baycon report. I am working my way home from con currently sitting at the Great Mall of America after eating Arby’s writing this up.

It was a pretty good convention this year. Lots of “growth opportunities” which were not plesant but have lead to greater understanding of how my head really works. I feel like I have a ringside seat watching a natural disaster unfold. I figure what is going on is churning up the ground soil and seeds I have gathered over the last decade will be able to grow. It is not a comfortable place to be in but I have faith it is a good thing.

more babbling behind the cut.

The affect of the music is wearing off. I feel the need to feel numb. Want to crawl into cave. Slope getting too steep.

Wed Sparrow came over and helped me do my laundry. Things that have been on the floor for over a year are not clean.

Over the day, I got to see how I handle things. I would start to get ansty and have a hard time breathing/thinking/moving. I know, if I was alone, to avoid getting to this point, I would have crawled into bed and dug up the computer or turned on the TV or pulled out a book. Anything to divert my attention and remain calm-ish. Because I had someone else here to catch me if things got out of hand, I would start breathing deep and focus on being calm and just getting through it without collapsing. Sparrow told me she could see me physically pull my self back down.

I don’t seem to be able to do that pulling down when I am alone. The fear is too great. I think what I am afraid of is a cascade. That if I stay with the feeling and work to calm it down, it could trigger a cascade where things get worse and then worse and then worse. When others are around it feels like I have something I can use as balance. Like when I am unstable and I reach out and touch the wall.I don’t need the wall to hold you up, I just need it for a point of reference. After I have that contact, I can take care of myself.

When I am alone, I start to panic. It feels like there are no walls around me for reference and the ground is tilting and I will fall and when that happens there is no bottom. This is terrifying so the best way to deal, the only way I know how to deal when I am alone is to not get into that position.

I have found that I am either full of lots of energy or I am collapsed. I am working on the middle ground but it is a long process. To avoid getting into that terrifying position of panic, I collapse before I get there. This is why I end up sleeping and hiding at home. Sometimes the terrifying point is getting dressed and ready to leave the house. For the most point, I have avoided that position. It was working with Sparrow and needing to pull myself back from going over the edge numerous times that illustrated what has been scaring me. I feel it is like being afraid of monsters in the closet without knowing you believe in monsters and thinking your closet is only a place for clothes.

Learning something new all the time.

Laundry and errands took up all of Wed. The clothes still need to be put away. That is one of the things Thursday was for. I found I couldn’t get out of bed. And it wasn’t even just thinking of the clothes and what needed to be done. I was wiped and wanted to hide. I think if I had someone over, it would have been fine but I couldn’t even work on getting someone over. Between Wed night and Thursday night, I watched 10.5 hours of shows from my TiVo. There was also sleeping and reading and fighting with the modem. About 7pm, I managed to cover my body enough to get over to the library and check my internet life. I was amazed that I was able to get moving because it was such a long haul all day. I ate leftovers from Wed, which I am very grateful for. I am not sure what I would have eaten if they weren’t there.

Still trying to figure out what to learn out of this beyond a down day follows a big day.

Today was a little bit of a hard started. Dorothy called and needs stuff from me and that motivated me to move. I called tech support for my modem and am not attached to the internet again. I have showered and started to collect witch dr stuff and zombie make up and dress clothes. I paused to write this out before I blow it off and never get around to it.

I was feeling itchy after being set to my tasks by Dorothy. I could feel the panic coming on. I plugged in music and it seems to keep things calmed a little. Sort of like creating interference so that a pattern lock can’t be established. Talking to people does that really well for me.

Now on to continuing to get ready and maybe food.

My eyes are bugging me again. They are shaking and not in the normal way. It keeps coming and going quickly. Like within half seconds to minutes. I know that I can see clearly more often than not clearly but it feels like the not clearly it ready to cross the halfway point. Probably because I don’t notice when I can see and really notice when details get blurred. The little push of pressure in my head doesn’t help. It makes me feel wrongly.

I didn’t notice it yesterday when I was feeling great and was super busy. I don’t know if that is because I was distracted or if it really didn’t show up often. It is back in full force today. It seems to be triggering off changing my focus this time around. Whenever one of these things starts up again it seems to be close to overwhelming at the beginning and then settles to just annoying after awhile. Maybe this is the start of a new version of the same old shit and it will become less of a problem later.

I did notice that I have started to try to read things through the bottom of my eyes when I am having difficulty seeing them. Like I have bifocals on which is weird. I know that you can’t use the center of your eye at night because there are only cones in the center and they need lots of light to trigger so you use the side of your eyes to read or see details in the dark. I don’t think there is anything special about the bottom of the eye (which is really the top since the image in inverted by the mechanical process of the eyeball and flipped in the brain). I am wondering if maybe the bottom of my vision doesn’t shake as much as the center. If I can remember and catch when I do it, I might try to see if using the top of my vision would yield similar results. I love being a scientist.

I really dislike it when I do everything correctly and I still crash. I don’t have any reason to feel this crappy today. I ate/drank my breakfast, I had a hamburger and fries at 1pm. I sat in a court room (I was supporting a friend) from 2-5. I had a dried fruit snack after getting out of court. On the way home I stopped at Grocery Outlet and did some shopping. While shopping I really started feeling crappy. I was overheating and starting to sweat. While waiting in line, I started to get confused if I was hot or cold. I felt somewhat nauseous and really had to focus on “I feel fine” to finish shopping. All I wanted to do when I got home was lay down.

When I got home, I peeled out of my clothes because I was so hot. The internal temp at home was 68 degrees F according to my thermometer. I ate a fudgesicle to cool off and focus on something other than how I felt. I read for a little bit and then just wanted to zone out. A little while later, I got cold and pulled a blanket over me. Now everything feels cool.

The back of my neck is tense. I have a feeling this is where the problem lies. I have been skirting a headache for days and I am sure the tension in my neck is the source for that symptom. I am pretty sure I am clenching my teeth.

After resting for two hours, I am feeling better enough to consider eating but am still a little sensitive to light. This sort of stuff is normal for when I abuse my body by pushing it hard at a con or by not eating. I really hate to think I hurt like this because I got up at 11am and spent the afternoon hanging out in a courtroom. I listened and learned what other people’s lives were like, I worked on ideas for my portfolio and read my book. It was warm when we started but by the end it was fine. (The judge did note during his opening statements that he hadn’t seen a fan in a long time and it looked very Victorian. I wasn’t trying to be noticed, I just carry a small hand fan with me when I don’t know what type of environment I will be stuck in.)

It could be a food issue, I haven’t had the greatest of food intake but I have had just as bad or worse many times before and it didn’t go this way.

It could be the neck tension. I am trying to relax and let it loose. There isn’t much I can do about my stress, it is at a normal level. Not much is going on, I am pushing myself to move in a better direction, I have a hard time finding ways to get myself up and out of the house, I sleep too much.

It could be the heat. It was warmer today and I was in Marin. But it hasn’t been that much warmer and it is no where near as bad as it will get.

It could be my environment. The courtroom seemed to be ok and the grocery store seemed to be ok. It is very sad if this is the source because it means I am getting more fragile.

I am already feeling badly about what type of work I am looking for. Some of the people today made $80 in a week, stand on a street corner looking for manual labor work, tried retail and fast food locations with no luck. I noticed that KFC is hiring and I imagined working in that greasy smell again for a very low wage and I am not sure I could. I have gotten soft with a 9-5 office job where I sit all day.

For the record, my eyes have been bad lately. It seems I am constantly needing to readjust for not being able to see clearly because things are blurry due to the movement or because they don’t want to focus. It isn’t too much trouble for large object but things like text is a little harder. It is sort of funny (ironic?) that my main skill set is using a computer to do graphic arts and I need to be able to manipulate details.

Some of this is to just whine, some is to record, some of this is because it is really bothering me that I don’t feel good and I don’t have a reason/source. I handle things so much better when I know where they are coming from.

I feel like I am teetering on the edge of being defeated. I had an ambitious idea around getting a group of friends together for an event and it was shot down from every direction. It was so clearly shot down that it looks like the Universe is saying NO, you can’t have that right now. I got the message.

I can see what I am being told no to but I feel I can see what I am being told yes to. I don’t know what direction is the one where the flow is.

When things go well, I am loaded with energy. When things are blocked, I feel like I leak air and go flat. I am feeling pretty flat. I am also aware that by putting more energy into a leaking situation, it goes flat faster. And when flat, it is harder to see where to go to catch the flow.

Don’t worry, this all makes sense in Gina Logic.

I am working on internal structures so that I don’t need outside people for motivation and movement. But I am not there yet. I still need external contact. But it has to be the right contact. If I show up somewhere I don’t feel like I fit, then it ends up costing me more than I would have gotten out of it.

I am feeling confused and frustrated and like the things I have learned so far are not applicable here.

It doesn’t help much that I was called for 1-2 hours of off site work yesterday and poked to find out today that the job was put on pause and I wasn’t told. I have a feeling this is something that happens a lot. But the client was impressed by me. There seems to be a lot of the impressed but no work thing going on. Yay, impressed.

Last week wasn’t so good. A number of plans fell through and I ended up in pissy mood. Part of this was body chemistry. Friday, a friend and I got together for breakfast. I had about 2 hours of sleep and I felt great. Life wasn’t bad anymore. It wasn’t good but I could appreciate the not badness around me and I felt ok about engaging with my environment. After I got home, things went down a little but not to the same level of ick that was the days before. Around 8pm, another friend that I handn’t heard from called and I enjoyed talking to him. It was enough to motivate me to make myself dinner (breakfast and dinner were most of the food I had that day). It was nice to be able to smile again.

I got together with a dear friend on Sat and it was like a switch was thrown. I was cheerful, happy, laughing. I enjoyed the day outside (and didn’t resent the clowdless sky exposing me to the big ball of burning gaseous evil beating down on me), walked a goodly distance and was excited by things. It was so nice to have myself back.

Sunday I was suppose to meet up with a new friend. When I woke up, I was bursting with energy and ideas and zeal. I was in top form. I made it there a little late (10 min) and far as I can tell, he never showed. He didn’t answer his phone and never returned the messages I left. I haven’t heard from him via email either. I handled it really well. I waited an hour and didn’t feel hurt or blown off, not really all that annoyed. It bugs me and I want to know what happened but other than that I am ok. I choose to go to downtown Berkeley because I knew going home would result in my crashing and being taken over by a bad attitude. I had a great idea about getting people together the way we used to and I put that into play while at the library.

Happily I picked up the entire set of A Distant Soil from the library yesterday and stayed up all night reading it to find out …. that the last book hasn’t been written yet. Arrgggggg!!!! The reason this is sort of a big deal is that I started reading A Distant Soil (aka Faraway Dirt) in the 80s. I loved it and was impressed by it enough that I still remember the storyline two decades later. It is an art style that I was seeped in when I started really drawing and I really resonate to it even as I know it is very dated to the 80s look. I decided to drop it back then because there were problems getting it published. The story went so far, then nothing and then it would show up again with a different publisher and started at the beginning again. I felt jerked around and very frustrated. I could see that any more investment in it would result in more disappointment and more frustration. I decided to wait to see if it ever finished and then I would invest in it again. At the library, there were 4 graphic novels and it I had only read up to partway through the second one. It looked like it finished in the fourth one. It could have easily finished at the end of the second but plans fell through for our heroes and there was more plot. Well, I have managed to find out there is only one more book. I have searched the internet and I can’t find what issue the comic is on to find out how close the story is to being finished. The last book was published in 2006, the one prior was published in 2001.

So here I am after getting no sleep facing the climax of the story that has haunted me for 25 years and then no idea if there is more (at least the author is still alive and producing). My wonderful big plan for getting a group even is not getting support (for good reason but that doesn’t stop it from being disappointing). My visit with the new friend is still poking at me as to why the lack of communication and I am working to hold that in the realm of reasonable instead of dissolving into drama. I have a couple of other places where I am not hearing from friends that should be contacting me and I am trying to hold that out of the drama-dip as well. I am facing a week with nothing scheduled but a therapy appointment. I am not sure but I think I don’t have anything ahead on my schedule, this week, the weekend, the week after. I refuse to look too far. There is a baycon coming up and that is a load of mixed emotions and issues to deal with.

I am too agitated to sleep and too exhausted to be active. My mood is sitting on the edge of a cascade of badness. I don’t feel I can even let it go and have a pity party. It either feels like there just isn’t anything to be more than mildly annoyed at or like it is too big and my self-preservation instincts won’t let go because I would fall too far.

I don’t feel I can reach out because I don’t feel like I can take adding another disappointment/frustration of a plan not working. I get so much energy when things work and lose so much energy when things don’t. I know I have the power to make things work for me but right now I feel like I am so out of tune that I will be stumbling over my own feet. I may get something moved forward but if anything doesn’t work, it will take the rug out from under me. I could follow someone else’s lead but I don’t think I can afford to drive right now.

So, I sit, alone, at home, again. Not daring to look into the future of even a few hours. And the way I used to get past times like this was to grab onto something in the future and plan it out. I need new tools. I am not doing badly (the typical scale goes a lot lower than where I am right now) but I sure as hell am not doing well. I want Sat and Sun morning back.