Hell is...

During the last week, I've been circling over things I would rather put away. I've been considering people I don’t want to consider, engaging in thought processes I thought I had left behind. Busy, in other words, in the endless task of assigning blame.

Parallel to this I have been feeling more and more depressed. There's an sense of impending failure in the air for me. As if, along with my cloud of bad thoughts over people, a cloud of bad behaviors has returned.

I've been going over the relationships of these last couple of years, smashing my way out of this horrible funk. It was easy, full of energy. It was righteous and profoundly satisfying. I got to let go of everyone before they let go of me. I could chose to understand what was happening to me in terms of my own self-preservation instead of in terms of the inevitable. I got away with it for weeks, letting myself believe in my own rightness and health, propping myself up, filling up with the hot air of being so much better than those others.  I got to be as selfish and arrogant as I have ever wanted to be because I was doing it in the name of my own good.

And it has been utter and completely pointless. I've yet to feel any better, and in fact, have only managed to feel worse, more and more afraid each day.

Today, I had a tiny reminder of why I am truly so mad at some people and with it, I made certain connections I had so far ignored. It's helped me understand why in these last days I've been so invested in my idea of I AM DOING GOOD and the idea of YOU PEOPLE ARE GROSS. I'm not happy where I am in my life. I want to get paid more, I want to finish school and I want to write. All these things are not actually outside my possibilities and are attainable with a certain amount of patience. But at some point my patience was going to run out. And it has.

On my way to school today, I had this running commentary of how I was going to write this blog entry an make it meaningful and flowing, so that you could see how I had arrived to my brilliant conclusion.

It's actually pretty simple. I'm not happy. Let's look at these other people who are even LESS happy than I am and see them suffer. Buahahaha, watch me judge you people who have no idea I am judging you! What? Why are you not crippled by my disdain for your crappy choices? Well, you are kind of, not by my disdain, but certainly by the crappy choices themselves. But, the thing is that these people don't live in my head. They do not judge themselves by the standards I use to judge myself, and obviously, sometimes others.

And the thing is, these are not actually good standards. In fact, I've spent the last couple of years trying desperately to shed them because they, too, are cripplingly crappy. They made me as unhappy as any of these people have ever been. And what's most important, they're not real.

Perhaps, it's not so much that I am doing everything late, late,  LATE and things must happen NOW, but that I get the feeling that they should. I should get paid more. I should finish school. I should write more. Any time at which I've tried to do what I should do has always ended up as a gigantic waste of time. With the kind of pressure I can put on myself through sheer imagination, I always end up snapping.

I forget how much I need to forget about shoulds and refocus on what my reality actually is. It's actually not a bad reality, and more important than being better than those other people's reality, it is a reality I can be content with. I need to stop looking at other people and begin to gaze inwards; ask myself the questions I need to ask and forget about those other lives out there, led by people who do not want what I want.

Let others figure out what their courses are. Mine has been set already.

Of Magical Girls and Many Faces

I've been feeling sort of down lately. I won't say depressed but I will say I've had my wits scattered and my energy has been ebbing. I can't seem to concentrate on the stuff I want to concentrate on. And I've had a lot of disordered sleeping too.

This scares me very much and it's made me go into a never-ending chain of excusing myself because if I don't excuse myself then I might actually be depressed and that would ruin my life forever. I can't afford to be depressed. I've been thinking that non-stop since about last Wednesday. It's really getting to my nerves.

Today I woke up at ten but was too tired to move my butt to swimming class, so I decided that fuck this shit,  what is one missed class? I fell asleep again almost immediately and had the strangest effing dream I've had in a long time. I woke up and I kept thinking, what a strange dream that was. Yet I could not recall all those details that had made my dream so fascinating. I have a special relationship with dreams. I get the typical confusing, dream-logic stuff everyone is always talking about (Oh no! I'm at school and I forgot to dress after taking a bath! Maybe everyone in the subway was just too nice to point that out) but now and then I get these amazing stories springing all fully-formed in my head. I always try to write down the bare essentials of them in case I ever want to put them in my books or something.

All day today, I just kept thinking how magnificently well this particular dream fulfilled this particular purpose. I kept trying to sort out the dream content in my brain, thinking how I was going to write it down as soon as I was done cooking myself some lunch. Then I forgot all about it and proceeded with the normal trappings of Mundania.

I was just about to go to sleep now (in an unproductive effort to control my sleeping patterns) when I remembered my intentions and decided just to give them a go. The problem is that now that the whole day stands between me and my dream, I don't actually remember what it was about.

So let's take a look at what I can unravel from the dream-logic:

There were three girls in my dream and they kind of reminded me of Magic Knight Rayearth or the Powerpuff Girls, with the different color schemes and such. I guess you could assume they were fighting for love and justice or something because my brain certainly assumed that immediately. (This is of course a very clear sign that I should STOP talking about Sailor Moon already. I haven't stopped all week dammit!)

I only remember the particulars of two of them: one was tall and thin and extremely nerdy and seemed to remind me of that girl geek in Disney's Recess cartoon. The other was kind of tough, dark-haired and green-eyed, very like Buttercup from the aforementioned Powerpuff Girls cartoon.

But what was most interesting to me was that whatever Big Bad they were fighting had existed in their past lives. Of course they had past lives, what kind of magical girl dream do you think this is? And apparently they had served it too, not fought it like they were doing now. I knew this but my protagonists were discovering it little by little.

And now that we're talking about past lives, our Buttercup stand-in seemed to have had multiple faces in hers. One minute she would be older and more beautiful than ever, with her dark, wavy hair and her green, green eyes, and the next her face would look like a mask, long-nosed and grinning and with the sort of exaggerated features only artifice has (kind of like the masks my friend Derre draws). And sometimes she would be an older woman, with wrinkles and wisdom in her look. Not a very comforting sort of wisdom, mind you.

Our tall, nerdy friend had a different sort of problem. She seemed to remember more of the past than the others, and she recognized more things than they did. She seemed to be having problems at home too. I distinctly recall a disastrous dinner party with some twit or other who she was supposed to be chatting up according to her parents. Nothing so cliched as an arranged marriage but there was certainly some family pressure to get.it.on already!

But what really got to me, what made me look back at this and think, someday, I must write about it, was that our tall and nerdy friend was in love. There was a garden and flowers, and a window overlooking the garden. I think there was a storm outside and she set on her window sill waiting for him. I remember a dragon, not a European one, all reptilian and stinking, but one of those long, marvelous creatures that ride the storms and seem to have no end, and are wiser and kinder and wilder than any mortal can ever hope to be.

I remember he was their enemy too. I don't think she knew. In fact, I'm not sure she knew who he was at all. But she knew she was in love.