16/10/2020

Where is my mind? I have a wordpress blog which I used to write in fairly regularly but have stopped doing so in the last year or so. I’d write some articles about mental health, some about writing and some about day to day issues. As time went by I started to think I used it too much as a diary, or that the articles were all to person centred, all about me and my symptoms, issues etc. I then decided that as it was my blog I could write in it whatever I wanted to, which is clearly true, but still I haven’t quite got my confidence back to write on there much. I used to write abstract bits as well, poems and prose which was surrealist or strange, and that

The mist prevails, it snakes past my outstretched finger tips like silk or lace, beautifully textured and nuanced yet holding a kind of sadness- a sense of beauty lost, aged sensibilities. It’s this mist in the mind which prevents me, in moments, from truly laughing or feeling the weight behind the words of my friends. They will tell me sad stories, funny stories and I will nod and mumour the same acknowledgement to each. I sometimes wonder how I hold onto friends, I worry that I don’t give them enough of me, the real me, although considering the fact that I’ve only just started to notice this fact I suppose they’ve likely never noticed the thin nature of my responses, my interactions, either. I think I get a lot of lee-way because they know I’ve had a couple of really testing years and so they assume I would give more, if I could. Which is the truth.

I feel like the character from The handmaid’s tale, yet without justifyable reason. Or perhaps with- the other side goes she faced her tormentors- in my mind my parents were the ones standing holding semi automatic weapons, pounding me with bullets every time I tried to move, they didn’t like the fact that I had a body and occupied space and didn’t agree with eveything they had to say, they didn’t like that I had a different version of events to them. So they battered me, and battered me, and sometimes they mixed it up, used different weapons and sometimes tactics. Then I spent time with them and so the voices the lying voices are telling me that I have accepted my tormentors and that is why I am so flat. They tell me I’m cowardly, dispite the fact that I know that I’m not. Ad that is it really- it is an adjustment period now, that is all. My mind sometimes drifts backwards into old patterns- I’ve written about all this and now I’m actually living through it, it’s absurd. However now I will move into something new, better, same, better over time.

17/10/2020

This strange space. My new flat is beautiful in pale blue, grey and mustard yellow- and it is not cold as blue can often be. It is strange though. My last flat had ten years of grit and dirt encrusted into the carpet, the curtains- it was so grungy I felt as though I could sink into it. My small dark space fit right in, I left no shadow there. Here, in this brand new shiny space I feel somewhat out of place- I feel like the shadow, my small dark spot of a body seems to rest upon the sofa precariously, like a pose. I sit here and watch the light- it is so beautiful and I don’t know what to do with it, how to be a part of it, of the scene, the room. I am like an afterthought, a memory or something which shouldn’t really be there. My clothes are so black and my skin is scarred and pitted. I don’t function in this room, I am an alternative.

I wonder about sex. Back and back to sex I go. I wasn’t too fussed until I read an article in one of my nan’s “Good living” magazines, and it stated that one of the ten things you ought to do to maintain a happy existence, to maintain well-being, was have regular sex. The article didn’t state that this ought to be good sex, with someone you love and trust. I’m fairly certain it didn’t specify this although, with hindsite, it seems like the kind of thing it would specify. I’m not sure if perhaps I didn’t read the article closely, out of a kind of petulant refusal. I didn’t want to take the whole article in properly, I wanted to leave myself the space to agonise over the content of the article itself rather than the central message. I’ve been big on well-being recently, well-being, self-care and self-compassion, although I only learnt this last phrase a week ago during my therapy session. Well-being and self-care have been the two driving focuses of my self-reflection etc, for a little while now and so I wonder if the reason this article got to me was because I’ve been veering away from sex at this time. I keep telling myself to wait for the right time, wait until I’m happy enough within myself to have sex. Although this has partially been a fib I’ve told to myself. However how is someone to have regular sex if they are single?

Urgh this is boring me now.

I need routine. I need routine desperately, as one would need water after spending a day out in a desert. I need structure to prevent this gappiness. I do things, then I pause for long periods of time, do something again and then stop and reflect and am distruaght over the pause. Then I forget the things I have done and am still for long periods of time, this stillness and the space it brings, the mist behind the eyes, is what I need to stop, is what I need routine to decrease, to diminish. I do not want this space anylonger, not in the form it is currently in. It may progress to something, and I either need this progression or I need the space to depart all together and some new energy to come in. I need more sustainable force, that is it- at the moment my force seems to stutter, it seems to come and go I don’t know where. I need sustainable drive, sustainable energy. Lol- I am so in touch with the planet. Urgh, I spit at my own jokes. It is stupid jokes like these that encourage this stuttering, this put, put putting of a half functionning engine. I need to stop giving myself the time and space for these useless jokes. I have more seriousness than this, I have more sustainability, I do. I must avoid the inclination to make stupid jokes. I need to up the ante and continue along a singular pathway, a pathway with less branchings off, less bramble patches. I think metaphors are ok but only at the right time. I will make tea and tidy my room, stop this putt putt putting.

The world has made me thin. This is the problem. Or not entirely a problem as I have been wanting to lose weight for ages anyway, but it is a factor, as element in what is holding me up. I used to feel massive and now I feel thin, I let too many men in. I say men because I have really only very recently started to give the side of me which likes woman a chance to breathe and to think. I wasn’t consciously repressing it beforehand it just hadn’t really occurred to me to identify myself in this way. A bi-sexual woman, perhaps even a bi-sexual lesbian woman, although if the correct identification is bi-sexual lesbian do I even need to add in the woman as the end to make it appropriate. There is so much talk nowadays about labels and sexual identifications. Bi-sexualism now has multiple other ways of defining it. Anyway, I feel thinner, and whilst it is not a bad thing it is something new to get used to. I wonder if my break down last year was a result of that- I’d held myself closed for so very long, again, not consciously but likely as some kind of defence mechanism, and then I couldn’t do it any more. Perhaps the first to come in was the one of wrecked the most, the five year relationship and everything which can afterwards was simply echoes of that initial breach. Regardless, this may be something to go back to, maybe not. regardless, it is this thinness which trips me up sometimes now, when I am making tea, brushing my teeth, trying to find a matching pair of socks with no holes in them. I notice it in myself, curiously, like a small child finding a snail and wondering at it’s sliminess and simultanious hardness- what to do with this strange alien little thing. I notice this thinness in me and I am confounded, knocked from my general sense of artless force to notice something small in me. I think it is what I have been working towards for the last ten years, because in reality I am small. I have huge opinions but no real clue on how to realise them and translate them into the world. I will have, and it is this optimism which has driven me onwards, optimism and stubborn blind faith. So how to relate- how to relate?

I have just finished The Handmaid’s tale by Margaret Atwood. I should have already read it- I’m a 35 English Literature graduate and I’ve only just read this novel. Shocking. Anway I have just finished it and so believe that this wrting streak as come out of this completion. I definitely feel the traces of Plaths fingers over the skin on the back of my neck, this kind of beautiful detachment. All of her jagged edges and the imagery which goes alongside comes to me, and so I am going to simply press publish without editing or checking. This is a diary, anyway, it doesn’t matter if it’s written well. This beautiful sense of detatchment has come on so strongly this evening- it is because I am still off sugar, still dieting and so I am empty and flat, caffine only, no refined sugar to stimulate me in the way I have always been stimulated. This is a big deal, it is a reason for this sense of floating, this sense of clam silence. The flat also, the beautiful blue and sense that I’m in a hotel room. I wonder how long it will take me to catch up. And lastly the novel- Margaret Atwood’s prose has spurred me on, tapped into some strange checkered low place in me, some deep, detatched realm where the mist makes everything look beautiful, faded like age and time, soft and easy yet too still. This is where I return to routine, I need routine to order this mist. I will make tea now, I’d already told myself that to make a change such as this, to reach this plateua of routine I need to think it through in deeper clarity, I need to embody the feelings and the thought processes I will need. I need to plan it out more, rather than keeping simply setting my alarm clock and hoping for the best- I need to anticipate it.

Right now I will make tea because this all makes me slightly anxious, I am despondent, really, about my chances of success in this, whilst simulationiously knowing that it is possible. I only want to get myself into a routine, it’s not like I’m trying to reach the moon.

Tea.

Later.

I think, the other thing is, that what I really need to do now is focus on the fact that I’m doing all these things on my own. Broke up with R after a five year relationship at the beginning of last year and then jumped into a situation with K almost literally two days later. Then last year happened, Tinder happened, relapse happened, and now this year I’ve been trying to deal with recovery and return to life. To me, the things that I want to be doing are writing regularly and exercising regualrly. I did these things before R and I got together, but then when we were together we both did them and focused on them and thought about them etc etc, so now it’s like it’s hard for me to get back to the frame of mind I was in, or obviously going back to a frame of mind I was in 6 years or so ago is difficult- so it’s about embracing the new with the same sense of how I used to do it. I used to exercise regularly etc etc. I went off on a little bit of a tangent. It’s about recognising that I am learning, re-learning, how to do these things on my own again. Do-able- I just thought I’d acknowledge seeing as today is being a loooong writing day.

Later: Most disjointed entry ever. Excuse the randomness but I think there may be more to come. There’s writing ideas here.

Peace OUT.