I am sad. And yet, not. And that is the problem.
I’ve really been split and dissociated the last few weeks. Not in the movie of the week way, but in the more pedestrian sense. It’s kind of an odd mixture and I’d like to post about it.
Noah’s been sick again, and Carl was sick, and I was sick. So that all was kind of lousy. It wasn’t the kind of sick where we were all abed unable to rise, but it was the kind of sick where people threw up and then were tired out and grumpy and stuff. It didn’t interfere with everything, but it interfered with quite a bit of it.
Easter was wonderful, and awful. Out here in the real world, my mother in law was down, and played with Noah a lot so I had time to putter around. I got through a stack of filing in preparation for taxes and cooked and cleaned and went to the Silver Snail with Noah.
At the same time, I have been feeling desperately terribly sad, if I stop puttering around and going to the Silver Snail. I don’t know if this is a multiple thing, a grief thing, a crazy thing, or a normal thing, but as soon as I have stopped long enough to do anything that touches on my inner life of thought and art and those kinds of things, all that has come up - welled up - is sadness and grief and tension and fear and anger. Quite a lot of anger.
I think perhaps this is what people don’t get about dissociation and how it really works. It cuts one’s life apart. This is good, in that you really do get to enjoy — at least for a time — the good parts. But the bad parts become a festering swampy bit.
I have been Twittering as my “real” [legal identity] self a bit, because my workplace asked me to and I am trying to get in there and understand the tool, but also as an experiment in identity: do I have anything to say to the world as the person that we present. Most of our Internet personal stuff has been our multiple selves bursting forth.
And as a result I have cheery Twitters from the weekend, because at those moments that was what was happening. That was not a lie.
And yet a whole other side has been going on. I haven’t been able to log in to PernMUSH to have fun, because I do not feel fun, I feel angry and upset and irrational. And I am perhaps a little too careful not to land on that soil with those feelings, given my history.
So at night, I have been sitting in my office some nights wiping tears off my face. Sometimes mine, sometimes other people’s in the system.
I had a fight with Lohr & Sassy. Lynn was really having a hard time in abuse-crazy ways, internally, expressing them in her own little way which got Lyria mad at her and caused several nights of nightmares and lack of sleep. What is this, 2001?
I could easily pin these things on sources: Easter has rough, rough, rough abuse memories associated (and perhaps, for the first time since becoming a parent, it’s okay to hit on that again); Noah is at an age where we definitely were being abused. Emily stuff is still around. I am pretty sure we are not going to be able to have another child biologically because I have had had: miscarriage, period, period two weeks later, none of which bodes especially well but I am tired of doctors. Also of my own hormones. My sister, bless her, is having a girl and I’m so glad for her but of course it does raise sad. And of course, it’s the season of crazy. So, you know, it’s okay.
Except, it’s not.
There was a time when things were more holistic. Now they are not. I think a lot of this is about Noah and about being a good parent, which means (right now) doing a good job at work so as not to sink in the recession, and being with him in a non-dramatic, good way. In a sense it’s a stiff upper lip thing too.
These are not terrible things but it is a strange ride, to be on two divergent paths at once. Some of us are growing professionally and as a parent and gearing up to garden and keeping house and Twittering and blogging. And some of us are stuck and frustrated and miserable and unhappy and unable even to express this well in poetry or art. I know, it sounds like therapy time, but I’m not even really ready to get that far.
Oh well, it should be interesting.
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