A good time to figure out 'read more,' I figured.

Edited to amend: The amazing feats required to actually make this ship "read-more" compliant have quite lit the fires back under me. Huzzah! Avaunt!

I feel like I'm a bit going mad today. I'm having trouble with productive impulses--namely, that they're not working. I want the dishes, laundry, and work done, but it just makes me grimace a bit and dance away.

I feel very much like I want to go a it mad, right now, but I embarrass too easily for that sort of thing....


I'd start saying the things that came to mind, but without enough confidence, and then there'd be the odd looks, but I won't have backed it up with enough gumption for it to be an "Oh, well, then, she's mad, that's all right then," it'll just be more of that uncomfortable and disdainful stuff, and then I'll feel sick and embarrassed. So, so embarrassed.

I've been reading, all morning, and feeling sick. I've tried to eat responsibly (i.e. enough), and that's helping a bit, but the discomfitted feeling and the nauseated one aren't helping.

I've been bogged down in a sense of racial tension. Namely, by the thought of white people I know in the "I'm not racist, but..." mode, which is so very charming. And then especially when one of them is targeted for a little reversal that they, quite honestly, didn't call on themselves. Which is a sure way (a) to make me feel sick to my stomach with upset, and (b) reinforce their "but..."

I don't want to go back to cheerful ignorance of the bad bits of the world, and back to the misconceptions that everyone has an equal go at things, and that racism and sexism and all such are dead, because I do value having a fairly accurate sense of the world (and if everyone accepted it was gone, who would be left to do anything about it?), but it was certainly a lot easier.

I'm trying to fish out that nice little point which is (1) I know, (2) I care, (3) I'm keeping a watch out for it, and (4) acting when I can, but (5) I'm going to keep living my life in the most positive way I can, because (6) there's no reason to add any more misery to the world.

But it's difficult.

I ... I've lost it. Ah, well.

Playing in dischordant A minor on the piano helped. This is helping. (Therapy, right?) But I can't seem to buoy myself back up and out of the sense of vague dread and sickness that sticks on my when I have Those Kinds of Conversations with Girlfriend B. I know that it only makes it worse if I argue, and that if I just let her go for a while she'll run out, and if I don't encourage her it should make my point, but how sickening is that? Having to sit back and let it go? Well, not sickening. Just in the sense that it makes me feel seething inside. Not sure if it's angry or guilty or sick.

Probably all.

Fuck.

And now this--this? Really?--I'll post up on the web. Why? There's no real sense. I could just show it to Love (I'm pretty sure he's the only one reading) or keep it to myself, in the age old tradition of psychotherapy, where you write the letter and then don't send it, but it supposedly exorcises your demons.

I used to keep a file full of these feelings, back in an old life. I think this is some kind of preventative method against that. I forced all of those sick and guilty and disappointed (there's the word!!) feelings into it, and just felt low and mean and unpleasant, when something had come at me wrong and I couldn't see a way to lance the wound to purgative effect, rather than to infection.

The last time I tried to argue this kind of thing with Girlfriend B, it got bad, and she wisely stopped and hung up, realizing very well the kind of momentum this shit could build up, but when I didn't hear from her in longer than usual, I was et at by the sense that I'd lost her, and was conflicted with that kind of empty triumph of a moral battle won with a friend lost. I wasn't sure whether I cared or didn't if I lost her, and it was some of both. I don't think I care enough about people, sometimes. I love people, but I somehow haven't got the strength of pursuing them to forgive them that I used to. I'm much more willing to let them go off, now.

But I don't have many friends.

Things like this make me not want to, really. I want to hide with my plants and my Love and feel sick.

But I don't really want to do that.

Hence the dilemma, eh?

Anyway, I don't want back into that week of disgusting doubt and worry. I was good, I derailed it myself (or, rather, didn't let it rail up in the first place), and when I hear from her again, it'll be gone. But I don't want to hear from her, because every time I think of her, think of the situation, think of anything that reminds me of it at all, I feel sick.

I don't think I've ever written the word "sick" so many times in a single sitting. Or in several. Not even in jest.

Maybe it'd do me good to get sick, properly, right now. (My making that kind of statement tends to precede its happening, and that is followed by the burst of wisdom that scolds me for having thought it, and reminds me how really miserable it is to be sick, whatever the appeals are from the other side.) But it's always the same. I feel dull and weak and sluggish and unpleasant, like I'm just getting the half-assed of it, and there's nothing really to do with it except go easy and ... I don't know, drink tea and juice and try to keep the spirit and health up. Except for getting properly sick and letting the immune system clear it out proper.

But that's such an unpleasant experience. And besides, I'm set to be very busy tomorrow. Which, when I think about it, will either mean I'm plenty sick by the time it comes around, or it'll be the tipping point to send me right into the arms of pestilence.

I want to cry, and hold a couple of my less-thriving plants and tell them it'll be all right, and rouse them with my tears and carbon dioxide and warmth and vibrations. I want it to work, and I want it to work on me, too.

The sick is much like the madness. I keep thinking I could just have it done with, and feel better for it, but I know, down, that it wouldn't make things better. Not at all.

The best thing, I know, down, is that I try to feed the health and the heart and keep it up, and if I have to deal with a little ill, I'll be better prepared to come out of it whole.

I'm a fucking optimist, for chrissakes, and I want that optimism to have some self-respect and get out from under the covers and come out to help me along. I could use it. That and some sunshine.

So, this having done as much as it probably can, I'm going to go out and get some light. We're enough like plants, after all. How can we expect to thrive in the dark?