Day 3

Still doing this, for now at least. Hooray!

I have a bit of extra time this afternoon due to a last-minute cancellation, so I’m taking advantage of the pissing rain to stay inside again until I’m absolutely forced to go out later this evening. I didn’t get to posting here this morning, but I still did my freewrite so all in all, not terrible.

It’s funny, I told my boyfriend the other week that I wanted to start recording my dreams again. And like that, I started remembering my dreams more vividly and was able to recall them. I didn’t even start writing them down until this morning, but it seems like even creating the intention helped me start recollecting my dreams. Since I set that intention, I’ve been having dreams where my past worlds get confused inside one another. I’ll have a group of people that I used to know in a setting from another time in my life where they were never present. Or I’ll have present-day me in a past setting, like grade school, encountering someone from yet another time in my life who never crossed through either the present realm or the way back.

That was what happened last night. Someone I try not to think about but who occasionally haunts my dreams and leaves me fearful and ashamed was very clearly present in my dream last night. I suspect I actually have more dreams about this person than I realize, I just don’t remember them all or they’re tucked and folded among other, more pertinent or flashy dreams. This happens with a number of people, the memories of whom I try to suppress but who used to be the subjects of obsessive thought patterns that made it difficult to function in daily life. Now that I’ve claimed enough distance from these people and events, and have worked to break the cycles of fear and self-loathing brought on by relationships with these people, they don’t haunt my waking days as much unless they’re summoned by a triggering person or event. They do, however, take more of a role in my dreams and appear from time to time in those subconscious films as identifiable but non-threatening characters. In other words, I’m not having flashbacks any longer for the most part. In my dreams they’re just another person, and while I recognize them and have a feeling towards them (disgust, fear, anger) they don’t act aggressively in my dreams. In fact, they’re often pitiable characters and in dreams I get the opportunity to see them for who they really are- sad, lonely men. They’re stripped of their power.

Last night, a person who I hope I never see again found me at my elementary school. As I pretended not to see him and began walking away towards the enclosed grassy field we had recesses and had to run laps around in PE class, he followed me. I was fully exposed on the flat green expanse and even though I walked towards a fenced-in area with no exit, he stopped following me after a while and he disappeared. I never acknowledged him and I never turned around, but I felt him behind me until he wasn’t. The glimpse I had of this person, who I haven’t seen in years was what I would expect him to become if the world were fair and made sense. He was, in reality and the last time I saw him, an extraordinarily beautiful man, something that distracted from his manipulative and abusive behaviors and enabled people to constantly forgive him his addictions and crimes. In my dream, however, the drugs, the lying, the self-destruction and the illness had taken their toll in the way you would expect them to. He was thin and sallow, acting erratically and blabbering madly. When another person in my dream told me he’d been here looking for me, she described him as ‘ugly.’

This stuck with me through coffee this morning, when I took some time to write down everything about the dream and what it brought up, because for anyone who didn’t know him intimately like I did, that word would never be used in conjunction with his name or any description of him. He was, like I said above, absolutely beautiful in a way I don’t have the words to describe. Physically. And the way he acted when you were just getting to know him, or when he was trying to be polite, matched his exterior. But there was something so severely dark inside him that quickly revealed itself. He was a maniac, someone who was capable of (and did commit abroad, in the military position he held and at home) horrendous atrocities that you would never, ever believe someone who looked like he did could commit. The beliefs he held were hateful. He had no qualms about hurting others, in fact, he may have enjoyed it. He was ugly. And here, in my dream, was someone besides me recognizing this and validating it.

I have not written about him since I started to understand what he really was. I wrote plenty of poetry when we were together, trying to justify his behavior because of the beautiful soul I was convinced I saw. But the past few years have been too painful and raw for me to even talk about it, because I was duped in a way that you couldn’t even believe. Until a few years ago I had no idea people like him existed in this world. I had simply refused to believe it, thinking naively that most men who did bad things were just misguided souls who still had goodness in their hearts somewhere. But this experience turned my entire reality upside down and let me know that everything I thought I knew was wrong. And I’m different now.

And with that, I think I’m finally getting ready to write about it.

Day 2

Day 2 of starting over. Doing the work, or trying at least. I’m not sure what constitutes work.

My routine in my recent unemployment, I’ve decided, is this: wake up (at a reasonable time, and don’t press ‘stop’ instead of ‘snooze’ and fall asleep for 2 more hours like I did today) and get the coffee going. Make breakfast. Pour coffee. Prepare the table with notebook, coffee, breakfast, computer, pen. First, eat the food. Then, time 10 minutes on the timer app and freewrite longhand in my journal. Try to ignore the cat taking this opportunity to do all the things she knows she’s not allowed to do. Only intervene once she’s in the sink licking all the dirty dishes or digging up the soil from the potted plant. Return to notebook. Finish 10 minutes, and if needed due to feline interference, tack on another minute or so to make up for lost time.

Drink coffee throughout all of this.

Then, open laptop. Do not be drawn in by Facebook or news. Go straight to WordPress. Make a post. Start writing. Write for 750 words. Afterwards, you’re finished for the morning.

This seems easy enough, right? I can do this. 2 forms of writing, but both in manageable doses. I’m not writing for anyone here, I don’t advertise my blog, and the few times I have it hasn’t been as anything other than a place to figure out my writing by getting it out of my own head and onto a technically public but probably unfrequented public place.

It seems easy enough, but I can’t even tell you how strong the resistance is coming from my own self. I have every permission to write. I have waited for this permission for so long, questioned, antagonized over whether I have the ‘right’ to write or whether my stories are worth writing. I’m still unsure about the latter, but I know that everyone has the right to write. I can do that. I can sit in this blog and in my notebook and make ripples with my hands and gaze at my own reflection and sigh and maybe wish for a prince or for a bird to come and do my hair and tell me my writing is the best writing and never to worry ever again and also your depression is gone now. Thanks, bird.

But the people giving me permission to write are the writers I know. I would have thought, a year ago, that that would be plenty. That was all that was needed and I could take off, launching forth with all the coiled up energy that I’ve kept inside me refusing to let it out, refusing to write it out. I thought it would explode out of me once someone said the magic words. It’s the same thing that used to happen with procrastination when I was in school, and later with leaving relationships that were toxic. I would wait, and wait, and wait, and feel the pressure building up and the information and ideas and realizations swirling and changing into something close to whole until it became so unbearable or the deadline became so inescapable that I would release it, fully gestated, onto the page or onto my own life. This pattern is addictive, I know, because to say I didn’t get high from the sudden 180 in my life, the sudden reformulating of my persona and my beliefs and my being, or the beautiful explosion of words onto the page and ideas so full and juicy they couldn’t hang on any longer, would be a lie. But what happens when you rely on this pattern for too long? I think I’m proof.

Alchemy becomes obsession, becomes repression, becomes reabsorption. Thinking that my ideas would make an exit of their own is like thinking that fruit won’t rot after going unpicked too long. All things have a cycle, and holding on too long creates toxicity, or a decomposition that once again becomes a part of where it came from. We know this. I should have known this. I live in a city where I’m pretty sure it’s illegal not to compost. I sort of know how it works in a ecological sense, and now I know how it works in a psychological, emotional, and spiritual sense. I could even throw ‘physical’ in there too, because I don’t think the heavy feeling in my body, the aches and pains are a coincidence when I used to believe that writing was the only thing saving my life.

Writing used to save me. Now I feel like a shell of me. I haven’t been writing. Do we really want to go ahead and assume this is the connection? I don’t want to be dramatic but I don’t think I know who I am when I’m not writing. I think I become all the shit that I don’t put out, that I don’t shed or get rid of like heavy fruit or dead hair.

Here we are.

Here I am, over a year later.

I  haven’t written much, I’ve been busy pretending to do other things. Last year’s NaNoWriMo was enough to convince me I should never write again, which I’m pretty certain is the complete opposite of what it’s supposed to do.

I get it: you’re supposed to throw trash on the page, it’s just about the doing, it’s not about the content. But still. I couldn’t separate myself from the judgment. I had maybe a few days of feeling excited, proud, but then when I looked back (you should never look back) my heart completely sank. I hated what I wrote.

Here I am again, and I don’t know what to write anymore. My own stories are weighted down in my mind and heart by the stories of the world, the pressing, soggy, tragic, sharp stories that are rushing like water from a broken dam through our news feeds, through our conversations, through our psyches, through our dreams.

I love reading, and I love journalism. It’s really hard to separate myself from the news, from the articles, from the reading, reading, always reading. Almost every conversation I have now with peers either starts with or shortly after its beginning uses the phrase “I was reading this article…” It’s become how we relate to one another. And it’s not horrible, because there is so much good writing out there right now, and I’m happy to hear people say they’re reading. But when the reading isn’t making us happy, I’m not sure what we should do.

Staying informed is important. Flexing critical thinking skills, questioning what information we’re receiving and where it’s coming from and whose agenda spawned it is even more important. It sets the precedent for how we perceive the entire world. Information is the theme of this election, of the last 10 years, of our generation. Our lives and the world are completely saturated with the stuff but it feels like our brains and bodies are struggling to catch up with the rate of input they’re experiencing. You know how screen sickness is a thing many people experience? I think information sickness is a thing, too. After days of gorging myself on news, features, op-eds, the world is ending, my body is aching and exhausted and my heart is heavy. I don’t want to leave the house, why would I, when everything out there is so horrible?

We are still learning what effects information overload has on us. We know, for example, watching the news on TV can cause anxiety because it’s mostly fear-mongering bullshit, but with this surge of fake news/propaganda that may partially have steered our election comes a parallel surge of wonderful and honest journalism. Anyone can tell their story. We get to hear directly from the mouths and fingertips of those people most deeply affected by the issues that make us nervous and closed off instead of speculating about what they may be going through. The honest news, though, is still not necessarily positive. Many times it reflects the true pain of the people who write and create it. Just because it is more honest does not mean that it’s going to affect us as consumers any less significantly.

While the essentiality of critical thinking in a time of information is apparent, what’s not as clear and what I’m currently struggling with is feeling like it’s ok to shut off the honest and courageous voices as well. There’s an anxiety that I’m sure many of us share that by shutting down or turning off we will miss something very, very important. That to remain politically active and aware we need all the facts, all the perspectives, all the stories. That if we miss something we will no longer be thinking critically, and will no longer have credible opinions and voices about what we think we believe. That we will make fools of ourselves.

It’s more than compassion fatigue, this thing I’m trying half-heartedly to express through writing because the other half is sunk deep in the cement of today’s atrocities. It feels like survival. It feels like our very ability to be intelligent humans is at stake, a true threat to our impression that we are autonomous beings. Like if we don’t keep fending off false information it will invade our bodies and obscure our sight until we can no longer tell what’s real, and that includes our selves. It feels existential. It’s an egocentric battle, based on maintaining some false sense of independence from one another, but how can it not be when we’re being told from every angle that we are in danger?

My goal this winter is to shut off. When I was younger I could do this. I didn’t understand as much the gravity of what we’re shutting off from when we choose to go off the grid. I can’t write when my mind is clouded like this, and all I want to do is write again.

Things I don’t remember writing: Part 1

When she puts feet to sand the cold shoots through her teeth. This is not sand. This is snow. The snow sits heavier than other snows, and like the bored bits of glass that have resigned themselves to being pushed around by the persistent tide it makes patterns out of itself, doodling in margins, la la la, I can’t hear you, untouchable to the abuse.

The snow steals her footprints as she walks, sandals in one hand, the other tense and braced against the frigid air. She thinks she hears the sound of the ocean but this ocean does not move. It is frozen at the first point of a wave’s fall.

In the moments before she orgasms, she laments the brevity of the stupid thing and tells herself before it even happens that it will not be enough, that she will want this again, that she needs more. In the final moments of ecstasy she mourns impending death, as she loudly tells the newlyweds which one of them will first be without the other.

After it’s over, she rarely still wants it.

She pours herself more than what she wants and she drinks it all anyway.

Directions for this Blog

It’s been a big move for me to start writing semi-regularly in a blog. Sometimes, though, I think I write myself into a corner by divulging really personal, inner thoughts and feelings, and then as a result feeling that I can’t share anything about my outer self for fear of being identified or judged.

Originally, I wanted a place I could post actual, long-form writing, whether it was excerpts from something I am working on, or essays that I want to write but don’t otherwise have the platform on which to do so, but I think this page is lacking a lot. I tend to ramble, and I recognize that not a lot of people are very interested by rambles about depression and inner workings of a person who they don’t know and can’t really get to know. Part of the reason those lifestyle blogs really work well and have large readerships is that, I think, they are ways of getting to know a person through accessible means.

I’m trying to figure out a way to incorporate some more public-facing aspects of my life into this blog, to flesh it out and give it more dimension, without it being shallow or overly exposing. Looking through other writers’ blogs is a good way to do this, I realize. Playing with layout and adding more images is another one. Maybe narrowing my focus in terms of themes and topics is a good idea too. Ultimately, I want to maintain the courage to write honestly about some of the difficult topics in my life, but I don’t want to bore or scare away potential readers.

Off to browse blogs.

Excerpt 3

The ground was gritty, cold. She opened her eyes to white, and the temperature of the surface below her was the only clue that she had actually landed somewhere solid at all. The pain in her body was a universal stiffness, sweet and feverish with no single point of origin or determinable cause.

Excerpt 2

“45 states voted today to bar Syrian refugees from entering the United States. The migrant crisis is one of unforeseen size, with over half a million displaced Syrians seeking new homes inside the United states. President Obama spoke to address the crisis, urging states to reopen their borders and not to give in to fear, because doing so-” Michael’s hand hit the radio power button on his dashboard and the woman with the disturbingly unaffected voice stopped talking. He rolled his window down a few inches, then reached under his seat to find the lever that reclined his seat. He pushed it back with the weight of his body, then folded his arms across his chest.

An Unedited Excerpt From the Thing I Wrote Because Some People have Asked

     Plunk. He groaned. These shoes had come in the mail just yesterday, after weeks of waiting, and he hadn’t treated the leather yet. Not wanting to appear petty, he took a few more steps into the water, submerging the tops of the boots and feeling the flood of cool water over his feet. At least this was storm drainage, he thought, and not sewage, a common but fortunate misconception that was probably the main thing keeping vagrants and vandals out of this place.

About a year ago, I started working at a spice shop.

At first, I couldn’t get enough. I had never been around so many spices in my life, and in such quantities- it was beautiful. I’d gaze into a massive pile of Persian Lime Curry, full of tart Omani black limes and maple-scented fenugreek leaves, and with a tiny metal scoop fill jar upon jar until I had filled hundreds, lined up in military neat rows, little canisters that contained a full sensory experience compressed into one half-cup glass jar. We made thousands of jars of everything in the shop, which was ground fresh on the spot in a tiny, hot room in the back and delivered to us in massive silver mixing bowls the size of sleds, like various fragrant piles of sand.

The smell, yes, was almost always phenomenal, but what amazed me was how sensual spices are. I wanted to plunge my entire hands, up to the wrists, into the piles of spices that I was working with and really feel them. I wanted to pack together handfuls of sticky, ground sumac and build sandcastles. I could see every grain of granulated garlic as it interacted with every other grain of granulated garlic as I poured thousands and thousands of them together and watched the way they fell into jars, watched their current, their speed, their viscosity.

Insecure Writers Support Group #4

…and I’m late again. I really need to start setting a reminder in my phone, because this is a thing I don’t want to miss.

Since I finished NaNoWriMo on the 28th, I haven’t looked back at my novel. The truth is, even though I made it to over 50,000 words, it didn’t feel done. It wasn’t resolved. If I were actually going to turn what I wrote into a novel, with copious amounts of editing, it would still only be the first part of a much larger story. Even 60 or 70,000 words wouldn’t be enough to complete it.

Today I’m conjuring the courage to look back. Last week I started anti-depressants, and this week I started my old retail job where I’m now just a holiday helper until the end of the month. Both have helped, the meds with the energy and the job with a sense of purpose and a distraction. But still, both are ways that I’m looking back into places I thought I’d left behind. I decided to go back on anti-depressants, specifically a medication I’ve taken in the past, and I decided to go back to a job that I don’t necessarily love to do full time but that will accept me and feels safe for now. It’s reminding me that I don’t need to burn every bridge that I cross, but it’s such an interesting experience coping with trauma while also learning to leave the door open just enough to let the more positive things in if it makes sense for them to come back. I guess that’s why people install cat doors instead of just leaving their front doors open all the time.

At the same time, I’m still waking up in the mornings replaying bad scenes over and over, and the tapes won’t stop playing until I get up and get on with my day. As much as I try to ignore it, my past is always with me, and I hate it. I’m enrolled in a self-defense class right now, and much of it focuses on psychological and emotional boundary setting. This is training I wish I’d had when I was young, and that I never got. It is a painful thing to encounter not only because of its difficulty, but because I am standing in a room of full-grown women, myself included, who feel they need a class to teach them to protect themselves, to use their voices, to say what they mean. It says something about all of us. It says we are strong, yes, but it also says that it’s very likely many of us learned the hard way that learning to protect ourselves is valuable. As humbling as it is to be surrounded by women whose values align with mine, I can sense that for many of us it’s like reopening a wound that’s only just started to heal, and asking it to heal again, but better this time.

I often use repression and denial as coping mechanisms, and when they get out of hand it affects everything I don’t want it to affect: my ability to stay on top of things, like emails, cleaning, bills, and appointments, and my ability to finish projects that I start. Going back into a piece of writing that was, at times, incredibly painful to produce in order to reflect on it and shape it into something better feels…unsafe. But I’m understanding that it’s ok to look back sometimes, and not only that, it can be necessary.