I Sold My Soul To Memory

Emotional stability is not my strong suit.  I am going to say this in advance, because I believe that people frequently forget that this is a normal part of my internal landscape which I open up here on my blog a lot more than I do in real life.  You ever read this blog and think "Shit, the drama never stops?  Up one day, down the next...can't she just be fine for a whole week at a time?"?  I think if emotional stability is something you need from a friend or a blog or your universe, you are definitely coming to the wrong corner.  You need to stop coming here.  I can't offer you any kind of stability at all.  It would be easy to blame it solely on my mental illness.  And that wouldn't be misplaced blame.  But I think it's only fair to point out that my life has actually been ripe fodder for an unbalanced psyche to swing from.  It offers me a lot of rope from which to hang myself.  Metaphorically speaking.  Mostly.

I get tired of being the master of uneven mood.  I would like to have an expert in my court helping me to find the right combination of medications.  I did make a valiant effort to help myself at the expense of my family by using some of our meager resources to pay an actual psychiatrist to help me.  But he turned out to be a shit.  I wasted $600 of our limited resources just to resume taking my previous medication and to discover that Prozac made me clench my jaws and then obsessively concentrate on my jaws to discover if I was actually clenching them or just thinking I was, and then wondering if my wondering about it every two minutes was actually the real cause of my aching tight jaws?

Whatever.  I can't afford to try again.  I need different meds.  This certainly is adding to the drama in my head.  Which I ungraciously spill here.  Because I have nowhere else to spill it all.  You come of your own will and so I think I can be absolved of coercion.  I think if you find it dizzying or annoying, these mood switches; these leaps from hope and flickers of light back into the dismal dark, you should go read Alicia Paulson's blog.  It is a much prettier and constant festival of the soft charm. 

I don't want anyone to try to solve my problems.  I am not extending an invitation to come up with solutions.  In the last four years I've found that solutions consistently disappoint.  I don't want them.  I am very fragile these days.  Very much on the edge of a dark I can't afford to be swallowed by.  I merely want to let off steam.  My blog is the only corner in the universe in which I allow myself to completely vomit up the truth of my feelings.  Although I do attract conflict in my every day life, I promise you that I don't talk out loud in the world at large like I do here.  It is almost to my horror that so many local people find their way here so that they may be offended and see a side of me that I reserve only for my true friends or complete strangers. 

I don't actually freely advertise my blog.  In the early days I did.  I try not to be coy and secretive either but there's no neon sign pointing locals here.

Today has been unpleasant.  My laptop may have been killed by one tiny spill last night.  My new (used) laptop.  The one I just got 5 months ago.  The one I depend on to do my paid work.  It's in the shop and the computer guys said I managed to spill my tonic water (no booze!!!!!!) in the WORST POSSIBLE spot.  They are not hopeful. 

That's all it took to make my entire mood take a swan dive of very dramatic proportions.  I've been trying so hard to be thankful for all my small blessings every day, in spite of the enormous suckitude of owing the tax-man amounts of money I can never pay but should be able to pay.  In spite of living in a community that I am learning to hate for it's hateful views of many ideals I hold dear.  In spite of having the following things broken without the funds to fix them:

Car
Dishwasher
Garbage Disposal
Fancy Camera
Lawn Mower
Bathrooms (dry rot from poor installation and leakage we've tried to fix)
and now the laptop.  The most important tool of my paid and unpaid profession.

I feel bitterness 7 layers deep in my skin.

I will admit that I am having constant fantasies of moving away but this fantasy is faulty because there is nowhere better for us to go.  And also, we'll never be able to afford to leave.

I am here until I die.  I'm feeling pretty sure of that.

Yes, yes.  I know.  SO MELODRAMATIC.  That's what people have been saying about me my whole life.  It can't hurt more to have anyone say it again now that I'm forty and I've been hearing that my entire life. 

I am having pretty constant fantasies of going to sleep and never waking up again.  I'm that tired.  Of everything.  Including myself.  How much of that fantasy is because I am reducing my Paxil by half, known to promote suicidal ideation during withdrawal, and how much is because I've kind of wanted to be dead since I understood that the only exit from the hell that life is, is death...?  I don't know.  I'm not going to do anything, so get your fingers off the suicide hot-line number.  I promise I would never NEVER do that to my husband and child.

That is the safety catch that everyone who cares about me can always count on.  My son is going to have a tough enough time in life and I love him so much there is no way I will ever put a suicidal mother on his shoulders to bear.  It crushes me just to imagine him having to go through that and I want desperately not to have the wishes and the dreams of endless sleep I have and I want to be someone else entirely for him.  It shames me to be me on my own account, it shames me twice as much that I'm not a more whole, even tempered, and stable person for him.

But I wake up and I dread what's coming every day.  I fight it.  I try to see positive things.  Some days I actually feel the glimmer of hope in front of me, like the mirage of a clean rushing river in the middle of an arid desert, and I try to hold onto it.  I try to milk it, coax it along, and hang onto it into the afternoon.  Because my spirit wants very much to nurture hope. 

I have this terrible gnawing feeling of being trapped.  If it doesn't seem like I'm working hard enough to see the blessings, the luck, the fortune, the good of the life I have and the place I've landed, then you aren't listening.  It has taken fully four years to unveil the truth of this place I've become stuck in like a moth in amber and to see how very corrosive it has turned out to be to my sense of belonging, my well being, my comfort and my hopes.  I don't give up hope as quickly as it sounds like I do.  I have bounced back so many times.  Once a week.  Every other day.  Every month. 

Meeting new people.  Hoping to find people who won't piss on my ideals and my life choices.  Hoping to find more people who don't think my mental illness is a fake illness to excuse personal (lazy) weakness.  Hoping to find friends and people who understand that Max isn't "choosing" to be a picky eater or to have issues with impulsivity and focus.  Hoping to find people who have the ability to make their own choices without hating mine.  Trying to find some kind of cotton in a mill of metal. 

This wears me down.

It isn't all black and white.  There are good people here.  Good people I can't be friends with.  Good people that I can see are good but who can never include me in their sphere.  There are more people here that I might fit in with but who already have their lives mapped out tightly with just as many people as can fit in their schedule with no room for fresh close faces.  There have been so many disappointments like that.  People I knew I would understand even if they were different than me, and who, in being different than me, could still accept with some goodwill that my decisions have been different but not be threatened by that or view my different decisions as unacceptable. 

It reminds me of when Philip and I first visited Scotland.  I remember talking to someone who had moved to a small town we were visting, maybe Pitlochry, and I said something probably stupidly rhapsodic and this person explained that after 30 years he was still considered "the newcomer".  Still an outsider after 30 years. 

I am living that here.

People have grown up here.  They already have their lives full to capacity.  I will never be in their inner circles.  And there are some transplants who are like myself enough that I had hopes of a meaningful and lasting connection who are in a separate social sphere that I only fit into when I was a store owner but as soon as I gave up the retail business I was suddenly persona non grata.  That stung too.  But I adjusted.  I am better than that kind of cutting.

There are things I love about this place.  The flaming pink and lavender sunset we're having right now is one of them.  The weather suits me.  I love the rain just as much as I always have.  Give me forty days and forty nights of it and I am still at peace with the grey and the damp.  It is beautiful and lush and the forests are generous and expansive. 

But so much about it is eating away at me.  Haunting me and needling me. 

My closest friend in the world who lives 600 miles from me and always seems to love me even when I'm tiresome, has told me I need to gather the few people I've found here that I love and spend more time with them.  She is wise.  It is true.  It's so hard with everyone's family life being divergent and non-meshing.  That's a whole different story for another night.  But the only way I'm going to survive this very long episode in hell is to gather what few kindred spirits I have around me, nurture them, and let that be enough to give light and comfort and a sense of belonging. 

If you didn't know it, most people need to feel that they belong somewhere.  Preferably not 13 hours from where they live.  Humans need a sense of belonging in order to thrive.  I've frequently felt I didn't belong wherever I've been, because my skin is difficult to wear, but I never understood until now what it truly feels like to have no place.  No real place. 

Having no real place is terrifying. 

I feel many things right now, sorry for myself is surprisingly not one of them.  There's no room to feel sorry for myself.  I'm angry, bitter, frustrated, disillusioned, and sad.  Self pity isn't one of my many melodramatic sins.  Think what you will.

I came here of my own free will.  California pushed us out and I sought comfort in the state of my heart.  The state I loved the most in my heart from the embrace it gave me as a child.  I had no idea what a trap I was making for myself. 

I sold my soul to memory.

I haven't eaten since breakfast.  I'm so hungry I feel like my stomach is going to collapse in a rage of hunger and instead of food I'm feeding it beer.  Beer without food.  My cardinal rule broken.  But my mouth feels like ash.  I'm that tired, I can't even stand to taste anything but the bitter taste of beer.

The thought of food is repugnant.

I sold my soul to a childhood memory. 

And every day I have to live with the aftershocks.

They keep coming.

I just keep going to sleep wondering if my spirit will have the energy to rise in the morning.

And I can't help but feel that it wouldn't be at all a bad thing if I just drifted across the badlands of sleep for an eternity of bleak burnt dreams.