take on me

continuing my trend of interspersing a few light posts with lengthier ones, here's an update of What's Been Going On as opposed to the fascinating world of flickr, heat waves and snorting. since my last mammoth update, i have had even more aha!s:

1. yes i said that my fixation on AG was about more than her, that it was about me wanting a richer existence. but, it was also about *her*. i haven't just been missing the possibility of her (or anyone), i've been flat out missing my friendship with AG, such as it was. maybe if i'm good, and lucky, we can get something back.

2. staying busy - and by that, i mean keeping my inbox on the verge of exploding during daytime hours - really is a good pacifier. beats staring at a cursor.

3. getting to know yourself, and even articulate! your feelings better is really quite startling at times. but good. :-)

4. self-doubt and/or self-loathing is an insanely powerful demon that has tortured both min and i for far too long. it's not the kind of thing you can get rid of overnight, but WonderTherapist, B, gave us some excellent tools for dealing with this. now if we can only remember to implement them...

5. last saturday when we saw B, we went to a very tasty dinner in the marina district and then walked along crissy field...watched the sunset over the golden gate. it was so gorgeous outside. the realization? that i am very lucky to be alive, to be there at that moment, with a woman who loves me (who i love as well), and a puppy who bounces everywhere.

6. an aha! moment that also was a duh!: Other People stick in my head because i'm interacting with them - or in some way, they are with me - more than min does. granted, once i get home, usually she's interacting with me quite a lot...but not necessarily.

why is this worthwhile to note? because it makes me feel less guilty about all this stupid musing i do. it's simple physics. more, better interaction with min = less Others because my mind's full with her. now, there's only so much we can do about that, given the situation, but still... it's in progress.

7. and in conclusion: WonderTherapist B, who we've decided to stick with, helped me come to an amazing realization. we were talking about the time in my life when i was cutting and very suicidal - my senior year in HS. she said, why did you do that then versus some other time? what happened?

my parents liked to think that it was because i was angry/whatever about the abuse i'd experienced when i was little. i never really bought that. i mean sure, that's not GOOD, but it wasn't on my mind, either. no, i'd say that far more pressing on my mind was that in the last year or so, my life had become a variation on running on empty. i am not kidding. for brevity's sake, let's just say that we spent some time on the run from the government, because of my dad, and because of both real and (his) imagined conspiracies and paranoias.

so i told B about all this. and she said: it's natural that you would turn to sexual fantasies (which also started around then) as well as the cutting, because it was an outlet that YOU could control. the rest of your world was about life and death, and that responsibility hanging in the balance. it was about control -- your parents controlling you, and internal messages to control yourself because there's probably someone waiting for you to mess up and then you're all dead.

you're jealous, right? right.

with help, i got the cutting stopped. and i knew - really - i would never do anything worse than that. which meant fantasy became my main outlet. i could control it, it was all mine and no one else's. even when everything was "fine", even when it started to cause me pain, it was still inside and therefore safe.

at least, until the last couple of years. that's when i fell in love with someone else, and became almost completely unglued. and that story, well i've talked about that enough. but that was my mind's turning point from safe to destructive. and i have never really been the same since. i'm hoping the difference now, though, is that i'm talking about these things. there will be no more decades of festering - only fortnights are allowed.

ok time for bed. enough analysis for now.