stress/change

Can't sleep for it even though I am alone in bed tonight because P. has to get up early to help a friend. My life is catching up with me, and I have hardly time to breathe, which is ridiculous, since on the surface I lead one of the most laidback flexible existences ever. It was a great weekend. I wrote a lot, starting Friday, but not in my blog. Instead I filled scraps of paper and a Word document, which I will copy and paste here, but not right now.

My mentor told me to make a list before bed of the things that need to be resolves and that it will simplify my life, but that doesn't help, as the list just grows and grows, along with ideas, for examples changes I want to implement in my work. I start fretting about all the people I have let down by not keeping in touch with, over Christmas that I don't know where I will spend, over my meeting with my supervisor after my trip to Italy this week, over Dutch classes I'd miss and will have to make up, etcetera. In short, I just start to flip. It got so bad that I ordered the homeopathic remedy from the pharmacy and took a dose on Friday, which seemed to have helped for a bit. I just need someone to cuddle me, tell me it would be alright and mean it, someone involved in my life, someone who knows everything I've been through without me having to tell them, that can heal my frayed nerves. Tomorrow I have a meeting with a councelor at work, someone who helped me out before I was diagnosed with some behavioral techniques to battle stress, but now I feel so removed from that. Whenever I've had a great day, like today, and relaxed for a bit, and not been anxious and didn't even smoke, stress raises it's ugly head. I vowed to improve me eating, too, since I had watched Supersize Me again on TV tonight, and realized the amount of junk I put into my poor body alongside those meds.

With P. the relationship is really starting to solidify, and it is like my learning to cycle, so long as I don't think about it and distract myself while doing it, it's completely fine. It's the same for other areas in my life btw, even work. So long as I keep a momentum going without too much ambition ahead, the fear remains in the margins.

Here is what I wrote yesterday [comments from today in square brackets]:

Change

This morning I wrote to one of the participants who is leaving the Ynet “love & hurt” forum (but didn’t publish it there, because of the English barrier):

and connects exactly to what I feel: do I dare to be happy?

after I left home yesterday (Saturday) I was sitting in a beautiful square with my BF and all of a sudden my ex comes along. I just said hi , even though last time he hang up on me and called me "a nasty, nasty person" after I told him I would call the police because he was demanding money from me for a private HIV test he chose to take instead of going to the free hospital clinic - and his insurance pays him back all or most of that anyway).

I didn't hate him, I didn't gloat, I didn't feel anything, I was as cool as a cucamber inside and out.

This guy cost me God knows how many wrinkles and pain and terror and crying and sleepless nights

I even dared to speak to P. really evenly and openly about our future, to express my feelings. [In fact, I think I mention that too often. The more people - my social worker, forum correspondets, friends - tell me to live in the present, the more I dread the future, and I express some of that dread to him, as well as telling him straight out - which I do hope isn't a mistake - what a special bond I think we have and he he is my best friend etc. But then, why can he say "I feel like I know you for years and years" and I can't say that? Why do I fear saying the wrong thing, expressing my warm genuine feelings would cost me the relationship because it would be too-heavy a burden on his laidback, lighthearted persona? I evene slightly regret emailing him tonight in my insomnia about a cycling date we had for tomorrow, which I have to cancel because of my Dutch course, and suggesting dinner at Wagamama instead]

Z. hurt me a lot but I must remember that inadvertly he saved my life (and of course he has his own very heavy burden to carry, but I am not willing to make excuses for someone who hurts me and objectifies me based on his personal history no matter how awful it is)

yes without him I would not have been tested, and I would have come up with full-blown AIDS within weeks

Ahhh life, it's so dynamic, it never stops still for a second, and thank God for that!!!


Lots of crisis make movement. I had a dream about the endless small talk I usually have with my parents, evening (nights really) after my dad gets home from work, whiskey and cigarette in hands in their backyard and the aging animals around us. In the dream, we were discussing my deceased dog or the cat, I don't remember, but this is all I seem to talk about with my parents when I am there, lots of small talk, just like I try to focus on some insignificant detail when I meet someone - say P.'s friend's girlfriend - at the gym and we are both working out and talking needlessly as though that would do anything to calm our respective anxieties, merely brushing them or passing them lightly as though they do not exist, which is worse than not mentioning them at all - last night (Sat.) with a group of P.'s friends wasd mostly alcohol and nicotine fueled small talk, surrounded by groups of Dutch doing exactly the same thing, and I had already some of that on Friday afternoon at a bar too; no wonder R. is my release from all that, and no wonder I find that when I am with P. the truth just pops out of my mouth whether is it "wise" or not. But there is also something reassuring, something cyclical, about small talk. We all stick to what we know, but how do we break out? Thanks to my small talk fatigue I spoke openly and sincerely with P. about next year, he also encouraged me to finish my sentences, which I didn’t know that I had a tendency to drift out of, not daring to complete them or not finding the words, discouraging myself half way through or just before the point and feeling it merely as pressure around my heart.
We all dread change and resist, for example I was at first upset by P.’s abrupt change of his plans today, from a quiet Sunday at home and possibly cycling with me to sailing with his friends, a spontaneous trip that came up after two previous ones planned long in advance were cancelled once because of the fickle Dutch weather and once because I broke my arm and he had to take care of me, but once we accept change, it is the only way to avoid stagnation (within reason). I often tell P. and others and also wrote here how afraid I am on any more change, how I want things to remain the same always, and they don’t because of the imminent threat built-in to the transience of our positions and lifestyles, as those of the people around us, but also because life never waits for anybody, aging and death and loss loom, but also birth and regeneration, just like my plants take care of themselves, and may not be something Martha Stewart would exhibit, but are still very much alive and kicking. I am so excited now, I can barely write. And I can’t wait to see my wonderful family in a few (3!) days in one of the most beautiful places on earth where I am flying for 5 days. I can’t. I am full of love and excitement and youth, I don’t even want to eat. But I eat, to rejuvenate myself, before I head out for a jog in the park and then the gym (yoga class) and make a full day out of it. Now I know why I feel that being diagnosed was a positive event in my life, because the jolting pain took me right off the predictable track I was on, and allowed me to to develop. Part of me is terrified and superstitious of even writing that, just as I was afraid to sit in the corner of the table last night where a large group of us foriegners converged, as in Israel the superstition is that if you sit there you’ll never marry. But I didn’t tell P. I told him I’d tell him later, but spoke about more important things instead. My not wanting to be in the same place 2 3 4 years from now, even though there is nothing wrong with this place.

All of a sudden, it comes to me: I am going to change the entire focus of my project. I am still going to do an online project if I can get participants, but I don’t want to be dependent on that. Not only because I don’t want to get stuck like xxx but because my project lacked soul and now I am starting to find a kernel that is becoming meaningful to me, related to my own life (I can even take myself as subject, and for sure I will take my boyfriend and some of our friends).

Now just my fear of how to communicate this to my supers in a confident way without them freaking out on me. Perhaps the best thing would be to do an analysis and bring them results. Start off with that. They already know I am concerned about the originality of my work, and that’s good, I don’t keep that harbored. Yet at the same time, this idea wouldn’t emerge if it weren’t for the influence of the surprisingly good paper by my super and the woman I dread.

And an event that would have been really meaningful and painful months ago just passed me by yesterday without leaving (as far as I can tell) any visible scars, even though I had a bit of a fearful, superstitious tendency to latch on to the fear and consider its lack a bad omen, in the same way I have to disregard a black cat or the number 13 (which I have discovered is positive in Judaism, as opposed to Christianity): while I was sitting in one of the gorgeous ancient squares eating a fresh seafood bun with P. while we met yesterday (and luckily I wasn’t alone because each of us was shopping separately and we only took a midday break together) Z. passed me by. He was so close I couldn’t ignore him, so I just said hi, with some vague hand movement, but without smiling, and he replied with the same token. On my side at least there was no hate at all, not any victory. Pretty much nothing, although that nothing of course is also something. Considering that the last time we spoke he had sent me a very passive aggressive email asking me to pay him 250 Euro he had chosen to spend on the HIV combo test (rather than do it the way I tried to set up from home, for free and fast, because he was afraid that at the hospital people would know him; but in any case his insurance would pay most of it back; and considering all the times he used me sexually, as is his way, even post-diagnosis and in my new apartment [after trying to convince me to hold his d*** while he peed?! he once sent me an angry email proclaiming that we always “fucked the way you wanted”]), I felt an overall lack of blood pressure increase and pupil dilation. In short, I was cool as a cucumber outwardly, which is not surprising, but inwardly too.