Closing in on the start of Fall semester

The weather this morning feels like fall, the air is crisp, the sky is a dreary gray that threatens rain for the day. The songs of the birds out the windows are of different melodies as if the summer birds have already flown south, and the tires against pavement sound faster and busier. Most importantly, I feel like is it fall. I feel sad, anxious, and most of all, lonely.

In lieu

What can go in place of the me, the familiar thoughts and feelings that consume my waking hours, and cause me to not be fully present in my body, in my interactions with others, in the world? Sometimes it feels so hopeless. I hate feeling the way I do. However, I’m not sure how realistic my want to rid myself of these feelings are since maybe others have the same feelings but I don’t know this. The one thing is that I live a life that is restricted because of this. I avoid people. I just want to be alone at home, safe. I do not take risks to get to know people, to ask questions, to reach out. I am consumed with being safe and feeling OK.

Intrusive thoughts

Intrusive thoughts of my mother and family may have a functional component that I’ve never before considered. These incessant little memories make me feel bad and they stop me from doing things I need to do. I realized the other day that although this seems to be their primary function, there may be more to it. If I had a coherent and stable narrative or understanding of my childhood, my relationship to my family, and the meaning and impact of the intersection of familial psychopathology, racism, and my own personality, I wouldn’t need these memories and thoughts to continue to plague me throughout my days.

They may also serve to remind me that it was bad. They could be urging me to accept this and perhaps then I could move on. They are urging me to take myself seriously, my pain, my sadness, my deep sense of loss and vulnerability by giving me reminders: “This is why you feel this way”.

Without a narrative, without making peace with myself about what I know (and perhaps don’t know), these (not so) random memories and thoughts will continue to intrude.

Curiosity

Are you not afraid of me? I who just spoke of my destructive tendencies, my monstrosity, my evil self. You used the same used to describe your mother.

Ticker-tape

It runs closer to the surface these days. The incessant dialogue in which I engage in futile attempts to argue and untangle my way to freedom.

I felt hopeless tonight and a twinge of desire to self-harm when Paul told me that he feels guilty about not contacting his grandmother who abandoned him to live with strangers. And his foster mother, who was the stranger who insisted he call her “mother” and proceeded to crazy on him for years. Is it futile? Can I never be free of my mother and father even though they seek and destroy and I manage to stay just under the line of fire?

Is my suicidality around the hopeless of getting away from them and around my terror at being their spawn connected to my apparent hatred of them and conscious wish that they would die?