January's theme song is "Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want." I don't remember exactly when I decided that; I think the day I chopped my hair off once again. It feels good enough for my hopeful moments and cynical enough for the sad ones. At the moment, it's a sad one. A crappy one, "rough." I don't know why entirely... I mean, yesterday was really nice. Before I went to sleep last night, I sat here at my desk - for no real reason, I didn't want to lie down, I suppose - and I happened to look over at the Linus figurine that has him sucking his thumb and holding his blanket; he's leaning against Snoopy, and Woodstock and a bunch of the other birds are around, all looking very content. And when I read the caption on the base, the line, "Some days there are just too many blessings to count," - the line that felt like such an awful irony all through that rotten month of December - felt entirely appropriate. I actually sat here for several minutes with this small smile on my face, feeling peaceful, and I thought about how the doctor promised Friday that I would not continue to feel as I did, and how he's right once more... I do tend to forget that I have good moments in the middle of bad ones. Just now, having resumed the bad one, I clipped yesterday from my memory and tried to make today directly follow Friday. I did well yesterday; why clip that out? I just forget. In recent weeks, good times are rare; good times are a change... which happens to allude to the title of the newest change in my life. I made a livejournal. I don't know why I did it. Something sparked in me yesterday where I just realized how many diarylanders write more often or different entries at livejournal, and how I so rarely remember to check those journals, and when I respond I have to be "anonymous" and I don't like that. I like to be known!
Anyway... I thought I'd just post an entry to have something on the page, and then I could use the account to keep track of things, but of course, I had to get all into it, play around like I had a new toy. I feel a little like a diaryland traitor, and I'm glad that I just bought a year's gold membership here because I'm fairly certain that will aid my fidelity to my first home. But as I have to learn, first homes don't have to stay our only homes... And I'm already thinking how I could post the random little things I sometimes feel like saying at livejournal, since my tendency to be expansive here makes brevity feel out of place. But do I want to separate my thoughts that much, that much more? One of the things I liked when I moved to chord was that I no longer had separate diaries for my fantasy world and my angry venting. I've come to a point where I love magic as it appears in "reality" which is not as cold as it seems; reality's rather fantastic, actually... and I no longer have cause to hide my anger most of the time. (No one gets too upset if I vent here, and in the past that wasn't always true.) Plus, I have the private entry option, which makes a great deal of difference. So, I can let myself have dimensions; I don't have to pour each part of my identity into a separate beaker. I'm already struggling to keep myself from editing out what isn't literary or interesting or insightful or optimistic enough for this journal, (in my opinion.) As if anything can not fit in a personal journal. On the other hand, it's fun to show different sides at different places. Accentuating different aspects of identity in different environments can exhilerate. I'm sure there's a way to write at livejournal and not completely piece apart and separate my identity again. It just doesn't seem probable that the situation is so all-or-nothing. It seems possible that my head, in this unhappy moment, wants to make it look that way. My head. It takes tremendously innocent things like journals and turns them into huge complications with weighty consequences. The doctor told me on Friday that I was overthinking a situation, and since then, I feel like I'm overthinking everything. I seriously need rest.
Unfortunately, the nightmares persist, and the waking hours are not exactly helping the situation. I manage to sleep, but it's not restful, and between today and Friday, I'm so exhausted. Can you believe yesterday, with my mission and everything, actually stressed me out less than today has - less than Friday did? And I'm talking pre-doctor's-visit Friday, which is fairly serious. The thing that sucks about it all is what's been frustrating lately is not something I can find any power around. I'm sure I have power, but I can't figure out where, and so I can't put it into action. For example, the nightmares. I've done so many things to try and get past them, but they don't stop, and they're not consistent the way they were a few weeks ago; they don't have recurring themes. They just happen, over and over again, and I wake up feeling worse than I did when I went to bed, and I can't stop it. That's how today and Friday have made me feel: powerless and poorly. If I could just figure out what I need, and a way to meet that need, I think I'd feel better. I almost know it; I would know it if the current reality weren't fogging up the truer one so dreadfully. But I don't know what I need, and I don't know what to do for myself.
I'm frustrated and angry, and that spectrum of emotion remains the most difficult one for me to handle. Even when I don't feel guilt regarding the emotion, I don't know what to do with it. I know how to feel sad, lonely, giddy, anxious, homesick, and I know what to do while I feel that way. How to feel through the emotion, stay safe, and end up feeling better. I don't know how to deal with anger so long as it's anger. A lot of times it chips away and turns into injury, and then I'm back in the game again, back to knowing, intellectually and intuitively, what I can do. When it doesn't chip away?...I just...stare at the walls and distract myself. Today the walls are closing in. I can't believe I didn't go for a walk. My mom and brother went for two walks today. I told them after the first one that they screwed me because we've had an ice storm going on since morning, but now I can't say to the doctor that it was unwalkable out there because the two freaky-freaks went out anyway. I kind of wish I had gone - by myself, in the daylight. I need to go tomorrow. First of all, the ability of this first step to be effective has a lot to do with whether or not I do it consistently, and so I need to stop missing it. Even though having been bedridden for a few days and not thinking about the time I'll lose, say, at an appointment, or yesterday at the store, and running smack-crash into the sunset, are fairly good reasons for the mistake. Mostly, I'd just give anything for some real light shining at my eyes right now, and crisp air that wouldn't chill me. Maybe I'll go out on the deck after awhile. After putting on about twenty more layers of clothing, of course. One of winter's perks (though it sucks to do it just to walk outside) - my major tendency toward layering my clothing (the fabric shielding technique I so adore) comes in ever so handy.
So, we had this ice storm. No, that's now where things start. So, Friday afternoon, I went to the doctor and told him that I'd done absolutely nothing all day and felt completely exhausted and ready to explode. I'd seriously accomplished almost nothing; I'd just responded to what other people were doing second after second for hours on end, and it left me so incredibly drained. I remember thinking as I walked into his building that I hadn't so much tried to move (or climb) Mount Everest, as leaned against it to bear some of the load. I remembered the Shel Silverstein poem about the kid who's busy doing things like counting the ants and holding the grass in place. And so I detailed the day, as it had unfolded up until that point to the doctor, whose eyes (I assume; I mostly look at his shoes and the carpet and the wall to my right) grew wider with each additional story. He did contend to understand my exhaustion, so I suppose it did have a little more legitimacy than I wanted to admit. Still. I think it bothered me that I was so exhausted with nothing to show for it, so exhausted on other people's accounts. It wasn't for my own sense of progress or because I'd gone and cleaned my room or anything like that. I felt unfairly used-up by people other than myself.
Friday went this way: I woke up around 9:30; I'd had nightmares, and I did not feel at all awake. I walked into the hallway, where I found my mom, who said, "You remember that Dodie is coming over today, right?" which - I'm happy to say - she had told me with an appropriate amount of notice, but which I'd entirely forgotten. I fell against the wall and said, "oy." I was grungy, I was barely awake, and I was not in the mood for company. To be honest, when I walked into that hallway I was still determining if I could handle my mom's presence in the apartment. I couldn't fault her, though; she had told me.
"What time's she getting here?" I asked, and received the world's most wonderful answer: 9:30. "So...like...now?" I said, looking, I imagine, rather piteous, and Mom confirmed that yes, she was expecting Dodie within seconds. I stared around the apartment, wondering if I should go into my room and hide, run for the shower, or go get breakfast, as I'd intended previously. The other important factor was that the meeting had some professional aspects, so it wasn't going to be a great get-together per the usual. The good news of this was that my mom intended to take Dodie into the back room and pretend we have actual soundproofing, leaving me free to roam. Finally, I asked the estimated time of departure - noon - and decided to pursue breakfast as originally planned. After all, 9:30 was a respectable time for having just woken up and looking scrubby, and I didn't have to care what my mom's friend wouldn't see the full glory of my newest haircut, that my pajama pants did not match the shirt I had on, or that I looked a little ragged in general. What do I care, right? (Or rather, why, and when can I stop, and how about I start stopping by not acting on it now - as in, then.)
So Dodie arrives; I call hello, as I put my breakfast together. I put on a kettle for them because Mom mentions she forgot to do it, and hey, I'm in the kitchen, and I make a pretty good daughter most days. They prepare to take their water and leave, when the phone rings. My mom hands it to me with her, "I'm trying not to look bothered that the phone could explode in my hand right now, and it would hurt less than this" face, which means my dad is on the line, and I take it, slightly wincing. I love my dad, I want to see my dad, I miss my dad, I want to talk to him, and yet... I've had three dreams in the past week where I spent several minutes screaming at him. I haven't told him that I'm working daily to leave the apartment, and so it's a little difficult to explain why I keep postponing going out with him. Especially when you throw in the fact that my dad, told "I'm just not up for going out right now," will almost certainly suggest staying in, without understanding that there's stress just seeing him. And I can't tell him that without hurting him dreadfully, and the fact that he's not even as stable as my mom is (which is less than she was not long back) makes it feel, to me, almost impossible to risk hurting him.
I took the phone, and we talked. I told him I felt better, though I hesitated to say it aloud, after saying it earlier this week only to fall much further into the depths of sickness. I told him about the migraine Thursday, about the doctor's improving health, a little bit about music. I asked him about life in Brigadoon; he told me he sits around waiting to go to work, then reminded me he could get me an apartment in town. I joked about not being the right make for that town and winced when I remembered he is. Or thinks he is. Or is once again becoming so... He said he really wanted to do something with me; I started to draw out a plan, even though it's ridiculous to think about right now, given everything. He actually stopped me and told me to wait until I really felt better, and to know it wasn't an obligation, but it is an obligation. It's not a bad obligation, but there are responsibilities required to maintain a relationship and one of the simpler ones is that you interact with the other person. The more advanced challenges - like honest communication and mutual trust - feel a little out of reach right now.
I told him I'd call him back in a few days, when I felt sure I was improving. I'll probably push myself to go to a movie, and come 'home' to write an amazed entry about how the agoraphobia was so amazingly less a challenge than the awkwardness with Dad. Or maybe it will be better. Can he really stay delusional forever?
Afterward, I sat down to breakfast with The Phantom Tollbooth, which I picked up for the twenty millionth time late Thursday, when I needed a significant distraction from how sick I felt - something good enough to keep my attention, simple enough to maintain my focus, and not involving many light or sound changes. (I had, by that point, pretty much concluded that my flu was topped off with a migraine. And even if I hadn't known, I knew what was aggravating it, and I didn't want to add to my pain.) The book was just as wonderful as it was the last time when it was as wonderful as it was the time before, and so forth. It's a quick read, so I only had the last couple of chapters to finish. (I must have done something else while Mom worked, but I no longer remember what. Most likely I spent time here at the computer or crocheted or played piano or did something else entirely incapable of standing out in my memory.) But anyway, she and Dodie eventually came out into the living room, and we did the whole smile and greet thing again. I hugged Dodie when she left (because I like her, and I like hugging), and went to make lunch beside my mom, to have some social time.
This worked poorly. I told her a story, or rather, a random thought, while we ate, prefaced with, "Do you ever get the feeling that if someone asked you 'what are you thinking' at a given moment, and you told them - honestly - they'd have to think you completely insane?" and obviously, any thought shared with that preface has some risk. How insane do I want to seem, you know? But I joked, and I told her the thought (which I can't very well exclude here...) and she laughed rather hard, and then Sarah called.
Here's the thing. Lately, my siblings are conspiring. Every time I sit down for a few minutes with my mom, one of them calls. Seriously. I'd have a better chance of talking to her if I had a cell phone. I live with her, and I hadn't spent a good half-hour with her in, like, three days. And it was pissing me off. In the not-so-distant past, my mom picked up my habit of letting the phone ring, of putting what we were doing ahead of whomever wanted to speak with us, and I really appreciated that. I noticed it. I liked that she would wait ten minutes and call them back, rather than miss the last ten minutes of a show we'd decided to watch or interrupt a game... She's stopped doing that, and I feel slighted. I want to say a little slighted, but truly, more than that. More than a little. It sucks and it hurts and it hits on all the "there isn't enough parent to go around" pain that colored my childhood.
I love my parents. They did a better job at parenting than almost every pair of parents I know. I wouldn't trade them. The facts, from my perspective, remain.
Even as we prepared lunch, she went to the phone and called John, inviting him over to join in the meal. Afterward, I reminded her that John was company, and that I'd appreciate it if company was cleared with me, and I felt crappy because it mattered so little that I was there. I realized when I told her that she must think of this, to some extent, as what I'd call "my parents' home" - that it's a place where any one of my siblings at any time could come for any reason. I think of it more as hers and mine - because none of them have lived here, because my dad isn't here, and because as much as I've resisted the "just the two of us" idea at times, I've fallen into and even appreciated it at others. John declined the offer, but mentioned something about coming over later.
So anyway, as we're eating the phone rings; Mom answers it and she talks to Sarah through some obvious static problems, and then she tells Sarah to call her back on our house line (because Sarah called the cell). So a minute later, Sarah calls again, and Mom answers again, and they start to talk, and are apparently still having problems, so Mom decides she'll try and call Sarah to see if that works. I don't know why it made a difference, but it did. It did work. This all happened in the middle of my, "Do you ever have the feeling" prologue. Every time I started to tell her what the actual thought had been, the phone rang again. When she came into the dining room with our phone to call Sarah back, she stopped to ask me what I'd been trying to say, but the timing was shot to hell, and I told her to forget it; it was a random comment from the moment. She pressed, and I folded. I said, "It just occurred to me...don't you think The Count from Sesame Street was seriously pissed off when Ernie got to sing, 'I Count Myself to Sleep'?" Now, my mom actually laughed really hard at this, which made me feel a bit better, but then she called Sarah and started to tell Sarah what I'd said, which seriously pissed me off. (I didn't detail all of this for the doc. You're getting every last detail because you're that special.) It seems like she's talking about me more when she's on the phone. She's constantly summarizing how I'm doing for people and repeating what I mutter under my breath to amuse her during a phone conversation that she's having in the same room. She started to tell Sarah, and I made a "no" gesture, and she kept telling Sarah, and I made a "cut it off" gesture, and she continued to tell Sarah, and I added "disgruntled" as I returned to my soup. Then she said, "Hold on, it's really Mary's story; I'll let her tell you." She tried to hand me the phone, and I said, "No, I don't want to tell her. I don't want you to tell her. It was just a random comment in a moment; it's not even a story," so my mom took the phone back and totally weirded Sarah out by saying it was something I said and didn't want repeated, et cetera. They proceed to talk, and I decide I don't want to sit across the table from her and watch her talk to someone else. I go to my room. After no time at all passes, she's in my room, handing me the phone. (This seems very wrong because the phone generally kidnaps her for long periods of time.) "It's Sara," she says.
"Sarah? What?"
"Your friend. Sara. She's on the phone."
"Are you still on the phone with Sarah? Are you on the other line?"
"No." Ok. I take the phone from my mom, and although I had planned to take a nap to rest my seriously stressed self, I fall pretty easily into the conversation with Sara. It's good to talk to her; it's been too long, and I enjoy it. But I hate that I can't hug her, that I have to use a thousand words to compensate. I hate that college is being not good for her in all the same ways I expect it would/will be not good for me. I feel wrung out and thrown off again; I didn't even hear the phone ring, and I wasn't expecting her to call, and there won't come a time when talking with a sister like that won't be the highlight of my day (even better days than Friday) but everything else made the phone call hard. I didn't want to postpone talking, by any means; I just wished that the day hadn't been so fucked up until that point, so that I'd have more energy to talk.
I talk in the time I'd meant to spend napping, and then take the phone into my mom's room, where she's managed a nap (grr), to restore it to its perch. I leave her room, go into mine, and lie down, deciding that I'll just try to relax and rest, rather than sleep. Approximately one minute later, my mom knocks on the door and enters. Guess what? John's coming! He's on his way now. I groan loudly; despite how much I love the boy, I want some fucking space. She starts to give it to me, and I call back, "Do you have any idea how long he's staying?"
"Well," she says, "we have to leave for the doctor around 3:30 - so I doubt he'll stay longer than that." Marvelous. 3:30 is approximately two hours away, and I want my apartment without guests, during that time. I hate the day, passionately, and I've managed to get nothing done. I continue my rest period for a little while longer, but eventually cave and go out into the dining room to join them. I sit down at the table, throw a few lines into the conversation, and feel like a third foot - which is, obviously, even more out of place than a third wheel... I can feel myself seething beneath the skin, just wretched with my inability to fit into this day, to be recognized, to have something go my way, and eventually I grab some yarn and try to forget I'm not really invisible.
John asks to hook his ipod up to my dsl connection or something, I don't know exactly what he wanted to do, and I didn't want to let him do it - I didn't want to have him in my space, with my computer - so I tell him that I have things on my computer that aren't saved, and he tells me he won't mess them up at all, and so I give him permission. He's still on when we leave. He's in my room, sitting on my bed, with my things. It feels like a violation, but I don't feel right saying anything. Mom drives me to the doctor, we sit in the waiting room, until the doctor appears. I can't even look at him. In my world, it is two years ago, I'm seeing Harriet, I hate my 'home', feel constantly tense and furious, and am planning to run away. Mom does not seem to have this struggle. She follows him when he goes into a small kitchen area to get me the water that makes me cry, always, and talks to him about how John's doing and how he plans to help John do better and what she's doing to help John. I try not to have a facial expression. She promised me years ago not to talk to the doctor about anyone but me around my sessions if it could possibly be avoided. I've been sick all week; I'm coming out of a hell-period - a month so bad that everyone who called got to hear how well I wasn't doing, and it still isn't enough. It isn't bad enough to catch her radar, and I hate the world.
I walk into the doctor's office, and I tell him all these things. I spit them out, and I start crying. I hate myself, of course, and I hate them, too. I don't ever want to go back to the apartment with my mom, I don't ever want to live with her, and I will never stop feeling angry. Everything is against me; life is shit. The one good thing I ever had was a cruel joke. There's no such thing as Rogers outside - that's why college will never work for Sara and me, that's why the world will never work for me - and so all Rogers really did was make me completely incapable of feeling content with the world as is. He tells me again and again that these feelings are legitimate and I need to feel them, but at some point, I will want to talk to my mom, I will feel differently, life will seem good again. I tell him I don't want anything from my mom; I'm not setting myself up to depend on her and have it blow up in my face yet again (because you know, it really meant something to me that we were getting close these past few months, and it really meant something to me that I felt safe letting her in more) ... I tell him I know that I won't feel this way at some point. Then I scream and cry some more, and he repeats that he doesn't want me to do anything rational right now. He doesn't want me to talk about what I need from my mom; he wants me to feel the fact that I don't want to need anything from my mom ever again. So I do, and I bawl like I have faucets for eyes, and I'm even mad at him for not pitying and placating me. For not taking a "there, there, you poor girl" stance. For actually helping me instead of licking my wounds.
When he asks if I'm mad at him for his sudden disappearance, I'm not. Still not. I depend on him and he left, he reminds me. No matter how good his reasons, he left. I tell him he came back, and that's still novel to me. Not mad. On some level, I am, he believes. I don't have the energy to be mad at him. I have to hold onto one ally, don't I? And who do I have that I can reach?
When we leave, Mom asks what I need from her, which should make me laugh because it's exactly what the doctor said we needed to determine (later), and I tell her she can stay away and keep everyone else away. She asks me if that could mean taking John out, if he's still at our apartment, and I say yes. Exactly. So, they leave, I cry more, I crash. I still hate the world when I fall asleep, and I have nightmares the whole time I'm dreaming.
Yesterday, we picked him up on our way to the store. I felt revived, didn't mind at all if he came along - no big deal. Didn't mind at all when he came back with mom and a video, which we watched and enjoyed. Didn't understand when Mom said, "Thank you for being so understanding about him needing so much right now." What's that? John's going through a lot, yes - a job change, a med that requires him to be off caffeine and alcohol (which puts my little sister heart majorally at ease, but is a huge challenge for him right now) - but I hardly saw the big deal of watching a movie with him. I'd missed the fact that he was sleeping over. But what did I care? He could stay over, sure. I know what it's like to need to be with people, even if lately, I'm more clear on what it's like to need them to go away. Then we have an ice storm. We're trapped here all day. And when I get up, after a restless night, and enter the kitchen, they've piled it high with photographs, and there's nowhere to sit, no way in. The last time I looked at photographs, my mom started crying, and I got the feeling she didn't really want me to have them out. But the two of them were laughing. I went into the kitchen; she'd obviously made breakfast that morning, but the only remains were dishes. I asked about it, and she said she'd make something for me if I told her what I wanted, and I said I wanted to sit down. They cleared all the pictures away within seconds... I didn't see any of what they'd piled up, what they'd laughed about, what prizes they'd found. I couldn't tell my mom what I wanted for breakfast because I didn't want anything. I wanted to scream and the fact that I couldn't scream made eating seem stupid and impossible. What would that help? And more importantly, how much worse would that make everything?
So, it sucked. And it continued, and we've become terribly bored. But now, John's playing Mom's guitar, and I can hear him singing over the sound of the keys, and I wish I could just feel the goodness of that, of John and his music and us. Just now, he came in and asked me if I felt up to singing some of his songs; he feels too embarassed to do vocals. I feel shy, too, but then...I always said John asking me to sing as a part of his music would be the greatest vocals validation ever. So, who knows? Out into the living room, I go, and things aren't great today, but the doctor had one very important point which remains pertinent:
Two years ago, I felt this way every day. Today, I have yesterday to remember, and tomorrow to believe in... And there's something big in that.
~me