Poem

I found this today so I just thought I’d post it because I know quite a few people in my life are down at the moment.

Don’t Quit
by Anonymous

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit
Rest if you must, but don’t you quit.

Life is queer with its twists and its turns,
As everyone of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about
When they might have won, had they stuck it out.
Don’t give up though the pace seems slow,
You may succeed with another blow.

Often the goal is nearer than,
It seems to a faint and faltering man,
Often the struggler has given up
When he might have captured the victor’s cup;
And he learned too late when the night came down,
How close he was to the golden crown.

Success is failure turned inside out
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far;
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit,
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit!

Stress Journaling pt. 1

Things that stress me at the moment:

-Work

- Parents

- Money

Work and money feed into each other really. I’m having problems with my work at the moment. The atmosphere in the office is awful and I really dread going even though it shouldn’t have to be like that. It’s like being in the school playground with people trying to get attention, and trying to get people into trouble. Well, one person really, and everyone else is trying to cope with that. I really want to find a job I enjoy more, and won’t have this playground attitude… but then short of working with animals, I’m not sure what will. Hm. Plus I need more hours, we’re pretty much living on my wages now and it’s not enough, no matter how much underhanded overtime my friend at work gives me (the odd hour here or there she’s not really meant to but she knows I’m struggling).

Parents are an issue. I just find it difficult to be around them. I can’t be me when I’m around them I have to be what they’ve seen, what I’ve always been and I can’t be that person anymore. I understand that they’re struggling, that it’s hard, but it’s hard for me too. Why can’t they see that I’m happier? I’m trying to become me, and they don’t seem to appreciate that. I’m worried about bringing it up with them because I don’t want to lose them but I’m not sure what else I can do except stay calm and try not to let it get to me.

My aspiration for today – may I be calm when things frustrate me, and react with kindness towards others.

Meh

I did it again last night. I went into the kitchen and basically just blitzed it… I ate everything that I could get into my mouth because I went to my parents and they didn’t treat me as male, they called me by my birth name all the time, everywhere they could fit it in. It made me feel so bad about myself that all I could think of was to eat. I know that I shouldn’t have, but it was the only thing I could think of to make it go away, but yeah, it didn’t. It’s still there, only now I’m feeling bad about overeating as well as feeling bad about going to my parents.

I’m trying but I don’t know how to deal with all this stuff. I keep trying to stay with it but it’s hard. It’s so so hard.

I just want to be seen as a boy.

Habits pt 2

Another one of my big habits is eating. Over eating to be precise. When I’m down, I eat, when I’m bored, I eat, when I go to a restaurant I overeat. I even overeat for no reason at all, especially when I’m in the kitchen at night and its just about to go to bed.

In short food was comfort when I didn’t have any. Food was a relief from everything I wanted to avoid. It was the short term symptom relief when what I need is an attack at the root.

I need to stop.

My aspiration for today: may I only eat in moderation when I need to, not when I want to.

I have joined a weigh in at work. There’s 12 of us. We each pay a pound a week and at the end of 8 weeks the person who’s lost the most gets half of what people have put in and the other half goes to charity. I lost a pound yesterday. I’m now on 13st 9. I need to lose roughly about 2.5st. Even if I lose only a pound a week its better than putting it back on again.

I need to remember to not beat myself up every time I overeat. I will try my best, I will do what I can and see what happens.

Wish me luck!

Habits

I am a creature of many habits. Many that have been strengthened over the years to a place where I just react to things/do things without thinking about them and most of the time I really don’t mean to. Lately I’ve been listening to/reading about a Buddhist nun called Pema Chodron. The way she speaks…it makes a hell of a lot of sense to me and I’ve decided that I’m going to try and do some self reflection, and try and poke at stuff within me in the hope I can make it dissolve, or at least get somewhere with it. I have a feeling I’m going to have to attack some of them with a pick axe to get anywhere!

I’m scared of people. For a long long time people have upset me and hurt me and have generally just not been very nice to me. Now, it becomes very difficult to relate or to be with people because of that, no matter how much I want to be with them, and how much I do actually want to interact and what have you. I always seem to tell myself that they’re going to hurt me, upset me, what have you, and then  I find that my mind works over time, going through all these scenarios, doing this internal dialogue and then I find that I can’t enjoy the time I’m spending with people because my minds off doing something else. I need to stop my mind doing something else, I need to stop shutting down, I need to tell myself, and do things, and be around people to show myself/tell myself that not everyone is bad. Sure, the human race is flawed, and sure, sometimes, people get hurt/do things/say things etc etc and it’s NOT the end of the world. People make up, and apologies are made, and you get forgiven. Holding things in rarely, if ever works. It just makes you so much worse because you can’t enjoy the time that you have with people, you can’t make friends and you can’t move on with your life.

I’m the same in relationships. I’m scared. And that goes back to childhood too. I didn’t get much affection, I didn’t get to speak much about how I feel, I shut a lot of my working thinking/feeling down and I’ve not got it back online again. Affection was so few and far between that when I did get it, when someone did look at me, talk to me, want to be my friend I’d hold on to it for all it’s worth because I couldn’t bare to let it go. I liked being the center of attention because I didn’t get ANY attention from anywhere else or if I did get it then it was bad, it hurt and again I shut down.

This inevitably led to people leaving because I did cling on… which fed into my thoughts of “everyone always leaves me” etc.  I always used to get confused when people used to go and be with their other friends because I didn’t know when or even if they’d be back. I had lots of friends in junior school (I think, I can’t really remember) and then when I hit senior school everything went down hill. I could never spend time with just myself and that was bad because I spent so long on my own. I didn’t know how to cultivate my own interests, I didn’t know how to go out into the big wide world and just be by myself. I still don’t. I still try and cling on with both hands in the hope that I can keep it close, that people won’t leave… but I’m leaning.

But it’s okay. It’s okay when people go out and be with their other friends. It’s okay because they come back, they spend time with me. It’s okay because they don’t hate me, they just don’t want to spend every single second with me. It’s okay to go out and be on my own. It’s okay to not try and seek a distraction, any distraction from my thoughts and my feelings because I do need to stay with them. I need to work  at staying with them and working out why I feel this way without thinking that thoughts are bad, or good. Thoughts just are…thoughts are noise and you don’t have to believe in them.

I’m learning that my world doesn’t have to be the size of a postage stamp. I’m learning that whenever I feel the tightening in my chest, or a spike of fear or uncertainty that it’s okay. I can do that. I don’t have to shut down. I just have to stay with it, ride it out until the end without my mind going off somewhere.

Sit. Stay. Heal.

Oh the wonders of life…

This will probably be jumbled as hell but I don’t know, I’m hoping that it’ll maybe help.

I’ve been feeling contradicted, confused, taken advantage of just lately. More so than usual. I mean its nothing new, I’ve been feeling it for years due to my inability to say no. I find it upsets people and god knows I don’t want to do that. But then I’m not sure when something makes me uncomfortable, or upset anymore. I guess I never knew. I’ve been living with at least a low grade level of anxiety for so long now so it becomes difficult to distinguish between emotions.

How much of myself have I pushed down and refused to deal with? How much more would I be feeling if I just unpacked everything and let it be despite the upset and the anger and the whatever.

I don’t know what I want, and if I do want it I can’t tell the difference between whether I want it or I think I do, or should do. But its been like that for years, nothing has changed. Running with things tends to help but its not always the best for anyone else.

I want friends. I want to go out and do stuff but I don’t know how to make friends, I’m scared of people, I feel more than anxious when I’m with them but I don’t do being on my own very well. I worry about crowding people, of suffocating them. I worry about upsetting them. I don’t know how to hold a conversation and I want to run away as much as I want to be with them. God only knows how to build relationships on top of friends, work out the difference, work out that line, let it be if you can’t.

The problem is I’ve taught myself not to feel, not to want because I always end up getting hurt. I’m like a blank slate with a shit tonne of baggage, half of which isn’t even conscious anymore. I’m like a big block of modeling clay, or a puzzle with a few pieces missing.

It’s like people I find ‘atttractive’. Now I don’t even know if there’s anyone I’ve found straight off the bat attractive. I understand what is determined as attractive but I don’t find it attractive. I never have. I war with myself over whether I like boys or girls when it all comes down to the fact I like people, not what they have in their pants. But I still overthink. I overthink everything, I just can’t let it be. I always have to poke.

Sex is the same, most of the time I can happily go without but I overthink that too. Why can’t I just let myself run with what I want, when I want? How do I even figure out what I want? Other people seem to manage just fine.

My counsellor once said that I’d somehow got lost along the way. He wasn’t wrong only how can you be lost if you never had a way in the first place?

Aspiration for the day

May I pause for three breaths before I say or act out in frustration.

Religion/Ways of life

I’ve been Pagan for as long as I can remember. Nature to me is something I understand far more than the human world. The human world full of smoke and noise and anger and pain. It’s somewhere I’ve never really fitted in no matter how I try or what I do.

Organised religion is not for me. Sure I like structure and order but I don’t really like being told what to do, what to believe, this, this, this is wrong and this is how you should behave and all that. I also cannot stand being preached to. Being told that I’m bad or evil because I’m different and because I don’t worship the same way you do.

I like a nudge, not a whole list, you know? And that’s what I like about Paganism. I like that there’s no hard and fast rules, I like that you can choose what to do and what not to provided you don’t hurt anyone whilst you’re doing it.

But there isn’t one branch of Paganism that resonates with me. I’ve read a lot, I’ve done a lot but although I borrow bits and bobs from different places I still don’t feel… right? I’m not sure that’s maybe the right word but I’m still looking for my way.

Just lately I’ve been reading a book about fears and habits that comes from a Buddhist point of view. Now I’ve read Buddhism books before and what I’ve read hadn’t resonated entirely with me. Until now. I’ve been reading about Shenpa. That is about attachment to things, both good and bad. We all have them and the more I read about it the more it makes sense. I have that a lot, attachment to things, people, emotions and its not always a good thing to rely solely on them because they’re not going to always be there and it stops you from being open, being neutral and leads to worry and pain. It also leads to me numbing out. I don’t want to numb out anymore, I want to be in the present.

I’m going to see if I can find more about it, maybe go to the Buddhist Centre in Nottingham or the Meditations on a Tuesday night. I’ve finally found something that resonates with me.

Fantasies and other things related

This is just something I need to try and put into words.

I don’t think I have fantasies. Or if I do, I don’t think that they are. They don’t make me aroused or anything like that (it actually takes me a lot to get aroused but that’s probably more for another post) It’s very complicated. I think I USED to, but then I used to do a lot of things that I don’t do now, but again they never aroused me. I think that my brain realised it was never going to have any of these things so it just stopped thinking about it. I know I think too much, and I just wonder how normal it is not to have fantasies. Yeah, I know I’m asexual,  but do other non-sexual people have fantasies too? I often wonder if it’s because I don’t have the right body parts…that I can’t seem to relate to them as maybe I should be able to.

Sometimes I wonder about being pinned down and screwed senseless but sex isn’t all that fun anyway. Sure it feels nice sometimes, but sometimes it’s just uncomfortable. Sometimes I wonder about being the one to pin down and… well, you know, and yeah, I don’t have the right body parts for that. Sometimes I wonder whether I would feel different about sex if I had the right body parts. But it’s never going to happen, so I don’t know. But at the same time, these thoughts, these wonderings…they don’t arouse me.

I wonder if it’s because I struggle to picture things in my head. I’m the same with all other things, that don’t always have anything to do with sex. Or maybe I don’t have the emotions to go with it, maybe that’s why. Yeah, I think too much but it’s always of abstract things, things that I don’t really understand. Or maybe it’s my brain saying “ah fuck it” and making me not now because I’m sure that once upon a time I could… but then I can’t really remember much before I left school. Or much of uni for that matter. Only that school was the 9th level of hell and uni was just meh.

It’s like that with attraction. I don’t look at someone and think “Oh they’re hot, I would love to…” and the like. It takes a while for me to trust someone enough for them to be…not attractive, but safe? secure? I don’t experience that THING that people seem to do. And then when I do come to like someone, then I get guilty, or worry that they won’t like me back. I don’t know how to flirt, I don’t know how to date, I’m still struggling around things like that because I’ve never had them. I always seem to try and attach logical things to them instead of just feeling. I attach labels to things because they help me to relate and I know that’s not always a good thing… everything doesn’t have to have a label. But again it’s hard for me to work around that.

I need to stop living in the past. Need to stop wondering what might have been, or never was. But the problem is I can’t really live in the moment. I can’t settle in and just enjoy things, or not as the case may be. I worry that if I feel much past the amount to survive (like now!) I think too much, and if I think too much I just end up crying. I hate crying but it’s the only time I feel in the present, it’s the only time I feel in the moment, it’s the only time I don’t feel fuzzy headed and just…not with anything. I run so much of my life on auto pilot and I know it’s not helpful.

There’s so much I want to do, that just seems hopeless, so I just stick with what I have and then I’m miserable. Like work. Work makes me so miserable and I keep trying to find another job but I don’t really have the skills. I wish I’d worked with animals, I wish I could write more, wish I’d done English, or Criminology, or anything that meant that I wouldn’t be stuck answering the phones at Asda 5 years out of uni. I’m stuck in a rut only I don’t know how to get out of it.

I’m still trying to figure out what I want, and yet I’m so scared of change. I’m still trying to figure out what, and who I am, and yet I’m scared of change. I know that I don’t think the same as everyone else, I don’t react the same as everyone else and I know that you should always try to be yourself, and not what other people are but how do people do that? How do people make friends? How do people date? People seem to not have any problems at all and yet it’s impossible for me.

I know I’m lucky; I actually have a job, I have a house, I am reasonably healthy, I have my girlfriend and my rats and I know it could be a lot lot worse. But I don’t know what to do to get out of this mental rut I’m in. I don’t know how to make myself happy.

I don’t know how to just stop thinking and let go.

My “Things That Make Me Happy” List

Because sometimes I really need this list. Things will be added to it.

- Sunrise/Sunset
- The smell of rain
- Being hugged
- Having someone get a joke you’ve told even if no-one else does.
- Making someones day that little bit better
- Getting feedback on writing/something you’ve done
- Always being greeted by my rats when I walk into my room
- Rainbows
- Having a photo come out really well
- Watching the waves at the seaside
- An ice cold drink when you’re really hot or thirsty
- The smell of freshly cut grass/the seaside/soil/tarmac in the rain
- Travelling
- Meeting a person who gets you completely
- Completely geeking out over things with someone
- Thunderstorms
- Rain on a tent roof
- Feeling safe
- Beach-combing
- The stars on a clear night
- Apple pie and custard
- Books
- Comic books
- Attempting to draw
- Having my forehead kissed