BLEEEEH

I'm wrung out, really. I've hit that plateau where I give up again. I'll go through the motions for a while longer, I think. I hope. But I'm not excited about anything anymore.

I need more sleep, I'm pretty sure. And I need something to look forward to, but what? Teaching? It feels more depressing than exciting at the moment.

How did this sneak up on me? I just want to be happy. I just want to live in the moments I have and enjoy them and keep moving forward, because stasis was strangling me. I don't want to keep living in these excessive cycles of up and down. Steady growth would be nice.

I'm trying to be good. I've heard all my life that if you're trying too hard, you haven't given it up the way you should and you'll just wear yourself out. Okay. But if I don't try at all, nothing gets any better, and I hate myself for doing nothing about my problems.

So I'm plateauing. I'm leveling off at the point where I'm exhausted, but I don't want to give up, but I'm too tired to be happy.

Waiting for nothing

I don't wanna. Do homework. Anymore.

I treat myself to Chaucer; this is what we have come to. This is the state of things.

*sigh*

Feeling good like the song says

For the last few years, I've posted only during the most... dramatic? ....traumatic? Intense. Intense points of my emotional state. So I feel like I'm presenting a distorted picture of how I'm doing.

I'm honestly okay. Grad classes are both more and less stressful than I expected. My friends are present but I have learned to say no when I need to. The guy I like likes me back, and I'm learning how to do emotions like an adult. Maybe I'm starting to grow up, just a little bit.

The hope I mentioned earlier is still there, even if I forget it sometimes in the pressure I'm putting on myself. My life has started again.

I'm okay. Everything is going to be okay. And that is a feeling I'm glad to have back.

cabin fever exacerbated

it is friday night, which means i am stuck here

going out on a friday night is bad, or so i have been raised to believe

i will abide by that, because i'm not planning on changing the core me bits

but i also have this intense need to get out, to go out and do something

i need to shop or eat or sing or scream, or all of those or maybe none

i can't and also won't do any, so i'm writing instead

***

coiled up energy and fear and stress and dread and guilt are springs squeezed to potential and let go inside me
where they ricochet off tender walls and poke and scratch with coarse wire ends and leave me bleeding and sore

turns out i never beat depression
and the easy fix isn't fixing anything this time.

***

hope so quickly turns to anticipation which turns to apprehension which turns to terror
and mixed in there somewhere is guilt tied to expectation

confusion is so much more easily conveyed in abstraction

and it's heavy, all of it, and cold

a sodden blanket

How the turntables.

***

Hello from the other side, she says. Laughs. It tastes sour. She bites down on that flavor and soaks it up, because she deserves this. It's her turn.

After what she put the others through . . . it's really only fair. She just didn't quite know it was this . . . this bad.

***


I've got this whole new level of empathy for my exes? Because I'm sitting on the other side of the table at the moment.

Back then, I was never in it seriously. I was having some fun, that's all. I felt bad that they were so much more invested than I was, but what was I supposed to do about it? I kept it as light as I could. For the most part.

And now . . . well. He's having fun. He likes where it's at right now, which is precisely nowhere. He wanted to try out the experience, I think. And that's fine. Very understandable, given where he is and what he is doing with his life right now. He's keeping it as light as he can.

I'm playing along pretty well, or at least I believe I am. I've always been good at keeping hidden what I actually want to hide. (I muddy what I want to make clear, but that's a different problem.) So I'm fairly sure he doesn't know how deep I got before I figured all this out. That's the hope, at least, because to acknowledge anything else would be deeply embarrassing.

But playing along is what I'm doing, and I need to reshuffle. Again. I need to make it true so that when this ends, as it always does with this kind of emotional disparity . . . I can shake it off like he will. Like I did before.

Maybe fatalism creates fate. But I don't want to feel the kind of hurt I know I caused, so.

(Too late.)

There. I said it. I'd like to go back to work, now, please.

It is almost too new to talk about? But I'm kind of squirrelly, so I need to say something.

First of all, I'm feeling  . . . happy. For the first time in an age. I mean, I'm still panicking, and I just wrecked my car, and I need a new job, and just thinking about all of this is making me ill, but. I don't hate my life for the present moment. I feel something strangely akin to hope. This is . . . huge.

And maybe, just maybe, I'll be direct at the moment instead of oblique, as has been my habit. I may or may not have feelings? About a person? But I'm desperately worried that God is against this whole thing, and I am trying not to commit my emotions to anything. I don't want to rationalize my way into a situation that will just be bad for everyone in the end.

Long story time.

With my last boyfriend, I kind of really wanted it to happen, and I sort of kickstarted it into happening, even though I prayed for a sign and didn't get it. So. About 6 months before it ended, I got another clear indicator that this was a bad idea. I thought my way out of it, convincing myself that surely that wasn't what He meant. It went sour a few months later, and I can't help believing that it would have been better to end it . . . earlier.

It's been like. Years. Five years? Wow. I've been single for at least five years now, just sort of waiting. I've prayed many times over for His will to be done, and I think, maybe? Maybe. That there might be some sort of a green light. With someone I would never have considered five years ago, but maybe I've been waiting all this time for a reason? Like. I can come up with all sorts of reasons why this is okay, but maybe I'm overthinking. Maybe the sick feeling in my stomach is the pizza I shouldn't have eaten last night.

See, I thought I got the same sort of "Nope" signal that I should have listened to back then, but then I kept listening, and I think what I was actually hearing was "Wait for it." But is that me implanting what I want to hear? I mean, He keeps reassuring me, but I'm very Gideon of late, and . . . well. I'll go in circles for days if I keep thinking. I speak from the last week or so of experience.

Really, for real now, I'm good.

This is something I jotted down on receipt paper while musing at work. Very organic, no? I had a whole argument with someone about how doing that sort of thing on purpose negates the hipster feel, but I suppose I have no room to talk about contrived originality . . . anyway. It would seem that a very long, rather frustrating chapter of my life is closing, not to be too dramatic or anything, and this sort of articulates how.

__

Not much is different, but everything's changed
where it counts.

Cuz you're still you, and I'm still me, and that will never change, but what that means to us both? Who knows. I can't speak for you, anyway.

That fact . . . those facts used to make me angry, or sad, or a whole host of other negative emotions.

Those facts used to light me up and make me sing before they brought me down.

Now, I think . . . I think I'm leveling off. Those facts sort of ground me, in a way.

You're you, and I'm me, and that hasn't changed for so long that I'm not sure how I'd function if it did. That's a lot to put on someone.

I'm sorry for that, but. Thank you.

For being you, and letting me be me.