054/100 days of aspirin

Friday the 13th, and on the recovery road - driving around to a nearby village (with wool shop), and to a couple of retail parks to pick up groceries, printer cable, resistance bands (which like the yoga mat, are going to do good just by being in my house rather than the store!), and some tights.

Passivity was going through my head today.

Firstly, I reached out to the Facebook group to ask for tips on self-care. Daily gratitudes seems to be the consensus, along with (for one person) prayers and meditation. My mind turned off. I equate self care with actually doing the things my body needs to be healthy which I often neglect. I don't often think about self care for my mind, and to be honest, I'm probably scared to, scared that my adult persona will crumble and I'll become a child wailing "it's not fair" again. It's nudging up against that CBT downwards spiral of low self esteem, thinking about gratefulness.

Secondly, the downstairs neighbour was playing loud thump thump thump music for around four hours. I'd banged a chair on the floor after three and a half hours, a couple of times, with no result, other than feeling shamed and annoyed that I was worked up, full of adrenalin. I then got up the courage to go and confront them, got my crutch and knocked on the door.

"Is that you, playing the thumping music?"
"Was that you, banging upstairs?"
"Yes, it's really loud even without my hearing aids."
"You should have just come down and asked!"
"Um... broken leg..."

Then, pondering passivity and how it was now somehow my fault for behaving unreasonably and banging on the floor rather than the neighbours for playing the music loud in the first place. And using my crutch to elicit sympathy when it didn't even work. And when I can get around without it. More shame.

I went upstairs to bed early (the dark nights, and the exhaustion of doing nothing, and the emotional exhausting of behaving badly). The neighbour to the side of me was having a party too, his birthday, guitar music and singing. I recognised some of the songs. It was annoying, after I'd mentioned the noise below to him, but I had gone to bed, was naked, and didn't feel like getting up and dressed and yelling over the back fence. Maybe, because of that, I had an excuse for being passive. It didn't annoy me as much as the thumping bass either. 

Finally, with the broken leg, there is a mindset I've got into. That I am not quite right, and I will do all that when I am better. World class procrastination. I'd like to snap out of it, to feel energised and actually do stuff. But not enough to actually get up and do it.

#awakeaugust 17

acid panic
there is a small bag I need to pack for my flight tomorrow
I saw it, four or five days ago when busy tidying, organising after my new office and hallway were completed
roiling frustration

I need to calm down and then it will be found, some time today
I sit in front of the white wall and type, soothed by clickety clicking


Awake August facebook page here

When was that?

I lost that girl somewhere.  She was careless and carefree and reckless and, no, wait, reckfree is not a word; but if it was, she would have been all of that too.  In retrospect yes of course I admired her, loved her even, if only she'd known that.  The turn of her neck, whisking her hair past me, across her eyes, so that I saw her face only in flickers as she smiled, on her way through to somewhere else.  Fleeting, fun and gone.
Stolid and set now, I have taken Scarlett O'Hara's "I'll think about it tomorrow" and hardened into a life of procrastination.

Stupid habits

Like sitting at the computer with your leg crossed underneath you; any fool knows you will end up with pins and needles but you do it all the same, you notice the strange bouncy feeling when you get up and try to walk on the numbed leg before the sudden nipping pains start.
Like picking at scabs, saying you're being careful, you're just taking away the crusty bits across tight pink healed skin until you pull too deep and the blood flows again.
Like cats and top-heavy stemmed wine glasses do NOT mix.
Like "I'll do it later"
Like re-reading your old words, hoping to see a different nuance, something to lighten the absence of hope.
Todays wine bottle, Marqués de Ballestar Reserva 2005, has a little net of gold threads around it, perhaps that will make me feel special, or at least help me forget that I am not.

Weak as I am...

I am sprawling in the dingy light, behind the bars that contain me, keeping me penned into the corner of the room.  I am not really there as a possession, treasured or otherwise, I am not really something he would display to other people.  But, in the recesses of his mind I am on display, I am defined by the sex we have had, and by the ideal of a mute naked slave, existing only to perform for him.  A casual pet.
I see the bars that keep me in, but I don't want to acknowledge that they were always weak, and now that he has broken a hole through them, I still stay in my corner cage.

Catch you tomorrow?

"Catch you tomorrow?"
Words that should be hopeful, speaking of continuity, speaking of the future; the wish to be talking again then as we were today.
But, but... they are so final for today; from experience I experience them as a turning off, being shelved, put away until it is convenient for him again.

Crawl space

don't give up the day job...  well, actually, you probably should, it's not like you can manage that either, is it?  you might tell yourself it's just an insane workload and no-one could manage it but you know better really don't you? and you thought you could channel the shavings of energy you had left over into something else, something creative? well now you've been judged in that different arena and what a surprise you are still found wanting.  you are so slow, when will you realise that it really doesn't matter how hard you try?

Faith in logic

I thought men were supposed to be the logical ones, able to think without all that fuzz of emotion that, as a member of the weaker sex, I am obviously so prone too.  I asked him "What criteria are you using to judge if your marriage is working?"
He couldn't answer me, he told me that he hadn't thought of it as a "project to manage", slightly huffily. After a bit of scrabbling about, he said that he couldn't afford for it not to work, thinking I would take this at face value and think about the financial costs.
I knew he was hiding his blind faith from me, his vision of what a good family should be; he wants the chance of being "a good father", and proving himself a better man than his own Dad.
It is one more chance I have given him.

The Puddle

Several minutes later, she was still standing in the same spot, staring at where his living body had been.  Red pooled on the floor, almost too bright to be natural.  It was shocking arterial red pink, especially against the grey tiles of the kitchen floor.  She could see the blood run across her palm, watched the hypnotic cycle of each drop growing, swelling and pushing against the meniscus holding it back, and then falling down under it's weight; the track across the heel of her hand flaccidly waiting to be refilled.  Her blood looked dull when it fell into the puddle of raspberry cordial at her feet.  Glass shards from the broken tumbler, she welcomed the pain as a change from the dullness when he was not there.

Not late but out of time

Last week I told him I'd loved him. Nearly eight months after we had stopped seeing each other. I don't know why I never said it to him at the time, perhaps because I suspected he didn't feel the same, perhaps because it would raise expectations too high for me to cope with. Perhaps the words stuck behind my tonsils, scared of being released for the first time, scared what would happen when they were out and unrecallable.

He said "I knew how you felt about me," sending this from his Blackberry in a jumbled rushed mail in a snatched moment away from the wife and baby.  I wondered what would make me not want to snatch a moment with him again.

So how inadequate am I really?

It was only last year, a fair way through my life that I realised the latest fact about another inadequacy of mine. Admittedly I had this thought while I was already upset at the course recent events had taken; to submerge my sorrows I wanted to drown in the words and stories of others, and so I made my way to the largest bookshop in the second largest city of my home country.  As I gazed at the hundreds of books in the Sci-Fi section (pleasingly, there was a separate section for Fantasy) there were so many authors who were new to me even though I had only been out of the country for 18 months, and I realised that I would never, never be able to read all the books in the world.
And I became intrigued, I do not know how many books there are in the world today, and I wondered how long ago it was, when it was still possible to read all the books in the world, assuming you could read every language, assuming you could access the manuscripts which may have been cherished and jealously guarded, or conversely, illegible through age or use.

So how inadequate should I feel not to be able to read everything? I reckon that if I lived and worked as now, I would get the estimated 3.5 billion books polished off in around 7.5 million years; and even if I devoted every moment to the task, it would still take me over a million years - one instance where my personal bug-bear of "trying harder" is not going to achieve the desired result either - this particular failure is only that as a human I am constrained to live my life on a human scale.

Morning

The sound of the radio hauled me into the present, the inane chatter dances along the borderline between bearable and irritiating as always, and as always I think about retuning it but don't, the well worn dialogue of my internal debate seeping through my conciousness.
Waking up knowing I haven't written anything for 4 days, recoiling from the derisive voice telling me I've letting people down again, no surprise there; recoiling from waking up as me.
Perhaps the radio is part of the problem, I wake up with other peoples words in my head, song lyrics being particularly pervasive, today I will find it difficult to forget "I'm safe, up high, nothing can stop me, so why do I feel this party's over?"  But every day, more words, more phrases, not just songs but fragments of speech, words I have read or written or thought.  They jump into my head and whirl around, dropping some bits and connecting to others, and how then do I tell if it is my voice speaking when they come out?
Small wonder then that I trust the only distinct voice I know, the one that tells me to forget about trying, it won't change anything, just turn over and go back to sleep.