when you’re a stranger
Tuesday 20 May 2008 | 4 cookies in the jar
1. Feel guilty! It’s your best skill. But don’t get in touch with any actual people to apologize, seek out help, or, God forbid, improve the moment.
2. Blame poor med management. That’s easy enough, since you haven’t slept in a week and have akathisia out the wazoo, even after discontinuing quetiapine. Lie in the dark holding as still as possible, trying not to twitch and wake the Brujo, and wonder how other people do it. How do you sleep? Do you just close your eyes, and it happens? How long does it last? Can you feel it? Is this called sleeping, what I’m doing? Because I’m lying still in the dark; but I don’t think I’m asleep. Can someone, like, DIE from not sleeping?
3. Decide to get up. Lie there another hour, confused.
4. Eventually get up (3 am, 4 am, 5 am). Dress in the dark, pace around the neighborhood fighting nausea, trying not to jump out of your skin. Wonder if you should walk over to the Rinzai Zen center which turns out to be a mere two blocks from your house, and try to sit still there. Be afraid. Don’t.
5. Write incessant posts in your head, an average of approximately half-a-dozen per day, and even fire up WordPress several times to try typing them out (”she who dies with the most fabric wins!” for example; or “summer is a cumin seed”) until you panic and become irrational and start worrying about what you write and how you’ll say it and what everyone might possibly think about it and what you should be writing instead and just generally do not feel like Mrs. Richard P. Feynman and shut the computer down again.
6. Have bursts of nervous energy wherein you clean the entire house, start painting furniture and papering shelves and washing dishes and rearranging rooms and cleaning out closets and reading madly about quilting, fabric design, and couture apparel sewing techniques; then bonk halfway through.
7. The Librarian once apparently opined to Mandarin that he thought meds fucked you up and made it so you couldn’t write. The Brujo and Mandarin gently remind you how much more fucked-up and unable to write you were before being medicated. Wonder if you’re really mentally interesting or if you just need a good yoga class, a juicer and something like Turnaround House (only a lot cheaper—like, oh, for example, Zen training?). Cower in bed trembling and starkers, because it’s 110° outside. Be involuntarily suffused with repeated tortuous memories (DBT: “rumination”) of how you walked out on your husband and threw things at your boyfriend. Try to remember whether medication has helped you or whether you should just stop taking it and see. Think about writing down a list of all the friends, relatives and business associates whom you desperately need to contact, and a list of all the things which desperately needed to be done two weeks ago. Don’t. Tremble, twitch, wrestle around. Cry half-heartedly. Fall, if not asleep exactly, into a weird non-conscious memory-redolent hell realm. Be taken out for mariscos by the Brujo, who is sweet and funny and makes you laugh; overcome nausea enough to drink horchata and wolf down shrimp tacos; temporarily perk up. Then droop into exhaustion. Crawl into bed and lie there next to him holding as still as possible staring at the ceiling in the dark. [Repeat steps 2-7.]
8. Post your all-time favorite Margaret Cho clip, and a website that’s really made you think about how goddamned vain you are, because you don’t know what else to do. Share pictures of a Moda quilting-cotton print which for no explicable reason completely charms you into weakness. Worry further about what people will think of you for selecting these three things as somehow representative of the shallow person you are. Regret writing that sentence.
9. Apologize, but inadequately. Beg forgiveness for the fact that this post itself seems designed to fish inappropriately for reassurance—which is of course exactly what has kept you from posting for days. Accept this failure.
10. Click “Publish.” Go on. Do it.
4 cookies in the jar
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arrrgh. for one thing, you worry too much about not waking the Brujo. He may grumble or sigh but he a). usually forgets having been woken up and b). sincerely desires a worry free narrator. For another thing, the situation is over your head and you need professional help, as the unexpectedly scolding (not hot) fortune cookie indicated. For another thing, you write gorgeous incandescent verbiage whether medicated or not. And still, the goal, remember, is to believe that you can’t do anything wrong.
So does searching for the right words to say in response to this imply belief that words would help? Because I believe in words, but I think I might believe more that we are at the mercy of brain chemistry, and I hate that yours is requiring, um, tweaking. I hate that I have nothing to offer except words.
Don’t know about fishing inappropriately for reassurances — I offer you my latest mantra: if it’s a need, it’s a valid need. So if you need reassurance, by all means, be reassured that you are loved (therefore lovable) and silences aren’t held against you because as much as they suck for your fans, we hold with compassion and the realization that they are sucking more for you.
And if I say feel better will you please see past the selfish-missing-you part of that to the part of me that wants you to feel better for you?
love, love, love!
This shop, Timorous Beasties (who could resist) is round the corner from where I work. I wanted the Napoleon Bee (stone), to paste over one of innumerable floor to ceiling mirrors in my flat ( I find the one opposite the bed particulaly oppressive, and I can’t take it down because it is a ‘built in feature- wardrobe’.
I also considered the black on back rose, in one of my more gothic moments, but it is rally all too expensive. Anyway, I thought I would share the site with you ( they do fabric too)… xx
http://www.timorousbeasties.com/products/wallpapers/entomology/159
Per No. 7 below, take some solace in the poesy of Ms. Dorothy Parker, if you please:Thomas Carlyle
Carlyle combined the lit’ry life
With throwing teacups at his wife,
Remarking, rather testily,
“Oh, stop your dodging, Mrs. C.!”