i’ve been advised by close friends and family not to give random people my blog address. and by random people, they mean people who are new in my life. my friends and fam tell me this because of the responses i’ve been getting from my writing, from themselves and others.

responses to my writing always interest me: since starting this blog several months ago i’ve had to deal with a different kind of feedback which i wasn’t expecting. i’ve been amazed at how many of the people in my life assume that i’m writing about them. situations have arisen where my words on this blog have been twisted against me and so far, undeservedly because the post wasn’t even about the person riled up about it. (yet). my theory is that readers who i actually know who take umbrage come at me from a place of slight paranoia/megalomania. ego, natch.

advice-giving friends to me: “see, your problem is you tell people about your blog. and you’re public with it, so everyone knows it’s you. it’s easier when you write under a pseudonym, you don’t have to worry as much. and wait for a while before you pass on your blog to new people.”

most people i know in the blogging community aren’t “out” to more than a handful of people. most of the bloggers i know in rl don’t pass on their blog address to their lovers, families, co-workers or most friends. i can understand the need/desire for anonymity, protection and security online. i can also understand not wanting to deal with the response from those you already have relationships with. i understand why people write under a pseudonym.

but the whole point of this blog in particular is to make myself more comfortable with writing honestly. challenge my boundaries surrounding public expression of my life’s ups and downs. deal with having my personal writing out there in the world. i want to take ownership of what i’m writing about here. i want to take ownership of the decisions and choices i’ve made, and i want to be confident in presenting them, whether i’ve messed up or not. partly, this blog is about learning faith in self.

of course the people who come into my life show up in my blog. it’s my response to situations that happen that usually involve other people. i do have my own personal rules when writing about other people: limit identifying information; write nothing out of malice, spite or any other negative emotion; answer “yes” if the person whom the post is about asks if it’s about them; and keep the blog post about my reaction to the situation, not the other person’s role.

i’m now adopting a “never apologise, never explain” approach when confronted/attacked/questioned. i don’t need to defend what i choose to write about. writing is what i do, it’s what i need to do. and whomever i choose to be with needs to accept that and have trust in me around it.

and on a slightly different tip: yes, i do easter egg my posts.

Title reference: “You’re So Vain” - Carly Simon, 1972.

last night’s dream was as surreal as they’ve been getting:

an albino newt. water. a boy child, lost. arts and crafts. blood. streets. danger. security. loss. more amphibians. a motorbike with sidecar. searching. wise women (feminine energy). watching. repetition. subconscious. fear. riddles. Macbeth.

i asked for some clarity. i’ll be adding to this particular post as i receive it.

***

July 29:

I’m in a large room, standing in front of an aquarium filled with newts swimming around in it. All the newts are a newt-y muddy brown colour, except for one, which is pure white. I’m transfixed by the swimming movements of the newts and how they move around each other without colliding, especially the albino newt. As I’m watching, one of the brown newts swims up behind the albino newt, and without any warning, clamps on to the albino’s tail. I gasp in horror as I watch the tail fall off like a lizard’s. Blood clouds out of the stump, and the albino newt swims away (not in a panic), leaving its tail in the other newt’s mouth. The albino newt climbs out of the aquarium, and stops on a pipe near the aquarium, where it just looks around. I feel compassion and sympathy for the newt and its bleeding stump, but the albino newt seems completely unbothered, and I know its tail will grow back.

I’m drawing again. I do it for another outlet, although my primary form of expression is writing, I’m first and foremost a visual person. I haven’t been drawing for years, unless it’s for design sketches, which I either execute on Illustrator or commission someone else with real artistic talent to complete. But I’m drawing again.

I sketch idly, playing with colour combinations, sometimes with a plan, sometimes without. This time around too, I’m playing with texture and feeling, using different mediums for different experiences on my skin. I’ve gone from pen and pencil to watercolours, and now I’m on soft pastels. Getting my fingers all in it.

What triggered the need to draw was the storyboarding of a short film that I would like to produce. Working off the narrative, I quickly sketched out in ink the shots that I had imagined corresponding. After the storyboard was completed, I laid it out, looked at it and then went back and re-wrote the original text, and not in a way that made it easier to film. And I haven’t stopped drawing since.

I’m surprised at what’s been happening as a result. Without fail, every single drawing, whether it’s been completed or not, has triggered a written piece that doesn’t necessarily explore the same topics or themes. Sometimes I’ve had to cut short visual expressions to go vomit on to a page/screen what’s built up. I wasn’t expecting this. So now I’ve got a whole bunch of bad sketches to accompany the scraps of paper and incomplete documents that seem to rule my life.

New exercise: plan a bunch of drawings that explore one particular theme or narrative, and use them for a series of related texts. Not that I need any new projects to work on, but I’m going to integrate this with one of the larger projects currently in action.

***

PS - someone commented on the amount of posts I had up. It’s because I’ve been spending way more time than usual writing again. I’m happy, I’m prolific. So by default, there are more posts.

Title reference: “Get By” - Talib Kweli, 2002.

rebuff

i can only take so much rebuff, rejection, refusal before i reach my breaking point. my something’s-got-to-give point. i can only balance so much when i’m not affirmed, validated, wanted. well, i broke, something gave, and things turned ugly. i turned ugly, and for a few minutes there, i didn’t like who i became. didn’t think i could become that. but it’s there. granted, it took a pretty deep stab to reach it, but it’s there alright.

you’d think i’d choose a different career than writing, seeing as i don’t deal too well with rejection, and the editorial process is a whole other level of discomfort. but hey, masochistic streak, there’s my explanation.

so what now? forgiveness is an easy thing to preach, a much harder thing to do. “people never forgive you for the bad things they do to you.” it works both ways i’m sure, but i’ve always taken responsibility for other people’s attacks: you know, if i hadn’t walked into that knife, i wouldn’t have gotten hurt.

i’m not guarding anymore. not out of stupidity or weariness but out of the acceptance that i need to be open. out of an overwhelming, naive need to trust on a human scale. there’s so much ugliness in the world. i need to believe in all the good things in people. i’m dealing with it. the upside is experiences become richer, more intense, lovelier. obvious downside, what with all the negative and unhealth floating around. i’m learning new ways to manoeuver, toughening up the core so it’s not so fragile. either way, setting myself up to be hurt or disappointed. but i’m so jaded, cynical, bitter, and unhappy when i don’t have faith.

i’m never going down that road again. i’m not even looking to excuse or rationalise. i’d lost sight of making decisions based on taking care of me; reminder noted. forgiveness starts with self, but my self and i are cool.

moving on, love, and my karma’s my armour.

buffer

had the best day ever yesterday. spent time with my brother. watched my sister play in a steel pan band for the first time. hung out with my friend’s son. bought some art supplies and books (including a graphic novel). tracked down an old friend. chilled around a fire pit. on the way home, taught my brother the lyrics to stiff little fingers songs and we had a singalong in the car. today, i visited friends of mine and spent time with their adorable three-month old. great food, even better company. i go back to toronto in a few days, and it’s going to be okay. a new phase is starting and this buffer’s been exactly what i needed.

still riding that high.

It’s a stack of photographs, and on the top one, the only one accessible, is an image of a man walking. The artist had blanked out the man’s face and drawn wings attached to the man’s back. A hybrid Icarus, if you will. The wings are downward, at rest, and the man looks like he’s crossing the road.

Days later, I was in that photo. I was standing in the middle of the road in bright sunlight, looking all around me. The world felt empty, but people were walking past me, people with sketched on appendages. I wasn’t one of them, and they ignored me as I stared at them. I could hear the wind, but no mechanical noises. All the buildings around me felt deserted, and I knew there were no cars around either.

pseudo-Icarus walked towards me, deliberately. In my dream, he had the face of someone I knew, but not too well. A man in his mid-40s who looked like a smaller Kurt Russell, that I had met a long time ago. Sideburns, and Teddyboy-meets-greaser style. I don’t remember what the man in the artwork was wearing. pseudo-Icarus spoke down to me, knowing something I didn’t. His tone was a blend of chauvinistic mechanic (you know, the kind that calls you little lady) and old school sailor, and although I couldn’t see it, I’d bet there was a comb in his pocket.

He ignored the people walking past us, either looking directly at me, or off into the distance, almost expectantly. I don’t remember what he said, but he was warning me in a non-threatening, and somewhat amused, tone. Like I shouldn’t be where I was, but that ultimately didn’t matter, because something was going to happen to me.

I’m not too sure of my feelings toward pseudo-Icarus. I wanted to trust him, have him be my friend, but there was something about him. He seemed friendly enough, like he was talking to me out of genuine concern. But he also appeared to be the kind of person who, should anything bad have happened to me, I got the feeling that he would have watched, maybe shrugged. Not a hero, nor an anti-hero. After he spoke to me, he walked off and stood in a huddle with two other men who had the same style wings drawn onto their backs and sketched cigarettes between their lips. As they talked to each other, they didn’t try to hide the fact that they were talking about me, and stared directly at me, squinting at the sunlight.

At this point, the camera angle on my dream changed to a rotating pullout of the scene, with myself at the centre. No closure, no sense of processing, no feeling that my subconscious was trying to send me a message. Just a vignette, a mash-up of various images I’ve stored in my mind, filmed starring myself.

***

Title reference: Karen Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore) in Donnie Darko (2001).

The dead animal sightings have followed me two provinces west. Over the past couple of months, several times a week, I’ve come across animal carcasses while moving around. Every kind of urban wildlife there is - from raccoons and a variety of birds, to squirrels, rats, cats and some rodent-looking thing that I couldn’t identify. Some were obvious roadkill, a pair of pigeons were decapitated and some looked like they had just died there.

Omens, for sure. No doubt about it. I did try rationalising the dead animals - chemical pollution, possible overpopulation, weird weather that had messed with the natural order, slack city workers (this predated the Toronto strike). Referenced appearances in literature of dead animal waves - specifically Silent Spring and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. None of that rung true, much as the environmentalist in me was buying into that Doomsday prophecy.

I’ve been in Moose Jaw, Sask. for the past three days, and I’m still coming across dead animals - in the roads (definitely not counting highway roadkill), on bike paths and even my parents’ backyard. This has been non-stop for the past two months. When I mention it to others, trying to make sure that I’m not the only person noticing, I don’t receive any validation. So I’ve started to look into the meaning of these sightings.

It may not even be that there are more dead animals than usual and it’s not that I believe that I’m the only person who can see these dead animals (I do see things that aren’t there, but it’s not the case this time). On a logical tip, I believe that I’m just noticing them more than other people are and they’re affecting me more than they are others. My mental’s cataloguing these sightings, and I would like to know why. So I started looking things up and once again, the coincidences have been ridiculous.

Death = end of a cycle (obviously). Also, where there’s metaphorical death, there is re-birth because everything needs to balance out, and the new can’t show up unless the old makes way for it. Reading around death brings up the phoenix (rebirth through the fire), the sun (sets and rises), the scorpion (venomous healer), 13 (=4, life lesson). Huh.

I have been feeling a pretty major change in my life, and not just superficially, which has been obvious in this blog. I’m transitioning, entering a new phase, saying goodbye, putting a lot to rest. I’m getting slightly impatient but suppressing it, waiting to find out what’s coming next. I guess I’ll find out when I stop seeing the corpses.

“What you seek is seeking you.” - Rumi

From Wikipedia’s style manual:

“An in-universe perspective describes the narrative from the perspective of characters within the fictional universe, treating it as if it were real and ignoring real-world context and sourced analysis. The threshold of what constitutes in-universe writing is making any effort to re-create or uphold the illusion of the original fiction by omitting real-world info.”

For the past 72 hours, I’ve been sitting with my emotions, trying to process and organise the mental mess that my thoughts currently constitute. Earlier on this year, a friend told me that she felt that I wasn’t going to be moving anywhere, and not necessarily in a physical sense, for a while. At the time I was like, I knew that, based on some news about the next few years of my life. My friend brought that up again a couple of days ago. What she had said back in March was true. Externally, I’ve hardly budged from where I was then. Internally, I’ve not shifted per se, but there’s been movement in the sense of turmoil.

Problematically for me, whenever I’m in stressful situations as I have been for most of the past year, I construct alternative realities in my head. I’ve done this my entire life, causing the people closest to me to get frustrated with my apparent obtuseness and stubbornness. “It makes sense in my head,” had been one of my catchphrases. Confronting and dealing with a whole bunch of issues is now teaching me that living entirely in my head is not, in today’s parlance, a good look. It’s reflective of my elaborate avoidance tactics.

I’m grateful for the time I’ve had to be able to sit with my issues. I’m proud of myself for learning how to be patient with myself. I’m still raw and in pain from the lessons I’ve been taught, but the healing has begun. Life’s harsh and personal growth is distressing. I’ve been really fragile because I haven’t had the energy to keep my defenses up. But it’s impossible to learn about trust without taking risks. And on a possibly masochistic streak, I wanted to see what would happen to me if I allowed myself to be that vulnerable, if it was worth it. I lost that particular venture but it was undoubtedly worth it. I’ve now been tested in new ways and I’m a lot more confident of who I am and what I offer as a result.

I’m now mapping out how I’m going to more effectively manage and influence the situations I put myself into. I’ve been learning about the importance of symbolism, and semiotics in retrospect isn’t as effective as reading the signs around me. My writing provides me with the most comprehensive clues - I mainly write through channeling and I’ve been unaware of the timely significance of the pieces I produce during certain times. The recent synchronicity has been blowing my mind. Omens, symbols, harbingers and signifiers abound, if only I knew to pay attention to them at the time.

And weirdly, the following cultural markers have been repetitively showing up in completely unrelated settings: Philip K. Dick (Valis mentioned by a friend, opera performed later on this year, Valis mentioned in my horoscope; sister doing coursework on Do Androids Dream…?, graphic novel coming out; Adjustment Bureau and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale in production); Catch-22 being referred to in unconnected conversations, history lessons in Assyria, Yossarian quotes being sent my way); a week in which every day featured Bacharach-written songs and conversations around them with completely different people; the other musical coincidences are too much to mention; the story of Icarus (after writing my earlier post, Avoiding Icarus, I recently met someone significant who had both appeared in another post and is connected to the name Daedalus). There’s an incredible amount of widespread channeling going on this year.

According to what I’ve learned so far, here’s what’s going on in my life: I’ve been blocking some kind of energy within me which is throwing everything off balance. The energy is feminine and contains both destructive and creative forces. I’m reaching a pivotal moment in my life and have to learn how to balance both sides because so far, my repression has been pushing me towards self-destruction. I have the power to manifest my desires and combining that with a migrant work ethic, all the signs are pointing to achieving a potential where I have no idea where the limits are. I’m feeling re-invigorated. I need to pay attention to what’s going on around me. I need to stop using my mental/spiritual (in the forms of my sub-conscious and imagination) as a refuge in the way a child will hide in a closet and rock herself; rather, I need to incorporate my safe fantasy worlds with my tangible existence. I need to stop fighting against Darkness, moving on from acknowledgment of the unhappiness that exists in my psyche to an acceptance that it is something that might never change, but can be managed.

And right now, I’m in the Prairies for a much-needed escape. And once again, I’m looking for somebody else. Feeling concerned about the distance since last seeing this person, but this time at least I understand what the drive behind this need to re-locate is.

I’m finally learning how to exist in my real life. It only took me three decades to start.

monday july 13 and over three weeks of no municipal garbage collection in toronto and it shows. the streets reek of garbage - an unpleasant stench of household waste, rotting food and decomposing animal corpses. detritus blows across pavements, weaving its way between the feet of pedestrians. i’m grossed out by the smell and look of downtown.

i’m way too entwined with this city. i’ve been picking up my mental cues from it - the disarray and unhealthiness had seeped into my life. i’m not usually like this, but a year-long series of messed-up situations has me feeling like whatever regulates my life is on strike too.

i recently came out of another intense and prolonged depression, so at least the helplessness is over. starting to make concrete steps toward becoming healthier, more productive and better, in so many ways. i had to go pretty far down, further than i had been in a while, before i could say “this is enough” right as i was being pushed deeper into Darkness. the oft-absent pragmatist stepped in at the very last second, deus ex machina style. i’m not really down with martyrdom for an extended period of time. my coping strategies haven’t been the healthiest and having wallowed for a tad too long, i’m on my way back up. taking care of self and not losing sight of the important things in life - my health, community, family and work. getting back into building once again.

had been on the losing end of too many battles in every single area of my life. felt so beat-up. karma, we good now? i got a blue car with my name on it out west, so i’m ducking out for a little while. the reset button on my life has been pressed, and it’s all new again. there’s tonnes of bright spots, i can see them. a reminder that i need to shape up for the next ones coming in. grateful for the love and protection coming from expected and unexpected places. i’m sorry i strayed, but i’m back on my path. keep those torches burning, they’re guiding me.

love and fierceness all up in this now.

one morning, i was followed home by a statue, a guardian of some ancient temple or city. i heard the stone footsteps behind me, and when i reached my front door, a hybrid mythical creature showed itself and waited for the expected invitation. i invited him in.

we sat across my glass table, drank coffee and talked for hours, our voices getting lower until we were barely above a whisper. and as we spoke, he weaved enchantment around me, turning air into amniotic fluid. i had spiced the coffee with cloves, cardamom and cinnamon, my own welcoming spell to control my home. his magic overwhelmed mine.

i felt safer than i had in a very long time. as the day passed, flecks of stone fell off his body and the greyness of his skin changed until he was fully revealed. tenne-coloured with the crinkle-cornered blue eyes of a hunter and the posture of a warrior.

guardian of the divine, protector of treasure, watching over a city that refuses to return a piece of my heart. the temptation to believe that he was real was overwhelming and dangerous. the coincidences were too many, and coincidences often aren’t.

but creatures from legends don’t exist; the trophies hunters brought home with the stories are all fake. my mythical hero no more exists on this plane than the Sirens, although he’s equally as seductive and deadly. it is dangerous to give in to fantasy but sometimes, my imagination is all i have.

you know how i can tell when i completely lose touch with the real? when my points of reference are almost exclusively mythical. it’s not real! it’s not logical, rational or pragmatic. i relate too easily to fictional characters and turn every single real life action into a fictional adventure. i become a bona fide supraman.

‘Superman?’ Clevinger cried. ‘Superman?’

‘Supraman,’ Yossarian corrected.

the cast of characters in my life, if they only knew, become correlated to imagined existences. i can’t even see the true characteristics of people, of events, of places. objects and characters that may never have existed (apart from in their human creators’ minds) become part of my everyday. it’s disturbing because now i can’t even trust my own perceptions or interpretations of situations. and those around me become caught up in my fantasy world.

it happens slowly, with the odd allusion. and then, insiduously, this fantastical thought processing consumes everything.

it’s how i take control over circumstances around me over which i have no control. i re-name, re-categorise, re-shape, until things become unrecognisable in this plane. re-allows me to manipulate and influence outcomes. unfortunately, it’s all hallucinated. none of this is real.

ultimately, when i’m forced to deal with the gravity of rl situations, it’s physically and mentally painful. i come back with a vicious bump and get steamrolled over when i try to transpose the decisions i’ve made elsewhere into this existence.

this has been going on for decades. but i think i’ve figured out how to at least manage it. conversely, i got that lesson from lost, season four. i need to find a constant - something that can travel with me into these imaginary fantastical constructed realms in my head, and provide me with a point of reference external of self.

or, i need to find an incredibly patient therapist.

***

Title reference: “Wrapped Around Your Finger” - The Police (1983).