Shattered again
A lot of things happened last week… I can’t get into details, in case somebody actually reads it. I can’t talk about it to anyone, I can’t write about it, I have to carry the burden all by myself.
Bottom line is that it’s been too much for me to process. I’m shattered into tiny pieces again. The pain is sometimes unbearable. And this is better than feeling nothing at all, at least I feel a little bit alive… and sometimes I just don’t feel anything I play the most emotional music I know and then it kills me piece by piece. I don’t know how to go on.
Broken
I don’t know who I am anymore.
I stopped talking with myself a few months ago. I seek out things to do to kill time, to kill thoughts. To live with myself. To go on.
You think that everything will be ok and that you’ll never love anyone else again, because you’re happy. Or you should be happy. And then, suddenly you’re in love again, with all the passionate thoughts I can’t really describe, but my stomach flips when I think about it. And you find yourself loving one person and being in love with another…
Don’t ask me how it’s possible.
Random thoughts
I have hurt someone I care about, by being selfish, lost and sad.
I don’t know how to live with myself and with that dark, lonely feeling.
I just wanted to feel desired, attractive. And I still don’t.
I crave attention from both of them. Everyday I want to make myself sexy, but it only makes me more vulnerable, so I end up wearing combat boots, combat trousers and black lipstick again, because I feel more secure in it.
I kill myself over and over with Pink Floyd and my sanity is dropping.
Music that makes me alive
There are songs, tunes and performances and performers, that go straight to my emotions without the analytical phase. They cut me open, shatter me to pieces, I feel a large ball of heavy energy over my stomach, I feel paralized, my hands and feet get numb. My mind gets numb. and I feel so sore like I was yearning for something that I don’t know of yet and I may never know. For something that could be just Right if it was here and I’d be in the right place.
And when I listen to them I feel like I’m alien to everything and everyone and everything is alien to me and only in this particular music everything is just right and I’m right. And I want to get inside that music, and I can’t, so I get even more sad. And yet I keep listening over and over, because it makes me feel, I feel more alive than I am without it. It’s like touching open wounds to feel the touch at all.
Everyone has their own inner music. Mine has a lot of air, as much fire, and a lot of great sadness. I see sounds in colours and feelings. I can touch the sound, feel its texture. I can see its colour and how it changes.
Robert Plant’s voice and way of singing is grey-blueish, smooth and steel-like cool and soft wind-like airy. It shatters me a little bit more every time. But I’ll keep listening. This is the cost of beauty awareness. If I didn’t hurt when I listen to music, I wouldn’t be aware of its beauty. It makes me seriously wonder about my life and my soul, and who I want to be, it makes me better. Or at least I think so.
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.
A touch that made me hurt
I had a very weird experience a few days ago.
One of my colleagues, not even a friend, just a person whom I meet at parties at our friends’ or in a pub somtimes, has shown certain feelings towards me. Nothing clear. It was a simple touch. He was getting out of a pub and wanted to say goodbye, and he touched my back for two seconds. But it wasn’t a kind of touch that you usually grace your pub colleagues with, it was something that you reserve for a lover.
I felt a surge of weird energy through my body, going right to my fingers and toes, feeling like they’d explode, and I’m not sure it was his energy or mine. I couldn’t ground that energy at the time and I couldn’t save it for later, so I simply had too keep it the way it was and it almost hurt. I didn’t know what to say, and he left very quickly.
Yeah, I had noticed his glances, but I wasn’t sure what they meant. After all I’m married and he knows that perfectly well. And besides, guys simply don’t feel that way about me, because I’m the person they like to have a few beers and talk about movies or photography with, not one of the slender and beautiful women they usually fancy in black laces and high heels.
I feel really weird and don’t know what to do with the fact in order to not hurt that man (no, of course I don’t want to go to bed with him, I’m married, for crying out loud.)
A few hours after this event I had a nightmare about our dog dying, and there was a lot of blood and guts involved; I really want to remember prettier dreams, but somehow I remember the ones like this. This is the way the painful energy gets out or makes itself known.
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.
A way of sharing
My good friend told me that my voice has changed. My singing has changed. It’s been changing for the last few months, and I don’t know if the change is done already. After last week everything has changed. The singing changes if the singer becomes different, I suppose.
I used to perform without emotions. Or with fake emotions. Not opening up, not letting anyone in. Going towards technical perfection (which I lack, but I’m working on it). There are people who observe emotions of others and they might use their conclusions against someone. A little Soulgaze, if I may use a reference to popular sf literature.
The last few weeks changed that. My goal now is to “rip away the top layers”. It needs concentration, emotion, perfect conditions. I only managed it once. I sang one sweet, sad song to my dear friend, as I promised him. He had his soulgaze and he appreciated. Something changed after that. He said I’m becoming someone else, and he wouldn’t say anything more, because he didn’t want to disturb the process. He said that I’m actually making a difference. I give something good to people. And that I should take from it too, because there’s enough magic in my singing for the whole planet and myself. That’s why I started singing on parties, recently, when someone asks me for it. This is the only way I can share my love for friends with them for now. It’s the only possibility for me to open up.
Even a musician who doesn’t actually like songs told me that my singing’s improved (it was after a few glasses of wine, but anyway). This must mean something.
My singing now lets me get rid of pain and sadness. Or sometimes to embrace them so they become more familiar, more… mine. I know I won’t get rid of them entirely, because they’re part of me, and I can’t simply cut that off. But singing helps keeping me from getting shattered more and more. And sometimes even glues some little broken pieces together.
An old friend
The day before yesterday, I accidentally met my old alter ego. I haven’t seen him for almost ten years. He had cut off all contact with people he knew, and went away to find a Purpose.
Now, when he has recently found it, he came back.
And he is dying.
I’ve regained a friend just to lose him again.
I couldn’t sleep that night, I was thinking. And I couldn’t cry.
