Humbled

My humble blog was selected as a reader favorite, and I was asked to be interviewed as "the person behind the blog." Oh good! More people can read about the train wreck of my life! When the interview is put up on Blog Interviewer's website, I will link to it here so you can read my words of wit and wisdom and tales of personal angst.

It's gonna be great!

On insomnia (part 742)

I dreamed of the Golden Gate Bridge falling on my house.

I dreamed of sipping sweet mango nectar and wondering where it had been all my life.

I dreamed of my brothers when they were little and innocent.

I dreamed of standing in line, waiting to be picked.

I dreamed I was alone and pregnant in an empty house, about to give birth.

Then my dreams stopped, and so did my sleep.

On the alignment of stars

You may remember that a few weeks ago I wrote about advertising on Craigslist for new friends. I was so pleased that I did actually get a friend out of the deal--my new friend R. She is interesting and quirky and spontaneous and good-hearted. We started hanging out regularly immediately.

I was so happy I'd taken a chance and gone out on a limb a bit, despite some ribbing from existing friends.

You may also remember that I spent a couple years attempting (and generally failing) online dating. I'm not even linking to any of those posts here because I want to think of them as little as possible.

On the day before my birthday this year, Jan. 21, 2010, I gave up. I had the 2nd worst date ever and ended up in tears in my car on the phone with the lovely M.S.P. I took down my account and stopped, and prepared myself for a life of singledom. I cried, I mourned, I slept, and I became annoyingly apathetic again. My friends said, "You'll meet someone when you least expect it!" I scoffed at this, because I LEAST expected it at that moment.

Then I met Dave.

Dave and I met through R's Facebook page--by commenting on each other's comments--and now we are inseparable. Unfortunately, he is currently in Dallas. That makes being inseparable a little challenging and frustrating. He is coming here to see me in a couple of weeks, and I couldn't be more thrilled.

Isn't it funny the chains of events that take place to bring people into our lives? Isn't it funny how easily we could have missed each other had I changed my mind about posting my ad, had R. not responded, had we not gotten our schedules together to meet up, had I not left a comment on her Facebook page.

It's enough to make one believe in fate.

On love

Alternative title for this blog: Should I be alarmed that this is post #666?

I haven't felt this way since 1992.

I am giddy and excited and happy and floating. I can't sleep. I keep forgetting to eat. I make wrong turns when I'm driving because my head is in the clouds. I giggle and blush like a shy little 8 year old girl.

We talk for hours. I can't wait to hear his voice. When an email from him appears in my inbox, I am absolutely ecstatic. Even if he just wrote 5 minutes before. Especially if he just wrote 5 minutes before.

How can it only take a week for your world to turn upside down?

For the first time in a long time...

...I am ridiculously happy.

Giddy

Let the words "I love you" surround you forever. I command everything that surrounds you to repeat this phrase endlessly. A thousand kisses I plant on your lips. Kisses hot as fire, kisses which thrill your body, kisses which make you surrender and promise you eternal bliss. Goodbye, love of my life. I would send you a whole volume, but a letter that large would only attract attention.

Alexandre Dumas
(To a married lady friend)

This morning I dreamed I was showing you my temple.

I dreamed about you. I dreamed that I went to meet you at the airport, and that when I saw you coming I ran up to you and we grabbed each other and held on. Other arriving passengers pulled their suitcases around us in irritation and the airport security staff nearby rolled their eyes in boredom--they had seen a thousand and one greetings before ours. I walked you back to my car and--once we put your suitcase in the trunk--we got in and held on to each other for the longest time. I knew it would be so much better when I got you home and we could do this in complete privacy, but I couldn't resist. Eventually we pulled ourselves apart and I did, in fact, take you home. We left your suitcase in the living room and climbed directly in my bed, all our clothes still on for the time being, and wrapped our arms around each other.

It was lovely.

Let it breakthrough

So. Today I had my first appointment with my new psychiatrist, Dr. T. I love her. Love, love, love her.

Of course the first appointment is pretty intense. You have to establish why you're there and the life experiences that led you down this particular path. Even when she asked me the most minor questions I burst into tears and barely got my words out.

Now I am emotionally exhausted.

She and I are adjusting my meds a bit, and we're going to explore some different types of therapy other than just the standard cognitive-behavioral therapy that was not enough in the past. She is interested in having me consider psychodynamic therapy and EMDR as a way to treat symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

I am willing to try.

I am happy to be back in treatment.

*sigh*

I would love to hear your voice again.

On surprise, 2

Friday night I got home from drinks at El Rio with friends. While messing around on Facebook before falling asleep, I got an instant message from a former SFSU student I had a little over a year ago in class, M. At first we chatted about what we'd been up to since our class, and then he asked me out. I laughed and joked that I was 8 years older than him and why would he want to go out with an old lady? He got serious and said I didn't give myself enough credit. He said, "You can use me at your discretion."

My goodness.

"Our love is rice and beans and horses' lard."

I live cement.
I hate this street.
Give dirt to me.
I bite lament.

* * * * *

Gouge away, you can gouge away
Stay all day if you want to.

* * * * *

Sittin' here wishing on a cement floor
Just wishin' that I had just something you wore

Once there was a girl

This has been a long time coming. I just didn't have the courage to tell the story before.

*********************

Once there was a girl who didn’t think she was worth very much.

She was a shy, introspective, and melancholy girl by nature, and probably destined to have self-esteem problems even without the things that happened to her. She had a very young, single mom. Her mom was lost and lonely and didn’t think she was worth very much, either. So she did things to make herself feel worth something—all the things that made her feel worth something involved men and drugs. The girl’s mom loved her very much, but when she was on drugs she didn’t care what her daughter witnessed. Even when it involved men. And more drugs.

When our girl was five, her mom got married. This is when the girl’s problems began in earnest.

Her shiny new stepfather tarnished very quickly. (If you ever want a nice case study of brainwashing and pure, unadulterated physical and psychological torture, you should study this man. He still remains the cruelest human being the girl has ever personally known.)

The girl and her mom were stuck. They were broke. They were powerless against him. Other people knew he was not a nice man. No one ever knew the things they went through. He was very creative and sly.

The girl wanted to ask for help, but she didn’t know the right words. She didn’t know how to say:

“My stepfather makes me feed myself cat shit while he watches and laughs.”

Or what about, “He grabs me by the hair and beats my head against the wall if I don’t pick everything up off the floor. And even when I pick everything up off the floor, he pretends it’s still there laying in front of me and beats my head against the wall because I say I don’t see anything there. So I pretend to see what he sees, and gather up imaginary pieces of what he sees in my arms while looking at him, hoping I have pleased him.”

How was she to explain that he made it a game to see how hard of a hit she could take without falling down? She was only a little girl, and it was impossible to withstand the full force of a grown man. So she was destined to be knocked down. And to get back up. Over and over again.

When you are little, it’s not easy to tell people your stepfather held a gun to your head while the police surrounded the house and your mother screamed. He wanted to be sure she wouldn’t leave, you see. Sometimes he even hurt their pets in front of them. (This was especially hard for the girl. She loved all creatures. Except locusts. Their sounds and shells terrorized her.)

The girl and her mother were required to recite specific sentences regularly in order to ensure their powerlessness: “I am a bitch. I am a whore. I am ugly. I am stupid. I am fat. No one loves me. No one will help me. I am a bitch. I am a whore….” When the girl started off saying these things, she knew in her heart that they weren’t true and that she was just saying them to appease him. But after saying them regularly, over and over, these words started floating through her head even when she was not being forced to say them.

The girl did the only things she could think of to cope. In kindergarten, she went to school with bruises under her clothes and locked herself in the bathroom and screamed hysterically when it was time to go home. She escaped to her grandparents’ houses whenever she could. She played outside from morning to night with the neighborhood kids as often as she could. When the neighborhood kids weren’t around, she found places to hide and explore with imaginary friends created for that very occasion. She took long rides on her bicycle and ate green apples from other people's yards. She gave names and personalities to everything around her—the trees, the flowers, the animals, the broom—to make her feel surrounded by familiar faces and friends.

Unfortunately, her stepfather was not the only one who made the girl think she wasn’t worth very much. There was more than one man, in her family and otherwise, who were more than willing to let her know she was only good for one thing.

One of them was an uncle who had his own cross to bear. He did things that no little girl should ever have to experience. She was five. She wore Care-Bear pajamas. While it happened, sometimes she would stare at a picture of the devil whose iridescent paint gleamed at her in the moonlight; other times she stared out the window and directly at the moon itself. The girl felt so dirty and was so ashamed that she wanted to curl up and die.

But she did not.

She got really good at picking up the pieces of love and acceptance she could find and curling herself around them like a cat.

Years later, when the girl and her mom (and now two brand new baby brothers) finally got away from the stepfather by going into hiding for awhile, the girl’s mother fell apart. And rightfully so. But then the girl’s one constant ally through those times, her mother, felt more than ever like she wasn’t worth very much. And she tried to make the girl and her brothers feel as bad as she felt because she didn’t have anything else left to give them.

…Fast forward…

Our girl is 15. Her physical situation is much more stable now, but she is confused, hurting, and lonely inside. She is mortally self-conscious and shy and terrified of every move she makes—what if she makes someone mad? She gets better at hiding these things and at doing the things a normal girl should. She is positive, however, that if anyone really knew all of the things that made her up they would be horrified and disgusted and not want to be around her. They would discover for themselves what she’d always felt inside—that she wasn’t worth very much.

At that young age the girl fell in love with a shy, introspective, and melancholy boy. He didn’t have the deep, dark secrets that she had, but he listened to her secrets and didn’t make her feel ashamed. This boy gave her the courage to try for things she never thought she could do. She left home when she was 16 and set about trying to make those things happen.

She actually did some cool things.

She went to college and she was very, very serious. Others around her had the liberty to fuck around, but the girl knew she had one shot and she had to make it happen. She didn’t fuck around at all—not even one little bit.

She started to explore the world. Every chance she got to do so, she took it.

She didn’t know what she wanted to do when she got out of school, so she went to school some more. She wanted to know things and to feel she had some power and control over her life. She used to laugh when she thought of herself with any kind of high-falutin' graduate degree. It seemed terrifying and unattainable and ridiculous to her. So she decided to shoot for it. She eventually pulled it off.

The boy was there through it all--even when she tried to test him by pushing him away. (She was still very afraid, you see, of everything and everyone.) She warned the boy, “If you ever lay a hand on me, I will set you on fire.” She was pretty sure he wouldn’t hurt her, but she also knew a thing or two about self-preservation.

When the girl was 24, she started to honestly look around at her life for the first time. She started to look deep inside herself, too. She started to realize that she needed more—that what she had was not enough. She even started to admit to herself that the boy was not enough. This was terrifying to her. He had loved her and given her strength and courage when she needed it most.

She realized she had been in survival mode for a very long time.

Upon these realizations, she felt lost and lonely inside. She knew what her instincts told her but she hadn’t yet really learned to trust them. She was uncertain of who she was, what she needed, and how to go about finding out either of those things. (It was a tough time.)

Once again, she didn’t know the right words. She was now an adult and had a much wider vocabulary at her disposal, but she didn’t know how to tell the boy, “Thank you for loving me even when I couldn’t love myself. Now I need to move beyond these fences we’ve built; they are pinning me in and I am dying inside. You loved me as a child, and now, should I be lucky enough to love and be loved back again, it needs to be as the woman I am.”

When she was 28, the girl did another thing she never imagined she could do and that was very terrifying to her. She left everything and everyone she loved behind and moved far, far away to try to make a completely different kind of life for herself. It was very painful. It actually took her a couple of years to make it all come together, but she made it happen. At the last minute, the boy decided he wanted to come, too. The girl thought it wasn’t the right thing, but she felt like it was worth one last try. (She was still afraid, you see.)

It was a disaster from the start. The girl knew that living with anyone would never be easy, but this move proved to her once and for all that she loved him, but her relationship with him was not enough. She was honest with him from a very early point that it wasn’t working for her. He kept trying. It broke her heart, but it wasn’t enough. The girl finally told the boy she was moving out, that it might take some time to put the pieces in place, but that it was going to happen and he needed to make plans for himself. It was terrible, of course, and still continues to be very, very difficult. Her friends, both near and far, have helped her find the courage to move forward.

It took a very long time and seemed like a simple lesson to learn, but she finally started to realize that she is worth something. She also realized that she deserves something more. (The girl’s mother has not yet put these pieces together for herself. The girl has no idea how to help her.)

There are days, of course, when the doubts creep in and when “moving forward” seems to be at a glacial pace, but there it is.

This was that girl, a long time ago:



And this was the first postcard secret she sent out in the world to try to be set free:



(She still has work to do, but she has been fighting for years now with everything she has. She will make it.)

THE END

Clit Notes

Alternative title to this blog: Why I want to dress like a lobster


"…was originally part of an evening called “Shrimp in a Basket.” The show began with me coming out as a sea captain with a cardboard parrot duct-taped to my shoulder. In a rich mixture of English accents, real and imagined, I welcomed the audience and assured them that if what they were about to see became unnecessarily avant-garde Walkmans would automatically drop from the ceiling; I reminded them that they should put on their own headset before assisting anyone else.

Then I scurried off…where I was hot-glued into a giant cardboard lobster outfit. This took about twenty minutes and was one of the quicker costume changes of the evening. I’d persuaded a friend to bring the accordion she’d bought that afternoon and entertain the audience with songs of the sea. By the end of the evening, after five or six sets of at least twenty minutes each, what she was playing was starting to sound pretty good, almost like music.

I reemerged with two women also in crustacean drag. We lip-synched to “It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion,” although the audience couldn’t tell what we were doing because the lobster suits covered out mouths. The…stage was so tiny and the costumes, though exquisite, were so huge and fragile that we couldn’t do much more than just stand there while the taped played on a borrowed boom box. Because the tickets for “Shrimp in a Basket” were only $2.99, I think most of the audience felt it was enough for the three of us to just stand in front of them, being big and pink. Then we exited, and it was time for more songs of the sea."

Holly Hughes (“Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler”)

On surprise

Every once in awhile it's nice to remember that I still can be surprised. I was surprised last night, and it was a beautiful feeling.

Sex dice

XKCD

The waiting...

...is the hardest part.

Tonight I am going through and adding tags to my oldest blog posts. I recently added a couple of new categories that I thought were worthy of their own.

I can't believe the last four fucking years!

And...I fucking love my blog.

Pie

I'm proud of my pie crust. I don't know why, but I seem to have pretty good luck with them. Maybe it's because I researched the shit out of them before the first time I made a pie. The fillings--particularly apple pie for some reason--have been a little more mixed. But this strawberry raspberry pie is one of my favorites that I've made.

Spring is coming.

I have NEWS.

Sperm donation is less expensive than I realized. Now I just have to decide at what age that becomes the plan.

I am making light, but it really was a relief to find out.

Does this get filed under sex? Or lack thereof?

"You're not listening or I'm not saying it right."

Damn. I have been a hot mess! I have tried to limit my blog posts during this time and it's probably a good thing.

I'm having one of those days where the fog lifts and I feel normal. I want to run around and make up for the past few days of being in the toilet. I want to get back to the goals I was working on full steam ahead. I want to make decisions and take actions and make plans before the sun starts to set again.

Last night I had to teach class even though I didn't feel well. As I was sitting in the front of the room waiting for time to start, I glanced over at one female student just as she was saying something to her friend about me. I smiled and said, "What?" She flushed a little and said, "I was just saying that you didn't look very happy and we should try to cheer you up." I was really touched.

I am fighting the urge right now to look for apartments and jobs in RVA. I have other stuff to focus on--namely, my well-being. There's plenty of time for the other stuff if I decide to do it.

Hanging

I have been starting to suspect that I have attention deficit...if not disorder, then problems. It started occurring to me recently as I thought about my problems functioning on a day to day basis, and I've been doing some reading on the link between bipolar and ADD.

I don't see my new doctor for nearly 3 weeks and I'm so impatient. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to last that long. I feel like I'm hanging on by the skin of my teeth as it is, and it depresses everyone around me to try and talk to them about it. My aunt doesn't really want to talk to me like this. Nannette doesn't call back. I feel really alone.

My future daughter

I had the most beautiful dream last night. I had taken medicine because I wasn't feeling well, and it gave me vivid, lucid dreams. I dreamed I was pregnant with a little girl, and I was getting ready for her arrival. I was preparing myself for her entire childhood and not just for the arrival of an infant. I filled a trunk with clothes for her to play dress up. I had visions of her and a friend digging through the trunk, adorning themselves with whatever they fancied. I went from thrift store to thrift store buying old ball gowns, colorful scarves, pillbox hats, and costume jewelry. I was thrilled with her imminent arrival and so looking forward to the person I would be meeting soon.

It was lovely.