How To Go From Self-Loathing To A Belief In Limitless Personal Possibility In One Short Essay, Almost

It was a relief to be woken up by the Palinode yesterday morning. I was trapped within a dream in which I had somehow fallen into unconsciousness at 35, my real present age, and awoken nineteen years later at the age of 54. My cats were dead, the Palinode had moved on, and I was left living with my aged parents and the entire arsenal of emotional baggage I had fallen asleep with all those years before.

I was in an unexpected psychological hell. The whole world had changed. Technologies had advanced, everyone I knew had nearly two decades of change behind them, and I was stuck where I had been in 2008, only in 2027. I had gone nowhere. I was still the person I am today.

The horror of my dream lay in the continuance of this person that I am right now. I was my own horror.

I am going through a difficult time both emotionally and psychologically these days. I feel as though I am in the middle of a slow reconfiguration. I am changing, I am becoming, and growth and change do not happen without at least some messiness along the way. Hands get dirty, blood is let. It is difficult and painful and so much like a dentist appointment minus the anaesthetic that it makes me want to run out with a set of bolt cutters and steal a tank of nitrous oxide.

When I first woke up, it took me an hour to get out of bed. I misconstrued the dream's meaning to be about a sudden revelation of exactly how much I hate myself, and I stewed in that lovely juice for a good while before I gave myself a metaphorical slap on the face and got my act together.

I do not hate myself. If I never changed or grew or became anything new over the many years I hopefully have left in this life, then, yes, I probably wouldn't like myself very much, but unless that miracle of a non-crippling, non-brain-damaging, decades-long coma comes along, that is not going to happen. I am a creative and dynamic human being with a powerful drive to make new things.

I realize now that the dream, rather than being about the horror of being me, was a warning against stagnation. I tend to avoid conflict like red hot pokers to the eyes, and during this time of depression and repressed creativity, what I feel I want most is to be safe and warm and fed. I feel like I want to stay pupate in a cocoon. I want each day to remain safely the same. This dream tells me that what I feel I want and what I really want are disparate things, which is a relief. It means that I still have drive, and that I value myself too much to remain the same.

And suddenly, valuing myself means being really freaking afraid on purpose, because I have to learn who I am, I have to start expressing my creativity in different ways, and I might have to start flossing every day. I hate flossing.

Hello red hot pokers! Please! Stick yourselves in my eyes!

After writing all of the above, I found this little beginning of an entry tucked away in my writing folder:

I protect myself to my own detriment. I wrap so many deflections around myself that I am no longer sure what it is that I hold dear.

I am numbed with television, long baths, alcohol-induced sleep, heavy food, and psychiatric medications. If I am experiencing these things, then I can look at them and not at the thing I use them to avoid. What is this thing I am trying to avoid? I do not even know. There is a large chunk of myself, squirreled away, some forgotten treasure that is powerful and good enough to protect against all odds, but I have lost it along the way.

I did not see a month ago that the thing I was protecting was not some small nugget of information or a specific aspect of who I am. WHO I AM is the thing I have been protecting. Way to over-complicate things, Schmutzie. If something seems complicated, it is often the case that the thing is really quite simple; over-complication is a tool that serves our selfish purpose to avoid decisive action, which bears the scary consequence of responsibility. Like my hatred of flossing and fear of dentists, it is easier to cling to a false ignorance that allows me never to have to own my failings than it is to take personal responsibility and acknowledge what I know and be who I am.

If you look at the other side of the coin, if we bravely step forward into living with personal responsibility, the opportunities for growth and expression are endless, because we can reach out and take in rather than turn inward and reject the myriad experiences this planet has to offer us over our short lifetimes.

Did I just move from self-loathing to a belief in limitless personal possibility in one short essay? Almost. I've got a headache this morning that is threatening to burst all the blood vessels in my eyes, so I am kind of more believing in heavy pain medication and wrapping my head up inside a dark blanket. I will fulfill my dream of writing award-winning novel tomorrow when it doesn't hurt so much to sit up.

On The Lam In Spain

So, I had this dream that you really want to hear about.

In the dream, the Palinode and I were separated because I was having a mid-life crisis and wanted to work in another town as a waitress in a little sandwich bar and live above it in a crappy apartment that was painted Pepto Bismol pink. I think my dream self was quite stupid.

At some point, I had become involved with a group of people who knew someone who looked exactly like me, and this doppelganger had manipulated things so that it looked like I had committed a murder that she had in fact committed, and I had no way to disprove it. This all somehow implicated the Palinode, so I called him up, told him to come get me, and we booked it to Spain where we moved to a remote valley in the middle of the mountains where the backs of the houses were all carved into the rock and the fronts looked down on the center of the town. At night, all the lights winked like fireflies against the black mountain face, making it feel as though we, the whole town, were all tucked inside one, cozy room.

We decided that despite our lack of decent Spain-style spanish and the fact that we would never see North America again, we could be very happy, because IKEA delivered to our little town, and their furniture fit right into our budget. Also, I got to wear these funky, asymmetrical sweaters, because we lived in the mountains where it was cooler, and apparently the Spanish have a madly stylish sweater-sense.

The End.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the group of people I got involved with during my mid-life crisis comprised these lame hippie-types who wore those slouchy top hats sewn out of guatemalan material and fanned their fingers out while whispering "five finger discount" every time they stole something from cheezy strip malls on the edge of town, which was a lot. One of them even wore a cloak rimmed with foxes' tails. I was actually kind of relieved to be taking the fall for the murder, because it meant that I could get the hell out of Dodge and avoid having to punch each of them personally in the neck.

I'm Giving It The Old College Try

Remember last week on Tuesday when I was sick in bed? Well, I am presently sucking back a Bolthouse Farms Berry Boost Fruit Smoothie, which contains 500% of my daily vitamin C requirement, in the hopes that it will help me make it through the workday. (That Bolthouse Farms mention? I promise that that was completely unsolicited. I am just a Bolthouse Farms lover and like to give away free advertising while I figure out how to afford a decent computer and buy new glasses when the lenses alone are approximately $125 each. I am nice that way).

This is my EIGHTH DAY with this blasted cold virus, and all I want to do physically is sleep, and I must stress "physically", because what this cold has done to my dreams over the last eight days is completely ungood psychologically. I sweat and roll around all night, and not in any hot heterosexual action kind of way but in a fighting-for-my-sanity kind of way. Here are a few examples from my illness-induced dreams:

I was a young man in college in the 1970s with a shaggy haircut who was told that he was failing out of school and then had the simultaneous realization that he was really a queer woman in the 1990s, which made him both transgendered and transchronological.

I was in a foreign country at a restaurant that served me raw human flesh. I ate it, rationalizing my choice with the "when in Rome" proverb and the fact that the meat came from free-range, organic humans. The meat was surprisingly supple.

An English man noticed an eagle hanging by its foot in midair. Oh, dear, he said, That bird's left side is completely obliterated, but its right side is still alive. What a horrible state. I looked up to see that the eagle was a siamese twin with a singular consciousness, and that it also had the heads of identical Englishmen, except that one of them was very corpsy and mangled.

The Palinode has had to shake me awake a couple of times when I have cried out in my sleep over being forced into deathly tunnels or strangling baby koalas. Yeesh.

The sleeping aspect of this cold is officially NOT WORKING OUT, which means that the being awake part of this cold is also officially NOT WORKING OUT. I cannot concentrate long enough to finish the pair of arm warmers I need finish for a customer or to work on the website design for another customer that I was going to finish this weekend or to put my freaking painkillers in my freaking purse because I HURT. From my head to my toes, I ache as though I have been on a forced march while dragging supplies through mud for three days; I am a serf at the feet of my viral lord. Every muscle in me is asking Why, why, why are we sitting up? We should be lying down! And resting! Even if it means we must dream of cuddling into the warm underbelly of a giant mother tarantula.

Despite this, I was planning on entertaining you with a photograph of what I was up to one year ago. I receive a Photojojo Photo Time Capsule in an e-mail every two weeks, which includes the most interesting photos from one year ago from my Flickr account, and I thought surely this would save me from having to use the aching rock I have attached to this stiff stump of a neck of mine. Do you know what Photojojo told me I was up to around this time last year? This:

I was doing dishes. And then you know what?

I got wrinkly fingers while I washed those dishes.

My life is freaking genius.

After work, I am going to the drugstore to pick up a cold remedy so that I can start hacking away at some of the projects on which I am working, but I am not sure which one will do the trick. Benylin 1 Cold & Flu gets me stoned (in a very nice way, mind you, but not one that is conducive to getting anything done, like figuring out what the first half of my sentence was so that I can say the second half without looking like I have gone catatonic), and I cannot take anything that has echinacea in it, because I am allergic to it. Any suggestions?

This Schmutzie's got stuff to accomplish, and it is not going to happen without some fine pharmaceuticals.