Onward and Outward

Hello, everyone! It is currently 2:14 am – pretty on par with when I wrote my last post and really most all of the posts before that. What is that? Why is it I can only write at night?

Today I had a tall, blonde Americano before class and then I had a small sugar-free iced vanilla berry Redbull in class. The class is at 10 am, but I was prepping beforehand, so the caffeine was necessary. And then my skinny and I went to the gym at like 11:00 pm because we both had busy days and while we were there I had another Redbull. Bad. There is so much caffeine swirling through my system right now that I am seeing all of the micro-organisms that are treating my ectoderm as a Middle-Earth. Apparently, I am swapping one addiction for another.

No, not really. I think today I just happened to have two Redbulls and some espresso. I did, however, stop vaping. It's been almost a month and I am putting it out there that while I did not pick up a new addiction, I am actively working on quitting one! I’ve put it out there with my friends, but I will tell you all now too. Shouting it out into the ether that I am turning a corner. It’s honestly not as difficult for me as I think it is for some people. I don’t say that because I’m like, “Oh, I’m tougher than them,” because that’s not what it is. I think that I mostly had an addiction out of convenience if that makes sense. It was always there so I always did it. But now it’s not there so I can’t do it even when I habitually reach for it. The only time I really feel the pangs of a reliance are when, visually, I catch a glimpse of someone smoking or maybe when I see a photo in which I am holding one. That’s when the demons start speaking to me. But how gross and how embarrassing would it be for me to stand up in front of a classroom full of my own students and teach them about love and life and literature, act as a role model of sorts or at least as someone who tries to live a physically and intellectually healthy life, and then for me to secretly have a vape waiting for me at home or even worse – in my bookbag. I’m just disgusted with myself at the thought. I’ve always said by the time I begin teaching it will be done and honey… here it is. It’s time.

Alright, new subject.

This one isn’t super glamorous either. I just finished the new episode of Tell Me Lies that came out on Tuesday and if you haven’t been watching or don’t know the show, I’m sorry, but I can’t really give you a synopsis because this show is MESSY. All I will say is that Stephen and Lucy are both in college, Stephen is damaged and manipulative while Lucy is damaged and desperate, and they go round and round in a toxic relationship. Now, there is more to the show than this, but I bring it up to make one point. In S3 Ep6, Lucy unintentionally shows up outside of Stephen’s door when she meant to walk home back to hers. She doesn’t realize where she’s at until she can’t get the key in the lock and Stephen opens the door. He plays dumb and once she comes to, she is confused and scared as to why she’s even there. Lucy became all night-of-the-living-dummy because Stephen was blackmailing and manipulating her to the point where she couldn’t tell reality from paranoia.

When Lucy showed up at that door and realized what she had done I didn’t personally feel like I resonated with the expression on Grace VanPatten’s face. Her portrayal of the untethered, strung-out, anxiety ridden woman is overshadowed, I think, by her beauty and her ability to perform normal daily functions without major issues. It made this moment feel a bit unbelievable for her character. However, as a person I found myself thinking back on a period of my life when I consistently felt like that. Untethered and so anxious I didn’t know how I was genuinely going to function for the rest of my life.

Once when I was at a house with a person apologizing for the (actual count, not an exaggeration) 16^th time for something I did not even do, I began to feel my mind slip a little. I am hesitant to write about it because I’ve found that the more time I spend playing Saussure and trying to find the correct signifiers for what that person actually did to me the more they show up in my dreams; I once had a dream that the other woman said, “He likes to touch me here,” and then made me touch her. They get worse than that, but that one was pretty bad. I can still feel how I felt when I woke up if I really sit and let it rest for a while. But anyway, at the house that person told me that upon their last trip on psychedelic drugs they had a revelation that I was a manipulative person and that every time this person acted inappropriately toward me, toward others, behind my back, that it was because I was essentially (now, he did not use these words) “rage-baiting” him. I remember earlier on in that relationship he told me that I was “too calm” whenever we had disagreements and that by me not being reactive, I was being manipulative as well. I can’t help but think that it’s probably that same logic that drew him to that conclusion on the mushrooms.

I thought I was going to break my jaw from how hard I was clenching my teeth when he said that to me. I already hated the drugs. They were unattractive, irresponsible, unsafe and unhealthy, but then you go and throw in this revelation, and I was utterly baffled. I slipped. I went to leave and I was so disheveled and psychologically worn down that, honestly, I was scared that something was going to happen or be done to me. And I remember that I came to the bottom of the stairs to leave through the front door and he was coming inside from the back patio and he looked at me with his hood up and I saw complete, abysmal black in his eyes. He knew he was scaring me and he was being quiet on purpose; I know this because he laughed at me when I told him I felt like he was going to hurt me. Something about his face did not look right. It really was evil; it unsettles me now to even try and recall that moment. I was scared and I started crying and I told him to take his hood down. I wanted to get away from him and so I left. And I went and sat at a gas station and called my mom. I couldn’t feel my arms or my legs and I truly do not remember the drive back to Bloomington that night other than that I talked to my mom and I was so scared and unmoored that I felt like I was having an out of body experience.

I know now that that was God putting it right in my face, screaming “GET AWAY FROM HIM!” I also know now that I will never put myself in a situation like that again and I cringe at the thought that that was only one of the many, many times I drove half-minded in my car while I was being broken and manipulated by a person that I couldn’t see for who they were. In concert with these ideas, I also think about all of the women, all of the people ever, really, who have experienced something like that. A codependent, hell-scape of a relationship that, in the words of my ex, “breaks you down to build you back up.” That is surely, 100% what Stephen and Lucy are engaged in on Tell Me Lies! And a lot of the time they get it too right. Why did I stay? I know, but I also don’t know. I am not that person anymore and I apologize for writing about it so much. I feel corny dropping a one liner here and there from post to post, but at the same time it helps to only process the really bad stuff when it comes up and to say (as woke as it may sound) "they" and "that person" because to me the details of that person, their face, their name, all of it has been smeared and is no longer readily accessed in my brain (although the other night my brain constructed a fairly accurate figure in my dream that ruined about 3 days of last week). The shame of it all makes me feel very unclean and undesirable.

Tomorrow is a new day! I am excited to get coffee and go to the gym. Hopefully I will be able to get my car out of the glacier it has been frozen in. Until next time…

xx

What do you think has become of the young and old men?

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,

And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

                        Walt Whitman, Song of Myself  (1892)