polluted by pain

Not going to pretend like this is some grandiose manifestation of what I thought I could be, because the truth right now is that I'm in a self-limiting place, one where I can only see the fault lines in my psyche and soul.  Coming out on the other side is no hope at all because I always dip right back into despair.  My depression seems inevitable.  

My mother tells me that people say nothing but kind things about me and love to learn that her daughter is me, like this persona or contortion of a memory in my hometown.  I don't know how to feel about it, whether I should identify with that or brush it off as a projection.  It's sort of maddening to know that I don't see it in myself. 

I feel the rage and sadness and pain on a cellular level.  I feel like bashing someone's teeth in, throwing a canning jar at someone's head.  I feel years of abuse and disgracing my body trying to escape through my pores.  My skin is crawling constantly.  I'm just dying to get out.  

And sometimes I want to just die.  

I'm so sick of landing here as if the weeks of beauty and laughter never exist.  I'm left wondering if I'm just faking it, on my best behavior.  I'm tired of trying to buy in to some spirituality I don't feel from the inside out, putting patches on my broken soul.  I feel like I need the company of other broken people to feel any love at all.  Maybe that's why I don't care about breaking the people around me.  I don't know.  

There is such a profound difference between feeling and knowing.  But right now I can't tell what is what.  There is too much rotting around my heart to know if there's anything pure left on the inside, or if there will be anything left if I scrape those parts off.  I think my fear of that is keeping me from letting go.  The fear of being seen, the fear of not existing or existing in a pure form only to be polluted by pain all over again.  

I can't think my way out of this.  But I don't think there is a way out of it.  I've been telling myself that I can only go through it, but I'm so tired.  Right now I just want to check out, stop thinking, stop dealing.

But then what?  

Maybe if I felt worthy of the beauty that is my children, my life, then I could live up to it.  I just don't know how to wrap my head around the transient nature of change and the fear of having nothing in the end.  I'm always left wondering, what's the point?  

What's the point of loving if I can't ever feel loved??

Overcoming My Fear of Rejection, or Accepting Acceptance

The past day or so has been rough.  It's hard to know where to start with this enormous project, where to most effectively spend my energy (and other funds), and sometimes it feels like I'm just leaking out the sides.  A wave of depression came rolling through, which always makes my ears prick up a little, listening for the sound of intuition, of something out of place.  I come to my senses.  I journaled and broke through the crying barrier last night, so there's not a terrible amount to divulge.  But the issues of rejection, acceptance, and unconditional self-love need to be spoken on.  

For as long as I can remember, I've been caught in a cycle of desperately needing acceptance due to rejection I felt as a child growing up with an incarcerated and addicted father, pushing people away who know their limitations of what they can and can't give me, furthering my sense of rejection, thus my deep need for acceptance.  This has played out in every relationship, several friendships, and my connection to myself.  


I've attempted to open my heart recently, only to become aware of this stuff once again.  Natalie writes an amazing piece on this over at Baggage Reclaim:

From the moment that someone decides that they no longer want you or that they no longer value you or the relationship enough to want to try and they make the decision to opt out, you need to start working towards not wanting them either.

Wanting people that don’t want you, nevermind respect, value, love, or care about you, is a surefire sign that you have lost your way.

I definitely felt lost yesterday.  To lay it out, I've got several fishing poles out on the dating scene, and the way I've been feeling has made me want to pull them all in.  I'm not sure if I can go through it anymore- putting myself out there- not until I've got some things straight.  

Natalie keeps going, though, offering some harsh truths:

You’re too busy feeling the pain of your own bruised ego that you have lost sight of reality.

I’m not even convinced that you truly want him; you just need him to want you.

Really, the whole thing is worth reading.  

Mostly, I'm worried about the fear of doing this again.  I don't want to be emotionally unavailable.  I get what she says about only investing time and energy in people that value me, not detract from my value.  It's about manifesting relationships/friendships through my own sense of worth instead of seeking it from other people looking to play by their own rules.  Vulnerability is scary, though.  But as we know from Brene Brown's TED Talk, people with higher senses of self worth fear vulnerability less.  Actually, they see it as essential to a deeper sense of connection.







This is all part of my recovery.  Please feel free to share with me where you are at in yours.  We can only give what we have, and right now I've got some big balls of wax to melt before I can make that really luscious calendula cream that everybody keeps asking me about.

When things fall apart.

It's gotten pretty bad. 

I took a postpartum depression screening online a few weeks ago, and while I wasn't too surprised, it finally let me say out loud what I've been feeling since I was pregnant.  I am ill.  I have postpartum  depression.  The hardest thing about saying that is the fact that I don't necessarily feel depressed, just extremely agitated, rageful, and anxious.  I've felt depressed before and it didn't feel like this does.  But I definitely feel like I have no control over my emotions, and I've reached a point where I don't want to be a mother.  I love my sweet little child, but I don't want to be his mother anymore.  I want to go home.


The most terrible part is that I can't really breathe.  I have just kept going going going with school and my other many hats that I'm always wearing some hat, some role, and feeling really screwed into being something to somebody all the time.  I don't know what it feels like to relax, to be nothing but my open, honest, joyful self.  Feeling phobia socially, snapping at everything that gets under my skin and dragging it out for fifteen minutes, and especially losing my appetite- none of that is ME.  I've lost a lot of weight.  Everybody tells me that I look great, and I just want to tell them that I feel like shit.


To be honest, to lay it all out, I feel like shit.  My marriage is maxed out, I've had blowouts with my mother, mother-in-law, and best friend, and I've pretty much alienated myself into a corner of distrust and isolation.  I see my midwife today.  I had to wait two weeks to get into the clinic because I couldn't afford to see her right away.  But what price did I pay by waiting?  Greg says that things are going to get better after the first of the year, after Elijah goes to school, after just a few more months.  I don't think I can last that long.


This is the first time in my life that I've even considered getting on some medication.  I feel like an emergency, like a walking time bomb.  If anything hits up against me hard enough, I'll shatter all over the place.  I don't want to wean Elijah, but I've thought about it.  It makes me so sad.  I know sometimes that nursing him really drives me crazy, but I'm not ready to let him go like that.  I don't want to look back at this time and think that I really screwed him out of a good mama.  And that's where I'm stuck.  I'm tired of being his mama.  But I know I can't stop.  And I want to say it's because I love him, but I don't even know how to love myself right now.  I know I love him, but right now, it's next to impossible for me to feel it.


We'll see how today's appointment goes.  I guess I knew these two weeks would be hell.

the new moon

Dang!  I almost fell off the wagon.  It's been a crazy week or more, and I'm finally on the upswing.  I got my "period" (I used to hate calling it that but it's started to feel more like the end to my long and drastic cycle than ever).  It came sweetly with the new moon, a time that symbolizes the shedding off of all my flustered film, all of the world that has clung to me in the last 50 days.  My cycles are that long now.  And some would count that as a blessing, but everything is more exacerbated now, all the highs and lows that I would normally flush out in 34 days just take their time and go higher and lower now.  I miss my 34 day cycles.

I've definitely been feeling a lot of the dark mother in my life, manifesting through me.  I am the dark mother.  And I've been having to own all of the other stuff, too.  I am anger.  I am the car.  I stopped driving.  I'm letting Gregory take the van to work so that I absolutely have to bike, and it's a blessing.  Driving makes me so aggravated, and I cuss and honk at people and bitch about how much the world sucks when I'm driving so I quit.  I'm actually going on strike from a lot of things.  Plastic bags being one of them.  I hate them so much and all they do is sit there making fun of the fact that they'll still be around long after I'm gone.  At least I know my car will die before me.  I've actually been pretty unbearable about a lot of things lately.  Now that I'm menstruating, I'm relieved of a lot of the guilty tension, but that doesn't change the fact that I've been a total shit to live with.  I'm a great mom, but make a pretty shitty wife. 


What did I expect?


Things ARE getting better, though.  I just got through three weeks of cynicism, croney complaining, and sinister thoughts, and it's okay.  I'm climbing the mountain again and it feels good.
 

Don't touch my belly!

I just read a pretty entertaining, and universal, blog addressing the more annoying things about being pregnant in public, posted by Jessica Valenti of Feministing.com.  I think that all of these things were a huge source of my mood swings and serious bouts of prenatal depression- feeling so widely undervalued and weighed down by the understanding that it was only the beginning of feeling degraded in my role as mother breast feeder giver woman.  She says it more concisely than I ever could.