so, the other night i'm laying in my bed. i'm laying there and doing
an intensive internal assessment. checking in with parts of my body, to
see if they're all still there, working and not needing any sort of
medical attention. this need to assess my physical well-being comes from
the fact that America is AWESOME and unwilling to provide any kind of
socialized healthcare to people who need it despite certain individual's
needs.
i checked with my legs and instinctively began
scratching. since my first trip back from England in 2004 i have
suffered from a horrible case of itchy legs. i would scratch and scratch
until i bled. there are countless scars all over my legs from years of
scratching. actually, little known fact, the main reason i originally
started to get my legs tattooed was because i hated seeing the scratches
and scars all over my legs.
moving on, i checked in
with my belly by giving it a squeeze with both hands. trying to compare
the size of the amount of fat i held in my hands to some sort of fruit
or vegetable. it used to be a grapefruit and has, over the last several
months, morphed into a large honeydew. i frowned and hated myself
silently for a moment, thinking about how much weight i had let myself
gain in the last year. i have literally put on over forty pounds. seeing
that number even just now makes me wish i was willing to lie, but i
know it won't do much good. i need to be able to see that number and
know that i need to do something, that i need to change my way of living
because i'm not healthy and i'm only going to become MORE unhealthy if i
don't sort my life out.
i checked with my back.
presumably as a result of my weight gain, my lower back has been killing
me. i can't walk for more than ten minutes at a moderate pace without
needing to stop and complain because my back literally hurts THAT MUCH. i
worry about my back because the last time i experienced a pain like i
am right now was when i had a kidney infection. i can't afford to have
any kind of illness right now, but a kidney infection would literally be
the worst. i've been VERY careful monitoring my internal organs because
i can't even imagine what would happen if i fell ill with a kidney
infection again.
finally, i made a stop in my head,
checked how my mental health was doing. this is always the most fun for
me. i'm now hitting the last of my supply of the anti-depressants my
doctor prescribed me before our healthcare ran out and i am to the point
now where i've got so little Ritalin left that i have to ration it to
days that i know i might want to be more active.
anyways,
the internal mental health check was alarming. i'm a mess. i'm existing
in this place at the moment where i'm completely unwilling to pretty
much do just about anything. i don't want to get up in the morning,
participate in anything during the day and CAN'T sleep at night. i'm
depressed. again.
i've been dealing with this very
special bout of depression for several months now, which has resulted in
the elusiveness on my blog, along with other things. this depression
has been crippling in a whole new way for me. i'd gotten myself into
such a fabulous cycle of self loathing, indifference and cynicism that
i'd just completely given up on literally everything. i'd stopped doing
my hair, wearing anything other than sweatpants, crafting, writing,
talking to people and worst of all, communicating in an age-appropriate
and conductive way with Muffin. i had just set myself up in a horrible
little hole of misery that was made up of nothing but sadness and
disappointment (pretty much all of which, i must add, was self-induced).
to be fair, my entire adult life has been made up a string of situations that
have left me feeling HORRIBLY disappointed. i have spent a great deal of
time wondering why i constantly felt like i was existing in such a
massive state of disappointment; why i just couldn't be happy.
wait,
i want to start this miserable part of this post saying that i love
Muffin. i love him so, so much more than i think anybody could ever
understand. the love that i feel for him, it goes beyond any means of
description or explanation.
anyways, do you know that
feeling after an argument where you feel like... sigh. you feel
completely deflated. no matter how amazing your day may have started
out, everything is gone after that last snide, shitty comment. i've got
that right now, kinda all the time. lately Muffin and i have virtually
lived exclusively between a string of FABULOUS arguments that are born
from simple, piece of shit comments that turn completely out of control
VERY quickly. i won't bore you with the details, but there tends to be
IMMEDIATE escalation and doors are slammed and i am just so tired of
feeling that horrible smug, yet ashamed feeling in the pit of my stomach
that i inevitably always experience after every single argument.
so
tired, in fact that last Monday i just got so, SO tired that i just
gave up on any even sort of rational arguing and i reckon Muffin felt
the same, because we pretty much broke up for about two hours.
yeah. my life's been THAT magical.
we've
both just been walking on an emotional tightrope with our own personal
battles staring us down every single minute of every single day. we're
both tired, uninspired and angry. not at anybody in particular, but
every single tiny bit of anger, sadness and frustration that we had
burst into a horrible, disgusting relationship-shifting bubble that i
think we kinda needed...
maybe i'm the only one that
needed it, really, but it was big and offered me a lot of insight that i
hadn't realized that i'd just shut out of my life because of the mess
i'd let myself get into emotionally.
since the
day i met him, eleven years ago, i have been madly in love with Muffin
and knew that he was the person that i was meant to see my oldest years
with. there's never been anybody that i'd be willing to love as blindly
as i have him. in the time i've known him i have seen him cheat on me,
lie to me and break countless hearts, and you know what? i'd forgive him
anything if it meant just a little more time with him.
at
least that's what i THOUGHT i felt. it wasn't until last Monday that i
realized that i've been holding him emotionally hostage and it's been
destroying our relationship. i've been accusing him and hurting him
making being with me nearly unbearable, all under the personal thought
that i was making things better. i've been arguing blindly with
him, not allowing him to offer me any input because i felt justified
after what HE had put ME through. i just bulled on ahead with my own
agenda, thinking it was helping, and not at all realizing that i was
very slowly chipping away at the foundation that our lives were built
on.
for months i've been searching aimlessly through
countless internet sites trying to find the answers to questions i
didn't even have the words to voice. why he was acting the way he was, why he wouldn't change and why he was so angry when he was the one who made the mistakes in the first place... i spent so much time focusing on what HE
was doing wrong that i never took the time to stop and ask myself what
in the world i was doing to fix things. i was just sitting back,
expecting HIM to change, not even toying with the idea that i might need
to step up and help. i was so focused on the hurt that he had inflicted
on me that rather than letting the wound heal, i would just pick it and
pick it and pick it, never, ever giving it a chance to scab over and
get better.
last week helped me realize just how
volatile i had become... just how difficult i had made life for the both
of us. now, we're working together to make things good again. we're
working and taking really great steps toward a better life.
the awesome thing? now, since i've stopped hounding him and
feeling the need to monitor his every move, i've found myself feeling so
much lighter and less strained. i've found myself with more time to
crochet and paint and prepare for school (which starts in just over a
month!!) i've found myself with the time and strength i was missing for
ME, which is awesome.
things aren't perfect right now, but they are most absolutely on
the right track. we hit the hideous rock-bottom we needed to and now
we're headed back to where we need to be and i couldn't be happier to
see the horizon.
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