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I just joined this online group for borderlines who want to learn life skills, which focuses very heavily on learning to get more control over our own minds, which is a doozie. Anyway, I have that car-crash fascination with most of the emails that go through this list because almost every. Single. One. Describes the same tortured process my mind goes through. The ones you could never describe to anyone else. But I don't have to describe it to them, because they understand.
So anyway, I've been having a really tough time with that seeming big selfish patch my husband's been going through. It really took the wind out of me because I'd been moving in some uncomfortable ways (everything's uncomfortable for me, especially normal intimacy) in my efforts to be more of a couple. I had taken some big steps under a leap of faith that we were working toward being a closer team and less of two independent satellites, and then I got slapped in the face with a big bout of "your needs don't matter to me right now." So that just ... floored me. And I've been having a really hard time since. Although slightly easier since tonight when husband announced he was exhibiting dry drunk behavior and would start going back to AA.
But, with my falling apartness of late, I've been shitty at work. I mean, really bad. I mean, I've been seriously wondered what would happen if I were unable to continue in my line of work, and was forced to see my business wither away. Competition is fierce in my line. My competitors are spending about 5K a month on SEO, which I do not do. I have succeeded by working like a friendless, isolated maniac (which I am) at all hours of the day. But lately, I can't concentrate. At all. And I have little ambition.
Until I got so upset by this last issue with DH that I started staying up all hours. And for the past few days, I have this workday that starts around midnight and ends between 4 and 5 a.m. And that's not a full workday, but it's a huge improvement over where I've been. AND, during these quiet hours, it's like I'm my old self. I have ideas. I have little inspirations. I can carry on correspondence. I can invent little things. I can do business.
Who knows ... I'm keeping an eye peeled on my list for whether this nocturnal coping thing is a borderline trait too.
It's always a trip when my brain starts reprogramming itself, because the dreams get crazy... and exhausting. Not bad, just tiring, so that by 5 a.m. or so it's easier to wake up and just wait until I get tired enough to really conk out. Last night the dreams were about being in a small clear pod with a few other women, tumbling out the back of a pickup truck at high elevation, and plummeting far, far down to the ground while I screamed, "God protect us! God protect us!" right before the others informed me that we'd already hit the ground.
And then, the one about being in the same pod, rolling down a conveyor belt in a dark tunnel toward a sign that said, "RADIATION." And I dug my way out of the pod with my fingernails and press the alarm button to make the conveyor belt stop, again and again... which it did...
That sort of thing.
Before that I had literally been praying for my compulsion to work on my business to be lifted somewhat, because I felt imprisoned. I felt like a horrible taskmaster. Not only did I work all day long, I worked all night long and on weekends, too. This was all accompanied by the horrible feeling that if I stopped even for a minute, my competitors would overtake me.
Then my mother-in-law died, and we were there for over a week (it was a full Catholic funeral), and when I came back everything was topsy-turvy.
Right now, I'm taking a break from work. I haven't seriously worked for going on two weeks now. My excuse, when I bother to have one, is that I'm doing taxes, which is true, and laborious. But that's not really it. I'm just making space for my brain to rewire itself, which is hard to do what I'm constantly scurrying after the next project like some robotic gerbil with no end to the hamster wheel in sight.
Instead, I sit at my computer, or on the couch with a book, or outside with an edging spade in my hand, and I ask myself over and over, "What do I want to do? What do I want to do?"
There's a pleasure with asking that's there no matter how often I do it. And this too makes it hard to go to bed. It's easier to sleep without that nagging sense of possibility and opportunity hanging around the hours.
- Mood:
contemplative
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