hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

So the book that I am still trying to read despite life being exceedingly distracting, is Prentis Hemphill’s What It Takes To Heal, and in it they talk about longing, about how what we yearn for at the deeper levels of the self is different from what we want in more superficial ways. And since I’m getting better at recognizing things that I want (a cup of decaf, to pet a cat, to have a conversation), now it’s time for me to recover my knowledge of the deep desires that move me through life, to see if I am meeting these needs or aligning my actions with them, or doing what might lead me there. ( Read more... )

I’m re-listening to the whole of bell hooks’ book all about love: new visions, since I couldn’t remember where I left off and none of where I thought I might be sounded familiar. Memories. Brains. Why.

( sad but thinky )

I hope you have good holidays and New Years and that your own families know how to show you love in ways you can feel.

Mom has the same need for predictability as Ghost and a lot of autistic folks, and it makes both of them stay in situations that make them miserable as long as it is safely predictable. I am writing Ghost a letter of all the times I can remember where he let me know when he needed something to change and I made it happen. Because he is a bit obfuscated as far as showing his needs.

On the flip side of that: I really really like changing stuff as long as I'm the one in control of it? I would redecorate every year if I could afford to.

I cry a lot more now that I can feel my feelings. Duh, right? But it's one of those things that nobody tells you about because most people don't dissociate from their feelings to that degree and then decide to stop. Also, I don't generally cry from sadness. I cry from helplessness and guilt/shame feelings. I don't keep shame like a pet the way that I used to, but I do have some problems with guilt feelings about stuff that's not my business. I need to get a handle on carrying other people's burdens and doing emotion work for people fully capable of doing it for themselves.

This year is starting out on some sucky notes for me and mine, but I have hope even on my saddest day. I think that has to be a good sign. Yay for therapy.

It's bad for your brain to be sad all the time. The neural pathways get used to being used that way and it affects your moods even if you aren't prone to depression. I can't remember when I started limiting the times my brain was allowed to think about depressing subjects, but it must have been a long time ago since I'm so good at it now that I don't notice.

Hacking your brain only takes discipline at first; once you get used to doing it the brain handles that functionality on its own. Really quite useful. The problem with limiting yourself that way is being careful that you don't stifle all expression of that part of yourself. You need access to mourning to stay human and I needed to be human. So a balance was reached: I could react to specific sad things as events occurred, but reminiscing was consigned to the anniversary of Larry's death.

( TLDR on the meta of introspective moping. )

I like the new autumn colors navigation bar. I love color, which is maybe odd for someone who intermittently wears black and gray for weeks. I'm not sure why that is - habit, I guess.

I have some other odd habits that I've been noticing. When I watch a show or a movie, I always identify with the person with the crappiest social skills. Even when they're not my favorite character they're always the one I see the most of myself in, even though I have social skills now, even though I'm not that girl anymore. I over-identify with awkward and dorky because that's where I came from. Maybe it's time to take a look back at other things that have changed since I was 15 and update my self-image.

So:

I have social skills now. People generally understand what I am trying to communicate.

I am not in unrequited love with anybody. All of the people I love love me back, even if we can't get our lives to match up in romantic ways. I am okay with all parts of that.

Not only do I have a circle of friends, I have multiple circles. I have more than one social role, and I manage to fulfill different emotional needs to different people. I have RANGE.

I am not the dorkiest person that I know, and in some circles I am ~the normal one~ and while that may never stop being strange I had better learn to accept and identify with it for accuracy.

My quirks are harmless and I have a right to them. I can stop justifying my necessary habits: writing on my hands, making lots of notes about context, and laughing at things that aren't funny to other people.


Those are the things I've noticed since I started thinking about the recurrence of my identification with Sheldon Cooper, Parker, Dr. Reid, Rodney McKay, Samantha Carter, and Hermione Granger and Luna Lovegood. Which admittedly I should not have been thinking about while giving a massage yesterday, but sometimes my brain is attacked by ideas and it's easiest to just give them space and then re-focus. I'm glad I seem to be pulling slowly out of depression. If the trend of more thoughts and interconnections continues, I may be past this in a month. Not being depressed for the housewarming? That would be awesome.

You know what else would be awesome? Telling me if you spot anything else I say or do that doesn't fit with how I present myself. I realize there's going to be variation, and that I don't have consistency so much as texture but being aware of the variation would still be good for me.

While I have issues (and tend to talk about them, often at length), I know that you have issues, too. Just because I don't point them out and say, "ooh, where did you get that shiny warped perspective?! you are so beautifully broken!!" does not mean that I don't see you. I see you; I see us.

( If you wonder why I consider you family when we have never met and have no visible thing in common, this is why. )

Thank you.

I throw words away: here's the next to die
Fighting to be heard. There is no reason why
This one has more hope than any other.
Were I dead and he alive, my brother
Would just as likely be resigned, pissed off.
But he wouldn't call you on this, he'd just cough
And look away, uncomfortable. Would
You rather remain mute, misunderstood?
When you had one family you could not
Afford to care. It seems like you forgot
And started another at their expense.
Tell me, please, how any of this makes sense?
I'm sad; I don't know how to yell at you.
Instead of ire, this grief will have to do.

I know the second line has eleven syllables and doesn't quite scan. Concrit is welcome anyway.

EDIT: Does this come across as harsh? Is there language I should change to make the poem sit more on the border between angry and resigned sadness?

EDIT 2: Changed the wording in a few places; how's that?

I'm only religious in the "I hope there are gods so I can laugh at them, too" sense, but I have a fair number of beliefs that do not require the existence of a god of any kind.

I believe in the Wile E. Coyote Theory of Not Looking Down. Some people I know scoff at what they call the "fake it 'til you make it" approach to attaining one's desires. Logically, there is little you can do if you do not at least attempt things you are uncertain about succeeding at. Is it fake to try to be a different way than you are? Sometimes you find access to new pieces of yourself in the play, and how will you find all of what you are if you never test the bounds of what you are not? I believe in not reflecting on whether you can walk on air until you can feel the ground beneath your feet again. I believe in finding out.

I believe that life hurts, but that it's okay. It's not masochism, exactly: it's just that experience would be missing something without it, that I would be some shallow thing I did not like without it. I believe that pain is finite and that I am not. It's just pain, and I'm bigger than it is, will exist after it passes. You may not be the same way, but I think some people are.

I believe that things are only impossible until they're not.

I believe that Murphy's Law rules the world, unconquerable. That said, I'm willing to keep testing that belief by attempting to wrest control from regular disorder and establish my own disorder. Dammit.

Like pTerry, I believe in reasonably priced love and that there never was an apple that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it.

I believe that regular contact with the inexplicable strengthens the cognitive dissonance load tolerance of the human mind. Being forced to deal with concepts you have no context for broadens your perspective and keeps you open to the possibility that you have things yet to learn that will make what you know now appear like life seen through a funhouse mirror.



What do you believe? What do you disbelieve?

I keep thinking that I'm going to wake up from the Capraesque dream of our country being under new management. But it keeps being real.

Can't sleep. It happens sometimes, and I don't know why. I need to pick a fight soon, spar with someone, get this restlessness out from under my skin.

It's good to periodically return to the parts of yourself you've been avoiding. I've always had more problems than I knew how to deal with and since I can't live in the shabby, brokedown parts of my head without getting horrible, I avoid that part of myself and go live in the intellectual and spiritual and occasionally physical parts of myself. I hold back my emotions and avoid them, while researching ways that other people deal and coming up with experimental solutions to test out the next time I'm here. And I'm here again; every once in a while I go on a mission to the Cambodia of my internal world, the Somalia and Nicaragua of my messy emotional poverty.

There are resources here. There are things worth having in the starving, untravelled parts of myself, and these resources are desperate to be used. But I don't want to strip mine myself or treat this like America treats a third world country. There's got to be some form of game theory that can be used as a blueprint for self-respect. There's got to be behavioral mapping from the external world that can guide me along the twisting mud tracks and dusty camel trails in my head. One world has to reflect the other, or what's a world for?

When my problems got worse than I knew how to cover for, bad things happened to me because nobody knew how to correctly interpret me. I'd been lying too much for too long. Eventually I learned to stop covering most of it up, and let people who were trying to get close to me know what they were really in for. Here's how that happened:

My peers gave me hell, unwanted gifts that I accepted because I didn't know how to refuse. A lot of kids that grew up the same way are concerned with paying their peers back for that treatment, which is not unusual for freaks in public schools. But I don't want to pay them back. I want to give them what they paid for, and let the buyer beware. That's my nature. I'm fair like that.

I transubstantiated that pain into something functional and beautiful and new. I made Hell part of myself and used its fire to forge the raw materials of myself into whatever I am now. And I want to share my smithied self with the world so the next generation of hell-givers and hell-takers will come to the table with a better understanding of the possibilities being offered there. Anger shows you what's important to you. Pain makes you grow. It's fertilizer, and like fertilizer it's pretty shitty. But if my peers had been better people then I wouldn't be one now. Thanks to the Tiffanies and Dominiques and Alexes of the world. I would say I owe you one, but I don't. :)

Gonna try to sleep now.

We burn with the power of a million stars.
We turn with the cycles of the fertile Earth.
We are children of great promise:
We are inheritors of magic's spark.
We are children of great promise:
We dance the light out from the dark.

In all of my power I open up,
In all of my strength I rise.
In all of my power I open up:
I'm reaching to the skies.

We dance in the heat of our Heart's Desire
We dance in the heat of our Heart's Desire
Open the Gate, the Key is within, to the Temple of the Heart.


( Notes from the Feri workshop on Sex, Will, and Magick. )