Written on September 28, 2010 by kat and matt.
there is always a headache at the front. sometimes it is small enough to ignore, a light band of tension across our forehead. sometimes it is bad enough that we can do nothing and concentrate on nothing – which is very bad indeed, since we are good at dissociating pain for the most part. usually it’s somewhere in between. at this moment it’s in between, probably an average level, maybe a bit higher. our neck is tight and will not be loosened. the tension swoops up through the back of the head, worst where the neck meets it, then spreads into its glory in our forehead and temples. if i focus my eyes there is brief dizziness subsiding into a pushing back against the forehead, with little needle threads rivuleting up from there. if i try to ignore it altogether it feels like i’m wearing a pulsing, breathing hat that is far too tight. that twists and settles when i move or concentrate visually. this is always.
today, as most days, it’s coming on afternoon and our melancholy is settling in. our therapist is back from vacation, and we saw her monday. it was nothing, low-key, fine. i joked that if edges were there, they’d probably think of loads that’s going on for me. i’m sure it’s true, too. but they weren’t and we couldn’t think of any particular aching misery.
we haven’t done any memory work with this new therapist, who we’ve been seeing for nine months, and that worries me a bit. it seems like we’re stuck. like we stopped going somewhere. we just keep bobbing up and down. therapy is hard work, school is hard work. i always end up doing the school stuff first. but of course sadnesses, issues, traumas come up; they just fade into the background as quickly as they came. and we can never remember any of it when we get to our therapist’s office. and i don’t know how to do not-doing. not to push but to find. i’m yawning all over the place just thinking about it. i worry. it isn’t that i don’t trust the process; i just don’t really trust me. i’m so afraid to be stuck here, well enough not to try to die and depressed enough not to be able to live (well). i am sick to death of my own issues.
Written on September 25, 2010 by matt.
i went to a play thursday night, breaking the code. it was about turing’s life. i was very pleased to do something like that – i never get out, but i always want to. edges and aeron both came… and of course i spent time worrying about both of them, especially aeron who seemed so bored. in the intermission i asked him about it and worried and got depressed, a little, and he got annoyed with me for that. sigh! but we did something. and it was quite good, even if aeron was bored and edges was upset with the colorlessness of the two female characters.
it was very sad. apparently neither of them knew it was going to end with his suicide… at least i was prepared! hell, i don’t know what to say about it, but at least i did it!
school starts wednesday. i’ve been anticipating a quiet quarter; i hope i’m right. i’m only taking one class, and it’s just an undergrad linguistics course. really, it should be more restful than this summer, which was four hours every weekday – the unpaid internship. (i never remember what i’ve said here.)
our therapist has been away all month, and we’ll see her on monday. it’s so easy to get out of the habit of going in. and her return means i need to keep dealing with the appeal to ssi, who denied me on my review. there are so many things i can’t bear to think about. the appeal; the internship report; almost out of testosterone and need to see the doctor… i don’t know, the list seems long when i’m not trying to reckon it up.
i feel preposterous. why on earth am i writing when there’s nothing to say?
talking to edges yesterday, about how we love to spend time with their littles, we were thinking about how we used to all hate the front. it was a relief to let small ones have it, though they couldn’t do the things we needed to do mostly. claire happened because i couldn’t stand it, basically. and i was trying to think about when that changed, and i think it was with our transition. particularly after the surgery. i love this body now. it is not a burden or a chore to inhabit it.
Written on September 23, 2010 by matt.
(ok, the title is cheesy, but it’s a quote from the catch trap. so don’t mock me.)
i used to write all the time. i was searching for entries yesterday to show edges our ambivalence about our mom in high school. we were talking about what we’d tell our high school selves, if we could. they were thinking they’d tell themselves they’re cuter than they thought they were. (sorry about the awkward phrasing.) i said i thought i’d just tell me one thing… “it’s not you. it’s her.” meaning, of course, that my mom was really fucked-up. edges said they didn’t think they’d believe themselves if they did say it, and so we were thinking about how although we tried to align our thinking with our mom’s, we had audible ones that didn’t like her. we had our resentment, we just used all our energy trying to quash it. entries like this and this. both written when we were quite young, 14.
then for some reason we got started reading entries from our first year of college, which was only ten years ago. and we could really follow what was going on for us during that time, because we wrote every few days. when we started doing an online journal in 1998, that was the point. there weren’t blogs and it wasn’t for friends. it was for strangers, it was an attempt to be a good story or as close as we could come, there were characters and you could follow them. most journals used aliases for their friends’ names. what i have now would fail and make no sense. we had over fifty readers for a while, at least that’s how many were on our notify list. we’re multiple and that can be interesting. we were often sexually explicit and that can be interesting too.
so often these days we have trouble writing because we feel like we’ve said it all before. (we also write less because of twitter.) i don’t know why the hell we feel we need to be original. all we ever wanted to do was tell our story. other multiples found it when there weren’t nearly so many multiples online, and we liked to think it could help them. i guess that kind of thing is hard to sustain over a decade, but some months nowadays we don’t write at all. i don’t know. even if just for ourselves, we like having an archive. we always have liked it.
maybe i’ll be better in the future. probably i won’t. it takes more out of us to write than it used to. we’re better at avoidance now. it’s a result of our healing, which is probably kind of sad. we’re a lot less miserable, but we’re less introspective too. i hate to say that. we’re still more inward-looking than 80% of people, i’d think. but it does seem like it must be less.
i guess we’ll see.
