God Jul

I lit the first candle at 4 in the afternoon, when the light began to grow wan through the trees.

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died...

It has been the worst year in my memory.

I am not usually the type of person to say these things. I'm really not. When all of my friends, year after year, spend January 29th and 30th counting off the horrible things that have happened to them, I spend a quiet moment or two in introspection remembering the good things.

But it started in November really, and I haven't felt safe since.

Don't stop, can't stop, it's like a freight train
Don't stop, can't stop, it's like an airplane going down

There are so very few good things this year. (Maybe even really only one, because he's the thread that runs through nearly every good moment this year.)

And there are so many bad.

I discovered a job that I'd taken was terrible. I managed to find a new job that promised great things, even if it only gave a small pay bump and meant the commute would be worse. That's okay, we were going to move and take The Next Step.

I took a vacation that was good, but also... well. If I'd known it was the only break I'd get, I probably would've done something different with it.

I started the new job. The boss I was supposed to report to quit. The guy I interviewed with turned suspicious and sour. The team I was to join had someone doing the role I'd been told I'd be helping, and he didn't want my help. Furthermore he felt threatened by me. There was no steady process. Another colleague left. And another. Down to three devs. Then we hired one, and another left. The team grew, the numbers shrank. Nerves frayed.

In May, my car was totaled.

Two days later, my heart was totaled.

I've got time, but you're tired of waiting
You only want me in other spaces
Come fill your gaps with people
I know no one
So lonely trying to be yours
When you're looking for so much more

I say my heart, but it was as if my future disappeared, like retreating backwards into a tunnel. My plans that would've made the small pay bump okay suddenly weren't happening. And then my rent went up. And I found, to my horror, that my decision to take that job, combined with the low pay and the fact that I'd been under market on rent for so long meant that suddenly... I was living paycheck to paycheck (more or less - I have savings yet) and unable to afford to move.

On these roads
Out of love, so it goes
How it feels when we fall, when we fold
How we lose control, on these roads
How it sings as it goes

(I still am, really.)

I watched friends and loved ones take vacations while I sat at home trying to find ways to spend less money, trying to think of ways to sell the things I don't need, trying to strategize ways to divvy up my things to take up less space, to require less room in a place I could maybe move to.

Shattered by an email
Your words will fade away
Castle built in the sand
Will only last one day
I'm holding on and I don't want to let you go, oh
Yeah, it feels like summer
Yeah, it feels like summer to me

But this past week I had my glowing performance review, accompanied by a raise that is such a pathetic pittance I was stunned and made some sort of half hearted comment like "every little bit helps." It's 1.2% my salary. It's 1/3 the rate of inflation. It's enough to cover five months of how much my rent went up just this year. It covers nothing. I spent way more of that day weeping in the bathroom than I would've expected; I busted my ass and moved heaven and earth and get nothing but some pretty words on paper.

It steeled me, if nothing else? I can no longer afford to work there - my health, my time, my sanity is worth so much more - and so now I have nothing to lose by telling them that they need to pay me more or I'm leaving. Because I will.

And I walked off you
And I walked off an old me
Oh me oh my I thought it was a dream
So it seemed
And now, breathe deep
I'm inhaling
You and I, there's air in between
Leave me be
I'm exhaling
You and I, there's air in between
You and I, there's air in between

This whole year has been the shortest day, when the light seems thin and wan, when the cold bites and nothing seems quite as it should be.

So farewell to the gloaming dark, and welcome the light's return. May things look up from here.

The Shortest Day
And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.

-- Susan Cooper

The storm passes

And like lancing an infection, I feel... better.

And I'm going to bed now.

Tee plus six months

or... the Green Eyed Monster.

It's been six months, twelve days, and probably about eight minutes, but I don't feel like going into Google Timeline to see exactly when the perp-walk back to my apartment in the moonlight was, exactly.

It's hellacious.

Facebook is the devil.

Today, a woman I barely know, who is tiny and fierce and thin and pretty, and more or less everything I wish I was, posted that her partner, who shares my ex's name and who I once fancied, had bought a house. And now her housing stability problems were solved for more than six months at a time.

Cue me, 34 years old, trying desperately not to cry on a packed commuter train.

I am having to actively unfollow my female "friends" whose lives seem so charmed. One who has the husband, the house, the kid, the workshop, the high profile business. One who has the high profile, the business she owns, the jet-setting lifestyle. One who has the retirement, the workshop, the cozy stability of house and home.

I am having to actively unfollow my friends with whom I was once close. Because I realize that I have fallen into a realm so far below them; they only invite me to things accidentally, they're surprised if I turn up, they spend their time insensitively bitching about the problems I would love to have, they don't call, write, or ask to meet up when they're in town. They hide the fact that they are in town. They are successful, and if failure is catching then they're insulating themselves from the plague.

I have failed as a person.

I am still estranged from my family; it was supposed to get better with time but I feel, if anything, worse than I ever have about them. After the utter bullshit abuse heaped on my by my little brother in August, and my father's continued failure to protect me from any of it, my little sister's crazy BPD targeting of me and my mother's NPD setting of everyone against me - I just have nothing left for them.

I have nothing.

I have a grinding three-hour-twenty-minute daily round trip commute, a rent which saps my will to live, an allergy which prevents me finding a housemate, a job that uses my own talents and work ethic to keep me off-balance and bound to them, all while underpaying me. All of which was supposed to not be a problem because I was supposed to have someone to share this burden with. Someone to build a home with. And now I have nothing, almost literally nothing, to look forward to. I cannot even afford a vacation, and if I could there is nobody who has time/money/desire to go with me. There will never be a respite from fear. There will never be a feeling of stability. There is little but a grinding loneliness with a grave at the end to look forward to.

Thanksgiving and Christmas are now times when I fear for my own safety.

And that is the scary thing that I need to own, because only by owning it can you (readers) hold me accountable. I have been hearing l'appel du vide for months now, and so far pushing the thoughts away like the arm of an inattentive commute neighbor. Even now I can't write the name here and am reverting to the French euphemism. But I was reading The Depression Thing and I got to the point that ends "Huh" and I got cold chills because if he has to call it that then I have to call it that and putting a name to a thing that's haunted you for so long makes it too real.

I don't want to die.

I want to rest. I want to feel like I have some modicum of control. I want to make art. I want to be happy with work.

There is some part of me that recognizes all the good in my world right now (and in fact I keep thinking about deleting this whole thing, as the best part of my world right now will be reading it from the other side of the world), but that sentiment is being overwhelmed by the fact that after five years together, after four long years of loving someone, he can cast you off with barely a backwards glance and immediately get on with his life. With hardly a word to you. And I feel so cheated, so thwarted, as if every plan in my world had been destroyed and I am owed compensation.

I don't even get the emotional satisfaction of knowing he's hurting. He has no proper feelings and has acknowledged as much himself, repeatedly. He's already dating and the pain is morphing to anger, which, without any target, morphs back into despair.

Tee plus seven weeks

Yesterday, I bought a car.

I am going to have to re-learn how to live like a person again.

I had forgotten how amazing it is to simply decide you will go somewhere, and go.

Crawling out of the hole

This morning in the throes of grief, I apparently tipped myself into panic attack mode. I found myself swapping between three self care modes - I wanted to nap, I felt like I should eat, I should keep moving, but my stomach hurt and I had so much anxiety and yet I was so sleepy.

I have the survivor's instinct. I wrote about it. In so doing I realized how bad it'd gotten. I reached out for help from a local friend. I feel like I'm using up the goodwill of my local friends, but this was definitely a "call in the cavalry" moment. She told me simply: "Take a shower. Right now. Get dressed and message me when you're done."

That worked. Having an external voice got me out of the whirl of miserable not-coping. We had lunch. I cried in a corner a lot. We walked around to a bookshop. I began to feel better.

I don't know what's going on with me anymore. That's the first time I've had adrenaline-drop symptoms after crying, and I hope it's the last. I know numbness isn't necessarily a great coping mechanism, but it's a hell of a lot better than this was.

I took the thermarest I was going to use backpacking this weekend and went to the park with a book and a soda and some cheese. Eventually I took a nap in the sun. I think that helped.

Lost

I have to get this out of my head or it will never go away. I spent half an hour wandering a supermarket at midnight, realizing I was the only person there by myself - this place is made for couples, for young people, for those starting out and with hope, not for the lost and bereft as I.

I have made my home a place for a partner, as far back as I can think of. It's never brought one in. Now I am hemmed in by the things of my art, but it's an art which I cannot sit still long enough to practice, a study I can't focus on for all the other worries, for all the loneliness. I've cast off so many people whose life choices I feel mark them as losers, and now I feel as I am certainly as bad or worse. I had a gut wrenching moment imagining another writer who I used to work with, alone and cranky with nothing but wine and work until retirement and I was suffused with despair. I would rather die than trudge out that existence.

Some part of me, some blessed inner survival instinct, has been going left and right looking for the things I once loved, trying to find dance events and camping and art shows and and and. Everything is so complicated without a car, everything is so hopeless without... what. What am I missing? I feel like I've lost my direction, or like I'm a small boat on a still pond, shoved towards the other bank without someone at the tiller, and now I'm running out of momentum and still don't know where I'm going and I'm drifting. And listing. I feel so little satisfaction from my job. I feel no sense of purpose or direction anymore. I don't feel like I'm having an impact, like I'm doing good in the world. I am marking time until...what.

Drop

I had a mostly-good week. He said an incredibly insensitive thing that made it easier not to miss him. But this weekend has blown up into something approaching a full-on existential crisis and I'm back to sobbing uncontrollably.

It started brewing last week, when I realized that this is Memorial Day Weekend, and I'd requested Friday off in addition to the long weekend so Mike and I could go backpacking. Ohshitohshitohshit. Wait, never mind, I'm sure there are other people who'd like to go camping. I'll ask around.

Apparently most of my current local circle are in Tahoe right now at a birthday party I'm not invited to. (Great to find out that you're that one person in the circle who you don't invite because...? too uptight for real parties?) The rest of the local folks have longstanding plans with other people. (I need not remind y'all that I'm carless, right?) I kept asking. Eventually, I found a group, and I spent the rest of that week and this planning for a Sunday/Monday trip. I bought a few missing items from my backpacking kit which arrived today, borrowed a bear canister from friends, and I was about to start inventorying and packing when I got a message.

Backpacking canceled; my friend's recently-surgically-repaired knee is swollen and she can't walk on it. (It's a testament to the fucked way my head works that the first thing I thought was that I'm too much of a burden and they're going without me, but this was a good way to slough me off.)

The entire weekend stretches on in front of me like an unbroken field of glass, and I am standing naked at the edge of the field and must cross.

And now I'm sitting here at 1AM on Saturday, alone and still stranded carless on the Peninsula, writing this down because I feel like I have to mark for posterity how fucked this whole thing is.

In a desperate attempt to prop up my own mood, I walked to Safeway at 11:45 at night to get ice cream. Halfway there I had to stop and sob on a park bench in the dark, because I had the realization that so much of this comes down to feeling like I'm not good enough, that I'm never good enough, that I have to sacrifice myself for people and if they don't stay or don't give me the attention and love I desire, I feel like I'm a failure.

And I begin to think I am. A genetic cul-de-sac, conceived with just the wrong blend of anxiety and depression, intelligence and pride, and raised with not enough of the social skills necessary to succeed and thrive in this world with these things. I'm 34, and I am so tired of fighting on my own, and now I'm terrified that there is no hope of relief from that solo fight. I am not making enough money. I am smothered by the things I buy to stimulate my mind and make myself feel like I have some modicum of control over my world. I am too difficult to live with. I'm too uptight, too judgmental, too fat, too ambitious, too mean. I'm apparently not great with money. I'm lonely. My relationship with my parents isn't good. I feel like the people I call friends avoid me; and conversely many of the people who I wish to not associate with consider me one of them.

I miss feeling okay. I miss the optimism that it would all turn out alright soon. Or later, that it would all turn out alright, in the next few years. Or by the time I was 30. And now I'm looking down the barrel of middle age and terrified that the best years of my life were wasted trying to survive, and that the better years following them were wasted in fear and anxiety, and that it's all downhill from here. Turning and turning in the widening gyre.

I imagine my life as a quarter that's running itself around in ever-decreasing circles, and this is the rattling noise before it drops and lies still.

I am so tired. I'm sure I'll feel better after I sleep some.

Oh shit

I can't recall when I've been this depressed before. It's snuck up on me so slowly I hardly had time to notice - I buried it in a million other annoyances and stressors until it was the pebble in my shoe and not the rock I broke my leg on.

I would like to go a day without sobbing.

The nice thing about living alone is that you can cry like a child without inconveniencing anyone. I hope at some point the well of grief runs dry because I begin to think I'm worrying my upstairs neighbors who can no doubt hear me.

The job I took in February, in an attempt to regain some semblance of work life balance, is backfiring and badly. My waking hours spent commuting rose from 2 to 3, and the chaos I feel in this role is twice that of the previous company. Ironically, I heavily favored this job over the other because it had good maternity benefits - I didn't tell Mike that because I didn't want to get his hopes up, and now I wonder if I was trying not to admit something (what?) to myself.

I saw a pregnant woman on the way home and was suffused with jealousy. She looked so happy and stable and well cared for. On the same walk I saw one of the condo-owners fumbling for her keys at her front door, and I was suffused with jealousy and despair. I will never own my own home, never have the stable place to plant roses and jasmine and lavender. It all seems so pointless.

I am so lonely. I've lived alone in this apartment since Chris moved out, modulo six months in Europe. That's nearly four years now. That is the longest I've been so alone. It is a miracle I am still alive.

In retrospect the thing that's kept me going, kept me fighting, has been the thought that soon I'd have someone to come home to, and somewhere to share tasks and griefs and triumphs, somewhere to sleep safe in the arms of another with regularity and without reserve or complication. Someone to watch movies with any old night of the week, someone to remind me to put sunscreen on when I was out in the garden. Someone to cook with, to dance with, to live with.

In the absence of all of those things, I find I am having trouble taking pleasure in anything. I am at the edge of my reach financially. I am so tired and worried all the time that I cannot even take pleasure in the many things I used to enjoy. I've grown lethargic on my own pain and nothing - dancing, fixing old machines, pyrotechnics, gelatin, historic cooking, gardening, Burning Man, costuming, theater - seems worth the effort anymore. He was so much a part of my life that there's a savor lost without him there beside me and everything is ashes in my mouth.

I startle awake at night, and I don't know why. In the morning I drink my coffee and think about how much he hated it, but I don't have time for tea and I need the caffeine to look like a semi-normal functioning human being. I've started carrying a handkerchief around because I'm running low on tissues to dab my eyes. Exercise is a painful slog; I feel like a blimp and wonder if trying to fix that is pointless. Decisions are hard. Sleeping is hard. Work is hard.

I am down in it, and I am afraid.

I'm taking ibuprofen for my injuries and firmly resisting the constant urge to look up its LD50, though I've had the thought to check about five times today. A book arrived on WW2 womenswear, and I found myself half-wishing for a reason to take a potentially-lethal wartime job. I feel as if I have nothing else left to do.

In the mornings, I am recoiling again from the approaching train. Not because I'm afraid of the train or the wash of the air, but because the sly finger that prods me towards the open rails is back, and I will not give it purchase. It's been years; the last time marked another grinding commute, another uncertain job, a different painful isolation.

I am afraid.

In 2007 I managed a job change followed by catastrophic car failure, and in 2008 changed jobs and living situations for the better. So if this is a ten year cycle I just need to hold on for dear life for another six months.

If you're within the sound of my words, please help me hang on.

Endings

It's been months, forgive me.

I blogged on Livejournal for a bit, and then recalled that, particularly given current political circumstances, that name is not safe. I migrated it to Dreamwidth, but then took up a new name, and I haven't quite moved in there yet.

On Saturday I stopped short on an onramp, and the guy behind me didn't stop and rammed me into the car in front. My radiator, front quarter panels, one headlight, hood and both bumpers were damaged. My neck is still sore. It's Tuesday night and I still have had only one voicemail from the insurance adjuster, who refuses to answer his phone or voicemails. I have no car. I have no idea what's going on.

On Sunday Mike returned from a work trip in Europe.

On Monday he broke up with me.

It's been a long time coming, but it's been a long time, period. Five years is longer than several marriages I could name. But I'd built my life around him, entwined it with his, and I am in a bad way trying to find the path forward. If my life is to be forever bootless solitary toil and never comfort, what good is a life? I am asking myself repeatedly. ("Children" still never looks like a good answer. Creating more suffering humans still never seems like a good answer.)

One foot in front of the other.