married life

My husband just made 6 slices of french toast and used up 7 extra large eggs...

The black hole and the volcano

I'm not sure I've written this before but whenever I try to picture what's in my heart/soul/whatever that's me inside my body I only see black nothingness and feel a black hole there. It is terrifying to sense it there, its powerful destructive force always threatening to annihilate me. Sometimes I can mostly ignore it though I could always feel a sort of desperation underneath my daily activities. But some other times I would panic and try to numb all my senses to better ignore it which only sped up my self-destruction and drove me closer to the black hole. This obviously becomes a vicious cycle where I am propelled ever closer to the black hole and I begin to lose my judgment, my principles, my memories, my passions, hope, endurance and connection with others until I can only see darkness. Eventually, because I have so little of me left to endure the fear and pain, suicide seems to be the only option. I see that this is the process that drove me for the last 7 years, somtimes slowly sometimes quickly. 

I wanted to explain where I think the black hole came from and the volcano part but this is upsetting me and I just want to relax today. I'm gonna play random games, knit socks and watch Netflix or something. Not that I haven't been relaxing. I've been doing those things for several days now. I've hardly left the apartment in a week. I really hope this is because I just really need it to de-stress from getting married and not because I'm avoiding things or something. I've also still been processing the past a lot in my head which takes more energy I think.

maybe finally processing the past

I've been getting the feeling these days that I am looking back a lot and for a bit I tried to fight it, you know not supposed to dwell on the past etc. But then I think maybe I need to. I thought at first that I had done this already seeing that my usual triggers are things from the past that land me in the hospital sometimes. But actually all I've really done through that horrible cycle is to just react to my past, mostly by rejecting it and not being able to tolerate it. I would try to pull the plug on my life out of sheer desperation and panic as a reboot that could kill the computer but hey, what choice do I have? Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Thankfully I am not that desperate any more. I think (and hope) that I've finally learned not to make my situation worse by self-destruction. But now I am left with a nostalgic bittersweet kind of surreal feeling underneath all my thoughts. Maybe it's time to fully understand what happened to me as a child, accept it and move on. 

I feel like an idiot and my grandma is dying

Like a self-centered bratty young child. I don't know how but I missed the bus going home from the mental hospital (for the DBT) by standing at the stop and looking at my phone for one minute. I looked up and suddenly no one was there any more and no bus for another 22 minutes. I got so upset. I called my husband and complained and whined and decided that that was it, I'm gonna have to smoke up when I get home and then some yelling at him to take me off speakerphone so I don't hear the echo of myself freaking out over nothing leading to more self-hatred. I hate how I sound when I hear myself talking. Anyway, this all also felt ironic because the intro to the DBT skills group included an explanation of some of the major symptoms of BPD like magnifying or catastrophizing which is exactly what I just did. I took missing the bus and turned it into some huge deal that somehow proves that I am incapable of anything good.

Which of course feeds my distress which requires immediate relief so I smoke up even though I didn't want to today. I tend to tell myself that if I'm cutting down, then I'll only smoke up if there's an emergency. But almost everyday there is a fucking emergency. It feels like I want life to slow down a bit but that's impossible so I'm just getting dragged along instead. What is also looming over me is the fact that I have to go see my dying grandmother in pretty much a week. Just thinking about it right now is overwhelming. She's the strongest person I know alive right now. My grandfather's quirks put her through so much suffering but she was always calm and kind at least to my brother and I. I know it was hard for her because she would call my mom and drain and annoy her by always venting and complaining to her about my grandfather or whatever other troubles she had. But things improved in later years. I know her faith brought her through to the better side. And I know that she has always had loving concern for us. I'll never forget what she told me when I finally explained my mental health problems and addictions to her and my grandfather. She said, "You suffer so much because you are too talented in many things." Honestly I'm not sure exactly what she meant but it definitely isn't condemnation or judgement which is what I expected. I think I'll make her sesame seed cookie recipe soon. We loved them growing up and assumed it was some tradition of my grandma's from Korea. When I asked her where she got it from she said it was from a Japanese cooking magazine. lol

I'm in happiness debt

Getting high is like borrowing feel good chemicals from your brain for the present moment instead of the future moments they are meant for. It's like you got a credit card for the first time. And of course what happens is you end up in debt. And of course debt is always harder than you think it is to get out of. And then it compounds and can spiral out of control as you keep borrowing just to stay sane and deal with life's unforeseen shit. Well I'd like to start paying it off. This means exposing myself to life's shit without getting high. Sigh. Well that can't be so bad can it? I don't even remember what I was running from anyway. I think the shit has subsided somewhat in my life right now and as much as I would love to just keep running away to give myself a break, I need to keep moving on. God I hate that though. I'm bad at moving on. The past still haunts me I think. And the memories of being traumatized by the past haunt me too so it's like an inescapable haunting inception thing. I'm pretty sure this is why I have such a bad memory for anything. People used to make fun of me for it. A friend in high school used to say that she was on the highway but I was on the service road and it frustrated her. Well, it frustrates me too. Still. But I see now why my memory is so self-centered. I only remember what I want to remember. It was and is an old way I figured out probably when I was young to deal with stressful situations. But it has it's drawbacks and I don't know how to stop it. Anyway, went off on a tangent. I think. I'm just so confused these days. Maybe the point of all this is that I am becoming a pillar of salt.
No wait, the main point here is that I'm hoping to stay clean tomorrow. Full 24 hours. But I'm starting DBT group therapy again tomorrow afternoon at my case worker's insistence. I so badly don't want to go. It'll be my third attempt and every time it is stressful as hell. You talk about difficult things with complete strangers whose problems are just as intense as yours. You can cut the tension in the air with a knife. It sucks.

OMG i'm married and tired and annoyed

Wow. Our wedding was incredibly awesome! For once, a day in my life where my mental illnesses can't trick me into thinking that no one cares since there they all were, right in front of my eyes. My favourite family and friends (and of course the random ppl you don't know at all because they are your parents friends etc). All very clearly moved and celebrating an exciting life decision you made with your favourite person on earth. The planning of it very nearly drove us literally crazy (we might be over the edge now...) but we did our best and left the rest in God's hands on our special day.

Looking over our almost first month being married, I realized that there isn't just us 2 any more but also God to whom we committed our lives and to each other. Which is incredible. I see now I was right to put the focus on Him during the wedding and to go through it all in the first place because it publicly announces that we live for Jesus and are united with His love. Because, looking back, if I was not Christian I would not ever put myself through that ever! The wedding was an immense source of stress and always incredibly expensive even when you think you are being thrifty. It's like a public works project, expect to add more 0s than you thought you would to your budget.

Now we are annoyingly married. We've been irritating each other so much lately. I think there is this horrible momentum to the self-neglect that was necessary to plan the wedding and now it's hard to slow it down. The apartment got so bad that even I couldn't ignore it any more when I noticed mold growing under the seat of our toilet about a week or two after the wedding. It was the cherry on top of months of no cleaning anything at all. I nearly had a panic attack and considered sleeping somewhere else. Instead we spent hundreds on a cleaning service. We don't sleep normal or regular hours nor do we eat on any kind of schedule. And I'm tired from my meds interacting with the pot so I sleep a lot. We're trying to get back on track in life but I'm not sure it's working. At least we haven't clearly failed I guess. I got our cat to the vet for a check-up (she's good), I got myself to a doctor for random physical problems and the apartment isn't a disaster any more...

What's the most epic reading while eating breakfast? The Bible!

I'm typing on an old iPad and I'm stoned and lazy so grammar may become a problem.

Anyway when I was still living at my dads I would often be late in the mornings because I love reading something while I eat breakfast and he got the newspaper everyday. Since I have moved out and ended up on welfare which isn't really enough for anything including a newspaper subscription, I would just sit at the table for breakfast reading the garbage or cereal boxes in front of me over and over again. I've done all the puzzles on the back of honeycomb cereal boxes maybe 50 times and they're for young children so yeah I got bored. And so one day maybe a month or two ago I thought to myself, what should I read that would be better and not only better but the best thing to read in the morning? Duh the Bible! Usually when I decide to read the Bible I feel very serious like I'm studying it which is fine except that I think the gravity of it all can make it hard to want to sometimes. In a moment of high clarity I realized its really just good to be exposed to God's word as much as possible so I just started at the beginning and read almost every morning and now I'm in Exodus where God is in the middle of giving all those laws and instructions to Moses. Amazingly whether I'm high or not I always learn so much about God's character and just so many random awesome details of how divine love works. So even though there's so much shit going on right now I'm still holding it together and I feel like God's word is the glue.

Something I thought about this morning while reading is the idea of wrestling with God. One of the laws given to Moses mentioned something like if something bad happened to you, you can bring it before God because He let it happen. He's not the source of it but He could have stopped it and didn't.  This sounded weird to me because I'm not in the habit of blaming God for anything and/or hating Him when things go wrong. Although I did get pretty close when my mom died. I just blamed our sinful natures and the spiritual forces of evil. Also, He's the source of all that is good so I figured I should be always thankful. But the truth is also that He could have stopped any of the times I got hurt by others  and I feel like its happened a lot. And this is something I have never let myself think about before. I have the feeling that it is important to grapple with this concept to grow closer to God. So as I think about it now I realize that God uses the darkness of evil and suffering to show us just how incredibly bright His goodness and glory is. We are limited beings who need contrast to see and understand things. He uses evil for good like how He used peoples greed and fear within the establishment to end up raising Jesus from the dead and saving us all in the process. He used death to bring life to everyone. Crazy. Mind-blowing. 

So clearly all the hurts and pains I've suffered are all part of the massive and intricate plan God has to save us from evil. I'll never see the big picture in this lifetime but after reading some of the laws God gave to Moses it is obvious that He thinks of absolutely everything and everyones well-being always.