I had plans for the day. I was looking forward to them. They are far away. I finally am up and I really don’t want to go. I know that once I am there, I will be fine but getting there is not something I feel up to facing. No one is counting on me to be there. My presence would be appreciated but isn’t required.

I did not want to get up yesterday either but C came over. After getting moving and doing some stuff, I was so grateful for her gift of a monthly washing dishes day for the clean dishes and for provoking me to move. I know it is good for me and I feel better but getting over that hump between not moving and moving seems nie impossible.

I have lots to do, even sitting at home on the computer and little to no motivation to do it. Some of it is important enough that I am even avoiding doing it. Which intellectually I know is harder on me that just doing it. I wish I could just stop living this way.

I finally got up and I feel horrible. I slept in today and got up late and I feel like I haven’t had three weeks of getting up regularly and climbing two flights of stairs (yes, it is a small amount but considering there were quite a few days that the only walking I got was to the bathroom and back to the couch, this is a good increase).

I am dragging majorly just moving around the apartment. I am currently burning hotdogs to eat with my pork and beans. I have been meaning to have this meal for over a week.

I hope I get some pep later. I really do need to do some things. Of course I will probably get my pep at some god-awful hour and not get any sleep.

No work today and no work next week. I am fine with this because as much as I liked the experience and needed it, I was ready to be done. They might call me back the week after in quarterly updates come in. This also gives me a chance to work on some offsite work that took a pause due to working full time.

I woke up this morning at 6 am and 8am, just like I was doing for working and which caused me to be late through most of the assignment. Damn do I feel bad about that.

Then I went back to sleep until 1pm, just like I did when I wasn’t working. I don’t feel ready to take on the world. I want to just keep hiding. I don’t now how to find a middle ground. And I feel frustrated by not being able to do it.

An event is coming up, I plan to go, I have it all worked out in my head. An internal check gives back the response of “Sure, no problem. We’re all good here.”

But my actions don’t support this statement. It is a mystery to me why but I will be on the ball and getting ready to go and then ….. I stop moving. I stall until it is too late. I know I will enjoy myself. I believe it. But I don’t move from the couch.

Well, tonight I made it. I spent from 5pm until 9pm pushing but I got out there door and to an event that had many people I really like at it. And people that like me and are happy to see me and let me know.

When I made the plans, I felt fine about going. When I prepped for it I felt fine about it. I fell of the rails but kept moving forward just a little bit at a time. Even though it was hard to move, I still felt it would be ok. I got there and it is a good thing I don’t have any more fingernails to chew off because I was ready to fall apart. I held onto the tips of my fingers with a death grip and twisted them in order to stay grounded. People asked how I was doing and I couldn’t answer them. Something in me won’t let me just brush it off with a “fine,” but I also didn’t have another answer so I just slapped a hard grin on and smiled at them. I will admit I would like to make people uncomfortable enough with the greeting question of “how are you” that they will switch to something else.

I was mostly ok and I enjoyed myself. It was nice to see everyone. I am sorry to have missed those that left before I got there. I felt like I could dance. I had no problem going right into it. In less than 60 seconds, I couldn’t stand up any more, I couldn’t catch my breath, I felt horrible. I was fine and doing fine until I had to stop and then *wham* all of my laying around getting next to no exercise makes its presence known.

There were cream puffs and carrots and tomatoes and piggies in blankets which I stuffed into my face. The sugar allowed me to actually make it through an entire waltz. I did need walking off the floor but a couple of cream puffs later and I make another half a circuit in the next waltz before aiming for a chair and downing a glass of water.

At least this wedding reception I didn’t have a cast on my leg, as was noted by the bride.

I think I was there for half an hour to an hour and then it was over. I managed to offer an apology to someone I poorly and have avoided for years. That turned out to be an emotional stab. I gave the bride and groom hugs and was pulling my “I appreciate you letting me attend with the big kids even though I am not one” shtick (It is showing up a lot lately. Acting like I am confident that I belong doesn’t seem to be something I can pull off lately). On the way out, my breathing got harder to the point of dry sobs when I was in the car. Now that I am home, in my safe nest, having downed a delightful eggnog, I feel fine.

Intellectually, I am fine with it all. Emotionally it was really really hard. There seems to be a real disconnect between the two. An hour after the last dance I was still sweating. Having sat here and gone through the logic exercise of writing this out, I have stopped.

It is great that I am getting in touch with these emotions. I think I really need to integrate them in with everything else so I can work around them instead of them undermining me.

Well, I used to live all in my head and I worked hard to bring my body into awareness. Maybe this is the beginning of my emotions being brought online too. Not fun.

I have been on a real nostalgia kick lately, finding old friend I thought I left behind and would never see again, revisiting times in my life with different eyes.

A friend of mine from elementary school and I have been poking at things due to the recent attention to bullying. She was posting about her childhood nickname used to torment her and how she reacts to it now. I took a look at mine thinking it was academic and stepped on an emotional landmine.

I don’t think the bullying that happened to me was all that big of a deal. I managed to avoid all physical confrontations and it was mostly verbal. But how much it affected me was a huge deal. I learned to accept that people didn’t want to be my friend and that was ok. There is a lot more I don’t want to bother going into now. It warped a significant part of my underlying structure.

I have accepted the experience and absorbed it. No it isn’t right that I had to go through that crap but it did happen and what I can do is deal with the results in the best way possible. I sort of like taking people by the hand verbally and giving them a tour of the hell I went through. The tone of my voice when I talk about this stuff shows people that this is what I considered “normal” and I think it creeps them out a little.

I thought I had gotten that way with all of that time. I was poking at the fact that I can’t let people know what my nickname was because there are times when I can not deal with it being referred to without being prepared for it. In describing how hearing that nickname now makes me feel I got dumped ass first into an emotional mess. My friend said she had a hard time putting out there the phrase that made her feel isolated, embarrassed, and rotten. My nickname generates a sudden slamming of defenses, everything goes on alert, I feel like I am being attacked and I don’t feel safe. I noted that isolation felt like a comfort to me at that point. While I did not go fully into being triggered, it was like standing on a hill overlooking the battlefield and I could tell how awful it is.

I remember the decision that it was a horrible time and that I have many scars to work on because of it. I had forgotten the feel of it being a horrible time. I really don’t like this feeling. I am not even sure what I am afraid of. It isn’t like I have a problem with being disliked. Maybe it is the feeling of being disliked by everyone and there being no reason for it. Better to stay safe at home.

Which is really too bad because I am going to a friends wedding reception where a lot of my friends will be. Maybe this is an opportunity to get an experience that shows how much what I am afraid of isn’t true.

My friend Lucretia wrote an amazing piece about her days of being bullied. http://lucretia.amplify.com/2010/10/06/why-i-hate-my-childhood-nickname-a-tale-of-two-selves/

We were there together and so it has a lot of meaning to me. I wanted to have a record of the comment I wrote to her post.

I have no problem being “outed” as a bully victim. I am rather proud of how I used my status to my advantage (in dodgeball, I would get the other team to aim at me, I would duck quickly out of the way and my team would get more balls to throw).

I knew it was hard to be my friend. That is why I always left you an out, much to your dismay I found out years later. I didn’t realize you got it just as bad if not worse when you weren’t around me. No wonder you were able to stay friends with me. There was no benefit to not being my friend like there was for many others.

The bullies in our school were pretty pathetic when it came to nicknames, weren’t they. I am proud/impressed you can put your nickname out there. That is one piece of information about my being bullied days that I can’t have exposed.

There are times when I am ok with it and it doesn’t bother me. I feel strong and I can tell people that stupid name. And then someone will mention it when I least expect it and I feel open and exposed and raw all over again. I learned that I can’t let others have that info because I will never know if I can handle it coming back at me all the time. No one has treated me poorly with it, it is said with love and caring. But to have someone who wasn’t there mention it when I am not expecting it will send me over an edge. Sometimes.It is a risk I am no longer willing to take.

Thank you for sharing yet another piece of a time we shared together. You and your bits and pieces have helped me a lot in getting a much more realistic view of that part of my life and what I still do that causes me problems because of it.

And because I can’t shut up, I wrote a second comment:

I gotta say, I miss my friend Tia. I thought the name was one of the coolest ones ever.

I really like this Lucretia chick I am getting to know. She doesn’t have the self destructive nature Tia did and is really fabulous. She has a lot of the good parts of Tia. But I didn’t mind what could be considered the bad parts of Tia. They just were. I hate how much bad things happened to Tia, so much so that this really cool name that I loved ever since I was a kid needed to be put aside.

But I am also glad that it can be put aside and a name you have always loved can grow to take over.

I will miss Tia, but I can get used to Lucretia (I still have to slow myself down and sound it out to spell it. LOL).

I debated putting it as a note on facebook but I think it is a little too much exposure and a little too much of a downer to put it there. I don’t seem to be able to edit things down when I really want to tell something.

I was bullied extensively in elementary school. I was the sensitive child that could be counted on to give a large reaction to any teasing. For over four years, my social identity was the school scapegoat. It defined a lot of my life and a lot of how I handle people to this day.

I was different than most which is one of the reasons I was targeted. One of these differences is, for me, Jr High was a godsend. I loved it. I learned how to turn my strangeness into social acceptability. My family life improved with my parents’ divorce. High School wasn’t as good because I was the same size fish in a bigger pond but it wasn’t bad. College was golden because I got to blossom into the weirdo I truly am.

Another difference I seem to have is I can’t say it gets better. For as long as I can remember, I have wanted out. I haven’t been selfish enough to do anything to myself but I have actively wished to have my life end for at least 26 years. From the time I was 18, I was only suppose to have to hold out until I was 42. That was an extremely hard year to deal with because I had hoped so hard it would be the end. I am still here and I accept that. My take on ending your own life is that no matter how much you hurt, you transfer that pain to every single person that knows you and it multiplies for those that love you. I am not that mean.

Life has its good moments and its bad moments. The thing for me is the good moments makes it good to be there just in that moment and the bad moments fill up all the rest of the time. The good moments don’t make up for the bad moments.

For one year, I had the opportunity to live life that felt like it was worth living. It came crashing down hard at the end of that time but it was enough to show me that it is possible to get there. It will take a change in me for it to happen, not a change in what is around me.

Life rather sucks right now. I have some bright moments and a hell of a lot of really crappy moments. Getting moving is really hard and I fail myself repeatedly. But I am working on it. I feel this is something I have to go through to get to where it feels like it is worth it. There is a lot of work to do and I have a lot to learn from this craptastic time. I don’t feel it is worth it right now but I have faith that it will be.

I cannot honestly say “It gets better.” I can say I believe that it is possible for it to get better and that it is a worthy goal to work towards while you are stuck on this ball of dirt waiting until the end.

I have emails I need to write. Laying in bed, they compose themselves in my head in great detail. When I get the computer in front of me, the job seems to enormous to even start. I know that if I start and leave it almost but not completely done, I will probably not come back to it and won’t send it.

They are serious type things that need care and understanding in the writing. They are not major life issues but they are things that would clear up problems and issues instead of letting them fester. I seem to be the one that is aware of the problem and the one that always addresses it first, it is my job to instigate the process. Those that are on the other end are good at living without a solution. It is possible for them to ignore the problem and pretend it isn’t there. I am not so good at tolerating these sorts of things and I get worked up about it. I do own that I set things up so that I am the one that has to make the first move. I think there is a good chance I wouldn’t handle someone coming to me pointing out a problem if I wasn’t ready for it. If I have to take the first step, I am guaranteed to be ready when it comes time to deal with it. If the other person is not one to take the first step, then they are probably well practiced at dealing with things with others bring them up.

It sure would be nice to get to a point where there is a little more balance. I don’t know if this is a possibility or just a pipe dream but sure is a nice idea.

Multi-dimensional wavelength of celestial intent

Blight Me

I love this wordplay.

I just did a phone interview for a job possibility in San Mateo. It is a financial firm with global offices. Not my fav but something I am very familiar with.

I was told it was very stay in the box like a place and it turns out they are looking for someone that can go outside the box somewhat. They are getting requests to build photoshop and illustrator things in ppt so they can be edited last minute by the clients, affects that look like flash in ppt, layouts that look like InDesign, and presentations that don’t looked canned. There are last minute projects that need things that are not normally done and then the inbetween time they do standard updates. This is so up my alley.

There were a couple of questions I had a hard time answering because they seemed so within normal standards I couldn’t imagine how else the situation could be handled to know what to talk about. How do you handle getting written edits for an update via pdf, handwritten, whatever and then have the client come to you in the middle of the update and tell you other edits. How do you make the client feel like they have been heard. Ummmm I do my job. I make the edits from whatever written source I have been given. I stop and listen and talk with the client focusing on them. I make the edits I have been given my them as well. If needed I will note the edits with the written edits and confirm with the client which ones win if there is a conflict between two instructions. It was sort of like trying to describe how do you walk to the corner. It is hard to know exactly what is being looked for as an answer because it is so simple and standard you don’t know what to say.

I find I am shaky. Yes I need to eat but I did have a shake and my meds at 10am and zoned out until 12:30pm when I got the call from the recruiter. The call was from 1:00 to 1:30. I searched some samples and sent them out. I got a follow up call from my recruiter around 2:45. I have a hard time believing so much time has gone by. It is 3pm. Yes I need to eat.

I think I am also shaky due to stress. I would not normally continue to be shaky this long afterwards but I am working within the current paradigm and this appears to be a feature. I think I got more stressed afterwards when I ended up facing actually getting the job than I did when I was working on getting the job. The starting on this Monday is really weirding me out.

I am happy it is only three weeks (if it turns out the way the recruiter thinks but she seems out of step with them at this time). Getting to San Mateo by 8:30 every morning is going to be difficult. Getting to San Mateo from home at any time is difficult. But work is work and I need to do whatever I can. I feel confident about doing the actual work and meeting their needs. I am learning that I am a conformist and I adjust to the environment I am in (to a certain point). Once I am there, I will fit the niche they need me for and make them happy. My problem places are ones where they expect me to do things their way without telling me what their way is. I feel this is not a place like that. They have specific needs.

I want the work but I do not want to face getting to San Mateo or the hard deadline or global structure. Everything else sounds great. They have an on-site cafeteria. I was just noticing to myself (I may have posted it somewhere) that I like places like that. The hard time deadline will probably be good for me. I will make the trip to San Mateo work for me. I am thinking I might even switch to an early schedule to avoid traffic. It has happened in the past and it will be interesting to see if it can happen again. It could be that I prefer to get up either before everyone or after everyone.

Since they want me to start right away (assuming everybody does really want to go forward with my couple of time things I can’t change) a lot of things I have scheduled will have to be dropped.

I am noticing that I am not liking things that are taking the fast track. I used to thrive being in the fast track and now it is really hard to deal with. Maybe like how some people who get sick around cigarette smoking after they quit smoking themselves. I was addicted to the speed of life and could turn on a dime. Now I feel like I am fast as a fish but turn like a cow (to paraphrase HHGTTG).