Tag: generalized anxiety

The Devil’s Circus

hills from bus

I want to smash things.  I want to smash everything.  I want to destroy all the delicate beautiful things and all the arrogantly strong things.  I want to rip down the shades and tear the curtains and I want to stab pillows and throw drinks in all the faces.

Except that I don’t ever want to see another face as long as I live.  And please god, erase mine first.

I want to claw into my skin to drag out the toxic disease that makes me constantly self destruct.  I can feel it in my body like it’s got its own corrupt soul, moving around in my bones treating me like a goddamn marionette.  I want to rip it out of my body and smash it against the walls.  But I know, I still know that it’s really just me I want to smash against the wall.  I know I’m the only one in this suit of flesh and I just need to find something specific to burn.  I keep lighting my own skin on fire.

I see it all coming down before it starts.  I try to stop it and everything I do to stop it makes it worse and it happens slowly – this B movie scene I can’t rewrite – so I have to live each frame without mercy.  I give it different words and I make it wear a denim tracksuit but it’s still naked and now I am too.

The words coming out of my mouth are always the ones I definitely wasn’t going to say.

I can’t be around people.  I can’t be around myself.

So many people think all I have to do is meditate or change my habits or remind myself it doesn’t have to be this way.  That if life made me this way I can unmake myself.  Bullshit.

Go fucking unmake yourself bitches!  Tell me how that’s working out for you.

If it’s working for you then go fuck your smug self.

I was supposed to go to the city today but I infected my people with my stress, it seems, and then fucking pounded it into their skulls for good measure.  Because people like me do shit like that.  Then I felt so fucking bad I wanted to knife myself.  No matter what I do, no matter what therapy I get, no matter what meds I take, it always comes back to that inward thrust.  The desire to destroy what wants to destroy me first.  To punish myself for fucking everything up AGAIN.

I haven’t cut myself or intentionally harmed myself for 28 years but it’s always there.  Saying it out loud makes me seem more diseased than I want anyone to know.  I want people to think you can just will that shit away and OVERCOME.  Maybe some can.  I can only speak for myself.  That desire to garrote myself is my second shadow.

I don’t want you to know about it because it will make you see me differently.   It shows my illness more than any other behavior or obsessive thought I can share.  The only human deviance worse than one who wants to hurt itself is one who wants to hurt others.

But I do that too.

The spirals are fast and brutal most of the time.  I don’t have time for last rights or explanations until it’s all over and then I feel like such a loser I let myself slip down the sink drain with the black mold and the tangled hair.

I am not fit to be around people.  Or in the world.  Or in a body.

I get whiplash sometimes between the good days and the bad.  The good minutes and the stopped time.

Animals know when they’re sick.  I know I’m sick in the mind.  It angers me when people try to make excuses for my irregularity.  It’s insulting to be lied to for someone else’s sense of comfort.  So they can feel better about themselves.  If I’m sick it means there are others who are like me who are also sick.  If I admit to being sick they question whether they are obligated to admit they are too.  They fight so hard against it.  Because having my sickness is ignoble.  It’s not nice.  It’s pretty fucking ugly in the corners no outsiders can see.  It’s the devil’s circus in here.

I made my child cry.  My wonderful child who suffers from some of the same things I do.  I made him cry because I was hanging on by a thread to my plans and he had the audacity to be barely hanging onto his.  I lashed out at him for deciding, right as we set out for the city, that he was going to have a bad time.  I tried to help and inadvertently made things worse, as I do.  So I got angry.  He cried.  He was so stressed out and he’s new at this stress of the unknown.  Poor kid inherited my awful awful anxiety and I fucking lashed out at him for it.

I am having a hard time forgiving myself for that right now.  That kid of mine is pretty fucking amazing.  I have the opportunity to give him support and empathy and teach him to live in a world that doesn’t understand people like us, and what I did was make him feel like shit for being sensitive to stress and outings he’s no properly prepared for.

I already apologized to him when he came into my office where I was busy not breaking everything and said he was sorry for ruining my day.  I apologized to him for making him think my ruined day was his fault when it was really mine.

My guys have gone to a movie and are, I think, recovering from that madly awful hour.

I am not.  Not yet.  I lie in bed for a couple of hours forcing self harming thoughts from my head, listening to my cat purring on my shoulder.

I want to break things.  I want to break everything.

I think I’m going to go get more beer and some Chinese food.  How’s that for a strong shot of bathos?

Obsessively Shoving Nuts in the Trunk

Sometimes what I write on one of my blogs seems to belong on both of them.  Today I wrote about gardening and how it’s changing in my town.  Very much an urban homesteading topic, except that it turned out to also be a philosophical look at my town through its garden style and philosophical topics I usually save for this blog.  If you want to know my thoughts on how you can tell who people are by what they grow, please go read today’s post on Stitch.

This week has been exhausting.  I have yet to find a rhythm with my working hours (we have some new systems in place in my job that I’m still getting used to) and I’m still recovering from my cold and cough and my back is still weak.  Sleep has been shit.  I was going to give a talk about local eating for the Rotary Club but made a complete ass out of myself by assuming it would be an evening talk when, in fact, it was an early morning talk.  I had already canceled the talk once due to getting sick.  My credit with the organizer is now completely sunk and I’m mortified.  I had a big debacle with plums this past weekend.  I had to throw out 13 lbs of cooked plums because when I started to cook them a bunch of insect eggs rose to the top.  I’m not punk rock enough or pioneer enough to have strained the eggs and carried on with plans to eat the plums.

I have sent zero queries out to agents in favor of a continued fervor of preserving.  I made a batch of (amazing!) Damson jam which makes me feel very Miss Marple.  I can’t wait to make some scones this winter and have a friend or two over for tea and whip out my Damson jam.  I have quinces needing picking now (very cool) and processing (what?  more preserving?).  I have grapes to make into syrup.  I have more plums for more jam as well a savory sauce and liqueur and wine.  This weekend I’m picking apples and will make them into sauce.

Wait, wasn’t I going to be done preserving two weeks ago?

I can’t stop.  I literally can’t stop.  My body is tired.  I haven’t been to Kung Fu in two weeks.  My back is aching.  I have no room in my head for anything.  Why does this happen to me?  Last year I simply didn’t engage at all in preserving (okay, obviously I did some) but I was busy writing my book.  Here I am at the most crucial point in the book writing process (trying to get it published) and I’m frittering all my time away making food for the winter.

I think finding out that we are approved for the HAMP trial period and knowing how much harder things are going to get has gone to my head a little.  If I can get some apples for free how can I, in good conscience, pass it up?  That’s free food.  FREE.  That’s a nice word.  I don’t like free anything else, actually.  I don’t trust the word “free”.  I hate free samples. I really do.  They freak me out.  I won’t take them.  Usually they’re crap I don’t want anyway.  But even if I did, I fear anything “free”.  Except for fruit or vegetables from friends or neighbors.  Free produce I don’t know how to turn down.

I really offended the mushroom guy at our Saturday market last year when I refused to taste his mushroom samples that he’d carefully cooked up on an electric cooker.  He thought I thought they were unsanitary.  I reassured him it’s because I don’t like free samples.  I explained that it was the free-ness that made them suspect.  I also explained to him that this dislike of food samples and free stuff is an irrational thing I feel because I have generalized anxiety.  When he looked at me disbelievingly and, I think, a little disgustedly, I said “I’M CRAZY” and walked off.  I really threw a bomb in his works.  Poor guy.

Oh, I almost forgot about the rose hips.  I have a bowl of rose hips I collected on a walk I took with my friend Laurie just to the right of the picture in this post.  I think I’m going to make rose hip syrup with it.  So that’s another thing I need to do.  I’m not really complaining.  I’m just a little overwhelmed.  I don’t really want to stop preserving.  I love it.  I really love it.  But if I’m being totally honest, I’m starting to feel itchy not working on a major writing project.  I think I already mentioned my realization (while looking for agents) that I need to write the next Cricket and Grey book instead of working on the Jane Doe book.  So I have projects to work on and I’m getting itchy to get going.  Life is a very full affair and I can’t understand people who are bored with their lives.  How is it possible to get bored with life?

I’m off to get dressed (at the crack of noon) so I can start making things out of plums.  I hope you all have a smashing Friday!