Archive for Psyche stuff
The Rape.
Possible trigger, which you could probably guess from the title.
I’ve considered writing about this before, but haven’t really had reason to. It’s not something I think about all that much, and it’s certainly not something I’m traumatised by, so I haven’t had that processing-through-writing desire.
But it does occasionally come up in conversation, usually if I talk about my teenage depression. Someone will ask, for example, if I know why I got depressed, and even though I am fine talking about being raped, I um and ah and make the conversation more awkward than it needs to be.
This comes back to something I mentioned before – the idea that I have a social obligation not to embarrass my listeners. I imagine that the bald statement “Because I was raped” is going to make the other person uncomfortable, but my reticence makes their discomfort more likely. I’m wondering if writing will help me deal with that discord.
Some speak the sounds, but speak in silent voices
I feel odd this morning. I felt odd last Monday too. Life not balanced. Mondays mean a knot of work somethings (adrenaline), and life has been too many people in too many spaces that should be just mine (misanthrope). My parents and their friend have been staying, which means three extra bodies chain smoking and talking when I want to write. Today, today is silence. It is beautiful. The city is still half asleep and the sounds are just me and the a/c and my beautiful clicky keyboard. It means more space inside my head to feel sad, but sometimes I need that. The boom/bust/polarization of people staying means bad feelings about guests get parceled up with a ribbon of guilt. All is tempered by the fact that each goodbye feels so fucking final.
Imitating life and art.
So around the time I was asked the question below, I was (briefly) living it. A very desirable and pleasingly feasible third party rocked up and stuck around for five days, half of which while the Boy was out of town, the rest after the Boy returned.
(Perhaps I should come up with some fun but non-identifying handles for people, but the reason J and I used our own names at swingers parties wasn’t to make a bold lifestyle statement, it was just paucity of imagination. So Boy = J, other boy = old friend.)
Have fun kids, and stay safe!
I mention my open lifestyle here a fair amount, and hint at the actualities (last weekend: Bangkok, five star hotel, five naked people, far too much fun) but I’m not sure how much of it is, well, useful.
Yet I find myself answering questions and giving advice (as best I can) quite frequently in real life. So, at risk of sounding self-important, I’m gonna try and translate some of that to these hallowed pages, starting with three specific questions from a friend.
Warning: this is only the answer to question one, and it’s l-o-n-g! Perhaps it’s time to make the columns wider.
How do you and J avoid hurting each other?
From a poly website
Made me stop and think, although I’m not sure about taking advice from a therapist who name-drops.
I remember one night, after Atlas was published, she [Ayn Rand] was sitting on the sofa, crying, protesting the state of the world and her place in it, and then she said how much she would hate for John Galt to see her this way, how much she would hate for him to see her miserable or in tears. I said, “Why? Wasn’t this part of the battle? Wasn’t feeling like hell and then picking yourself up and carrying on part of what made the struggle heroic? What was there to be ashamed of? Why did one have to pretend that there were never moments of utter despair? Wasn’t the challenge to experience them, own them, admit them, without denial or pretense ‹ and then go on fighting?” I said we should be proudly willing to let people see us in our darkest moments because in the end it was not going to be our darkest moments that would define us.
– Nathaniel Branden
Crash
Been two and a half weeks since they sacked me, and two weeks since they maybe-unsacked me.
Maybe-unsacking me was a good move in terms of keeping a useful employee around (if you’re paying someone you want them to work, even if they suck at it). I definitely wouldn’t have been able to work out my notice in my fully-sacked status.
Being maybe-sacked has been unsurprisingly confusing. The first week I entertained giddy ideas that I would start the new project, be amazing at it and find a place within the company where I was meant to be. The second week the metronome swung the other way. I started applying for jobs, regained my confidence and was finally able to say ‘fuck you’ and mean it.
Neither situation has been particularly pleasant, but there’s been optimism undercutting both. I either stay and do something awesome, or I leave and do something even better.
Then yesterday I crashed. Got a bit of a head cold anyway, so been shivering and run-down, and this morning I just couldn’t do it. Every time I tried to make myself go to work I felt nauseous and started to cry. In the end I called in sick. That way I managed to get enough of a grip on myself to stop crying, but I’m still shaking and scared.
I’m not sure where I go from here. I can’t be off-sick every day until mid-August. If I can make it through to Friday I have two weeks in the UK where I can forget about it (although that’s two weeks not spent job hunting), but I still need to work this week.
I am hoping that maybe I can get further with the job hunt today and that will give me enough confidence to go back into work tomorrow, but there’s no fight left in me right now. I am just small and scared and sick.
Safe, sane and consensual
Cos nothing completes a complicated working week like a spot of non-consensual sex.
At least I don’t seem to have insomnia anymore
Ack, sleep gone very weird. Only had one proper lucid dream in the past four months but last week I had an odd two days of something like anti-lucid dreaming – knowing I was awake (sensing the bed, hearing the room around me) but not being able to control the free-flow of my thoughts, resulting in something very dreamlike.
You could have it all
Had a really sad dream this morning.
Started with my old art director making a video that included a clip of mitosis taking place, then he animated the whole thing in jagged black and red (I think in a kind of rotoscope fashion).
I was with my mum and sister in a long room, showing the animation to them and my first boyfriend (see post below), who was a decent artist (irl).
In the dream I was conscious of the real life time that had passed since I last saw first boyfriend, and we fell to reminiscing – looking at old photos and sharing stories.
We walked away from my mum and sister and ended up in the garden of my second house (first boyfriend never went there irl).
The garden had an abandoned air but was far more beautiful than it had been before. There were large holly bushes, huge peonies, banks of wild strawberries and tall hollyhocks.
They were all leggy and overgrown, but that somehow added to their charm, as if they had rightly claimed the garden back since I’d lived there.
I was still reminiscing with first boyfirend, and mentioned that the garden was just as beautiful as I remembered, even though I knew that much as I wanted this to be true, it wasn’t and therefore the garden wasn’t real.
I woke really incredibly sad and reluctant to leave the dream behind, and have been humming the words from Hurt ever since.
Possibly revealing post script: old art director is the only guy I’ve had a really important relationship with that hasn’t been based around sex or the promise of sex. First boyfriend is the only important sex realtionship guy that I don’t have much contact with.
Unrelated (but is it really?) post script: about a week ago I wrote a post called ‘Fuck Prudence’. It’s still in my draft folder. I’m so lame.
I bet I think this song is about me.
