residue » passivity

Baby Steps Suck

Luz — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:48:33 +0000

I’ve been feeling okay. I have. I just keep thinking about a penis across my face, in my mouth, inside me.

I feel the tears pushing their way out, over, down my face. I can’t stop them. I can’t stop anything. I’m so tired of this fucking existence, but no one cares. No one. I’m all alone because everyone’s always so wrapped up, so wrapped up, always telling me later. I feel like a stupid little girl pulling on her mother’s skirt, calling for her attention. Reality itself is playing Mommy. I’m all alone. I want it all to stop hurting, but it won’t.

It hasn’t even been so bad lately. Lately, it’s only every few hours. It isn’t the whole day like it used to be. I don’t spend the whole day feeling like I do as I write this.

Frightened senseless, little me is standing in a big world. And like a child, I want someone to hold my hand in this loud place. I don’t understand what’s going on. I want someone to hold me and tell me, it’s going to be okay.

But that’s childish. I’ve learned that waiting for someone to help me is like waiting for Godot. In waiting, I suffer and increase the likelihood I’ll continue the passivity ensuring my continued suffering.

It’s why I’ve started eating better, visiting my doctors, and started therapy back up in the last week: that realization. If I don’t do something, I’m only allowing the suffering to continue. In other words, I’m hurting myself.

So, today, I threw away the remaining half of last week’s birthday cake, I took the medication to clear my long-endured sinusitis symptoms, and I ate breakfast before noon. Yesterday, I cleaned my apartment, had sex with my boyfriend, and worked out. My glutes hurt, but I’ve only had three panic attacks today, none of which were paralyzing, more like five-minute bouts of light crying—not even sobbing.

I’m laughing at how ridiculous it is that three bouts of sadness constitute a good day, observing the standard of living I can currently expect from life, and I’m struggling to accept who I am, where I am.

I’ve had the realization that I’m at the beginning. I can either accept that and keep working hard, doing all the things I know I’m supposed to do—exercising, having new experiences, pushing the current boundaries of my awareness until they break—or I can sit back with bitterness born over my lousy childhood. I can be my own mother, or I can be a child.

I’m struggling to make healthy choices. I’m struggling to be okay with my mind as it grapples with the consequences of these choices. I’m struggling to be okay with struggling.

Thank you, all the people that help me get through my days.

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Terminator / Feminism

Luz — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 02:16:50 +0000

I just watched Terminator: Salvation for the first time, a movie I’ve concluded was made to ease the loss of control Americans feel. Who can blame us? The state of the economy is enough to give anyone a panic disorder.

So Hollywood gives us this action-packed film full of familiar things like salvation, duty to society; the empowerment of the poor, and watered-down lipstick feminism in the form of a hot young girl who took some kickboxing lessons. It’s about everything the first decade of the twenty-first century has been about.

This movie is a reflective product of this culture, but I still don’t know whether Hollywood is trying to promote a revolution or if they’re giving me a controlling substance, a Media pill to render me passive by satisfying my impulse to rebel against the dominant party to the right of me. Somehow, it’s hard to believe commercialists have my best interests at heart.

Then again, movies like The Women make me feel like a more assertive model for women is represented in mainstream media: we can have it all, but do we want it? Is it even healthy? And do we really want to reach our goals if it means betraying other women, and therefore ourselves? The movie says “no” to all three questions. Instead, it argues women need women friends to help them do what they cannot possibly do on their own: survive this life in one emotional piece.

I knew what kind of woman I wanted to be by watching my sister Maggie’s successes and failures, my mother’s philosophies at work, and my girl friends’ misconceptions revealed for what they are. And all of them had one thing in common: they weren’t hot, young girls who had taken kickboxing lessons nor knew how to hotwire a car. They were stupid when they were young, ignorant through most of their 20s, and sometime after they turn 30, they’re trying to fix the mess they’d made the last few years. I want to see more movies about women going through all that, and being okay with it, even as they try to prevent it. I want a heroine as barely in control as I am. Except, this woman, unlike me at my worst, is trying to be okay with it all–the fuck-ups, the wrinkles, and the betrayal. I want movies to be made about that kind of woman. I want movies to be made about that kind of woman, because I don’t have any real life examples.

What I mean to say is, there’s also a crisis of womanhood. Most of our mothers didn’t survive the war. They’re victims of the patriarchy with Stockholm Syndrome. Isn’t it worth considering whether it’s healthy to even engage with these women we call Mom , if only for those times when we are most vulnerable to judgment? Maybe rather than fight an obstacle, we should sometimes focus on avoiding it, at least until we’re ready to confront it?

Of course, the risk is becoming addicted to avoiding.

I spend at least some time every day writing for self-improvement. But last week, during therapy, I realized I’ve been avoiding people. I realized I’ve been avoiding interacting them because it’s painful, because I fear them looking at me and judging me. I realized I’ve been avoiding my social anxiety.

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Self-Trust

Luz — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:44:02 +0000

I’ve been venturing out of my usual work-home routine in an attempt to fight off my depression. So far, I’ve discovered social situations emotionally exhaust me. All the effort of interacting, of lying, drives me further away from reality toward something I hate, a life too normal, a passive observer. I find myself watching TV shows and window shopping online.

Thankfully, I finally woke up today and did something for myself. I called my therapist and scheduled an appointment. It hurts my pride to admit I’ve been ignoring my therapist’s calls for some weeks now.

It’s something I do when I get really bad: I abandon my therapy, sometimes even my meds, though that’s not the case now. I slowly start to ignore people, slack on my responsibilities, piss some people off. The last time I stopped going to therapy, I stayed away for a year, hiding out with my books and my boyfriend at the time. It took me another year of weekly sessions to start taking control of my life.

So, I should be proud that I caught myself long before I lost complete control. I fasted and feasted the last few days. For weeks, I’ve regretted every moment I’m not in my home. I’ve passively endured the days, but today, I took an action.

It wasn’t premeditated. Suddenly, I was locating her number in my contacts. Yet that isn’t what surprises me. I picked myself up with some help from Sam, yet only how little I feel right now toward today or any day, past or future, resonates. And somehow, that’s a good thing.

Maybe it’s dissociation, but I’m going to choose to believe I’m just feeling at peace, feeling like it’s all going to be okay. I’m in an up mood, I think, but I’m trying to trust it. I’m trying to learn how to trust myself again. So far, I’ve managed to stop blaming myself for the assaults and abuses, which in turn has quieted the screaming insults I hurt myself with all day. If I can sustain this, I know I’ll find my former vivacity.

I don’t believe I’ll find my former self. I don’t even believe she’s a healthy someone to rediscover. But my old love of life: I miss that. That’s worth rescuing from this depression. If I focus on that, if I just commit to enjoying this goddam life the best way I know how, and I trust that I know how, I’ll be okay. I just have to trust that I’ll be okay.

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