The tags on this are gonna be fun.
Ok, where to begin on this fully-sleep-deprived morning (getting zero sleep has never happened to me before). I guess I need to purge this out on the blog before I go rest.
My dreams generally fall into 2 or 3 categories. The halfway fun category involves me kindling light sabers with my breathing (it doesn’t always work) and/or having a Gandalf/Dumbledore type mentor following me and protecting me (hmm…daddy stuff?). The more common ones however involve me fucking up, through no fault of mine–being blamed for something that is utterly unreasonable or simply factually wrong. And there’s almost always a girl(s) in there somewhere.
Example: Two nights ago I dreamt I was at Ithaca College (I’ve never been there, but my brain simply knew it was Ithaca), and I couldn’t find my classes, my books, my schedule, and the place itself was a massive labyrinth of distractions: dark corridors that led downstairs into cobwebs, or up into dorm-like areas; cliquey areas I felt insecure in (though I felt insecure most of the time as it was), indoor campfires…it’s like the whole place had no electric lighting and was built in the Middle Ages (complete with serving wenches serving beer I cannot drink in real life due to health problems. And yes I play too many RPGS). I was frustrated and didn’t know where to go. Once I found a place to go, something became my fault, and none of my protests mattered even though I knew I was correct. As usual, this grew into me futilely shouting obscenities and death threats…when I could get the words out. This type of dream, maybe 65% of the time, comes with this wonderful feature: the louder I try to be, the more choked I am, the less air passes through me, the less I can actually form words. It’s like someone is clamping over my mouth and twisting it, yielding gibberish. Quiet, inconsequential gibberish too, since I can’t seem to put air behind what I’m saying.
That’s the second type: college/high school setting, not knowing anything, getting accused and reviled, becoming mostly verbally paralyzed.
The third type is quite similar to the second type, only the setting is work. 95% of the time, it’s Borders, even if it’s not recognizable as such (again, I know it’s Borders in the dream). Somehow the POS terminal isn’t cooperating, I can’t type, or I’m not doing something right, and then I get accosted so hard that I quit in a fiery rage and try to destroy everything around me.
And then there are the girls that show up probably 90% of the time, in the latter two types. I say “girls” and not “women” because that’s how I grew up saying it. To me “women” feels stuffy, “girls” feels playful and young. That might be unfair, and I take care with my distinctions when discussing the sex with others, but that’s simply the semantics that have always felt comfortable to me.
(Why I feel the need to defend myself on my own blog…So cognizant of potentially offending someone. I hate it. I hate it because it extends into me censoring and censuring myself, as though I don’t deserve to live and be happy.
I read that back to myself, and rather obviously this way of thinking has many of the same roots that my dreams have)
Anyway, girls. I haven’t been in a serious relationship in a good many years, and have had sex extremely rarely, and have never actually enjoyed sex though I want to (*that* topic is something that I’m not getting into in this post. Too much shame involved right now). In dreams sometimes the girls are those I worked with (not solely at Borders), sometimes they are women I fell for and had fallings-out with, sometimes they are unknown to me. And often I touch them, yet if they protest, even if I know I’m dreaming, I will stop because it’s upsetting to me. I don’t want to hurt anyone. “But it’s a dream!” my mind sometimes says. But it doesn’t matter, I stop and I feel bad for touching them.
I find the interpretations of these dreams to be pathetically obvious. They are manifestations of the following: a childhood squelched, where it was unsafe to feel or say anything (it was even unsafe to say nothing or even agree with the person picking the fights. I’m not going to name the person who picked the fights every single fucking day. However, the tags might hold a clue…). No one ever soothed me when there was shouting, fighting, broken bones, cops called…no one ever told me I was ok. No one ever showed me it wasn’t my fault. (There’s psychological evidence that indicates that, in absence of an explanation, a child will often take on the blame him/her/themselves). This, in addition to be told explicitly all the time “you’re selfish” and that things were my fault (when they weren’t, they were HER fault, the bitch), resulted in my internalizing just about every negative thing I could possibly internalize about life and myself and my place in the world. The only semi-safe place was my room. I say semi-safe because I witnessed beatings in there, in my sanctuary, in the only place I felt remotely comfortable.
Alone. I wanted everyone to leave me the fuck alone. I was so emotionally wrecked that I was one of those kids who fantasized about shooting his high school up. Now, I was a coward, I didn’t have access to guns and didn’t know how to go about getting any, and anyway I was a coward who was afraid of EVERYTHING except his own bed.
All the childhood stuff happened, as far as I can remember, from birth through about 15. Fifteen was when the bitch went off to college and she wasn’t in the house anymore.
I expect I’m rambling now, but do you see all the fuel for the dreams? Emotional unfulfillment, self-blame (in the dreams, someone always blames me instead of me blaming myself), sexual frustration, major self-esteem problems, PTSD, depression, anxiety….a family that, in short, could be counted on for one thing: to fuck me up. Actually, two things: we never lacked for money or material stuff, but I’d have traded that for a loving father.
So now you see the other part: How Do I Truly Live? My interest levels in a lot of things are quite small because 1) I’m just about always afraid of them, and 2) I don’t love myself. If I don’t love myself, it really mutes enjoyment of anything. Hard.
No wonder I spent the last 8-10 years getting drunk all the time.
So I need to live, but don’t know how. Or, I need to live and perhaps know where I might start, but the fear can be so great that I rush to the toilet a lot. (This is my blog, I had diarrhea, deal with it). Somehow I have to overcome this and take smalls steps. But the steps seem large, and all the steps produce enough anxiety for my abdomen to hurt.
But I’m still here. Which probably means one or two things: 1) I’m still a coward when it comes to suicide–I’ve had suicidal thoughts many times in the past, but in the last decade no actual plan to go about it; 2) I, somewhere buried inside me, have hope for myself. If I truly had no hope I think I wouldn’t be here.
But I need to live. I’m not living. I’m existing. I don’t know what’s fun (outside of video games), I’m not terribly social anymore–some friends have decided to go on with their lives without me (activating my abandonment issues, regardless of their reasons for moving on, which I usually don’t precisely know), or otherwise I have told them to get out of my life because they became poisonous to me. It really feels like I have no close friends. I know I share some things with others, but I see people talk about “besties” and I sure don’t have those anymore: one of them was passive-aggressive repeatedly with me so I told her I was done with us, and the other I’d fallen in love with and couldn’t emotionally cope with her being with another guy (it was like reopening a wound every single time I talked with her).
This blog is entirely too fucking long. In my blear I have no idea if this is coherent or even if I covered everything I wanted to. But there’s always other days.
sabatimus 