Peanut butter, four rooms, and random facts

I've been having a hard time being creative lately. I don't know why, exactly, but it feels like... it feels like I'm dry inside. Like peanut butter stuck to the roof of my mouth. Can't write, don't feel like acting, and my words just don't come out right, even when I'm talking.

I'm not really sure what this means. I am getting lousy sleep, that's for sure, which Benni helpfully diagnosed as "Nightmare Insomnia" the other day. It means I don't have any trouble falling asleep, but a few hours later, I will wake up screaming and crying from a bad dream, then go back to sleep, then wake up from another bad dream. My brain just isn't processing things right. I'll put it this way - I'm sleeping as much as I drive each day - about two hours. I have the patience of a 2 year old that's permanently in need of just a really good nap. And since sleep and appetite are linked, I haven't been eating much either. Joy.

BUT - I have started working out lately. Which is a GREAT thing. I already feel stronger. I started up again with Escrima (Filipino knife fighting) and found an instructor who combines Escrima with Wing Chun (a hand-to-hand form of martial arts that utilizes grappling mostly), so that's been challenging and fun. And, for those days when I'm NOT feeling violent, I took up Yoga. I had my first class on Monday. 

I have an inkling that my dry spell has something to do with the Four Rooms. This quote sums it up best:  

There is an Indian proverb or axiom that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional, and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but, unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.  - Rumer Godden in A House with Four Rooms

I definitely only live in one room at a time. And visit the others, oh, every other month, maybe. I tend to be very singularly focused - get one thing done at a time. Problem is, life doesn't exactly work that way. I can't be awesome at 1/4th of my life and then ignore the other 3/4ths all the time. It's just not balanced.

So my new goal is to go into each room at least once a day and take care of something - anything - that I can in that area. I'll let you know how it works out. In the meantime, I've decided not to push. All my life I've pushed myself, and rarely just stayed in a place that was sucky and uncomfortable. Doesn't work anymore. So here I am, sitting in it, letting it wade around my ankles, and hopefully it'll move along sometime soon. And I know I've sucked at leaving comments and posting because I sit in front of the monitor after reading all of your posts and... nothing comes out. Nothing. Just...nothing. I am dried up inside. It's weird.

To make up for this being the most boring post in the history of blogging, I thought I'd make a list of five facts about me that you might not know. Because maybe if I'm an interesting person that'll make up for it. (Fingers crossed.)

1) I don't like to waste time on books I don't like. If I can't connect with it, I don't care how many people rave about it (Finnegan's Wake, anyone?), I won't finish it. Life is short. Spend it on the books that move you to tears or make you shake with laughter. This goes for movies too, only the rule I apply here is - no dead animals. I don't care how beautiful the story is or if it has the best acting in the world. If the main animal dies at the end of the movie, no, screw you, you can't make me watch it. I won't. Animals die horribly every day. I don't need Disney movies to drive the point home.

2) All my life I thought what I wanted out of a partner was someone who would sit through the entire credits of a movie with me; someone who would hold my hand while one of us was driving; someone who would sit in silence and listen to the entire song I just told him that he NEEDED to listen to without interrupting or moving on in the conversation. But I got it only half-right - what I really wanted was someone who just naturally did these things, someone who did them before I had to ask him to do them, because it was just who he was. And now that I'm with that guy, it's pretty damn awesome.

3) I'm thinking about shutting this blog down. Because it feels like this world is just kind of over it, you know? No one cares anymore. Having followers used to mean that they'd actually comment. And maybe that's my fault for creating inconsistent, stilted content that doesn't exactly inspire people to visit or leave feedback. But maybe a fresh start is what I need. Not sure. I think I'll give it to the end of the year and if I don't sense anything but a huge wave of apathy when it comes to my blog, maybe I'll just shut it down and invite the 25 or so of you (you know who you are) who have become my blogger family to go meet me in a field somewhere else, under a different blog name. I guess we'll see.

4) Part of what I meant by the words don't come out right can be applied to my last post. I think people interpreted it that the moral of that story was: accept that you're a doormat, then continue being a doormat. Oops. I suck. That's not what I meant to say at all. What I meant to say is: when you love yourself unconditionally, you stop putting up with other people's shit. Which is exactly what happened, and that particular ASS in my life now floats in a completely different boat, in a completely different ocean, than where I am. This person lost all ability to affect me in any way because I took the first step in accepting myself unconditionally and then looking at this person with compassion and saying, "You don't deserve to have my attention." And it was that simple. 

5) I have a random fear of dropping important papers down into the crack between the floor and the elevator. I can't explain it, and I don't think they've named it as a proper phobia yet, but every time I'm in an elevator and I am carrying papers, I clutch them tight to my chest like a freak and take a huge step over the elevator/floor crack of doom.

I never claimed I was normal.

wholeheartedness

I won't lie in that there aren't some times that I'd like to punch my heart in the face. My whole heart - my wholeheartedness.

 

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I am sitting in therapy like a good person does, because depression is like acne, in that when you follow the right routine and everything clears up you are tempted to go, "Look! I'm fine! I don't need to do this anymore!" and you are tempted to think you are no longer a person who has acne and/or depression, and then you stop following your routine and everything goes to hell, including but not limited to your face. And your heart.

I am telling my therapist about the astonishingly selfish someone who has popped back up into my life, the one that I would love to cut off from my life and never see again but unfortunately, sometimes life just doesn't work that way. Astonishingly Selfish Someone (A.S.S., see what I did there?) is yanking my emotional chain, and man, all I want to do is unhook and then wrap that chain right back around that person's neck. Not very loving of me, but I'm tired and I don't like being manipulated and I'm allergic to Passive Aggressive and I came to the theory a few days back that no one, besides your children, should take up as much energy as the person you're sleeping with. If you have people in your life that take up more emotional energy than your significant other, then you should ditch them.

Unfortunately, this theory doesn't work, because Benni is possibly the most low-key, chill man on the planet. I think a stick is actually more high-maintenance than Benni.

I hate my heart sometimes, I say. And my therapist gets it. She does. She knows that the life I live, where I lead with my heart, where I stay awake at night and try to think of ways to save yet another shelter animal that I saw about to get put to sleep on Facebook, where I get angry at injustice and devastated at death and loss and the way I wear my heart on my sleeve for the whole world to see, that it doesn't exactly make me feel like a winner a lot of the time. In fact, most days I think I got the losing end of the deal.  I tell her so. She nods.

Let me ask you this, though - she asks - who would you rather be? Would you rather be an ASS, an astonishingly selfish someone, or would you rather be you?

I'd rather be me.

So this post is for you. If you came here on purpose, if you're a regular follower and commenter, and you needed this today - it's for you. If you came here on accident, if you stumbled upon this because you were looking for steampunk pictures (that post still gets like 34 hits a day, which blows my mind, but also makes me want to hug the entire internet that much more), and then you read this post - it's for you.

It's for every single one of you who worries that you care too much, too deeply, about the stupid things in life, those of you who wish you could check out and not want to make things better or try to fix people. It's for the people who know they are being taken advantage of but keep caring anyway because what's the alternative? Turn into someone you're not?

It's for those of you who know what it feels like to love people and know that they don't quite know how yet to return that amount of love, so they just keep taking and you just keep giving because you are you and you will never stop being you.

We are told everyday that the cool kids are the ones who don't care about others, who don't look up from their own lives to make one iota of effort to make someone else's life ever so slightly easier, that the best way to get ahead is to step on others and eat each other alive.

I wasn't ever a cool kid. Never will be. Give me my heart, my whole heart, my wholeheartedness. I will wear it proudly, and I will be vulnerable with joy.

I'd rather be me.