Sep. 7th, 2003

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I'm having trouble speaking. My mouth feels physically heavy, as if opening it, forming words, would be an unbearable weight to shift, and so I am silent. It's actually not a big deal, it's one of those odd things that happens to me sometimes, and I'm not sure if it's normal or odd. Hell, I was 21 before I found out thinking in third person was unusual. Even more strangely, that was about the time my mind moved to first person thought.

Remember that book I mentioned getting today? I've finished it. Now, I have always read at very high speeds, but a 300 page nonfiction text in a few hours is pretty good even for me.

I feel validated by a good deal of what I read, even had a few moments of "Wait, you mean that's not normal? It's ok that I've always thought that was a shitty thing to do to me?" However, there were some discordant notes. In a chapter about weight, body image, and eating disorders, the focus was entirely on compulsive overeating, with anorexia mentioned offhandedly three times. Distressing. Anorexia has an odd rep - it seems many people have decided the one and only cause is the "Madison Ave" image of the ideal feminine. Um. No. For some of us, it's control, invisibility, something to hold on to.

A remember my mother giving me shit about being chubby all throughout my childhood. I had thought I must have weighed close to 200 pounds at my biggest. Recently I found out I never went over 160. I had hit full height at 13. At that age I went on a diet and excercise program of my own devising (I didn't become anorexic until college, when all my life came to haunt me). Moma panicked, and went on a campaign against it, deliberately removing the fruits, vegatables, and other healthy foods from the house, instead only keeping around cookies, candies, and heavy foods she knew I liked, in order to get me to eat. To this day I wonder at the mixed messages.

My past is the world eater worm, though. No one single issue is to blame for what went down. Yes, my mother being a drunk was a major problem, compounded by my fathers passiveness. (Oh, daddy. I'm so sorry. Life has not been good to you, but I have to learn to not try and make up for it, or deflect it from you. It hurts me to do it, because it brings you down from that shining pedestal I put you on and pulls you to earth, but I have to acknowledge where you hurt me too.) However, my sister is *just* *not* *right*. She started beating me when I was 6 months old. Normal kids don't do that shit. Perhaps she learned some of it from moma, but still...she has responsibility here too.

This is getting erratic. There's something I need to say, though...I know it comes from being accused of malingering, or being attention hungry, or making too big a deal of things, but I need to say it anyway - I'm not writing about this for attention. I'm writing about it because I have a responsibility to myself and the world I live in to dig deep and fpull out the weeds, the trash and the broken bits, so I can have a good harvest.
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Today was interesting. We woke much later than we intended, and then got stuck in traffic on the way to the faire. Route 4 was closed due to a truck accident, leading to an hour in traffic, and then a half hour trying to find our way back to the highway. All before coffee. In fact, at 10:52PM, I'm having my first cup. It's been a day of ups and downs, to be sure.

Thank you all for the comments to my laty entry, they've given me some things to think about. While my mother is a drunk (not all the time, but she binges with clockwork regularity), and my father is either the same, or simply a hard drinker (hard to tell with daddy, really) neither of their parents drank, at least my mothers father only began drinking after moma married dad, and my fathers parents...I think Elmer was an 'after dinner' drink type, and Helen never touched the stuff. Dad always says the only thing he learned in the Army (drafted) was how to drink. (Drafted into Germany, no less) I'm really not sure where moma learned her habits around drinking. The rest of her habits, however...I know precisely where they came from. Her parents were monsters. Her father is long dead, and I do not lie when I tell you I laughed to see him dying slowly, cancer eating him away just like the cancers he'd planted in my mothers mind. I was 11 when he died. When he was dead, my mother bathed him and prepared him for burial. A nurse commented on how unusual and 'sweet' this was of her. My mother said; "Honestly, I'm just doing this to make sure he's really dead." Her mother is a bitter, lonely old woman who will die soon. I have not spoken to her in years, and never will again. I know where momas poisons come from, and I weep for the ghosts that haunt her every step.

That was another of the discordant notes in the book I was reading...There was so much unresolved anger, so current, so violent. I can certainly understand that, as there are people in my life I feel that rush of hot blood for, but my parents are not among them. I do not hate them. I wish they had done differently, but I understand they couldn't have, they were doing the only things they knew how. Anger, it seems serves no purpose but to keep me in the past. Anger is about them, when I need to be about me. Besides, while there are some unpleasantnesses here and there, I value my relationship with them as it is now, with me as an equal. I know it's an unusual relation for a parent to have with their child, but we're an unusual crew. Anger would only cause new pains, when what I need to do is mend my old ones. My parents have pains of their own from those days, but that is for them to heal or not. Part of what I am teaching myself, in slow, patient lessons, is how to keep those two pains from melding together and becoming twice as heavy.

Thinking about what I'm writing, I'm pretty pleased with myself, to be honest. I have much more, and more difficult work ahead, I know, but still I'm doing well.

I got my cards read for the first time ever today at faire. (don't laugh at me) While I don't believe they 'tell the future' so to speak, I have long felt they are useful tools for prodding our subconscious minds onto paths we might not see otherwise. It's one of the reasons I'm so fond of runes, they work so well for me in that. Anyway, I decided to do it because of the depression I've been feeling of late, and the general sense that I feel like everything I could possibly want for a full life is right in front of me, but in pieces, scattered about, and I don't know how to put them together. I've been feeling like a hamster on a wheel about this for a while now, so decided to try the reading, see if it didn't prod me into a new direction.

(laughs)It didn't. It wasn't bad, but didn't tell me anything I wasn't already well aware of on a fully conscious level. Well, not entirely. It did bring to mind something that I hadn't looked at too closely - spending some time in a more contemplative space, a 'retreat' of sorts. I think that's a good plan - my biggest problem right now is too many irons in the fire, all needing my attention at once. I'm spending and spending myself in all directions, I need to pull back a little bit and concentrate on the things that nourish me a little more, like my service, my arts, and my spiritual practice.

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jadegirl

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