So, An Id And A Super-ego Walk Into Dream...

I have been suffering acute feelings of too-ugly-to-leave-the-house-ness recently. I think this is due, in part, to feeling a bit insecure after having finished up my job at the shoe store before taking up full time work at home. Who am I again? What does my life look like? Do I really ever need to leave the house again?

This is also due, in part, to my being rather ugly lately. Don't try to console me. It's true. I've been sick for nearly a week, I haven't been able to take the clippers to my hair because of a jacked back, and I've been breaking out something fierce for months. I'm pale, shaggy, blotchy, and prone to a particularly unsexy kind of groaning.

Some part of my subconscious is trying to give me little pep talks through a recurring series of dreams, though, which is kind of heart-warming. I must like me. Like really like me!

In one of these dreams, this cute little woman keeps trying to come on to me. She sits down next to me, chats me up, touches my arm. At one point, she reaches down, pulls up my skirt, and tells me how much she likes my hairy thighs. I look down, and my thighs are exceedingly hairy, hairier than in real life even, but with her verbal suggestion, I buy just how hot they are. My hairy thighs are double-T hott with some sexy on the side. I decide that I love my hairy thighs, too! In fact, why not show off how confident I am in my hirsute beauty and hike my short skirt even shorter!

Of course, because even in my dreams I am prone to knee-jerk monogamy, the Palinode came into the room, and I pretended that I was showing off my hairy thighs for him and not the hot little number who was trying to pick me up. She looked depressed about my hetero marriage, but I didn't mind for long, because I suddenly said the best thing I've ever said in a dream.

I said, and I quote, "Check out these getaway sticks, baby."

Check out these getaway sticks, indeed.

In another of these pep talk dreams, which I just woke out of, I have a svelte figure despite all the food I keep eating. I eat cakes and chicken legs and milkshakes, and yet my waist stays slim. At some point in the middle this weird food porn, someone walks past me, slaps my butt, and says something like "how do you do it?" or "keep doing what you're doing, because it's working", and I beam over fistfuls of food with my mouth stuffed to the teeth, because, at that moment, I know exactly how awesome I am, and I am awesome.

These dreams are obviously about things which make me feel insecure, but part of me must actually really dig what I've got going on, despite the sick, shaggy, blotchy thing I'm presently trying to carry off. Of course, it looks like my Id wants to off my Super-go so we can just eat all the things and be hairy and merry, but that doesn't support my I-love-myself-I-really-must theory, plus, everything I know about Freud I just read in a Wikipedia article, so nothing I've written down today is based in any actual, established knowledge, except for the term "getaway sticks", which is a real thing people used to say.

And now I have to run. I may be suffering acute feelings of too-ugly-to-leave-the-house-ness, but I'm going to leave the house and go soak up some of my sweet Shanan_S anyway. No point in keeping these hairy thighs and my voracious appetite to myself!

And In The Second Year Of Her Sobriety, She Freaked The Hell Out

I am trying to accept that sometimes I need to be an overwhelmed, emotional mess. So much is zooming around in my brain sometimes that it's important to just collapse and let it all come out in sobs, whispers, snot bubbles.


This is the view from my therapeutic bath, from which I am writing this weblog entry.

I am terrible at accepting my need to let it all out, though, because I like to feel as though I have a measure of control. So, instead of just letting it all out naturally, I end up trying to make time for it, because it just makes so much sense to say to all your crazy Hey, Crazy, how's Thursday at 3:15 p.m. for you? If you get good and broken down, you'll still have time to recover for your 7:00 p.m. meeting.

Of course, my crazy doesn't respond well to my scheduling attempts. Case in point: me finding myself face down on my kitchen floor in response to the Palinode asking me how my day was last night.

I was hoping to put off such a meltdown until at least two weeks from now, but when I tried telling the Palinode what my day was like, it all, quite literally, went south.

"This last month of my life just feels like it's been too much, you know? I did all that fear conquering stuff with the dentist and the public speaking and the plane travel, and then..." I said from a perfectly normal standing position.

"...my grandpa died and we had the memorial and that weekend with family, and then my computer ate all the work I did today..." I huffed while bent over at the waist, arms dangling.

"...and I know that this is probably not a good time, because it's less than two months to Christmas, but my availability was terrible and unfair to my co-workers, so I quit my job today." I said, crouched over on my knees.

"You quit your job today?" he asked.

"Yeah, I quit my job. Wait," I said. "Am I face down on the kitchen floor?"

And, lo and behold, quite without choosing to be so, I was. My lips were brushing the linoleum as I spoke.

My crazy refuses to be scheduled, apparently. It also prefers to choose its own battleground. Why it would choose a faceplant on the kitchen floor over, say, a tropical resort, I have no idea. I think my crazy needs to re-prioritize.

It turns out that a faceplant on the floor was exactly what I needed, though. Instead of holding it all in and spackling over my heavy emotions with flat logic, my body took over and said You need to freak out, sister. Finding myself face down on the kitchen floor actually felt like a fortifying vitamin shot to the heart.

One of the biggest lessons my sobriety is teaching me right now is how to be an emotional person without running away to numb myself, and, as strange as it might sound, collapsing last night felt so incredibly human; I felt comforted by it. As much as all the noise of human emotions can be daunting and scary and downright inconvenient, especially after two decades of drinking them down, these same emotions are also the door to coming home to myself. When my mind and my body collude to make me finally let this shit out, and once I get comfortable with the humbling experience of kissing my linty floor, I can see myself. I can actually sit inside myself. Me as contentious object turns into me as Self.

I'm not suggesting that we all get down on our knees and make out with our respective kitchen flooring, though. Definitely not. Especially if you keep your house the way I do.

I am suggesting, though, that it can be a more relieving experience than we usually think it might be to get right down in the mud with ourselves, even if only for five minutes. It can feel like a revelation to be able to acknowledge with real feeling that today was the worst day ever and to let things move on through as they will when we aren't so busy shoving them back down deep into the middles of ourselves.

Thank God For Apathy

Some days you feel like that last, tiny spring in the middle of you, the last coil of you still left unfrayed, is going to give way. You can feel it twig to the right in your chest and away from your heart, and you are certain, you are absolutely confident, that this is it.

You imagine stripping off all your clothes and running barefoot into the middle of the street nearly frozen over with the last autumn rain and screaming something that might really piss off your neighbours.

THERE IS NO GOD, MOTHERFUCKERS! or YOUR CHILDREN WILL NEVER BE ANY BETTER THAN YOU ARE RIGHT NOW!

You don't strip yourself naked and run into the street, though. You sit inside and order takeout and hold on for texts from the Palinode and obsess over making this tree:



It's all you can do, really. You don't like the cold. And you'd like to keep your 38-year-old hindquarters out of public view. And there's a pizza with your name on it that won't order itself.

Sometimes a little touch of apathy can do your neighbourhood a world of good.

I Am Not Allowed Detachment Now

For the last two days, I have had a tightness in my chest. I'm distracted. I'm depressed with a twist of unplaced worry.



I thought this was my usual fall weirdness, the kind I feel every year that translates the skittering of leaves outside as a death knell for all that is well and good in the world. Something about that self-diagnosis didn't sit right, though, and then the inside of my mouth began to ache.

The inside of my mouth nags at me when I am feeling some kind of non-physical pain to which I am not paying the proper attention. I am the local queen of denial around these parts. I often won't notice that something is up with me until my anxiety has inflicted me with numbness in my extremities, apocalyptic dreams, and painful outbreaks.

It's not like the reason for my anxiety was hiding under any rocks. I am travelling to my hometown over the weekend to spend time with family and attend my grandfather's memorial service. He died, he's dead, and I obviously have feelings about that which I am not expressing. I know this, because the roof of my mouth just ahead of my throat is raw and red.

This used to happen to my throat at church every Sunday when we sang hymns. Hymns fester the sorrow out of me, and there will be more than a few of them this weekend. Goddamn.

I used to be able to avoid everything all the time by chasing down the bottoms of pint glasses, but now that I can't do that anymore, my body won't let me get away with the avoidance. It sent me a rash of canker sores when he died. They bloomed into broad, white heads that bled when I sucked at them in my sleep.

I am not allowed detachment now, if my actual, flesh-and-blood mouth has anything to say about it. Goddamn.

This Is How I Become More Than I Was

Fall is a tough time of year for me. I feel like a butterfly in reverse, receding into a sticky and slow chrysalis. When you have a seasonal depression problem, it can feel like a regression, a backwards slide. It feels like failure.



This isn't the truth, though. I just have an illness. I can feel like things are backsliding when they are, in fact, moving forward quite tickety boo. I can't feel it, though, at the moment.



It'll come back to me. It always does. Those of you with seasonal depression know what I'm talking about.



This year is harder than other years, though. One year, one month, and ten days ago, I quit drinking.

I spent most of the first year dealing with sweeping lifestyle changes and not getting high. Other emotions? The hard emotions coming out of my real self, the self not numbed by alcohol, were so distant behind the noise of not drinking that I barely felt them. I can see that now.



Upon the first anniversary of my sobriety, a handful of people congratulated me by saying Now you can begin the real work of being sober. I nodded to myself and smiled and hoped that they were wrong.

They were not wrong.

I'm over the hard beginning stages of kicking my old habit of drinking myself into a black hole every other night, but now I'm a raw nerve. I'm all vulnerable and frayed and tired and overwraught and naked and uncomfortable.

It turns out that if you spend over twenty years drinking every time you have a strong emotion, good or bad, there is a lot of stuff to get through at the end of it all. Nothing goes away just because you got drunk enough to forget most of it.



It's still brilliant, though, this having a life I've chosen over one that lead me by the nose, despite the tears and the bad dreams and the urge to smoke every cigarette I see and imagine and remember smoking back to when I was fifteen and learned how to french inhale.

I have to remember that this is how I learn to be free, or at least more free. This is how I become more than I was and more than I am.

Despite these moments of self-doubt and heaviness, I am living a life I love. I get to tell, hear, and help mould stories for a living. This is the seed of fantastic.



I just need to remember that these difficult feelings do not mean that I'm sinking.

This is swimming.

It's just that sometimes swimming is lazily floating around a lake on an inflatable tube with tropical fish printed on it, and sometimes swimming is slogging your way back to hide under an overturned boat in a sudden storm.

In either case, the next day looks pretty good from where you are, as long as you don't drown, and we all know that I suck at drowning.