Thanks for Dept. of Eagles!

Today. Okay. Positive. Okay. I went to a Bible study and good things came of that.

I don’t want to be a rational architect.

Wishful thinking is symptomatic of anxiety. okay. I think I’m ruining everyone’s life. No. Stop generalizing just so that you don’t have to make any particular person feel any particular way. I might have ruined my family. No. More specific. Today I called my mom, because a woman at the Bible study talked about her daughter who had Aspergers’ Syndrome (high-functioning autism–trouble reading social cues or understanding social behavior), and I had thought, when I met this woman’s daughter… She reminds me of my mom and my mom’s family! Probably more along the lines of.. Aunt Annette? And sometimes my mom, I dunno, she gets so fixated on houses, building things, productivity… And I got inspired that maybe if my mom figured out that she needed help with social things… or that maybe I wouldn’t feel like I was the crazy one for thinking people’s behavior abrupt/rude/abrasive… So I called her, but I chickened out in saying that I thought she might have it, so I said “your family” and she said, “No.” And I kept prodding around, mentioning Aunt Theresa and Aunt Annette, and she said, “No, you don’t get to find diseases.” Then I was like, “What do you mean by that?” And she was like, “I don’t know” kind of coyly. Then I was confused and halted, and I felt like she’s got this thing built up around me that I’m a hypochondriac. Her and Russ: it’s in your head! Well, you know what I thought of saying after I had hung up and my altruisitc attempt had failed:

Hey Mom, remember that time I thought I had lice and you kept saying “No, you don’t. You’re just imagining it. You’re a hypochondriac.” And then you finally believed me when my entire head was itching and you saw a bug run across my hairbrush???

That’s because I was RIGHT. I was good at deciphering what was happening to me. I’m not a hypochondriac. And admitting that something is a problem is not DEFEAT. Such tight denial.

 

I sat on a builder on the premises of The Yoga Hut and some thoughts breezily unfurled.

Acknowledge that her words led to me feel hurt, manipulated, and misunderstood. The misunderstanding of my intentions perhaps hurts the most, being treated like my curiosity needs to be extinguished.

Don’t suppress the feelings, but now… the most freedom comes from knowing my own freedom of choice, that I don’t have to let pain ripple through my cells and out into my actions against others.

 

I dunno how I feel about blogs and the internet now. It seems like the maximum in social scrutiny. Maybe I could check out of all of this. Maybe that’s avoidant. Hey!

 

But I think my big push away from people is because I’m not setting identity boundaries. Meaning: whoever I’m around, I feel at their mercy, whatever they believe, whatever they’re doing, whatever their opinion about a CD or a shirt we passed in a window, well, disagreeing can’t be as important as our relationship, so I don’t need voice it! Or I chatter incessantly, I say things outside the realm of my good discretion, projecting other people’s opinions because mine aren’t sharply and quickly formulated. and Silence is not. allowed.

BLECHG so much garbage in my mind. Who’s operating the gas grill beneath me? Maybe this is what they mean by Hell. Oh yeah! My theory of God. The kingdom of God is within you. The Bible is a metaphor for the entire inner, emotional/spiritual journey of a single person, and each of us can use it to exquisitely calibrate our inner lives with the richness of wisdom. The infinity stretching out before us is within us. Right now.

Over

The Mac Attack (espresso, chocolate, raspberry) from Art Six may be keeping me awake…

Tall people are special, often.

I’m not tall. : (

I got the idea to write songs about all the different parts of personality, to teach people about those and help them feel pride in/accept all the different angles of themselves. My first lyrics are

PERCEIVERS UNITE!

Mold – fascinates me

There’s a loaf of moldy bread on my floor from when my dog fished it out of the compost

I dotingly watch its form grow e-ver-yday

PERCEIVERS UNITE!

This mold anecdote isn’t so much ‘creative’ as ‘true’.

Next would be songs for judgers, intuits, sensates, feelers, thinkers, extraverts, and introverts.

It started because American culture specifically favors extraversion. Someone who likes to spend time by himself, who lives according to her own internal vision, who switches gender freely like that, can feel underdeveloped when in fact they’re just differnt. Differnt.

If I could explain that in a fun song format, parents of introverted children might say, “Why, they’re not dysfunctional! They’re introverts!” and harmony would increase between people on earth. That’s my vocation.

 

I followed an extension of my skipping instinct today, a ‘late instinct’, and was late for Learning & Cognition to get some green milk bubble tea. We had a substitute today! No quiz or attendance at the beginning of class… I walked in as they were watching a film about Clive Wearing, the man who is so amnesic that every minute or so he feels as if he has just awakened. When he sees videos of himself in the past, he claims that he was not conscious then. He remains articulate and intelligent, and he retains his ability to play piano and speak from information of that past without being able to directly acknowledge it.

Appreciation for memory has been moseying around my mind lately. Learning&Cognition is a wheel of cheese to my hunger on this subject.

Sara and I split some queso fresco on the last grocery shop. MM

Make People Uncomfortable

Thoughts, recently.  This is going to be disorganized.

–Mackenzie told me about troubles that she’d had in high school.  She sounds like Holden Caulfield.  “I was just having a real hard time in school.”  She said she didn’t have any friends, and she wrote some really dark poems about rape that scared her teachers.  They kicked her out of school and told her not to come back unless medicated.  She started taking Ephexor– a LOT.  750 milligrams in sample pills.  She said she almost killed her family by turning on a carbon monoxide-leaking air conditioner and leaving the house.  Antidepressants affect people differently, and for some it amplifies feelings of emptiness, apathy, and sadness–what you’re trying to escape or better yet cope with–to a totally dangerous extreme… Case in point.  There’s really alot more to her story, I’m not sure how much I should write here, but… left and right, I saw through her words people handling the situation horribly.  And it just made me realize how much, in general, people really don’t understand depression, or anxiety, or mental illness.  Like I thought maybe teachers or at least school officials would’ve been trained in a little bit.  I thought counselors at least might be able to get over themselves and try to help a person in conjuction with her free will and a realistic view of her circumstnaces, instead of forcing convenient theories on her or deciding on their own what they were going to fix.  … Not that they can.  No one can fix you but yourself.   But the thoughts people inject into suffering others~!  The way they’re treated!  I’m starting to believe from secondhand experience that institutions exist to protect the sane people.

Because this is my journal and because you’re willingly subjecting yourself to its words, I’m writing what I would want to say while pointing a finger into your chest.  Buddy.

 

–Don’t freak out.  They’re a fellow human being experiencing more negative emotion than you can imagine or handle and you would act the same way to try to get out of it.  You would do all the same things that seem crazy.  Actions that seem crazy usually have a real source within the person that’s indiscernible but could be found by talking to them.

–Don’t utter these familiar words: “You have a good life.  You have no reason to be depressed.”

That’s why it’s a problem.  You could have a perfectly good life (like me) but have incongruous extreme quantities of negative emotion.  What a problem!  Defined.

I realize that I sound pretty condescending, but I was aghast that so many people in Mackenzie’s life had reacted in the absolute worst ways possible.  She just kept slipping further and further downhill, and those freaking out around her rolled her down that hill when they were trying to push her up.  To be honest, my family wasn’t too hot either, but they did try and they did gain patience after a few years.  And really I’m pretty much convinced that almost no one would know how to act.  If I built a time machine, and I wrote a note to people of the past who encountered me at my worst, they would find on a folded-up piece of notebook paper tucked in their sock drawer one day:

 

 

IF YOU WANT TO HELP ANGELA:  Be calm and patient (really calm).  She gets really scared when she thinks you’re all going to leave her behind, and it makes her draw in more, and that makes everything worse.  The problems will never get talked about if she feels like she has to hide everything to keep you all safe and comfortable.   She has to find a good professional counselor whom she trusts (maybe she’ll meet one in Chicago… whoops! I let that future event slip, didn’t I?), because a neutral party will be less prone to freak out, and the counselor will have tools to help Angela learn to sort through her own criss-crossed bullet-like thoughts.  Most importantly, know that she has every reason to get better, especially if you’re reading this when you would be putting on socks, because then it means she has people in her life, like you, who care about her.