beautiful monsters

I'm back, did ya miss me?

Been hanging out in hospital / respite for a while... just three nights actually. Feels like half an eternity. Needed some time out. Needed some extra support. But they’ve let me out now (guess they needed the bed for someone else). Everyone keeps asking if I’m ok, and to be honest, I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I think I will be.

Short

I shaved off my hair. Actually, I paid someone else to shave it off. I don’t have the necessary equipment. It was sort of an impulsive thing. They let me out of hospital for a walk yesterday, because it was my last day, and so I walked down to the shops, passed a barbers shop, and went hey, maybe I’ll get my hair cut.

I think I like it, but I’m not really sure. I think it was kind of inevitable, it had to happen at some stage. I’ve always wanted to know what I’d look like with no hair. Well, alright, I’m exaggerating, I’ve still got some hair, it’s just very short.

I like the way the wind feels when it brushes over my scalp.

I don’t like the way I no longer recognise my own shadow.

I can’t help but touch my hair, all the time, it feels so strange, my fingers are always drifting up to pat and stroke my head.

Scum

I love The New Scum!

Wellington, you have two more chances to get your apathetic ass into gear and get down to the Bluenote, 9:30pm Thursday and Friday.

"Theatre so sharp it draws blood."

Note to self

Do not go and see The Hours when depressed. It is not a feel-good movie. Everyone in it is depressed and suicidal, even the kids are pretty morbid.

Calling

Someone stole my cellphone, ages ago, back in October I think. The worst part was that I lost all the numbers I had programmed into it, which I was dumb enough not to write down anywhere else (Matiu, if you’re out there, I miss you, please get in touch)! And I had to get a new number.

Anyway, last night I got this email from a sort-of-ex of mine, apologising for the drunken manipulative abusive voicemail message she supposedly left me. I couldn’t actually work out what voicemail message she was talking about. I thought maybe I’d blocked it out. Maybe it got lost in the blur of crazy shit happening lately. Maybe my flatmates censored it. And then I thought, maybe she left it on my old phone.

I found out that I can still check the messages from another phone. It’s kind of weird to think that someone else has my phone, but the number still exists and a recording of my voice is floating around in some kind of virtual space somewhere... But the weird part is, that I checked my messages, and there were about 20. And one of them was from weeks ago, cos hey, it’s been months since I lost that phone. But all the rest were in the past week!?!! What’s with that? How come all these people have suddenly reverted to my old phone number, all at once. Even my mother left a message on my old phone. Now that’s really weird, cos she called me three times on my new one today alone, so you’d think she’d know the number. Odd. Very odd indeed.

I gotta work out how to cut off that number.

Bonds

My flatmate drove me down to the hospital late on Saturday night, bless him, and then he stayed with me for hours. Held me while I was crying and shaking and screaming and trying to bang my head against the wall. I’ve talked before about the terrible blackness that is always inside me, and sometimes it seems to well up and engulf me. Many times this has happened when I have been alone, and sometimes it feels like I’m drowning in it, sometimes it really feels like it will kill me, and I have to drag myself out of the blackness, it takes all the strength I have but I always seem to be able to pull myself away. I always know it will come back. A couple of times I have fallen into the darkness when other people have been around. Sometimes they have stayed with me for a while, most of the time they have ended up getting frustrated and scared and told me to pull myself together, stop crying. And I do, I pull myself together because I don’t want them to be afraid of me. I manage to squash all the blackness back down inside myself.

On Saturday, I fell into the darkness and I couldn’t find the strength to pull myself away. I struggled with it, and then it overwhelmed me, and I couldn’t get away. I wanted to hurt myself so much, I wanted to block it out, I wanted to escape, it felt like I was being torn apart, like I was being crushed. And then my flatmate put his arms around me, and even in the middle of the blackness I could feel him there with me. He held my head in his lap so I couldn’t bang it against the wall, and he wrapped his arms around me and held me. He didn’t tell me to pull myself together. He didn’t tell me to stop crying. He didn’t tell me it wasn’t that bad, or that I’d feel better in the morning. He didn’t get scared or angry or frustrated or tired. He just sat with me, held me, sang a beautiful waiata.

That is honestly the most beautiful thing anyone has ever done for me.

The next evening he came to visit me and we talked for a while. He told me that there have been times when he’s wondered if he could keep living with me. He’s really sensitive to how people are feeling, and he can tell the moment I open the door when I am having a bad day. He’s kept his distance because he hasn’t known if he can be there for me. And sometimes he’s been really frustrated, he has heard me up late at night, on the computer or talking on the phone or pacing in the kitchen, and he’s thought "why doesn’t Fi just go to bed! That’s what she needs!" But he said that on Saturday, he realised that he could be with me, and he was ok with it. He realised the depth and strength of the feelings I struggle with, and he realised that sometimes when I’m pacing around at 3am it’s the best thing I can do. In my head I might be fighting not to smash the windows or walk out into the night, scream, cut myself, jump off a building. It might be taking all my strength just to stay alive. He told me he had so much respect for me. For only the third time in my life, I felt like someone understood me.

I also felt like I was beginning to understand him. There have been times when I have found it frustrating living with him too, when he has got on my nerves, when I haven’t been able to understand why he is acting the way he is, when I have felt like screaming at him. This weekend, even though he didn’t speak about any of it, I understood some of the struggles that he has faced, and I loved and respected him more that I ever have.

Addictions update (warning, contains blood and knives, content may disturb)

When I got out of hospital I asked my flatmate if he would take me along to one of the NA meetings he goes to. It was really cool to go along and be a part of that other side of his life. Everyone was really nice, and afterwards I went out for coffee with some of the girls from the meeting. One of them started talking to me about her experiences, and I could relate to so much of what she was saying. And suddenly it hit me, how my life is such a mess, how I’m such a mess. At the beginning of this year, I made a resolution, that I was not going to cut myself any more. Lately, I have really been struggling with the desire to cut myself. The thought is with me all the time, it’s the first thing I want to do when I wake up in the morning, and I fight against it all day and all night. If you don’t self-injure, it’s probably quite a difficult desire to relate to. But believe me, you come to crave the release of blood.

"Deliberate self-injury appears to be a source of effective and instantaneous relief from both the state of heightened agitation and anxiety as well as from the opposite state of inner deadening and numbness that characterizes dissociation. Although neuroscience research hasn’t yet produced definite answers to this puzzle, it is clear that this is a physiological as well as a psychological process. In one study, cutters and noncutters were guided through an imaginary act of self-mutilation, while their blood pressure, heart rate, and other biological measurements were taken. The results confirmed that cutting does physically reduce tension.
"One of the most challenging questions is why so many self-injurers feel no pain when they slice and burn their flesh or break their own bones? One theory is that.... cutters developed a conditioned response to stress that produced a heightened level of opiates in their bodies, which in turn causes numbing. This conditioned response may take on the nature of an addiction, with cutters experiencing opiate withdrawal and cravings in the absence of stress or traumatic triggers. The withdrawal is expressed through anxiety, hyperactivity, and outbursts of aggression. This process is yet another vicious cycle that contributes to a sense of loss of control...
"The question of whether cutting is actually addictive... is highly controversial. Most chronic self-mutilators think it is and insist that alcohol, drugs, sex – even eating disorders, notoriously difficult to overcome – are easier to give up than self-harm."
(Marilee Strong said it better than I could).

At the NA meeting, they give out these pamphlets that say "Am I an Addict?" They have a list of questions written by recovering addicts, designed to help you work out if you might be an addict. There are 29 questions. I can answer yes to several of them in regards to drinking chocolate, as you already know, but I don’t think that’s the real problem. I can answer yes to about a dozen questions in relation to alcohol and about six questions for other drugs (and I’m not talking caffeine and sugar) which really shocked me. But I can answer yes to 26 questions if I apply them to self-injury. I have done it alone, I have substituted other behaviours (including drugs) thinking that cutting was the problem, I have lied to get hold of surgical scalpel blades, I have stolen sharp objects, I have lied to cover up how much I have been cutting myself. I have tried to stop, over and over, and failed. If feels impossible to live without cutting myself, and the thought of running out of scalpel blades terrifies me. I have often felt defensive, guilty and ashamed about cutting myself, I think about cutting myself all the time, once I start I find it hard to stop, I cut more and more frequently, deeper and deeper, further than I ever meant to go. I have found that my own private hell is within me. And I need help. So what now? Drugs have never been a major problem for me, I think I’ve just abused drugs occasionally as a substitute for cutting myself, so I don’t know if I really have the right to take part in the NA meetings. I don’t know, I’m still getting my head around all of this.

God

It’s not a matter of believing in God. I see God everywhere, in the kindness of friends and strangers, in the beauty of new leaves unfurling, in the sun breaking through and in the dark clouds passing by... in the stars and the spaces between the stars... in laughter and in tears... in life... I believe in God.

I’m just afraid that maybe God doesn’t believe in me.

Sex

I hate the Dominion Post, I really do, it’s one of the most rightwing newspapers I’ve ever come across. But they did print a letter I wrote, so give them some credit. They even stuck it in a box with a big headline and a picture.

MPs have just voted 62 to 56 to take the Prostitution Reform Bill to the next level, one step closer to the decriminalisation of prostitution. The papers have been filled with hysterical headlines. "MP fears uncontrolled sex trade." Apparently the country is in danger of becoming an orgy of sex, drugs and gang violence. Impoverished children will be trafficked between rural and urban centers where they will be raped, abused and infected with AIDS. And so on.

Did you know that under the current law, if a man goes up to a woman and says "I’ll pay you a hundred bucks to have sex with me" it’s legal, but if a woman goes up to a man and says "I’ll have sex with you for a hundred bucks," that’s against the law? Did you know that partners and children and even landlords of sex workers are criminals, because they are "living off the earnings"? Did you know that massage parlours can’t provide condoms or safe-sex literature because it could be used as evidence against them? Oooooooh yeah, the current law is pretty $%@*&#!!

There was a great billboard in Cuba St last year. In big letters it said "Jesus Loves Hookers," and then underneath it said "Support Prostitution Law Reform – God knows we need it!"

Weird dream

After the NA meeting and after reading the 29 questions I freaked out. I went home and drank half a bottle of vodka and passed out on the kitchen floor – oh yeah that’ll solve everything.

Then I had this weird as dream. It was late at night and I was walking home with my flatmate, and we came to this carpark, and all the New Scum were there, sitting around in a circle. We went up to them and they were all drinking furniture polish, or at least some chemical that had something to do with furniture. Well, drinking isn’t really the word, because it was too thick and sticky so they were kind of licking it off the brush. My flatmate went and joined in, but I was too freaked out. Somehow I got some of the stuff on my fingers and I had to lick it off and it burned my throat. And then I was talking to one of the girls, and I was saying "I can’t be a addict, because if I was I wouldn’t be scared about taking this stuff, I’d just do it."

And then I was lying on the kitchen floor calling out to my flatmate, help me, please someone help me.

Posted by Fionnaigh at February 26, 2003 08:22 PM