Toilet Terror

I wonder if being small means things that aren't scary for normal people are scary for me? In this case, it's the toilet.

For some reason, every time I flush the toilet I'm gripped by the bizarre fear that something will slither up from the drain and bite me in the butt as I skitter out of the stall. On the list of irrational fears, I think this comes fairly near the top.

My sister (who won't thank me for telling this story, but don't worry, no one's naked) used to be terrified of automatic-flush toilets. Back in the Technological Stone Age when these things were modern, they had them installed in most reststops along the major US highways. This meant that every time we took a family road trip (a horror within itself) she would need to pee but be unable to, due to abject terror.

While this may, in some strange world, make sense, for the most part it just made me laugh. Now I'm in the awkward position of being afraid of a normal toilet, and (naturally), it doesn't seem so funny.

Oh dear.
WolfGrrl

Daemon

Those of you familiar with Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series will get this. For me, this was just so accurate it make me sigh a little - partly wistful and partly resigned.

"You are calm and logical, but not unemotional. You are an introvert, at heart, preferring to read alone than be subjected to the crush and noise of a big party or bar. You have a few friends and family, whose presence you welcome - to a point. Even they can wear on your nerves eventually, and you need to retreat back into your personal space for a while so you can recharge. Your energy comes in bursts, after which you need a long nap or a couple of evenings at home to recuperate.

"You are comfortable with yourself, and reasonably confident. You want the friendship and goodwill of others, but you are not willing to sacrifice your principles in order to get it. If your close friends need something that you can provide, however, you will be the first to offer it.

"You are a good and sympathetic listener, and are aware of your friend's emotional states. With your very close friends, you will open up, but rarely - you don't like to burden people with your problems. At the same time, though, you are honest and are not willing to alter the truth for the sake of convenience. Among strangers you are reserved, and may resort to making jokes to disguise your true feelings.

"While you are not afraid of conflict, you do not seek it, either. When you are hurt or insulted, you feel that you have a choice to make. You can choose to take the up on it and defend yourself, or you can let it pass. Your decision may depend on how well you know the person, how personally you take the insult, or simply what mood you are in that day. Your friends may not always know how you are going to react, for that reason. Whatever you reaction, though, you will be logical, rational and unnervingly accurate: a measured strike.

"Your daemon's form would represent your calm, introverted nature, your cool logic, and your impatience with crowds of people. He or she would probably whisper ironic comments in your ear, give logical advice and try to hide his or her soft side from everyone, even you."

Suggested forms: Peregrine Falcon, Snowy Owl, Snow Leopard, Siberian Tiger, Osprey.

Too true, this.
WolfGrrl

Hope

Hope is something small;
Something hardly felt at all.
Hope is something clean
That's smooth and without seams.
Hope is something strong
And it rarely stays for long.
But hope is something new
And I offer it to you.

I hope that the good times are a little bit better;
I hope that the bad times are a little bit shorter.
I hope that the world gifts you with one unexpected smile a day;
And most of all...
...I hope you know that you are Loved. 

Spasiba,
wolfgrrl

Lunacy and Chocolate

I sat at my desk and seethed.

Seething is a very satisfying process, because it lets you get good and pissed off without actually forcing you to interact with someone who might (God help you) get pissed off back. Seething is what allowed me to stay in public high school instead of going to a very private, very well recommended and very secure juvenile detention center. On any given day, my mental body count was somewhere in the hundreds. There was one extremely excruciating Wednesday where I nuked the school.

I wasn’t an enthusiastic student. Just an obligated one.

And there you have the two great driving forces in my life: Obligation and Guilt. I always think of them as two whiny, pretentious individuals, one of whom looks like my mother and one of whom looks like me after forty years and forty drinks (is that mutually exclusive? Whatever).

I was never very fond of alcohol; the fumes make me think of gassing up my car, and the results are reminiscent of my days wrangling four year-olds – who were, now that I actually make that comparison, probably more rational and articulate than my drunken, college-educated friends. Alcohol, the great equalizer.

But let’s get back to seething. I am a person who holds everything inside, like a homemade volcano or a Maltese cocktail. I listen to people ramble on about their woes and their terrible relationships and smile and make all the right responses, while inside the soundtrack consists of machine guns, B-movie screams, and more gore than even an NC-17 rating would cover. Seething – the pastime of the American (college student).

Occasionally some nut-job gets his hands on a gun while the CEO of his brain is down in Maui for a vacation and has left the guy who fixes the photocopier in charge. This tends to lead to what the media likes to call ‘massacres.’ I’m sure these occur everywhere, every day, in all social environments. (It’s like throwing darts, only your professor never actually falls over with a feathered projectile sticking out of his shiny forehead.)

While I was sitting at my desk and seething tonight, I was also worrying about all the things stacking up on my mental Sticky Note. Rambling, incoherent, irrational, all-important, all-consuming, and maddening. The adjectives are as numerous as their counterparts, and just as intimidating. Getting anything done is rather like standing behind the starting line of a 10K run and looking at all the career athletes lining up on either side of you. You, in your Spandex and hideously ugly sweatbands, suddenly feel fat and slow and stupid and out-classed in every regard, and self-conscious on top of all that. Somehow American society has reached a pinnacle of hypocrisy: we are both individualistic and comparative. I’m only as good as the next guy, and he’s only as good as the one next to him, and so on.

My seething tonight came courtesy of chocolate candy and MSG. Like the lab rat that presses the pleasure button until he dies, I indulge myself with poor quality food and repeatedly fall into a crashed state where I am simultaneously lethargic, overstimulated, sleep-deprived, malnourished, and courting scurvy and constipation. This state is accompanied by paranoia, crankiness, irrational mood swings, tears, laughter, disorganization, and bizarre rants. My next blog will be called “Rantings of a Rabid Chocoholic.” It sounds poetic and appropriately screwball for the Internet.

This in some ways is probably what taking amphetamines is like: racing heartbeat, unfocused vision, delusions, rants, rapid-fire and incomplete thoughts, inability to function and diarrhea of the mouth (fingers). Wheeeeee. I’m also stressed to the point of lunacy and I feel fineeeeee.

There is clearly no point in continuing. I don’t even know where this was going originally; we took a little detour, and I forgot to ask for directions. There was the image of a young woman in a daffodil colored coat, walking her daughter to school. Maybe I’ll go and write about that, now that I’ve shoveled the shit out of my brain and smeared it all over the wall.

I promise I am not the psychopath I seem like. All I've had to eat today is an apple, a blueberry scone, a box of cheap take-out Chinese, and M&Ms.

Ba-boom.

WolfGrrl

The Color Wheel

I've always liked colors.

I don't consider myself much of an artist, but the concept of the color wheel and its emotional connotations has always interested me. I said once in group therapy that I see people in terms of colors; based on what I know of their personalities, I look at my friends and match them to a color (or a range of colors) on the Wheel. It's fun and surprisingly insightful. It also kills time on the treadmill (always a bennie).

Therefore, I guess  it doesn't seem odd that instead of thinking of myself as blue, I try to find other colors that more closely match my emotional grid. I've been down for a couple of weeks now; it comes and goes in various intensities, but I've been consistently sad and/or fragile and/or angry for a while now. Part of what makes me sad, I suspect, is the fact that this isn't new. I was this way for a long, long time before, and it was only about two years ago that I changed into the person I now want desperately to be again: someone who was fun, and game, and who felt everything so intensely.

It sounds incredibly cheesy and Rom-Com-ish, but it's true. There were a lot of things wrong with the place I was in these last two years, but I can remember being happy. Happy to the point of incandescence. Happy to the point of spinning in circles until I fell down (I'll be twenty this year, but most people tell me I was born forty and have gotten more middle-aged since then). I cannot have what I had at seventeen. There are a lot of really terrible things I did and felt that I never want to repeat; yet at the same time, I'd give anything to go back and do it all over again. Self-flagellation and fear at it's finest, ladies and gentlemen.

There's a post on here called The Definition of Happiness. Occasionally, I have these moments of epiphany where the world reveals one small mystery to me and I feel blessed. But the deeper my fog, the louder those revelations need to be and the harder it is for me to see the woods, let alone the trees.

Happiness feeds itself; unhappiness is the same. I am a blue person anyway (in terms of my personality's coloring). I like the softer, more melancholy shades of twilight and evening: violet, cobalt, lavender, mauve, midnight blue and rose. I prefer dark-colored clothes too; in high school, most of my wardrobe was black, because it was the most forgiving shade. That's one of the signs I've noticed (among others) that I'm backsliding.

When I was happy, I bought bright, pretty things. Delicate dresses, pretty shoes; shorts and skirts and flirty little tops. I did things to my hair, played with my face to make my eyes bigger or my mouth redder. No more. I haven't yet descended into sweatpants every day, but I do wear running shorts and sweatshirts. I am in hiding, and whereas before I'd never known any different, now I have the pain and guilt and regret of what I lost - or unknowingly gave up.

Confidence, like happiness, comes from within. Confident people are content within themselves; happy people radiate happiness. I feel small and tired and dark: a pebble, a piece of driftwood; a lost cloud. I don't go shopping anymore. I don't go out with friends that often. I don't write as much either, and I've slipped into the realm of nonresponses - I go away from people. I drift.

This is the cobalt world I inhabit. Not exclusively, and not forever, but I don't want to be in this place again. I want what I had, and I can't have it, so I have to move on and find it in another form. My colors are soothing and mild, but they can also rage with black despair. Don't underestimate despair; it's a powerful force.

People (my therapist) try to tell me that a lot of my 'suffering' is unnecessary. But at the same time, I see things, or hear things, and know that whatever I feel is so small and insignificant it seems criminal to complain or ask for help. I must be strong; I must stand up and carry my burdens. I don't believe that we are given burdens beyond our ability to bear. So how can I ask for help when my burdens are, as another post joked, First World Problems? I haven't been abused, or displaced, or wounded. I'm not starving, I'm not poor. I have water and heat and clothes and food and the chance to expand my mind. I am intelligent (I think) and capable (I hope) and strong (I don't know).

All my life, I've tried to swallow everything unpleasant or petty, mean or selfish or arrogant or cruel. Maybe it's a lifetime of these emotions that's weighing me down now. I'd hoped my Lost Year had dealt with all this; maybe it did, and this is new. That's discouraging; like garbage, it builds up so quickly.

I don't know.
I don't know.
I just don't know.

A term I recently learned is 'Flattening of Affect' or it's milder form 'Blunting of Affect.' I think it's called depression, and that I have it. I just don't...respond. I'm indifferent. I haven't seen my boyfriend (for a lot of reasons, but this is one) in almost two weeks. He lives twenty minutes away from me.

I have this suspicion that I lack the ability to self soothe. I don't really want to list all my problems here (who wants to read that?), but they all dovetail together the same way my colors on the Wheel do. Depression. Anxiety. Insomnia. Disordered eating. Blunting of Affect. Alone, any of these is scary. Together, the picture they paint is my private Scream. My mother tells me that when I was a baby and I cried at night, she gave up leaving me to cry because I never stopped. I'm stubborn to a degree that borders on self-destructive; Anorexia requires discipline, but to the exclusion of reason. Even as an infant, a few months old, I lacked the ability to self-soothe. I push people away in relationships; I sever all acquiantance rather than attempt salvaging them. Solitude calms me down, but too long alone and bad things happen in my head.

Blue colors are pretty, but they are the colors of the evening, the end of day, of nighttime. They are the colors of winter, and sleeping things. Dying things. I am a sleeping thing, and if I don't do something, I won't wake up.

I am colors (wedges) 23 - 18.

WolfGrrl