metamorphosis

on heart

What does your heart tell you?

For most, the answer is simple: "I think I am going to pursue that raise, even if I risk my manager thinking poorly of me." "I think I want to try and win them back, even if they might get on my nerves for trivial things."

For you, though, it's never that simple, is it?

You will literally waste marker ink on a whiteboard sketching out everything that you wish to have and all the reasons you shouldn't have it.  You drive yourself crazy sometimes, because you feel like if you settle for an answer, you won't be completely fulfilled.  It's the "warrior's spirit" in you, you say, because no regular mortal would waste these precious hours of their life attempting to solve a problem as trivial as "Should I go do my laundry now or at 8pm?"

In many situations, you get exasperated at this lack of answer.  "Damn it," you curse, "just pick a flavor of soup, you moron."  It's not really about the soup, is it?

Imagine yourself wrapped in a blanket by the fire.  You would find that rather redundant where others would find it peaceful and reaffirming.  The reason to this being that you would want either blanket or fire, but the two together would overstimulate you and make you too hot.  That means no hot chocolate for you, silly.  What is it about being too much of something? 

Too much warmth makes you sweaty and anxious, but being too cold makes you shiver and (you guessed it) anxious.  You don't like having too much to eat because of the bloat, but if you eat too little in a day you cry at minor inconveniences (as stated in "on food").  You wonder if you'll ever be covered by a blanket without realizing the individual creases and wrinkles in the fabric.  You used to lay on grassy hills and cry when you realized you were laying a patch of what felt like one blade of grass when you wanted all the individual little blades poking you like horticultural acupuncture.  Then, you realize, it is a matter of under-stimulation as opposed to over-stimulation.

They feel the same, ironically.  Either way, until you feel like this feeling of not being stimulated properly goes away, it will be all you can think about.  It's like knowing your back needs to be popped but not having the professional chiropractic training to do it yourself.  That lack of self-sufficiency seems draining; at the same time, it is suffocating.  Being all too much and not enough is a heartbreaking combination.  Having to sit impatiently in a public place with the feeling of not-enough-too-muchness in a certain time frame in which you are socially punished if you attempt to leave is a suffocating and damaging process.  Welcome to society, you guess.  Unfortunately, it is but common decency to just cope.

How does one just cope with the feeling of nothing fitting and everything being inconsolably bad?  Well, according to your therapist, there is being aware of every little thing that is wrong (call it mindfulness to know you're in pain) and then there is trying to fix it.  You think this is absurd, seeing as you cannot simply take off your pants in public and scream at them, but you absolve to try and "pick wedgies", being literally every other part of your pants that isn't your immediate buttcrack, any time you get.  Shall you be known as the butt picker?  Perhaps, but you can ironically handle that social criticism as opposed to having meltdowns every time you are wearing the right pants and the wrong underwear, or the wrong pants with the right underwear.

When you first started anti-anxiety medication (a combo pill to help your "generalized eating disorder" and your panic attacks, which is a fancy way of saying anything referring to your disordered eating and not eating in "on food") you reacted horribly, screaming and crying because your clothes were not colorful enough.  The red almost looked pink in comparison to the color you know that blood is.  You would cry at the blues and the shitty purples that the off-brand blues and reds would make.  You absolved to wearing only neutral colors.  You dressed like a Hot Topic commercial because being not Hot Topic would make you melt down.  In other words, it was a Hot Topic that you would cry at the rainbow.  It doesn't have to be elaborated on in this chapter the other side effects of this medication, but it is clearly put that any sensory issue you had before starting this medication was still bad but the reaction was not as severe.

You are not as receptive to physical affection because of these issues.  For example, when he is holding you and he accidentally lays on your hair, you will get up, scream incoherently, and then lay back down as if he is supposed to go "Yeah, okay" and hold you in a similar but slightly different way.  One time when you two were laying under blankets, you spent thirty minutes rearranging the blankets so that your feet were covered by the "good feet texture blanket" and that the bad feet textured blankets (which is basically all blankets for you) were on top of you in a way that was perfectly uncrinkled and safe.  He does nothing but laugh at you as you are a frivolous mess.  You like that, sometimes.  Other times, you wish he could understand how you have to pick up the ball of yarn quickly unfurling all over the room and roll it up exactly into its once-spherical shape.  You sometimes feel alone in these issues.

It is not his fault.

~ You just don't really quite know how to be happy yet, do you?  That's okay.  No one really expects you to.  That's why you're put in therapy.  And, well, why you have some random author jotting your most personal moments down into a public domain area for random people to read.  If you knew everything about yourself, this book quite frankly would have one page.  If this book were to have one page, it would be a thank you letter to all of the tiny moments in your life that you decided not to end it.  Maybe this page is a thank you letter to you.  For saving your own life every time you decide to ignore intrusive thoughts or look both ways before crossing the street.  Thank you.  Seriously.  You will change lives someday.  Maybe you already have. ~