// truths: you can run, but you can't hide.
| 10/19/2005 - 6:16 p.m. |

emailed to pat, 10-19-05, 3:39pm

"it's frustrating to be me." that's like my phrase of the month or something i think.

and scary. scary when i feel bombarded and incapacitated seemingly out of nowhere, whether it actually is or not. how 'easily' i can be triggered into this 'state'.

because on a surface level, it appears like this:
1) i'm struggling a bit more than i had been, specifically w/ certain symptoms of my depression. it's hard to explain how exactly, but i can almost feel the chemical imbalances and other malfunctioning in my brain.

2) hence, already vulnerable, i get 'triggered' by a few random 'environmental' minutae, and bam, i'm plummeting.

that is all true, but i also get that its more complicated. i get that...*sigh*...i get that there's shit i've never dealt with, not really, and it's still there, always around, "weighing me down" if you will.

i hate it, HATE it, but the events of five years ago, as much as i knew how much it hurt then, it never really stopped. as much as i knew how important she was to me, how deep in my heart she was, how much i loved her, i didn't even know...i didn't know. and i hate it.

i thought i'd dealt, accepted, moved on. obviously i was dead wrong. i *thought* i'd dealt w/ it by the time C. actually moved. not that i didn't miss her TONS, not that it didn't hurt, didn't hurt really bad at times. but i honestly thought by the time we said our final goodbyes, that i had pulled myself together--i mean, i no longer felt like it would KILL me. and w/ her help of course.

my greatest fear had been that once i no longer saw her in person, i'd no longer feel that connection, that *mutual* connection either. i remember thinking, remember writing to her, how happy i was that it didn't happen, that i could feel it even thru email. and i still felt it inside. that in a way, i was really appreciating the shift in our relationship, relating, relatively speaking, more as "equals".

and, yet again, i'm close to sobbing as i write all of this.

i thought that was it. that any 'grieving' i still had to do, i was doing it myself, and i was fine. so i never really talked about it again, since then, not *really*. certainly not w/ the twit i saw very briefly after C. left, which i only agreed to do to begin with for her. i don't know if i ever said a single remotely negative word about her to Diane, even talking about her at all almost felt like a betrayal, or that i was tainting somehow the relationship I had with C. obviously, i've talked about her more w/ you, related some of our cute little stories, and even bitched about more recent frustrations.

but the part that hurt so bad, that affected me even more than i wanted to admit to myself, even more than i knew. no way. too scary, too much. and how could going back there possibly help, possibly do anything but make it hurt all the more.

but here it is. BAM. here i am, definitely sobbing now. shit, i can't breath thru my nose. five goddamn years later, a couple little annoyances, and i'm overtaken by it all over again. and suddenly i know...that i can't outrun it. can't even run away from it at all. i have to know it's going to hurt like hell, and face it anyway. i used to do things like that all the time. take the risks, feel the pain, somehow make it through. i was the kind of person that did that. i don't know that i have been now for...for 5 goddamn years.

so yesterday, i went looking for one of my journals--best thing i could think of for where to start. the one that covers those 4 months i tried to say goodbye. i don't even know how much or what i may have written. i have a feeling there is a lot missing, that i avoided writing for the very reason it hurt so much. i don't know b/c i haven't gotten to that part of the journal yet. i've started reading from the beginning, which was new years eve 1999--a year minus five days before the last time i saw her in philly.

it's weird. i was so different. a whole other person. there are so many things in it that are funny, telling, contradictory...for the most part, i seem so fucking stable it's nauseating. for the most part. and i just *write* so differently--full sentences, grammatically correct w/ appropriate capitalization, and where is the sarcasm? the cynicism? it is seriously bizarre.

besides the fact that some of it is just hard to read again, it's slow going b/c i'm actually typing it. back when i was in CA, i typed ALL of my journals once, when I grabbed for anything so tedious, anything to give me a break from wanting to die. at the same time, i remember being mostly very removed as i went through them. i was pretty much suicidal and/or thoroughly apathetic back then--not much else on my emotional spectrum.

but anyways, all hundreds and hundreds of pages (that i have on occasion actually *fantasized* about publishing one day) were among the casualties of my other laptop's death. i swear i will be better w/ backing up stuff this time!

the point of all this is i get it: i have to talk about it, about her, about everything, the good and bad. i still have my doubts that it will actually *help* any, but i don't seem to have a choice anymore. and i never could have managed to articulate all this (if i've even managed to somewhat do so here) 'background' if you will, in person, or out loud in general. so, i'll bring the journal w/ me tomorrow and...???

on the odd chance you actually have time to wade through all this (i feel like i've been 'bugging' you way way too much w/ these emails. sorry?), i'm gonna attach the first entry--a preview, a little taste, of a me you've never known and i barely remember...

see ya tomorrow.

calmed down finally and breathing,
m.

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12-31-1999