spinning wheels

I have a soul sickness.

I don't think this sets me apart.  I think it makes me like many others.  The nature of this sickness is something of a mystery - we can contemplate the symptoms, speculate on the origins, but the exact size and shape, and most certainly the cure, remain obscured by my conscious mind.

I believe that a real faith in magic would be a cure for this sickness.  I envy those who can use their faith in a higher power to keep their emotional body protected from the slow decay of their flesh, and the constant assault on the form and senses of the outside world.  Unfortunately, my reasonable mind rejects most magic (perhaps foolishly), but most especially rejects antiquated, dogmatic rules that have been paired with their manifestation of belief in magic (and this, I feel, is not foolish at all).

I do not feel "right."  I feel disconnected from other people, from the pulse of life, and I feel as though there is something wrong with me.  My mind is busy and searching, constantly, for answers.  I am not wrong, though.  There's nothing bad about me, any more so than there is about any person.  I cannot seem to deliver the same pardon I am so quick to bestow on others unto myself.  I only really see myself as anything when I see myself through the eyes of another - and usually my projection is of inadequacy.  There's no sense of wholeness in my being.  I feel intangible and adrift without the approval of others.

For many years now, I have poured much time and energy into toxic or at least dead end relationships.  I do not want to condemn all of my loving feelings for other people, and all of my efforts to bridge the seemingly endless gulf between two hearts that have at least resulted in a little bit of understanding, a little bit of pardon.  But.  It is as if I see a relationship with another human as a garden where I can finally grow, when I can finally be me, as though by myself I am only a malformed half thing, or an empty vessel waiting to be filled.  The players have changed by my efforts remain.  In these efforts I feel most alive, the least bored, the most distracted.  But, I am drawn to problem situations, things that require sacrifice or suffering to perpetuate, high attraction paired with high anxiety.  I say I do not want to be alone, but perpetually try to plant myself in unforgiving conditions, wrestling against a state of rejection, deprivation, as though that is my place, as though that is when I am alive.  I do not truly believe I am trying to punish myself because I don't feel like I deserve happiness.  I think that love and attachment give me enough motivation to try to create when I don't really believe anything within me is worthy of manifestation.

Today I looked at flowers at stores.  Individually potted, ready to be taken somewhere and planted, for real.  My anxiety swelled as I looked at them, thinking about how I wouldn't know how to keep them alive, thinking I wish I could ask my dead and distant relatives how to do what I don't know how to do.  But the flowers were not worried.  They are just flowers.

I want to believe in something, to believe something is real, besides we're on a rock and everything dies.  That is real, but there is something else, just out of reach.  I want to believe so I can create.  Create beauty, create love, create magic.  I am very afraid of growing old alone, hidden away, wringing my hands and asking these questions until the very end.  I need to heal my soul sickness so I can create beauty, and so that I can be loved without trying to create a self I think is desired, a self I can see projected onto another.  I just want to be, and to be good.

selves

i'm a witty human, and i (like most people, i assume) make jokes for myself all of the time.  some of them are silly and/or not particularly nice, and i most often hear them in my head (and out loud on the phone to the people who really know me) in a slightly combative sounding deadpan, a real wise woman who's seen the ways of the world.  like, a woman who understands that you can truly know your place in the world by visiting a publix.  a woman who wanted to put "don't be sick all of the time" and "don't have creepy secret relationships" down for annual goals.  a woman who is fully willing to acknowledge that when your cat almost burns down the house with a hitachi magic wand, you are no longer allowed to live alone.  and so forth.

i gotta tell you friends and neighbors, this gal entertains me.  but, she is also crass and cynical and doesn't actually represent how i would want to come across to the public at large or to people who do not understand the context of my personality.  she's my scathing better half, my wicked lady, and be it with a grimace or a grin, she's got a perspective.  and i do believe, after a lot of reflection, that she should have more of a public voice.  problematically, she'd out all my dirty laundry, and I try not to publicly slam myself (enough people will do that for you), but as you might imagine, the butt of her insightful (biting) observations is most often me.

dear sweet germaine. me who plays as nicely as possibly.  me who avoids the conflict in favor of assisting with the resolution.  me who is sweet and chaste (lord). me who somehow feels the need to apologize a lot, all of the time.  so in fact this wicked lady is essential, because she keeps me real, keeps me honest, keeps me from evaporating into a fine mist of obliviated haze.  perhaps most importantly, she helps me know when it's time to stop taking other people's shit.

i guess my main conflict with publicly sharing more of this side of my personality is that it does not reflect the amount of charity that i strive to cultivate in my heart.  in all situations, i try to remember that everyone is coming from somewhere and that we are all striving to meet the same basic needs with varying levels of damage.  she might help me maintain boundaries, but my witty defender does not always embrace compassion, forgiveness, and love.

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i decided to post this to my blog instead of as a facebook status when it grew to a certain length.  when i logged in and read the most recent entry (11/12/12), imagine my wry amusement to find that though i don't have any recollection of writing that post, it is about essentially the same thing.  private vs. public, etc. i spent a looooong time at http://www.zaporacle.com/ reading lots of thoughtful insights, mostly about integrating the parts of your personality and finding peace within instead of seeking it from without, something that is also very important to me at this time in my life.

so, i believe for me the year 2013 will be about integration.  the first hard resolution i made for myself was that i wanted to audit my belongings and maintain a list of all the items that i owned.  to take concrete, specific, mindful responsibility for my existence in the material world.  instead of a sprawl of random clutter, expanding to fill a seemingly infinite space, it will be a collection of useful or treasured objects, in a small space, that i will keep comfortably neat and clean.  i think part of me has been afraid to really face the real world, accept other humans as intimates, etc, because of how disjointed and unanchored i feel within my own psyche, and the chaos of my surroundings is closely intertwined with this state of being (and in assuming my mother's identity, almost IDENTICALLY, but that is a WHOLE other post in itself).  and maybe, in the process, i'll find ways to resolve my "conflicting" selves into one whole, successful self, and find a balance between cynical and world weary, pristine and unfailingly kind.

i found a book on how to be invisible

I have dealt with formative misfortunes by attempting to be invisible as much as possible. if you are invisible, you cannot be attacked, scolded, criticized, or, perhaps most essentially, rejected. But if you are invisible, you cannot be loved, nor heard, and you can never enjoy the basic human pleasure of sharing with other people you trust. There's obviously a part of me, the artist, the voice, the word - that does NOT want to hide, but I have completely unresolved issues of my willingness to be authentic with other humans. And this discord, this desire to continue to hide lest I be held accountable to standards I learned early on that I would never be able to meet vs. the desire to sing, dance, love, live, and be boldly, unapologetically me and not just in secret, but with other people, has been at the center of my life for a very long time. Love me, but don't look at me, see me, but don't know me. Like a ghost. This statements seem perhaps grim, but I do not feel sorry. I am relieved to see parts of myself more clearly, to understand myself in such a useful way. Because when you live your life to please and avoid other people, your whole inside turns to escaping, your every impulse consumed with a totally negative relation to everyone. But people love me. I love them. The things I learned about the world as a child were limited to the circumstances around me, to foolish assumptions about myself based on the adult drama swirling around me. What I am is fine. It's fine if other people see me. And if I am not so worried about making them think a certain thing about me, maybe I can finally see myself, a self whose inside is not all escaping.

On Authenticity

One of the things I dislike about publishing my thoughts on the Internet is just that you either open yourself up to too much scrutiny or you run the risk of presenting a very skewed portion of the puzzle.  I am a person who craves to be understood, but there is a lot of darkness in my soul and I fear rejection, so I want to hide my true self as well.  Facebook invites us to share with our friends, but what is it that we'd actually share with our "friends?"  I don't think there is anything necessarily immediately illegitimate about expanding our social base to 100s of people, 100s more than would "naturally" be the case, but you must be a very brave human to speak as you would to a few close friends to a giant pool of people. Sure, filter things down, but then it becomes a matter of classifying the people you know, and facing the big question: who cares about your innermost self and who do you just WISH cared?

And then there's the question - is it possible to be authentic, EVER? Well, for one thing, updating to a website is one sided, and the fact is, people will not necessarily even understand your meaning, nor may you understand their true intent in any feedback or replies.  All communication is a negotiation, and the things we decide to communicate might be SELF DECEPTIONS to start!  OH MY GOD, it's so convoluted, I can't even begin to deal.

But the other option, the silence...  This does not appeal to me either.  I'm not the end all be all of wisdom, but I think my voice can carry messages that matter to other humans.  I think I can move and stir and heal and inspire.  I think I can cause someone to pause and reflect, or have a laugh, or feel less alone.  I have to personally find the balance between over and under exposure, between packaging a product and presenting a breathing, bleeding human being.  I need to find my voice, and learn to sing, and I want it to be an honest song.

learned helplessness, least lovely trick of a lazy brain

So it is Saturday morning, and I feel like shit.  Part of feeling like shit is that you don't feel like addressing anything that is bothering you, or have convinced yourself you can't.  Humans actually love to solve problems, to change their affairs to suit their tastes more closely, to accomplish and achieve - things you cannot do if a lack of accomplishment or achievement didn't exist initially.  No, feeling like shit comes when you aren't happy with things but just sit around feeling sorry for yourself.

Sometimes it can't be helped.  Sometimes the problems you identify as being the source for your unhappiness are truly things over which you have no control, and you can't just jettison them from your mind - they affect you too much to be ignored.  Sometimes sorrows are sensible and legitimate.

Sometimes, however, these are the lamentations of brains more used to thinking about why their owners suck than anything else, and these lazy, habitual thought patterns are easy to do vs. figuring out sources of discontent, evaluating possible plans and procedures, or adjusting your perspective significantly enough to realize that a particular concern is not really so big of a deal.  Sometimes this is just the autopilot that switches on, out of habit, when your body is tired or worn, or when you are going through the natural fluctuations between heightened and depressed affects, which all people do.  This is just our favorite station.

And the more you think about how shitty you are, and how hopeless your situation is, the more you will believe it. Why not?  I mean, after all, you're the big sack o' shit just sitting around whining.  This is all so first world, right?  You're an asshole for being sad to begin with, what's your problem you mewling meat sack?  And you know you COULD be doing this, or that, but instead you sit here feeling sorry for yourself.  That one's pretty fair, actually - if you WANTED to do what you believed would solve your woes, you'd be doing that, instead of feeling sorry for yourself (and probably doing something mindless and immediately gratifying all the while).  You may not realize this, but that is one of the most insidious things about depression - it loves itself and wants to stay well past the end of the party.  It is you, it is how your brain has become wired, and it is going to town on thinking shitty thoughts and making you feel terrible.  You're doing that because it is easy, because it is automatic.  It is hard, and thus less desirable, to do the things that would save us.  We don't even believe we can, so of course it feels hard.  Who wants to spend time doing things we think are worthless, that will have no end?  Humans, by and large, are lazy and pragmatic (except when it comes to other people, but that is a whole other issue) and most will not engage in discomfort if they don't predict requisite compensation for their troubles.  Simply put, the human being will always ask, what's in it for me?

I have been guilty of the above behavior patterns so many times I can't even begin to imagine it, this very morning has been full of this kind of business.  I think many people live in this mental space for great stretches of time.  It is clearly something that is common in human psychology, especially in a "first world" which has increasing demands on the mind over the body, and time is less naturally regulated by biological necessity.  Still, one thing I can say for myself is this: no matter how far down in the spiral of paralyzing self deception I ever dropped, there was a restlessness inside of me to climb out, to find something better, to solve the problem.  The human spark, the bratty baby deep in my heart, she can't be kept down.  I may have the damnedest time loving her like she deserves, but she's a fighter.  She inspires me, makes me tough, gives me strength.  Can't keep a good girl down.

A little forgiveness goes a long way, and gentle reminders to yourself that you don't have to be perfect to be good, and you do deserve better than to recycle the same litany of self hate over and over, creating a dark, hopeless reality in which to live. Most of what we perceive to be real is just a big human hallucination, crude sensory data filtered through our pre-existing fictions about what is significant.  But it IS your hallucination, your dream.  Be mindful of your thoughts, lest you teach yourself to be helpless in a world that will only reward those willing to advocate for their own worth, and are willing to mentally cast themselves as effective.

First lesson: agonizing over blog template, likely a waste of time.

I've been hemming and hawing over starting this chronicle for some time, and finally got around to making it happen.  Now I've been wringing my hands over what generic template to use.  None of them are totally "me." I find myself wanting to create my own template from scratch, you know, learn CSS and generate some original graphics or artwork and tweak everything to my precise specifications.  Of course, those things would take considerable time and effort, and while I might find those projects interesting, I simply feel anxiety about them in this context.  The idea of this blog (a word that gives me pause, but it is what it is) revolves around my efforts to deconstruct the harmful fictions in my life and replace them with celebratory truths (insomuch as truth is accessible - perhaps "celebratory educated guesses" would be more apt).  So, first things first.

If it is my ideas that are important (to me, or others), it doesn't matter if the instantly editable template for this blog is any one thing or another, as long as it is legible and doesn't actively offend me aesthetically.  There's nothing wrong with me for not teaching myself how to make my own template right now.  And, happily, there's no reason that I couldn't teach myself these skills in the future should I so desire.  So - today, hummingbird silhouettes it is.  And tomorrow it could be something else.  And in five years everything will be completely different.  Tomorrow, things will be a little different.  And so it goes. SO: spending emotional currency on this issue?  Useless.  I'm stopping!  And committing to this lackluster first post.  Because everything starts somewhere, and goes until it ends.