wixbloom's journal

So, I wanted to name it "recovery vent" because I don't want this to be a thing for me to... wallow in negative feelings, so I want a positive focus. But the past couple of weeks have been rough, mental health-wise, so I really felt the need for this.

And the first thing I want to write in this vent thread is:

Perhaps it's about time to stop thinking primarily in terms of what I've lost, or what I'm trying to get back, find again, recover. "Recovering" doesn't have to be so literal. There's nothing to recover, not because there's nothing good in my past, just because... what I'm constantly framing as loss is just change. What I'm constantly framing as gain is also just change.

Last night in bed I started to cry (breaking down into tears in bed has been uncomfortably common for the past couple of weeks) but as soon as I did it one of my cats butted her head against me. And instantly in my mind flashed Wallace Stevens's beautiful poem "Angel Surrounded by Paysans": "I am the necessary angel of the Earth/ Since, in my sight, you see the Earth again"...

And in "seeing the Earth again" I saw myself from the outside, just a grown child with limbs spread on a bed, crying, softly being headbutted by a very fluffy cat. There was nothing about this image that wasn't pure, good and beautiful. And most of all, real. It being real was the most important thing by far, and I realized just how much I've been tangling myself in what-ifs and thought exercises and forgetting how much I am real.

Being real feels like the hardest thing in the world, but it's so much simpler than worrying and projecting and overthinking. And it's easier than grasping to "recover" a self who changed, because the change, like so many not-always-kind angels of the Earth, was necessary.

Who am I, when I am real? I am a set of limbs, and a beating heart, and a mind. I am a network of relationships and a thread of affection. I am a person, who occupies a space in the world, who moves their limbs, executes actions, thinks, dreams, communicates. I am a bright, intelligent, curious and passionate person. More than anything, I just am.

I used to call this state "being the iron ingot" - an iron ingot being a thing that doesn't need to think, process, plan, decide, which has inherent worth just from existing. Earlier this year in a particularly poetic moment of my journal (during a particularly poetic time in my life) I wrote that I had been crying less because "I've been having the tears hammered out of me as the iron ingot is forged into a blade with purpose". That's change. It encompasses loss and gain in the same breath: maybe I am losing some sort of passive, potential-filled softness, and gaining drive and purpose. It was a very beautiful and apt metaphor, and - I was gonna say "positive", but that's not the point, it wasn't positive or negative, it just was. It was words that I wrote about myself in a moment when I was very aware of being real.

I think right now, "recovery" can be discovery instead. It can be finding out how to just be enough - not in other ways that I've been enough in the past, in other shapes that I've taken, but in new ways.

 

Well since I wrote this last week I've been feeling significantly better! WOW.

Coming to the conclusion that my journals (which are a therapy tool) kinda NEED to be a certain way for maximum effectiveness. They need certain sizes, textures and colors otherwise I end up not engaging with them. Spiral notebooks are a BIG NO. Thinking of buying myself some cute journals off Book Depository - sure, it'd take them months to arrive and in the meanwhile I'll also need to shell out some money for a journal to carry with me now, but since I plan on having journaling be a lifelong practice...

Speaking of lifelong practices, here's another one I'm gonna get: using eye drops. Right now I such at them, having gotten started on Monday, but as it is, I'll need to use them for the rest of my life, which means plenty of time to get used to it. They also make my eyes sting a bit, and the next morning it looks like I've been crying, which in turn makes all my smiles look even more watery than they normally are. I am, of course, trying to be nonchalant here regarding the fact that oooops I have permanent optical nerve damage from super high pressure in my eyeballs and I'll need expensive medication for the rest of my life in order to keep that in check. I have also incurred a debt of 460 reais with my mom due to eye exam and medication expenses, fml - and that's with her doing me the awesome favor of buying me new glasses AND sunglasses. It was... a pretty overwhelming way to start a week.

I had Monday "off" because of the eye doctor madness, and Tuesday and Wednesday nights off college because classes were cancelled due to a congress thingy that the art school is hosting, then I had Thursday "off" due to a paralization (that's a one-day strike). You'd think I'd be more mellow because of that, but I've been a bit overwhelmed. Mabe still with the medical stuff? That always takes a heavy toll, often heavier than I'm willing to admit even to myself. I also got hit with a bout of anxiety yesterday afternoon. It was fixed by closing my windows, lying in bed with the electric sheets turned on to their full capacity (warm warm WARM <3) and watching cute youtube videos and eventually napping. I felt like a whole new person after doing that, though: I finished a drawing I'd been kicking around for weeks, fixed another I'd been agonizing about for even longer (tbh I'm still probably gonna toss it and start again, but the practice of "fixing it" was very enlightening and I learned quite a bit.!).

Also, while I was making Sims 4 downloads, which is what triggered my anxiety because my brain went "YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO BE THIS USELESS!!!", I actually... found... my Art folder, with all my art from 2009 to January of this year, when I lost the folder. It had been misplaced somewhere in my "Users" directory and I hadn't been able to find it - I thought I had deleted it in fact! And when I saw that my jaw dropped and I straight up almost started to cry. There could be no cleared sign from God that I'm doing OK and that it's OK for me to play videogames and have hobbies.

I was having a lot of anxiety relating to two classes I'm taking, but then I ended up producing work I'm SUPER PROUD OF for one of them, and that put me back in my balance - in a place where I'm getting my education for me, however I'm able to, however I can. For the other class, stuff is a bit harder. I got a C in the first assignment due to "lack of care" ("falta de capricho") because my paper got rumpled and I didn't realize that a 2 page paper required a facing page. And I and am already possibly going to be late on another one, and have another assignment due next week for which I have to grab a text from the copy place. I'm staying sane and reminding myself that this is a class I'm taking for extra credits, and that I'm neither going to fail it or drop out of it, and that now that I'm aware that my professor is a bitch very strict I can do all the facing pages in the world for the next assignment. I'm also working hard at compartimentalizing: if my other assignment is late (because I missed a class in which we set up deadlines for the presentations, and in fact only realized this week that deadlines had already been established, and was unable to contact my classmates on the subject) then I'll apologize and commit to doing my best - and I'll deal with that WHEN I'M IN CLASS AND TALKING TO THE PROFESSOR, not today, in my home, where I can't do anything about it.

 

Hello and welcome to today's installment of "wixbloom tries not to cry about having permanent optical nerve damage". On this episode: total failure!

 

My mother wants me to go get medical examinations tomorrow but I can't, I can't do it, I'm so done, it's not an emergency so please can't I just not deal with this yet on top of everything else.

 

//hugs

 

I feel I should clarify that "permanent optical nerve damage" doesn't really affect my vision right now. I'm gonna have to medicate forever to keep it from spreading and eventually imacting my routine, though, and that sucks and is very scary as well

 

Oof :(

 

And my mother has this attitude in which she just... blunders through as many tasks as she can, often on impulse, like "oh, since we've already done 8 things, how about we do 3 more!!!!!!" and she's never really understood that I can't function like that at all. She's grown a bit more respectful of my boundaries but she doesn't understand what THE BIG DEAL IS woth doing a thing if it needs doing and I have time. Needing to occupy hours that could be productive with rest and unwinding is alien to her.

Hah, no wonder I have anxiety.

 

She agreed to do the exams next week so I cam plan for it and I nearly cried from a mix of relief and just emotional imbalance as a result of the anxiety spike I got.

Ugh.

 

Hm, so I have a stomach bug that kept me up at night and has kept me from eating breakfast (and also made me lose my dinner, so technically I haven't had a meal since lunch yesterday) but ALSO my brain chose this morning's bus ride to work as an opportunity to cheerfully remind me that hey, you have glaucoma!! You're probably gonna go blind eventually!!! Have a nice Monday morning sweetie!!!! :)

I don't really know how to deal with this. My health is such that I have a set of expected bad health news. "You're gonna go blind" really wasn't numbering among them.

 

"Hey remember also that your grandmother is going to die? Sure sucks huh" :)

This is why we can't have nice things.

 

//Hugs
//pokes the wixbrain.
You stop that.

 

When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes

I'm not into Les Mis, but I happened to watch Lindsey Stirling's Les Mis Medley and it made me want to listen to this song and... I just listened to it and cried.

I told two separate abused children, today, that what they're going through is not acceptable. I feel so helpless and yet I'm filled with so much fury on their behalf. I wish I had better ways of conveying hope and love to them. I long for a world in which all of us who were abused in our homes get to be safe in the knowledge, deep in our bones, of a life about to start when tomorrow comes.

 

I'm so sorry I'm so sorry I'm so sorry

I have so little to offer and so many people suffer

I wish I was a better person

I wish my mind and my body and my life allowed me to give more of myself to others

I wish I knew smarter, more effective ways to help with the little I have

Like volunteer work in an organization I could actually trust, for example.

I wish I were able to actually team up with people to make stuff happen that I can't do alone.

 

Not for the first time I wonder, how did my therapist do it? How did she get me to a point where I was able to contemplate that I was actually being abused and it wasn't my fault? It's so hard and listening to kids being abused justify their abuse and defend their abusers. It makes me want to cry. It makes me want to break the entire world. Neither of these is a useful reaction. How did my therapist do it? How did she hear me say so many similar things and just... stay cool and help me? How did she?

FUCK, I just remembered one time, the first time I got really upset with her. I was upset because she didn't let me try to finish a thought. The situation was as follows - my mom had interrupted me halfway through sperging out about one of my special interests and said "this is why you don't have any friends, you know". I then cried to the internet friends I made BECAUSE OF MY SPECIAL INTEREST about it. They assured me that I did have friends and that they were my friends. At some point as I was telling this story, my therapist kept trying to get me to discuss my mom instead. What I wanted instead was to talk about my friends, and how having them meant certainty that she was wrong and that I could too make friends. For some reason, as she tried to guide the conversation to my mom, I remember her starting to sound really angry - and I got proggressively more angry that she wasn't listening to me when I said NO IT'S OK BECAUSE I DO HAVE FRIENDS, SEE?

I literally just realized that it wasn't me she was angry at.

Eleven years later.

Shit. I want to cry again.

[EDIT: one of the people who sparked this comment complained that I'd quoted them indirectly but close enough that it was possible to tell who they were; I agree that that's not cool and have edited the post accordingly]

 

I am NOT worthless and I do NOT wanna die!

My brain is making me scream those things at it right now, to ward off intrusive thoughts to the contrary

Doesn't matter. I'll scream them forever if I have to

They're the truth

Here is the truth:

I am NOT worthless and I do NOT wanna die.

 

Long phonecall with my moirail. What a good, pure human being. I'm so proud to have his friendship and support.

 

"How do I make the same stupid mistakes regarding lack of boundaries, which I'm fully aware that I'm making, but in the crux of the moment don't feel like mistakes?"

*backreads the Oct 18 posts here*

Oooooh, THAT'S how.

 

"I overexposed myself and got triggered and I'm going to continue to overexpose myself in some sort of absurd, self-effacing mea culpa over not being, in fact, either an angel or a superhero"

She had years of training and a therapist of her own, Léo you dummy

*BAPS SELF UPSIDE THE HEAD* Your worth!!!!!!!! Is not conflated!!!!!! With your usefulness to others!!!!!!!! And you don't need!!!!!!! To buy a place into your communities!!!!!!! Through emotional self-sacrifice!!!!!!!! Dumbassss!!!!!!

 

Goddamit Léo Monteiro if you had only taken a fucking breath that day and stepped back and given yourself a few days to realign your emotions and take care of your goddamn self (rather than projecting the care you were needing and treating it instead as care that you owed other people) you could have avoided 2 months of emotional fucking turmoil and increasingly unhealthy boundary violations!!!!! This is your future self here to gently but firmly bap you in the goddamn head and tell you to take care of your fucking self!!!!!!