It is interesting to watch myself get upset when I am being jerked around by someone else but don’t respect myself enough to do anything for myself. I can get really angry and have loads of energy when I feel like someone else is messing with me and treating me poorly. But when it is just me, myself, and I, I don’t move or lift a finger in ways that would improve my situation.

I know better and I do try. I just don’t get anywhere with it. I start and then feel like I am facing a clif that is leaning over my head ready to crumble down on me and it is best if I don’t do anything to mess up the precarious balance of the system and I should just shut down until something from outside of me demands my attention again.

I have been focusing on helping others to help myself but that isn’t working out so well. And the part that isn’t working is not what I thought it would be. I am great when helping others but the others aren’t working out. I try to set things up and things keep coming apart. I admit there is a certain balance that works for me to help, a narrow band, so if something doesn’t work then there aren’t too many other options.

I have energy for others but no energy for myself. I am not sure why. I am at a point where I know that I am good and great and all that but I don’t like myself and I don’t like where or what I am. When I am with others, my natural defense structure automatically takes over and I am pushing energy out of me and having a good time. When I am by myself, the energy doesn’t move. It pools at the lowest point and gets stuck. Enthusiasm is the only thing that provides motivation and I am running out of any kind of enthusiasm.

I am pissed at a friend of mine because he is flaking and including me in his flake. I wouldn’t be pleased with him flaking but I would make room for it because that is what he needs right now. I am really angry over him projecting his issues onto me. It makes me feel like he doesn’t have a clue who I am and I don’t see options on how to work with him to make things better. My old self would have just cut and run by now. My current self wishes I could too. So I have all this energy when I think of him, I want to yell at him, sit down and talk things out, find out where this stuff is coming from and understand him better…all this stuff is all in relationship to him and us being in connection during the process.

So I think, why don’t I use all this energy for myself since he is flaking out on me. I had plans to take advantage of the day and they came to naught. I am sitting up now looking around and everything looks too hard to even start. It is sort of like that feeling of staring at a blank piece of paper and knowing you have to write/draw/paint/show something but have no idea what or even where to start. Everything is a starting point and everything is overwhelming. I feel a vague sense of what to do but nothing firm enough to act on. The computer is the only thing that seems to be able to get me moving. Even writing this was hard to start but I felt I had a thread so I started tugging on it.

I am missing the threads to tug on in the rest of my life. I don’t want or don’t like any of them and there isn’t anything to keep me occupied/distracted enough to just start working on something.

Yeah, I don’t like me much today. I don’t like my life and I know it is within my ability to change it but I don’t know what I want to change it into. I am full of I don’t wants right now and I don’t see an end to them. I am aware that there are moments when they aren’t there but I feel like I am sinking into the quicksand of them right now and I don’t have anyone I can trust to get me out. It would be easier to just detach from everyone and stop caring. Then I wouldn’t be so vulnerable to the quicksand. Again, I know that isn’t true but it feels like the truth.

I am so sick and tired of my drama and melancholy and shit. I wish I could just quit it but there is something in here that I need and I don’t dare let go. I wish there was a drug for that.

I do a better job at handling disappointment now than I used to but it is still not all that great. I think I get mesmerized by the face-plant I see myself falling towards and am not able to look sideways once I start down that track. I seem to be able to limit the despair/depression to the actual problems at hand even if I can’t see anything outside those problems. At least I have gotten to the point where I don’t end up coloring everything else in my life with the same brush. I just tend to have a hard time seeing the other things in my life.

In the past, it was imperative to distract myself from whatever could go wrong before I saw how bad it could be. And to make sure I wasn’t in a position to have any kind of disappointments. In order to work against the need to keep the risks minimal I would get worked up into a frenzy every time I stuck my neck out. This is how I dealt with finding jobs. Lately, I have been amazed at how easy it has been to write a cover letter and send in a resume and samples. This, and the low level job process of filling out applications, would fill me with such dread and since I had to do it to get a job, my energy levels afterwards would be at a frantic level. I had so much undirected energy at those times I had to things I couldn’t normally do just to drain it off. And it felt horrible. Once I got to the interview stage, I was fine. It was a weird quirk of mine.

Today I have been avoiding making contact with the people I met yesterday because I was suppose to hear from them yesterday afternoon about the two week job. I have known exactly what I was going to say and I also wanted to just hide my head and let it pass and do the non-confrontational assumption of “they didn’t pick me” because they blew me off. After 3 hours of watching TV and really wanting to just fast forward it all so I could get the story without all the pauses, I decided to bite the bullet and call. I knew that I felt miserable and it was just going to continue and therefore what is the worse that can happen? Since I would feel better even if they told me that I was a lousy fit for something I know I would be great at, it could only get better.

Turns out that someone who has done the work before that they thought was unavailable is available and is doing the job. They said they liked me and thanked me for waiting and would keep my info. I don’t know how true all that is. I would like to work with/for them in the future so if it is true, at least it is an open door. If it isn’t true, I haven’t lost anything and I can put it behind me.

I do know what would be good for me. Going out for a bike ride would help. Getting any kind of exercise/movement would be good. Getting involved with other people would be good. Going shopping would be good. But I am still stuck in my ways enough that I am not moving in that direction. My legs hurt from the walking yesterday (I think it is because I had the heels replaced on my dress shoes and that really stretched my calves) and this is the same pain I had after taking the bike out once. I don’t want to try and reach out to anyone because that is opening the door to more rejection and hurt. I don’t feel protected enough to put myself into that vulnerable position. Yeah, going outside could be good but there is the fear of what if it isn’t. Then I wouldn’t have any back-up plans that I can use as an excuse to why things aren’t better.

I am bull headed enough to follow up on some emails that are risk taking. There is a sense of distance when it is people you don’t know and it is via email. I need to be careful not to look too closely to the possibilities in that arena or I will collapse under the weight. One of the ways I deal with my troubles is by planning the future out. Well, since this is a risk and I am feeling like I need to be overly cautious, that planning would show me all the ways this could hurt and then I wouldn’t move at all. This is one way I have managed to change my process to the better.

Disappointment has had most of my life to be a habit of derailing me. So it still does. I just have to remind myself it isn’t as bad as it used to be and a result of the work I already am doing on myself, it has the possibility of having less of a pull on my mood.

Baby steps.

I have spent a lot of days alone in this last week. On monday, I tried reaching out and no one was available. People started showing up on Tuesday which I already had covered. It was really weird.

I don’t feel very competent and I can feel my shaking down to the bone. I don’t want to be around people because I have a hard time talking and getting my ideas across. Therapy was really good last night. We hit some meaningful stuff and I am wondering if this is part of that stuff. I wonder if I give into what I am feeling if I will be taking care of myself and get better or if I will just let it run away with me and get worse. I really wish I came with a diagnostics system that is better defined.

Saturday, I met someone that is a 7w6 like I am. Usually when I meet people that I know are 7s, we seem to slide off each other. I like them but there doesn’t seem to be much traction. This guy was different. It was so weird to have my methods of thinking reflected back to me but in a different form. I think he is enough like me to be on the same wavelength but different enough to be interesting. Or some mix of that.

I got notice for a job for the next two weeks which is about a brand that was launched when I worked at BGI. I did a good job writing the cover letter and modifying my resume. I am sure I could rip apart how well I did (and there are voices in the back of my head urging to do just that) but all of me concedes that it is better than I could have done in the past. I am surprised by how different the process feels now from how it used to. Hmmmm maybe that is where some of this shakiness is coming from. I used to be a basket case when doing the job hunt/paperwork thing. Once I am to the interview stage, I am much better. Now I feel like I won’t be able to do the interview part as well as I should.

It is good that I am having dinner with friends tonight. I cooked up an entire roast and have been trying to get the carrots and potatoes to cook but they just aren’t. I think I need to come up with a salad because the meat is very oily and something needs to break up the clogs. Bread will help soak it up but won’t do anything to unclog it. These words aren’t the right words for what I am trying to describe but they sort of pass on the idea. I just know what would work and what wouldn’t work with this food by instinct.

I am not feeling overly depressed but I am not feeling good. It seems like it would be really easy for me to slide right into depression. In some ways, I am wanting to crawl out of my skin. It would be good for me to have a physical activity that I enjoyed. I think it would help.

A Conversational Dinner Party #3. Actual quotes from the evening in order (mostly).
Many quotes were missed from A Conversational Dinner Party #1, a recording that has gone nowhere was made of A Conversational Dinner Party #2. Less people were broken by laughter at this event than previous ones but brokenness was achieved. Yay!

Injia!

Brownies = Dessert
Brownies = Fey creatures
Brownies = young Girl Scouts

We use sex toys with our wine.

Chicks dig scars.
(someone else, tipping head forward to show top of head) Check out my brain scars.

…. aaannnd then Paul made Ammy Happy.
Ammy: Do it again! Do it again!

I was at work and I got this email….

We said that 4 times so she is writing it down.

Don’t be That Guy.

We need a sacrificial That Guy.

Don’t Fuck with the English Majors.

A troll?!?………..Ooo Essays!

A snake eating its tail. Or rather eating That Guy’s balls.

Oh, the things you used to be able to get away with in Church.

She is the Betty White of Sci Fi Cons.

Release the Kracken!

Did they make a Hamlet sandwich? (to the idea of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are women)

We filled out the Sistine Chapel of spreadsheets. (to which they asked for Death and instead got Cake.)

…with the sneakers
…in the front room

Want to hear something scary? I have started drinking coffee.

HARDCORE!

Aw, Steampunk. Introducing brown to all those little goths.

Gears….Wrench…Googles…STEAM!

I feel completely worn out. I have been running full tilt Mon Tue and Wed. All this after weeks of high drama and pushing myself to be my best self. I was suppose to work either today or tomorrow so I was shoehorning into the other day what I could of this weeks plans and not making any new plans.

Well, work canceled out so now I am facing a completely free day today and tomorrow. I think this weekend is clear as is all of next week other than my weekly appt. I am standing at the beginning of a huge empty space after having everything crunched into such a tight space there was no room for things I wanted and no room to make plans to fill the empty spaces ahead of me.

I have been trying to help a friend of mine with some accounting stuff. I have wanted to do it because it was work that I felt I could do easily, help him out of a crunch which would make me feel good and might even make the stuff I have that is similar easier for me to face. But I think he is hiding from it which means I am having it taken away from me too. This hurts. It is so much easier for me to care and to do other people’s work rather than my own. I invest in it so it is hard when it is taken away from me without involving me. What makes it easier for me to tackle is also what makes me so vulnerable to it. C’est La Gina.

I really wanted to keep up the regular schedule that the last few days have pushed on me. Things were getting better for me. But here it is, almost 3pm, and I still haven’t gotten up. I have been fighting to stay awake and not just drop off to sleep again which deep in my bones I want to do.

I have watched TV, I have read some of my book. I have downed a hearty juice drink and eaten a tub of pasta noodles. Every thought towards eating involves “making” food and that feels too big. I don’t have any motivation to actually do something physical and that is just what I need to get me out of the zone where sleep can just steal over me and take me back under. This is why I make plans with people. That seems to be able to override this ability of mine to draw myself back to sleep for massive portions of the day.

I have a hard time going to sleep but if I have been asleep, usually it is easy to drift back into it. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how long I have been awake, a few minutes, a few hours. Doing something really awake, maybe something physical, something where I am interacting with the outside, something that sparks stuff inside of me (which is what having other people around does) is what assures me being awake. And then I get to face the other end when it is time to go to sleep and that spark needs to be dampened. I haven’t figured out how to make that easier.

Currently I find I would rather be asleep than awake. I can’t think of a time when that wasn’t true but it is really easy for me not to see things from other time periods in my life right now so I don’t know if this has been different outside of the last couple of years or not. The main reason I don’t sleep all the time is that I feel so ill when I have slept a lot and then am awake. Right now I feel like crap and I know I need to get up and move around and get out of the house and I really don’t want to. My body is telling me that I will feel better if I go back to sleep. And I will, until I wake up that is.

Enthusiasm is the only thing I know that overcomes my typical lack of motivation for me to get myself moving. This is why I set myself up using other people and tying myself to plans outside of myself. I can dismantle anything I create where I am the only stakeholder. If I am excited by it, then I sometimes can avoid taking my plans apart.

I need to get out of here and move.

I have been on the move for days. By stopping all of a sudden, I fall down and hurt. I would rather slow down in a controlled way, but right now I don’t feel I have that choice.

This is just another day in the life of The Gina.

Left mom at the airport, her flight leaves in about an hour. I have a lot of mixed feelings, emotions, thoughts. A bowl full of mixed jelly beans including the bad tasting Harry Potter ones.

I think the bowl if full of good tasting ones but it is a little hard to tell. When savoring a good one, it brings a warm smile to my face, I sit back comfortably well grounded and pleased. If you look too closely, the cracks and fractures show up and get larger. When encountering a bad tasting one, I feel like I need to smash myself with a metal bat and rip my flesh with pointed claws. The negative side of me is rather harsh lately, I try to keep it in its cage. The variance in intensity makes it hard to review the last few weeks to get any sense if it has been an over all good or negative experience.

I can say it has been an experience. Shitty stuff came up and it was dealt with in mostly good ways. I feel more connected to my mom and to my SIL and more willing to work with my brother. I will add dad back into the system in a week or so.

This has been a good growth opportunity and I think I managed to work through it instead of just run away. This counts as a big win.

You know that heavy thing you had to carry around and complained about all the time and you can’t help but miss when it is gone? Yeah, I feel like that. In a way I feel free and I can run and play, in another way I feel like I have stepped off a cliff into open air and am about to fall.

I told myself last night that tomorrow will be different. I stayed up way too late (6am got up at 7:45am) and it wasn’t that much different. Had a therapy session with mom that really pushed at me and made me tense, had a break from mom for an hour and a half, picked her up and dropped her at my place and went to visit a friend. Had lunch (almost 4pm), picked up mom and took her to another friend’s house for dinner (I managed to invite my mom and I to his house, we brought the ingredients and he cooked), then took mom to the airport. Things feel very different now than they did yesterday, or this morning or earlier this afternoon.

I was nice to be able to be with friends in a different environment after an intense time with mom. The dinner was lovely. My friend and mom got along better than I do with either one of them. I sort of wished I had a picture of him helping her to the car. It hit a soft spot in me.

Really not wanting to exist right now. I have been hiding in my hole trying to reboot and am currently feeling very stressed out and like there isn’t a clear direction to move in. I know it is all in my head and I am whipping it up but that doesn’t lessen the affect it is having on me.

Not enjoying the concept of life at this time. Not enjoying the concept of being me at this time.

A thing that does bring a smile to my face is Happy Jewish Dead Zombie Day. I like that.

I got woken up from a deep sleep by mom and was instructed to just put clothes on and get out the door to pick her up. She said that she needed time to cook. I told her 15 minutes. I took 5 minutes to curl up under my covers (because I was freezing) and drink my shake. I had lost track of when time was so I really didn’t know how long I had. As soon as my allotted 5 minutes was up, I got up, put on pants and jackets and headed out the door.

I found mom at the hotel’s computer searching up movie times. She proceeded to list off locations and times for How to train your dragon. I didn’t care. I really didn’t care to see a movie but this is one I would like to see. I was on “get mom to home to cook” mode and really wasn’t processing her load of data. She didn’t seem to care. There was a sense of resentment over not really wanting to see the movie and hurrying out the door so that I had to sit and wait while she babbled data at me that I not only didn’t want but wasn’t processing and I had to figure out a way to tell her.

We got going and in the car I am smelling something that smells like Altoids. In the past, I have gotten very sick on Altoids and so the smell makes me nervous, uncomfortable and somewhat nauseous. I asked if she had had an Altoids and she insisted that she was sucking on a lemon drop for her saliva. Then told me a story about a little girl taking her Altoids, blah blah blah. She showed me her lemon drop and it looked like it was a round Altoids thing. I asked could it be a lemon/Altoids thing. She described it and in her description there is the possibility that this “lemon drop” has a lemon outer covering and an altoids like inner center (instead of a lemon drop that I am familiar with which is all lemon candy). But I think she was stuck on the name of Altoids as my issue (even though I kept asking about a mint thing, just that Altoids has that extra kick that takes mint to sick for me).

She then tried to make some joke about it (I can’t even remember what it was and it probably would be a good thing to remember) and it pissed me off. Being out of sorts I let her know how much it pissed me off because this happens over and over, her trying to make a joke, it not being funny and then turning it around to it being about me not allowing her to be funny. This time instead of just putting up with her, I let her know what I thought. She gets to sounding so self righteous about how other people would think she is funny and how maybe the problem with me not finding her funny is not her but me. I hope I don’t do that to other people like she does it to me. I will have to watch for it and I am pretty sure it will be hard for me to see and if anyone stuck my face in it then it would hurt. It probably would have to be pointed out to me softly and let me figure it out for myself. Asking me questions and getting me to dig about some time when I did it would probably work. This is something I would really want to know if I did because I would want to fix it. I may think that someone responding to me badly is their fault but pushing that back onto them is not the way to handle it.

I would like to think that the right way to handle that would be to accept that people respond to things based on who they are and what is going on inside themselves. If they respond “wrong” then the event triggered something in them that led to that response. Approaching it as the problem is with them just leads to them getting more defensive and reinforcing that “wrong” behavior, possibly spreading it into other areas because stuff from me gets marked as not safe. I would like to think I absorb the “fault” for “wrong” response by owning what I did to trigger (even if I think I was in the right and they were wrong). From there I could possibly find out why my trigger got the response it did to find out what is behind what I see as the “wrong” response. With that info I think I could see that my idea of why the response was “wrong” is faulty or I could find out what the “wrong” response is really triggering from. There is a chance that my action combines with something else that sends things down the wrong channel resulting in a “wrong” response. Or I could find out that there just isn’t any way to make heads or tails of it and that I should leave it alone. In the end I still would have x trigger gets y response which means if I don’t like y response then I shouldn’t do x trigger.

My mom and I get caught before this level happens and go around in circles. I think I make complete logical sense and she seems to think that just because she doesn’t mean any harm in it that I should adjust my attitude to match hers. I feel she should earn that trust and should learn why she doesn’t have it. The reason I had trouble with her “joke” this time was because I was having a hard time getting the info I felt a strong need out of from her and was somewhat frustrated with the translation problems. Her timing of the “joke” hit the button of her purposely adding miscommunication to the process. I did not get the feeling that she understood what my problem was and her part in it. She just made a very poor attempt to joke about it. To me this feels a lot like someone razzing you and then saying it is your fault for not being able to take a joke. This really pisses me off.

One thing I learned is that since mothers will still love you no matter what your behavior, the need to control how upset you are feels less. So I let her know how upset this made me. It has been a problem with us for years. She seems to think because others would find it funny that it makes her in the right and that I am in the wrong for not finding it funny and I should change my attitude to allow her more room to move. I think my reactions are my reactions and if you tell a joke and the other person doesn’t find it funny then it isn’t funny. The interaction between two people is between those two people with everything they bring to the table. If something doesn’t work for one of them, then it doesn’t work. Period. You can only change yourself. I guess I do tell her to change her joke making stuff. That since I don’t find it funny, it doesn’t work and to stop doing it because it pisses me off. She tries to tell me to stop letting it piss me off. I think mine is more reasonable but both are telling the other to change.

Mine is a change to avoid a negative outcome. Her’s is to try to remove the negative outcome. I guess I just need to codify the negative outcome. I really don’t like getting pissed off and then dealing with her. Since she doesn’t seem to be willing to stop doing what pisses me off, I should figure out what I need to do when I am faced with that. Right now I want to let her know that when she attempts to tell a joke and fails to make it funny and it pisses me off I will hang up or turn around and deliver her back to her hotel room. Trying to stay connected results in more negative reactions and I don’t like them. I don’t like needing to suck it all in and sit on it so that we can stay connected and have the low simmer resentment. I think this is a very negative reaction and is probably coming from wanting to make a point more than just taking care of my needs. That I am somewhat cutting my nose off to spite my face losing more than I want in the process. But I should figure out something.

So I was in cranky mode and it just got worse. I admitted to being cranky because I didn’t take the time to start the day. I have to do this quick starts every now and then but I usually am by myself for awhile and then in public where there is no direct social contact. I have a chance to get on my feet and be ready to be a social creature. Boyfriends of mine taught me that they prefer to feed me breakfast and take care of me first thing in the morning because I am much nicer and more pleasant to be around if I don’t have to use up my energy taking care of myself. I get breakfast bed so that they get to have the good side of the Gina experience. I have gotten spoiled by this and have a hard time training a new boyfriend in the process. Not everyone can figure out that feeding me before I have to be social and interact with others is a good idea. Especially when I have gotten better at managing the social aspect with lower and lower reserves.

Today I just let it go without trying to control it. The sad part is even though I owned up to me being in cranky mode and it was a me thing, my mom bought into it and was cranky in response. So when I did try to control it and was much better behaved, she would bark back at me and I didn’t have enough room to just tolerate her. We reinforced each others cranky moods and it just got worse.

Mom’s are suppose to put up with our tantrums and take care of us and sooth us and make us feel better. They aren’t suppose to be human and need taken care of and soothing themselves.

We decided that it would be better for her to go back to her hotel and to try to start this day again later. I don’t mind it being a day of mom and the day before she leaves. I do mind it needing to be a holiday we are suppose to spend together and we have to have ham and man & cheese and see a movie because of what day it is. We bought all the supplies for stew and I am ready to just forget about have mom cook it just to take something off the list of “This must happen.”

I am ready for a day by myself, I don’t even feel the need/desire to spend it with friends. I think this is mostly because it is a so called Holiday and while mom isn’t pushing it, she is making me aware of it and it bothers me.

I was quite happy asleep. The dreams weren’t all that great, my friends and I were getting punished for what a huge group of people did, we just were the only ones that agreed what we all did was wrong and stuck around to help clean up. Not fair and other stuff was going on but I would rather be there dealing with that than awake and dealing with this.

Even when life isn’t all that bad, I don’t like it and resent needing to live it. Bah.