definitely *not* keeping it together...

Dear savers of face (addendum to previous post),

Just so you know, it's probably okay to have a meltdown. And I think most people can empathize with a meltdown.

About two days ago, around midnight (my meltdowns usually happen at night for some reason), I had a mini melt down.

I had spent the previous five days feeling extremely ill (due to my neverending flu), and I just crawled into bed beside my boyfriend, and began whimpering.

He said, "Awww... sweetie, what's wrong."

Big mistake on his part. Personally, I think if someone's crying, and you acknowledge that crying, I just makes them cry harder... At least it does in my case!

So I start blubbering about how I feel like such a loser because I've been so sick, and how I suck because I'm unemployed, and how I feel like such a burden. I went on and on about how even though I feel sick, I feel like I have to clean and do all the house stuff, and I feel like I can never let anything fall apart, and how everything needs to at least look decent, if not fantastic. I blubbered on like this for about 30 minutes, all the while feeling guilty, because he had to wake up for work early in the morning.

And he, the eternal darling, murmured, "Honey, it's okay to let things unravel for a little while. You don't have to be on top of everything all of the time. I don't care if things are messy, or if you don't feel like getting dressed. And who ever comes over? Just take care of yourself while you're feeling shitty, and let the rest do whatever it's going to do."

It was like a breath of fresh air!

So, it took awhile to digest what he said; but today, I let go.

I laid in bed until past noon. I didn't do any dishes. I made my SO cook. And I pretty much read and watched TV all day.

You know what?

The world didn't stop. No one said anything about anything. And, best of all, I actually feel better.

Letting it unravel, one thread at a time,
O.
PS. "Letting go" seemed to have some karmic advantage, since I got my first call for an interview this afternoon! Woohoooooooo to letting go!

keeping it together, even when i really just can't!

Dear fellow savers of face (you know who you are!),

I like to "save face." Saving face means that you are in a position where you have lost some element of your personal dignity, and you try to recover a shred of that dignity in whatever way you can.

Say for example you go to pay for your groceries at the store. You know you don't have much money in your account, but you're pretty sure you have enough to pay for the groceries you've picked out. You swipe the card, tap in your PIN, and wait... wait... then the machine beeps and flashes "Insufficient Funds!"

What do you do?

It's pretty rare for anyone to say, "Oh, shit! Look how poor I am! I can't even afford $20 worth of groceries!"

Usually a person will say something to the effect of, "Aw, crap, my cheque didn't go through!" or, "What the? My boss was supposed to deposit my pay! What an ass!"

Then you either whip out a credit card (if you have one), or scrounge through your purse to pay part cash and part debit, or (horror of all horrors) you slink away from the register and abandon your groceries whilst muttering excuses.


My version of saving face is a system of survival unto its own.

I grew up po'. I grew up po' and went to school with all the rich kids in town.

When you grow up surrounded by kids with all the right clothes, who live on the right side of town, in the right houses, you sort of develop a complex.

Growing up with all these kids who had all "the toys" was not easy. (Mind you, it was easier pre-ipod, pre-cellphone, and pre-laptop, and so on.) I worried a lot about fitting in.

It was pretty easy to hide the fact that my family lived in a not-so-nice apartment... all I had to do was make sure that no one came around to visit me. It was pretty easy to hide the fact that I was not up with the latest video games... all I had to do was pretend that studying and playing were more important than games.

It was a lot harder to hide the fact that I simply looked different from the other kids. Those kids had the brand name clothes, and the expensive shoes, and the pretty jewelry, and the funky new accessories.

I did not have those things. But I tried. Confronted with the "indignities" of poverty (or relative poverty), I tried to save face.

I learned very quickly that if you don't "look right" then you won't fit in. So at a very tender age, I became meticulously focused on my appearance. I tried to always look nice... to take care of my hair, to keep my clothes clean and fresh looking, to make sure that my outfits always matched and fit me well. I even went so far to harass my financially stretched family to go out and buy me some of those brand name clothes... I wound up with some second hand brand name sweaters that I was thrilled with!

When I was diagnosed, so many moons ago, with psychosis, that meticulousness, and how it had kept me socially viable (when I might have otherwise stuck out like a sore thumb), stuck with me.

Psychosis imposes enormous indignities on the people who live with it. Psychosis causes symptoms that seem strange or frightening to those not familiar with the disease. People who live with psychosis often face discrimination as a result of the ignorance and mythology that persist about this condition. The media, our friends, and even our families claim that murderers, rapists, and molesters must be "insane;" inadvertently diminishing the dignity of every single person who is truly afflicted with the condition of psychosis by placing perverse criminals in the same category as someone with a serious and life-altering biological disease.

So I knew that this disorder would somehow affect or at the very least distort my personal sense of dignity. And I knew I had to save face (again).

I knew very deep inside of me that I could not "look" sick. I knew that people would judge me if I somehow looked "different" from everyone else. My hair could never be unkempt in public. My outfits always had to be perfect. I always had to be properly dressed and accessorized for every occasion... even if I did not feel like it... even if I really could not afford it.

Now, as an adult, living on my own, this sense of "saving face" takes on a whole new meaning.

I sit here, seven days into a flu (now on the healing end, I hope!) and I look around me and think, "What can I do to make this place look better?" Because for some reason, to me, if *I* look good (and by extension, my surroundings look good), then all must be well... even when all most definitely isn't well.

So everyone, please know, that sometimes looks are deceiving. Even when someone looks great, when they're home looks wonderful, and when they seem to have it all together, that person may be hiding behind appearances, hoping that no one will notice what is going on underneath.

I have to go clean something now.

Always hiding, even when I'm too tired to hide,
O.

dignity is hard to come by...

Dear fans of music and people who feel the burn of daily life,

I love a good line. Some people just really know how to say something, without needing to say much.

I love these lyrics by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah:

"So go salvage some of your human dignity,
'cause it'll be a long hard road."

For some reason, I think that people don't think enough of themselves. The ennui of daily life, with all the complaints, and aggressions, and all the saddness, and the irritations... the ennui eats away at us a little, day by day, by day.

We don't see our sadness or frustration or anger. We don't see that we are leaden with the burdens of our daily lives. These ennuis build up slowly, like grains of sand on a table. As we move about our lives, the grains are added, one by one, by one... until the legs of the table begin to wobble beneath the weight of its burdens.

These song lyrics remind me, that no matter what negative things happen in my daily life, I am human, and I deserve respect, kindness, and to be treated in a manner that is free of judgment or stereotyped thinking. Nobody has a right to impose their burdens, anger, or general shit on me.

So every day, I salvage my dignity by standing up for my beliefs and convictions, by commanding respect from those who would rather put me down than see me as an equal, and by offering the same dignities to every single person I meet... respect, kindness, and freedom from judgment and discrimination.

Forever yours, in dignity and in respect,
O.

forgive me (proverbial) Father, for I have lost... my motivation

Dear (proverbial, because I'm not religious) Father,

Father, forgive me, for I have lost my motivation. At least I think I have. I feel I have...

I am currently "between jobs" as my too kind and supremely diplomatic friend put it, after I told her that I am an unemployed dirtbag. In truth, I have been "between jobs" for about four months now. Granted, I have been dealing with health problems and waiting on a contract that keeps getting pushed back, but still, that does not stop me from feeling like a giant sack of shite every day. (My health problems are of the "physical" variety this time around, as opposed to the "mental" variety... as if that distinction should actually exist in our day and age, so please don't worry too much, dear readers!)

My partner saunters off to work every morning. And I bury myself deeper into my blankets, thankful for one or two more hours of sleep, dreading that I have to wake up and find things to occupy myself with that day.

Four months ago, finding things to do was easy, since me and my SO had recently moved into a new apartment. I occupied my days with painting, arranging furniture, cleaning, and organizing, while simultaneously trying to manage my health problems. He went to work. It was a great formula because we were both contributing to building our new life, just in different ways.

All of that is done now. There are no more changes to be made to the apartment. There is not one curtain left to hang, or one measly door to paint. He goes off to work. I wake up to another day... another day of feeling like a dirtbag.

So I sit, every morning, on my couch, and wonder, what the hell am I going to do with myself today? And I think; I feel like a sack of poop. I feel like all I do is cook, clean, and waste a lot of valuable time that should be spent working and earning an income.

The other day I visited my too kind and disgustingly diplomatic friend. We had a chat about what we were up to recently. I actually haven't seen her since I moved into the new place four months ago.

I told her how I haven't really done much in the months I've been at the new place. But I told her about the work I've done on the apartment. The furniture I've refinished, the rooms I've painted, the shopping I've done to get the place looking somewhat livable. I chatted about the gardening I've done, and the more that I plan to do. I told her about the meetings I've attended in order to "harvest" the job that I'm waiting on in the hopes that it will open up soon. I told her about the book I'm trying to write. How I sit for about four hours a day, three or four days a week, tap tapping on my digital computing machine (erm, my craptop). I told her that I'm averaging about two pages a day during those sessions. I talked about this blog that I've started. I talked about the books that I've read. I talked about the pets that I feed and give love to every day. I talked about all the baking I've done since I've moved in and so on.

At the end of our chatting, she interjected, "Wow, you sound pretty busy!"

I looked at her in total disbelief. I was shocked that she had said that; totally and speechlessly shocked in fact.

Here I've been beating myself up for being "unmotivated," and my friend, my blessed, wonderful, generous friend, in one simple sentence totally put my life into perspective (at least, the last four months of my life, anyway).

I guess it's all a matter of how we look at things, huh? And it's possible, that my goggles are a little screwed up or something, given all the hangups I have about wanting to be a "contributer" not a "consumer." How else do you explain why I've been castigating myself for the last three months?

Here's to waiting one more week for that mythological job to open up... and here's to one more week of "doing nothing!"

The busiest, yet most unmotivated, girl on this side of the pond,
O.

PS. If you don't know what the word "consumer" is, here is an explanation: Consumer is what the mental health professionals call people who have mental illness. People with problems of mental health are called "consumers" because historically people with mental illness have been dependent on health care and social services... Their logic in using this term is that people with mental illness "consume" social services in the same way that people with money voraciously consume products on the market.

This is a dangerous term because in the word "consumer" is implied that people who require the help of health care professionals and social services don't give back to their communities. It is implied, by using this word, that people with problems of mental health only take from their communities. Examples of giving back include volunteerism, using experiential knowledge and skills in the workplace or to help peers, contributing to the community and social services through paying taxes, and so on.

PPS. I LOATHE the term consumer.