Me, Feeling Self-Pity and Trying to Dig It Out

[itsallovernow]

I started the weekend off on Friday with a migraine complete with puking. I can't quite describe how much I hate to throw up. I mean no one loves it, right? But for some people, it's like "oh man, that sucked, but now I feel better." For me, it's still, "oh man, that was so gross and the only good thing is that now I don't want to puke."

The migraine shouldn't have been a surprise (but it makes me terribly terribly grateful that I don't suffer them chronically anymore and equally empathetic to those on the flist that do.) This was a perfect storm of stress, depression, the weather, allergies, my cycle, and gin. Regardless, once I recovered enough to speak to humans, I went to see iamsab and projectjulie and sat on their futon and watched Videodrome while Julie and I ate Papa John's space pizza with extra fat (garlic butter dipping sauce).

Saturday, the same household helped me turn my hair into an adventure in hot pink/purple streaks. We did the whole 9 yards – bleach + color and everything It looks … like me, but with jolly rancher candy hair. It's beautiful, and odd, and was a good antidote to feeling like my whole life was out of my control, like I just didn't have the resources to make things work.

I want words on my body that inspire me, I want my own words somewhere that I can paint and trace and look to.

I've been unbearably sad lately – so frustrated and stuck: wanting to move and not having that be at all easy to achieve, to get to; feeling like a failure at relationships, feeling unwantable; feeling like both a sellout and a failure in my career; feeling like a failure in my body.

I'd like to take all that and transform it, but I can't figure out how. My father, either as a kindness or in revenge for me being irrationally upset with him, asked if I liked my job. If it was what I envisioned doing when I was in college, studying literature and analysis.

"What kind of question is that?" I asked. I like my job well enough. It feels like a step, not a resting place, but a step towards something. I hope. It's the one thing I've sort of accepted right now, this place and being in it, giving myself some breathing room for a few more months.

"What did you think I'd be doing?" I didn't know if I wanted an answer. He's always a mystery, alternately proud of me and wanting me to be his own vision and version of things.

"I thought you'd be writing witty, erudite pieces for the New Yorker," he said, meaning it both as a reprimand and a compliment. I think.

I started to sob then, feeling like a failure to the man who won't leave his armchair. "Well," I said, trying not to run into the car in front of me as I slipped along the street, rain suddenly slooshing out of the sky. "I guess I'm doing what I can."

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to write for The New Yorker. I find it overly… smug, both in status and in production. I find it's place in the world of intellectualism frustrating in the same way I find the whole mentality of "East Coast intellectualism" frustrating. I'm a West Coast girl, and I'd match my brain against anyone, and if I came up short it wouldn't be for lack of an East Coast upbringing or education. (These are stereotypes. I know. I'm not… I keep running into these issues of West vs. East, and it gets my back up. Of how the West lacks. Of how Los Angeles lacks. It doesn't lack, it just doesn't fit the mold).

But that girl, that 60s beatnik, beret wearing, poetry writing, east coast intellectual, writing for snooty magazines and living in Manhattan in a tiny apartment, only exists in Woody Allen films life is what my dad wanted, and what he wanted for me – an open door to the world of ideas and intellectual achievement, and instead, I fled to Hollywood to live in the sun and to struggle like an idiot among beautiful people with endless ambition, fulfilling nobody's dreams.

I call Sh., telling her I'm stuck. She doesn't offer me comfort. "I'm sorry," she says, "it's hard to feel that way." I know the godchild's cradled in her lap, I know whatever comfort she's got is going there, and I'm not jealous, just lonely. "I wish you were here to curl up with me," she says. I want from her this acknowledgment of my loneliness. I want more than her protests of how difficult it is to have a kid. I want these things she has, and even as I love her, I hate her for having them and not… knowing what to say to me that I don't, for wanting part of me to stay the same and never get there so that I'm always what SHE needs. It's about boundaries, I know. She's learned to set them for herself. I'm proud of her for that.

But I'm still stuck. I'm still sad. I'm still alone. I'm still no where near the person I want to be, doing the things I want to do. And I don't have any … solutions. I don't even have anything new to say.


In other news, I'm nearly done with S2 of Buffy. I'm so glad I waited this long to do a rewatch, am getting so much out of it with 10 years distance from the show, more from my own high school experiences. I love how, in many ways, they are children, how the metaphor shines out, how they struggle and fight and love. It was a good choice, this show, a good way to stay afloat, along with a re-read of Winter's Tale, my early year companion, my gilded golden age tale of justice and the perfect city.

Comments

[raithen.livejournal.com]

oh, hon.

I have more thoughts, more to say. But I don't know HOW to say them. I am struggling a bit myself, and have been told directly and indirectly that the broken record of my life's tale is getting rather old and boring, and to just move ON already. And I am working on it, but it isn't easy.

And really, this comment isn't meant to be all about me, though in some ways it is. But I wanted you to know that I empathize, and I am happy to listen, and I know that it takes time to get it all sorted out, and you can keep talking about it until you do. I am here to listen, even if I don't know exactly what to say.

{{Hugs}}

[jenlev.livejournal.com]

I hope you're feeling better soon. It's so hard to be human I think, and I wish I had better words. Or at least something more useful. But I'm sending you good thoughts and thinking of you. :::hugs:::

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

I wish I could say something real -- I just didn't want to have read this and move on by without acknowledging how much I sympathize, and how fucking, fucking hard it is to turn to the people you know and love at the time when you really, desperately need their help and understanding, and they're just... not there. Or there in the wrong way. Or only halfway. I know it's part of being an adult but nothing makes you feel more alone.

[hossgal.livejournal.com]

I'm still no where near the person I want to be, doing the things I want to do.

Ah. That.

And worse still, perhaps, is that you fear you will never get any closer to being those things than you are now.

And you don't want to be miserable and unhappy and unsatisfied all the rest of your life...and yet you don't want to settle either.

I know this place. I can't make your solution for you. You have to make that - find that, learn that - yourself. Which is likely as little comfort to you as it was to me. So I will only say...Keep going. Don't give up, don't give in. Keep on, keeping on.

And I don't have any … solutions. I don't even have anything new to say.

For me, many times, this is when I go back to the old words, back to prayer. Say it over and over again until it is no longer someone else's words, but my own. Say it over and over, until it becomes new again.

Litanies, prayers, chants, mantras. Call it what you like. I keep finding them throughout human history, even as prosaic as I think I can, I think I can.

It might not work for you at all. It doesn't always work for me.

I wish you luck, and all the best of fortune. When you get to the end of your rope, that's when you tie a knot, and hang in there.

- hg

[ropo.livejournal.com]

I wish I could be a helper, but all I can say is that you have words in you that nobody else does, and someday I hope everyone knows that, and that you're in exactly the right place. Also, go you with your crazy cotton candy hair.

[lem0nb0mbs.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

I am experiencing a lot of this myself -- it presents itself differently, but, yeah, I recognize it. And I can't offer much, as I don't know how to deal with it myself. But I know it often is tremendously comforting to know that somebody out there gets what you are saying, identifies, empathizes.

So, yeah. I know these feelings. I know this general funk. You aren't alone in this.

[geoddess.livejournal.com]

T- usually just pop in to see how things are getting on in L.A. (I really miss the sunshine now), but just added you to my flist so I didn't have to go through Cret's list to find you anymore so I thought I would say "hello"

In the last few years I have "unstuck" myself from Pasadena to Tempe, AZ and now recently from Tempe to Bremen, Germany. I so sympathize with your current state of mind. I don't know if I can offer any help, as I never feel quite settled enough in my own life, but I hope you're on the upside of things soon!
-G