Spirit of Glass

Life is a circle and my spirit is glass as thin as breath.

"I am at one of the tables sitting with my wrists facing up, my hands are passive as I wait for something. Another set of hands, which belong to another girl whose face I don't see, are opening a delicate bottle of scent next to mine on the table. It is a special scent that someone has gone to a lot of trouble to find. The bottle is opaque and somewhere between the color of moonlight in a smoky sky and summery blushed peaches. Maybe it even resembles the skin of an infant. It is the most impossible color I've ever seen and the scent is exactly the same: somewhere between the smell of smoky moonlight and night blossoms with the blush of peaches to keep it from total darkness. It is the smell of me."


Dudes. This was part of my dream last night and I actually never wanted to wake up again. Not out of a disdain for living, which I love, but because the dream was so rich, amazing, and better than life. My dreams, as I have said before, are rarely good. I am a person who is plagued by very bad nightmares or at best a whole lot of stupid anxiety dreams about missing classes. But this one was like something unfinished, something freeing, something important and it makes me wonder if most of my healing has been done during the rare nights when I dream like this: dream better safer things than I have lived.


I went to the library today. I am going to try to power through my impossible four year stretch of difficulty reading a book without losing focus, feeling itchy, and needing the constant comfort of watching gross medical shows in order to calm myself enough to face every single next day of my life. I used to read a book almost every two days. Until I quit smoking a few years ago. I have not been the same since. Healthier, yes. And no. My mental illness has also reached a point over the last few years that it is hard to take a chance on new books. New stories. I have to manage my moods to such a degree that a book which creeps me out or depresses me could knock my mood down for days.

And that's WITH medication.

So, for example, no Carson McCullers for me. Ever again.

It's very hard for many people to understand but I need to know ahead of time (as much as possible) how any event or "entertainment" is going to impact my head and my capacity to deal with the aftermath. Surprises impact not just me but also my kid and my husband. I have to do risk management equations on myself all day long just so other people can see me as pretty much "normal". It's a lot of work.

I checked out two Mary Stewart novels (not from her Merlin series but from her mystery/suspense series she wrote mostly in the nineteen fifties) which I have already read (but not for a very long time) and adore because the suspense is page turning but I know how they end and I always want to be one of her heroines. I also checked out some books from the psychology section. And I'm a little worried. However, I need to reconnect to what's being written these days from inside the mentally ill mind. I need to connect with my kind, hear their stories in order to figure out which stories still need telling.

In particular I am anxious to read the book called "Cutting" by Steven Levenkron. People like me are called "cutters". I don't call myself that. Until I saw an episode of Maury Povich (many many years ago) about "cutters" I didn't know we had a name. I didn't know we were a group. I didn't know there were enough of us to be our own special thing. I am many special things so I suppose it never hurts to add something to the list. I was worried that it ended up on Maury's show before I got whiff of it in some more legitimate forum. I mean, to see the really cheap low down version of something you've been and loathed and feared end up on a really bad talk show is extremely depressing. Maury was a complete ass about it too.

I need to know, finally, what others are saying about me and my kind. I need to know if I am being properly represented. I have tried writing about the subject and read it out loud to friends which I think is a mistake. It has helped to highlight my non-normalcy almost better than any other single action I've taken in my life. Doing it was bad enough, saying it out loud makes me feel like a very sick and battered human being. Feeling that sick and battered triggers a ferocity in me that is not healthy.

So. I checked books out that I need to read. Will I be able to turn off the shows that calm me like giant shots of Thorazine do for others? Will I be able to concentrate without smoking?* Will I discover what words are missing from this world that I need to add to it? Will I find my place? Will I need a lot of time to recover?

All these questions, and more, may never be answered.

Oh yeah, and I ran out of Paxil and I don't have any refills and I neglected to beg for some tide-over pills for the week-end so my head is doing that twinge-y thing I LOVE so much and by tomorrow I should be well into worrying that I'm going to stroke out or that my head has a bomb lodged in it and will explode before Monday.

Ah well. At least then I won't have to worry about getting that second job, huh? Always look for the silver lining.







*No worries. I won't start smoking. I'll just stop reading if it comes to that.