had a dream that (years after we adopted him, and ps it’s been over a year since I’ve seen the cat or the ex boyfriend) some people showed up to claim Very Odd Second Cat and declared that his name was Hröth (pronounced with a long o), and that the rexbf just... let them, and he was telling me way after the fact, and my dream self was like “okay, cool: closure”
but I also had the best (and unbroken!) sleep I’ve had in a long time last night so I guess I can’t complain? I woke up naturally and without struggle about fifteen minutes after my usual alarm (which I had delayed, so I wasn’t late or anything) and felt this incredible peace with being awake, or like just an absence of uuuuuuUGH kind of intense reflexive resentment about being awake.
10: If you could relive one day from 2014, which day would you choose and why?
Oh wow. Um, I have a couple of front-runners?
1: Araluen? It was gorgeous there, wow-panorama, and I felt like I was doing something, and there was both companionship and quiet solitude, and it was somewhere near the middle so I had good times before and ahead, it was just a really good day. I ate fresh figs for the first time there. I think it was your birthday? I almost chose the day of roasting things at your parents’ house because that is such a nice memory, with the cow-snot passionfruit pavlova. But, not the day we came back up the valley, where it started with a brief rainstorm and we sort-of-snoozed in the car. The full day.2: the day I broke up with the rexbf. I just feel like I could have done that so much better. And possibly earlier, so maybe instead that day.3: I’ve had a couple of really nice I-feel-like-a-part-of-something-bigger days and they were all this summer so I’d choose one of those, for the companionship and the optimism
14: Who were the most meaningful people in your life this past year?
You, jerk! The way you can both poke me and let me sit quiet, you’re a touchstone too many miles away, and I hope you always make this list because I hope I keep tied up in the threads we’ve run between us. You’ve always offered a home away from home, half-joking but totally real. I always want to be worthy of the effort you put into me.
TJ and Field were bright sparks for different but similar reasons; bonding with TJ over similar experiences was super super helpful to me, and just having her companionship for being kind of silly and very done with things was nice. Field is someone I look up to and respect and pity and like, and I feel like I did him a little wrong this year and like I’m discovering more about him every time we talk even though we’ve known each other for a while. I miss Mace a great deal; he showed me a slightly different way to live, challenged me; I couldn’t be his twin sun all the time, I’d burn myself up, but we were powerful. Bones has been here for me even when I haven’t been… here. Good Boss Lady has saved me — future-me, in a way. Boris and Natasha have had a huge impact on me even though they are shit. Is fandom a person? Fandom can be a person. And the little tiny interactions that I have here and on AO3 with people have been so impactful; it’s asynchronous and without much expectation. It’s nice.
My philosophy professor? She saw me, she heard me, she encouraged me, and she kind of helped me recover some of the things I used to like about classes and study. Also, the DM and the Stanalike of my students this summer — DM was my friend and the Stanalike I barely interacted with but he made this incredible heartfelt speech at the end that made me think “We did it.”
I’m… kind of wary of the way I want to phrase these? Because my people are my people and not just what they’ve done for me, not just what I can see and how i see it. So, like, I want to make sure that even if someone could recognize themselves here, that I try to be respectful of the things that they are and do that aren’t for me and never were.
37: What’s the bravest thing you did in 2014?
I should probably have done some thinking to prepare for these? I’m going to say, moving out. I have long been terrified of living on my own, for what I thought I would become and fail to be. And it involved finally breaking up with my boyfriend, and you know just how big that was even if it was a foregone conclusion — it faced a complex net of fears that weren’t similar but were tangled in each other, and, well, I did it. Some of my fears were baseless and some were realized and some I fight still.
Aw, you gave me my favorite present ever: talking about myself!
(There is anxiety talk below the cut! I don't know the right words for how to warn for it, but some of it's my symptoms and some of it's my half-useful not-coping mechanisms, and I don't yet know how to separate my criticism of me doing these things from the things themselves -- and all three of those things have, when I encounter them in others' posts, knocked me off-balance so I figured I should warn.)
I set an alarm for six AM so that I'd have enough time to bullshit thing before the group meeting (god, what is that as a coping strategy -- I hate waking up to an alarm, and waking up early, so... I'll do that! Totally has a 100% chance of working and not making me more miserable! It's actually amazing that I managed to work at all, because the first half hour was still avoidance behavior, I had woken up feeling pretty bad/nervous, and it was like I had no access to my regular self-soothing capabilities), and I ended up waking myself up at 5 after some intense dreams (this lady had a circular scar on her wrist almost like a flattened mole or an age spot, and she told her artist SO that he could probably exhibit it because he caused it, wtf brain). So I started working on thing, and worked myself into a kind of low-altitude anxiety attack, physical symptoms and all, and almost, almost, emailed to cancel. But I went anyway. And I had a few things to share. So it was good that I went.
Tool that helps me do thing doesn't work quite as expected, and neither does our data, but we're going to work on that. Now, I put aside thing for a couple of days to do two other assignments. One's a 15-page paper and the other is a relatively mechanical homework assignment. Given that I have had a lot of trouble concentrating (my personal malware has activated! that metaphor for depression is so useful -- it's like I don't have access to parts of my usual functioning that I depend on normally: for instance, my spatial understanding of linear algebra keeps crashing and is just replaced by flat fear, and the usual recovery mechanism is just... not online) I am not sure that these will get done without some crying. But maybe since I've already had a freakout we're done with that for a bit?
Yesterday was the rexbf's (recently ex bf) birthday. I noticed it pretty late, and did a double-take because oh, I had forgotten about you. I dithered about sending him a text, and finally did this morning because it's not like I'm mad at him, I just don't really have anything to say. Well, I have a couple of questions about how he resolved the lease that used to have me on it, and about the health of the other cat because mine's been coughing lately, but none of those seem like good openers after a couple of months of living in the same apartment complex and not seeing each other, when the moveout and the breakup were pretty unceremonious and abrupt. Sort of abrupt. Whatever you would have called normal functioning for us in a relationship, we hadn't been doing that for a long while and there was actually plenty of warning, it just felt sudden anyway. We were just shy of four years, and living together the whole time, the longest relationship for either of us, and I... have no idea what's supposed to happen after that?
Now, maybe I start on the paper.
There are so many things I want to do besides my work. I have so many plans! But I just can't get things done. Sometimes overcramming my schedule works -- like, I pressure myself into actually doing a lot, and not all of it gets done but a lot does and I feel very active and contributing and kind of buoyed along by it. Right now, it's not working. Partly because most of my impulses are NO (rather than, like, actually wanting to do things) so I don't even accept things to put on my schedule, and partly because I'm in that gear where extreme deadline pressure translates only into more anxiety and avoidance rather than, as occasionally, enough of a prod to get me started on something.
I'm using my schoolwork as an excuse not to write on a thing I really really want to (okay, part of the excuse is that I feel like I can't write coherently), but I'm avoiding my schoolwork not with writing but with this. And, like, going through archives of blogs and vines and tags, stuff that I wouldn't usually do. It would be nice if I could figure out how to do the things I actually want to do!
Now, maybe I start on the paper.
(Ugh, I am caught between semi-healthy coping strategies! I stopped trying to punish myself for not doing work, by trying to stay flexible about what tasks I could do when I felt like it, but that backfires when I magically just don't want to do things for a while! And I mostly recognize when I'm avoiding things and try to stop it [success is another matter] but I haven't been able to find better ways to conquer or sidestep the fear -- the advice I have gotten from one quarter has always, always been "take a day and regroup" or "soon it will be over, just hold on" and... no? I can't? Or I have already and it didn't help? Because I don't know how to do those without overdoing it on my avoidance activities or spacing out and losing time, which I intensely dislike.)
