Short answer: yes! In indie shoe-gazing-fashion, I will attempt (as always) to reflect on myself. Although I will not do so whilst wearing dark colours (not intentionally anyway), tight denim (fuck that) or 'exciting hair.' Guitars and abstract maudlin wailing will be absent for the time being.
The reason I'm writing this is because a) I haven't posted in a while and I think it's making me crazy - I NEED TO WRITE and b) I need to clarify posts like the previous one. I had to explain this to the Libertarian once, after I posted something without speaking to him first, and he was (understandably) somewhat hurt. No major revelations had been concealed, but he wanted to be my rock. I then attempted to say what I'll say now, but more succinctly and clearly this time.
As was meant to be evident by the tag, posts like that serve a paradoxical purpose relating to my depression. That particular one was written (as was quite flaming obvious!) after having issues with TL. It wasn't a fight, but a series of compounded and painful misunderstandings. The fight itself, involving plenty of meaningless snark and inflating-of-self-for-anger purposes, came after.
Before I go any further, I must just comment on how much that strikes me. Fights in themselves are not bad; we might think that they are. They're actually a relief, coming after the egotism that misunderstandings generate. You are open about your feelings, clear in your aim to lash out and destroy. Often when misunderstandings occur, however, there's no-one to blame. Instinct demands that we blame someone though, that there be no grey areas. As a result, there can be a whole disgusting grey area of feelings. Despair, at the preventability of the whole thing, at missed opportunities for maturity. Irritability at the other partner, maybe partially founded, partially unfounded, for just not understanding, for being as human as you. Frustration at yourself for being human (read: 'failure'); guilt at yourself for blaming them.
I spent much of that day feeling like a raw wound. It wasn't helped by the fact that I was crying constantly. The post was the height of my fucked, depressed self-indulgence. I fashioned betrayal from a misunderstanding. Why? I knew TL loves me, I knew that he didn't really think I expect him to plan my life around him - but I was in the zone. The depressed, pre-menstrual zone. I have worked out now that I may be a bit miserable for the rest of the month, but being pre-menstrual triggers depression proper in me. I become incredibly irrational, lose all sense of perspective and balance, have suicidal and self-denigrating thoughts...
Let's not forget that I'm also pre-menstrual, so I have a lower pain threshold, general increased sensitivity (physical and emotional, as a result of hormones). The more severely pre-menstrual I feel, the worse I am overall. I often don't sleep as a result of being so uncomfortable and unable to relax at night. So, I'm pretty much a little time-bomb, waiting to blow. Blow I do, at the same time every month. ALWAYS before I'm due, and ALWAYS once I start, the suicidal tendencies and despair lift considerably.
However, normal rules do not apply when I'm 'in the zone.' I am a solitary person generally (although I have realised I need to work on this!). PMD finds me in an awkward position, reduced to calling up people and begging them to save me from myself. Since I am not accurately able to conceive of how others view me, I cannot do this. I imagine concealed irritation, better things to do, frustration. The worst part is that lived experience informs these fears. I loved a depressed man. Depressed people are hellishly trying. If they retreat into a self-destructive downward spiral - that is, if you get to them just a bit too late to head them off at the start - you may well find them simultaneously 'boring' and 'infuriating'.
Again, however, there's little logic to that fear. You'd only feel that way if you were in the position I was, of being a person's go-to rock. Being on the receiving end of that kind of thing for hours a day. Plus, (and this will sound really awful, apologies!) I don't last very long in the self-indulgent phase, unlike my ex. I move quickly into heavy self-loathing. Not 'I can't make people like me,' or 'I'm not cool anymore' self-loathing. 'I shouldn't exist/ My mother was right, I AM a psychopath' self-loathing. It explains why I could handle my ex's depressed spells, but mine destroyed him. He became like that when he felt wrong-footed. Paradoxically, I was the opposite. I became like that when I was fully, bleakly sure; I become like that when I feel that my internalised bullies have been validated. 'They' are right after all; right about everything; right and they always will be. I think I really will have to get therapy at some point, because having my family's shadow over me for the rest of my life will destroy me otherwise. However, living away from them for a sustained period of time (like, longer than 2 years) may do the trick... here's hopin'!
So. I'm in the zone. I need help, like URGENT HELP. Platitudes and attempts to deploy logic have, and will always, fail. My mindset crystallises back into the world of binaries. There is a black and a white. The dichotomy that interests me at that point, though I obviously don't realise it then, is that of action and words. Telling me I am loved and that people would miss me if I died MEANS NOTHING. That is my breaking point; I risk everything, I trust nothing. I test belief. Love must be demonstrated, not promised. I need to be held, in a touch which is firm yet yielding. Not stiffly, not as if I'm being restrained. TL excels in this department, and hence I felt the first terrifying butterfly-brush of awareness that I could fall in love with him on only our sixth meeting.
A university counsellor observed this too; that I have moments when I really test my partner(s). I have gotten a lot better at not doing this, with TL; that might have a lot to do with us actually being emotionally suited. I don't quite know how to break that pattern, although I know what formed it. Years of being ignored and mocked have made me terribly insecure about whether my voice matters or not. Whether I am sane or not. Whether anyone is really listening or not, and do they care? Can they care, when the people who were always meant to didn't? Especially when those same people told me they wouldn't care?
This quote sums up the situation rather well, I think:
second generation Punjabi women – being the product of patriarchal culture – are either depressingly servile or terrifyingly aggressive… Sikh girls don’t have personalities, they have post-traumatic disorder. They have to fight so hard and so persistently for their independence that they become brutalized by the experience, and even when they have their freedom, they can’t stop fighting.
This has a grain of truth, rather than being 100% applicable. Not least because it fails to appreciate that many girls can - and do - flit between those two states. I find myself doing so... The thing about not being able to stop fighting seems very apt here though. Paranoia and fear of betrayal - two states of mind which are, interestingly, embedded into Punjabi Sikhs, especially many who are now British Asians - make me challenge everything that I should believe in.
In such a state of mind, not quite on the verge of total despair, I am on the brink of escaping. Thankfully, the part of me that wants to live seizes it and runs like hell. If I can trust no-one, I can tell no-one. I can, however, suck out the poison and spit it onto my blog, which is after all intended as a literary mirror of the inside of my head.
So I do, and then paradox frees me. By writing down my feelings, I can almost 'seal' them on an imaginary page (a Web-page?). They leave me to course, like insignificant minnows, into the cyber-stream. I don't have to worry about them any more because I have 'set them free' - and myself in the process. Yet simultaneously, blogging my depressive states also does the opposite. It sets them as if in concrete, to remain there for all to see. They cannot get away into the safe darkness of forgetting. Not just an exercise in humility and maturity, they are also evidence. Proof, to be exact. When I blog a foul mood like that, I let it go AND I own it. Afterwards I have the proof of my own survival. Evidence that I made it, and can thus do it again. To quote the glorious Gaynor: 'Did I crumble? Did I lay down and die? Oh no, not I! I will survive!' From that point, I can face my own part in generating a misunderstanding more honestly. I can call and apologise and tell him that I love him. I can save myself - not a psychopath, but a survivor.
(Speaking of which, one of my best friends recently told me in her usual calm and direct manner that my mother is a sociopath, as she lacks some basic human ability to relate to others. I agreed, noting that it is her ability to empathise which appears to be, ahem, seriously fucked. It was all v.heartening!).
Time to go sleep now, though, almost 2 a.m... Whoops. This is what happens when you artificially prolong wakefulness by Jeff Buckley's sexiness and being determined to be organised and efficient and all that other shit you aren't in daylight. Don't look at me like that, I know Jeff Buckley is dead, but he's still sexy, goddamit! His voice AND his physical form *chuckles idiotically.*
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