Random Irritations

I don;t think this new medication is working for me. In fact, I think it's making me worse. I have more days that it just feels too hard to do anything. Like today, when all day the thought of even getting dressed both made me tired and sent me into a panic. I know I should bathe and do girly stuff like shave my legs but I can't be bothered; it just seems too hard. I guess that's why I didn';t shave my legs for a long time. But now that I've started I don;t really want to stop. honestly, I feel cleaner when I do it.

The cats have a brand new way of annoying me--by tipping over the trash can in the bathroom and dragging the garbage all over the place so the floor is continually covered with dryer lint, old q-tips, sanitary napkin wrappers, etc. Honestly, you;d think they were dogs sometimes. Also, another feline creature has decided that the laundry basket is a good place to pee in the night, so I am continually doing laundry to keep up. Fortunately except for once whichever feline it is has coinfined this behaviour to the dirty laundry.

Sometimes I hate living in a small town. Like tonight, we got a yen (no pun intended) for Chinese food. The nearest Chinese place is 30 miles away. Darling Husband graciously offered to go and get the food, but it's still 30 minutes there, 30 waiting for the order (okay, maybe less) and 30 back. We have a chest with a hot pad we can pack the stuff in so hopefully it won;t be too cold by the time it gets to the table.

Why is it that I have developed this habit of staring down the street every time I pass the dining room window to see if the toxic bitch's car is in her driveway? It hasn't been a lot. Maybe she's hanging out with her shiny new boyfriend. Maybe she's going to move! I can only hope.

About the only good thing I can say about recent days is that I have stopped dreaming about vampires.

Must drink more water.

Dreams and Vampires

Last night I dreamed that my mother invited this rather well-known Vampire to a house-warming party for me. There are other details of the dream I remember, like the nature and location of the house: what it looked like, what the yard was like etc. But the thin that really stands out for me is my mother inviting this Vampire. Which now that I think of it, I guess she really couldn;t well do, because it has to be the person who lives in the house who does the inviting for the invitation to be effective.

But the thing is, I've been dreaming A LOT about Vampires, and this particular Vampire, for a long time now. The night before last, a Vampire offered to buy me a pair of malachite earrings. He said to me, "If I bought these for you would you wear them?" and I said "Only if they weren't too big." And several nights ago I dreamed I was at a party at a bookstore in town with this Vampire and Alan Ginsberg.

I don;t get what's up with all these Vampires in my subconscious. Okay, we HAVE been watching a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs in our spare time. But we've done that before and it never affected me this way. Is it that I feel like my blood is being sucked out? or that the people aroound me are soul-less? or what? Is it because I feel threatened or feel like I need a supernatural protector or is it just a projection of someone I know in the conscious world who sucked out my soul, of whom I've been thinking a lot lately? Don;t know. But it puzzles me and is actually beginning to disturb me to the point where, when this Vampire shows up in my dreams I begin to wonder about it and then I wake up. Which, in some book I read, is not helpful. This book said you should stay with your dreams, however disturbing, and see where they take you.

So I guess I'm going on a ride with the Undead. I'll let you know how it goes...

Where's the List?

If you've been keeping up with me and my blog for the last few years, you know that this is the date when I usually publish the list of all the books I've read in the past year--often over a hundred volumes. So where's the list this year?

Well the truth is--and I'm somewhat ashamed to admit it--that with everything else I have not been doing all that much reading this year and the books I HAVE read I can;t remember. Which isn't saying much for the quality of what's out there these days!

I did read The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger recently and enjoyed it. I am currently trying to get through the latest "Bloody Jack" book (Mississippi Jack) and not liking it as much as I have liked others in the series. But I have so much trouble remembering farther back than that; it almost seems worthless to try.

So if you were waiting for this year's list, I'm sorry; there just won't be one.

Trigger Unhappy

Well, I woke up feeling like shite anyway.

Then I'm reading one of my regular forums and someone made a comment in response to one of my comments that really triggered me. I'm trying to tell myself that's why I feel this horrid combination of depressed, furiously angry, afraid, frozen...my therapist says when you hit a PTSD trigger you get frozen like that...

That and the fact that I just can't respond to the comment for various reasons, one of which being that it has to do with religion. And when people get entrenched in religious beliefs, well, there's just nothing more to be said. It's like ramming your head against a wall.

Most religious entrenchments don;t affect me this way. I can just blow them off. But having had some experiences with a particular religion that were...shall we say, less than healthy, I have a particularly hard time with that one. I want to be able to say, "Believe what you believe and it doesn't bother me." But there's an ego factor involved in this one that is curiously disguised as lack of ego. And you just can't discuss it in any rational fashion without getting "the knowing smile" and the general response that "when you reach a certain point you'll understand." Which just activates me on so many levels. It seems to assume that--and I'm having a hard time going on here without naming the religion so forgive me--when you reach a particular place in your spiritual development you'll just naturally see that everything you've believed before is wrong. I don;t believe that.

My own spiritual views have a LOT of leeway for various paths. But any path that masquerades as being open while so many of its adherants (sp?) practice a One True Way philosophy really gets me.

So I'm triggered today. I want to go back and hide under the bedclothes. I want to say, "well, of course from the inside it looks that way to you." I want to...do something to feel better. And I feel helpless and powerless and like I'm going to be punished if I do any of those things.

So I'm sitting writing this blog, for which I also feel as though I'm going to be punished, and smoking way too early in the day and feeling like I'm going to have a heart attack.

Happy New Year's Eve.

A Sequel

1:23 am Christmas Morning. Snowing heavily. I can;t sleep. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say, I am afraid to sleep.

This fear has tormented me every since I was a little girl and learned the so-called "Children's Prayer:"

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

This verse always set me off thinking about dying, of course. And at six or seven as now, having some undefinable and unknowable Lord take my soul did not seem adequate compensation for a life cut short. So I would lie in bed in terror that I would die before waking and wondering about death. I was a morbid child as I am a somewhat morbid adult.

I have never lost anyone close to me but I have known many people whose lives have been cut short in various ways. Some just lay down and never woke up again. This is the kind of death that scares me most. The idea this could happen. Without warning .

So it is Christmas morning and I am afraid to lie down beside my snoring husband and go to sleep.

There are things I want to do yet. Small things, but things all the same. I want to watch the movies we rented for the holiday. I want to finish the book a friend in Liverpool was kind enough to send me. I want to learn, one day, to play the Irish flute well. I want to eat a real cheeseburger again, not a weight watchers' substitute. As I said, little things. Not earth shaking things. Not things of consequence. Perhaps some people would even say selfish things. But does that justify the possibility of death? Nothing does.

Yet we all die. I'm having a hard time with that concept and thinking about it a lot, as this blog and my last show. I guess many people never think about it or console themselves with religion but I don;t seem able to do either. Maybe because I've never lost someone close to me I fear it all the more. But then, not many people are clsoe to me, so why shouldn;t I fear it? If you have 20 friends losing one doesn;t make much of a dent. If you have 2, losing one is half the world.

Maybe that was crass, but it's verging on two in the morning now.

I really need to sleep but I am still afraid.

Morbid Thoughts

A friend of mine had to have his cat put to sleep yesterday. Another started a thread on my fave forum about remembering those who have left us in this last year. And I suppose it's not unreasonable to be having these thoughts as the old year dies (whenever you celebrate that fact) and the new year comes in.

So I've been thinking a lot about death--my own and death in general. Well, to be perfectly honest, I think about my own death a lot. I'm terrified of it. Actually, a strange mixture of terrified of it and attracted to the idea, like looking over the edge of a tall building and feeling an overwhelming urge to jump.

I did not used to be terrified of death. I was scared of the thoughts that drove me towards bringing my own about sometimes, but the thought of death never scared me until I had a really bad acid trip and nearly died. And I suppose I had an out of body experience then, but instead of its being really full of light and love and all that crap that it's supposed to have, it was nasty. So I've been terrified of my own death ever since although sometimes I crave it.

I can;t stand the idea of me not being in some form. I can;t conceive of it. I don;t think any human can conceive of it, which is why we make up glorious stories about whatever afterlife seems best to us and go with that when we get too scared. But I don;t know what I believe anymore. I was brought up Christian, but I never believed in that much; it's hard to when your father is the minister and you know all the tricks behind the curtain, so to speak. I went through a brief period of devout Hinduism. I am now nominally Wiccan, so I should believe in some form of reincarnation. I guess I do. It makes sense. Energy is conserved somehow. It has to be; this is a natural law, isn;t it?

But then I think, if there is reincarnation then it has to apply to everything. We can't be egotistical to the point of just applying it to human beings. Every spider and every bird, every blade of grass even, must reincarnate. And how is that possible? Maybe if you equate humans with blades of grass...or maybe as humans increase certain species die out and that explains a lot of mass extinctions...I just don;t know. I can't wrap my mind around it.

One time, shortly after my last miscarriage, I saw my cat eat a spider. And the spider was there and living one moment, gone the next. The sight revolted me so much I had to throw up. It still disturbs me that life and death can be so narrowly entwined--living in one moment, dying in the next. Maybe that's what frightens me most: the thought that I am not ready and I may never be ready: that death may come suddenly from some unknown source and I will not have time to prepare.

I know this is why a lot of people turn to religion. It helps them prepare somehow. It does not do that for me.

I am home alone and writing this is freaking me out to the point that I think I have to stop or move on. Whatever. I can;t make sense of it and I can;t know anything about it and that naturally triggers me.

I guess I just have to live with that, as I have to live with so much else.

A good day?

I got out of bed. I brushed my teeth. I got dressed. Somtimes, a woman on my BPD forum says, that constittutes a good day. The fact that I did dishes is a bonus.

But I wonder when I'll feel better. I wonder how long I have to keep trying different drugs, trying to find the one that will help. Another BPD woman has told me, "When they find the right ones, everything is different." I am obviously not there yet.

Watched Live Free or Die Hard last night. I love those movies. I like watching things explode. Is that weird? At least it distracted me from this grey place for a couple hours and that's good thing. If weird.

I have a loving cat in my lap and that's a good thing.

I can;t think of any other good things right now. I can;t think of any particularly BAD things either. I guess some people would consider that a good thing in and of itself, but I don;t. I'm tired of feeling nothing at all.