"there's no rules or laws to unchain your life."

i am overpowered by the love that is inside me.  i always have been. sometimes I have been able to use it to great effect, and other times I have been terrified by it to the point of total paralysis.

i’ve been reading break the night by elizabeth murray. it’s a good book so far. i love reading biographies. if i made a list of all the biographies i’ve read, it would fill this blog. i read them to remind myself that everyone has specific struggles throughout life, and often they are worse then my own. i find it fascinating and encouraging to learn how someone survives and prospers under difficult circumstances.

that said, i just fully realized last night that if a story is close to what i experienced as a child, it will start bringing back memories. things that are floating in my mind that i chose not to focus on because they tend to stop me cold. i remember being very young, and when my father would come home from work, he and my mother would lock themselves in their bedroom to get high. i did not know the reason when i was a kid. my mother admitted it to me later on, although she is never specific on what they were using at that time. my sister and my older half-sister and i would spend the time drawing pictures in the kitchen. i remember sneaking down the hallway and sliding the pictures under the door.

i was always taken care of. always fed, always had clean clothes, never neglected, never sexually abused. i got all the little girl toys i wanted, really. i did, however, get shit kicked out of me on a fairly regular basis. i learned how to hide my bruises when i went to school. but we won’t get into that too much here.

these experiences do not define who i am, but i wouldn’t be me without them. i contradict myself because i contain multitudes (walt whitman). at the top of the list of things that i am, number one would have to be survivor. if you have lived through a shitty childhood, you build up a resilience. at the bottom of your mind, you know no matter what happens, you will find a way out.

everyday is a choice.

i need to leave. in the history of people who need to escape situations, i am in one of the top 5 scenarios.

i keep fighting this inclination to get sucked in. his capability to make me feel vulnerable is unreal. i don’t want to have to worry if i hurt his feelings, just as much as i don’t want to be in a position where mine are hurt. last week he demanded to know what was wrong with me, just because i didn’t respond in a certain way to him. today he acted upset after i made a (joking) comment about his tendency to yell when he talks. i actually worried about this. i don’t what that is, but i don’t fucking want it. since day 1, i have tried to maintain distance. i should have never given him an inch last year. that was my first mistake. when i took his arm and told him that i liked him. i was a goddamn moron.

i am sick of it. even when we are getting along wonderfully, it makes me feel slightly ill. there should be boundaries. there should be no feelings involved at any time. no telling me that he misses me. no mentioning “love” or my “little heart.”  i get along with everybody, but it is as a casual acquaintance. the truth is, this is only temporary.

i just need to leave. other than the bullshit with him, there are about 4 other reasons to just get the fuck out of dodge. i just need to be gone.

“you tend sometimes to overvalue the gifts of the mind, and as a result you may betray your own needs and lose contact not only with what is right for you personally, but with what is right for others as well.

because you look at the general pattern, you are liable to miss essential needs in yourself which may vary from one situation to another. your emotional nature is powerful, raw, and extremely sensitive; and it may periodically throw you into depressed moods, fits of inexplicable irritability or anger, or feelings of loneliness and melancholy which you are unable to analyse or explain.

and you may also overlook another dimension of the realm of the heart which you fear so much: those mystical feelings of longing for letting go and experiencing a more infinite cosmos of love and serenity. personal love and mystical longing lie close together within you, and if you can find the courage to balance your powerful mental abilities with a greater openness to your own humanity, you will find that intimate relationship opens doors of a deeper and more profound kind - not just love of one person, but love of people and of life itself.

you have built a carefully controlled, detached and tolerant personality, and are adept at understanding another’s perspective. but this outer surface is very fragile, and you must expend a considerable amount of energy preserving such a front when your real feelings are bubbling away underneath.

your assessment of your emotional life may be a distorted and overly negative one, and perhaps the parental values in which you were brought up have contributed to your harsh judgement on anything within you which is less than perfect or ideal. you will in the long run be far happier and more fulfilled if you can allow others to see and experience your great emotional sensitivity and depth.”

“as good as this feels, you know where it goes.”

“no. you’re wrong. what feels so good is not knowing where it goes.”

“how do i talk to you so you hear me? like a child? like a nut? like everything’s fine? what’s the secret? because i need you to hear me.”

“i hear everything.”

“then hear this: you need help. before this gets too far, you need help.”

“i awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness…”

william s. burroughs

(my brother relapsed. i am so fucking angry and sad at the same time. i want to smash things.)

today was not great.

“i think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, betrayed them, who is going to make amends. we forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”

joan didion

the employee of the month deal will be announced tomorrow. the prize will be tickets to a baseball game, hockey, or zoo tickets, or perhaps gift cards.

i do not care what the prize is, i want that shit and i will be bone crushingly disappointed if it goes to anyone else.

i am normally not a competitive person. but i have been killing myself at this job for the past 3 months. my sleep pattern has gotten all sorts of fucked up. i have little free time. tomorrow i will be there to at least 9 p.m., then come back in at 6 a.m. saturday morning.

besides the obvious self-esteem issues here, i also really want to win to stick it to at least 3 people.

this post makes me seem like such an asshole, but it’s 100 degrees here and i’m exhausted.

listening to p.j. harvey takes me back. way back, i listened to stories from the city, stories from the sea at least a few times a day. (it actually wasn’t that long ago - it just feels like it.) i was in love with that album.

i’d sit outside smoking, on my break, with my CD PLAYER, and it would change my mood completely. music has always been a way to escape. those were also the days i worked with brett, who would randomly come and sit outside with me. for the longest time, i had no idea that he liked me.

he had told me he used to smoke (which turned out to be a lie). so i would think he was trying to bum a cig. i’d offer him one, and he’d turn it down. brett was a cool guy, but a little awkward. he was at least 6 foot and thin. he got into this habit of shoving me at times - really hard, i would go stumbling and tripping across the room. then there were the gentle headlocks. dude would manhandle me. in a goofy way. it was only after he came back from some vacation that i figured him out.

he had this big dark ring on his finger, and i commented on it. he immediately took it off, “i got it from mexico. you can have it.” i was amazed and tried to give it back, but he wouldn’t take it back. and then i finally realized that i was kind of dumb. i was just starting to see the hippie, who was a friend of brett’s, too.

i ended up being even dumber and followed that disaster to the end. brett, of course, heard about this pretty quick. he didn’t really talk to me too much after that.

the point of this story is: sometimes i’m a liar (a boy has given me a ring), and sometimes i’m the one who hurts someone else.

summing up - i can’t listen to pj harvey without a heavy tinge of sadness. also, i’m kind of a bitch at times.