be golden, but, i rationally knew it was the drugs not how i felt consciously. My family, genetically, seems to dispel drugs like there is no tomorrow. My mother had been on various anti-whatevers for the last year and she would get to the point where she would be okay, she would be almost maniac but not quiet and then BOOM, she would fall. With me, it is almost the same. Prozac, paxil, Effexor, zolotf, now Serzone all seem to have the same effects one me — fine for awhile, then the drug does not work anymore. I’m tired of feeling out of control and like my life is spinning 180 degrees. I fought so fucking hard to not be where I was five years ago only to find that it seems worthless. I feel worthless and I feel like my life is not worth it.
My eyes are welling up with tears again, like they have been for the last few weeks or so. Everything, everything is setting me off. I feel so fucking helpless, because i AM seeing a therapist, i AM taking anti-whatever drugs, i AM going to a chiropractor, i AM seeing a massage therapist. NOTHING IS WORKING. I’m so fucking pissed because I’m doing all the ‘right’ things, and yet i feel I’m back where i started over a year ago. That fuels my anger even more and i want to hurt myself or someone around me.
I just got done making breakfast as I decided it was in the best interest that I not go in today. I’m lucky, in that, half my department is fucking loony toons and that they know my history that I can call in ‘sick’ and tell them really why i was ‘sick’.
I sat there chopping up onions and green peppers thinking I can make this omelette (which, I of course burn) and the thought of slicing my skin is still there. I watch the omelette burn and I have this special omelette pan in which when I flipped it over, a plastic part of the pan starts burning stinking up my kitchen. I toss the whole mess into a regular frying pan and end up making scrambled eggs with potatoes, onions, and green peppers.
My life could be described just like that: it’s a mess so i transfer it over to something else. I’m tired, oh so tired of fighting to stay alive. I keep myself in check all these years, busting my ass to do the right things, and to make up for all the things i feel I’ve done to slight people and myself and I can not catch up. I just can’t do it anymore.
For a long time, I wanted to be crazy, like really crazy , mental hospital crazy, but my mom’s experience this summer showed that what i saw in movies and what was real were wildly different things. I still want to be crazy, I feel worthless enough because I cannot accomplish anything feasible. Everything feels like this huge burden that I cannot even begin to touch.
You’re a child, and you are told from day one that you are special and worthwhile and bright and gifted. You are told you can do anything you want, that the world is your oyster and you cannot fail at anything.
Then the chemistry changes and at the age of nine you are seeing a therapist because “you’ve been a bad girl,” and your mother keeps yelling at you how everything is your fault, and you are grounded not for days or weeks but for months and years. You run and escape into books and feel paranoid. You feel like everyone is out to get you and you can’t understand why at the age of 9,10,11 why you don’t have friends like other people have friends. You’ve spent so much of your young life being grounded that you miss out on birthday parties and events with other kids. You don’t have friends. The people who say there are your friends only use you because you are stupid enough or naive enough to think they like you. But they don’t, not really. Kids are cruel creatures.
So you grow up, your family moves, and you start a new school where no one knows you. You think that you can be anything you want to be, but your attempts at making friends is feeble and you spend most of your lunch periods reading or writing, always alone. Your 13. Your body changes and you suddenly develop breasts and lose some of the baby fat, and suddenly guys want to date you. You still feel like this insecure be-speckled person you were when you were nine and 10. Fat, worthless, pointless. You don’t know what changed but now people want to be your friend, but they are they wrong type of friends. They are the ‘bad kids’, but you don’t care because someone finally pays attention to you and you feel happy because now you have ‘friends’, and that’s all you wanted. Everything becomes this big blur as you enter high school and everyone leaves you alone because they either don’t know you or assume you are a transferring senior when really you’re just a 5’10 150lb freshman. You still think you were so fat. Then you go on the special school trip where your class of AP students travel to Kentucky. You get lured into and locked into a cabin with the swim team where they get this bright idea to gang rape you. You fight and claw and run screaming into the bathroom and a friend saves you. But no one is told. Not the parents, not the guardians, no one. You sit through the going away party glaring at the boys who had tried to harm you and they act nothing is going on. Back to school, everything changes and suddenly rumors are spreading and the same boys who grabbed you are leering at you and making comments. Kids are so cruel, they didn’t mean it.
You start getting older, 14, 15 and things remain the same. You now feel like two people instead of one. One who doesn’t give a fuck and the one who does. She (me/i/her) still hangs out with the ‘bad kids’ and the other half goes and starts studying for the LSAT. The two worlds cannot reconcile themselves and the fighting at home becomes worse and your mother keeps taking you to separate therapists where you confess just what an awful child you are. You start a new habit of breaking things. You get angry and start breaking anything made of china or glass. Your friends get used to it and you laugh it off and your mother gets angry for breaking all the dish ware in the house. You had as a child taken a point of where you used to sew your fingers together with needle and thread, through the upper layers of your skin. You would sew and sew and then rip it out gingerly and start over again. You used to pull huge clumps of hair out. At 16,17 and 18, nothing has changed. You lose your virginity to someone you don’t love only to have him dump you four days later for a whore. You sleep with whoever and you don’t care, thinking your this badass who can deal with it and you know they are jerks and won’t call you again. You spend a lot of time hiding under your desk when on the phone, as if the wrath of your family is just that bad, but your family consists of a younger brother and a mother and how can it be so bad?
Anyone who was seriously into you, and I mean seriously into you, leaves because they can’t deal with the mania and the depression that follows. Sometimes you forget to eat and when you do eat, you gain weight. Except now you are cycling, between the mania and the depression. You move again and again with your mother and move to Toronto when your 18, only to find that the lessons you had learned as a child are still with you. You come back having only made a few friends, didn’t leave the house and nothing changed for you. It was still the same.
Then it cycles faster.
And as you get older, you notice that the so-called ‘adults’ you are supposed to be, still have the same tenacity as the children you knew. No one is interested in being ‘real’ or friends with you, they would rather lie, cheat and steal. Instead of hair pulling or sewing, you cry and don’t leave your room for days. Friends call and want to go out, and you have panic attacks thinking about leaving the house. Then a few days later everything is ‘fine’ and you pretend nothing happens.
Your world has become disjointed and you tell yourself you’ll pull out of this bullshit and move on. But you can’t reconcile the differences between reality and fantasy. Reality is much too fucking painful to deal with. Either that or your sense of reality is too fucking painful. You don’t see happiness or warmth in anything, it’s all gray and dark and dismal.
Memories keep shooting up to the forefront and you still cry. You cry when your mother left you with cast up to your thigh on the Christmas you were 22 and your 16 year old brother was with you to help you use the port-a-potty because you could not walk the 50′ to the bathroom. Your brother helps you up the stairs and you really bathe for the first time in a week and your next door neighbors come over on Christmas day and help you hobble over to their house for dinner. THEN the police show up at your door because your father is worried you were being mistreated (22, no phone in the house, no food and your mother and her husband are gone for the holidays). The following Christmas your mother gives you a bottle of washer fluid for your car, and you sit there crying. Your brother and you start a tradition where you go to blockbuster and grab burger king for dinner. You hate Christmas and all the fake cheer that is associated with it.
Now you are 29. Next year you’ll be 30. All through the years you’ve kept a pretty good handle on the monsters. You’ve kept them at bay and worked to not let them interfere with your life on day to day basis, but you know that is a lie of sorts. If you really kept them at bay, you would not be suffering this pseudo-breakdown you are today. You feel embarrassed and guilty for bringing it up, and the non-stop headaches you have lately does not dissipate with bringing all this information forward.
Part of you, a good chunk of you, has given up. It’s easier to automate your life and work on that than to work on what’s really bothering you, but even you don’t know what’s bothering you anymore. Everything seems so trivial and of a lesser extent than when you make it real. But if there were true, there would be no fucking reason why you would be fucking crying at Harry Potter or any other movie that shows some sort of goodness to the heart.
The other part of you, albeit seemingly feeling small and unimportant is hanging on for dear life. Sheer will is keeping you together as your body is trained to handle certain things, but, sheer will is losing out fairly quickly. Rationally you know that you won’t necessarily do anything to harm yourself, but that is fast running low against the monster that wants to hurt you.
The irony of the saying “god only gives you what you can handle” which has been drilled in your head since your Catholic school days is fast losing its hilarity.
———–
I’ve got a 3:30pm appointment today with my shrink.
x0x0x
lisa

almost famous

news and reviews:
I’ve been wanting for a long time to make my website pda enabled (well, since i found out that waitingforbob.com was pda and Netscape channlized) and i finally figured out how. if you want TLC on your pda, just go here and follow the instructions. Bop me an email if you have any questions.
This weekend was a very slow and lazy weekend — the kind where paul and i did not have guests so we could relax but on the flip side i was so wired from — something (dunno what) that i couldn’t sit still for longer than five minutes at a time. i bounced around from cleaning to organizing to walking the dogs because no one could stay put in the same spot. on the flip side, paul was so bored that he took a three hour nap yesterday afternoon to relieve the boredom.
my mind was whirling at a speed i couldn’t comprehend. i would walk around doing stuff thinking of better and shorter ways to organize and clean. i couldn’t walk in the bathroom without putting towels away and putting towels away meant doing laundry and doing laundry meant i had to clean up the bedroom. so the simple act of putting something away was prolonged by insistence on doing 15 different things at once.
one of my obsessive/compulsive is cleaning and paul calls me the goff martha stewart because i love to clean. I’ve always admired working with my hands and putting things in order so that it is just so. I’m not so anal that there are not mess’s laying around but there is an order to the chaos of our lives and that order is me.
so i cleaned and organized and sorted and did things that i haven’t been able to do in the preceding weeks (paul cooks — we’ll just leave it at that) and finally crashed early later on in the after noon.
it all started when i was sitting on irc and someone brought up the infamous sexchart of which I am listed (just do a find for simunye — you’ll find me). Which made me REALLY FUCKING ANGRY! I sat there snapping to people on irc about something that happened to me only four years ago and yet feels like a lifetime ago.
Some of it came out in the open in the news two years ago when I sang to the major papers (and never following up on my chances for writing for wired — second time in my life I’ve blown a major opportunity like this) about my relationship with se7en which seems like a nightmare and a life time many times removed from now.
the anger subsided later on in the night when paul and i had hit the local barnes and noble and i got a tall raspberry mocha frap (i am a trend setter — starfucks is now selling a ‘raspberry mocha chip’ frap in their stores. i don’t drink that swill — just mocha frap with raspberry syrup for me thanks).
but i couldn’t place my finger on what was making me so angry — so much has changed in the last four years since i moved to san francisco (almost four years to the day) and since when i left for Virginia. i sat there in the car just staring into space trying to think why i was so pissed, and not one goddamn reason was coming up. maybe because it was with my relationship with christian where i had laid all my eggs in one basket and they got scrambled or the thinking that my relief of finding someone like me wasn’t even close to being true. maybe it was the lies, the cheating and how i had fucked him in the summer of 97 when he was cheating on me with someone who he cheated on with me in Vegas. I still remember the look on his face when he told me he was breaking up with me — or the look on my face when i was jumping around for joy in my brain. I remember sitting in the bathroom at 4am in the morning writing in my journal about how much i hated laying next to him when i had no where else to go. I hated feeling weak and insecure and unloved.
with the help of Dr. B (indirectly I’ll add), I’ve been making a timeline in my head of where everything fell apart — and it was always with the men (which, one shrink had pointed out so wisely to me many years ago). With each passing relationship, where i had thrown myself into thinking i was in love with them, and getting trampled on only to have hurt the ones who have really loved me (danny, justin, and now paul). I think about this a lot – that the new spanking apartment in Herndon is still the crappy old apartment in El Cerrito, CA because in my head while the things around me have changed significantly, what is in my head has not. I still feel trapped and scared and unwilling to deal with what is truly bothering me than dealing with the present. and the past. and the future.
haven’t you ever just wanted to say “enough is enough” – but I’ve been screaming enough is enough for a long time now and I’m not getting any response back. i feel like the little boy who cried wolf — that simply (and honestly) no one believes me. it makes me smile saying that because in my youth — and to me my youth was in my early 20s, i always thought that the man i was with ‘right now’ was the one who was ‘forever’ — instead of just saying ‘he is mr right now’. but i was young and foolish and what did i know from any better on anything at that time other than i just wanted, simply and honestly, to be loved.
i wish someone had explained to me long time ago how to be more rational instead of being pigheaded and stubborn. i look at paul and i know deep in my heart we are meant to be together but from somewhere within I’m not allowing it to happen. to be relaxed and to watch him and love him. it was so easy a few years ago when he was 3000 miles away and like everyone before him, i have him and i don’t know what to do with him.
everyone wants me to talk, because i never say anything about me anymore anywhere i just agree and ask questions and forget what i asked. i want to learn about the people around me but forget when they tell me things because somewhere, unconsciously, perhaps i don’t care. or perhaps i care too much? it doesn’t hurt anymore thinking about it — i suppose the Effexor is good for one thing is stabilizing my emotions but for the last two years, i haven’t had that many emotions to deal with. i worry about the people who loved me I’ve left behind and about not being a good enough employee, girlfriend, daughter, sister daughter or lover.
i remember the ages of my youth falling with a twinkle in my eye and I’m watching paul going through what i went through less than a decade ago. i remember thinking i was never ever going to put myself in the position to be in a relationship with someone unless i was truly passionate about them and i remember what it was like being passionate and feeling i was in love with paul and knowing even know that i am but feel dead inside for no real discerning reason. sometimes i would think i would give up some things in my life only to feel alive like i did when i was younger and more naive because the i had not learned or handed myself to the ways i was now.
even then when i hated myself for being so impassioned i would look at this new self even more and shudder thinking what it was like to become her and how did she end up like this? i wish there was a way to chip the ice off of my heart so i can feel the love i feel for paul instead of looking at him sometimes waiting for him to leave like everyone else did before or lie or cheat or say something to make me wish i was noting more than a mattress with a hole in it. i wish i could feel the rage and the passion and the ups and the down of life instead of feeling like I’m drifting off into no mans land, on an ice cube in the Arctic.
i think you get my point.
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lisa

insomnia strikes again

it’s apparently 2:33am and I’ve spent the better part of these early hours whittling down my email inbox from close to 60 personal emails to below 20. Some of you may think this is nothing — but — some of these go back over six months ago. I’m horrid, I know. So what happens when I whittle down my email? Inbound mail is spool’d and Moe is sleeping so I can’t kick him to unspool it. Murphy’s law #1.
As many of you may have noticed, modgirl.net is now up and running. however, while the main page looks okay, the archives and everything else i was salvaging from modgirl.net hasn’t been moved over yet. I’ve updated a few things on the premise that when i do the site redesign sometime this week, I’ll have everything up and clean. fresh start. what is even funnier is that modgirl.net is still getting massive hits but very few are trickling over here. which is fine by me i guess — i was getting disturbed by how people were finding me via my entries. what was interesting to note was that the NUMBER ONE THING for keyword that brought people to my site was “obsessive/compulsive/anxiety”. oh of course, sex ranked up there in the top 5, but i was just astounded by how many of my hits were coming from my cryptic discussions on the above diseases.
i am doing — okay.
that is about the only word i can describe at 2:37 in the morning right now. I’m on this mania high. my goal was to return all the email my cousins had sent me after my father had died (which i never did) and all the personal email in my inbox that i had not replied to in eons. one person (who thankfully has three email accounts) had his email bounce back to me twice (from two of those accounts). i was sitting there adding my “rings” to my brand spanking new yahoo id! (gotta love creativity — i refuse to have any “name” with numbers, underscores, hyphens or any other alphanumeric in it).
lately there has been this rash of “self-help” in the people who i know. everyone seems to be either sick, getting over themselves or making attempts to get better whether it’s physically, emotionally or just over all well-being. I’ve got five people using breathe-right strips after i told them it helped with me stop sleeping with my damn teeth grinding.
people are going to chiropractors, doing yoga and generally feeling more feisty.
the change in the weather has helped me calm down enormously. i no longer feel angry and when i do — it’s over something silly. I’m attempting to kid myself that I’ll wake up in three hours and be able to function.
but on the other hand, while i attempt to take a look at life and things around me (like noticing the sky the other night driving home and the sun filtering between the break in the clouds) or designs I’m seeing everywhere in nature, man-made and what not, slowly, very very very slowly; I’m starting to relax.
not much mind you.
but enough.
now only if i can stop eating Mickey d’s, my life would be complete.
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lisa