C-r-a-z-y

Sometimes the case of the letter makes all the difference.  God or god.  An important personal I or a misplaced letter i.  Summer the girl or summer the season.  The uppercase letter delineates between importance and the ordinary.

Perfectionism is a haunt of mine.  It is a ghost that follows me and does not stop no matter what I'm doing.   It kills a day in a blink.  It turns anxiety inside/out.  It takes away my care for something good; even the smallest of outcomes.

Fuck it.

That is perfectionism in two simple words.  If I cannot do it right then I refuse to do it at all.  How dangerous is that?  Or rather... how stupid is that?

I see my world in black and white.  Absolutes.  You are either right or wrong.  Good or bad.  Smart or stupid.  I have a ridiculously logical brain.  Logic is the glue that holds the shards of me together.  Without this reason, I probably would have landed in the crazy house a long time ago.  Logic is my reality.  If I can reason it; it exists.  If I cannot; it must not be.

And there is the problem.  There is nothing logical about my past.  Although it seems that abusers have a handbook; the logic chapter is always found to be ripped out, shredded, and burned.   They left that part of it up to us to figure out; to understand their evil.  That is what makes us crazy in the first place.

So the harder I try to understand; the crazier I get.  Literally.  I cannot reason what was done to me and so sets in denial.  I can't understand it; I can't make it right.  So fuck it.

The abundance of fuck its has really slowed me down.  Nearly to a halt and I'm not just talking about my mental healing.  This is my real life too.  Housekeeping, taking care of myself, dieting, exercise, blah blah blah... you get the picture.  If I can't do it right and perfect; then I won't do it at all. 

All great thoughts to live by.

This thinking is not something easy to change.  It is a deep part of who I am.   It is also something that makes me feel normal.  Normal exactly long enough until I realize that normal people don't do math and physics problems for fun.  But I digress because my weirdness belongs in a whole other post. 

I have steps to take.  One at a time.  Crying just one time worked for me.  And then I did it again.  Getting up early once led to me getting up early again AND working out.  It doesn't have to be all or nothing and sometimes it's alright to be somewhere and in between.   I don't have to be completely healed or entirely wounded. 

I'm still crazy; even with the steps towards tears and feeling.  But I have progress now because I have downgraded letters; even if it is just one.  Now I'm just crazy.

crazy with a little "c"...

Tears

Dear Tears,

How very sorry I am for what you have lived with.  You and I have not spent much time together.  I avoid you because I despise crying.  You avoid me because we are not supposed to cry.

So other than objectives, we have not known much about one another.  Sure, I've squeezed out a few tears here and there; but a sob?  Not really.  And those times that I have needed to cry, you stood by and fought a deluge at much cost to yourself.

Over the past few days I have cried.  And when I say cry, I mean real and bitter tears.  Tears stockpiled over years of pain.  Tears we both did not believe to exist.  As this happened I watched you through my blurry eyes, shaking in a corner.  You were waiting for him and he did not come.  We were both surprised.

No one hit us until we stopped crying.  No one fucked us until there were no more tears to cry.  Not once was the blood running faster than the tears.  In fact, there was no blood at all. 

Each tear, it did hurt.  Like crying razor blades.  But it was a healing kind of hurt.  To borrow a thought... it hurts a lot less to rip a band-aid off quickly than slowly.  Or not at all.  So I sit in my car and cry while I peel the neglected, crusty bandages of abuse away.  I do this while I worry about keeping you safe.  It's a role reversal of sorts.

Watching you with intent, I see that you are small.  You are a skinny boy younger than my own daughter.  She's six.  And now I am not seeing you through the haze of my own pain.   Without the need to dodge his fists, I see that you have glasses and blonde hair.  Your glasses are broken and behind the cracks you have no eyes.  No eyes that cry no tears.

No wonder. 

I can cry your tears now.  And it's OK if you never shed one of your own; that is not your job.   It's mine now and you know, tears are not that bad.

And neither are you.  So go and rest.

Your friend,

Shattered

Flat

So today is a new day and I'm trying again.  I must sound like a wreck because when readers start asking me if I have a therapist, it's then that I realize how bad I sound.  And for my newer readers, yes, I do have a therapist who I have been seeing for quite some time.  At least once a week.

Reading over my post from yesterday, I did sound depressed and I was.  I still am.  And once again I am at the point of retreating to the hills of my head or sticking with the present.  I am learning that this is a choice.  It is a hard choice too. 

But in making that choice I am learning a lot about myself.  I don't do stress.  I don't do pain.  "Flat" was the word that kept coming up in therapy yesterday evening.  I've given it a lot of thought between then and now because I argued last night that flat was easier than feeling. 

I was wrong.

Flat really is hard.  Exhausting.  And I think I create a lot more stress and pain, the very things I try to avoid, for myself in trying to be flat.  I really thought that this was how people wanted me to be.  However, as I look at my emotional responses to others, I can see that my flat response was the last thing they needed or even wanted. 

I do not know how to change this overnight.  Flat used to my safe.  If I showed no emotion, the chances of being hit a lot or worse went down.  Flat let me mirror the emotions around me and let me remain invisible.  I focused on other's feelings instead of my own.  I thought this was safe.  But in doing so I added layer upon layer on my own pain which seems to fester into depression.

I have one assignment for the next week.  Cry.  And cry some more.  When I am in the car I am supposed to cry.  That is a long way from flat and I am scared.  What if people don't like my emotions?  My trademarks are levelheaded, calm, logical, a rock... all a nice version of flat. 

My next step: call my shrink and tell her that I don't have any of my meds nor have I been taking them because "someone" threw them away.  I've been too embarrassed to make that call but I need to.  I also need to do some housekeeping in here and figure out "who" threw them out.  And after that...

Cry some more.

Friend

What's that line... hello, darkness, my old friend...? 

My friend is making a raging comeback.  Yippee.

I do not know exactly what has brought this on but I am knocked down, sideways and can't get up depressed.  Those irritating Cymbalta commercials showing depressed people sucking at living?  That's me minus roaming around aimlessly in sweatpants because I don't wear sweatpants.

I just stay in my pajamas.

I don't have the luxury of sleeping the day away or even lying in bed with my eyes open praying that a spontaneous lobotomy will occur.  I have a kid, I have a job, I have judo, gymnastics, and swim team to attend, and I have a rather important (to me) husband who occasionally would like to see me out of pajamas and showered with a smile on my face.  It's a rough life these days.

The thing is, I do shower, smile and dress nicely.  It's my mind that is still wearing pajamas and perhaps that is where the conflict begins.  I am fucking exhausted and I honestly believe that there is not a soul on earth that understands where I am coming from.  Try as he may, my husband doesn't get it and he substitutes his confusion with anger.  I don't do anger so I just shut up and stay quiet.  I certainly am not talking to my daughter about this and I don't have any girlfriends to call up and bitch about my fucked up life.

So here I am.

I told my husband this morning that I am a really fucked up person and it is really hard to live.  His response was to yell at me that I'm not fucked up.  Right.  Everyone he meets hears voices, sees people who aren't there, and wishes they could carve the feeling part of their brain right out of their skull.  Right.  I'm definitely not fucked up.

Love him.

But seriously, I'm tired.  I walk a mental high wire, balancing with hate in one hand and sorrow in the other.  And then I crash with only my pretend friends to catch me.  The reality of my horrors catches up with me on occasion and now is one of those times.  I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can barely think.  The Shelter is screaming and I can't help those babies enough.  I am getting that familiar feeling that I am not the one made for this job.

What this boils down to is that I hate my parents.  I hate what they did and I hate what they allowed.  That hate is consuming me and I feel myself getting angry so I turn the hatred on myself.  It is easier to hate me.  It is safer.

Until I run out of room for cutting.

And I'm there; I have no more hidden skin available.  This is usually where I retreat deep inside but I'm not OK accepting that this time.  Problem is, I don't know where to go.