For Those At All Troubled By My Recent Silence.
I'm sorry. I didn't mean to worry you. I knew some of you might be worried, but this time around I expected less worry and more speculation and gossip, perhaps even relief that I wasn't making so much noise figuratively speaking.
And it looks like that's what I got for the most part. I didn't quite expect the particular lie that prompted the content of the last entry, and yet I can't say I'm surprised. The funny thing is, if not for the fact that I've been forthcoming about being locked up every single time that it has happened, people would probably be more likely to believe that than that I could quit the internet for over a month almost completely voluntarily,though I did sneak back for about an hour late in February to send someone a birthday e-mail. I didn't do anything else. Didn't read LJ or even sort though the couple of hundred messages that had piled up in my absence. It was surprisingly easy,and I don't know whether to be pleased by that or not. There might be something wrong if I can so easily withdraw and not even feel the urge to look in as I did when I was silent in the summer and fall of 2004, aching over how I couldn't speak.
And I suppose there are other things I should apologize for. I deeply regret that my intensity has made people feel they should stay away from me, and if they couldn't, that they need to appear invisibly as anonymous ghosts. I don't believe most of them are former friends as they say,but nonetheless regret anyone feeling they have to hide from me.
But I don't know what an apology like that is worth. I don't feel I could have done any other than what I did. I felt trapped, frightened, angry, misunderstood, underestimated, and any number of other things, even just one of which would make a person want to break ties with all forces perceived to be causing these feelings.
And I was also so happy. I still am when I'm not having a flare-up of anxiety induced nausea. Because the use of words like "worry " and "concern" had so often lead to me being locked up,which, I don't care what anyone says, is a measure of pure authoritarian control and has never been for my own good or safety, I couldn't accept that the expression of these things from my friends was pure of intent. And even though I want to, I can't let go of my suspicion. After the recent hiatus I find I'm not as passionately convinced of anything I've said in the last few months or even before that, but nothing else makes sense.
I may always be perceived as an unapologetic loser no matter what I do, and perhaps I am. I enjoy my intensity, even when I'm intensely sad. Anyone with experiences like this knows that a so-called depressed state takes as much energy as a so-called manic state, but in a depressed state no one knows what you're using it for.
Worry, of course. That's why you're always tired and yet you can't sleep at night. Efforts to keep people away that might lead to you not bathing or changing your clothes or staying in bed with the covers over your head even though you aren't sleeping because it's just one more layer that will protect people from you. As C.S. Lewis bitterly speculated about his friends' reactions to the grief over his wife's death "perhaps the bereaved should be sent to a colony for lepers."
Speaking of events and people in my past, revisiting them for different perspectives is no different from speaking of the dead, though they may be walking around somewhere. Hell, my father may be walking around somewhere for all I know, but that doesn't stop me from occasionally calling him a hotheaded bastard who fixed all my relationships with men to be adversarial.
Yet because of him and my mother I am mostly unafraid of intensity and find all sorts of things a measure of love even if I can't abide them. I have similar feelings about all my relationships: That even the things perceived as harmful in some way were mostly edifying. I often don't realize that not everyone grew up around nearly constant raw emotion, or if they did, would ever run away from it rather than right out to meet it.
So, I guess I regret that the fact that I've chosen to apply high intensity to all aspects of my life, even when it seems like I'm drowning myself or running through fire just to know what it feels like,that this makes people uncomfortable enough that they won't jump in with me or atleast want a thorough account of what it does feel like.
I'm as rotten as anyone else, I just enjoy my rot because it's mine. Often I'm ugly, but it has ben a long time since I disliked anything I saw in the mirror, again, because it's mine.
I wish you were no different than this. I wish you could love yourselves as much as I have loved you and myself,even though we're all rotten. If we're all rotten, rot can't be anything that bad.
But either way I'm sorry. For all the things I can't change, for all the things I wouldn't and won't change, for the fact that without the promise of change apologies generally appear worthless, for the fact that I don't know for what I apologize.
I am as I am.
Alexandra
And it looks like that's what I got for the most part. I didn't quite expect the particular lie that prompted the content of the last entry, and yet I can't say I'm surprised. The funny thing is, if not for the fact that I've been forthcoming about being locked up every single time that it has happened, people would probably be more likely to believe that than that I could quit the internet for over a month almost completely voluntarily,though I did sneak back for about an hour late in February to send someone a birthday e-mail. I didn't do anything else. Didn't read LJ or even sort though the couple of hundred messages that had piled up in my absence. It was surprisingly easy,and I don't know whether to be pleased by that or not. There might be something wrong if I can so easily withdraw and not even feel the urge to look in as I did when I was silent in the summer and fall of 2004, aching over how I couldn't speak.
And I suppose there are other things I should apologize for. I deeply regret that my intensity has made people feel they should stay away from me, and if they couldn't, that they need to appear invisibly as anonymous ghosts. I don't believe most of them are former friends as they say,but nonetheless regret anyone feeling they have to hide from me.
But I don't know what an apology like that is worth. I don't feel I could have done any other than what I did. I felt trapped, frightened, angry, misunderstood, underestimated, and any number of other things, even just one of which would make a person want to break ties with all forces perceived to be causing these feelings.
And I was also so happy. I still am when I'm not having a flare-up of anxiety induced nausea. Because the use of words like "worry " and "concern" had so often lead to me being locked up,which, I don't care what anyone says, is a measure of pure authoritarian control and has never been for my own good or safety, I couldn't accept that the expression of these things from my friends was pure of intent. And even though I want to, I can't let go of my suspicion. After the recent hiatus I find I'm not as passionately convinced of anything I've said in the last few months or even before that, but nothing else makes sense.
I may always be perceived as an unapologetic loser no matter what I do, and perhaps I am. I enjoy my intensity, even when I'm intensely sad. Anyone with experiences like this knows that a so-called depressed state takes as much energy as a so-called manic state, but in a depressed state no one knows what you're using it for.
Worry, of course. That's why you're always tired and yet you can't sleep at night. Efforts to keep people away that might lead to you not bathing or changing your clothes or staying in bed with the covers over your head even though you aren't sleeping because it's just one more layer that will protect people from you. As C.S. Lewis bitterly speculated about his friends' reactions to the grief over his wife's death "perhaps the bereaved should be sent to a colony for lepers."
Speaking of events and people in my past, revisiting them for different perspectives is no different from speaking of the dead, though they may be walking around somewhere. Hell, my father may be walking around somewhere for all I know, but that doesn't stop me from occasionally calling him a hotheaded bastard who fixed all my relationships with men to be adversarial.
Yet because of him and my mother I am mostly unafraid of intensity and find all sorts of things a measure of love even if I can't abide them. I have similar feelings about all my relationships: That even the things perceived as harmful in some way were mostly edifying. I often don't realize that not everyone grew up around nearly constant raw emotion, or if they did, would ever run away from it rather than right out to meet it.
So, I guess I regret that the fact that I've chosen to apply high intensity to all aspects of my life, even when it seems like I'm drowning myself or running through fire just to know what it feels like,that this makes people uncomfortable enough that they won't jump in with me or atleast want a thorough account of what it does feel like.
I'm as rotten as anyone else, I just enjoy my rot because it's mine. Often I'm ugly, but it has ben a long time since I disliked anything I saw in the mirror, again, because it's mine.
I wish you were no different than this. I wish you could love yourselves as much as I have loved you and myself,even though we're all rotten. If we're all rotten, rot can't be anything that bad.
But either way I'm sorry. For all the things I can't change, for all the things I wouldn't and won't change, for the fact that without the promise of change apologies generally appear worthless, for the fact that I don't know for what I apologize.
I am as I am.
Alexandra