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!

Repeated slaps on the back of the head do one of two things: they finally knock you out, or they get your attention in the right way.

Tonight I had a slap on the back of the head. I finally got it.

Stopped at a service station, driving a friends car, she got out and approached the door to the shop at the same time as a big, burly drunk man, who turned on her aggressively.

I reacted. I got out of the car and told him to leave her alone.

He reacted aggressively to me. Verbally aggressive, with a bit of standover.

I’ve finally realised that my reaction provokes this reaction, and I’m left with utterly nowhere to go after that.

Under those circumstances, I can:

• yell and scream — provoking more aggression from the other person
• back-off — provoking more aggression from the other person because they perceive me as weak
• stand my ground with eye contact — provoking more abuse because now the other person perceives me as passive-aggressive

I can see this now. Finally. It’s taken a while.

So the solution to this one would probably have been to have stepped out of the car and asked sweetly if everything was okay rather than going in hard. Make a joke, distract rather than attack. And if the guy still came at me verbally to have backed off with a kindly apology — not backing-off as such, more smoothing things over. Allow him to think he’s in the right (clearly he isn’t).

Okay. Now I can sleep.

More on this at sixwise.com – how to stay safe when you’re confronted by an aggressive person.

my life has gotten complicated again.

Me and my big mouth! ^_^

After the rushing around last week, and even up to and including last night, a quiet day at home seems an anticlimax. I know it’s good for me to stop, but I can’t help feeling there’s something I need to be doing.

However, it’s best for me to just go with things. Fighting the tide is something that causes more problems. I have earned (seriously) the right to stop and relax. This is my reward.

Today rest, tomorrow, the universe!

I am a frustrated writer. It’s the kind of low-level irritation that, if it were an audio frequency, would be carried for miles and miles by the perfectly configured woofer; it’s that bass frequency that you can hear from across the continent.

Here’s my frustration:

As a writer, I can churn out stories relatively easily (given the right circumstances and the presence of the Muse – more on her later). A fortnight ago I wrote 10,000 words in 3 days, which is pretty good given a book is on average 80-100,000. The muse was with me that night. She’s hanging around nearby but I’ve yet to get her attention; she’s a bit drunk on what looks like a quart of absinthe… yes, Absinthe, she just swigged the bottle and giggled, the bitch.

What I find irritating is that there seems only to be one way to get work “public” – to rely on publishing companies that are inundated with manuscripts, or to try to find a magazine that has a gap or likes your work.

I’ve whined about this issue to friends: artists have the option of galleries (and I’m not talking the major ones as they’re the equivalent of the publishing companies). Art is something you can look at, regard, like or dislike in a community setting. There are many different open galleries that can exhibit your work.

Musicians have a similar way of getting work out there. My fabulous housemate is at an open-mike night in Northcote tonight (I’d be there too if it wasn’t that I finished work only about an hour ago and was ravenous to the point of tears. Not going into that at present). A musician can stand on a street corner and strum. If I stand on a street corner and start reading, odds-on I’ll be heckled as a religious nut. Could be amusing though.

I’m aware this could be sounding like sour grapes. It’s my blog and I’ll whine if I want to.

A writer is, by definition, a lonely person, slaving over a hot processor creating work of potential genius… for… what? Sure, we can submit work to competitions. We can try and get things published, but there appears to be no way to cut out the middleman and just perform the work in some way, get it out for general consumption without involving the money-men and what’s “likely to sell”. Publishing is, after all, a business.

Am I wrong? Have I missed something?

I just can’t find anything. Writers groups have meetings and chat about their work. It’s a community, sure, and by joining one I get a stack of magazines I’m not interested in, cheap courses that I don’t want to do, the right to go along to meetings (which is nice) and I can even get, in some cases, a professional assessment of my manuscript (for a few hundred dollars that I don’t have. I’m a penniless writer as well as a frustrated one). It’s like when I joined the Australian Society of Technical Writers; what did it get me? A place on a mailing list and nothing else in particular. I’m thinking in purely selfish terms here, I’m aware: the society is great for many people, as are writers groups. But I know (pretty much) how to write, and throughout my life — regardless of courses on offer, being told I should read a great big book cover-to-cover — I’ve learned how to do things by simply DOING them: Practice Makes Perfect. I’m simply not interested in courses on writing, in someone standing at the front of the room telling me “this is what makes a story good” and “this is what makes it bad”. I’m not for formula, I’m for innovation through experimentation. And I know this won’t necessarily make me a bucket of money, either. I’m in it for the enjoyment of the writing; I’m in it to see where the muse takes me.

So what’s the answer?

It’s looking increasingly like I have to get off my arse and just do something myself. Have duplex printer, will produce zines. The magazine I produced with good friends back in 2004-5 worked to a degree. The magazines certainly disappeared from their spots in cafes. And I even managed to sell some. Perhaps that’s the short-term answer to my bleating: take it to the people.

Opinions greatfully accepted at this point. Me, I’m going to eat my rapidly cooling dinner. Au Revoir.

I have a specific reaction to stress: itchy knuckles.

Contrary to the suppositions of people I used to know, this does not mean I need to hit something and that I have a lot of repressed anger (‘The teachers on Minbar said I had a lot of repressed anger.’/'And now?’/'It’s not repressed any more.’).

What it means is that I’m stressed. And this means I break-out in little milimeter wide lumps which, like mosquito bites, are itchy and need to be scratched, which results in cracked and incredibly dry skin.

The solution is that I need to work-out how I’ve gotten so stressed.

Exhibit A

Oh, the work I did last week. What a complete disaster.

Contrary to already established intent, I did not have Monday as a writing day, work 3 days, and have Friday as a writing day. No, what happened was that I got stressed about a job I had to do on Tuesday and did some of it on Monday. This irritated me no end, but I still did it. Then on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and — dammit — Friday, I worked. I worked Friday because I had a client meeting presenting a website and copywriting I’d done.

But, I thought, I’ll take most of the next week off.

I was supposed to write on Monday this week, but didn’t. Why? Because I thought that having four days straight of writing would be better than one day, then a work day, then 3 days.

I was wrong.

This week is proof that I have slipped back into work stress. And it’s really showing.

Exhibit B

My lovely housemate “C” has moved out. This meant much of last week, and all weekend was really taken up with moving which, as wiser people than I have pointed-out, is one of the most stressful activities a person can do to themselves. This, presumably, is why god invented moving companies who do it all for you.

My lovely new housemate, “E” is in now, and we’ve added a few pieces of furniture to her room. She’s really great, but as I say, the moving experience of others has probably rubbed off onto me, resulting in itchy knuckles.

Exhibit C

For reasons I have yet to ascertain, I am storing and holding my body up with my shoulders again. This is, frankly, a near impossible feat, but still I do it.

Ultimately, I have slipped back into old habits. It could be because I relate to the desk in my room, set-up pretty ergonomically, as a “workplace” rather than a “computer place”. This being the case, I write on the computer in awkward positions, on the lovely little table in my room — designed for eating off, not typing on — and the table in the back yard, similarly designed. I also have — until recently (when I realised I was going through $20 a day in cakes and pots of tea) been using the tables in nearby cafes to write the splendorous stories to which many have become enthralled on the daisydonnie site. Again, the height of the tables — designed for the consumption of foody goodness, is not ideal for typing out prose of any nature, unless you’re taller than I. So my shoulders unconsciously (well, they’re not conscious of course) rise so I don’t get RSI of the wrist.

Of course the rising of the shoulders means the stress of the rising is stored in said shoulders and thus I become stressed.

And my back hurts.

Solutions

Well, as exhibit A proves, I should bloody well stick to what I said I was going to do (and really enjoyed) and do Monday and Friday for writing, and tuesday to thursday for work.

End of story. No negotiation. No exceptions. Just Bloody Do This!

Exhibit B will sort itself out. The lovely “C” has gone to her new home, and I really hope she loves it there. The wonderful “E” is here, and we’re getting along really well. This is good. No more stress there.

Exhibit C is rather simple: I just need to build a bloody bridge and get the fuck over it.

See how writing sorts my problems out!