it's gotta get bad before it gets good...

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.

me and the trapped crickets, we don't trust you

it happens at least once a day... my mind decides to freak the FUCK out and stop trusting him for like, two minutes.

i'll be fine, sitting around, leading a normal life, existing with relatively sane mental-processes when my brain will suddenly over-analyze something ridiculous and i will immdiately develop a distrust for Muffin and the things he does.

i remember, prior to my leaving England and prior to Pow and Amy's breakup, i used to scold Pow constantly for his paranoid ideations. i know that whilst this isn't QUITE the same (as his went far and beyond what could be considered sane), and whilst mine have actually turned out true once or three times, i still, every time, hate myself a little for not putting everything into him and doubting him, even for those two minutes a day.

i occasionally find myself terrified of loving him completely. i'll watch him and things will pop into my head and remind me of all the emotions i went through when he broke my heart in the past... i remember how i promised myself i'd never trust him again.

they are unreasonable, my ideations, and i am aware of this. just one night after i left for Cheyenne, i had a freak-out that made me stop and actually have to scold myself for being so silly.

he had told me that Origami was coming over to pick some stuff up and about twenty minutes after she was due to arrive he sent me a photo of himself in bed, telling me how much he missed me and showing me a "view from danie's side of the bed." instantly, my brain said to me, "Wait, Origami wouldn't be gone by now, i bet she's convinced him to sleep with her and he had her take that photo so he could make you believe he was going to bed when REALLY he's sleeping with her and didn't want to arouse suspicion." the freakout was only heightened when he wouldn't respond to my texts and i didn't hear from him for over an hour. he calmed me and my mind was settled for the time, but i still hate that i find myself having these little distrust episodes so often.

it occurred to me late at night, the saturday before last... i was laid in my step-neice's old bedroom listening to the songs of the crickets that had gotten themselves trapped in the window-well. the movements of their wings creating their songs drew me through my thought processes... the processes that made me worry that there might be something broken in me that won't allow me to trust Muffin, that i might be forever doomed to live a life like Pow, filled with distrust, scepticism and paranoia. for two hours i laid in that bed with a sleeping child next to me (Paige, neice), worrying that my incessant concerns would drive Muffin away and ruin this thing that we have that i hold so, SO special.

i worried but... i don't know. i still worry, but the moments of worrying are but a few minutes in a day full of perpetual reassurance and love.

i worried, but i know that the things i worry about aren't completely without just cause. it's an awful thing to say, but i would find myself feeling more crazy were i to be worrying so much if we had no history. instead, we HAVE had a history, and a rocky one at that, and that fact makes me feel like, whilst still quite unfair to him, i am processing things. not living in a world of fantasy, but living in reality and contemplating things with a clear (although sometimes irrational) head.

i guess with my time away from him i have been given time to reflect on a relationship that has been "real" for the last four weeks. real in that i have been here and we have been living together, on the same continent, and existing as a real-life kinda-couple.

the time has been beautiful and better than i expected it would be. the time has made me more confident, more in love and more happy. the time has made me trust that Muffin is someone i COULD spend the rest of my forever with.

but as everyone knows, i love to over-think things... everything. and i have a LOT of time to do that currently, with LaDonna and Heyward at work all day and just sitting around a lot. the over-thinking leaves my brain a great deal of time to worry and paint very vivid pictures of things that could be happening in my absence. i know it's not fair on him, but i can't help it. with all the time that i have known him, i have only known things to result in my heart being broken, so i find myself worrying about the day that my brain is SURE will come, when he will do something REALLY stupid and mess all of this up.

i worry about when i go away because anytime i've gone away in the past, he's abandonded me or hurt me... when i went into the home he lost hope and joined the ARMY and had babies. when i went to the seaside for ten days he married Origami. they're two very excellent examples. obviously, i'm aware that it's unfair of me to think that he would have waited for me all the time i was in the home or kept his word in 2007, but i guess the scars from being burned are still there and i am reminded of them in times when i am in a similar situation.

i love The Muffin, and like i've said in countless blogs, i just worry and have a stupidly vivid imagination.

currently, today, Muffin is my life and i've no doubt that we'll be old and senile together one day, once i've crossed this hurdle and gotten my head out of this place that only causes tension and upset in a world that should only really be filled with kisses, cuddles and lovenotes.

Becoming whole again... Daily OM seems to know everything!

Becoming Whole Again
The Process of Grieving

When we experience any kind of devastating loss, whether it is the loss of a loved one, a dream, or a relationship, feelings may arise within us that are overwhelming or difficult to cope with. This sense of grief can also come up when we are separated from anyone or anything we have welcomed into our lives. And while it may feel like we are caught up in a never-ending spiral of sadness and emptiness, it is important to remember that the grief we are feeling is not a permanent state of being. Rather, grief is part of the process of letting go that in many ways can be a gift, allowing us to go deeper within ourselves to rediscover the light amidst the seeming darkness.

The emotions that accompany any kind of loss can be intense and varied. A sense of shock or denial is often the first reaction, to be replaced by anger. Sometimes this anger can be directed at your loved one for “abandoning” you; at other times you may feel outrage toward the universe for what you are enduring. And while there are stages of grief that people go through – moving from denial to anger to bargaining to depression to acceptance – the cycles of grief often move in spirals, sometimes circling forward and then back again. You may even experience moments of strength, faith, and laughter in between. While these emotions seem to come and go sporadically, it is important to feel them, accept them, and allow them to flow. With time, patience, and compassion, you will eventually find your centre again.

As we move through our grief, we may find ourselves reluctant to release our pain, fearing we are letting go of who or what we have lost. We may even regard our movement toward healing as an act of disloyalty or giving up. Know that while the hurt may fade, the essence of what you had and who you loved will have already transformed you and forever stay with you. If anything, once you are ready for the pain of your loss to subside, their memories can then live more fully within you. Remember, that healing is a part of the spiralling cycles of grief, and that in letting yourself feel restored again, you are surrendering to a natural movement that is part of the dance of life.'

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i came home yesterday to the above in my inbox... it seems that everything in the world knew that i would see what i saw friday night but me. it also seems that people i know and trust(ed) saw these these and decided to hide them before i saw them myself.

it was brought to my attention that someone may have seen him getting off with this female before i did (as, apparantly, it happened more than once friday night). this someone is a person i thought i could trust and someone that has shown his true colours as poop-coloured since the event occurred. whilst small gestures have been made, i was still left to deal with the fallout with strangers whilst he pranced off with the very female my husband got off with... i was still left to go home without any of my stuff because some more interesting and attractive female invited him to go to TK Maxx with him... i have now been left hanging as to when i will be getting my things from his house because he seems to enjoy ignoring me.

it's nice to know who your real friends are. you fucking put a lot of effort into making a friendship worth having and then when the chips fall and you need a bit of help, all that person cares about is themselves.
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i am now running around in limbo. chris is trying in vain to act like nothing happened. like he can go ahead and cuddle me and kiss me and that everything is fine. it isn't... it won't be for a long time, if ever. barely 24 hours have passed and all he can think about is when he will get his next shag. i just want to figure this all out. i don't want to be rash or make a decision i will regret.