Monday

I just spent 45 minutes trying to get a mini-DV tape back on the track, getting increasingly frustrated with every failed attempt, not really sure if the footage I needed was on there anyway, but terrified that the best stuff I took of our whole trip was on the tape and now it was gone.

SO much of life is spent doing this sort of thing. It's amazing. How much time does it take to fix things, or make them work in the first place? It can be a bit overwhelming when it's added up, so it's probably just as well that most of the time is not.

I am in bed. It's 4 p.m. on a Monday afternoon, and I'm here but I'm away on paper. I should be asleep. That was my intention, anyway, to come home after my class was cut short and take a nap before I have to go back to school, but it turns out that I have too many thoughts in my head for that. It's grey and cold outside, too much of both for April, and I have myself tucked in listening to Hem. "The Burnt-Over District" just turned into "Reservoir," and that'll swoop and dive sadly into "I'll Dream of You Tonight." I have relationships with special albums, and this is one of them that it seems I need on occasion to get my head straight.

I'm shutting down comments here today. I feel a little guilty about that, but the truth is that I'd almost rather not do this anymore, at least not the way I have been. Coming up on three years, I'm feeling like it's time to transition into something different. I never did this for recognition, and I'm not very good at keeping up the conversation. I want to do something different but I'm not sure what. I initially did this because I was a little bit nuts. When I started I was in such pain and confusion that I didn't know what I was doing, really, and now that the scales have fallen off my eyes for the most part, I'm not always sure that the intention is the same. Maybe I should set up some anonymous site somewhere where I can just let it all hang out without worrying about what people say who know me in real life, but really, what's the point of that? My paper journal is already sadly neglected.

People found me accidentally, which has kind of freaked me out. I used to keep track of such things but now I don't, because I don't like to. I used to write for other people. I used to have really shitty boundaries. I used to think that everything I did was because of or for other people. I used to be worried about hurting feelings and what people thought and how deeply what I said mattered. And now, although I honestly believe that a big part of the point of life is to shore other people up or it's really not worth it, I've learned to make space for myself in there too. That is really, really hard for me sometimes. We all have to carry our own weight. We have to take what the truth is about whatever confronts us and move through it and along. We have to stand alone at some point.

If there's one thing I've learned in the past three years, particularly the past one, it's that this letting go thing is for real. It's not like, "Haha, you have a choice. Don't want to let go? Buy this free pass." No. At times it's seemed like a joke, in the past several months especially, like there's someone watching me behind a curtain going "Wow, let's see if this one really fucks her up permanently. Been pretty good so far, poor old girl, but this one should do it and then we can move on to that dolt down the street." I mean, really. Seriously?

It's a good thing that I don't dwell so much anymore in the present tense, while avoiding martyrdom, as hair shirts are difficult to find at H&M and I can't stand itching anyway. I've gotten fairly good at pressing on, pushing through things that used to stand me still, because I got bored of the way I used to react. I realized that people got tired of listening so you'd better sublimate it or else risk ending up on Montel, and besides, I kind of like to enjoy myself, bottom line. Misery and depression sucks. I've had plenty of times where I couldn't control either, but now that I've been lucky enough to get some kind of traction where they're concerned, it's been good to use mind over very difficult matter.

Still, if you don't acknowledge pain, if you don't acknowledge loss, you just delay your reactions. You put crazy on hold, essentially, or at least I do. I will never, ever know why I reacted like I did when the last relationship I was in ended. It is a great mystery of my life, and one that if I could explain, I'd write a thesis about it, because I swear I could make that shit fascinating. It was something so grand and existential that nothing in printed literature about emotional attachments could describe my pain. It was both absolutely and not at all about the specific situation at hand. It was about being wrong and being crazy. It made and makes no sense to me, and it's one of the things I despise the most about myself and about my life. I hate not understanding things.

But what it did teach me (although I'm so not a fan of the whole "not killing yet strengthening me" business) was the letting go part. Finally, finally it taught me that, in spite of myself, and I guess I should be grateful for that. It also taught me that a lot of times the pain at hand is not about the situation at hand. The pain at hand is the acute thing; it's the symptom. And the cause can run as deep as the years of your life, with the most recent trigger only that. And as one by one I've learned these things and, by choice or necessity, let go of people and situations that kept me stuck and in some cases spinning into the chronic anxiety and inadequacy that I'm capable of, the results have eventually been (mostly) positive.

It should be clarified that none of this is as neat and tidy as a sentence can make it sound. Messy is unfortunate, but it's real. I'm just a little bit different than I was three/five/ten years ago, I think and I hope. Although I don't at all like the causes in some cases, the effects have been pretty good. I thought about that when I found myself standing in a mud puddle by the side of a Vietnamese highway in the pouring rain with semi-trucks hurtling at me. Hello, surreality.

I think the thing about loss for me though is that it brings up old loss. And losing my dog, besides hurting on a level I can't adequately describe, really opened up some old wounds almost immediately, I think because he was a part of my life for so much that's happened in it. 13 years is a long time, and it's been a fairly active stretch.

He was a last vestige of Ohio, and coming back home. He was something I was always responsible for, even though I had so much help with him, and a creature who loved me unconditionally. When they say you don't know what you got til it's gone, I really think they don't speak truer words. I pulled up in front of my parents' house last night and got all happy inside, because I looked forward to him waiting for me behind the door. When I snapped back to reality in the two seconds it took me to process these thoughts, I felt knives in my stomach. Horrible, and also quite unavoidable.

I've felt that a lot over the past few years. I used to wait for bad things to undo themselves, for happy endings, for the phone to ring after the fake hang-up. Denial was one of my closest companions, and I was so into it that I didn't even know it. When my dog died, I got sad about a lot of old things all over again. Even though so many of the faces and places in my life have changed, it turned out that I wanted to lay my head down mostly on things that didn't exist in my world anymore, which scared me because I realized how close to the surface so many things are that seem in the light of day to be buried for good reason. My new life wouldn't, in many ways, recognize my old one, and as much as that makes me glad it also freaked me out.

It turns out it's a constant management thing for me when it comes to the things I've loved and lost. I'm really not thrilled about that, but I'm accepting it a little at a time.

I am a little better now, and sometimes a lot. My reactions are less extreme. I still have bad dreams and I still have random negative thoughts, but I do pretty much whatever the spirit moves me to do. I live more courageously than ever, I think. I'm learning to file stuff away and only take it out when I need it, although I still slip and have moments and even hours where I go back to things that aren't useful, where I persevorate over this or that turn I could have taken. I'm told that I'm allowed right now, that after the shocks to my system of last fall (last fall!) and last month, I need to be patient as the impulses and images roll by.

I've been thinking about so many things in the past couple of weeks, things that have mattered, and how I've filed them away with sadness and joy. I roll them over in my hands like sea glass, dull enough that it doesn't cut me, that it just catches the light.