Why is it that the more overloaded you get the more likely it is that a part of your anatomy will get itchy?

Why is it that clarity of communication is routinely absent in academic texts to the point where you need to know what the author is writing about in order to understand what they’re writing thus making it pointless to read the text in the first place.

Why can’t I just leave things alone?

I’ve had such a sharply defined sense of right and wrong for so long that I wonder about the shades if grey that I’m missing. The sense of fairness that I can’t help but defend to the bitter end often to my own cost.

I wonder where it came from?

Seems it’s the day for profound revelations.

For most of my life I just haven’t had much time for money. I didn’t see the point of stockpiling it, I didn’t see the need for anything other than paying the rent, eating and odd bits of entertainment. I saw how it could corrupt and the effects it had on relationships so I’ve studiously avoided it in large quantities for a while now. Perverse, perhaps, but true.

The reason: It had no use to me.

I’m fairly ruthless in my life these days. Everything in my life needs to have a use – having lived in enough small homes, you get that way. If you stockpile stuff it means you can’t get into the kitchen for breakfast. You can’t get out of your house or even into it for that matter. I don’t like the idea of the McMansion, the huge sprawling house in darkest suburbia, I prefer compact, simple and neat.

Perhaps this has been my problem all along with money?

Anyway, so here’s the revelation that’s come from last night’s thinking.

The reason it had no use is because I had no reason for having it. If I’m not prepared to stockpile then there’s no point having it, is there?

Well there is if I have a goal in mind for it.

And now I have some goals. Neat!

So this week, as mentioned in the last post for those who still visit and are keeping up, has been a bit crap.

I’ve veered from very sad, to anxious, to pissy, to feeling all sorts of other things. And it all makes perfect sense once I got to the bottom of it all last night at 3am.

I think I should point out at this point that I, like many people, suffer from Zombies.

You think I’m joking?

Zombie memories that is.

They act like zombies: brainless, unstoppable, marauding, hungry and ugly.

They drag me down and I end up fighting with them.

And most of all, when you think you’ve buried them once and for all, they rise from the fucking dead to maraud and cause chaos all over again.

Now they’re not vampires, which was another idea I had. No, Vampires are intelligent and clever and you can talk to them. You might not be able to reason of course as they drain you of blood, but you get that this comparison doesn’t really work (though I might use them in a future post I’m sure!).

Zombie memories have got emotional material attached, but it’s damaged and oozing nastiness, dragging behind without being of any use whatsoever, the frayed clothing and flesh around the real issues.

This week, the Zombie had me, dragging me down into the pit of despair it lived in, filled with old memories of being abandoned, left, losing people I cared about; the loneliness was unbelievable and for a while I became it. I was picking at things my partner said and spinning them into things they weren’t.

And all the while I hated what I was feeling. I couldn’t work out why I had suddenly become this “Thing”. It came at night (of course it came at night, it’s a Zombie!) and I woke up with all these negative thoughts. Why didn’t this happen? Why didn’t that happen? Why was this done?

I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t understandIdon’tunderstandIdon’tunderstand…

That’s where a mind like a steel trap comes in handy. I’m fairly logical in a lot of ways and I had to reason the damn thing out.

So what I started with was a page with the word “Feelings” at the top. On this I wrote everything I was feeling at the time in black and where it was in my body in red. This gave me all the specifics of what the zombie was about.

the emotions were (among other related ones):

abandonment

loneliness

a feeling of being left-out

isolation

sadness

Next page had the chain of events:

Reaction (is) Knee-Jerk (based on) Assumption (translates to) attack (to force) breakdown

These events were basically passive-aggressive in nature. And I don’t like passive-aggressive. It makes me angry.

Basically at this point, I lost it with the Zombie, writing:

I was fine

I was okay

This is bugging the shit out of me

What the hell has changed in the last 2 weeks?

I’d found Patient Zero: the one that caused the outbreak. I was at the bottom of the pit – like the “Hero’s Journey” – there was crisis, a slow downward decline into the pit, and here was the realisation, the change that I need to find my way out; the only way was up, where the light was, and the light was where I wanted to be.

Two weeks ago I wasn’t so bad; I had some odd issues (money’s tight at the moment for example), but I was coping, surviving, and chirpy with it.

What happened during that time matched the kind of zombie I was battling.

• My school came to an end
• I have worries around work
• I am aimless
• I had an awful cold that just wouldn’t go away

Here were the core issues.

Nothing mattered. I was cast adrift, without anything to grasp, without anything to feel connected to. I was lonely – the people I’d gotten to know over a year were now gone, the structure was gone; my work had dried up mid-year and so there was no structure there either. The aimlessness came out of these: what was I going to do for the rest of the year and next?

The cold was physical symptoms based on these. And it wasn’t going away – I still had a throaty cough a week and a half after the damn thing had gone.

Abandonment and lonliness: a loss of people

A feeling of being left-out: people are gone, school is gone, therefore I’m not a part of anything anymore

Isolation: As with being left out – there’s no-one I can rely on, I’m alone.

Sadness: the result of all these.

The steel trap had worked. I’d caught the Zombie and chopped enough off of it to work out what it was really about.

I needed something to anchor against. I needed a goal. I needed to find something else, and what I wrote was:

Where is my integrity?

What do I want?

Pursue

Now wallowing in self-pity isn’t like me: I usually work hard (one friend said I was the hardest worker they’d ever seen), I am intuitive and I work out ways to do things. I persist. I pursue. I can be like a Jack Russell Terrier the way I go after things.

I wasn’t persisting here. I was falling to bits.

The saying about 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration applied here. I wasn’t putting the effort in. Why? Because I had no clear goals.

What do I want?

• Career in counselling – need batchelors; 4 years part-time

What do I do in the meantime?

• Idea: 3-6 month contract in IT then study. – Lots of $ (but hard on me mentally) – would create a buffer

OR

• part time study and part-time job

And there it was: a solution, something to do, something to anchor myself on and a decision made.

I felt good again. I feel good again this morning. The zombie is dead.

Again…

I’ve been finding myself severely agitated over the last few days and not sure why. It started a couple of days ago and at the time I thought it was triggered by a soy chai latte from Starbucks (which will be my last for a while anyway – sugar is no longer on the menu).

Last week after the skating accident I had the same thing, but worked through it and identified the problems.

This week though, it’s back. Last night I was unbelievably sad and unhappy, mainly due to a phone conversation and the aftermath of that. I wrote, and wrote and wrote and wrote… it was almost non-stop until 2am. Then this morning I wrote a letter which I will never post, and the resolution arrived.

And now I’m back in it again. I woke angry, speculated a bit (which is what I do when I’m agitated), checked something, got really upset and angry, threw the laptop across the bed, then wrote some stuff out in a document.

Writing helps me.

Only about 20 one sentence statements got me to a place where I could work out something; they veered  from the anger, hurt and child-like reactions:

• “I am” (“I am feeling left out”; “I am feeling nasty”);
• “I have” (“I have unpleasant, nasty thoughts”);
• “I feel” (“I feel like I’m the one making all the compromises”);

…to ones more self-aware and of ownership:

“My moods” (“My moods are all over the place”, “my moods are controlling me”, “my moods are creating the situation”);

then finally I was led into queries and problem-solving:

“Could it be” (“could it be the hormones?”, “Could it be old patterns?”, “Could it be I haven’t had time for me?”)

I realised something: this is what my father did. The pattern was so close as to be uncanny: a slow arcing up, slow burn, some resentment, building, building, building, then a dark feeling of being alone and excluded (which is my stuff); all irrational, nasty, spiteful and out of character but uncontrollable like a tide hammering over me, lifting me up and carrying me along.

I researched mood-swing, which is the first thing that came to mind based on the statements.

That led me, thanks to google to wikipedia. There I found that ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) people suffer mood swings. I was diagnosed with Adult ADD a few years ago. Mood Swings ADD led me to a couple of sites with home remedies but suddenly the tension and anger was gone.

Whether the damn thing is still there is another thing altogether. Maybe I cut the blue wire and the bomb is now disarmed? Maybe there’s another one lurking just around the corner?

All I do know is that I’m getting better at noticing the signs, finding ways to fix my own reactions and minimising harm to those I care about.

And for that I have to be thankful.

It’s funny, but I’m wondering if this would be of use once I’m out in the world doing counselling?

Life is not a box of chocolates. It’s not a bunch of roses either. Sometimes it’s like falling into a rosebush. Sure, you might be surrounded by the sweet smell of the flowers, but the thorns scratch you a bit and sometimes expose what’s underneath because they’ve ripped little holes in your clothing.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Exposing what’s there and seeing what’s really being hurt is very good, because it allows you to learn something about yourself.

This is my life. Sometimes there’s the smell of roses (I’m using this loosely; I don’t mind the smell of roses, some of them are a bit overpowering, but I’ll ignore that for the purposes of this post), and sometimes there’s the thorns.

Sometimes I learn things I wish I hadn’t.

But then a little time passes and these things get the perspective they need and I can look at them clearly; I can see them for what they are and then make the choice to change, modify or ditch. That’s not possible immediately though. In the moment, it’s hard to learn something that’s painful or is causing pain. It’s even harder if you’re a person that expects perfection from themselves.

So, as I sit here, I must just breathe, I must chill. I must give this the time it needs to get the persepective I need.

Then I can make the decisions.

Okay, I’ve had enough of this.

It’s my XXth year now. And each year, I’ve had this long-standing dislike, disappointment and depression around the 24th. Which is my official birthday. It’s a bitch of a time to be having a birthday. People are busy. Friends are going elsewhere for the silly season. I end up alone and feeling generally disappointed and sad. It’s been going on for a very long time.

Time to take charge of this beastie on my back. I have reached the all-important “Fuckit!” moment, where the sheer unadulterated boredom and repetition of old behaviours finally becomes too much, rather like that video of snow on a sports stadium roof finally breaking through. The roof has collapsed on this little self-referential “woe-is-me” adventure, the straw has broken the camel’s back, I’m so totally done with this.

I hereby announce that my birthday is now the middle of Autumn. I like Autumn. May 16th is the number that has popped into my head.

So. look forward to seeing peeps then!