oofz
I dropped out of farming and traveling in the Southeast early in the game; my mental health has been doing all sorts of loops and dives recently, and for the past few days I've been perennially afflicted with harrowing bouts of nausea, really paralyzing nausea that may or may not be psychological but in any case leave me spent and beat after twenty minutes of very half-assed hoeing and pulling up shrouded crinkly tomatoes and basil and eggplants that were offed by the low temperatures that have been devastating Florida recently. I came to D.C., where I was immediately plopped back into picture-punk reality with a hardcore show and me experiencing my patented D.C. Punk-Scene Anxiety and retiring to the first shower in a week and then a bed where I dozed very restlessly with nary half a dropperful of passionflower spazzing me into heavy-eyed oblivion that somehow did not help me sleep at all. (Oh, passionflower.) I had a conversation with an ex at three in the morning which I don't remember too well other than my empathizing with his Brasil-induced banana snobbery by my cluckish statements of, "Oh god, I'm never going to drink orange juice that wasn't juiced by hand five feet away from me with delicious real oranges in real Florida."
Said ex and I have experienced a fuckton of really bullshit relationship games that I feel, at least in my book, are boiled down to the reality that for three months I expressed my concern with the fact that he would not show affection for me, and for three months he wrote off and invalidated my feelings by saying things like, "I show you affection in ways like making myself available to talk and not getting defensive when you call me out on my shit," really fucked-up ways of excusing and justifying what really is not that difficult to convey, which is that he didn't have feelings for me and did not have the capacity to show any affection to me. And by "he would not show affection," I don't mean that there was an insufficient amount that could've been rectified by him being more mindful of my needs - I mean that he straight-up displayed zero affection to me. I'm now just coming to the realization of how inconsiderate, invalidating, and fucked-up it was for him to ignore this communication for three months while he regularly detailed to me the levels of commitment and shared love and affection that he gave in his last relationship, and I grappled over a number of issues about our relationship and tried to figure out for the life of me if it even was a relationship, because it sure as hell wasn't anything but a friendship-cum-sex-walk in my mind. It was a paradise of mind games which seems really daunting to think about, because I still consider him "good people" in my mind, but his style of "discussing" and argumentation is extraordinarily nit-picking and derailing and ultimately pretty silencing. I would not term his behavior as abusive or malicious, as if labels mean anything anyway, but I definitely experienced a consistent shortage of support and need-meeting from him, despite my frequent communication about it. I guess that one good thing to come out of this mindtrap was that for the five months that we were supposedly dating, his lack of interest in conveying affection or compliments or any sort of nice things about me as a person led me to act as, well, myself, with none of the bullshit unconscious influences of what he liked or disliked arbitrating my behavior. I guess that's a good thing.
I feel like my anxiety about that relationship has been influencing much of my mental state recently, as petty and disheartening as this is to me. I was super-pumped about it in August and September, coming off of months of struggling with the traumatic fallout of emotional baggage and other sorts of mind-warping materials, but the once-in-a-blue-moon hand-holding and day-trips to Spot Pond to forage chufa and sit in the shade of pine-tree canopies making out disintegrated into a lot of what-if's and back-and-forth in my mind that made me feel really crazy, breaking up with him a total of four or five times and never following through because it seemed easier to be miserable in a non-relationship with good sex than to not have to feel even shittier about Pittsburgh and all that that entailed (a lot, by the way), to not feel sad every time that I looked at the Slingshot organizer that he gave to me (and punx being punx, lord knows I'd be looking at it pretty often). Stupid bullshit.
All of this documented mind-tangling consists of fleeting and arbitrary conceptualizations, therefore I feel like it isn't really that important, because I'd rather be thinking and writing about grand plans and schemes and the good experiences that I've had lately, like waking up in the early morning on a Greyhound and finding warmth and sunshine and palm trees (as synonymous as palm trees have become with the consumerist bullshit of capitalized "paradise" and all of Florida's bullshit tourist attractions, it was pretty great finding myself among flora and fauna that I've never witnessed before), slurping on mustard greens that had been demolished by bugs but were still so tasty, scraping into a mass of palm trees looking for big birch firewood; it was so great, like venturing into a rainforest, and being able to run down rows of orange trees bearing the juiciest and sweetest and biggest oranges ever, dodging the holes that the armadillos (the best add-on package to the journey that I could imagine) had dug and the pygmy rattlesnakes that apparently make their homes among the trees. And finding myself with so much reading material and so much time to dig in! Finally read Redefining Our Relationships (a quick read that wasn't as exciting as I've been told, but still pretty okay), a feminist manifesto by bell hooks, and started poring into Food Not Lawns until I took a flight to Baltimore yesterday. This amassed book conquest seems like an accomplishment to me, seeing as how I was only there for six days and read about the same amount of books throughout all of last year (don't even).
So I'm surviving. Not really sure what is on my plate right now other than a whopping serving of self-care, but I am sort of transient and vagrant right now and am almost one-hundred percent resolved to not return to my mother's house except to maybe retrieve my laptop. Want to host me as a houseguest? Because I'll definitely come over.
Said ex and I have experienced a fuckton of really bullshit relationship games that I feel, at least in my book, are boiled down to the reality that for three months I expressed my concern with the fact that he would not show affection for me, and for three months he wrote off and invalidated my feelings by saying things like, "I show you affection in ways like making myself available to talk and not getting defensive when you call me out on my shit," really fucked-up ways of excusing and justifying what really is not that difficult to convey, which is that he didn't have feelings for me and did not have the capacity to show any affection to me. And by "he would not show affection," I don't mean that there was an insufficient amount that could've been rectified by him being more mindful of my needs - I mean that he straight-up displayed zero affection to me. I'm now just coming to the realization of how inconsiderate, invalidating, and fucked-up it was for him to ignore this communication for three months while he regularly detailed to me the levels of commitment and shared love and affection that he gave in his last relationship, and I grappled over a number of issues about our relationship and tried to figure out for the life of me if it even was a relationship, because it sure as hell wasn't anything but a friendship-cum-sex-walk in my mind. It was a paradise of mind games which seems really daunting to think about, because I still consider him "good people" in my mind, but his style of "discussing" and argumentation is extraordinarily nit-picking and derailing and ultimately pretty silencing. I would not term his behavior as abusive or malicious, as if labels mean anything anyway, but I definitely experienced a consistent shortage of support and need-meeting from him, despite my frequent communication about it. I guess that one good thing to come out of this mindtrap was that for the five months that we were supposedly dating, his lack of interest in conveying affection or compliments or any sort of nice things about me as a person led me to act as, well, myself, with none of the bullshit unconscious influences of what he liked or disliked arbitrating my behavior. I guess that's a good thing.
I feel like my anxiety about that relationship has been influencing much of my mental state recently, as petty and disheartening as this is to me. I was super-pumped about it in August and September, coming off of months of struggling with the traumatic fallout of emotional baggage and other sorts of mind-warping materials, but the once-in-a-blue-moon hand-holding and day-trips to Spot Pond to forage chufa and sit in the shade of pine-tree canopies making out disintegrated into a lot of what-if's and back-and-forth in my mind that made me feel really crazy, breaking up with him a total of four or five times and never following through because it seemed easier to be miserable in a non-relationship with good sex than to not have to feel even shittier about Pittsburgh and all that that entailed (a lot, by the way), to not feel sad every time that I looked at the Slingshot organizer that he gave to me (and punx being punx, lord knows I'd be looking at it pretty often). Stupid bullshit.
All of this documented mind-tangling consists of fleeting and arbitrary conceptualizations, therefore I feel like it isn't really that important, because I'd rather be thinking and writing about grand plans and schemes and the good experiences that I've had lately, like waking up in the early morning on a Greyhound and finding warmth and sunshine and palm trees (as synonymous as palm trees have become with the consumerist bullshit of capitalized "paradise" and all of Florida's bullshit tourist attractions, it was pretty great finding myself among flora and fauna that I've never witnessed before), slurping on mustard greens that had been demolished by bugs but were still so tasty, scraping into a mass of palm trees looking for big birch firewood; it was so great, like venturing into a rainforest, and being able to run down rows of orange trees bearing the juiciest and sweetest and biggest oranges ever, dodging the holes that the armadillos (the best add-on package to the journey that I could imagine) had dug and the pygmy rattlesnakes that apparently make their homes among the trees. And finding myself with so much reading material and so much time to dig in! Finally read Redefining Our Relationships (a quick read that wasn't as exciting as I've been told, but still pretty okay), a feminist manifesto by bell hooks, and started poring into Food Not Lawns until I took a flight to Baltimore yesterday. This amassed book conquest seems like an accomplishment to me, seeing as how I was only there for six days and read about the same amount of books throughout all of last year (don't even).
So I'm surviving. Not really sure what is on my plate right now other than a whopping serving of self-care, but I am sort of transient and vagrant right now and am almost one-hundred percent resolved to not return to my mother's house except to maybe retrieve my laptop. Want to host me as a houseguest? Because I'll definitely come over.