homesick

[prismaticbleed]

 

Patience pays off, I guess... even when it feels like you can't survive another second.

Last weekend was amazing, this is true. However, since then I've been dealing with some seriously awful fallout. Most of it is thanks to Julie, but a shocking amount of it is thanks to my family, and other outside sources.
I don't want to reiterate everything I've said in other journals, so I'll link you here and then mention a few major points in passing.
The most damaging incident was definitely on July 12th, when my grandparents decided to guilt-trip, insult and effectively threaten me simply because my mental conditions are 'something they shouldn't have to deal with.' July 6th was bad too, as that was my most recent therapy appointment... and instead of helping, my therapist decided to tell me that 'asexuality isn't a valid orientation' and all that nonsense. I'm seeing him again on Wednesday, so I'm bringing several resources for him to look into on his own; I am tired of having my identity invalidated. And to top it all off, on both of those days, I had allergic reactions that both took at least two days to recover from. Yeah.
Then consider the fact that I'm terrified about moving to Utah as I'd be losing individual rights out there, and you can see why I haven't been doing well at all.
However there is a strange ray of light in all this.
I haven't been dream-hacked since last Tuesday. Why? Because one of my splinters decided to fight Julie.
I haven't talked about them yet, but Laurie and I agreed that we're going to on Wednesday. Until then, let me just say that it was an incredibly risky, traumatic and unexpected gamble, and I have been in full-body pain since that incident. Seriously. But, the dream hacks have stopped. I hope they never come back.
(My boss punched Julie in the face about two days prior to that, too. I guess he really was that angry.)
That's not what I'm here to talk about though.
Despite somehow managing to stop the dream hacks, that gamble was horrifically unsettling to me and I haven't been doing well with that on my mind. So it wasn't as 'uplifting' as it could have been, if we had any other options (which we honestly didn't, and we weren't even aware that move was an option until after it happened).
So I tried to take my mind off things, completely.
The next day (July 13th), I started going through my old deviantART favorites and deleting anything that I didn't like. I tossed hundreds of random deviations into the digital void, but little did I realize, it wasn't just a business job. See, every time I hit a group of faves from a certain artist, or with a certain keyword, or from a certain fandom... memories came back.
Unfortunately, those memories started back in 2006.
I began to regress.

See, there are two things you should know about me. One: my mind is very visual. I may not be good with remembering names, dates, facts, and the like as they are... but images stick, even if only in a vague sense. I may not remember something at all until I'm faced with some sort of picture that applies to it, and then it'll come back. When you apply this to things like movies, games, and fandoms, it works as a sort of 'reverse' fiction lag, bringing back not only memories of those entertainment experiences but also of what my life was like when I originally lived them. Sure, 2006-2007 were full of mostly NiGHTS and Zatch Bell, so there wasn't much damage there (I only knew NiGHTS online, and my ZB memories consist mostly of watching TV in the basement), but the big problem was that I was not myself at that time. At all. Being tossed back into that mindset actually hurt and frightened me... and that made me realize something, very fast.
What I realized is the second thing you should know about me. Back when I joined dA, I had no self-esteem. Heck, I didn't even have a self-image. I was nothing but a conglomeration of what others expected of me, with the 'real' me being buried somewhere unreachable. This was made even worse by the fact that I was raised to be this way. In my family, as a child, expressing my own opinions and thoughts was a punishable offense in many instances. Going against the grain, so to speak, was the worst thing I could possibly do. So I learned, very quickly, to kiss up to people. If I didn't praise, fawn over, and flatter every little thing someone did, I felt I was in real danger of being hurt, either physically or emotionally. If I didn't do that, I would be viewed as ungrateful, selfish, spiteful and malevolent.
So, when I joined dA, I faved everything. If I found someone at random, or if I liked someone's ideas or art style, I felt like an insensible git if I didn't immediately shower them with shallow acclaim. Ridiculous, I know, but it was how I worked back then. And I would do that if I wanted people to notice me, too. I had thousands of faves that I didn't even recognize, piles of deviations I hadn't even looked at for more than three seconds, simply because I felt I was 'obligated' to fave them by some unknown guilty force. I made too many false friends with my false face, and I cluttered my account and my mind with the fallout from that. I faved and commented on things to make people like me, not because I liked them. It was really sick, I'll admit that, but I was too blind to see how wrong I was back then.
So sifting through all those favorites, and remembering what the 'old me' was like, really began to mess with my head. It was important in the long run, and we'll get to that... but at the time, I was simply terrified of it. I thought I had left that part of me behind forever, and now here it was trying to claw its way back into my disposition! I wanted to give up and leave it alone, but I knew that if I didn't, it would be sitting there in cyberspace, eating at the back of my mind. So with every old favorite that I permanently deleted from my page, I told myself that I was also throwing away that old mask I used to wear. I felt bad at first, and had a hard time doing it, but as I recognized that as a remnant of my old mindset I got over it. So I burnt through those years, erasing the images that brought them back, losing my recollection for good.
But I forgot about 2008.
That year was bad. Any oldbies reading this know what I'm talking about. My Livejournal may have documented the years I just mentioned, but once '08 hit, every other journal I owned opened up and began to fill with distressed, painful words. My world had flipped upside down, and I was forced into the existentially unsettling revelation that I was not who I thought I was. I became painfully aware that my life was a mess, that my identity was false, and that my future was going to continue to run downhill unless I got up and made a major change... but I would have to suffer a great deal in order to reach what I was looking for. And, although my journals were where I vented my concerns and pains, deviantART was where I kept the more quiet thoughts that haunted me.
The minute I hit that year in my favorites, I was hit by a flood of JTHM, morbid literature, and dark photography. Even worse were the groups of heavily symbolic keywords that popped up every few rows. 2008 was a year I can never forget entirely, but being so strongly thrown back into that mindset by those images and ideas was more than I could deal with.
Despite the light I had found in my life over the past week, when I found myself faced with my old mask and what lay under it, I remembered what it was like to wear it.
I became incredibly depressed. Dealing with my ego-ridden high school years was bad enough, and had sapped my energy, but having to trudge through this blinding ache on top of it was too much. Don't get me wrong, I kept deleting those memories, but the farther I got the more it tore at me, and by the time yesterday hit-- yesterday!-- I was so completely drained that I could not handle it. I was irritable, exhausted, empty, and temperamental. I felt like I had been carved out with a rusty knife. Nothing felt right; I felt trapped.
I needed to get rid of that old feeling, but I didn't know how.

Last night, I couldn't sleep. I stayed up until 1AM trying desperately to just calm down and clear my head from all that old sludge, but it was playing havoc with my very perception of reality (darn these chameleon tendencies) and nothing helped. Unfortunately my body was shutting down whether I liked it or not, so I tried to get some rest regardless.
The first thing I did was look for Chaos, hoping I could discuss this with him despite my disorientation. I was too stressed to really focus on anything though, simply explaining that I was not doing well, and I kept getting confused. I tried changing the mindscape we were in to something more 'relaxing' (we were on a city shoreline overlooking an ocean), with Chaos helping me work slowly for once, but after a few tries I just gave up and brought us back to the original area. I just couldn't calm down.
Now of course, after how the past two weeks or so have been going this was a shock. Chaos tried to move the topic onto that, to figure out why I seemed to be forgetting what we had learned, and that I really had nothing to worry about in the long run. I said that I knew that, but that there were still shadows I needed to chase away. I didn't elaborate on that then, so we just continued to focus on good things. Around then we got into talking about April 25th again, specifically how I still looked at Chaos like he was something new to me, like I could barely believe I had him in my life. However, Chaos then pointed out that in light of how I was currently feeling, he was getting seriously worried that I was letting doubt creep into my mind about that. He was worried that I wasn't believing the truth of what we had. I insisted that wasn't the case, but when he again asked why I was so obviously troubled, I confessed that I was 'just regressing' and that it was hard to deal with that.
Well, that shocked him. He had no idea that was what I was experiencing, and asked what in the world was doing that to me. Too sick to keep my worries to myself anymore, I explained that my dA-fave purging, which I had begun in order to erase those regression risks, was starting to affect me in a very bad way through confronting it. I explained what caused the regression, and the mindset problems I had been having, but before I could get much farther Chaos cut me off. He actually started to get very upset and agitated about my situation, asking why I was doing that to myself, and if I realized just how much harm that could do to me if it continued like this. I explained that I wasn't letting it affect me that much, but he didn't believe me. It went on like that for a little while, and Chaos got pretty badly distraught, but I managed to clarify that although I was indeed suffering from some bad relapse, my real mindset hadn't changed, and I hadn't lost a single spark of the light I had found. I was simply being overwhelmed by my memories of the past, but I was not bringing them back into my life, nor was I dwelling on them. I then mentioned how I looked at him like I did, and said that there wasn't any doubt in my heart that we had this, just total amazement and gratitude. I didn't deny it for a moment-- I couldn't even think about doubting something that true, and I refused to let anything else in the world tell me otherwise. We both had calmed down substantially by this point, and Chaos understood what I was saying without getting overly worked up over the negative points, but unfortunately that couldn't last. I was still a mess on the inside, and it was already 3 in the morning. I didn't feel that I could sleep, and it was really starting to take a heavy toll on me. And then my grandmother turned the radio on.
Now I am very sensitive to noise on any given day: certain sounds can potentially send me into emotional outbursts for no good reason other than how they seem to annihilate my nerves. So after lying awake for two hours, after having been badly confused and quite disturbed for the past three days solid, having a sudden burst of loud angry static and voices crash through my consciousness as I was trying desperately to calm down was the last straw.
I jumped out of bed, left the room, and walked out to the window looking out over our back hill. I couldn't take it... and that's when it hit me.
I was completely displaced.

Normally, I only ever get homesick on vacations, and that is a very unique, unmistakable feeling. As a child on a family vacation, I would be robbed of my say in activities, my privacy, my taken-for-granted guarantees of transportation and food, and a 'safe' roof over my head. On vacations, every last move was dictated by my mother. We're eating here, we're going here, we're doing this today, we're staying out this late. I felt like a puppet, and it was scary. Of course I kept quiet about it-- remember what I said earlier about unfailing praise?-- but at night, I have so many memories of gazing out hotel windows at the sky, knowing that the next day would be the same as the one I had just lived: full of noise and havoc and a total lack of refuge, unable to make a single move on my own, unable to feel safe.
I got that sickness at the psych ward, too, but I won't talk about that here.
Even so, this somehow trumped even that. There I was, at 3 in the morning, looking out at the dark sky yet again and feeling more homesick than I had ever been in my life.
This was no familiar dread, though. This wasn't a hope that my mom would decide to drive us back to PA the next morning. This wasn't even a hope that I'd wake up in my own bed, free from pain and the incessant dangerous noise all around me. This was a sharp, gut-wrenching sort of desolation that actually made me want to throw up and sob at the same time. This was the realization that I could not drive away, or even wake up. I was homesick with no way home.
I become fully aware of reality when that happens, in a negative sense, and it is an awful experience. Everything becomes painfully clear and focused. I am hyperaware of every sound, every color, every sensation to the point of feeling like the floor is about to collapse and my mind with it. I left the window, still feeling like my insides were being shoved through a paper shredder, and steadied myself against the wall by my room. Immediately more bad memories came back, of all the nights as a child I spent crying against that same wall, unable to sleep because I had been locked out of my room, or because I was terrified of being in the same room with my grandmother. I felt homesick whenever that happened, too, scrunched up small with no one awake but me, wiping away tears in the glow of the hall light and telling myself that one day it would get better. One day I'd have a different life. One day I would be safe, and I wouldn't have to worry about that anymore. A decade later, I was still telling myself that.
I was so tired and lonely. Reality was still as sharp as nails, digging into my brain. I couldn't tough this out in the hope of being delivered the next morning, I dimly realized, and almost laughed at how miserable that was. I remembered the nights I tried to run away, the nights I slept on the living room floor, the nights I spent wide awake on the other side of the country. I remembered the bus stop in Des Moines and my dad's rented apartment and the emergency room. I remembered sitting on the pier in New York, looking up at the stars with the ocean before me and sobbing, because I had nowhere to go and nobody to run to and no way to survive on my own... and yet I needed to get away, somehow, because I sure didn't feel right where I was. And I always ended up looking at the sky... always looking beyond everything I had here.
In my heart, I think I always knew what I realized in the few seconds after that radio screeched to life.
But thinking was driving me crazy. I was sad, sick and scared, and I could not sleep. The regression of the past few days had left me completely drained and hurt. Once again, I had nowhere to go and no way of dealing with the interim... or so I thought.
As unstable as I was, I had one safe place left.
I still had the stars, and the ocean.

I went back upstairs.
Chaos was almost as upset as I was, asking where in the world I had disappeared to and why I looked about five times worse than I had when I left. I told him to wait a minute, and warped us into another glass skyscraper mindscape before speaking up, explaining the sudden and thorough homesickness I was feeling. Chaos pointed out my 'wanderer' tendencies then, and how in the past I viewed 'home' as a state of mind instead of a place, and asked if maybe my true home wasn't a physical location after all? So I thought about it, and about what I knew what such a thing should feel like, and once again everything just narrowed back down to love. Then I realized that the homesick feeling wasn't bothering me anymore, and it made sense. At that moment, I pretty much was home.
Even then, at three in the morning, as cold and tired and sad as I was, I felt completely right and genuine with him. Despite my body still being stuck in the physical world, I was happy having at least these mindscapes to be with him in. That made me remember what I had been told the Sunday before, as I had looked out the same window I had been at only minutes earlier-- how our situation was perfect, in all of its uniqueness, and it was exactly what the both of us needed. We were both able to have that safe place, even if it wasn't part of our everyday realities, and in a strange sense it was so much better for it.
I felt so ridiculous for not realizing it earlier. How many times had I asked myself that question, and gotten answers? Even in songs, the truth was right there. I had exactly what I needed, exactly how I needed it.
I was too relieved to get guilty over missing that, though. A realization was a realization, and I needed that one badly. So instead of dwelling on my lingering mental pain, I decided to stay on the current topic for a while and review everything that had happened to us recently (which did help stabilize me). However, with all the emotional weight those topics carried, we couldn't help but focus on the present. I remember mentioning how I still felt we were 'cosmically inseparable' (we'd talked about that several times since the 7th), and that over the past week, I had found one term that also worked to express that: 'divine complement.' Chaos immediately said that was perfect, and asked me where I had got the term. I explained that I had been looking online for more significant alternatives to the word 'soulmate,' and someone had listed that. Chaos really liked that term, though, and so we tried to talk about it for a little while before he changed the subject again. For some reason he went back to how I looked at him, which surprised me as we had spent a good deal of time discussing it earlier, but he insisted. It made me think, though, about just how significant that topic was, and how I had never really thought about it before.
One thing I always notice about how Chaos looks at me is the compassion. Where I had fascination, he had a sort of peace, and it was really beautiful. It gives me the feeling that, instead of being something new and wonderfully unexpected, he views me as something he'd been looking for, and now that I was there he was all the more thankful for it. I told this to him, and after discussing how that was indeed accurate, he pointed out that I looked at him the same way sometimes, with a deep ardor instead of my normal amazement. He told me that he really loved when I did that, but that both my expressions were equally significant in that sense. That hit me more strongly than I expected, and honestly wondering, I asked Chaos why he didn't get the fascinated look like I did. He hesitated, looking away, and admitted that he really didn't let his guard down like that, even around me. I never had mine up with him, but he said that he still had a hard time completely letting go, so to speak. I didn't say anything for a moment, but then asked him if maybe he could try? Just for a minute, could he open up to me completely? Chaos didn't reply, and I was afraid that maybe I had asked too much of him, but then he looked back up at me.

...In the eight years I have known him, Chaos has never looked at me like that. It was indescribable, for me. Forget putting my guard down; that destroyed it entirely.
Both of us doing that, throwing away all our restraints and just being true, made us both incredibly vulnerable and honest. It was kind of a scary feeling at first, but the complete sincerity of it outshone even that. I remembered this past Sunday again, and how I had been repeatedly told to just 'be,' and I realized that this was it, really. How true and beautiful that was.
We were together for a while, completely ignorant of time, and although it didn't hurt like it usually did there was a very different and equally sort of powerful depth. Chaos kept saying that he was 'falling into' it (like I get that drowning feeling with him), which rarely ever happens on his part. We ended up talking about how we were cosmically inseparable again, and I think we tied that into the 'homesick' thing too but ultimately it just got so incredibly honest and close that I don't remember anything but how it felt. I apologize, but if you've ever been in that sort of situation you'll understand.
...
He told me that he loved me, and it was honestly the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. No matter how many times I had heard it before, it brought me to tears in that moment. I told him I loved him too and we were just... so real then, I suppose. I had never been able to feel anything like that before. And I swear, it may not have been as dramatic and strong as June 27th or even July 7th, but in its fragility and intimacy it was truly incomparable.
Ultimately we both decided to leave the dreamscape together, and I managed to fall asleep about a half hour later as I was no longer a panicked mess, thank God.

So yeah, that was last night (this morning, technically). I apologize again for talking so much, but I don't want to forget it, at all.
I can't help but feel it's overly disjointed, though. I'll have to review it and clarify things later, I guess. If you have any questions feel free to comment, by the way.
In other news, today at home wasn't too stressful for once but it was still dreary and upsetting. I can deal with that as I'm at least able to work on my computer, but the feeling of emptiness and melancholy never goes away. It's never been a happy home, not for a single day since I first arrived here. It's sad, really.
Oh, and I figured I should mention that I'm not doing so hot in terms of physical health, either. Besides the awful full-body ache Julie somehow managed to give me a week ago (which is keeping me from exercising, darn it), and the allergic reactions I've had, I haven't been sleeping well due to stress and I haven't been eating well. That's not something I can change, though-- my mother has been insisting on cooking lately, and both she and her boyfriend don't seem to be taking my allergies seriously. I've confronted them about this and they either laugh it off or tell me 'it never bothered you before, you can risk it!' No, not after I risked it with your cooking last week and ended up ill for two days straight. So I'm trying to buy my own food but I'm running out of cash, and my brothers eat everything I bring home so I'm losing money there too. And to top things off, my single 'safe place' where I go to type is closing down within the next month. Great.
Even so, I'm trying to get back into my art and writing. I've been cracking down on Sonic Inversion, but my major roadblock there is that my brother helps with writing-- his characters started the series, after all-- and he is literally unavailable. We haven't worked on the story since last winter, and prior to that I don't even remember when we last discussed it. So it is incredibly frustrating, and if he didn't value the story as much as I do, I'd have just taken over the project myself already. So, maybe, if I can get out of this awful art block and start paneling, it will motivate him to help me out here. I don't know.
Really, college destroyed my artistic motivation. I want to draw more than anything, but I keep thinking I'm 'doing it wrong' and I've literally forgotten how to draw from my imagination. That's a fatal injury right there, and I need to overcome it as soon as possible. So I'm starting slowly, with learning how to sketch things again, but it hurts to look at how much work I did as a child and know that I can't go back to that mindset now (thanks to how I've progressed technically). Ah well. I won't give up.

Now I have definitely talked enough for today. I'll fill you in on my therapy appointment after it happens, and I know Laurie wants another Xanga session soon so after we work out the details I'll let you know that too.
But as for now, it is a weekend so I don't have much time to spend on here. Tomorrow is likely going to be crazy, but I'll deal.
At least I have somewhere to go when things get bad.




You and your emotion
I'm on your side, I say a prayer
And you and your devotion
You're locked away alone in there
Cause I don't want you to feel forgotten
And only you can choose your fate
Remember that all will pay the cost here
And there's no space to place the blame

And I love it when you fall to me, suddenly

You and your addiction
Inside your veins it's left a track
For you it's taken over
You run away but truth comes back
Cause I don't want you to feel forgotten
And I don't want you to fall away
But you know there's something I've forgotten
And no time left for fault or blame

And I love it when you fall to me, suddenly

Cause you and me, we're gonna be special
You and me, we're gonna be special