enough

It's incredible, to see where I am, compared to where I was a year ago. From rock bottom, I've managed to pull myself to a fairly decent place. Not without loads of help, of which I am very appreciative. I'm proud of myself for getting better at wanting to get better. It's been a rough year, but I think I'm in a pretty good place right now.

Which isn't to say things are perfect. My mood has been volatile again lately. Everything in my life seems very uncertain at the moment, and the lack of stability is both exciting and terrifying. I found out today my seasonal job ends in a week, and I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with myself when 1) my income source is gone, 2) I'm not working 6-7 days a week, and 3) no longer have an excuse for neglecting myself, along with my relationships, among other things. For a number of reasons, I can't wait for this job to end, but ultimately, I will miss it. Rather, I will miss a lot of the great people I had the privilege of meeting. I miss a lot of people all the time, including ones I stay in touch with, and I have a really hard time with more permanent goodbyes.

Mostly, I'm trying to be positive about my job ending. I'm feeling relatively optimistic about finding another job, and in the mean time, I have interning to keep me busy. I turned down a second internship recently, just because I don't have the time for it, and I felt it would just make me more stressed and more exhausted.

Exhaustion has been a problem for me lately. I work 32-40 hours a week at my job and 14-16 hours a week at interning. Yet, I welcome it. It's a great distraction, and helps me think less, feel less. I work, eat (sometimes), sleep. I don't have much time for friends or family. I stayed in New York over Thanksgiving and my birthday this year, and nearly decided to stay here for Christmas. It was just easier. For New Year's Eve, instead of going to any of the parties I was invited to, I plan on staying in and going to sleep early, and I don't mind it. I guess I'm kind of a workaholic. I've always liked to keep busy with things I enjoy, and it's gotten harder and harder for me to find things to take joy in.

Keeping busy helps me ignore the fact that I constantly feel like something(s) is missing in my life. I know I have more close friends, more people I can wholly trust, than most people do, and for that I really am grateful. But at the same time, I find myself feeling lonely and extremely vulnerable to any kind of attention, and that's dangerous. My sense of self-worth is still mostly nonexistent, which has led to me making some serious mistakes in the past year. I've gotten pretty good at treating these mistakes as life lessons, and haven't beaten myself up over them too much, and that's been hard for me.

And now my self-consciousness and fear of an unhealthy level of narcissism is kicking in and so I'm stopping.

a city of miracles

The city itself was built upon water by celestial decree. It was a miracle, in itself, to build upon the sea. Thus it became a city of miracles. Everywhere in the Venetian chronicles there is a great and shining image of the city. Venice became part of the history of human redemption...Venice was idealised beyond any recalcitrant historical fact or inglorious episode.


Yet the real origins of Venice, scattered or random as they are, vouchsafe a great truth about the city. They convey certain characteristics, or certain qualities, to the nature of life there. Every organic thing wishes to give form and expression to its own nature; and so, by obscure presentiment and by the steady aggregate of communal desires, Venice took shape. The statue is latent in the marble...There was a constant preoccupation, among all sections of the community, with stability and continuity. Where are those qualities more necessary than in a place shifting and uncertain? A city created by exiles became, over the centuries, a home for many and various refugees...By the tenth century it was already known as "la civitas Rivoalti," civitas implying a citizen state.


The great and enduring fact, however, was the fight against the sea. Out of this arose the need for common purpose and community of effort. There was no antagonism between the individual and the collective or, rather, the Venetian individual through the centuries subsumed himself or herself within the organism as a whole. It is an organism that, like the human organism, can be seen as a unity. It obeys its own laws of growth and change. It has an internal dynamism. It is more than the sum of its parts. Each aspect of Venetian culture and society reflects the whole.

Venice: Pure City by Peter Ackroyd

In short, this is everything I miss about this city. I would go back in a heartbeat. I've been missing it, and my friends and professors from there, a lot lately. My time there was so rejuvenating, so revelatory, that I think my longing for the city will never quite go away, even though I know I can never recreate my previous experience there. I wouldn't want to recreate it, though. I think Venice would reveal a new kind of magic with each visit, and I can't wait for the day I go back.

For the briefest of moments, December '11 was looking nearly as bleak as December '10. But thanks to some amazing coworkers and friends, things are looking up again, and I'm handling negative situations in a far more positive way than I perhaps thought possible. I'm taking responsibility for my mistakes but still standing up for my right to be treated like a decent human and I think these are good things.

And I still like my life.

For once, November wasn't totally awful.
So much has changed in the past year, and for the better.
I like my life.

I said you'd work on it and it'd get better and I'd love it and you did and it did and I do and I hate that. I hate that I was right about this but wrong about so much else.

Well, I knew I'd say goodbye
Though it's not my time to cry
And forever and for no one I will let it all go by
And to be myself completely I've just got to say goodbye...

Well, my heart has fallen down
Thought I'd talked myself around
Though we say goodbye and wonder
What's to know and who's to blame
But to be myself completely I will love you just the same.

belle and sebastian

self-indulgent

My birthday is coming up and I'm tempted to just not celebrate again. I'm so tired of parties. I said the other day when I was hanging out with 7 or 8 friends, "I'm never hanging out in big groups again, I hate this, everything just becomes a project, from now on I refuse to hang out with more than two or three other people at a time." I kind of meant it. I don't entirely mean it, of course. I'm just tired of being with people I love and feeling so far away from them at the same time. I've said this before, but in London it was easy to feel far away because I physically was far away. Now it's harder to deal with feeling far away, because I feel so far away, but I'm right here. And everyone is so shrouded in his own cloud of wanting to avoid, his own cloud of drunk, I feel like I can't feel near to anyone. It makes me not want to see anyone. I can't do that though, because I have to go and be human and need people. I don't know what to do any more. I've been on a sobriety kick for a few weeks now, and I broke it last weekend in Baltimore/DC, but I sort of wish I hadn't. It didn't make me feel any better. Drinking usually just gives me an excuse to feel worse, or it acts like a placebo -- it's a panacea that doesn't actually do anything. I don't know.

I just miss everyone.

what am I getting myself into

today I got an internship. I am now the entire development department of a non-profit theater company. they need to raise $60k by the end of the year.

this will end well, right?

right?

an act of preservation

I saved all your letters. I once thought about throwing them out in a fit of rage, from a hunger for destruction and a desire to forget. I'm glad I didn't yield to that. Years later, looking back at what you wrote me, it's like nothing's changed. We are what we were and you're the same as ever. Of course this isn't true -- memory is fluid. Time distorts what was; and what is, changes from moment to moment. I'm not the same person I was then, and you can't be either. But I don't want to forget who and what we were. I need to hold on to what we had, because it was beautiful. I need to remember what was real. It's an act of preservation -- I have to protect the memory of what we shared so I can believe I can some day have that again. By keeping your letters, I chose to remember you as you were, to remember us as we were, instead of as we are -- as friends, instead of strangers. I can't help wondering: how did you choose to remember me?

This afternoon, I had a dream

where a terribly scary alien monster was chasing me. The alien monster was not unlike the "shit demon" in Dogma but looked more like it belonged in "Futurama." I was carrying an alien-shaped cake and trying to run away at the same time, through a videogame-like maze. The Futurama Shit Demon would be borne out of toilet in the top left corner, and I would take off to the opposite end of this strange earth, but every time, I wound up on a high school baseball diamond. The alien monster would swipe some of my cake and then take off on a cloud and fly away -- and then I'd end up back at the beginning of the maze with less cake, the toilet would incept the Futurama Shit Demon, and the whole thing would happen over and over, until I had nearly no cake left. Finally, I figured out how to stay on the field, and tried taking the pathetic remains of the cake to the cafeteria's back door at the school, but when the door opened, it was the Futurama Shit Demon.

Then I woke up and I've been listening to Belle and Sebastian's "Dress Up In You" on repeat since then. I don't know what that means, other than it'll probably make for another really depressing dream later on.

"You got lucky, you ain't talking to me now...Get on the airplane, you give me stomach pain...We had a deal then, we nearly signed it in our blood. I thought that you would keep your word. I'm disappointed...I always loved you, you always had a lot of style. I'd hate to see you on the pile of 'nearly made its'..."

tired.

Whenever someone asks me how I am, and I say, "I'm tired," I almost never mean that I'm just sleepy. I mean that I'm emotionally exhausted. I mean that I'm confused, depressed, and pissed the fuck off. I mean that I'm overwhelmed and scared, and I'm over it. But who wants to hear that?

So I'm just tired.

I've been coasting

maybe I want to fail so people will stop expecting so much from me. or so I will stop expecting so much from me.

maybe I don't want anyone to love me too much so I won't some day, inevitably, let them down. maybe I don't love me enough so I won't let me down.

(22 Nov 2010)

There is a narrow berth of floor space between my bed and my dresser that fits my body perfectly. My comforter drapes off my bed and over most of my body, but still my head can peek out and see the glitter stuck on the 1970s popcorn ceiling dimly sparkling in the warm glow of the red shaded 40 watt in the opposite corner. When my bed feels both too big and too small, I like to lie here, hiding from nothing. Or, I guess, hiding from everything -- including myself.

but it doesn't

Joan: [pause] I loved her.

Adam: I know. And I don't know why that doesn't matter.

under a crushed velvet gaze i turn to clay ready to bend at will and fit a mold. i am an elastic rubber band man pliant and quick to stretch at the slightest tug. i am butter spread too thin melting in a hot bagel's craters. i am weak. i must be strong and resist the urge to turn to mush but be willing to adapt and roll with the punches. the punches hurt but it's okay. i get by.

There's something really liberating, I'm finding, in learning that you deserve more than what some people can give. It feels good, to stop settling for less than decent treatment from the people you allow to lay claim to you. It isn't easy to do it, but it prompts such a beautiful release.

It also really sucks and makes me want to hate everyone.

That was easier to kick than I thought it would be...

If I had been a functional person last year and not a train wreck, I would be finishing writing my dissertation right now and would soon have an MA.

I kind of wish I had been a functional person last year.

I am not naturally a happy person.

I'm just not. I have to work really hard at being happy. Right now, I wouldn't say I'm happy; but I'm not unhappy, and I'm not nearly as low as I was this time last year. I worked really hard to get where I am. I had a lot of help from a lot of different sources and I'm not ungrateful for it. But one of the negative side effects of all this is that, as massively hypocritical of me as it is, I'm starting to lose patience with people who refuse to do anything about the absence of happiness in their lives, and content themselves with being depressed, hiding behind it like a mask.

I don't like this. I used to do this myself, until I stopped settling with being miserable. And, in ways, I've been a foul-weather friend to a lot of people, and now I'm dreadfully afraid of tipping the scale in the opposite direction, instead of balancing.

At the same time, I'm tired. I'm tired of listening to people I love complain about the same things over and over again and then refuse to do anything at all to help themselves. I'm tired of trying to help people I can't. I tired of not getting anything out of relationships in which I feel I give a lot.

I just want everyone to be happy, including myself. I'm trying. Will you try too?

For some reason, I've grown up with this idea that desiring intimacy of any kind -- physical or emotional -- from another person is strange and wrong. As I'm learning how deeply wrong this is, I'm also learning that there are some people with whom I desire intimacy, from whom I can never, ever get it. Mostly because, for whatever reason, they won't give it to me.

I think this is bullshit.

I also think said people are scared, whether they know it or not. As scared as I am, if not more. It's frustrating, being in a place where I finally have the guts to stand up and declare what I think I want, only to be met with silence. It makes me want to scream, WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO LOSE?

But really now: what have we got to lose?

"You're fighting a losing battle there, dear."

a mirror to Harry in Harry Potter.

The King is Dead

When I was snowed in at Heathrow for 9 hours, the new Decemberists album leaked. My friend sent it to me, and I listened to it several times while crying in the airport. I listened to it while crying on the tube back to my empty flat in Central London. I listened to it for days afterwards, wandering depressed around Camden Town and South Bank.

It's funny. I can no longer separate in my mind that music from that time in my life. On days now where I feel terribly alone and disconnected from the people at hand, who I claim to love the most, I begin to miss London and the way I haunted the city like an invisible ghost listening to The Decemberists. I miss the weight of missing people, the way I felt so far away from everyone because physically, I was so far away. Now when I feel alone, I feel this weight of missing the people who are right in front of me, the weight of feeling emotionally separated from the people I want to know me and understand me. But I still listen to the new Decemberists, pretending I'm in London, so far away from the people from whom I feel so far away.

I wish I hadn't wished I wasn't there when I was there with you.

I'm terrified I'm making the same mistake I made last time. When will I know I've learned?

a sage person once told me to give yourself 100% of the love you need. that way, all the other love in your life -- from other people -- is just extra. bonus love. it's nice to have, but you don't need to rely on it because you give yourself what you need.

this sage person, though, never told me how.

Sometimes I wonder if "moving forward" with your life is just another form of running away.

Pavement keeps its heat long after the sun goes down. In the cool night, it keeps my feverish body warm. My glasses begin to fog as I lie in the middle of the cul de sac, as far from the streetlamp's reach as possible. Its arm is long, though, and the night offers me no place to hide. Just this black hole, this windless vacuum, where an artificial yellow glow colors everything false. Everything feels thin and vapid. Like a shot of 151 flaming under a glass, the moment is wildly, rapidly turning to nothing but a heavy stench of intoxicating air full of all the things everyone thinks and feels but no one will say or do anything about.

True Life: .....

JD: what is ur life

CO: the discarded manuscript of a very poorly written absurdist play.

It's funny...I hadn't realized how effectively I had blocked your face from my mind, until I saw you for the first time in years, and once again began to imagine that I saw you everywhere.

It took so long to unlearn your face, your frame. I don't know if I have the energy to do it again.

Today my therapist asked me what I've been up to, what's going on in my life. When I told her, she burst into hysterical laughter, put her head in her hands, and asked me, "What! Are you a masochist or something?!" I said, "Duh. Don't you know that by now?" She laughed at me some more. I laughed too.

Somehow, my stupid life seems a lot funnier and a lot less retarded when my therapist is laughing at it.

I don't really understand why it's called "friends with benefits"...what, exactly, are the benefits? Every way I look at it, it just seems like both parties lose. No matter what.

To fucking Do list: Monday edition

-- Call Great Magazines in the UK about my stupid Empire Magazine order(s) that may or may not have gone through.

-- Call the Accomack VA District Court and find out how to get out of this court appearance.

-- Call work and confirm my schedule and find out what time I have to go in on Friday. Gag.

-- Call my gastroenterologist and reschedule my next appointment.

-- Call my psychiatrist and reschedule my next appointment.

-- Call my GP and beg, if necessary, for an appointment.

---- Get a script for more blood work to have my hormone levels checked.

---- Get a script for more blood work to have my vitamin B12 and D levels checked.

-- Go to therapy.

-- Mail the mixes I made today from Point Beach because there will be no line at the post office.

-- Exercise.

-- Eat more protein.

-- GET MY FUCKING PASSENGER HEADLIGHT FIXED AGAIN. FUCK.

-- Get gas for the drive into Manhattan on Tuesday. Gag.

-- Figure out when I'm going to go to Philly, and with whom, if anyone.

-- Figure out when I'm going to go to LBI, and with whom, if anyone.

-- Go to sleep at a normal time. Start getting into a routine.

fuck all of this. ALL OF IT.

I wonder if I'll ever shake the emotional associations I have with certain songs.....

I don't understand why I can't let myself feel like I deserve to be loved, like I deserve to be cared for. Why does it seen normal to feel this hurt all the time? Why do I feel like it's wrong to demand more from the people who claim to love me? Why don't I feel entitled to happiness? I don't get it. I don't know how to fix myself.

It's unfair, isn't it? To know that you can't get what you want or need from certain people, but be unable to distance yourself from them. It's a lose-lose situation. Distance yourself, and you lose the good aspects of the relationship; stay close, and you feel starved for what that relationship can't give you.

I keep saying that I don't know what to do, and it keeps getting suggested to me that I need to stop thinking of my feelings as things I need to do something about. But how else do I make them go away? How do I make them stop?

Ugh.

WHY AM I SO BAD AT HAVING FEELINGS.

everyone just keeps telling me to stop worrying so much about my life and lack of productivity, and to just focus on taking care of me. well, what if I don't want to? and what if I don't know how?

It's recently been pointed out to me that I have a tendency to express feelings of anger through tears. I cry when I'm sad and depressed, I cry when I'm frustrated and feeling unable to communicate what I want to, but I also cry when I'm angry. I rarely yell or even speak with hostility. I don't like conflict. I try to avoid it. I'm the diplomat, more often than not - the peacemaker, the person always ready to apologize or forgive first. And usually when I'm angry, I'm so overwhelmed and surprised by the feeling that I'm speechless, and I don't know what to say or how to react, and then the next thing you know the tears are flowing. Characteristically enough, I'll try to brush it off and ignore the fact that I'm feeling anything, or find reasons to condemn my anger as irrational. But that sometimes (okay, frequently) leads me to being passive aggressive, channeling my anger into scathingly sarcastic comments that are totally unnecessary. But mostly I just cry.

I don't understand why I do this. It's almost as though I don't feel justified in being angry, so instead I internalize it and become upset with myself. I don't understand it. Why I can't just let myself experience the feelings that I have every right to feel? Ugh. I hate feelings and being sensitive and all that. It never leads to anything good.

I hate feeling disappointed in places where I thought I had zero expectations. Disappointment squared.

"The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy...

...What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly." (Bach)

I don't know how I feel about this. Just because I believe that there exists injustice and tragedy, doesn't mean that I don't appreciate that both can be, and sometimes are, beautiful in their own right. Right?

oh, distance has no way of making love understandable

I'm continuing to struggle to remember that I can, and do, exist between fixed identities; that who I am is not an image assigned to me by others, but a fluid, ever-changing, unique being that can and does encompass multiple layers of images and selves. I don't need to choose to exist singularly on either end of a spectrum, but I can float throughout.

Similarly, I'm remembering that my relationships with others can exist in the same fashion: I don't have to cut someone out of my life in order to put some distance between myself and that person, and that distance doesn't have to signify the relationship's end. Putting metaphorical distance between yourself and a person is more and more difficult these days, what with technology working its hardest to keep people "connected" at all times. But though it's hard to do, at times, I'm finding that it's possible to create space between yourself and another. It's necessary, in a way. It's learning to adapt. It's doing what I need to do to take care of me, by losing as little as possible in the process.

I'm still not certain how I feel about this latter concept, but I think I find something comforting in it. At the moment, I feel like it's a theory I'm applying and crossing my fingers, hoping for the best. I hope in time it's not just a practice, but something I can believe in.

What does one do with feelings one does not want to have? How does one make them go away? I need a flippin Vanishing Spell or something for this shit.

I wish I was not so terribly sensitive in so many senses of the word.

la la la

A confluence of incidents that have occurred without my fully noticing them, over the course of several years, have left me extremely conscious of some of the ways in which people manipulate each other, and consequently, extremely wary of suspected attempts at manipulation. A person does not have to accept such treatment, and as in anything, has the choice of what he accepts from others. Though of course excuses must be made at times, I am so slowly learning how to choose not to be manipulated, and learning why I'm so fiercely adamant about the importance of learning this. I am learning how to choose how to care for others' whole selves without acting solely as a booster seat to their toddler-sized egos, and how to deal with my anger when I see others acting as such. I am learning how to recognize how much distance is appropriate between two given people, and how to choose how much distance I want between me and others. I am learning how to let some people be as close to me as they let me be to them. I think these are good things.

I am not learning how to deal with how I feel when I don't or can't or don't know how to get what I want. I am not learning how to more effectively figure out what I want. These are not good things.

Baby steps.

if memory only has meaning in a world where time has meaning, then maybe love has no memory.

To Whom It May Concern:

Learning how to love and support people and care about them and be concerned for them without letting it become a source of anxiety and pain is turning out to be one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I have a really hard time accepting that I sometimes have to say "it's not my problem, I am not responsible for this person's problems or this person's happiness, this person is the only one who can truly make him/herself happy," because I want so much for people to be happy, and other people's happiness makes me happy. It gets very complicated in my little brain and some days I feel like I'm stepping on toes, trying to learn to do it all properly, and I don't like that. I'm sorry. I'm just trying to learn how to be me without letting that anxiety be part of who I am, and I'm finding it to be a lot of hard work. I hope I get better at it soon. Thanks for understanding. Love, me.

loving people is weird.

being loved is weird.

feelings in general are weird.

and it's all really, really hard.

post-scrub.

The morning sun was shining through the slats of the blinds on my south-facing window. I sat on the floor, my hair dripping on the carpet, wrapped in a towel. I hate stepping on wet spots on the carpet. It feels unsettling to my callous-less wintertime foot. Dry skin, shriveled and un-sunned, but never quite ivory. (I am very conscious of this.) Pull knees to chest, chin to knees. Wrap the towel tighter. I sink slowly into an imaginary well, swallowed whole, lower and lower. So low so low. Slow and wholly. Maybe I can will myself into nonexistence and all that will be left is wet spots on the carpet, until they evaporate and we are all gone. Gone below.

won't. can't.

it's awful of me to say this, but

I've been missing London a lot lately.

scrub.

I shampooed my hair three times in the shower the other day. Accidentally. Sort of. I'll wash my hair twice sometimes, just because it feels better when it rinses the second time. But the other day I washed my hair three times. I think I just wanted that extra minute and a half, that extra 90 seconds it takes to lather and rinse.

The 10-15 minutes I spend in the shower have come to mean a lot to me. In the shower, I can't check my phone. Can't check my email. Can't talk to anyone -- can't ignore anyone. I have no obligation to be doing anything that isn't washing my hair or body. I don't have to think of where else I'm supposed to be or what else I should be doing, because I'm doing something that needs to be done. Like a child, I like to pretend that everything that stresses me out, everything that makes me anxious or sad or hurt or angry, goes down the drain with the suds and water. And I breathe.

Sometimes throughout the day, I feel like I forget to breathe. The moment the water hits my scalp, though, I grow conscious of the fact that I am breathing effortlessly. It comes in gasps at times. It's like seeing the sun for the first time after days of rain, or coming up from under a wave crashing over you in the ocean -- a sense of calm, a sense of relief. It's permission to stop for a while and take care of me. It's 15 minutes where I'm allowed to be okay. Or, maybe, it's 15 minutes where I'm allowed to not be okay.

I hate feeling this transparent.

It's weird to remember when no one else does. Do memories get etched into one's consciousness, deeper than conscious recollection? If no one else remembers, maybe it never happened.

only for the sake of separating times and places

I'm currently reading a book partially set in Hollywood and it's reminded me of the way I find comfort in names. There's a sense of control, isn't there, in the act of labeling something, in assigning it a title that you can refer back to later? I've only been to Los Angeles once, and it was only for a few days, but I spent a lot of my time while I was there driving around, because everyone drives everywhere in LA, and the names of the streets freeways and towns in the greater Los Angeles area still feel familiar to me. La Brea Sunset Santa Monica Studio City West Hollywood Beverly Hills Wilshire Melrose Burbank downtown, the 405 101 10 110. It all just sort of drips off my tongue and across my mind, which associates images of the places themselves or pins on maps with each word and there's something reassuring about this.

It's the same with anywhere I've spent any significant amount of time. New York, London, Venice. Ocean City, Myrtle Beach, Sarasota. Here. Sometimes I wonder why this is. Familiar names evoke familiar places evoke comfort. I don't know why this seems to matter so much to me right now. I suppose it has something to do with this frustration with nostalgia I'm struggling with lately. Everything seems to touch the memory of something else and it feels like a trap and I don't like it.

Maybe none of these places really exist. Maybe they're just there in my mind to hold the spot of something else.

bottom's up

whatever I can get

whatever I can get

whatever I can get

...

I want so badly to want this so badly.

feelin' [the] ugly today

ouch.

what's the point?

Most of the letters I've been writing lately have ended up in the shredder, and those that haven't probably should have. Is there such a thing as too much honesty? Letters preserve the truth of a moment with a certain permanence, but sometimes I wish they didn't. The truth changes as people change as time sways, and usually I love the capturing of moments and preservation of them, but sometimes I'd prefer that no record existed of certain ephemera and am tempted to destroy what attempts I make. Sometimes it's out of my hands. Regret is a useless emotion unless you act on it...which I guess applies to all emotions...and I really don't see a point in wasting my time being preoccupied by it when there's no ctrl-z to fix things. Sometimes I hate trying to be honest or truthful when I know that the truth is just going to change and that mostly the rest of the world is pretty dishonest and untruthful. I suppose that's why the best art is the capturing of some kind of truth, no matter how impermanent a truth it is, and I suppose that unless I can learn to shake this discomfort with certain truths I'll never be able to be an artist of any worth.

This is not the direction in which I intended to move this, but whatever. Perhaps it is better that way.