but am I?

I had a lovely summer. I learned to be happy, I pushed my limits, I made new friends. I was more than just my sickness; I was someone you'd want to be around. People started asking me for advice: how do I quit smoking, what vitamins should I take, how should I change my diet, can you cure my cold.

we're well into autumn, with just over a month left before the shortest day of the year. as the light begins to decline the respites from pain grow few and far between. I'm trying to come up with better coping mechanisms for Incipient Winter Doom. I got a light therapy box, a shit-ton of vitamin D, and I've been ingesting a ridiculous amount of anti-anxiety/depression/pain herbs, both Chinese and European.

I have a tendency to let myself slip too far down into the Black Dog hole. I have a tendency to let the physical anxiety from consistent high pain levels create mental obsessions over things that are out of my control. I confuse a desire to hurt less with a death wish. I forget how much better things are when it's warm outside.

Pain is a time warp. It's long-term memory damage. It's being forever stuck in the present. If I were more than just a lazy Buddhist, I'd be ok with it. instead I think maybe there's such a thing as too much mindfulness. sometimes I hurt so much that it gets hard to breathe.

Pain is an endless rick-rolling and I can't Force Quit.

Until April or May, then, the best I can do is turn on my light-box, take my vitamins, drink my potions, hope that Corydalis yanhusuo doesn't tolerate too rapidly, and try to fill my life with as many distractions as possible.

Until April or May, I'll dig my toes into the clay and keep pushing this heavy, heavy rock uphill.

(and keep watching House.)


It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

raining

Thinking about your friends
How you maintain all them in a constant state of suspense
For your own protection over their affection
Nobody broke your heart
You broke your own because you can't finish what you start...


one of the last remnants of my battle against borderline personality disorder is this insidious, all pervading feeling of inferiority. in every relationship I have, whether it be professional, friendship, romantic, or familial, there are always a set of self-imposed standards that must be met. If I can just do "x," then he will love me. then she won't hate me. then he will stay. then my life will be better. I have these incredibly high expectations of myself. I have to be perfect or I will die alone and be eaten by my cats. sort of an emotional OCD. I have to be the perfect friend. perfect roommate. perfect lover, employee, etc ad nihilem.

it didn't take years of therapy to suss out the etiology of these obsessions. once I stopped and thought about the effects of being sent off as a 13 year old for 14 months to a brainwashing camp it became exceptionally clear. everything I was got stripped away and discarded and then I lived in perpetual fear of being sent back until I was 18. I was forcibly pilled, everything I owned from diaries to shoes to favorite books were thrown away. I had nothing to call my own, nothing to call myself. broken down to my components and then half of them thrown away.

15 years later and I wonder how much longer til I can let go of this. the few people I am close to obviously love me in spite of my foibles, or perhaps even because of them. I certainly don't expect them to be perfect, so why do I expect perfection of myself? why can't I just let people love me without having to impose conditions on them? more importantly, how do I let them love me?

deep breaths? om mani padme hums? weekly therapy and lots of bike rides? or do I just have to wait it out?