Don’t Know.

I see that it’s been a long time between posts for a while now.  I think this thing with my old therapist has shut down some things in me and is leaving me quieter.

Sucks.

Not that it would really be a problem to be quieter necessarily, if it were just that, but it’s a sort of squashed quieter.  It’s a look-what-happens-when-I-open-up kind of quieter.  I’ll probably do it again eventually, I can’t ever seem to help it.  But this awfulness with the old therapist isn’t going away.  She doesn’t care I guess.  She certainly doesn’t seem interested in apologizing which i guess isn’t something people do all that often at least it seems so to me, but also she doesn’t seem to wonder how I am or anything.  I don’t understand what changed.  I hope some time she will talk to me–it feels like i need that to release me.  I don’t want to be bound like this forever, I am already bound in enough ways.

My new therapist has said a few times things about my sharing a lot that day, and I wonder if that means it’s something not quite right.  That is what I generally wonder about everything, to some degree.  I also think it’s a little of a the desperation of the person with attachment problems.  I don’t know.

I’ve had a stressful day with my job feeling like one big bunch of scrunity and criticism.  Tenure-track.  The rack.  Publish or perish.

It’ll be over in a year or less really, one way or the other.

But I also did just have an amazing time at a conference.  I’m finding ways to pull the drive and interest I have in the relational/mind things I write about here a little into the work I’m doing, which is cool.  And I got some good responses.  More importantly, I was more able to meet and connect with people.  I still went off on my own plenty, I just seem to need that a certain amount.  But I did more of the other too, and I felt more like I belonged, or at least less like I didn’t.  Then I came back to daily work here  I work and didn’t feel quite so much that way.  What does that mean?  I know part of it is just the ickiness of where I am in the process, and how hideous I find being in a scrutinized situation, but is it just that?

Don’t know.

Stupid Stupid Stupid

I’d been having a difficult day or two this week–just feeling very spinny and unintegrated and ungrounded.  Then I was oh so clever and had a phone conversation with my old therapist and she said we could only talk by phone one more time instead of once a week for the next month.  This was right after I said how much I missed her.  I thought that was okay, that it was okay to be attached and sad to lose her.  But it seems like I’m getting punished for it somehow.  I feel that she means well though so it’s very confusing.  I think she things she’s helping me somehow but now I just don’t feel like I can go on.  With therapy with the new person, with anything.

I guess this is only a part of me that feels this way and other parts feel other things, but right now it’s almost all I can feel.  The rest is somewhere else, not available.

Only this screaming at me for caring, for being vulnerable, for being whatever it is that makes these things happen to me.  And the pain of loving someone who doesn’t want to to talk to me much, and doesn’t think I should want to stay connected to her.  As if I could just stop.  That doesn’t happen when someone we love dies, we don’t just stop being connected and switch all that attachment over to someone else like I’m apparently supposed to do now.  I don’t exactly feel great about the prospect now.  I don’t want to keep getting hurt like that.

Last night I dreamt that my husband had an affair, just to add to the mix.  I guess I’m not feeling very loved or lovable, more like a repulsive twisted slut monster.  That  makes me feel a tiny bit better, going far with my phrasing like that.  That’s always here for me, words and my love thereof.  There’s the screaming that won’t stop too though.  And rage.  There’s a whole lot else that I can contact now.

There’s something else though, something deep and steady, something to do with my feet moving me across the earth and contacting it. So I put my hands on some rocks and plants in my garden to feel it.

Highly Classified Information Leaked to Therapist

State secrets of the utmost sensitivity have been leaked in the therapy room!  Security has been breached! The end is near!

My “do not discuss” list is pretty empty right now, and I’m feeling weird without my secrets, a little naked.  It’s mostly just that I’ve started talking about some things in therapy, not that I’m just blurting things out from the rooftops willy-nilly (well, not too much of that anyway).  But it’s scary and liberating even to open up those rooms even a little.  I’m letting a little air in to bring some life into those secret places, to let them stir and move a little, in time.  Or not (it’s scary after all, no need to rush things).  

As long as those rooms stay shut, part of me stays shut and frozen.

And whether I like it or not it’s too late to turn back now.

The Pleasure and Pain and Pleasure and Pain of Living. And the Cycling around and around their Wheel.

The thrill of new connections–with people, with ideas, with places–charges me. The fear of misreading and misplacing my trust unsettles me. The flaring pain of being hurt burns me. The thrill of new connections–with people, with ideas, with places–recharges me. [If I stop here I end on an optimistic note. . .] [but if I go on. . .] The fear of misreading and misplacing my trust revives my unease. [not so sunny-minded] [and of course I could go on further still. . .] The flaring pain of being hurt again burns deeper down. [and what if I go on further still–will the optimistic recirculation back to new connections seem quite the same as last time?] The thrill of new connections–with people, with ideas, with places–recharges me. [it could still seem optimistic, but it could also now seem a bit absurd, a bit exhausting]

‘Round and ’round we go.

Telling a circular story or a story of a cycle requires that we add an artificial stop, lest we go on. And on. And on. [see–lots of drives or directions can be hard to stop, for me at least.] And where we stop matters; it shapes the story. We can’t truly tell the circular story–that isn’t a narrative mode (visual yes, but not narrative; narrative must move and except in Jorge Luis Borges’ world of circular books, and to a far lesser extent, Joyce’s Wake, narrative has a start and a stop). And these things matter; their placements and forms shape mean things.

Viewing experience as cycling and round rather than linear can provide reassuring continuity or it can feel confining, like the overall territory is too bounded. And it can feel both ways at the same time, and so it does, to me.

And if our linear version of the cyclical story stops on the upswing, it feels like progress. But this is an illusion. Upgoing means downgoing and all that. If it stops on the downswing, it feels like worsening, like decline. But this is an illusion. We are not really going anywhere. Not far, just around in this tight space that the circle marks. There isn’t any room for goal-directed journeys, but more importantly to my mind, there isn’t any room for the other sort, the sort where we depart without maps, and possibly even without destinations. We give ourselves over to the experience. We don’t presume to be able to predict where we need to go and how we need to get there.

Or so I say. It could just be that I want to justify my haphazard way of moving through life, of being in the world.

The Night Forest

I know which side my bread is buttered on. I may be afraid of the dark, but I know that there is only one sort of place to go when I am falling apart, whether it’s dark there or not. Many of my nourishing spaces (I tend to have a collection wherever I live) are natural, but some are architectural too. The nearest one at the time of my need today was a forest trail, and so I brought myself there, and gave myself over to it.

I’m having a difficult couple days, lots of panicky implosion feelings and insane self-beratement and no daisies. There has been a real dearth of daisies, and kittens.

Some things (setting/space sensory info) are calling forth a (recent) bad patch in the recent past (a marriage crisis life falling apart kind of thing about a year ago), and that bad patch had reopened/opened for the first time a lot of much older bad patchiness.

A cascading effect, effectively cascading me right down onto the floor, laying me low. And then today–and I feel so pathetic and ridiculous about this but today someone I rely on (and this is a rare and terrifying thing for me to have done in the first place) told me that for a while she’ll be a lot less able to be there for me in the way that she has been. It’s for a perfectly good and believable reason but do I believe it? And do I believe that this isn’t just the beginning of being totally ejected/rejected altogether? Not all of me does–not those parts of me that expect everyone to want me to: go away, die, disappear, be quiet, be less, be someone else, at least have the decency to pretend to be like someone else. . .but especially the “go away.” I find it hard to open up and depend on people, and don’t particularly trust that they’ll be there for me (for everyone else maybe, but not me, because–well I don’t know what it is but I tend to feel that I am wrongness incarnate). So it’s hard not to get freaked out. And freaked out I have gotten. It’s the two possible rejection scenes right after the other, and not sleeping much lately, and being overworked and nonetheless woefully behind (or so I feel–it may not be at all true really). It’s being in a weakened state, and it’s being startled and having something that looks like one of my worst fears come true, and it’s just me having a hair-trigger panic-button for things that sound like potential ejection from someone’s life, rejection by someone that matters to me.

I did what might sound unsafe but I think was the safest place for me comparitively speaking at the time, which isn’t really saying much, I admit. I went for a long run in the forest, long and late enough in the day that it was seriously dark by the end. I didn’t feel able to handle my mood/emotional state anywhere else besides on the move through the trees. I cried (including sobbing) some, which would probably have been quite a sight, but there it is. And I do have to say that darkness and trail running are a bit tricky to combine. Sometimes though I can hear owls in the night forest. And I felt the earth’s shape through my feet, and I remembered what has always been there to hold me and be a home for me as I moved across its surface.