"11:07AM: peed and thought things like ‘did i respond to colin’s texts’ in the same neutrally focused ‘tone’ of the pee, which stopped when the pee stopped.
11:12AM: can’t find liquid antacid. keep wretching and swallowing prevomit stomach acid. last food eaten was raspberry cookies, over 24 hours ago.
3:19PM: want to be talking in insane unprecedented 9:47AM update voice all the time. funny to read 11:12AM update after writing insane update."
Eight years ago, around this time (12:20p.m.), I was sitting on my bed at my mom's condo, writing the "insane unprecedented 9:47AM update" on Adderall, after having made myself vomit because I'd eaten Xanax after snorting heroin and then slept irregularly from 8:25a.m. to 3:15p.m. the previous night. I would then stay awake, mostly typing for a little over 62 hours.
Just got so sad for me, typing that. Not a self-pitying sad...this is a new kind of sad that I've been feeling lately. I guess it's kind of self-pitying. More like "compassionate grief" than pity. I don't feel like "poor me: the joke of the universe" or "poor me: a hopeless case who will never get out of this" anymore, which I associate with pity.
Actually, some part of me does still feel like I will never get out of this.
The circumstances of my life have, on the one hand, changed greatly since 2013. But there is still this wall in me. I build up momentum for things and then I get afraid and I don't follow through. At this moment in 2013-time, my current tasks were to assemble recommendations for an apartment in New York I had no means to live in, but "grand plans" (if I'd been being honest with myself at the time, I knew I wouldn't follow through with any of these plans) to attain those means.
Currently I'm tasked with applying to grad schools with the same feeling. I'm trying to complete volunteer training which will help not only me get into grad school, but help the world in a small way, and some irrational part of me feels like I can do nothing but fuck up the world, because I've only proven time and time again that the only thing I'm good at doing is fucking up my own life. That was helpful for me to write. When I write sentences with lots of "buts" and "ands" and "becauses" and commas I know I'm veering into irrational territory ("and" can be neutral; it's mostly the "buts" and the "becauses").
Before I started typing this I took a shower, remembering my life in 2013, thinking about how everyone close to me right now seems to be encountering a depression. On Monday, my therapist and I decided I was "depressed," but we found a way out of it. She really took on a tone...that...well. The things she said and the way she said them are still clonking around my head, which is actually one of the telltale signs that this kind of therapy is working, so I'm taking it as a good sign. Here are some key phrases:
"You have a choice to do or to not do any of these things. This is your life."
"That didn't work out so well for your mother, did it."
"I don't know, Megan. Do you want your mother's life?"
"You can just go on fixing up a house that doesn't have your name on the lease, taking on more and more responsibilities that no one asked you to do, sleeping ten hours a night and getting 'sick,' watching the time go by, or you can make a choice to claim your life."
"You know what comes naturally to you to do."
"Jung says consciousness is an act against nature. Do you know what that means? Against nature. It's the hardest thing on the planet to do. The majority of people walk around unconscious of their feelings and thoughts, they're just dictated by the stories they've always told themselves. We've known each other for a long time, now. I don't think you want to be one of those people, and I think you have it in you not to be. Otherwise I wouldn't be talking to you right now. You have some good ideas, some good intentions. You just need to put them to work."
"You are an expert at the path of least resistance. Do you want to go on like that?"
"This will be harder than quitting alcohol and drugs. [Pause]. Don't think I don't know how hard that is."
"You need some fight in you. Walk around the block stomping your feet. Pretend you're an Amazon, you know? [Okay] Be like the Amazons, just–don't cut your breasts off. [Did they really...did people really do that?] Well, yes and no–real in the sense that they were real mythological creations."
"This will be a choice that only you can make. I can help you as much as my role permits, but this is your life, Megan. This is up to you."
"You know–he probably already knows that about you. He probably already sees that you have trouble finishing projects. It's no use hiding it; it's no use pretending to be someone you're not. So, tell him about it, and tell him you want to change. Get him to hold you to it."
"My job is to help you harvest your life. I care about you, Megan. But it's your life."
After the session, I decided to make some changes. I told my boyfriend in a roundabout way that I knew I was bad at finishing things I start, and I didn't want to be that way, and I asked him if he thought I was "[felt too hard to say]," and he said "are you asking me if I think you're lazy and disorganized and [I forget the third word he said]?"
That means...he...some part of him has seen that I'm lazy and disorganized. I'm not dwelling on this, I'm just looking at reality. I appreciate what he said. I am lazy and disorganized. He sees the potential in me to be better, but if we're being honest, which is what I want to be in this life: I'm lazy and disorganized right now and it is making me depressed and it's an evil ouroboros feeding itself on the story of my life from beginning to end and it doesn't care about me it just wants to live my life for me so I don't have to think about it until the curtain closes and that's all folks. Disorganized is the big thing–laziness comes from having "too many things to do," and the feeling of the things becomes some amorphous glob, impelling me to "take a break and come back 'refreshed.'"
On the phone, we talked about how I feel a "fight" in me when I'm exercising. My therapist suggested exercising before I do my volunteer training, and I said I'd do that. She also suggested investing in an hourly planner, which I ordered after our session, and should be arriving today.
The funny thing: after our phone call, I stopped feeling sick. For the first time in years, for about a week prior to the phone call, I'd been experiencing something like seasonal allergies (congestion, headache, sore throat, cough, sneezing, runny nose, dizzy/spacey/sick feeling behind my head). Yesterday and today (Tuesday and Wednesday–we talked Monday) I've felt almost completely better.
My friend came to visit boyfriend and I yesterday and it sort of messed up my momentum. This morning I've been...just. Well. I slept poorly; boyfriend and I were up until 2a.m. watching "The Bachelor" last night, and in the morning I learned my friend is feeling really low and I wanted to help, and I had some emails to do and laundry to put away.
I could keep making excuses like this all my life until the curtain closes and that's all folks.
Writing, though, is something I wanted to do today. After showering, boyfriend asked if I was getting ready for the gym and I said, complexly guiltily, "yes but first I want to do some writing!"
I don't need to feel guilty about it, though. This is actually helping my emotional state...to write something...just...with no expectations attached to it. I feel so many expectations attached to anything I write now ("be good!" "be in your 'voice!'" "be a different voice!" "do fiction!" "do poetry!" "no, no, like actual poetry!" "no, no, like actual fiction!" "no, do autofiction again, but better!" "do a funny article!" "do a serious 'think piece!'" "do something, anything, that won't end up being what it is!"). So I end up writing nothing but overly detailed "day updates" with tiny handwriting in a five-year journal I have trouble maintaining in a daily-use way (meaning, I do retrospective updates every week or so, with an uncomfortably similar feeling of obligation I had about accounting for lost time after periods of "no updates" during my 2013 liveblog).
Last night, my friend asked if I'd been writing anything lately, and I said "no, not really, just journals." I felt something fall in me as I said that. I felt his and my boyfriend's faces change, hinting at "something known about Megan right now that we're not sure she knows," but probably meaning something else entirely, or probably something only I perceived. I'm probably projecting my own disappointment in myself onto them. I feel good when I'm writing. I miss feeling excited about it. I've been in this "missing writing" way for years. My friend said it took him years to start writing again after he got sober, and I...am...well. I'm just getting honest with myself about my own sobriety (I have close to six months–I'd miscounted, and I've been telling people "six months" but really it's five-and-counting–about three weeks ago I started going to 12-step meetings again, but before that I'd been white-knuckling after a period of insane marijuana use this summer).
Oh jeez. Haha.
Yeah, bit of a mess right now. It's okay though. I have choices now. Going to post this and then go to gym with boyfriend and then do volunteer training. Keep telling myself "it's going to be okay," but what does that mean? It's okay. What does "okay" mean? It's just...it. It's just living. It's just the one foot in front of the other dance until curtain closes and that's all folks, and endless opportunities to rebuke the ever-beckoning chance to actually write the script and act the part in the space between.
