part 104, "if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, etc, etc,etc."

I’m feeling much less angry today. Nothing’s changed (other than the passage of time), I just feel less angry.

Those times when I am feeling completely powerless and trapped are some of the most difficult times to get through. They used to be the times I would drink a fifth of vodka, or eat a dinner for two from Chin Chin, or throw things, or just generally become hysterical, or any combination of those things.

None of those things are options for me anymore. Well, except the eating, but I have so many allergies all I can binge on are rice cakes and bananas and stupid shit like that. I fantasize about sticking my entire face into a double thick, extra, extra cheese pizza – my husband used to make those for me, and OH MY GOD could they take the edge off.

My primary tool for remaining sane these days is straight-up distraction. Watch a movie, read in the news about other people’s problems and the horrible state of the world, play word games online, read fiction – I do still have reading, my first and most reliable way to get out of my own mind. It has saved me over and over and over throughout my entire life. It’s one of the reasons I love writing, because knowing I can give someone else something to read that takes them out of their stress, even if only for a few minutes, makes me feel very happy about myself.

One of my most useful and effective ways of getting out of the trapped-in-a-corner-hysterical-rage times was to go on walks. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it on here before, but I just really do miss my walks. Usually basic, generalized anxiety will prevent me from leaving my house on foot by myself, and often from just leaving the house altogether. It really sucks to be paranoid when there is an actual, logical basis for that fear. Would that make it not paranoia then? I don’t know.

The car is a much easier way to get out – I just park in the garage and don’t open the garage door until the engine is running and I’m in reverse. When I get home, I hit the button for the garage door opener and inch my way back into the garage before the door is all the way up. Then I close the door, and I’m back in my house again, and I feel a lot better.

I’ve noticed that I will sit in my car for long periods of time after getting home, or if I’m in a parking garage and I don’t have anywhere to be in any hurry. I don’t know what it is about being in a car. It’s one of the most dangerous places to be at any given moment, when I’m out driving. You know, statistics.

But a parked car feels really safe. Not always, but enough that I notice I stay in the car for long periods of time after I get to where I’m going and turn the engine off. I just kind of slump and rest my head on the steering wheel for a second, and then I probably do some trance-like staring into nothing.

I like when I am in a parking garage and can see other people come and go. Strangers who have their own lives and their own problems, and I look at them and how they walk, and what they are wearing, and what they are carrying (like a bag or something), and if they are on the phone or walking with someone else, I also listen to their conversations.

I pretend that I am that person in that moment, and think about what it is like to be that person. Why do I wear these clothes? Why do I listen to such shitty music? What kind of person am I that I would actually wear a sweater over my shoulders as an accessory? Do I think I’m beautiful? Do I hate my face? Do I look at other people and feel resentful because they are skinny, or muscular, or they have a chin, or they have no idea how much it means to be able to walk around wearing shorts or a skirt because they don’t have kankles?

Then they are on their way, and I stare off until someone else comes by. I would be remarkably effective at surveillance, like the kind cops and private investigators do on TV and in the movies. I suppose they do it in real life, too, but I’ve never personally witnessed anything like that, at least not that I am aware of, but I assume it really does happen and that I would be remarkably effective at it.

I would also be a good racecar driver. Not the kind that goes around in circles for five hours, but long distance or street-circuit races, like the Gumball or what they do on all of the Fast and Furious movies. I love a good high-speed chase – not to be in one, but to see one happening on TV or in a movie. I’ve never been in a high-speed chase personally, and it is kind of a sketchy thing to do just so I could see what it was like, but if the time ever comes for me to be in a high speed chase, I will be ready.

I would also love to be a criminal profiler. I think all of the evil and violence and mind-fucking I’ve been exposed to has given me the ability to see it in other people. You know, kind of like it takes one to know one. Its strange, though, being so familiar with the potential for violence and harm and seeing it all over the place, but not actually being a criminal. It’s kind of lonely and stressful.

I would be a horrible criminal, though, especially after these past years in therapy and recovery and stuff. For one thing, I am largely incapable of lying. Not necessarily out of a sense of righteousness, but because mixing what is real with what is not real can give me a nervous breakdown all in itself.

Another reason is my overwhelming belief in Karma. I know very well how much it hurts someone to hurt someone else. They might not notice it, they might feel strong and righteous and whatever, but it takes away from them. Hurting people kills the soul, and the soul is not nearly as resilient as anyone might want to believe.

Sigh.

Life can be so philosophical – it drives me crazy.

Anyway, I’m definitely feeling less angry today.

part 103, or "motherfucking fuck fuck"

I really am so angry just about being here. All of the other shit – money, car, school – would be so much easier to shoulder.

I hate it here.

I HATE IT HERE.

There is a conflict for me with our house, though. We’ve lived here for a really long time, and its where my kids are growing up, and the backyard is beautiful – its like being in a park, and there are a lot of other people who live here that I love and appreciate. I guess aside from all of that, I FUCKING HATE IT HERE.

Growing up, I didn’t have any place to go. I didn’t have any choice about where I was at any given time. I didn’t get to enjoy things that I chose to enjoy. I didn’t get to get in bed at night and feel comfy and safe, knowing my parents were near. I didn’t get to have any childhood experiences like the ones on TV and in movies.

There are so many other things I was not able to choose, like who I would loose my virginity to, and how to express feelings, and how to feel safe, and getting excited about the little party my mom was throwing for me when I graduated from high school. My main focus when I was growing up was to get hurt as little as possible and to not die. Oh yeah –also to get the fuck out of here.

I didn’t get to choose that for myself, but that’s what it was, what it is.

 As an adult I really love the things I can choose that were not available to me as a child. I can choose to not have breakfast and dinner every fucking night around the big conference/dining table in the kitchen. I can choose not to read the bible, and I can choose to not feel like a dirty whore for having sex. I can choose to not believe that the god I was raised with is anything other than myth.

I can choose not to go to church, and I can choose what TV shows and movies I watch and don’t watch. I can choose my own music, my own books, etc., etc., etc.

I really do enjoy making those decisions for myself, and having a legitimate say in what happens in my house and with my family. For example, I made the decision that we would never have a round dining table, and we don’t. We have never sat the kids down at the dining table and forced them to eat lima beans and given them long lectures about how close they are to falling into the bowels of hell. I have been able to make those decisions, and be respected for them, even if it seemed like the decision I was making was trivial to other people.

But I can’t get the fuck out of this motherfucking piece of shit town. All I ever wanted to do was leave here. I didn’t know where I would go. Probably not far; I fantasized a lot about having a trailer home in the next town; it would have fit my budget and I would have loved every inch of it. I never really yearned to travel all over the world or anything, just get the fuck out of this motherfucking piece of shit town.

What if I am never able to leave here? What if the only way I can get out of this motherfucking piece of shit town is to run away on a whim and never look back? What if my only way out of here meant abandoning my husband and kids and dog and friends? What if I DIE here and get BURIED here? My only dying wish – seriously – is to be cremated and taken away from here. Anywhere but here. If my loved ones want to dump my ashes into the air while bungee jumping in Panama City, Florida, good for them. I don’t care, just as long as it is not here.

I fantasize about leaving here all the time. It never actually occurred to me that it might never happen. Not until just now.

Fuck.

I really don’t think I will never get out of here. It would be like, when I was a kid, thinking I would never get out of my parents’ house, like I was doomed to be trapped in that place forever. If I had done that, I probably would have died a long time ago.

Now that it has occurred to me that I might always be in this motherfucking piece of shit town, I’m getting kind of antsy. But then I remember that there is no way in hell it would happen. If it came down to it, I could always just walk out the door and keep walking until I was outside the city limits, and never go back. I don’t know how I would survive, but being dead out of this town is a brighter prospect for my future than living here my whole life.

Sometimes I think about that book, The Stand (Stephen King), and how it would be to all of a sudden be completely alone here. The thing I would do is start burning down houses. My mom’s would be first, then the nasty greasy rapist pig’s across the street, and then the pedophiliac self adulating bitter piece of shit’s next door, then the one diagonal from my mom’s, where the used-car-salesman-looking douche bag raped me when I was 12.

There are some houses I would simply defile, the houses of people who, when I was little, looked the other way, and told me I was bad, and a liar, and looked down their noses at me. Those houses would not be worth the effort of burning them down, but defiling them would be fun.

Then I would probably get through the shock of 98% of the planet’s humans dying suddenly, and get really pissed, because even though I got to burn the houses down, I’m now I’m left on own to survive again.

Christ.

Well the world’s humans have not almost completely died off, and I am not here on my own to survive again, so I guess being stuck in this motherfucking piece of shit town is not so bad.

But it is. I FUCKING HATE IT HERE.

part 102, or "be nice to slow people"

So it's almost Mother's Day, and I just keep getting angrier and angrier at my mom. It feels a lot like what I felt towards her all through high school, and I guess until I was pregnant with my oldest son. My mom went with me to the doctor's office for my first appointment, and we heard the baby's heartbeat, and it was just a really beautiful moment, and I held on to it, making her mind-fucking a bit less glaring throughout the following years.

My birthday is on Mother's Day this year, and the day is a very difficult anniversary of something my dad did. On my eighth birthday (also Mother's Day), he set up this whole scenario, and after Mother's Day/My Birthday dinner, whisked me off to one of the single most traumatic experiences of my life. He said it was a birthday present.

This is all SO. FUCKED, and it's ME. Sometimes it still just baffles me when I put that into perspective. It's just fucking crazy, and not something anyone should have to experience. But I did. I am. I'm out of loopholes on the insanity front - I'm left with my sanity and what is real.

Jesus fucking christ.

It is SSOOOOOO much! It presses down on me all the time; it hurts every fucking day that I am awake; it is exhausting keeping it from smothering me. I have been fantasizing about when I get old (like 80 or so), and I will finally be able to die, and not have to deal with all of this shit anymore. It will just be so peaceful and quiet.

Don't get alarmed about the yearning-for-death thing; there is no way in hell I am leaving this earth without experiencing the good shit I have coming to me. I still don't know what that good shit will be, but I strongly suspect it will involve weekly spa visits and someone to regularly clean my house.

I wouldn't leave my husband and kids, either. How shitty would THAT be? Suicide hurts people so, so, so deeply. You can't hurt the people you love more than by taking your life away from them.

I've very recently been on the outskirts of that kind of despair and depression with someone very close to me, and whom I love very much. This person is doing much better now, and is getting the help they need, which is not far off from the kind of help I needed five years ago, so not only are we all still alive, we can empathize with each other, too, so, you know: win/win.

Blargh. I ran out of decaf and used all regular coffee this morning, and now I am all shaky and nauseous. I made that coffee know it would make me feel bad, and I drank it knowing it would make me feel bad, and it took 2 1/2 cups, along with feeling bad, to finally stop drinking it.

My therapist was talking about those tiny little birds that flit around on the ground in no logical or recognizable pattern. She said that's what it was like talking to me right then. I knew it, and I know I am doing the same thing right now, but it just starts to feel like too much after a certain amount of talking or thinking about difficult things, and I bail. Abruptly. That hopping around only intensifies with stress.

So between the caffeine and the stress, I guess this going to be one hell of a flitty blog post.

I've gotten so much better at not shaming myself when all of my neurological functions are making it difficult for me to communicate anything, or even to process words. I used to feel like I was stupid, or that other people saw me as stupid - the same thing with the dissociating, coming back into my mind in a group of people not knowing what just happened, and trying to re-start where everyone else is, and then saying something irrelevant or ludicrous or mean.

Now it's just like, "look what you've been through, for chrissake. You're really doing great, even if intelligent things come out much more slowly (or not at all), and it could be a whole entire hell of a lot worse."

And then I'm like, "you're so right. I'm just going to lower my shoulders from up by my ears and try to relax about being perceived as anything at all."

(successful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy right before your very eyes!)

Well I can't remember what I started out talking about, but I feel much less wound up now. That was an emotional writing session. I cried and everything.

Cheers! (I'm watching the British version of "Shameless," and brittishy things keep popping up. Like "cheers".)

part 101, or "i'm not friedrich nietzsche, goodnight"

I watched the movie Youth in Revolt yesterday, and in addition to glowing in the enduring adorableness of Michael Cera, I was very taken by his character’s separate self. For some reason, I have become preoccupied with my own separate selves, and am finding it much easier to see where I have been able to integrate myself into myself, in the past and the present.

There is one separate self I have that is all about shutting down and staying over and to the left of what is happening. I’m beginning to recognize how that part of me used dissociation to get through painful experiences – I actually have tons of flashbacks at the dentist, when I am on my back with a man holding me down (in my mind, that’s what it feels like and I itch my nose or something over and over so that he will have to lean back and get out of my face when I need him to), and doing things that hurt me. This is one of the very few times I use the floating above and to the left kind of dissociation in the recent past.

Also, maybe I should get a dentist who is not a large man. Hm.

Another part of myself is when I have a very distinctive feeling of switching off my feelings, and just moving my body along. That’s what happened that day when I was terrified to go into school (having aborted my father’s embryo three days before, doing something as normal as going to school was not actually within my concept of reality) and he made me go anyway. Like with the staying to the left kind of dissociating, I could feel this separateness of myself, and I could feel cement in my chest instead of fear, and I was surreally aware of what was going on, but I just was separate and away from myself.

It’s actually really difficult to describe. I don’t feel like there are separate versions of myself that take turns dealing with whatever crisis I may be experiencing – it’s all me, but separate. Like I am composed of fragmented stone, all the smaller bits getting together to make the one me – the smaller bits are still the smaller bits, but they are also all the one person that I am.

Anyway.

It was just kind of comforting to see what I can’t really describe about myself on my tv, in the form of Michael Cera. I feel like it’s easier for me to accept my separateness.

Today I’ve noticed that it’s been difficult concentrating on where I physically am and things of that nature. I literally could not spell virus or obnoxious – I had to look them up. I was stopped at a light this afternoon, and when the light changed, I suddenly realized I was supposed to be turning left, and there were multiple lanes, and I had to finagle my car over and to make the turn.

Except that I wasn’t supposed to be turning left; I had made that turn onto that street about five minutes before that. It’s kind of jolting, and can be very frustrating to deal with this shit, but today I was able to see where my separateness is getting kind of crossed over and intertwined, and it’s overwhelming and makes it hard to just be aware of what’s going on around me, but feels really good to be merging into a less separate person. Or maybe it’s just getting more familiar with how I operate, and can accept it all as who I am.

Getting more familiar with all of that means having to not only accept the things that happened to me, but to get comfortable with it all, too. All of that stuff is never going to change – all that stuff in the past. I’m stuck with it. Its what has made me who I am.

This is all so existential. I feel like I should be sitting around a campfire, smoking peyote and binging on philosophical philosophies. Thinking about all of this really clouds up everything that is going on around me, like I am having the “good trip” I never experienced when I was actively seeking it by eating LSD.

Okay, enough thinking for today. All of the parts of me are going to get a bowl of cereal and watch The Office with my man. 

part 100, or "my mom is seriously a stone cold bitch"

It’s been awhile since my last post. This is because: 1) I am going through some tough shit that I don’t want to disclose here, and 2) I’m so tired from dealing with all of the aforementioned tough shit that I haven’t had the energy to write at all.

After getting knocked flat on my ass again a few weeks ago, I am starting to feel better. Today I wore makeup and flossed my teeth and left my house and everything. I feel especially good about that today because I saw my mom yesterday, and the last time I saw her it upended me for much longer than that.

When I say I “saw” her, what I mean is that I saw her. I didn’t have any contact with her, and I have no idea if she saw me, too, but just seeing her out and about in the world is enough to throw me off. It was different with my dad, because I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in years before I started remembering things, and I didn’t see or speak to him at any time after that, and now he’s dead, so…I never had to deal with what he did to me while he was a hop, skip, and jump away.

With my mom I don’t really have much room to accept and feel and recover from what she did to me because she’s always there. The reality and pain of that mom-betrayal-shit is always popping back up in my mind, derailing the healing process, because I’m still here, and she is, too.

I’ve been imagining some undefined scenario in which I knock my mom down, punch her face three or four times, then rub her face in the dirt and walk away. I don’t have anything to say to her, and I don’t want to kill her like I did with my dad, but I am just so ANGRY, and she is the cause of it.

I literally can’t get away from her. She’s always right down the goddamn street in that house of twisted, fermented, putrid evil.

Since I can’t get away from her, I’ve been wondering a lot about what it would be like if she died, if that would make things easier for me while I’m stuck in this quicksand town. When my dad died, everything was easier, because I didn’t have to be constantly looking over my shoulder for him coming to kill me (even though I still catch myself doing it sometimes).

If my mom died, I think I would be relieved, and not terribly upset, but she was never the bigger threat between my parents. I don’t remember her ever expressing that she wanted to kill me, and I don’t have any memories of her actually trying to kill me, so that is a HUGE difference in my relationship with her (as opposed to my dad).

Another thing is that she is smaller than me, and 25 years older than me: she doesn’t pose much of a physical threat, if any at all. I mean, I’m no Xena Warrior Princess, but if it came down to mano a mano between me and my mom, I feel pretty strongly that I could prevent her from hurting me. Also I feel pretty strongly that I could hurt her.

I guess the biggest difference between the idea of my dad dying and the idea of my mom dying is that my mom’s death would serve no fundamental purpose. I mean, she’s still my mom, for christ’s sake, and as amusing as it is to imagine it happening, I really don’t want to see her harmed. I am able to go out in the world without fearing her, I can function, I can pretty much keep on living my life with her still living and breathing, and that wasn’t true when my dad was alive.

It does knock me down when I see her, though.

I seriously have no idea what a confrontation with her would be like. I’m just so mad, and I have nothing to say because she already knows how disgustingly pathetic and self-serving she is. She already knows what she did to me. She may be too ashamed to ever admit that she is that kind of person, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know that she is that kind of person.

When I get beyond the fantasizing about punching her, I am still stuck with her and me, face to face, knowing what she did. It will always be there between us, and no matter how satisfying it may feel to pummel her face into the ground, physically harming her would serve no purpose, and it would not make things any better.

I do wonder, though, if she would be able to meet my eye if we were ever to come face to face. I always thought that was kind of cheesy, the “look in my eyes so I know you’re telling the truth” thing. Being able to look someone in the eyes is not inherently indicative of being forthright with the truth.

But I cannot imagine her even looking at my face. I’m sure she could find hundreds of excuses to not have anything to do with me, explaining away her lack of action by thinking she would never stoop so low as to face me, or to even acknowledge anything about me.

She could think that I am crazy and vindictive and manipulative and spiteful, but it still doesn’t change the fact that she knows full well what she did to me. I wonder if she would admit to it if there was a total guarantee that no one would ever know, if it was just me and her.

I don’t think she would. I don’t think she could face me, and I don’t think she will ever be willing to think about what she did and how tremendously it has hurt me. I don’t think she would ever deign to put herself in the same category as a perpetrator of harm, the kind of harm she sees every day in victims of other perpetrators.

She is one hard core, stone cold, and frigid bitch.

Seriously.