System re-set? (mental vapors – code to self ahead)

Gig Thursday, been holed up since – haven’t left the house for anything, not food, not a walk, scarcely poked my head outside.

Ran out of sugar in the process – no candy, soda, what have you.

First couple days were *hell* - thought the top of my head would come off. Lots of weird nightmares.

Then started to lose the body fat where much of that crap is stored, and with it, the whole de-tox process. Didn’t drink a lot of water – grape juice instead, the water here’s nasty, even after filtering. Also it seems to mess with that broken tooth somehow – don’t know.

Today feel better, clearer-headed, though feel things lurking around the edges that I previously kept at bay with sugar and caffeine.

Think I’m going to ‘give in’ today – mostly because I’m completely out of anything edible.

So we’ll see – my period even shows signs of starting, after a several month hiatus! Whoo-hoo!

Though I had an odd thought – soon’s I put the last photo of whosis away, suddenly that zone is freed up again. Go figger. Remember: Correlation does not equal causation.

***
But anyway – my *gums* have been acting weird – remembering some Chinese med. idea about gums and guilt? and today Googled it and saw stress associated with gum disease.

So mind leaped to: Guilt --> eats gums, gums get rotten and nasty, bad stuff pools, eats teeth.

Does guilt make some kind of ‘hormone’ in the saliva, like fear makes cortisol? And does it float around and irritate your teeth and gums?

Hm. And how does the sugar play in?

I’m pretty sure anybody reading this will think I’m crazy for saying it, but my *sense* is that:
If I eat the sugar like a hungry baby, with no guilt, just filling the belly and meeting the emotional need,
Nothing bad happens.

Whereas, if I’m worried about calories, or weight, or any of the many, many, many
MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNYYYYYYYYYYYY

cultural shoulds attached to nearly *any* behavior,
suddenly I get fat, or feel sick, or bloated. I’ve just ‘swallowed’ something I ‘shouldn’t’.

Too bloody fucking complicated, if you ask me.

***
Also, fat has mainly been getting stored around mid-belly, which is a new one for me - use to be on upper legs (still is, but used to be *only* there - now it's both, oh joy :-)

The fat is in a zone that neatly divides second and third chakra, the lower portion being where 'old stuff' (emotional stuff, unfinished business?) is stored, and the upper portion, third chakra +/-? where the 'will' and one's main power source comes from.

So - eating all the sugar creates kind of this protective 'barrier' to me being aware of stuff I'm not quite ready to deal with yet? Kind of holds it at bay?

I'm pretty sure I need someone like ♥ to help me through this next bit - someone I can physically be with, who's not *necessarily* aware of what's going on for *me*, but who's open to experimenting with what's going on, which will allow *me* to do what *I* need to do.

I think most people are just a whole heckuva lot less *conscious* or *aware* of this stuff, and do it, kind of, unintentionally.

I sort of wish *I* could be as oblivious and unaware and just willy-nilly be out there grabbing for what I need, no guilt, no shame, no 'asking'. Just 'doing' and 'being' without all the insanely time-consuming ...

Ah! THAT's what people mean when they say I 'think too much'. I guess I kind of *knew* that? But, since I didn't have any other way of *doing* what I needed to do, I kind of just have/had to ignore them and keep right on going.

But now? Hm.

***
It seems like it may kind of go in layers, or cycles, for a while? til I get the hang of this. (Like Shrek, where the donkey says Shrek's layers are like a parfait.)

So - a few days without sugar? Maybe this will help me select *what kind of people* to be around - if I can handle them and not feel the need to recluse (?) for a week, or three days (the usual length) and not pile up on top of all my guilt/shame feelings for all the ways I 'fucked up' during my time with the people, then - well, then maybe things will change?

brain blarps

Blarp: A cross between a burp, a blurt and a - I don't know what. I just like the sound of it.

So. Onward...

First of all, as donated by friend G, at a dance the other night:

baby steps. It's ok to go slow, take your time, and - gasp! MAKE MISTAKES WHILE YOU LEARN HOW TO DO SOMETHING!

He didn't actually say all that - when I expressed concern about going 'too slow' in learning to use an unfamiliar technology, he simply gave me a big, encouraging grin and said, "Baby steps!"
Thanks, G! If only my parents had ever understood this basic cheerleading technique - sigh.

So, breaking the ensuing thoughts down into small bites to help unravel, untangle and overwrite the old thought-tapes that imprinted themselves in my infant cranium as a result of growing up with unsympathetic, unsupportive, clueless parents:

being allowed to go at your own speed

being allowed to MAKE MISTAKES!!!!!!!!
even if you’re really smart

not being punished for being really smart

smart people still make mistakes, and sometimes they make really big, really stupid mistakes. We’re still human, you know.*

being allowed to learn at your own pace (as distinguished from being allowed to learn at your own 'speed'- speed is the raw processing capacity for learning a *given* thing; 'pace' is when you're ready to move from one 'thing' to another, or possibly to the 'next', thing - these are all arbitrary symbolic assignments [?what word? almost said 'assignations' WRONG buffalo breath.] I mean, who gets to decide what's 'next', anyway? If Einstein had followed the 'tried and true' series of 'next' steps in life, he'd never have found his own path. So FUCK road maps, anyway. Get there however you want. Or better yet, stay home, don't go there AT ALL. Just go in your head, or something. Do something else ALTOGETHER, don't let 'them' fuck with you. The Joneseseses [or who-ever].)

(symbology SUCKS and feels REALLY REALLY LIMITING right now. I need to TALK and WAVE MY ARMS AROUND with some other REAL LIVE HUMAN BEAN who actually GETS it. NOW. Ahem.)

*I think my dad used to try to make me feel bad when I'd make mistakes because *he* often felt bad because of how smart I was - ok, let me try writing that again so it makes more sense.

So. My dad was really insecure, and didn't feel very smart a lot of the time.

Enter new baby girl, who at an unexpectedly early age shows great precociousness (yes, that would be the actual *definition* of 'precociousness', now, wouldn't it?)

So now dad feels even *more* insecure and self-conscious, because, dang it, here's this little *kid* who's constantly showing him up! And she doesn't even know it! And isn't even *trying* to make him feel bad - no, she manages to 'make him feel bad' by merely existing. This tiny, wee, brand-new baby girl stirs up such horrible feelings of insecurity in this young man that he feels compelled to (emotionally speaking) squash her like a bug. So that *he* can feel better, regain his manly sense of superiority. Or some such shit.

No, as the squashee, I *refuse* to have any sympathy for the squashER. I mean, come on - *I'm* the one who got to have my little innards splattered all over the pavement. Metaphorically speaking. Theoretically, there isn't even enough 'me' left to be capable of having sympathy for another being. Besides which, I'm the one we're having sympathy with, here. NOT him. Ok? Got it? Good.

***
Next thought-fragment:

being uninterrupted by the needs of others while you’re trying to learn how to do something

***
The thing that people from previous generations don’t understand, and even people only 10 years older, or sometimes only 5 or 6 years older, is that things are changing and have changed so fast that no one can keep up. It takes time, and energy, and focus to learn how to do all these new things, and still get all the *other* things done, as well. Especially when you have nobody to help you learn, nobody to CARE *if* you learn, or *what* you learn, let alone HOW you learn. Mostly they're just pestering you to GET ON WITH IT AND DON'T BOTHER ME WITH YOUR STUPID PROBLEMS.

So piss off, all y'all, while I figure out what the hell's WHAT here, and decide what *I* want to be doing with MY time, energy, and LIFE.

And THEN, *IF* I've got any time, energy, or LIFE *LEFT*, after all that, then MAYBE, if you're really really GOOD and NICE TO ME ALL THE TIME, I just MIGHT let you back in. To my life. MAYBE.
***

And just because our *technology* has leaped ahead at the speed of light in the last human years, doesn’t mean humans have ‘evolved’ to keep up. Yes, we’ve *adapted* to a certain degree, but our basic wiring, physiology, mental and emotional coping mechanisms haven’t changed. So there’s a massive cognitive dissonance, culture clash, etc. I'm pretty sure I don't want to be around when the results are in, when this asymptotic catastrophe curve gets close enough to ground zero to implode.

***
parents who expect you to do too much too fast because they are impatient, or you are too obviously smart (it took me a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time to get that if you're FEMALE (ack!) you're not supposed to be smart. Or, you're not supposed to show it. Or, you're supposed to hem and haw all the time and pretend not to get it so as not to step on anybody's toesies or hurt their little ... blech. Feeling ill, now. Must stop.

I guess,to be honest? I STILL don't get it. And I DON'T WANT TO!!!!! What the fuck, why the HELL should I fucking HIDE one of my best ATTRIBUTES, for FUCK's SAKE????? Jesus H. CHRIST on a fucking toothpick. I just don't GET people. ever. At ALL.)

Continuing... They put this pressure on you to grow, like those hothouse plants that are force fed nutrients so that they’ll be showy enough to sell at some particular time and place.

And that’s another thing: Feeling like you’re a performing seal or a trick pony or something. They only want you around if you’re somehow a feather in THEIR cap – you have no intrinsic value of your own, as a person, as a human being. You’re only valuable to them if they can PROJECT something onto you: Their needs, fears, wants, unrealized hopes and dreams; or, if you’re a SERVANT, and DO WHAT THEY TELL YOU; or, if you somehow COVER THEM WITH GLORY, in the reflected limelight of your successes and achievements, which they try to take credit for, again, as if you were a performing seal and they taught you all your tricks, taught you everything you know.

Which we all know is total, utter, complete CRAP, and, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit.


***

I am making
a big mess

you know how you get these theories
and then you try them out

and sometimes they turn out to be totally wrong

but sometimes, they turn out to be totally RIGHT?

Well, this time, I think I’m on to something. I mean, I’m *often* on to something, because I’m just brilliant that way.

But – THIS time, I think I’m REALLY on to something.

Ok ok already, what is it then, madame le ultra-brilliance?

It is this: When I was little, I was not allowed to be messy (and somehow, my mother never made the connection between her obsession with cleanliness and my fear to make a mess and my hyper-organizedness, which, even she, when I was a little kid, admitted blew her away. Maybe being organized was actually *hard* for her [yes, I would say so, given her *current* lifestyle], so I totally flummoxed her with the apparent ease with which I, this tiny little kid, with no training or experience, could put things together? Wow.)

Anyway. So NOW, as an ‘adult’, I’m making up for it. In spades. Or something. As in, “It’s MY house, MY life, and I’ll make a great big mess in it IF I WANT TO.” And you can’t stop me. So neener neener.

In summary? Because I wasn't allowed to be a messy little kid, I have to be messy now. To make up for it.

***
More random thought bubbles from the same gassy patch of memory-swamp:

I think my parents resented how *easy* I made things seem, things that *they’d* always struggled with. (Actually, I think my dad was the one who really resented it - my mom's reactions seemed to be anywhere from a vaguely perplexed, "huh - should she really be able to do that at that age?" to a more opportunistic, "Hey, this could save me a *lot* of time!" The main problem with the latter response was that it seemed to label me as 'adult' long before I was anything *like* an adult [at least, in my mom's mind] - she used to say I was "Two going on twenty." Curses, foiled again.)

But what they forget is, I learned from THEM. From watching them. I learned quickly, and easily, and I had lots of examples, all the time, all around me, both of GOOD ways to things and BAD ways to do things. Did I say I learned quickly? And without being taught. The basic definition of high intelligence: One who learns by observing rather than being told how to do it.

The point being, I think, that i sort of wish I could go back in time to my too-young, clueless parents and say: "Hey, it's ok that she's really smart. It doesn't actually HURT you for her to be smart - in fact, in can be an advantage, right? And guess what, even though she's really smart, she still has to pick up what she's learning from somewhere, right? And guess who she's learning all this really cool stuff from? You two! That's right! You parental units have actually made a significant contribution to all this brilliance! Yay! You're not just loser slug-heads!"

Actually, I'm pretty sure mom never thought of herself this way (as a loser slug-head) - her defense mechanisms were too solidly in place for that. And my dad? I think he pretty much went to his grave doubting himself, though he learned how to hide it reasonably well by the time we (kids) would've been old enough to begin questioning him about it. Which was right about the time he died.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, maybe dad would've felt better if he'd realized I wasn't just totally figuring all that stuff out out of thin air? That I actually gleaned it from somewhere, and hey, who else would I have learned it from if it wasn't him or mom? But maybe that wouldn't have made him feel better after all. I don't know.

And the truth is, by the time I was a little over three, I was already reading so fast and furiously that I think a lot of my ideas *were* coming from 'outside' sources.

Reading so much at an early age is the only way I can explain having such different notions from my parents, because I had very little interaction with others outside the family (maybe because we moved so much, my dad was gone a lot, and my mom was pretty anti-social between raising two young kids pretty much single-handedly and various other factors I can only guess at?)

There really weren't any other 'outside influences' to speak of until I went to school, I was something of a hermit between ages 3 and 5 while my mother cloistered me (unintentionally - I think she was trying to do the right thing, but simply didn't 'get' that a kid that young shouldn't be left alone so much) in her pseudo-'Montessori' space up in the attic that she made for me. I don't really remember that time - I have a flash image of a dark space with lots of 'stuff' for me to play with, and a screaming little brother downstairs taking all her attention. I'm pretty sure this is when I began my lifelong tendency to escape into books, and why I get absorbed in them so quickly and easily, and why I read so fast: They were my own personal equivalent of TV. All that was a coping skill rather than a talent, although it served me well in later years. Two-edged swords, once again.

***
part of it's being an energetic, talented, smart WOMAN in a world where GIRLS (blech) are expected to SIT AROUND BEING PRETTY and NON-THREATENING in case there are any MALES (note: I did *not* say 'men') in the vicinity to feel THREATENED by your superior mental fire-power and general all-around AWESOMENESS.

Note to all be-penised ones: I will not SMALLIFY myself any more. Yer on yer OWN.

FUCK this 'nurturing the yayhoos that get all the power in the first place'. FUCK that shit. And the dinosaur it rode in on.

We NEED other people. Period.

[Edited to add: The following is very disjointed and random, but I'm leaving it as is. "Thinking out loud," after all.]

It's clear that most disease comes from lack of love. And yet, over and over again, we insist that we must first 'love ourselves'.

This makes me want to bang my head against the wall and scream at people. And then I take a deep breath, and try to look past the fact that they're all being complete fucking morons. Ok. So why can they not see it? Why are they blind to this particular truth?

I think we are hard-wired to believe what we experience. It can be no other way. That's why there's no such thing as altruism, or really even empathy. It's all projection, because that's the best we can do. Some people may do pretty damn well at it, to the point that we're actually able to help each other a little. After all, we all have more or less the same basic needs - food, shelter, love, warmth, etc. So it's not that hard to guess what another person might be needing. But the important thing to remember is that it's a guess.

Which is why communication is so confoundedly important! Expressing our emotions is the original way we humans got our needs met. Look at a brand new infant: What are her ways to get her needs met? Crying, screaming, yelling, thrashing with arms and legs when needs are unmet; conversely, giggling, cooing, smiling, wiggling happily when contentment has been achieved.

And you know what? Though we may add many, many layers of confabulation and obfuscatory something-or-other over the top as we 'mature', basically our communication skills really depend on our gut-level connection with these simple, child-like expressions. The further we get from those lizard-brain ways of being and connecting, the further we are from getting our needs met.

Of course 'adults' expect to be able to communicate in less - fraught? demanding? temper-tantrum-ish? ways. But nonetheless, the underlying basic meaning is the same as that of the newborn: I NEED this, and I need it now. As adults we learn to delay gratification, but this is not really healthy beyond a certain point. Yes, it's useful to be able to hold your water when there's no toilet nearby - but this is a socially instilled requirement in a culture that doesn't like its sidewalks to reek of urine. (Though I must say in Paris, it wasn't only the four-legged dogs who routinely made use of the nearest tree. In fact, here in my own mild-mannered burg, I saw a guy just the other day taking a whiz against a tree in the middle of a golf course. Right there before god and everybody, as they say...)

Back to the point: There's that saying about everybody needing eight hugs a day, or some such thing.

You know what? I'm lucky if I get eight hugs a month. I am literally dying here from emotional starvation. And yet this is considered my fault - that I'm just too picky, or what have you.

But consider: What are the means by which a single, adult woman may get her needs for physical affection met? Contrary to the popular idea that women take care of each other, many, if not most of us, don't have the kind of physical relationships with other women that would satisfy this need. Most women turn to men to get our affection needs met.

And along with this comes all the baggage of sex, and the related complications. How many marriages/relationships founder because she wants touch, and he wants sex? In this male-dominated world, guess who wins? Go look at the personals ads sometime and see how many married men are openly advertising to scratch that itch, under the guise of 'feeling unloved'.

Or we can pay somebody to give us a massage. To me this is not worth wasting breath to refute. How can paying to be touched by some random stranger meet the need for close, affectionate touch from a well-know loved one???????? Answer: IT CAN'T.

No wonder we're a nation of addicts - to television, sugar, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol or what-have-you. Our so-called 'gurus' teach us that we are not allowed to ask to have our basic needs met. They repeat, over and over again, the same shit that traumatized us in the first place: Be a big girl. Mommy needs you to be a big girl.

What does this mean? It means, Go away, don't bother me with your childish needs. I'm busy. You're too much trouble. Nobody ever met my needs, why should you have yours met? And on and on ad - how to say 'pain'eum?

Experientially, then, we learn not to have our needs met. We are taught to be self-sufficient at a time when we are developmentally incapable of being so.

No wonder we're all so fucked up. America: Nation of junk food for the soul.

****
Don't give me any more of this bullshit about 'self love'. What the fuck is that anyway? Isn't it just another name for narcissism, which we simultaneously revile and embrace, in that cognitive-dissonant way that most Westerners 'cope' with anything messy or uncomfortable, from sex to death?


****
Unposted comments to '10 Common Reasons to Lie to Your Therapist':
We learn to lie because the people in our lives are untrustworthy. Why should we suddenly trust some random stranger (aka therapist) just because we're paying them a lot of money?

Clue: Most therapists are no more empathetic or caring than your average Joe. Most therapists are out to make an easy buck, and many of them have not done enough of their *own* healing work to be really useful to anybody.

All 10 of these items are about trust. The whole reason most people go to therapists in the first place is to find a SAFE place to talk about things that have always been too scary to share anywhere else, because the people in your life have been untrustworthy with that information.

If the therapist is dismissive, unresponsive, negative, judgmental, invalidating, that re-creates the same scenario most people are trying to escape.

I think most therapists don't really know how to create a 'safe space' because they've never experienced one themselves.

Our culture teaches self-sufficiency, even in relationships. Which is totally ass-backward - by definition, relational needs require a relationship. We CANNOT meet our own relational needs.

***
Just came across excerpts from your book (The Cure Within) via Google, would like to comment.

Quote from Dr. Siegel (p. 196):

I feel that all disease is ultimately related to a lack of love, or to love that is only conditional[...]I also feel that all healing is related to the ability to give and accept unconditional love . . . the truth is: love heals.

In this Western world, we believe that we are personally responsible for everything that happens to us. In the shrink world, this includes the belief that we are responsible for our own emotional nurturance.

But we can't provide our own nurturance. It's humanly impossible. Nurturance is a relational need, which by definition requires another human.

It's as if he gets the first half of the equation right: "Disease comes from lack of love".

And yet in the second half, he reverts to the cultural brain-washing that somehow suggests that we are capable of being our own nurturers.

This is WRONG. Nurturing comes from OUTSIDE. Would you blame a plant with brown leaves for its environment, and accuse it of having 'brown leaf disorder'? Would you say that the plant 'stubbornly resists all attempts to water it'?

No. That would be ludicrous. And yet an equally ludicrous rationale is almost universally applied by so-called therapeutic 'thinking': That somehow we are personally, individually responsible for the circumstances and conditions in which we find ourselves. We are basically expected to 'water' ourselves.

Why is this most basic, essential connection not made, over and over in this culture? Why do we repeatedly deny that we need other people? What's with this obsession with autonomy?

The cure is NOT within. The cure is without. The cure is in relationships.

A Parable of Heaven & Hell

A man spoke with an Angel about heaven and hell. The Angel said to the man, "Come, I will show you hell."

They entered a room where a group of people sat around a huge pot of stew. Everyone was famished, desperate and starving. Each held a spoon that reached the pot, but each spoon had a handle so much longer than their own arm that it could not be used to get the stew into their own mouths. The suffering was terrible.

"Come, now, I will show you heaven," the Angel said.

They entered another room, identical to the first. The pot of stew, the group of people, the same long-handled spoons. But there everyone was happy and well- nourished. "I don't understand," said the man. "Why are they happy here when they are miserable in the other room and everything was the same?"

The Angel smiled. "Ah, it is simple," she said. "Here they have learned to feed each other."

still offgassing

Mind still bubbling away this morning with unresolved bits and pieces, fallout from last night (and of course all the 'old' stuff that gets stirred up along with it, that's still waiting to be sorted through).

An interesting thought: Why do some kids (people?) seem to be swayed more by what someone says than what they do, or vice versa? For example, middle niece seems to be caught in this mental trap where she seems to be trying desperately to do whatever the adults around her are saying she should do, but she's continually tripped up by the fact that her sisters seem to get away with absolute murder and never get caught or called on it. Or, if they do get caught, they often seem to wiggle their way out of it somehow, with charm or distraction or something. Middle niece, on the other hand, feels like she's consistently singled out for punishment more often, and not only that, once she's in the hot seat, she can never get back in her parents' good graces - she's become the bad guy. So then she feels like there's something wrong with her, and that gets compounded with resentment at the unfairness of how she feels like she's being treated so differently from her sisters:











The scapegoat, in other words.

Youngest niece seems to be the opposite (and this is just off the top of my head, further observation may come up with some completely different theory, who knows): She seems to almost entirely ignore what her parents say (to their eternal - and I must admit, sometimes amusing, to this 'outsider' - exasperation), responding much more directly to what they do.

The third niece, the oldest, seems to strike a balance somewhere in the middle, and she's actullay gotten to the point (she's 8, now) where she calls her parents on their sh*t, pointing out when their actions and their words are at odds. It's great that she can see that stuff (and I like to think I may have helped a little with this one) - I sure couldn't at her age! I was much more like middle niece, I was pretty much completely bamboozled by the words my parents said, I think I never noticed how often their behavior completely contradicted what they were saying out loud.

It's taken (still taking?) me a heck of a lot of work to get to where I can actually notice when peoples' actions contradict their words, and it's even harder yet to call them on it - amazing how often what is considered 'right' has more to do with what a particular someone is managing to get away with, kind of like the Emperor.

I've even read that somewhere, that we define 'normal' by our own behavior - that we can sort of 'train' the people around us to accept dang near anything as normal just by consistently doing whatever-it-is the same way all the time. In fact, my own experience suggests that people so love consistency that even a non-standard, non-conformist behavior can become a 'quirk' that people actually like about you, to the point that if you decide yourself that you want to change it, people actually resist your desire to change. I'm sure there's some handy, well-worn aphorism/saying/whatsit that covers exactly this situation, I just can't think of it. People often seem comforted by the known, the familiar, to a degree that predictability comes to be more important than what is actually 'right'.

(Brings to mind a little sociological experiment I did in 7th grade: There was some kind of two-day seminar/whatsit, and kids filed in the first day and each chose a desk. Second day, just to be ornery and stir sh*t up, I sat somewhere else, just to see what would happen. Sure enough, whoever had sat there the previous day protested, insisting that it was their desk, why was I sitting at their desk. I thought it was funny and pathetic and utterly predictable, and was a little disappointed that the person whose desk I chose didn't have enough imagination/courage/whatever to play along and make a game of it, rather than taking it so fricking seriously. Ach.)

i've tried everything i can think of

to salvage this relationship. At what point do you just walk away?

Again a metaphor is trying to form: Picturing myself chipping away, chipping away at the mortar between the bricks of a very solid wall, hoping for any slightest ray of sunlight, any tiniest beam of hope. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. But I keep trying, til my fingernails are bloody nubs and my fingers can hardly move.

Why do I keep struggling with something so futile? Am I trapped? Is there no other way out?

No - I feel a breeze, and when I turn around, I see a door, standing open. I am free to leave at any time.

But what if I leave? Will I be able to come back in? I don't know. It feels like one of those nightmares where doors appear and disappear, hallways stretch and narrow and veer wildly, unpredictably, with many doors to the unknown scattered along the way. Stairways rise crazily into nowhere, or sometimes loop back on themselves, Escher-like; elevators zoom frantically past my intended stop, or plummet madly into the depths, and I am unable to ever get where I am trying to go.

I am in a cell (not of my own devising?) which is so, a cell, that is, because - why - put the words out there and see if they make sense - the other person? can only think in terms of bricks and blocks (echoes of Dr. Seuss, oops).

And the cell (started to think cage, but try to stick with one metaphor, see where it goes) is a symbol for the relationship, which is a trap from which I cannot escape.

I don't know where this is trying to go. I just have to put the words down for now and hope that more will become clear later.

(this is about my mother, I've got that much so far. Feel like an anthropologist exhuming the contents of my own memories - can't see what's coming, don't know what this thing is that's being exposed as I carefully scrape away the dust of centuries [ok, decades :-)]) (maybe I should change my name to Parenthetical Thinker.)

And then I imagine I'm taking all the carefully untangled strands of my SELF that I've slowly, painstakingly un-knotted from this gigantic, incomprehensible wadded-up mess of confusion that I've been caught in for so long, and slowly, carefully, gently, lovingly twisting them together into a single strand of being, a single, continuous self that makes sense to me. Fuckin' A!!!! Cool, it's like I finally understand the shrink concept of True Self/False Self at a gut level, beyond the words that I've read so many times - I can actually feel it!!! Woo-hoo, as my SIL would say.)

And the bricks, and the mortar, those are her metaphors, I don't have to use them. Hence the door. But for her (she's literally described her experience of relationships this way) it's a wall. When she described it in the past I always pictured this wall that was taller than I could see over, stretching away in both directions as far as I could see.

I would stand there, in my mental image, with my fists on my hips in frustration and perplexity, puzzled and irritated that my stupid mother was so irrational, juvenile, and most of all, depended on me, her child, to get us out of this mess.

No more, babe. You're on your own behind that wall. YOU built it, YOU get to live there. (Somehow The Cask of Amontillado keeps popping into my head - not sure if there's any relevance, other than the similarity of somebody voluntarily bricking themselves up into a tiny space.)

And that's how I envision it, from my side - it's as if she's built this tiny room for me, that this is all I get, no more. If I want a relationship with her, I must be content with bread (dried-out crusts) and water. (Puritanical punitive mindset poisons even those of us never been Catholics. As the parlance has it, WTF???)

(this process makes me think of reading tea leaves or something - looking for anything, anything at all, that will lead me in the 'right' direction, meaning, out of this frickin' maze. Tarot, ouija board, seances. I'm blindfolded, in the dark, trying to find my way. And yet, there is light! A crack is appearing! Will she make it? Will she escape?)

I never know whether something's made a dent in her head or not - I'll say something mean one day, and the next she acts like it never happened. We don't do apologies in our family (or, at least, no one besides me does. And I'm learning how to give them up). We just sweep, sweep, sweep that guilt, that shame, that anger under the rug. (now the lump under the carpet is beginning to resemble an elephant. And it's fricking moving, it's taking on a life of its own...)

Why do I want to come back into this tiny cell, anyway? Why can't I just walk away?

Because it's my mother. Everything I need is in here (or so says my psyche, at the deepest, darkest, most primitive lizard-brain, gut level) - food, shelter, love

wait, wait, I interrupt. Love is not here. This cell is devoid of love. Remember the turnip from which blood cannot be squoze? Or the stone? Same deal. No different. You gonna starve to death if you stay in here, sweet pea. (yeah, the metaphor needs some work. Lots of loose ends.)

test

Like a swamp offgassing, fumes bubble up from the bottom of this brain and seek release into the outer atmosphere.

My drawing teacher used to say, just put the dang pen on the paper and draw already. Yes, that big blank white sheet is terrifying, so what? Just do it.

Topics may range wildly, no predictions. Never done a blog before. Have to see how it goes.