too much tea!
I envy my mother at the moment, with her ability to drink a cup of tea and then pass out. I doubt the same will happen to me tonight. Pezita and I spent the last three hours at burnt toast doing homework and drinking free coffee and tea (it was just gonna get thrown out!). The guy there let us stay really late because his ride wasn't coming until 2am anyway. How nice to rediscover the coolness of random strangers.
I wrote a modernization of Little Red Riding Hood for creative writing. It's all right. It's kind of a rip off of Francesca Lia Block, which is what I've been reading a lot of lately. I'll go over it in the morning, when I'm a little less sleep-deprived and high on caffeine.
It's been another one of those bipolar days. I woke up feeling harried, and knowing I had to write a paper for class at noon. At said class, we watched Hamlet (the mel gibson version), which never ceases to put me in a nihilist/fatalist funk. Then came a few hours at burnt toast and a run-in with a friend who asked me to be in her play. Happy! We'll see how that turns out, if it turns out...
Then came community meeting at the beehive that is Sangha house. All was fine and happy, I was squished in between two of my delectable roommates on a very comfy couch. Then up comes the subject of people using drugs and alcohol in the house, which I have done on occasion. I was trying to make this point about how not to make assumptions about other people's tolerance for dealing with it, and as an example I brought up issues I have with being around drunk men. There's some trauma there. My father was an alcoholic and part of me remembers that. I also got molested by a drunk kid when I was twelve, and it fucked me up good and proper for a while. I still freak out when drunk men get too close to me, even if they have entirely innocent intentions, because it brings me back to a night where I felt completely helpless and hijacked by this stupid kid who probably didn't know what he was doing. It's the smell of alcohol on the breath, I get very freaked out by it.
However, when I brought that up, I started freaking out, assuming that the people around me were making judgments about me and the validity of what I was trying to say. And then I got too wrapped up in remembering it and had something between a flashback and a panic attack in my room after the meeting was over. I curled up on the floor in my coat and tried to get my breathing back to normal. I started feeling like everyone in the house thought I was a man-hating femi-nazi, which is a first impression a lot of people make about me.
I figured out I wasn't going to make myself feel any better lying on my floor in the fetal position, so I went upstairs to the kitchen to eat. Ben Cloud, in some manic gesture of affection, jumped on me from behind and clamped his hands onto my shoulders. God love him, but it was exactly the wrong thing to do to me right then, having just relived a sexual assault from seven years ago. I went into the next room and tried not to cry or scream.
Here at Naropa, whenever someone is upset by something, people tend to tell you to breathe through it, or sit with it, till it goes away. I've been sitting and breathing with this for seven years. It doesn't go away. Sometimes it needs to be screamed out, danced out, bled out, written on a piece of paper and burned with a crystal before you can heal a little. This is what people at naropa tend to forget.
I wrote a modernization of Little Red Riding Hood for creative writing. It's all right. It's kind of a rip off of Francesca Lia Block, which is what I've been reading a lot of lately. I'll go over it in the morning, when I'm a little less sleep-deprived and high on caffeine.
It's been another one of those bipolar days. I woke up feeling harried, and knowing I had to write a paper for class at noon. At said class, we watched Hamlet (the mel gibson version), which never ceases to put me in a nihilist/fatalist funk. Then came a few hours at burnt toast and a run-in with a friend who asked me to be in her play. Happy! We'll see how that turns out, if it turns out...
Then came community meeting at the beehive that is Sangha house. All was fine and happy, I was squished in between two of my delectable roommates on a very comfy couch. Then up comes the subject of people using drugs and alcohol in the house, which I have done on occasion. I was trying to make this point about how not to make assumptions about other people's tolerance for dealing with it, and as an example I brought up issues I have with being around drunk men. There's some trauma there. My father was an alcoholic and part of me remembers that. I also got molested by a drunk kid when I was twelve, and it fucked me up good and proper for a while. I still freak out when drunk men get too close to me, even if they have entirely innocent intentions, because it brings me back to a night where I felt completely helpless and hijacked by this stupid kid who probably didn't know what he was doing. It's the smell of alcohol on the breath, I get very freaked out by it.
However, when I brought that up, I started freaking out, assuming that the people around me were making judgments about me and the validity of what I was trying to say. And then I got too wrapped up in remembering it and had something between a flashback and a panic attack in my room after the meeting was over. I curled up on the floor in my coat and tried to get my breathing back to normal. I started feeling like everyone in the house thought I was a man-hating femi-nazi, which is a first impression a lot of people make about me.
I figured out I wasn't going to make myself feel any better lying on my floor in the fetal position, so I went upstairs to the kitchen to eat. Ben Cloud, in some manic gesture of affection, jumped on me from behind and clamped his hands onto my shoulders. God love him, but it was exactly the wrong thing to do to me right then, having just relived a sexual assault from seven years ago. I went into the next room and tried not to cry or scream.
Here at Naropa, whenever someone is upset by something, people tend to tell you to breathe through it, or sit with it, till it goes away. I've been sitting and breathing with this for seven years. It doesn't go away. Sometimes it needs to be screamed out, danced out, bled out, written on a piece of paper and burned with a crystal before you can heal a little. This is what people at naropa tend to forget.