Failure by Design

Listening To: Pure Morning - Placebo
Drinking: Shocktop
Eating: Carrots
Watching: Nothing


I feel this huge weight on my shoulders lately. I have a lot riding on a potential move at work, and that will decide how the next year or so of my life unfold. I've never been good at making plans in advance, especially that far.

My birthday is coming up. I usually just go out with my friends for a beer, and play pool... Pool is basically the only thing I don't have in common with most of them. I usually use pool as a second or third date. I love the game, but none of my other friends do, and I don't want to force it on them. Besides we all share a love of board games and that's our thing.

With the birthday comes the realization that in several months it will be a new year, and thats brings with it a few major events that happened in January that... broke me in a few ways. The first weekend my grandmother had a stroke, and Allison cutting contact, which is just as much my choice as it was hers, I just didn't have the spine to force it to happen... I had work to distract me, and that helped me cover up the cracks.

I also so my therapist for the first time in a few months. She asked the usual fair of questions, and then we got in to it a bit. She asked me about the medication she prescribed, even though I had called her to tell her I wasn't going to be taking it anymore. Both her and my GP agreed it was the right move since all it seemed to do after a month was make me angry irrationally at things, and generally not change my mood for the better. I was never big on the idea of taking a pill to cure my feelings anyway. She asked me if I was content.The answer I gave her was generally.

The next part I told her was that I was scared. I crashed and burned my own life a few years ago because of being scared, unable to cope, unable to admit truths and unable to open up. I have that same feeling creeping in to me. This time I talk about it, openly, with pretty much anyone who will listen.

She's very good at her job. She simply let me talk about my life, and the various things I think about as I go, sort of like how I used to blog stream of consciousness style. She then took a few minutes to tell me that I'm not the villain I keep making myself feel like. She always says this, because I still feel like a villain in my own life, even though the part of my life is over where I was the villain. Remorse and guilt have a powerful hold on me, and I just need to keep reminding myself that I'm a good person generally.

She also mentioned that I might be feeling these "cracks"(my words) more because we are approaching the anniversary of my grandfathers death. She says she doesn't think I've squared myself with those feelings, nor the feelings I have from when I learned about the sort of man he really was.  I still miss him like crazy. I told her about my grandmothers boyfriend situation, and how it weirds me out, and even made me a little angry the other night.

If i'm still broken from that, it's no wonder I wasn't able to stabilize in a rocky relationship. I pushed away the only person at the time who could have maybe mended me. I shut down because... I didn't know how to do anything else, and I was stubborn, refusing to learn any other way. And then as I learned more I just regressed even more. Knowing doesn't fix it though, and if I'm still coping with the man who raised me being a slight scumbag, then I'm still damaged goods, just in a different way... Maybe I just need to be more upfront about my damages.

My trip to San Jose, away from everything familiar is exactly what I need. A full week in a new city.  I'll take the chance to reset, I hope.

"Gnothi seauton"