2:21pm

Good morning everyone - : )

I am trying to stay positive lately - I know it is the only way to keep afloat. There is this problem with me: I am too lazy, often, to want to put up a fight. I am, frankly, tired of keeping myself upright. Every time I fall, or find myself knocked down, I use it as a sort of a test: will anyone help me up? Please, someone help me up! just to come back to the same realization every time:

 

"no one is coming to save you

get up."

This post saved me once, and now it has remained a nagging voice in my head. Other notable factors in my earthly salvation have been the thought of doing it for Adrian, the goal to actually make friends, or at least to find out whatever the heck is wrong with me, and Black's song of irony & sarcasm "Wonderful Life".
I know there are reasons to live and I know that you feel better when you get up and do the life, but I hate it sometimes. I hate having to get up. I only get up sometimes because I can't take the guilt of laying down. I hate having responsibilities and I hate being such a problem for myself sometimes. I don't hate myself - but I think the person inside of me is someone a little different from the person holding it all in. I don't know. I guess I am just sad and homesick and a little bit annoyed that things didn't turn out the way that I wanted. 

5:45pm

Had a break in what I was doing - I guess that I have resentment towards my job and a nagging feeling that there is danger, or that I need to be on alert. That I need to keep myself in good health on all fronts and that I am not protected. A feeling that I want to turn back around and knowing that I can't and that I must push through with a job I don't like and this horrible feeling, just this horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach and all over everything- it isn't an easy thing to swallow. I just feel like I wake up and am completely alone - that there is nobody to talk to. At the end of the day you can cry yourself into an existential sleep and wake up feeling like you need to slog through the day. But on a morning where you have nothing to do and you just feel guilty and like the last remains of yourself - your dreggs and sediment - are all that's been gathered up of yourself to complete the difficult task of living everyday; and you have to muster that up every day. It feels like I am just tired, and I'm sure it isn't helping that I have somewhat lost my sense of smell, taste, and half my hearing for now, due to a sickness I just went through with about 10 days ago, so I don't have a good sense of anything that is going on around me. I am outside and it is sunny and breezy, but with a low temperature. I can't smell the grass. I don't feel present in this world around me. Maybe that's why I have a heightened interest in films and such these past days. Whenever I don't feel comfortable in where I am or who I am, I turn to others' lives. To someone else's story . . . I just can't feel anything right now and I don't feel present. I am sort of coming back to a sense of feeling, but when I do it's just because something reminds me of what I had, and what I want and that I am not where I want to be, even on my journey to a different place to land. And I feel anxiety, resentment, homesickness, and dread. I feel sadness and disappointment and frustration and extreme loneliness where I simply cannot find a single person to turn to. Things will smooth out, but I am numb. And regaining emotional capacity and feeling will not be pretty. 

But I bought a jacket from Kidsaint. For $384. Its title is "I am safe inside uncertainty". It is coming with a custom quote of Exodus 33:15: "If your presence will not go with me, do not carry us up from here." And I am feeling hopeful because of that. Everything will be okay. Someday, perhaps, someone will hold me like I am held in my maladaptive stories. Whether that is stories of Dale Cooperesque knights in shining armor, or the shows I watch to cope. As Kidsaint says, "we are all just trying to cope with being alive". 
Maybe if I could rid myself of all fear. Fear is the root of all evils. Fear is my enemy, and fear is what kills. We are afraid. We are all afraid. We are afraid of showing ourselves, of being responsible, of answering calls, and of failing. We are afraid of showing up, of being punished, of reliving experiences, of experiences that haven't happened, or of never experiencing something. We are afraid. I live inside myself because my own world inside my head and heart is the only coating for all the fear that I would be running through in the raw, otherwise. 

I miss my family, and I am only an hour away from them. But I carry a heavy weight in my heart and a lump of charcoal in my throat. 

I have also made a playlist, finally, that I have long had plans to make. I have had an idea for a playlist of devastation like this since who knows how long. What I believe to be one of the most, if not The Most, saddest songs in existence has just begun playing right now: Happy Birthday Jane, by The Enemy. It is a song checkpointing what was probably my deepest plunge into depression to date. My sister's name is Jane. And I just don't know that I have ever recovered from that time. I still think about it, and I am still trying to regain something that cannot be regained. I lost a part of myself then, and I guess that that is what I am still dealing with and looking in the face when I wake up - atop the ceiling lies the point blank and hardest truth. "You have no one to turn to". Because I wasn't chosen. Because I was left rejected on the sidewalk to deal with life myself. A choice to respect, but a choice I cry about to this day. So you see, in the midst of a job I don't like at all, a move I hadn't planned at all, and a general fear that I know is unnecessary, old wounds are easier put on hold. It's just that they don't cooperate at all when you wake up on a day off and stare at the ceiling talking to your dread like it's a den of lions that have their mouths taped shut, but are no less terrifying somehow.

Anyway, the show will go on, whether the dancers dance or not, whether the chorus girls remember their lines or stand empty, and whether the puppets are fresh and lively or limping across the stage. All I can do is put on a brave face - a brave face shows faith in something that has not happened yet. But it will come. It will come . . . 😔

Here's to rejection sensitivity disorder and all the other wonderful things in life. <3 <3

-SS

7:10am

Good Morning, Club!!

I'm so tired, it's insane. I haven't done anything besides move boxes, pack boxes, unpack boxes, clean things, buy things, watch a show, and yap. Which is actually kind of a lot of things.
I have to leave in about 30 minutes for my first training at my new job - not the fancy cafe or cozy space at my beloved Brewhalla, but a Caribou in the town where I now live, about an hour away from my hometown ( close in comparison ). Things are adjusting well, I am not greatly moved by all of this ( I suppose God puts me through things at the times He sees fit ), and I think the job will be pretty easy. Plus I will have more time for the things I love, and {hopefully} a better schedule. Not a better one, but a better kept one. 
But I haven't touched a page in weeks. I haven't read a book, I haven't written in my diary, I haven't jotted down a single poem besides shopping lists and some thoughts I finally had scraped up the other night. Don't even speak to me about my devotions. My adherence to the things necessary to my life in the long-term (and short term, too) has been non-existent. And I am the greatest slacker to my own routine. And Spotify is removing my favorite artists one by one. Okay just Cinerama among my favorites, so far, but what will become of everyone else on there when one by one, people are being removed? All of that is out of my control and therefore very distressing. My routine is within my control to a point and is also therefore very distressing. And I always write about all of these things because they are the cover soil, layered over roots of guilt and disappointment in myself for other things I cannot seem to remove from my life. For things I am in the process of removing. For things about myself that make no sense. What if I am just trying to categorize myself? What if I don't understand things at all? What if my faith makes no sense? What if I just misunderstand everything? What if I will be condemned because I blur things in my own mental vision for peace of mind . . . ? Because I can't be angry . . . because I can't heal . . .  because I can't get away or say no or convince anyone or shake the blame that I feel born with for something I can't name? Because I hate groups and I hate people because I always feel that they see something inherently bad in me - (except J and his family) - because I can't get back what I want and I lost something I just thought I had and I feel disgusted by a feeling from my past that isn't nostalgic but isn't traumatic . . . rather, somewhere in between.  A sense of loss I developed at 6 years old, a sense that I was grasping onto something I couldn't keep - would never be old enough to realize fully - and was proven right. A sense that I wasn't worthy. Condemned because I can't figure everything out and condemned because I would try to and condemned because I think I know a thing or two and because sometimes, in other places, I do feel angry. I am wrong for having a desire, for trying to satisfy it, for believing it can be satisfied, and I am wrong for doubting and being complacent. As David Copperfield describes the age old feeling: 

"What meals I had in silence and embarrassment, always feeling that there were a knife and fork too many, and those mine; an appetite too many, and that mine; a plate and chair too many, and those mine; a somebody too many, and that I!"
(...) "what answers I never got, to little observations that I rarely made; what a blank space I seemed, which everybody overlooked, and yet I was in everybody's way;"
David Copperfield, Chapter 8

I need to get up now, and get ready, but I am lucky to have had these moments to write. I will write next time, when hopefully, my room is clean and my life is somewhat in order. <3

-SS