"uh-oh guts!" was a zombie novel by nick miller.

sometimes i feel like i've exiled myself up here. i don't know what i'm doing up here. i love being near so many friends. i love my porch. i love trees. i love cheaper groceries. i love that sometimes i can feel the cold. but it's disjointed--scattered pieces of good, and the only connective tissue is me. is that how it's supposed to be? i don't know how to be that in a way that feels secure. i know how to sit on my porch with my coffee and a banana and a goofy sci-fi/crime trade paperback from a free little library. what else? what can hold me together, and help me hold together the rest?

yesterday i cleaned all my glasses and washed all the dishes and did all my backloaded laundry. all day my thoughts were too loud--nothing remarkable or objectionable about their contents, but they had dull edges as they echoed inside me, and i couldn't stand leaving myself to sit with them, the incessancy of them. today my thoughts are once more the way they should sound inside me. nestled in their cushions, not stripped to their raw skin and left to yell. it feels good to have clean glasses and an empty laundry hamper. i am sad. i've been worse.

i think the reality that ** ***** ** & * ***** **** has maybe finally permeated every mental&emotional layer i contain. it sucks and it's scary and it's cold at the center. but i guess it sucks less than the fear and confusion that i was lugging around because parts of me remained uncomprehending :/

this depression goes and goes and goes. it digs itself deeper. it chews my skin raw. is it largely caused by the removal of all familiar structure as brought on by me moving to a different state right after losing my job and not even having shark week's meal times as temporal landmarks? is it a post-surgical combo of chemical disruptions + an end to the orienting urgent processes of making surgery actually, like, happen, aka an end to having one overarching concrete goal? is it the basic heartache of missing specific people and places and things? is it colder and darker here than i'm used to? am i despairing over my bedroom's perpetual disorder? is my sense of agency becoming eroded by the frequency with which i'm driven places vs. the frequency with which i get myself places under my own power? is my upper limit on how often i can hang out with friends before my social battery dies much lower than i estimated and i've been heavily burning myself out in that regard? is it all of this. is it everything. it feels like there's very little left of me i just want to feel okay

i want to swap out my brain for a different brain for a little like the woman in return to oz who has a collection of heads to change between. just for a little while. just until whatever spiral this is passes. it's stupid how physically painful sadness can be. maybe i just need to sleep

i was feeling sick with sadness again. sick with regret. sick with guilt. sitting with how badly i fucked up something beautiful. i was thinking about the horror of being so dissociated from myself that i don't even somewhat understand how much power i've handed over to my vampire-style perpetually young, wounded animal brain. a foggy mirror view of a sizable chunk of my actions.

i was comparing this to the horror of seizures, that much more immediately visible repetitive experience of being out of control. doing things i have no conscious desire to do. the sense of being unable to trust myself.

i was walking this back--the comparison felt too weak, too crumbly--in the midst of a seizure, what i can and cannot control is fairly clear-cut. what i can and can't control when acting from a wounded vampire place is murkier. harder to see and know for sure. but also. the part where i have the most control is the same, sort of. if i can already tell i'm about to have a seizure, or i'm having one already, yeah, i can't just will it to go away; i can sometimes force my muscles do things i need them to do, but it takes a lot of effort and i can't keep it up for long. and there are some things i can do to make it be less dangerous and less immediately upsetting, making minor adjustments myself and if possible asking people nearby for help.

otherwise, the control i can exercise over the frequency and severity of my seizures comes down to minimizing stress of all kinds in my life as a whole, and working through whatever channels i can on brain problems that don't feel obviously related, and learning to read warning signs--by which i mean learning to believe that i'm reading warning signs correctly, and that those warning signs are SERIOUS. drop what you're doing and attend to this now serious. and that's like. that's the same stuff that in the long run should decrease frequency and severity of falling into dissociated terrified splitting spiralling mode. for that, recognizing and believing and responding to warning signs is recognizing and believing and responding to the information that i'm losing myself and my priorities and perspective in calmer daily life. not turning away and telling myself that isn't what's happening just because i don't want it to be what's happening and it's upsetting to consider that maybe that is happening and if it is happening then that complicates everything etc.

which is at least partially driven by shame and embarrassment! i mean, i know there's a shame and embarrassment component to brushing aside seizure warning signs. actual acceptance of my limitations and compassion for myself as someone disabled in various ways would mean less of a loaded, terrified relationship to saying "oh yeah that seems bad i seem to have hit a distressed point i need to exercise the small amount of control i do have to make this a less dangerous and uncomfortable experience so i can let it pass through me. including being vulnerable and asking for help if that's an option. instead of like. trying to hide the distressed part of myself. trying to do so even when the distressed part is the size of my whole convulsing body.

so like. yeah. they're horrifying for similar reasons and hard to respond to for similar reasons and they ask similar things of me. if i'm going to be okay. and i guess since i just established that shame contributes heavily to getting totally mired in these terrifying patterns.....then i really am not going to benefit from approaching the patterns with shame.....no one is going to benefit. it won't undo anything or prevent anything. shame = repressing and avoiding = never breaking free of the fucking timeloop

thanks for listening, team

edit: the actual biggest difference between these two things is temporal scale and any translations in approach between the two need to keep this in mind. imagine im saying this part into a pocket tape recorder

:( kesha-thedrama.mp3

feeling bad. emptied. insecure. stuck. i woke up at nine (reasonable) and i got dressed and took my meds. and then i got back in bed and fell asleep again and didn't wake up for another four hours, despite many attempts to fight my way awake. i felt drugged. i felt weighted by sandbags. in my dreams i was very scared of a turkey. i was going to see the joker sequel with a friend today but then i fucked that up by being asleep. when i finally woke up, i had a seizure. i don't understand why everything is so hard for me. i'm getting so depressed and small and i don't want that to be the situation. is it a natural comedown after surgical stuff that will level out soon enough? is it the lack of structure or routine? is it just an inalienable part of me? therapy was large yesterday; is that the problem? i want to hold my cat. i want to know what i'm doing. in the past, i might break myself out of this by dying or cutting my hair, but i don't have hair anymore. tattoo ink is on its way to me, though. maybe tattooing myself will work? i want to go over my red LURID so it's vivid and bold and then add a red sharpie writing it. in the meantime. i could put on makeup and/or do my nails. cut up some shirts. hot glue things. take a very long walk if i stop being so body-tired. cook something complicated if i stop being so body-tired. do a load of laundry. just one. that's manageable. idk man. the thing is that the things i most need to do on a practical level are not these things. they're computer tasks. but that's no way to help myself feel less abstracted and disappearing. how does this work. what is the secret. how to be rae

i spent so long thinking of myself as terrible at compartmentalizing & i've really been struggling with the revelation that i'm great at compartmentalizing--just not in a way that i have much control over or awareness of as it's happening. like. actually i would rather just be bad at this thing. can we do a take where i'm just bad at this thing, please? that seems less painful. instead i'm like a lint trap waiting to catch fire. i guess

also the rate at which i am noticing unsettling tiny coincidences has really been going up and up. and for now i'm doing okay with noticing each coincidence, sitting with it, letting go. but i won't lie: i am worried that one of these days i won't be able to let it go and i'll start actually documenting and accumulating the coincidences. and that probably isn't a great direction in which to head. or maybe writing them down would be better somehow. idk tbh

had therapy scheduled @ 9 and @ 9 as i was opening my computer, checked my email, thinking without much seriousness, god i hope she didn't cancel again, and well, there in my inbox--

back home (in massachusetts) in my bed (in massachusetts). tired and sad and scared and lonely and adrift in massachusetts. i had a fun little interaction outside the train station with a guy who asked me for a pen. i had a long bath (in massachusetts) & replaced my cpap filter. i'm hungry and i'm addressing that responsibly, snacking on plain greek yogurt until i'm not hungry. my stuffed animals are all here with me. i'm here with me. what now. it all continues from here (massachusetts). and it hurts a lot. the pictures that don't line up. and it could be lovely, one picture and another and another. please.