The End (of this Blog)

I'm no longer going to post to this blog. It's old. It's stale. Never mind that I haven't posted to it in months because I'm so depressed I can barely get out of bed.

I've started a new blog. I'll give the link here, but I caution you. I'm writing the new blog about what I hope will be a successful journey from where I am now (very bad) to where I hope to be (very good). It will be raw, honest, accurate, and precise. I won't be sugar-coating anything in order to not upset my friends. It won't be sweet and it won't be pretty. Some things I write might piss off or hurt some of my friends because I will state unequivocally that I feel as if I am all alone. 

I'm writing the new blog because I hope it will help me hold onto the remains of myself. I hope that by writing it I will be able to hold myself together until I am  in less of a dark place.

So, feel free to join me if you want. Thanks for sticking with me here.

Bye.

New blog: The Light and the Dark

Lying Under Dark Water

I'm unhappy, desperately so. I'm more than unhappy: I'm sad; I'm depressed; I'm anxious. Like heavy weights chained to me and unrelenting noise piercing my ears.

I'm 53 years old; I can probably get away with looking like I'm in my early 40s. I'm 53 and I've got nothing to show for it. Went to college? Sure. I did do something with my second degree, and eared quite a bit of money for a while, but ow it's all gone. Fifty-three and no savings, no retirement, no home. No family of my own. No books written and published. I'm 53 and I'm living with friends because I have no income and the only reason I'm not living in a shelter is because I have friends who can and will support me financially. It's pathetic.

I can't find lasting work and haven't for many years now.It's come to the point where several people have begun asking if I shouldn't consider an alternate career! I don't have the education or training or experience for anything other than writing and editing; no one uses word processors anymore (the human kind, not the software kind).I don't even know why I can't find lasting work. Is there something wrong with me that I can't perceive?

Maybe everything is wrong with me. Broken. Sick. Non-functional. Incapable. Who else do you know who has spent nearly their entire adult life — 30 years! — in therapy without getting well?!

I hate my life, and I am so terribly disappointed in myself. Sometimes I'm completely disgusted with myself.I don't think I'd want to know me, much less be friends with me.

The only real thing I've ever done, the only thing that matters, was being with my Mom when she had cancer. Fifty-three years, and only two and a half months of it matters. And God! It was only two and a half months!

View from the Shadows

I'm feeling again. My intellectual detachment has faded, unfortunately. I don't like when I feel, because when my feelings come back, they are not the light, but the dark. They are not happiness, contentment, or serenity; they are pain and sadness and despair. I'd rather have the detachment.

Some years ago, as a therapy assignment, I wrote a piece that illustrated how I experienced and perceived the world. It told how I lived in a world of twilight and darkness, looking out onto the world of light, wondering at a world that I didn't live in, a world of beings who didn't see the dark and unsafe things in my world.

"So she built walls and landscapes and castles with high inaccessible towers, and she populated her lands with magical creatures and loving people, but she still yearned and the pain stayed inside her walls, keeping her company.  And even when the walls finally burst and broke and fell, she still had one wall remaining, one quiet hidden prison.  This prison hemmed in her unlovability, the thing you must never admit to, neither to the world nor even to yourself. To admit to it would only make the lovable ones feel uncomfortable, awkward.  As if their worlds were somehow missing something.  As if something important were hidden from them. As if they'd done something wrong."

i my perceptions and experiences haven't changed that much, except that right now, at least, I don't feel I'm in so much darkness as dusk, or perhaps a very flat, gray light that leeches the color, contrast, and depth from the scenery.

I also feel as if I am separated from the people around me by a glass barrier. I can see them; I'm not sure they can see me. But I cannot touch them. I am outside, excluded. Other. When I am detached, this separation is simply something I perceive. When I feel, this separation pains me.

Did I mention that I Don't like to feel?

I'm tired of this. I wonder if I will ever get better (hence the despair). I wonder if I am expending useless effort toward an impossible goal.

That's really all I've got to say right now.

A Tangled Mess

I'm a mess. Much of my life is a mess. I'm spending so much energy distracting myself from my messes that I barely have enough energy left to breathe. I feel like I'm caught  in a mass of tangled yarn.

I'm reading obsessively, including books that I'm not normally interested in, as long as the books are light entertainment. And when I read, I skip over more and more of the text to just get to the main plot points. I'm not taking much enjoyment from the books. Books with greater emotional or mental content get set aside. I just purchased a new Tawna Fenske book and haven't been able to enjoy it. I love Tawna's work, but I'm anticipating the emotional and romantic complications and getting anxious about them. Anxious about fictional characters, people!

I'm not watching any TV series with my housemates anymore. Everything they watch has character arcs: I become invested in the characters and get stressed out when their lives are difficult. In general I've always had difficulty detaching from movies and TV, but it's a lot worse now.

There are people in my life I haven't contacted in months, some of them in over a year, and not because I don't like them. I don't read blogs much at all. I don't know why I've dropped contact with most people: I have no idea how doing so connects with how I'm feeling.

Right now, I'm in the middle of a two-week experiment proposed by my psych. For two weeks, I'm not going to try to go to bed earlier. I've been staying up until 3 am, but wanting to go to bed around 10 pm. I spend mental and emotional energy chastising myself for staying up so late. So for these two weeks, I'm just going to let myself stay up as late as I want to and sleep as late as I want to. No judgements.

As a corollary of this experiment, I'm setting aside all shoulds and should-nots. No judgement. No restrictions. Want to eat ice cream? Sure. As much as I want. Be a slug on the couch? Sure, as usual, but this time no judgements. Do it because I want to.

When I manage to quiet the shoulds and should-nots, I feel less stressed, more peaceful. It does take effort to quiet them. In addition, my housemates do NOT like this experiment. They think it's a bad idea. They disapprove. They disagree with my psych. Even though it's only for two weeks and I wasn't making any progress doing things the other way!

Squish

I gained more insight into my attitudes toward strength, bravery, and resilience this week. It comes down to stress balls and Silly Putty.

I still have difficulties seeing myself as strong, brave, or resilient. For example, throughout my life I have been victimized, bullied, and abused in some way or another. Bullies, predators, and people who need to diminish someone else in order to feel bigger have found me and made it their purpose to squash me. Other children, adults, coworkers, bosses, even friends: people of all sorts have seen me as weaker than them and gone on to prove it.

My fight or flight reflex? Permanently set to flight. When the group of friends I hung out with in my 20s would get too overbearing and downright mean, instead of standing up for myself, I would take a break from them until I felt recovered. One of them even went so far as to tell me I was like a soft, furry bunny — and he didn't mean it as a cute thing but as a nonthreatening prey object. (BTW: I stopped hanging out with those folks regularly in my late 20s.)

Even some of my well-meaning friends have diminished me. Because I ask other people's opinion, many of my friends and even my mother sometimes treated me as if I were unable to make my own decisions, as if I were not quite a responsible adult. Really, because I have been single and lived alone most of my adult life, I like to get second opinions and bounce my own off of other people from time to time. Some of my male friends think of me as delicate or fragile.

Adjustments

Things are changing. Again. The feeling is just as pleasant as it usually is.

The events and situations causing the changes are good: I've been spending my weekends at the home of one of my best friend's and her family, and I've finally found work. Both of these things have an effect on my schedule and routines. Both of these things, because they are changes, cause me some stress. Stress is not always a bad thing.

One set of routines that has changed is my morning routine, which had grown to last until past noon. I woke up, got out of bed, made tea and breakfast, then spent hours reading my selected blogs — those blogs you see listed in the right-hand column. I comment on most of those blogs, too, which also takes a lot of time. And if I have comments on my blog post, I usually respond. That's a lot of time spent on blogs. Oh, and then there is the time I spend revisiting some of the sites to see what other visitors have said.

My first adjustment was that I didn't get online while I was at my friends' house, so I didn't visit my blogs on the weekend. Sometimes I'd catch up with one or two blogs on Sunday evenings, but that has become less frequent.

Next, I've been spending less time on blogs during the week. Today was my first (nearly) full day of work. I get to work at home, but I woke up later than planned and didn't have time to read blogs at all. Now that it's evening, I find myself uninterested in doing so. Perhaps I've become lazy.

I've also been reading books a lot more. I recently started borrowing ebooks from my library and reading them on my iPad. Because I read very quickly, and many of the books I want are available when I want them, I've managed to plow through a couple of writers' entire booklists and I'm working my way through a couple more. This reading has taken time and energy away from reading blogs.

Layers of Defense

My inner self, my core self, sits inside a stone tower within a stone castle behind a moat behind a low stone wall behind a white picket fence behind a low fence of iron pickets with roses growing up the fence.

I used to have a problem with boundaries, in that I had virtually none. This is typical of someone who has been sexually abused as a child. Over the years, I worked hard at developing boundaries. Then, as I continued to be hurt by relationships, rejections, disappointments, and letting too many people in too soon, I began developing protections.

I have a vivid and strong imagination and am good at visualization. Every time I felt hurt, I imagined myself protected by a thick wall. This wall extended out to become a fortified castle, a wide land filled with dangerous creatures, and a series of walls and fences, all with manned gates. The outer fence was too tall to see over and the roses grew huge, sharp thorns and obscured an onlooker's view inside. Eventually, no one could see inside and I couldn't see out. I had become almost completely protected against emotional pain, yet I still hurt because I didn't have close intimate friendships (I had even protected myself from my oldest, closest friends). I still felt alone. But no one could hurt me.

Several years ago, my protective barriers crumbled and broke down completely, leaving me naked and vulnerable. My therapist at the time was stunned by the self that was revealed because she had taken what she'd seen of me as truth: that I was fairly superficial and had solid boundaries. Finally we were able to do deep work. I learned that vulnerability was a strength and that being as protected as I'd made myself actually made it impossible for me to form and maintain the emotionally intimate connections I craved. I agreed to not create such an impenetrable barrier again, but I would still create the layered barriers to remind me to not let everyone in and to let people further in only when I knew I could trust them.

Over the past several years, I've experienced some heartbreaking pain. I've wanted so much to build up those barriers again, wanting to be safe from pain, but I have learned that they won't keep me safe from pain. Nothing can. And I want to be able to experience life fully, which does require being vulnerable to pain.