Do other people get to have epiphanies one time and then they change whatever they realized needed changing and they are fine forever? I really suck at that bit. For me it kind of works like, “Oh no! This is a huge thought! This is life changing! Oh shit! la la la living life la la la Oh shit! Here is this different situation! I have to have this huge thought about it! Oh shit! It’s the same thought as last time! I was too stupid to remember it! Fuck.” Apparently in my head exclamation points are king. I don’t have a lot of patience for this cycle in myself. It drives me batshit. Isn’t that the smart kid/perfectionist in me? It’s not ok to make mistakes? It is certainly unacceptable to make the same mistake over and over but similar mistakes also make me pathetic! But no pressure.

No pressure. (by the way if this actually works it’ll be my first time posting one of my medicated stream of thoughts things, let me know if this is coherent. most of it feels terribly profound in my head this second. ha.) No pressure. God I hate that expression. I am so tired of the casual demeaning of stress and how much it affects people. Pressuring people is so very very awful. But man I am getting off topic. See, I’m nervous. I don’t want to say the same things over and over again because that’s boring, right? People don’t want to listen to the same problems over and over again. It’s whiny. It’s pathetic. It lowers the whiners social capital. And I don’t have a lot left to lose. Although I suppose, to be fair, I would be really surprised if anyone who is currently showing up in my life disappeared. I might lose internet readers. Whoopie? Ok. On with my whining.

Nope, because then I had to pause to deal with the medicating part and the train went on without me. I have had 15 different conversations with myself since then and I remember none of them. I’m not sure exactly why that makes me shake my head and smile. I feel like I should be angry with myself for being stupid. But from where I’m sitting it feels like that tape got turned off. Like I’m living in an old-fashioned sound studio where they are mixing together many different reels of music to get the final track and right now I can only play one or two reels at a time. It’s fascinating because I can still see the other reels. They are sitting there on their original players. I know what I am “supposed” to be feeling. This is the part that I call people hacking. I think it is interesting to shut down most of my emotions and analyze why I have them. It’s a disassociation trick. Can you normal people do this? Am I farther along the road to having multiple personalities than I want to believe? (More than one shrink has referred to the way I do this as ‘nearly multiple’ and I feel very insecure about that.) I can do this sober sometimes if I am in the right headspace (Chris and Noah can walk me through this with NLP sorts of tricks) but it’s hard to really get there. I think this has actually been a lot of my motivation in trying drugs over the years. I can’t remember exact percentages of course, but a very high percentage of my drug experiences have involved a lot of heavy thinking about who I am as a person and why I am the way I am. The reason that this is different while altered I can move between states of extreme and intense emotion and then step out of them instantly when I find the key to an intellectual realization and then have a calm and collected conversation like I was never upset at all. It’s stepping into and out of characters. Sometimes I am me and sometimes I am not me but I can look at me. Is this common? I get the impression that it isn’t. Sometimes I worry that part of me having these cycles the way I do in processing the abuse is related to my sense of reality starting to slip. Something happens, like Shanna turning two, and the pieces in my brain start shifting over just a few notches to the right. It’s like a clock losing time. And every so often I lose enough time that I am seriously drifting and all of a sudden I ‘wake up’ and I see something horrific from my early childhood and I can’t understand exactly when is ‘now’. It’s very scary and very confusing. Now I’m terrified to actually post this. Is this the kind of evidence that results in me losing my children to CPS? I dislike that I feel that fear. Why should I be afraid of losing my children because I have bad thoughts while adequately caring for them? I mean, beyond the “they are clean, well dressed, and fed” I play with them and talk to them and I am gentle when I touch them and I encourage their growth and I talk to them about nutrition and… yeah. If I am looking at the very bad days… I am probably around a dozen so far? And on the very bad days we eat reheated food and cuddle on the couch and watch movies. There isn’t drama. At home. But going out is really bad. I know I am moving at the wrong speed.

Dear god. That’s it. That is why I can’t handle being out of the house right now. I am moving at the wrong speed. And before anyone makes the (appropriate) snarky joke about stoners being slow–that’s not it. It’s not the pot. It’s when I am sober. I don’t know the rhythms of conversation. I can no longer judge body language at all. I feel like everyone who looks at me has scorn on their face. I feel derision in every word someone says. Even sales clerks who are objectively very perky. Everything feels like it is happening at a rate I can’t process. I can’t hear things and respond at the proper rate. But with effort I can step out of that state and ‘wake up’ and kind of step into being me. Kind of like the movie effect, really. Only I do that every so often as I am walking around living my day to day life. Uhm. Do other people do that?

This wasn’t where I was supposed to go with this. I am doing the meta shit. I like people hacking because then I am talking about talking about the problem. That’s safe. I don’t want to talk about having a conversation with Noah and him saying something snarky about “Greco-Roman wrestlers” and me feeling my throat close with terror because I all of a sudden feel like my father–who was a very large man–is leaning on me again. I can feel his hot breath on my head and I can feel his fingers between my legs. I am instantly physically having an experience that went on for a while all of a sudden squeezed into a 1-2 minute interlude in an otherwise completely unrelated conversation. I am experiencing more time than him. I feel like my brain is racing through thoughts compulsively. I have very little control over all the things I touch on. It takes me many tries to get through every basic task, like washing dishes. It can take me over an hour to wash three pots–that have been soaking–because I keep wandering off to do things I am ‘forgetting’. If I try to settle into a task the slow repetitive portion of doing that task allows my mind to wander into another track of time and I have this burst of adrenaline as my entire body system speeds up really fast and I HAVE to move and go do something else. I shake. In my thoughts I am feeling different parts of being molested again and my body is mobilizing into fight or flight. This is the part that gets dangerous with the kids. When I am home I can stave off huge explosions and keep things at a mostly even keel if I follow my bursts of energy and I never try to really focus on a task. But uhm, that results in a serious problem for my life. So then I have a bigger job of trying to repair many entwined messes because I couldn’t handle picking up the small messes on the way.

But if I smoke then I relax into each task and I feel like it is a meditation. I actually really enjoy washing dishes when I am super super stoned. I feel like I can create in it a meditation to wash away the sins of the world. I feel like I can visibly see that nothing is made too dirty. I can get all of it clean again. If Shanna interrupts with a question I answer then stop and look around and take in everything about my surroundings. In the process I enjoy things more. I recognize items currently in a place that is not my preferred home for them and I notice and add it to a mental list, including the task I am doing. Then I prioritize the list. Like, I seriously make a list and weigh the merits of each. Then I decide what should be the first thing I do. Mostly it is to finish the task I have already started. Occasionally something moves up the triage list “Shanna is presenting me with sticky fingers” is a big favorite. While I am stoned that process probably only actually takes a few seconds in real time. To me it feels like I had a reasoned discussion that lasted a good five minutes. So I am still out of time. See how this leads to me wanting to just stay home? I know this is part of the cycle. I know that I need to make several lame attempts at standing up before I will actually stand up and move forward with my life. I know I will have lots of strong feelings as I am resisting really trying.

See, I’m doing it again. This is the meta. I am stepping out of the feelings. I don’t want to have them. So I’m talking about having them. I do this on and off all day. I’m doing it silently. Noah often expresses surprise because he and I will be having a conversation and another track of my brain will be on a guilt/shame cycle and I will start profusely apologizing to him out of the blue for being a terrible person. I don’t do that with Shanna. I don’t talk about my feelings directly with Shanna. I’m starting to realize that I need to not do it out loud with her awake/in hearing range. Not at all. Oh man. Let’s get back to that idea of pressure. Obviously I haven’t taken another hit in a while. And on that sobering up note, I hear my daughter crying. Time to stop being me.