Part of My Plan

Everyone has a standard operating procedure when it comes to making plans and decisions, and this is mine.

1. Chew on the issue until I have gnawed it into the shape of a well-defined question that will support a concrete answer.

2. Decide the best course of action, with several options, redundancies, switchbacks and emergency hatches all built into the plan.

3. Enact plan, allowing for setbacks and changes of mind.

4. TELL NO ONE.

5. Content to remain unfathomable, conquer life one step at a time. Stop for breath often.

It's that step #4 that's really precious to me. I hate to make commitments. I hate to make promises. There's so little wiggle room in a promise. My favorite word might be "might."

So to make a long story short I promised the father of my children I would Do Something with this story I wrote. This ridiculous 100,000 words of lurid space flashiness. It felt like a safe promise to make because "do something" is so vague and open ended. I mean, I could just decide to edit and revise it. Again. That would be doing something, technically.

In a rare fit of growth as a human being, I decided to honor the spirit of the promise and not try to squirm out of what we all know I was really agreeing to do. But I've still taken two months to work out a careful plan with concrete answers. What is Something and what are acceptable methods of Doing it? Honestly, my plans are like choose-your-own-adventure books. The kind where there's a chickenshit option and you can choose to run away from the haunted house and never confront the ghosts within.

So anyway, I'm working up my courage to write down my plan here. I'm trying to be less hung up about my worthiness issues and just have fun with what I do.

C'est Moi

For the curious, I am illustrating this post with a self-portrait I have titled, "I was trying to wipe dog snot off the lens and bumped the shutter button so I'm calling it art." The astute viewer may even notice the dog snot in question.

I feel sort of obligated to follow up my last post with a reassuring "I'm not dead yet" post. So... I'm not dead yet. I'm not feeling much better, but I'm not dead.

In the interest of trying to get my life to suck in at least a different way, I'm trying something new and terrifying that I'm not ready to talk about. If I say it here, it's harder for me to shrug off. It's nothing dangerous, I promise. And when I can bear to say it "out loud" I will.

I'm really honest in this blog. I'm a really honest person in general, to the point of detriment, so as a counter measure to that I am in reality a very close-mouthed person. In being open about issues that are important and serious and under-documented, I'm trying to tell the world to look twice. What you see is a frump, a housewife in gray, a stand-offish and over-sensitive bitch. I can't tell you those things aren't true. But I can tell you that it's not the complete truth.

Post-Failure Self-Castigation

Disclaimer: I will regret publishing this post, because I'm going to be honest. To make sure I really do publish it, I'm not going to indulge in my usual squeamish hours of editing and second-guessing. I don't really want to talk about it in a "dialogue" sense, though you're welcome to ask questions. I'm saving them in a file with the nebulous plan to answer them all at some point.)

I want to share some things with you.

But I probably won't.

Being "open" about having mental illness(es) turns out to be exponentially more painful for me than I thought it would. I think part of that is the specific dysfunctions I have and part of it is my underlying personality, what there is of it.

I am clinically thin-skinned. "Emotional burn victim." No matter how casual your touch is or what you mean by it, I can come away wounded, infected, re-injured, blah blah blah. You're smart people, you can extrapolate a metaphor. No one that has read one of these posts and responded, either in comment or in person, has been anything less than kind and supportive. That doesn't stop me from wincing and tensing and anticipating the pain.

I am also shy and insecure. I don't know if that's who I am or who my symptoms make me. I am uncomfortable with your concern. You can't help anyway, so I'm going to tell you it's fine.

It's really not fine. I'm increasingly frustrated as I crawl closer to 40 and nothing seems to improve. I'm waiting to outgrow this. It says there on the Wikipedia that people do, you know. Symptoms lessen over time, it says. Could I just wait it out?

I think that one of the hardest parts of being "open" for me is that people who know me "in real life," the people that have known me for so long like my remaining parent or my in-laws or my aunts and cousins, can all read this. I feel constrained by that. These are the people from whom I have been hiding "how bad it really is" the longest. I'm afraid of their concern.

Last and far from least is the humiliation factor. I hate being this way. I am embarrassed and disgusted by myself. I still cannot accept that I can't always control myself. A few days ago I broke down and I'm still mentally engaged in the post-failure self-castigation that will go on for weeks. I am dismayed and ashamed at some of the things that I did and most of the things I said. I can't bear my own company and I can't escape it.

I don't even remember it all correctly.

I remember being on the floor. I do not remember throwing myself there. I remember running down the street. I do not remember leaving the house. I remember the throb of bruises rising and I do not remember hitting myself. I remember being desperate for the end and I don't remember the beginning.

This is why I can't meet your eyes.



(Because I mentioned it previously, I feel obligated to mention I did actually complete NaNoWriMo. I wrote something like 50,150 words in a story during the month of November. I'm counting it as a partial success because I didn't actually completely the story. More specifically, I haven't written a single word since about the 29th. Nothing. It died. It was a desperate rush at the end to at least meet the word count, even though I knew finishing the whole draft would be beyond me. I can feel these shut-downs coming.

There are a couple things I can do to jump start it again but none of them are available to me. Sadly, these are also the things that would ease my desperately symptomatic behavior of late. So I wait and maybe it'll come back. Maybe it won't, this time.)