Freewrite 2/10: More things

If there's anything I'm thankful for today, it's that I'm not nearly as pained as I was yesterday.  Yesterday was harder to get through because everything hurt so damn much.  Today is definitely a lot better, likely due to my counseling session yesterday giving me the chance to let out most of what I was feeling/dealing with.

Speaking of that, in case anyone really needed confirmation that Justin's insulting little 'Friends With Benefits' suggestion was garbage, even the therapist said she thought it was ridiculous.  Sure, she said she could see it if that was what we agreed to way back in June, but she thought it as sensible an idea as I do (hint: I still don't) after all this time has passed.

And really?  For him to go from complaining about my spending too much time with him to not spending enough with him?  It's silly.  Just a couple weeks ago, he was complaining because we'd spent most of the prior weekends together.  He kept telling me he wanted more of 'his' space, since weekends were all he had to himself.  And now, when he has all the space he could want (with the chance of us scheduling date times when we can fit them in) he STILL complains?  I really can't win, can I?

Ah well, if I can't I can't.  I'm making plans of my own for the two of us for the weekend.  It won't be anything fancy, but I'm thinking creatively and I hope he chooses to join me.  I also have a gift I made up for him, which will either be given to him this weekend or mailed to him if he chooses not to spend the time with me.  Either way, I'm still going to keep going forward and working to survive.  What's my other option, after all?  Give up and go back to San Diego?  Not on my agenda, thanks.

Freewrite 2/1: Family stuffs

Another of these rare early morning freewrites that leaves a door open for another one later this evening.  This is technically a holdover from last night, since I didn't emotionally feel up to writing.

So I talked to Mom for a bit last night.  If you've been watching this space for any amount of time, you'll know I've admitted a few times to missing Ramona.  We talked for about five minutes (nothing new on her end, same old same old as far as she's concerned), and I told her about the new job in San Dimas and about school.

Her response to my school talk was...interesting, to say the least.  I wasn't expecting rapt fascination, but I wasn't really expecting to feel as though she was brushing it off.  Her response was essentially 'Well, if that's what you want to do'; and coming from someone who always wanted me to finish school and have a workable education, it bothers me a bit.  I know speculation is essentially worthless, but I still have to wonder if she still believes this is some sort of wild idea of mine that I'll 'get over' in time.  Get over, go back down there, and go back to how things were.  Or maybe it's so far removed from the 'typical' career choices people make that there really is no talk point unless you've been there.  I can yak to my heart's content with my program classmates about school, I can talk with my instructors, and I can talk with folks working in the field.  But layfolks/parents/others?  Seems it's tough to find a good conversation point.  Still, it was enough to bother me a touch last night, even though I miss my old home a little bit less now.

Freewrite 1/29: On, well, nothing

Seriously, there's not a lot to say today.  There was a bit of residual from yesterday that I had to work through, but currently, all is well.

Freewrite 1/28: Catharsis

So today I had a full day, which I just came back from.  I worked for someone Cindy (and from what I hear, Justin) knew, cleaning out her horse stalls.  It was good, tiring work that has left me with stiff shoulders and a sore back, but I feel good, all in all.

It also let me really let go.  I'm not ashamed to admit that I cried a few times while I was working.  (Hey, if the worst I have to be worried about is being judged by three horses, a donkey, and a bunch of manure, then I should be in pretty good shape, amirite?)  I let myself really miss my family, miss where I came from.

And I do miss them very much.  I miss Mom and Dad, Steph, and James.  I miss the girls, I miss Max and Marley.  I miss the town I'm from, the people I knew there (and in the surrounding areas)...all of it.  It hurts to be this far away and not know when I'll go back and visit.  It hurts to not have Mom nearby to talk about school and how classes are going, or to hear one of Dad's stories about his days back in Davenport when he went to Chiropractic school.  Everything just...hurts like hell.  It hurts like hell and I have to fight through it to feel better.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not giving up on making my way here.  I've got a job hunt to do, along with three semesters to finish school, get my degree, and get my license.  I've got a lot of work ahead of me to keep me busy.  It's just so hard sometimes, when I feel disconnected and scared and I start to worry I won't make it.  Then I remember what lies ahead when I do, and it's just enough to keep me moving forward.

And hey.  That's all I can do when the chips seem down, isn't it?

freewrite 1/27: Insularity and other ponderings

This will be one of those rare freewrites that I do during the course of my day, as opposed to when I get home this evening.  I noticed it a bit last night, and even moreso this morning.

Justin often tells me (in so many words) that I've been letting myself be too insular.  I'm sociable, but I don't necessarily like to socialize.  It can get to the point that, if there's an opportunity to socialize with people, I'll do so for a short time before retreating and doing a solitary activity like reading or sitting/standing by myself.

Why?  I'm not completely sure.  Part of it is my wiring.  While I am outgoing and sociable, I do have a limit, especially in newer environments and/or situations.  When that limit is hit, I withdraw a bit to let myself relax, lest I start feeling panicky and/or anxious about people being around me.  This is especially true when there are a lot of mostly-unfamiliar people surrounding me whom I'm starting to get to know.

I guess the other part is not being sure how to fully connect with people.  I'm the type who, when I'm into something, I go into it wholeheartedly.  I could talk for hours about some topics (and often do, just ask Justin or anyone else who knows me really well), while others I have little clue about.  This can make it hard for me to connect with people, since my interests aren't quite mainstream.  It's why I'm glad I'm meeting and getting to know my Mortuary Science classmates.  I think one hard thing about my being away from my family is missing the interest they -especially Mom- took in what I was doing in class.  She and I could talk about my classes all day if we let ourselves, and Dad took interest here and there as well.  Up here?  I feel like I'm pretty much on my own.  So I'm glad I have a few people I can talk to who don't give me funny looks for going on about funeral homes or anatomy, or othersuch.

Lastly, in case you couldn't already guess, I find I miss my family every so often.  I hope I can talk with them and let them know how I'm doing very soon.

Freewrite 1/26: Rage, more grief, and othersuch

So I had another therapy appointment today.

Wait, before anyone says 'but Andrea, you just had an appointment on Monday', let me explain.  To save on transit costs, I switched therapy days from Mondays to Wednesdays.  So I have switched from Ashley to Penny, who is still an incredible individual who had a lot to share with me. 

I opened up to her about the troubles I've been having, from the issues I started with Cindy, to my grief at leaving Ramona, to some of my other feelings about everything from school to Justin.  She let me cry, let me vent, let me do whatever I needed to do.  (She also agreed the freewriting is a good thing.)  She gave me some great insight about guys and relationships, among other things.

When our session ended, I asked her if there was anything she wanted me to work on between now and next week.  She told me to focus on de-clinging myself from Justin.  She emphasized that the more I tried to stay close to him, the further he'd want to go.  So I'm going to take her advice and mostly disengage with him from here.  Don't get me wrong, I'll still be around if he wants to talk, or if he has a question about anything.  But I won't be trying to talk with him or spend time with him every chance I get.  I'll let him initiate things much more, rather than jumping in to talk to him every chance I get.  With a bit of luck, we'll each do better from here.

Another thing today made me realize is just how much my family still affects me.  Dad tends to have a temper, and when he goes off, he rages.  It's a mix of frightening and annoying when it happens, but I had no idea how much it affected me until Penny got me thinking.  It would explain my own fearfulness, especially when asking for things I need.  I found it hard to ask for anything, since I was so scared of the reaction I would get.  Hopefully, I can get around that fearfulness and be more open with time.

In other news, I know I'm doing better.  How?  On the trip home, I met someone new.  More than that, I talked with him and really enjoyed it.  His name is Arnel, and he's a Navy recruiter who works down at the Puente Hills mall.  While initially he was interested in me mainly due to my past military interest (and my 95 score in the ASVAB last year), but he also showed interest in my studies as a Mortuary Science student.  I suggested we spend time together here and there as friends, and he seems open to it.  So we shall see.  I'm gradually feeling more open and comfortable with things, to where I feel like I can be much more sociable.

Freewrite 1/25: On Grief and Grieving

Sometimes, I think I'm in the right line of study, considering what I left behind when I moved up here.  I was sitting in Thanatology I (Thanatology is the study of grief/mourning/bereavement/everything affiliated with it.  It's a very interesting blend of Psychology/Sociology) when Professor Bower mentioned the saying of how we all have 'a thousand little deaths each day' (to paraphrase).  And I got to thinking about that, both as I sat in class and as I made my way home.  It doesn't explain all of my recent shit behavior, but it does explain a lot of my depressive feelings.  At least, in my mind it does.

See, I've been grieving.  I've been grieving about the home and the family I left in Ramona.  Now, some of you will likely chime in at this point and say, 'But, Andrea!  That wasn't a healthy situation at all for you.  Why are you grieving for it?' or some permutation thereof, amirite?  Well, remember that, until a month or so ago, that was the only home I really knew.  That was the only family I really knew, screwed-up as they are.  The house I left I had lived in since I was six years old.  The town I left I had spent my entire life living in.  Naturally, it's going to be fundamentally hard to let that all go.  It's going to be hard to walk away from everything that was known and familiar to me, even if it is for a better opportunity.  A part of me will always be there, just as I'm sure anyone who has ever moved a considerable distance from home will always have some small portion of themselves back in their 'roots', as it were.

But I hope that this process benefits me in my chosen field.  See, grief is kind of part and parcel of the whole funeral/mortuary deal, and I hope that my grieving for the things I miss back home will help me be more understanding and empathic toward people who are hurting.  It may not be for the same reasons, but it's grief nonetheless.

Without attempting to jinx anything, I really hope to have good news soon.  I had some good things happen today, and I'm praying (in my own way, since I ain't the praying type) that they work out.  They'll go a long way toward helping me with a lot of what I'm dealing with.  Fingers crossed.

Experiment

A rare early-morning post for me, but this worked so well last night that I had to share when I finally woke up this morning.

As many of you can guess, I miss Justin when we aren't together.  Quite a bit, by my own admission (and somwehat to my embarrassment, I'm not normally this dependant on people).  I'd made the suggestion in the past that he and I carve out TV time together, but plans he already had for last night put a crimp on that (at least for now).

So I tried something.  I've always believed you're only as far from someone you love as you believe yourself to be; if you feel close to them, you will be in some way, no matter what the distance.  So at 8PM last night, I curled up on my bed and watched Chuck and The Cape.  We watched them together last Monday night, and I enjoyed the time we spent together.

How was it?  It worked pretty well, actually!  I enjoyed watching TV for the first time in a while (most times, I use it as background noise to something else I'm doing), and while it would have been nice to have had him there, I didn't miss him nearly as much as I sometimes do.  Going to sleep last night, I almost felt like he was asleep next to me.  All in all, it was great.

Now, to see if I can't keep a good thing going today.  Time to get ready for school.

Freewrite 1/24 1 of 2: Therapy recap

This will be one of those times when I post more than one freewrite.  I had a lot on my mind today that went into two separate lines of thinking, so I decided to split this freewrite into two topics.  First, the 'serious' freewrite (this one), then a 'fluffier' freewrite that came to mind this afternoon.  (Well, it actually came to mind last week, but came to mind again today, so into the blog it goes.)

So today, I met Ashley.  Ashley is a Marriage and Family Counseling intern at the Health Center at Cypress College, and she was/hopefully is my therapist/counselor.  To say she is amazing doesn't feel like it does her justice.  Here, let me backtrack a bit and explain.

Before my appointment, I was feeling rather numb.  Numb and thoughtful.  I was thinking of everything Cindy told me/has kept telling me, and I couldn't figure things out for the life of me.  It got so bad that, as I waited in the HS office for my appointment, I started to cry.  I'd been able to hold things together all morning as I waited for transit, walked around applying for jobs, and as I walked around on campus, but I fell apart just before my appointment.  I seemed to come back together as Ashley called me back, then I fell apart yet again as I told her what was going on with me.  I told her why I was seeking help, what my goals were, and how I wanted to stop hurting myself and people who were trying to help me, all the while crying like I haven't cried in...wow, I don't even know how long.  (I tend to be sensitive, but I try to hide a lot of my emotions since showing them was severely frowned upon in my origin family.)

But Ashley...she was great.  She sat there and talked to me as calmly as could be.  It felt like talking to someone I'd known for a while, and at times almost like I was talking with Justin or his dad about things.  It was just such a comforting feeling that, even though I still couldn't keep my tears in very well, I felt like I could trust her.  I told her how overwhelming everything felt for me, and she understood.  She commiserated with me, saying it had to be hard to take on so much in a short amount of time, and promised she and I would work on the things I said I needed to work on.  She noted my self-esteem was rather shaky, and said we would work on improving that as well.

Most of all, however, she really opened my eyes.  I hadn't realized how insular I'd made myself.  All this time, I thought I'd been doing well, but I was really only focusing on my own feelings, and they were really affecting me and dragging me down.  They were also coloring how I was seeing/hearing/perceiving the help Cindy and others have offered me.  When all they wanted was to help me, to my twisted view of things it seemed they were criticizing me.  How effed is that on my part?

So I spoke with Cindy, exactly as I told Ashley I would.  I apologized for the utterly ungrateful bitch I've been toward her, and told her I WILL be stepping up from here on out.  I WILL put out 5000% toward job hunting AND toward making amends for having violated her trust so badly.  I'm not proud of having done so, and I'm going to work on fixing that and making it into something positive.  Understandably, Cindy doesn't believe me, but that makes me want to work even harder to show her that I have started down the right path, that I WILL get better, and that I WILL do whatever it takes to make things as right as possible.  I still have a lot of work to do, and I've been a damn idiot and wasted a lot of time, but I'm going to do my best to get where I need to get.

I also began to realize a little just how my behavior has affected my relationship with Justin.  It'll take a bit more work, but I'm confident that I can turn around and be someone much better for him.  He deserves that much from me, after all.  (We focused on the whole thing with Cindy, and my lowered motivation, and other issues related to that this session.  But I hope to work more on things relating to my relationship with Justin very soon.  I can't wait!)

And that's been that.  My energy level is still good, and I wrote this entire freewrite/recap combo with a huge smile on my face.  (Remember, yesterday's freewrite ended with me pondering how long it would be before I could write a freewrite entry without crying.)

Freewrite 1/23: Complicated.

(To make sure I freewrite once per day, I'm going to date my freewrite entries from today forward.)

I've been feeling very mixed today, physically, mentally, and emotionally.  Luckily, the physical discomfort was short-lived, so I can focus on the other two things that have kept me a bit down today.

The biggest thing on my mind is my lacking motivation in my job search.  It's pissing Cindy off that I don't seem to be taking my job hunt seriously, and I really don't blame her.  And the thing is, I'm not sure why my motivation in this regard is flagging so badly (which is why I plan on making work on it a priority with the therapist).  It could be as simple as discouragement.  I've been out of steady employment for a year now, and every time I apply for a job that doesn't pan out, it drops my enthusiasm by a tiny fraction.  Kinda like developing a tiny hairline crack in a piece of glass, with sufficient stress and time that little crack gets bigger.  In much the same way, my enthusiasm has been dropping in tiny increments every time something doesn't pan out.  The problem is I haven't been able to bounce back as readily as I have in the past.  Why?  I'm not sure, but I hope to figure it out and work through it to get back where I need to be.

Another thing that came to mind this morning is how much I question my own value, and wonder if I'm merely some expendable pawn in life.  Growing up, I always felt like there was little in my life I could truly control for myself, it felt like there was always a plan for me that I had to follow.  It always felt like my sister was the 'good' one, the one who followed the 'perfect' path and turned out good.  I've always felt like the 'bad' one, the one who never took the 'right' path.  If anything happened to me, would anyone really care?  My family has their 'good' child, what do they need me for?  As good as I always try to be, I inevitably screw something up in a way that makes someone angry with me, so why should I even bother trying anymore?

I know giving up isn't an option, but the learning is so hard.  And even when I am learning, I feel like I'm not learning fast enough, like one day I'm going to screw things up irreparably and that'll be the end of it.  I hate to sound so negative, but it scares me.

In other thoughts, I hope the day comes that I can sit down and do one of these freewrites without crying through almost the entire process.  Right now, writing this feels as painless as pulling a shard of glass out of my chest, only to reach back into the wound for the next one.  Damn it all, how long is this process going to be this painful?

All I can do is keep pushing forward.  It's the only way I'll heal.  I just wish it didn't hurt this much.

Goals for therapy

Since I plan on starting officially with my therapy tomorrow, I wanted to cross-post a list I wrote out last Thursday after making my appointment.  They are things I want to work with the therapist on, in the hopes of improving myself for my own sake and the sake of those around me.  None of these are 'easy' or 'quick' fixes; with time I will improve.  Stand with me.

So, here goes:

~Breaking down unneeded self-preservation behaviors.  I have a lot of behaviors that I'm ashamed to say are still lingering.  (Yes, this includes my lying.)  As much as I've tried to dispel them on my own, they're persistent behaviors that I need help to get rid of.

~Improving my communication skills with others.  I'm not sure whether it's pride, intimidation, or a combination of factors causing this one.  But when I need something, I find I get scared of asking people for fear of what their reaction will be.  (This will be a topic all its own in time.)  I'd really like to no longer have that hurdle in the way of my asking for help.

~Work on my coping skills/emotional responses.  Justin has mentioned to me several times that I tend to overreact emotionally to things, or make a big deal out of a minor disappointment.  This is something I've struggled with for some time with limited success, but I want this go-around to be different.  I want to better emotionally handle when life throws me a screwball, no matter what the size.

~Get past the 'old garbage' in my life.  The feeling that I'm punishing myself and those around me for what I've gone through prior to now came to me.  That's totally not fair on my part, so I'm going to fix it once and for all.

~Be more emotionally/mentally independant.  Continuing with one of my posts from yesterday, I really need to learn to stand on my own.  Justin is right, I need to learn not to rely on him so much for my day-to-day functioning.

~Fix my wonky motivation.  I've noticed that I have super-high 'I can do anything!!!!!!!!!!' motivation when I'm at school and doing school-related things, but when it comes to other aspects in my life (namely, my ongoing job-hunt) my motivation is flagging.  This is totally unacceptable for me -especially in light of the promise I made to Cindy-, and I'm going to work on repairing it.

None of this will be easy, but I'm going to say right here that I'm going to put 155% effort into every appointment.  I'm going to work as hard as I can to improve myself, no matter what.  I swear it.

Lies and the lying liars who lie

Justin made me think of this topic, so my other topic will be today's second post.

I am a liar. I'll admit it right upfront. Now, before anyone says 'But Andrea, aren't we all in some way?' I'll tell you how I'm different. I'm a liar because I am afraid. I'm a liar because I don't know how to tell people things that are less than pleasant. I lie because I'm trying to protect myself. Yes, even away from the circumstances that encouraged the development of this trait, it's still manifesting.

And that's what pushed me to seek therapy. That's the last straw that made me go 'Okay, enough putting it off. I'm going to get help, like, yesterday'. Seeing how I hurt someone who has tried her damndest to help me hurt me more than I can really articulate. I had no reason to, yet I did. It's an asinine self-defense mechanism that I can't get rid of, kinda like trying to pry apart two things held together with Super Glue.

I made a list that I'll eventually put up on here tomorrow. It's a list of what I want to get out of my sessions. And one of those items is to figure out how to break down these old mechanisms so I stop relying on them. I don't need them, and in fact I need to get rid of them in a hurry. But it's not a process I can do alone; it's so ingrained in me that I need help getting rid of it.