Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Two years later and I'm actually proud it happened. Humans are so weird.

You can be so completely attached to another person that the notion of letting them go under any circumstances is beyond the pale. Choosing such a heartless abadonment and then being happy about it? That's just unthinkable. What are you, some kind of monster? You'd have to be crazy to blah blah blah.

So yeah, we broke up. And yeah, it hurt like hell for a year. For most of that year I literally grieved. I pined and obsessed. It was all through my dreams, where I could--and did--cry. I raged, I blamed him, I told myself I had to work up the courage to go back because I felt I couldn't take the loneliness for one more second. I felt like it was a moral failure on my part that I never quite got pathetic enough to go back on my knees and make him forgive me for bringing out his rage and contempt by being flawed and human.

I'd done it before, but this time my stubborn pride wouldn't let me make things better. I didn't want to pretend I was wrong or sorry when I wasn't, just so I could have the old relationship back. In my eyes, this made me the bad guy. Petty. Had to have my way. So arrogant I'd betray a friend rather than lie to them and make them like me again, etc. etc. But I had drawn a line: if he didn't come back, I could not chase him.

Too many times before, I'd done just that, and I always felt so diminished afterward. Pigheaded as he was, he never would have returned or apologized first. I could do it, and I saw myself as a martyr because I did. Yay for me, I had the courage to take the blame I often felt was undeserved, and my prize was having him like me again.

So fucking disordered, but I needed it. And you know, he always wondered why I hate love songs and chick flicks so much. Well, basically it's because everyone hates having that black mirror shoved in their face. I think I just can't stand watching people celebrate the same kind of twisted codependence I secretly suffered. I have just enough insight to recognize dysfunction, but as for applying it to my own life? Still working on that. Lots of denial in there to cut through first.

And time went by. Slowly I began to realize that what I labeled as obstinacy and pride were actually protecting me from allowing my poor sense of boundaries and ragingcodependence to keep me in a bad situation. Nothing would have changed if I went back. It would be a huge fuck-you to my sense of self-preservation. Another fit of martyrdom would have been killing the first healthy impulse I'd had in ages--to not fix everything at my own expense. Deep down, I knew this from the start, but I tried pretty hard to bury it in layers of obfuscatory bullshit, and for a while it worked.

By the time the anger and obsession began to fade, I started to see how emotionally unhealthy things were. I had never realized just how much the relationship had warped when I wasn't paying attention. It was rusted through. Nothing held it together now but my determination to keep it alive at all costs. That was when the grieving stopped and I began to move on.

Starting a few months ago, I realized that, far from missing the way things were, I was actually celebrating its end. I was relieved! For the first time, I thanked my stubbornness instead of being ashamed of it. That petty little line in the sand that I drew in anger had finally put an end to a relationship that ought to have died naturally many years before.

Kids, they don't know any better. Kids think friends are always forever and that every love is the only true love they'll ever have. Kids don't recognize the signs when the time comes to stick a fork in a relationship. I missed this stage of development when I was growing up, and that has led to years of animosity and dysfunction. The people involved grew up and went their separate ways in life, and our friendship began chafing as it ceased to grow along with us.

The resulting swan song droned on, unheard and unheeded by either of us, until what should have been the happiest memories of my life were polluted by the regret and resentment of the latter years. That makes me sad.

So many grudges and self-censorships, trying to be a different person from the one I was, just so someone else would like me. All because I was in love with someone who didn't exist anymore. Oh, the depression, the recriminations. The self-loathing. Why wasn't I good enough? Why did he change? Woh, woh, woh.

Imagine my surprise when I realized that this, all of this, was normal. Normal and okay. A vital part of being human. Imagine my relief. It's not about finding company in misery, it's about finally connecting to a major component of interpersonal relations.

So kids, when you're in a relationship and things change, don't be scared to change with them. When the skin you're in gets too tight and starts to itch, try shedding it. Spend your whole life terrified that your guts will spill out because there's nothing left to hold them in, and you'll never get to see what's actually underneath. For me, it turned out to be a much thicker skin, and it fits pretty good.

Antidote to the Late Winter Funk

EDAR (Everyone Deserves A Roof) is a 501(c)(3) charity that provides unique mobile shelters to those living on the streets all around us. Each EDAR is a four-wheeled mobile unit which carries belongings and facilitates recycling during the day and which unfolds into a special, framed tent-like sleeping enclosure with a bed at night.

Fucking awesome.

The Burden of Fame

A year ago I made a snarky post about some truly wretched and self-absorbed E!D!G!Y! teen artwork on Deviantart. Over time, that post somehow ended up high on the list of Google results for a self-injury related search string, and now that old entry is getting heaps of anonymous comments.

So far not one of these newbies has bothered to comment on the entry itself. Overnight the comments just became a forum to share their issues with the usual poorly concealed self-admiration. Mid-conversation, even, like they all migrated at once during a thread somewhere else.

It's like somebody's copy-pasting Harry Potter hurt-comfort fanfic in my blog, complete with self insert characters who listen to Evanescence and think suffering is just so romantic.

Of course I'm fucking with them. It's like a law of physics. Gravity pulls, objects in motion tend to remain in motion, and Luka hungers for the blood of Mary Sue. I added a shit ton of attention whore macros to the entry, and put a trigger warning at the very end just in case.

God bless you, blink tag. You get a lot of shit in this world, but you might just have saved me some eyerolling.

Hate and Love: Two Epiphanies

Being outside of my family's particular bubble of insanity has given me a lot of additional insight, but it's taken so long. For one thing, I can say now without trying too hard to spin it into something softer, that my family really was abusive.

My mother, who I love dearly and miss every day, was a complex and damaged woman, and she passed the damage down to me in her blood and with her behavior.

My father, who once warned me apropos of nothing that he would choose his new girlfriend over a relationship with me and never look back, gave me his schizophrenic logic and paranoia along with his artistic ability. There was no therapy. Therapy was the ultimate stigma, a threat to make you behave.

My siblings have their own damage and we don't get along. My sister steals anything that isn't nailed down and flies into a self-pitying rage if you notice your shit in her house. She is a classic borderline personality, leaving chaos everywhere she goes. You can love her for the beautiful person she is, but best to do it from afar, where the snakes can't reach you to bite.

Before prison, my brother was the kind of kid who would slash you with a box cutter if you walked in front of the television. He might be over his anger issues, but I'll have that scar for the rest of my life. I automatically cringe when somebody stomps around in the room because unpredictable violence is a fact of life that's long since been drilled into me.

Nobody bothered to call and tell me my mother was dying in the hospital. For days she asked for me, but nobody ever made the call. Why didn't they call? I asked, and my sister made excuses and lied about how long Mom was in the hospital. My brother didn't understand it himself, and at least he came right out and said so.

And that's how I found out what hate, real hate, the kind that you don't throw around casually when speaking about your feelings, felt like. I'm not sure what to do with it. It feels kind of like I swallowed a bag of lead shot.

Leaving the war zone doesn't mean shit if the war zone won't leave you. And so that's my current project: getting past the damage without false hope that it can be gotten over.

Then there was a bad relationship. It wasn't bad at first, but both of us were fucked up and there were certain areas where communication was absolutely forbidden. For years I watched the other person change, becoming darker and more angry, deciding to "become an alcoholic" and then buying vodka to make it happen. He wasn't happy and he wouldn't tell me what was wrong. Later he would say this was my fault. He couldn't open up because I haad proved he could never trust me.

It's weird in retrospect how reasonable that sounded at the time. I'd never betrayed him in my life, but I accepted it and took the blame on myself. To my credit, I believed it for exactly three months before I figured out his game, but still. That was three months I was hating on myself like I always do.

This person was and is still the most amazing guy in the world. We were friends for fifteen years. But by the end of it we were at each other's throats. He would hurtme by attacking things I loved, and I'd find myself joining him before too long. At times I hated the world just as much as he did.

I never completely absorbed his bullshit. Some of the things--his pathological hatred of women for being weak, his homophobia, his racism, the way he had of hating anything I liked to goad me into a fight--were guaranteed to cause drama, and I learned not to engage him on certain topics. Of course we still fought about them, but it was always disguised as some other argument. And of course, not talking about anything important will eventually change a good friendship into a bad habit.

But we still had fights over stupid shit. He would use a racial slur and wait for me to be offended so he could pull out his trusty "you're only offended if you're a pussy who cares too much what other people think of them" line of defense. He abused my internet friends by trolling my LJ, and I let him because every fight we had eventually became THE fight, and I was afraid he'd finally snap and leave me like he ditched every other friend he ever had. I've seen him utterly lose his shit and ditch friends over nothing, and I wasn't in any hurry to have it be me.

I knew my time would come someday, but I loved the angry motherfucker, and I was in it for the long haul. Keep in mind I'm disturbed too. Some part of me needed to have a friend who made me feel like a terrible person, a worthless person, a disgusting person.

I've never even been on a date, much less gone through an abusive relationship. I didn't even understand how that stuff works. I can sort of grasp the concepts as an abstract, but the motivations themselves make no sense. Even if I did, I suspect it wouldn't have made any difference. Things look different from inside the bubble. Dysfunction can very easily get ahold of you while you think you're being vigilant; hell, because you think you're being vigilant.

I think being reasonably smart actually works against you when it's the heart. You're convinced you'll beat the odds because you've read all those books and know the signs of an unhealthy relationship. Bullshit. I can tell you from experience that the books do not do justice to the reality. We weren't even romantic (I don't think, anyway) but it was nothing like the movies and books where you have the benefit of objectivity.

So we cycled up and up until both of us were miserable, and then it was over. The tumor that used to be the best frienship in the universe was removed, and for a long time it kept hurting. I'd get all mad and have imaginary fights where I'd try to explain myself to him, over and over again. But around the anniversary of my Mom's death, I realized I was actually a little bit grateful to have it finally be over.

I wished, in fact, that we could have ended it sooner. We could have saved eight years of indignity and self-hate. But we didn't, and I know I paid for it. I'm only just starting to realize just how damaging we were to each other.

I never saw it clearly from the inside, and I was honestly looking. I was scared that the influence of our bad blood would make me nihilistic and hateful instead of just bitter and snarky the way I naturally am. But I honestly thought I was OK.

The destruction and rebuilding of my psyche into one more appropriate for that particular bad relationship was so subtle and insidious that it took place right there in my head without me catching on. I never noticed the way I was changing. I thought I would have to see it if there was something there.

I read back on my old LJ entries and I was just so fucking angry and frustrated and FULL OF CAPS LOCK RAGE. There was a whole universe out there that was just begging to have its ass kicked and I was the guy for the job.

I used to be so optimistic and naive, and somewhere along the line our dysfunction sucked that out of me and made me jaded and angry (but still naive). It's like I couldn't be sensitive anymore and leave that in the open. And then I started finding sensitivity funny and worthy of mockery.

I never realized such nihilism had crept up on me until long after the breakup, when my attitude started to fade and I began to realize how much self-censorship I had been doing. It was suddenly right there in the middle of the picture, full-focus.

In the time since we broke up, I've gone from angry capslock troll to a bit of a sparkle-eyed peacefag, and I honestly find being a total pussy the much more fulfilling attitude. I want to be the kind of person who trusts others. I want to be the kind of person who helps fix the world instead of bitching about how much it sucks. I want to feel optimism again. So this really rocks.

This is who I used to be, before I started censoring myself to keep a dysfunctional frienship going. This is who I want to be now that I'm not living that life anymore. I feel kind of like a kid again, and there's just so much in the world that matters to me. I never quit caring, but I was careful not to care too loudly lest it make me look like a loser.

Well, so be it. I'm a loser with a big fat smile on my big fat face. And so far nothing bad has happened to me, so I guess all the angst was a waste of time anyway.

So to everybody who was there to read while I took out my anger on my keyboard, I apologize. I know it's not exactly abnormal to vent on the internet when shit is truly, truly horrible in the real world, but I still apologize. I won't blame any of the trolling I did on my family or my failed relationship, because everybody I ever trolled was abusing other people to earn my wrath, but I do feel bad about all those capslock rants when I could have been thinking about ways to make things better instead of cheerleading the apocalypse.

It's been a pretty rocky life so far, but I'm starting to get the hang of it.


TO BE CONTINUED.

My Hamster Wheel Heart

I'm feeling lonely and abandoned, and Mom is getting more dead with every passing day. (There's your spoiler. Now you don't have to read the rest of this entry! You can just skip on down to the final paragraph).

Sometimes I feel like it's gonna crush me if I don't keep moving. I don't have anyone I can talk to, so I keep finding new things to distract myself with, and that keeps on being just barely enough.

I wish I knew how real people dealt with major life crises. I'm not doing so hot, from a purely practical standpoint. Emotionally I'm recovering, but there's this whole 'real world' where things seem like they're fucked beyond my ability to fix them.

I've got an unpaid YMCA bill because I forgot my membership when Mom got sick. Do I call and tell them what happened? No. I don't want to be on the phone anymore. The phone is a place where terrible things happen far away and can't be taken back, and I don't want to tell a stranger what happened to my mother and hear the words coming out like some kind of cheap excuse for why I didn't pay my dues. So the bill's gone to collections and my credit's fucked even more.

I've still got that bank snafu that's been going for months. I'm on Mom's Wells Fargo account, and they might have ME on the hook for her credit payments now, but do I call them and tell them she's dead? No. I can't seem to handle even that.

The emails been building up for months. My brother is leaving angry messages on my phone about the bank thing and whatever else is going wrong. Do I answer them or call him back? No. I don't want to know what else has fallen apart.

It sounds like such a bloodless and lazy way to dodge responsibility, but that's only because I can't put into words the unbelievable enormity of the helplesness and inertia and that's been with me for months. I've been overwhelmed by emotional extremes from every direction and now all I want is to be left alone. I don't know why I can't fix this. I'm good at doing so many things, why can't I handle a few simple phone calls?

This winter, not two months after Mom died, my best friend since the age of 12 dumped me. These were two kinds of loss I'd never had to deal with before, and suddenly they both were happening at once. It was like being smashed between two Mack trucks headed in opposite directions at high speed.

To put it mildly, the timing sucked. Rain got me through the whining and hysteria. Mostly we watched movies and drank bizarre alcohol. And then, having ignored the real world for months at a time, I found that I was starting to feel a little bit less like dying.

And then Rain moved out.

She'd been intending to go for months and months, but needed to save up the money. I had made my peace with her leaving way back in the fall, before everything turned to shit. But now she was packing up her stuff in the aftermath of two other people leaving me, and bad things always happen in threes.

I was also chock full of self-pity because I felt like I wasn't outgoing or social or interesting enough to make her choose me instead of the many awesome and hip friends who were waiting for her in Asheville. But when she moved and didn't die or stop talking to me, I calmed down again. Sort of.

Fast forward to late June: I'm still standing in the wreckage of all the things that fell apart in my absence. Want to know my shameful secret? I barely care about what a mess I've made. It's like it's all happening to someone else. Maybe this is my brain's way of coping with everything--depersonalize and screw the consequences. I dunno. I'm not a shrink.

I do know that if it's not immediately connected to getting me from one day to the next, I don't want to hear about it. I'm obsessing over soft and comfortable clothing. I'm taking long leisurely walks by the lakeside. I'm hanging out on the internet reading stupid drama that people actually think is important. I'm reading books again, something I haven't found time for in years.

I'm getting by. I'm even happy, most of the time. But then I'll see some kid losing his mom in a comic book or remember something Mom said and start to cry, and that kind of fucks it all up for a while.

But it's not so bad, as isolated depression goes. At least I never have to look forward to losing my Mom again, wondering if the next phone call will be the one letting me know she's died in her sleep. No more standing over her at night, listening to her breathing, afraid that she might stop if I leave the room.

No more wondering just how much misery I can stand--I finally know. Anything you throw at me. I won't land on my feet, and a judge surely wouldn't award me points for style, but I fucking dare you to try and stop me getting up again.

Here endeth the ruminations. I hope you guys liked reading it as much as I enjoyed wading through all that pent-up negativity yet again! It was a blast! :)



On the happy side, I spent 4 hours clambering around the Lilydale hillside and riverbank. I took pictures, collected dead dragonflies, ate homemade chicken onigiri, and stuffed various marine fossils into my pack. Turns out, I do all right on my own.

Hey, it's a start.

YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO SEX ME

Some things you need to know:

1. There isn't much you can safely do with a head full of henna, so things can get VERY boring by the end of the six hours it takes to kick in.

2. If you don't paint some of the gunk onto your eyebrows as well, they tend to look weird later when the rest of your hair is orange.

3. There was a camera nearby.

Thus, this series of photos. And yes, ladies--I AM single.