Humpty Dumpty
I usually have a good intuition for people. There are people whom I like instantly we meet, and there are ones that I resent without any reasonable cause.
I usually stick to the impression.
Except that one time, when I met that sociopath about twelve years ago, told my intuition to fuck off because I knew better, fell in love, got my heart broken repeatedly and got my already weak self esteem shattered into tiny pieces, that I’ve been trying to glue back together since then.
I know he is a sociopath, I know he manipulates people to feel better, because he likes it when people are emotionally dependant on him. I know I shouldn’t worry about anything he had said, but anyway I can’t get it out of my system. And it’s been so many years. He made me feel worthless, so I feel worthless. Even though I have a partner who says otherwise. Even though I’ve got friends who make me feel otherwise. They all make the little shattered pieces glue themselves back a little bit. But not enough, apparently. How do I get rid of this feeling? How do I get to like myself again?
Mage wars
I dreamt about being involved in wars of powerful mages.
I’m not sure what the wars were about, I don’t remember much, except the paralyzing fear when I was standing on the top of the stairs in an enormous golden-brown hall, a dark blue robe on my back, a wand in my right and an axe in my left hand, waiting for the unknown enemy (aliens?) to show up.
I remember my stomach hurting and its contents going up to my throat out of pure, primal fear, and a single thought: “If I fuck this one up, everyone will die”.
And then I woke up.
Empathy III
My brother says that my biggest problem is that I feel so much true compassion for people. This actually is true. When somebody is in pain, physical or mental, other people say they’re sorry, they express how they sympathize with that person, they discuss their feelings and generally do a lot of talking, “ohs” and other relevant noises, and then they go on about their business.
I don’t.
Instead I feel the pain which feels like swimming in liquid cotton. Instead I get sharp aches in my stomach. I get a numb, pulsing pain in my left hand. I get white hairs. I get a lot of bad dreams. I get a dark and pulsing sadness. I get the feeling that nothing is ever real. In several combinations at the time. The feeling is usually so overwhelming that I usually don’t say much at the moment, because nothing feels relevant or appropriate, which can be interpreted (and often is) as being rude and not compassionate.
And, contrary to what one might think, I sort of appreciate all those things. Not because I like the pain, no. I don’t. It makes me feel sick and helpless and hopeless and numb. I appreciate them because sometimes those emotions that come directly from my empathy are the only thing that give me energy of a certain kind, make me feel alive and make me feel emotions and remember that I once turned myself into an emotional vegetable on purpose, in order to not feel sorrow at all. I blocked all the emotions as an effect of blocking the bad ones, but now I understand that joy would be worthless without sadness.
Maybe there is a way to not feel the physical pain when my empathy turns itself on. I don’t know. It probably won’t happen unless I learn to express those emotions to people (at least to the ones I love) verbally or through the touch (this is where we come back to the communication issues again), which I doubt will occur soon. I’m still too blocked, emotions still hurt me, even the good ones. This is one of my biggest demons. I learn to feel again, and when the emotion is strong I get petrified for a while.
I have to learn to feel without hurting myself.
My body
For the first time in the last few years I’d like to perform some major artistic activity, and for the first time in those years I don’t have any means to (because of my current situation and place of residence; long story). I have an idea for a series of emotive self-portraits, both photography and painting, that I couldn’t probably show to anyone afterwards anyway, because they’d be nudes, and too emotive, and I don’t like being physically and emotionally naked before others.
But I seriously think this might be the only way to get rid of my demons, or tame them at least. Or maybe make friends with them, as my brother has recently suggested. To turn them into images, so they’re defined, restrained and changed into something good. To stop quelling my emotions inside and vent them into something constructive and beautiful. To like my body as it is. Yeah, I’d love to like my body.
Communication
Talking about my feelings is an enormous effort for me. I always have the feeling that the person that I’m talking to doesn’t give a crap. So I don’t. I close up. Even to my love. But in spite of that, I have a distant feeling that people should talk about their feelings to their spouses, right? Right.
So sometimes I try. I try to cry to feel a relief, but I can’t. And when I try he changes the subjects, starts talking about irrelevant silly little things that make me mad at the moment. Or he tries to make me laugh, when all I need is someone to take my pain and ground it, because I don’t have a lightning rod in a form of God or gods.
And he has that stupid little habit of interpreting all problems as medical cases.
So I accused him of that all.
He accused me of closing up. He said that I should talk to him more. Because he isn’t a telepath (which he probably isn’t, true) and he has no way of knowing what brews inside my head. And that the more he’s trying to listen to me, the more I close up. Which is also true.
And we started talking. I told him that I have a problem with talking about certain stuff, especially to him. How can I talk about my problems with religious identity to someone who sacrificed a normal religious life to be with me, right? This wouldn’t be fair. So I didn’t. But he asked me to start talking, so I did. And I managed to tell him all the things.
That I don’t deny existence of any gods or a single God. They may all be there, for all I know. I just don’t give a damn. I refuse to worship them.
That the Bible or any other “holy” book is for me merely a set of legends, written to keep people together, because when they are unhappy, they should have a tradition and religion to make them feel more safe, and it should be treated as a legend, not as the only truth, because if you think logically it just can’t be.
That I simply hate people who think that their way of thinking is the only right one and I think that because their beliefs simply aren’t verifiable (is that even a word? O_o), so they might be right, wrong or both, for all I know.
That I think that bringing up a child in any religion (especially the one like his, which doesn’t tolerate any signs of thinking differently, or maybe I’m too harsh?) is brainwashing them from the beginning and making them believe things that aren’t verifiable (O_o) as they were real and true.
That he doesn’t talk about himself much and after all those years I barely know anything about his emotions, his spiritual life. I only know his opinions about various stuff and his brilliant sense of humour, which helped us through many difficult times.
He didn’t say much. He wasn’t too happy with what I said (I probably hurt his religious feelings more than once, and I realize that too painfully), and he had probably suspected such an opinion from me all this time, but he was glad that I started talking. And promised he wouldn’t send me to another shrink, and acknowledged my problems as something to be solved by some serious work from me, not by medications and talking about irrelevant stuff to a strange person, which I hate with all my heart.
I also asked him if he really wanted to be with me and why, I don’t really know why I did, because I feel that he does. Maybe I needed to hear it again to feel wanted.
I know it’s not much. We didn’t solve anything, only opened some old and new wounds. But we began communicating and it’s a good start.
Why am I here?
When did I last write down my personal thoughts?
I don’t remember.
I used to keep a diary for a very long time. Somewhere in the meantime I forgot how to verbalize my feelings and thoughts. After that I forgot how to express them through all the artistic activities I had been performing.
And after that I stopped talking about emotions. I stopped talking about anything that wasn’t emotionally indifferent. I stopped listening to people talking about such things. I stopped crying. And I also stopped enjoying. I became an emotional vegetable.
I functioned like this for another couple of years. I made the biggest effort to deceive myself, because it wasn’t difficult to deceive others. Oh joy, Black Cat is happy, finally, they kept saying. They still do. I think I even was for a while. My demons were carefully buried and asleep. It was good to not feel watched by my demons for quite a while.
They woke up. They started to dig their way up to the surface and yell for attention. I couldn’t keep them hidden from myself forever. When they are digging, the pain seems almost… physical.
I’ve got a friend.
Not a lover. There is only one lover. And the friend… simply is. He’s with me all the time. He says that when he feels me hurting he comes over and strokes my head or holds my hand for a while, over a distance. I can feel his presence all the time. He appears in my dreams, when I dream of danger.
But he also made me dig out all my demons at once and now I can’t get a hold of any of them!
Why am I here?
To catch all the demons one by one and kill them, because writing clears my thoughts, helps me understand, makes me realize things, helps the thoughts out of the chaos. When a problem is unverbalized it’s very difficult to solve. I don’t want to talk to people about my problems. They have enough problems of their own, they don’t need mine. I’d be unhappy if I gave them that burden. I can’t speak, so therefore I write.
