Willpower is Finite

I remember listening to a StuffYouShouldKnow podcast the other day on willpower – that it’s finite. Resist one thing and it’ll get harder to resist something else.

My mother called me twice in concern over my shoulder. At first I resisted contacting her back – saying to myself ‘I’m not falling for that again’.. (she’s a narcissist)

But ultimately I fell for that again and responded to her facebook message, poured my heart out on how much my shoulder hurts (injured it a few days ago) and got four words in response ‘hang in. How’s work’ and then nothing after that even telling her how work was, she ghosted.

People ghost a lot.

I tend to say to my shrink ‘no one cares about me’. Which is draining to her because she cares, I know.

I think what I mean by care is.. empathy. Sympathy.. I don’t know. I don’t feel that many people care about me in any good strong way. No one hates or loves me very much. I have two cousins who do love me, a cat at my parents house who does, a sister who does *sometimes*..  and all of these have a huge caveat, as you know.

 

So for family I know the ‘dance man’ rule well, and can tell exactly when and how I break it. I don’t know how to fix it when I break it… I think what happens is they see something interesting on the edge of the radar of ignoring me and come back for another show, and I’ll exhaustedly put on the monkey suit and dance again, because what else can I do?

I don’t know what the answer is at all when it comes to friends or lovers, because I don’t have any and I don’t know why, and no one will tell me.

So.. with no empathy towards me, I feel like I have no choice but to drink the poison of self pity, which makes me feel worse. I don’t know how to cope with nothing in the ‘belonging’ jar. I’m exhausted, I feel like I’ve tried everything. I am empty.

I am.

But honestly.. I am not.

 

What is self pity and what is grief?

I am suffering from sob constipation. I’m holding so much in, but there’s not a safe place to let it go. I let one tear out today, but I have nowhere to put it entirely. I’ve been wanting to call my sister for weeks and try there, (fat chance) but keep making excuses to not to do it, so I don’t.

I don’t know what is self pity, and what is grief.

I constantly grieve the loss of my family. Sometimes that coagulates into self pity, but mostly it’s a constant stream of grief. There are people who have done stupid things, and their families held onto them, and were there and didn’t let them go. I did NOTHING. I transitioned. And they let me go.

The rest of this is probably only self pity:

At BEST I am in a laundry at the fountain square scenario, one of the girls in their gossip circle, and I have to suffer in silence.

That’s at best.

With family all I’m seeing it as, is I’m a thirsty man, but am drinking poison. Is that really any better?

I don’t have any friends to move forwards to instead. There, I am a starving man. With any interaction at all, I can’t handle too much of it. I sip at it. And that water turns sour because of a nonexistent reaction time. I am looking through a rolodex to find something to say or share, and by the time I think of something, it’s too late. If I try to say anything at all, it’s a naked dumbledore move. If I do hit on something, The inability to keep up causes overstimulation and then it crumbles. And if the overstimulation occurs, my hackles are up and I’m useless after that.

The Whole is Other than the Sum of the Parts

-Kurt Koffka

I can recognize what my pac-man sides are, but I don’t know who I am entirely, the triangle. http://www.intropsych.com/ch04_senses/whole_is_other_than_the_sum_of_the_parts.html

I don’t know where to start. I’m queer, I’m trans, I love cooking, I knit, I play guitar, I garden, I love the ocean, and iceskating, and contra dancing.. But those are some my pac-mans. I don’t know what the whole of it is, what I wear on my sleeve, to hopefully find a tribe with other sleeves like mine.

I have been trying to fit in with the queers here. But being queer is for me an ‘Oh P.S, I’m queer’ thing, not an ‘I’m queer!’ thing, if that makes sense. It’s part of my make up, but I’m not front and center about it, nor am I about anything else up there, so I have to figure out what my front and center things are.

I can obviously go into the ‘”I am thoroughly used to being different shades of shadow and not being allowed to be otherwise so that’s the only thing I know how to do’ pity party, but fuck that.

…okay, I am really tempted to do that, actually =D

Obviously I’ve got to allow myself.

I want to figure this shit out. I want to find a tribe, instead of bursting out everything that’s happened during the week to my shrink, because she’s basically the only person I talk to. (I can’t help but see it as some kind of horrifying Wilson, Tom Hanks thing). That doesn’t seem useful shrinkage, at all. A tea party, instead of actually getting down to business. So, I don’t know how, but let’s do this.

Captain, I am not

• My not sleeping is of the ‘Freddy’s gonna kill me’ variety, not a manic one
• Brave vs. Courage (1)
• Hugging mostly sucks (2)
• My house does not equal home (plus it’s tidy, but not clean. I don’t know how this connects to any of my issues, but it probably does) (3)
• Lamictal helps me survive, but in doing so hampers my ability to live
• My acceptance window is shut, but my tolerance window has never been closed.

1) Cousins see my Steve Rogers side, which lights up a genuine Captain America for them. For them, (and my cat, back at my parents’ house) I feel courage.

For everyone else I know, it’s bravery. They see the sexy uniform and shield, and for them that equals the Capt. The don’t care to see the Steve Rogers behind it.

2) Which is also why hugging them, even touching them, makes me feel disgusting. They are hugging what they want to see, what they think is real, a courage, but because they don’t care to see the Steve Rogers part, my actual courage quails, because they’re touching it, dragging it to light, without bothering to care about it.

Hugging strangers is better than hugging them. Strangers haven’t formed an opinion, whereas family insists on theirs, and fuck mine.

3) The ‘house not being home’ pain used to be ‘not allowed’, but now it’s, I see that I’m allowed (but that’s still hard). but the worst of it is that no one else is there. Friend, family, or lover. All those are different kinds of pain: Friend: regret, shame. Family: a young abandonment. Lover: a bitter self disgust. Plus all three have a wistful, missing them feeling to it.

PS: I got a diagnosis that makes sense, finally. PTSD, and ADD. The ADD is biological, and the PTSD, you know how that goes. I don’t know how to fix it, there isn’t a right answer. I wish I had a mentor, though, an older guy. The past six years I’ve been trying to learn ‘guy’ on my own, and before that, trying to learn ‘human’ on my own. I am a blob of ‘not raised.. at all, really’, and I’ve been having a hell of a time trying to do it alone.

Can I at least get a good ball to bounce around in here?

I can’t… do anything. My neurons won’t let me. I know what I should be doing for my bad shoulder, for example, my physical therapy exercises, which I’ve been slacking on, but I don’t know what to do about a broken brain. Depression, PTSD, anxiety, I know these things, and I know when they come up, they pass in time. I’ve got a few tricks here and there to cope with them, and sometimes they even work =)

But I don’t know what to do about a broken brain. I don’t mean it in a mood like way. I mean that, for example, I can’t read anything for more than ten minutes, for the most part, and that’s generally if I know it well and I read it many times before my neurons were shot to pieces. If that’s not the case, I’m lucky if I can absorb a few pages. It takes me a full day to watch a movie. I just rediscovered subtitles, and now I can understand what they’re saying, mostly, even if I can’t connect the pieces of what’s happening sometimes. (As I said, it takes me all day to get through it. My queue on netflix is becoming more and more of a wreck. I hope the rest of my family doesn’t look on my page).

I went to see the new Marvel movie in theaters when it came out. I love superhero movies. I barely understood any of it. I wanted to cry.

I can’t hold a conversation with people either, really. I don’t sound very intelligent, in speaking. I repeat myself, I can’t hold a debate, and I can’t hold one thought through to the end. Most people I know have run out of patience and stopped listening. I’ve fallen back on my old habit, of middle school, of trying to be as invisible as possible.

The therapist says to take a nonjudgmental stance, but it’s hard to do when in a mental sense of it, I can’t even hold a stupid spoon.

I’ve been slacking on everything else, like the physical therapy and whatnot, because I want to hold that spoon. But as I said, I don’t know how to fix it.

And of course, I have to be very careful not to mention anything of this to family. Not only is appearing weak a bad idea in front of my aunt, who is the mother of my cousins, (they’re the only people who look at me with anything resembling unconditional love, though I have to censor myself because of that aunt. The only time I didn’t, in trying to explain to the younger one why I changed my name, the oldest said ‘can we not talk about it anymore?’) That aunt will cut me off (again) if I am slightly left of normal. Showing any of them, aunt, immediate family, in general anything other than their dancing monkey, their eyes. go. dark.

A Felted Heart

11:11

I wish I were healthier.

11:11

I wish I weren’t so alone

11:11

I wish I were normal.

The gods of 11:11 seem to be busy with other cases, lately. All of those things sting.

My senses are clearer, these days, it’s like this:

the depression is, as ever, present, at times a knife blade, but I see it, instead of it seeing me, if that makes sense. I can move forward with it flickering and sometimes burning in my chest, because there’s where it’s staying right now. It’s not everywhere, bringing me down in shackles.

But all of those things sting.

I wish I were normal, and I didn’t go into a sports bar in a kilt and rainbow socks. But I did, you could cut the tension with a knife. I lasted until the end of the second period before I knew I was defeated. They were laughing at me on the patio, as I was leaving, with the old ‘is that a boy or a girl’ routine.

I wish I were healthy, and my meds didn’t exhaust me into napping and into the caffiene nation, or ravage my insides so badly that walking about is a chore and the best of my nutrients come from gatorade.

I wish I weren’t so alone.

I have friends from the past, that I’ve tried to regrow something new with them, but it’s fallen apart in my hands. I have blood family, and they don’t want to talk about the things that hurt. My chosen family is all but gone. I had a cobbled up patchwork something, to me it was beautiful, that kept me warm. Now it’s just me and my cat.

I try to reach out, but it doesn’t work and I just curl up in shame.

My heart is a loose bag of felt triangles. You can barely feel an edge, or substance, about to give up. I think all the triangles are the times it has broken, and it’s about to come tumbling down.

I wish I were a courtesan

I’ve been well enough to be able to hear my body, lately, to be awake enough to feel like I’m absorbing the experiences of life a little more, and thus more able to respond to it.

So, I thought it’d be a good idea to do something about being lonely.

That kind of lonely.

I ‘went walking’ with a couple of people, casually, but there was dishonesty abound.

All of my ‘walking’ experiences have been horrible, few as they’ve been. I know I shouldn’t have done it, because of how awful my past record in that department has been, but I thought this time would be different. But alas, the definition of insanity.

I’ve been hollowed out and morose since then, been doing stupid things that my body doesn’t like. I feel used and lied to.

I wish I knew of a way that wasn’t skeevy online that would work for me.

But the friend department is mostly empty, so is the family one. And I’ve been thinking on those, that those should be steady and have something in them first, right? And for so long they haven’t. And yet still, as they haven’t, so then I haven’t even considered the romantical basket.

I am too skittish, I think, for something more traditional like marriage. I don’t know what I’d do with myself in a relationship (no, I’ve never had one). There was this movie on a courtesan and this nobleman and they were in love but couldn’t marry, he already was, class, all that, so it was a long term thing with them.

Why can’t I be a courtesan?