Aw. Morning pages No. 77 - Bronchitis can die in a fire.

 I have been sick for the last two weeks because of a combination of a head cold, bronchitis, and a sinus infection. Week one was spent with a moderately high fever and a lot of time where the world felt like it was spinning around. Four days into weeks one with this monstrosity (two days into the antibiotic treatment), my eldest son comes down with this bug. Some where around this time, Beloved catches it. The two of them have a moderate head cold, I'm sick to the point where I really should have been sleeping in bed but I had a child to mind.

I wasn't so feverish that I was hearing colors but it was a close thing. I'd close my eyes and see swirling colors in neon shades. It made the evening conversations with Beloved weird as the patterns shifted based on the sounds I heard. The fever has come way down and it in the moderate to low range. All hail Tylenol. Alas, in the course of the week right before I caught this damned virus, I developed an allergy to Aleve (which was my go to for migraines for the longest time) and shellfish. So, now I have burned through all over the counter migraine medications and I can no longer have my favorite soup (clam chowder). I am highly annoyed with all of this.

I have been trying to write off line but it's pretty much all been gibberish because I haven't been well. Now that I am feeling a little better, I am hoping I can get back to writing. I am so close to finished on the print copy of the Lokean devotional that I wrote. I've been starting to get feed back from readers on the Filianic stuff that I've written. It's been a mixed bag. I've come to the conclusion that I need a form letter to reply to the mass of email that have been hitting my inbox. 

I guess I'm going places with my non-fiction because I'm getting responses to it. Things have slowed down on the book revenue front. I'm also not out there heavily promoting material because I've been sick and my brain's been weird for the last few months. I'm mildly depressed because I'm experiencing more dissociation. My psy doctor has been working with me on it. I've been doing a lot of therapy journaling. My sleep has been rotten. At first because of brain stuff, then it started to settle down with a med change and then this stupid virus hit me. 

This being disabled business is bullshit. And being sick on top of it it is just the worst.

AW: Morning Pages No. 76

 I hate my disabilities. For one, they're invisible and people around me frequently forget that I have them and get irritable when I can't be neurotypical. (Beloved and the kids don't, but we're all not neurotypical in this household. We have to give each other a lot of understanding and try really hard to work with each other to make things function on a halfway normalish level.) I hate the fact that my traumatic past is rearing it's head and making everything hard. I hate the fact that I am sliding into depression and I'm not sure if it is because of my bipolar II or if it is because of my seasonal affective disorder. (It's a great thing, a double whammy of suck that lasts for months. -5/7 stars)

I have been tired because I'm not sleeping well. I think my doctor's got the medication angle pinned down. I am not happy with the medication because I have a lot of bad emotions attached to it. But, despite those feels, I am actually sleeping better. I still wake up on occasion in the night disoriented and not sure where I am. As I am falling alseep, I've taken to running my fingers across the wall next to the head of the bed to make sure that the wall is smooth and lacks the rough board that was at the same place in my parents' house in my room to cover up an enormous hole. I know it's anxiety and the fact that I'm fighting derealization. I spend just about all day fighting derealization.

Complex posttraumatic stress disorder is bullshit. It fucked up my brain so hard that I have times where I can't tell what's fully real or not. It's terrifying to be sitting in my living room wondering if this is a hallucination and that I'm actually in my parents' house, hiding from them so they don't beat me for some random reason. Reality testing, like running my fingers across the wall, is a thing I do every day, multiple times a day. Getting this major haircut change was one of the best decisions I have made this year.

One, it's a look I have wanted for years. Faux-hawks just look cool. I'd have gone for a full mohawk but I know that would have not worked for me because it requires more care than I can do. It's awful that the first thought I had upon getting home and some of the excitement about my new haircut was wearing off was that my father would have said I looked like a 'bull dyke' with a tone dripping with scorn. My father's a real winner. He's got issues.

The second reason that going from shoulder length hair to this faux-hawk was a good decision is it completely eliminates my passing resemblance to my mother. I look enough like her that when my hair was longer, catching a glimpse unexpectedly in the mirror set off a minor panic because I feared that I was looking at her. Like my father, my mother's just got issues that I don't think a ton of therapy is going to resolve. When I wear my faux-septum ring, I have momentary pang of panic that someone's going to rip it out. 

Why? Well, when I was in my late teens and I was expressing interest in getting more piercings, she said that she was going to rip a septum piercing out of my face because they're for leading bulls around by the nose. She had similar comments about getting additional ear piercings. It has taken me approximately thirty years to experiment with faux jewelry to see if I like how it looks with the way my face is shaped and such. It's taken me an equal length of time to truly embrace the fashion style that I have always wanted to wear.

So, I'm kicking around in all black in a pretty generic goth style. I don't have my parents bitching at me that I'm dressed for a funeral or that I look like a freak. It's liberating to finally dress authentically. I was working towards that goal since I hit college a little over a decade back and I started therapy. People bitch about the masks and the inconveniences of them because of the pandemic. I love the fact that I can wear a mask as I am out and about doing my thing.

Between the haircut, style change, and the mask, my parents (who live near by) wouldn't recognize me if I passed them by on the street. It makes me safe from their harassment and emotional abuse. It lets me be authentic and wear things that help me stay grounded in the present. And, I have the added benefit that my teenage sons think I look cool now. Beloved has said if I suddenly started dressing like one of the normals, he'd be concerned that something was wrong because of how comfortable and happy I am with the style changes I have made.

I wish that my brain was as easy to fix. But, somehow in the process of making that break from what I was taught was 'normal,' I have been dealing with a lot of repressed stuff coming up to the surface. I don't know how to handle it. It's been sucking up at least 4 hours of my day as I do my journal work and I try to sort out what's going on in my head. I want to blog more. I want to get back into my fantasy writing. I want to finally finish book seven of the Umbrel Chronicles because I finally know how I'm going to do it. But, therapy comes first because it helps me function better.

I'm not ignoring you all. I'm just going through a really hard time right now. I am trying to move forward, but I have this baggage holding me back and lots more brain weasels than usual gnawing on my psyche.

AW: Morning Pages no. 75

 For the last three months, I have been having problems sleeping. I'm working with my doctor to get that sorted out but it really sucks. I wake up a lot during the night and I am waking up with this disoriented sensation that I can't fully tell where/when I am. I and my doctor concur that this is a manifestation of my brain having issues with my c-ptsd. What do I do when I wake up like that? Well, I get out of bed and wander around the apartment checking on everyone to make sure they're ok before I get a drink of water and try to get more sleep.

Last night, I only woke up twice. For some insane reason, I am completely drag-ass tired today. I feel like I didn't sleep at all. It'd be easier if I could still remember my dreams. I'm on some serious medication to help me sleep and one of the effects is it basically makes me forget what I was dreaming. My brain is working overtime to try to process something and I can't figure out what it is. But the end result is random flashbacks during the day, existential dread, derealization, and major sleep problems. It really sucks to be a trauma survivor.

The other day, I saw some person on the internet posting that trauma makes you stronger. I wanted to reach through the internet and high-five them with a brick to the face. Trauma doesn't make you stronger. You've always had that strength inside you. People are resilient as hell. Trauma just fucks up your brain, scars it in ways that other experiences can't, and leaves you operating at a bit of a deficit compared to neurotypical people who just don't understand what the hell your problems are like.

I get angry with neurotypical people who tell me that I'm brave because I survived horrible shit. I get furious with it. I am not brave because of it. I simply didn't let them kill me. I endured awful shit with the grim determination that if I can get through one day, I can get through the next. That wasn't courage. That was just survival mode. Courage was standing up to my parents when they went to go after my brothers when we were small and I was four foot nothing and a bean pole. Yep, I got my ass beat for pushing my way between my parents and my younger brothers when they were about to whoop the hell out of them for just being typical boys. But it switched their focus from my brothers to me, which gave my brothers a chance to spirit off to their room and hide until my parents were done with me and got that rage out of their system.

That was courage. Not the grim process of getting up and facing the day where you didn't know which rules were getting changed as per the parent's whim. I regularly pushed my way between them and my brothers. I also did shit like keep my brother from getting kicked out of a second story window because my mother woke up out of a night terror and flailed. The screen went flying, but I had a solid grip on my toddler brother and dragged him back in the window. I was six. I don't know if that stuff qualifies as courage, to be honest. I just saw that there was a problem and somebody had to do something to solve it. I got punished for it, damn near every time, to be honest, but I kept doing it because my parents basically put me in charge of my brothers' welfare up until all three of us hit elementary school.

Then I got into trouble for being a 'little mother' to them. Never mind that I was changing diapers, supervising them, and acting as a 'little mother' when my mom didn't feel like doing it. Which was pretty often. My parents called me their problem child. Which is pretty damn funny, in a really dark way. I did my best to follow the rules, no matter how rapidly they changed. My brothers, on the other hand, were out doing stupid shit and my parents turned a blind eye to it. I tried to stop them. I was the reason why my brother's alcohol problem got caught in high school and I was the reason why my brother was intercepted trying to run off with some rando he met on the internet at fourteen.

But, I was the problem child. Why? Because I refused to lie when they wanted me to. Because I stood up to them or resisted their demands when they ran contrary to what I had been taught was right and wrong. Because when mom started using me as her therapist, I said I can't do this at 10. At 12, I ran away from home because mom was doing the 'therapy' thing and telling me that she was going to divorce my father but I couldn't tell anyone. At which point I said, "Fuck this noise." and walked out of the house. I stayed with a friend for about two weeks. My parents made contact through a neutral party who knew us and the friend's parents. I was told that I was making my father cry because I wasn't coming home. I told my mother if she wanted me to come home, she had to tell my father everything and get marriage counseling. 

Next thing I know, I've got my parents setting up family counseling sessions. We did it for a month. It was useless because my brothers and I had been trained via regular beatings not to talk about shit that happened in that house. My parents theoretically got their marital differences sorted out. I will say, mom stopped throwing cast iron across the house at dad after that happened. The damage, however, I think was done. Because things have never been quite right between them and only gotten weirder as time has gone on. And I kept getting called on to be the person to smooth things over between them.

I confronted them about this and the history of psychological abuse at the urging of my therapist in college. She said that it was an opportunity to clear the air and rebuilt a healthier relationship based on the fact that I was a grown adult. Yeah, that went about as well as expected. I was called the bad guy because I made my mother cry and my parents threatened to kick me out of the house and pull me out of college if it ever came up again. That crazy bullshit continued into my mid-20s. I still have days where I wake up and I am left wondering if my life that I have now is real or if it's an elaborate fantasy that I created to escape my parents. Derealization is an awful thing and I don't wish it on anybody.

But, my timer is up. I've done my word vomit for the morning. I apologize if this was distressing for anyone to read. I've been writing down the really ugly stuff in my therapy journal. It's just been preying on my mind for weeks and real hard to cope with. So, I write about it and that takes a little of the pressure off.

AW: Morning Pages no. 74

I intended to type this up yesterday. I had the post queued up with some random text in here to serve as a place holder for content. Then my brain went 'NOPE, NOT TODAY!' and I found myself struggling with random bouts of anxiety over pretty much everything. I have c-ptsd and it sucks. I have mainly been dealing with emotional flashbacks over the last three weeks. They're debilitating because I just sit and stare caught somewhere between the urge to scream in agony and break down sobbing for reasons I can't put into words. My executive function gets over ridden by these emotional flashbacks and I am just trapped in one spot with this shuddering terror that I have utterly lost my mind. Then it passes and I'm exhausted and ready to cry because I'm filled with a deep hurt in my heart and mind.

Then there's the flashbacks where I'm not here anymore when it happens. I am back in my childhood cowering in fear of being beaten for missing a spot in the cleaning of a room or desperately hiding from a raging parent who is looking for someone to vent their spleen upon. I could give more details but it is enough to say that my siblings and I had a rough childhood. Normally, I wouldn't be putting this stuff out here like this. I'd keep it in a notebook where the parental units would be unable to find it. I, however, am too tired of keeping secrets and ignoring where the bodies are buried. I'm not mentioning who by name because I am to tired to deal with them randomly searching up this post when they do their weekly paranoid search of the internet to see who is talking about them.

I cut myself off from 90% of my side of the family when it became clear after my paternal grandparents died that the rest just didn't care. It's been a pandemic and the people who raised me with the attitude that 'family sticks together' never once called. Well, that's not entirely accurate. Mom called to try to manipulate me into bringing my family out to the farm after Dad had a mini-stroke. I didn't take the call, so she called my husband's number. He calmly asked what help she needed from us. Got the answer that our help wasn't needed. And that was the end of the discussion. 

The last time I spoke to Mom face to face, she tried to evoke a panic attack by mentioning how 'anxious' I got about an abusive ex and how she felt I needed to get over it. There was no context to this statement, it was made to provoke a reaction out of me, preferably one of distress that she could twist to her advantage. Well, she did get a reaction, I gathered up the kids (who were still small at the time) and I left. They have a history of violence toward kids to force them to submit to their will. They have a history of psychological violence towards people to force them to submit to their will. They'll humiliate and belittle you to make themselves feel better.

These are the people who called me a failed investment because my degree didn't equate to a nice, cushy job right out the gate. These are the same people who threw me out of the house when I lost my job due to chronic, severe illness. (Thankfully, my grandparents put me up in a place they owned elsewhere. It was a hard year getting that health problem sorted out, working for less than minimum wage, and trying to survive with a severely limited support network even as I was planning my wedding. That was a fiasco too because of my drama whore of a mother.)

I decided that the next time I see my parents is going to be when they're dead. And then it's going to check and make sure that they are dead in that pine box. Some may say, 'Hey, isn't that cruel? You're breaking their hearts. You're punishing the rest of the family by not going around on the holidays.' My answer is simple. I don't go where I'm not wanted. My grandparents made clear they wanted me around and that they were happy that I and my husband were part of the family. We visited on a regular basis and they were thrilled to interact with their great-grandchildren.

My parents and most of my other relatives don't give a damn. When they see me I hear nothing but criticism or platitudes that are supposed to soften me up for the criticism. Since Covid-19 arrived on the scene, there's been nothing but silence from them. The phone works two ways. I refuse to be the 'guilty' party when if they wanted to contact me they could do it at any time. I don't want to deal with their two-faced crap. There are some belongings of mine that are at the farm basically held hostage. If I am going to get them, I have to go and 'talk' to my parents and brothers. I have to go with my hat in hand and beg to get my belongings back. For all I care, they can burn them to the ground. It's only stuff. 

I've got my family. I've got a healthy life and I refuse to put myself or my family in the crosshairs of their bullshit for them to play stupid power games and hurt people to make themselves feel better about their pathetic lives.

But, that's rambling about me and the emotional garbage I'm dealing with right now. My psychological challenges have been acting up making it hard to post pretty much anything because I've got that woman's bitter 'no one is going to want to read this trash, write what I tell you to.' stuck in my head.

AW: Morning Pages no. 73

 My snake plant is blooming. I've had this plant for over ten years and it's never bloomed. Rumor is that it will have a pleasant smell. I attempted to smell the blossoms but all I could smell was the wet soil from watering it earlier in the day. I kinda hope that they don't smell like dirt. It'd be different, but a little bit of a disappointment. Another rumor that I picked up about this plant is that when pollinated, the flowers turn into orange berries. I think I'm going to do like my Grandfather did with his orange tree and pollinate it with a paint brush.

Going back about twenty years, my Grandfather decided to plant the seed of a sweet orange to see if he could even get it to grow in our WNY climate. I watched him put it into a 5 gal bucket and patiently water it regularly. He kept it in one of the warmer, more humid rooms of his house. After most of a year, he had a seedling. Summer came and the bucket lived out on the front porch.

Most of the family were a bit exasperated with Grandpa for his experiment. Grandma and I were entirely unsurprised. He was a science teacher by education and a farmer by way of the family business. He grew up out on Long Island on a potato farm. It was a big fight between him and Great-Grandpa when Grandpa wanted to go to college, but he finally talked his father into it. While at Cornell University, my paternal grandparents met and fell in love. A little while after graduation, they got married.

Before they moved up here into the boonies of WNY, Grandpa was teaching science at a school downstate. His family was growing and Grandma wanted to move closer to her parents in the Southern Tier. His farm that's on the other side of the hill from where we live and about ten minutes south west was the only house he could find close enough to drive there. (It's about a 3 hour drive from the farm down to where my Grandma's parents lived. Slightly closer than Long Island but a trickier drive because of the hilly landscape.)

He took up farming and with his sons and some employees raised a lot of corn, soybeans, and peas. Sometime in the 1970s, farming by itself wasn't quite enough to pay all the bills. Owning your own tractor is expensive, y'all. So, Grandpa got a job across the valley doing grounds keeping for the state prison. Things were such that he was able to afford to keep the farm, not work it full time, and afford to get his pilots license and a small personal airplane. That thing was his biggest hobby.

Every weekend, Grandpa and Grandma were off at fly-in breakfasts when it was the season for it. I remember the scandal among my parents' generation when Grandpa decided to put an airstrip right down the middle of the property. They were all concerned about how much land was being wasted. Grandpa answered it was his land and it was cheaper to keep the airplane on the farm than at a rented lot at the airport in the next town over. Someone tried to appeal to Grandma. She just chuckled and kept knitting. That's how my brothers and I knew that the air strip was probably her idea.

So, the story of the airstrip is one of those ones for another day, but my paternal grandparents were people who enabled each others' hobbies and catered to each others whimsies. So, when Grandpa decided he was going to try to grow an orange tree in her downstairs bathroom, Grandma's response was to water the bucket of dirt until something green came up in it. Mom insisted that the tree wasn't going to grow, being from Florida and a self-styled expert on the topic. Grandpa's answer was, "Wait and see."

After about three years of tending this slender sapling in a bucket with a handful of leaves sticking out off of it, it blossomed. Grandpa carefully pollinated it with a small paint brush and waited. The tree gradually got a tiny orange on it. My brothers weren't impressed but I thought it was the coolest thing to see an orange tree growing in my grandparents' house, with fruit on it, in the middle of January. To support the experiment, Grandpa bought a grow light and hung it up in the bathroom. After the orange tree experiment came to its conclusion, the grow light was moved to the alcove in the living room where Grandma had a veritable jungle of different plants.

So, the orange tree had an orange on it. It looked about the size of a plum. It smelled like an orange. Grandpa waited for it to get bigger but it didn't. So, after it was ripe, he picked it. He peeled it and handed my brothers and I each a piece of this orange while saving some for himself and Grandma. When Grandma got in the dining room, we tested the results of his experiment. All five of us were surprised. The seed came from a sweet orange but what we had was bitter and tasted like a cross between an orange and a lemon.

Now, I've been reading about snake plant. It'd be nice if my Grandma, whose degree included a minor in botany, was still alive. She told me that she hadn't seen a snake plant blossom here. When she gave me the plant, she said that they were from the desert and that they just show interesting leaves here. I think she'd be delighted to see the flowers. And I think Grandpa would be proud of how my indoor 'garden' is going. With the exception of the African violet, everything has been flourishing. I learned well from them how to care for houseplants. They always joked it was simple, keep the green side up and the roots down. That's what I've been doing for twenty-ish years and now something really cool is happening. I just wish they could have seen it before they passed on.

AW: Morning Pages no. n+1

 I fell off the bandwagon of writing morning pages. I fell off the bandwagon of blogging daily. And I gave up on projects like the analysis of The Artist's Way. I feel guilty about it. But, a freaking pandemic happened. And I have teenagers in the house. And I have been having problems with my bipolar (type II) and my c-ptsd. It's just been all around a crappy time. Did I forget to mention that I have been seeing progress in at least one area of my life?

My diabetes is slowly improving. My A1C is down to 6.4, which is a pretty big deal considering that when I got diagnosed three years ago it was 12. I've lost weight and gone down about four dress sizes (if that's even a reliable measurement anymore, every brand is different it seems). I took some time during the last year to take a serious look at where I wanted to go with my writing and my life.

I wasn't blogging, that bothered the hell out of me. I wasn't working on anything but keeping the kids doing school work and preventing them from spontaneously combusting. Housework piled up because of the depressive episode that hit me, followed by my putting my back out, and then a week and a half of bad c-ptsd messed up thinking most recently. I just felt guilty about everything and like my horrible parents were right about how I was going to amount to nothing.

I made the mistake of looking at my revenue on KDP. A whole dollar with twelve cents for the month. It was enough to make me question everything because I was in a bad headspace to begin with. Beloved pointed it out that it was a dollar that I didn't have before. And that was a good thing. I grumbled but agreed with him. He then said "You know, you're not a machine. You can't produce product/content/stuff all the time. You're a human being with limitations and you're not lazy. You're overwhelmed."

I'm really lucky to have an understanding husband in that man. This year we celebrated out 17th wedding anniversary. It was going to be a romantic walk at a park we went to while we were courting. The mosquitoes were so ferocious that even bug spray with DEET in it wasn't enough to deter them. I don't know what's up with the mosquitoes this year but they've been bad in my neck of the woods. You can't go outside with out them swarming you. And I live in WNY, this is not the bayou or serious swampland. 

It'll be cold weather soon enough. That'll kill the little bastards off for a while. Then I get to hobble around like an old woman because my arthritis hates the cold weather. But, my sons are old enough and responsible enough (sort of) that I can give them the job of shoveling the front steps and the walk for a bit of money. Now, if only that level of bribery worked on getting them to clean their room. It's a losing battle on that front. At least we've got the prodigious Lego collection and the massive creations contained to the kitchen. (Don't walk through there with bare feet, it's hazardous. Caltrops everywhere.)

I'll try to post something tomorrow and figure out where I'm at numerically speaking on the morning pages. Next week, I'm going to try to figure out where I left off with the analysis of The Artist's Way. So, look for something more about that in about two weeks. I have to re-read the chapter in question and take notes.