When it’s Dark, Look for Stars

I’m having a really hard time starting this post, because I’m crying while typing, so please forgive typos… I really want to get this out in one shot, though, so I’m gonna keep going.

Tomorrow is the 10-year anniversary of my sister/friend Midnite’s death.

It’s a big milestone, but it still doesn’t feel as though it’s been that long. It feels like yesterday, the way my pain rates right now.

I knew I was going to be walking into a dark place emotionally tonight when I got home.

And then, I stopped to get my mail.

Now, to back up a few days.

There’s a woman whose blog I follow, Jenny Lawson, otherwise known as The Bloggess .

On March 20th, she posted a blog about reaching out to others, and trying to bring some sunshine into their day. She opened her comments to her followers, and let us decide if we wanted to participate too, sending love to each other.

I admit, I picked a few, and sent some things out.

And, I participated, but didn’t really expect anything.

But – of all days…

Today…

I got 8 pieces – 8 PIECES of MAIL FROM STRANGERS.

Telling me I was worthy.

Telling me to keep going.

Telling me I was worth it.

Jenny Lawson…you don’t know me. You’ll probably never see this post, or know what you’ve really done for so many of your readers with your blog.

But, I’ll tell you this.

You will never know just how far your words can reach.

All the way into the darkness.

Dusy Bay

There’s a lot to today.

It’s Imbolc. For us Pagans out there, it’s a big holiday, a sort of “kickoff” for the year, bringing the light back to the world, & life back to nature. (The first flowers started to bloom, calves & lambs start being born, yada yada)

This, for me, is a sort of Pagan anniversary, as this was when I dedicated myself to my Path, 21 years ago. I celebrate, quietly, on my own, every year.

It’s also my blogging anniversary here at WordPress, I guess? I received this today…

So there’s that.

And…

I quit smoking on Jan. 31. That was the day I had my very last cigarette, at 7:40 am… And, yes, I’m about ready to put my head through a wall.

But I won’t.

So February is the beginning of a lot of things for me.

Let’s hope this is the beginning of more good things.

Background Programs

I suppose I should feel grateful.

My stats have gone haywire over this last week. My post about Doc Hordinsky must have been shared over Facebook again, because I’ve been receiving mass hits on my blog because of it over the last few days.

Exposure is supposed to be good for writers, right?

Ok.

Instead, tonight, I’m sitting inside my house, in the dark, isolating myself. My anxiety has me in near-panic mode, for some unknown reason, and my evening has disappeared down a dark, seemingly endless well of nothing.

I’m numb to everything but the panic, and I can’t decide between flight or hide. “Fight” isn’t an option, since there’s no opponent, so it’s either “flight” which means medicating myself into oblivion… Or “hide”, which is to try to ride it out curled up in bed, hoping the morning will see it gone.

……..

I haven’t heard anything from E (my stalker) since Saturday… This, to me, means he’s either out of his normal phone service area, or he’s making his way overseas… At least when I was seeing the auto-rejected phone calls, I knew where he was located. Now, he could be anywhere, & I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.

No wonder my anxiety is so high.

Rather like this post about Doc, which is years old, still garnering so much attention even to this day…

The programs running in the background always seem to carry the biggest surprises… Not always good ones.

500

I just noticed today that I now have 500 followers on my blog!

Holy crap.

Thank you to all of you who subscribe & follow. It is greatly appreciated.

Learning the Dark

This is a difficult post to begin, so I’m just going to dive right into the middle, and work my way out to the edges from there.

The Morrigan works from the gut, most of the time, anyway. She is instinct & courage. Passion and fire and fury.

I’m learning to listen, here, to what She has to say, because I’m in the middle of a battle…and I need all the help I can get right now.

And being told that my emotions, at least the “darker” ones, need to be abandoned, given up, let go… 

Is bullshit.

I used to repress my emotions.

I used to tamp them down, pushing them into smaller & smaller spaces, because they were deemed “unacceptable”, “socially abnormal” and just plain “dark, morbid, negative & wrong”. 

Until, of course, I’d explode, sending my anger, darkness, whatever you want to call it, by this time magnified exponentially, onto whomever was closest to me at the time, whether they deserved it or not.

I was Vesuvius.

I was Krakatoa.

I was Pele.

I was fire and ash and death, burning the air, scorching oxygen from others’ lungs and melting the ground out from under their stance. 

And, when I was finished, I would feel horrible over the destruction I’d caused, but would have no idea how to fix it, so would run away…leaving the wreckage behind.

So, I grew up.

Learned how to express myself better, with more clarity. (For the most part) Yes, sometimes I still fall down the verbal well when it comes to expressing my feelings to someone, especially someone who knows me from my past, because they have access to those emotional buttons (triggers) that caused me to go off “back then”. 

Started blogging, which really does help me figure out my emotions, & how to verbalize them.

But, back to the darkness.

I…am not a sunshiney kind of person. I’m not a hippie, or a bohemian. I’m not a cheerleader or perky pixie type. (Factoid -I tried my hand at cheerleading in high school, but even to this day, people don’t believe me, & need photographic proof)

If I weren’t almost 47 years old, I’d say I was closer to a Goth or Emo kid, or at least on that end of the spectrum, because of the way I think, speak, act, dress, blah, blah. 

Hell, I’ve said it before, in relation to my poetry… “I was Emo before it was a style”.

I wear black, pretty much all the time.

Not because it’s slimming, but because it helps me blend in to shadows better, and, as I’ve said before “It goes better with my soul”.

I laugh at morbid jokes.

I don’t get scared watching “scary” movies, but instead critique the special effects techniques, laugh at the stupid dialogue, & make fun of the plot choices.

I prefer to sit in the dark, rather than turn on a light.

I sit up late at night, and hate early mornings.

I detest early morning chatter at work, and do everything I can to avoid it.

I need my dark side.

After all…

You cannot see and know the light unless you sit first and accept the darkness.

Morrigan came to me at this time of my life for a reason.

She knows I need my darkness.

She is the Queen there, & can help me navigate my way far better than some of the lighter Goddesses. 

This is not going to be an easy battle.

My darkness is the only thing holding me together right now.

Don’t touch.

Lovely Bloggers

Guess what?

VP over at Viper Pit Memoirs gave me an award! Wow! Thank you so much, it truly does mean a lot to me. Dear readers, if you’ve ever struggled with family, head over to the Viper Pit Memoirs. She writes about her own survival, & the difficulties of dealing with genetically-related bipeds who can’t seem to human.

I’ve received awards before, but it’s been a looong time, and I’d actually kind of forgotten I’d posted them on the side of the front page, because most of the blogging comes to you live from my phone, while I’m sitting in my easy chair, or on my front porch.

So, Ok, there are some rules, of course, to receiving awards, and here they are for this one:

Umm, facts… Oy vey… After blogging for over 6 years now, and quite in-depth, sometimes, I’m going to have to really dig for these!

1. I recently (within the last year) discovered that I love Bollywood movies. The music, the singing & dancing, a lot of up-beat stories, even if they have drama & sadness, they find a way to inject humor into almost everything. And, I’m slightly obsessed with Hrithik Roshan now… After all, who wouldn’t be? Look…

C’mon… Admit it. You just picked your jaw up and wiped the drool off. (Wanna see more? Check out “Bang Bang!” On Netflix. Just do it. It’s worth the subtitles. The man can dance -ohmahgawd can he dance.

2. I’ve been thinking about writing a book of flash fiction/short stories. Nothing super ambitious, mind you, because I know how flooded the market is with all the digital printing. I kind of just want to see if I could pull it off & actually finish the project. I’m good at starts, not so much at ends.

3. I like baking, but I don’t really like cooking all that much. I’d rather slap together an easy meal, & save my time in the kitchen for all the sweet stuff.  Not that I need it…danggit. Texas chocolate cake, soft Nestle’ Tollhouse cookies (the secret’s in how much flour!), snickerdoodles, pumpkin pie, chocolate pudding cake, these are my specialties, but I can bake just about anything.

4. I really miss having horses & being able to ride whenever I want. I grew up with them, & some of my favorite memories are with horses. 

I was really good at gaining the trust of horses who didn’t like anyone. I miss it. A lot.

5. I speed read books. No, really. I actually took a test, and I can read at 1,500/wpm and retain meaning. That’s a lot of words. Plus side? It really helps me at my job, which requires fast reading & typing. Drawbacks? Books don’t last me very long on the first read. Every book I own, I’ve read at least 3 times…some as many as a dozen times or more. There’s only 1 book I own that I haven’t read cover to cover, & that’s the one I had a photograph published in.

The book

The photograph.

(It’s a college-level architecture book, and I’m just not that into architecture)

6. I get “word vomit” when I get nervous. Which gets me into embarrassing situations. I really need to carry a roll of duct tape in my purse for these moments, & just slap some on when I feel it coming on. Seriously.
So many times.

7. My Etsy shop might not have a lot of sales under its belt, but it doesn’t matter to me. I make my crafts because they bring me happiness. And I focus totally on them while I’m doing it. It shuts my million-miles-a-minute, anxiety-ridden brain down for a little while, and the peace is totally worth the sticky hands & paint permanently stuck to my t-shirts.

Now, for the nominees…*drum roll*

(In no particular order)

* The Other Side of Counting to Ten, make sure to read all the “Shoe” posts! I guarantee, they’re not what you’d think at first glance!

* life vivified a relative newcomer to the blogging world, but heartfelt & funny.

*Sparrow’s Ramblings – a personal friend in real life, a great woman with scads of sarcastic & witty humor.

*la vie en rose – never afraid to tell the truth as she sees it, will smack you up side the head with sensibility

*Depression is the Enemy – working issues with positive energy, and helpful information about thriving while living with mental illnesses.

*How Many Masks – A survivor who understands about the safety of emotional masks, & how we can be healthier by taking them off sometimes.

There are so many more blogs I love visiting, but many I also know don’t “do awards”, or would prefer to not receive them for their own reasons. However, if you glance at the right side of my blog’s page from a laptop, you’ll see my blog roll there – a good list of some of the places I enjoy lurking. Check them out!

*caveat* this post took me quite a bit of  time to write… I never realized how long it takes to gather all the necessary links by using your phone to play hopscotch all over the internet! 

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming!

It’s All About Me

This blog is, anyway.

What I write here, comes from my head, my heart, my fingertips. 

Yes, I’ve talked about my kids, my family, my friends…but these are people who are in my life, so once again, it circles back to yours truly in the end.  How I feel about them, how I feel about what they said, or did, or what happened to them.  It’s my perspective on the world around me, and the people in it, that you end up reading.

So, it’s my galaxy, my universe, here.  And that gives me permission to say what I want…within my own limits.

If you are a satellite in the orbit of this, my universe, you run the risk of finding your story appearing somewhere within the lines of my posts. I might not use your real name (probably won’t, as I try to protect the people I care about from the rigors of others knowing their words, actions, stories), but, sooner or later, something I write will resonate in your mind. 

Hey, I resemble that remark!

And if it makes you laugh, or makes you cringe, well… It’s still my story told here.

As I read somewhere, “If they wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

I’m not an impossible person to get along with. I have only a few rules that you really shouldn’t break, at least, not if you want to stay inside the circle.

1. Don’t lie to me.

2. Don’t break promises. Matter of fact, don’t make promises, unless you absolutely know you can keep them.

3. And to expand on #2, if you tell me you’re going to do something? Doesn’t matter if you say the word “promise” or not. I will take you at your word. If you can’t do what you said you were going to? Call, text, message me. I’m not insensitive, & I know that plans change because life gets in the way. 

But, I do also have feelings. I won’t put up with being “ghosted” or ignored. It’s rude, insensitive, & ultimately, it tells me that I mean shit to you.  So I’ll be on my way, without a backward glance. 

I’m worth more than that.

4. I expect my friends & family to call me out on my bullshit, too. I am an introvert with anxiety, which means I don’t really like going out, much. I detest crowds. So, sometimes, if I’ve made plans with someone, I’ll try to worm out of them. And I can also get irrational when my anxiety is really high, or my depression really low. My friends & family care enough to talk me down, ride it out, and wait for the storm to pass.

5. Don’t do anything to hurt my friends or family. I’m awful at sticking up for myself, but if anyone hurts someone I care for? Back up, & buckle up. It’s going to get ugly, fast.

That’s it. 

Don’t lie, don’t jerk me around, don’t let me be a jerk, & don’t hurt the ones I love.

Not that hard to follow, right?

In other words…

Don’t be a dick.

Because if you are… Chances are you’ll see yourself in the words I write…and it won’t end with “happily ever after”.

Timing is Everything

I’m so glad I’m able to post things to my blog from my phone. And that WordPress allows me enough autonomy to set up “timed” posts.

Because I ended up with another migraine, today, and wouldn’t have been able to post anything coherent.

I’ve been trying really hard to post on a more regular basis, after having been mostly absent from the blogging world for a while, and have been mostly successful on that score.  It’s been helping me a lot, while I try to figure out what’s going on inside my head, and in my life.

There have been a lot of changes in my life over the last 5 years, since my divorce, that I haven’t completely processed, so I’m working on them.

There are going to be a lot of changes going on in my life over this upcoming year, as well, so I’m also trying to get a jump on that.

Luckily, WordPress makes it possible for me to type posts whenever I want, and set a time and day for them to appear on my blog, so I do try to space those out, but sometimes I forget, as I’m wont to do, occasionally.

So, if you see posts popping up, seemingly randomly, or a bunch all in one day, that’s why. 

I’m working, internally, on a lot of stuff, right now, so please excuse if I overload a little.

Permaneo

Never give up.  Hold on. No matter the struggle, no matter how many times you get knocked down…you must get up again.

My blog here holds a lot of information about my life. I write about my family, my crafts, my friends, pets, blah, blah, blah.

But, I also write quite a bit about feelings. This blog is my journal, my place to work through the struggles I have, with anxiety, with depression, with relationships & loneliness.  

I use this space, to help me work things out, in my head. I don’t trust therapy, for myself, having been burned by it in the past. And I’ve found that, writing things down, expressing them through my words, brings me clarity.  Having others read my words, and sometimes getting comments, gives me strength…because I know that I’m not alone.

Reading other’s blogs shows me that as well.  People I will probably never meet face to face, tell me about their lives, their troubles and triumphs, and it reinforces that sense of community for me.  After having done this for so many years now, I have even made some good friends, one, at least, that I did get to meet in person.  And it makes me feel good that I can share that feeling of “not alone” with these others.

Some days, I’m on top of the world, able to do anything, achieve every one if my goals, and triumph over any adversity.  

Other days, I’m ahead of the game if I’m showered and dressed.

But.

I come from a long line of women who simply – Don’t. Give. Up.

Call it stubbornness.

Call it persistence.

Call it resilience.

Call it strength.

Whatever.

It doesn’t matter what word you use.  Because, it’s just words.  

What matters….is that I get back up.

Maybe it takes a while.

Maybe I fall down, and stay down, for a while.  I might cry, rage, be anxious, depressed, angry, numb.  Maybe it feels as though life will never be the same. Well, it never is, after.

But I always, always get back up.

Permaneo.

Packing Boxes

I’m getting ready to move.

No, not my life, just one of my other blog’s posts.

Throughout my time on WordPress, I’ve had a few, & I’m figuring it’s time, once again, to consolidate and simplify.

So I’m moving all my stuff from “Fictional Jen” over here.

Please excuse the temporary mess…