Went for a walk and bought groceries and a hydration drink. It was nice to take the long walk home and look at the grey sky and snow-laden trees and drink an artificially sweet weird concoction. I was thinking about Nera and how things sometimes feel really bleak but the good stuff is as real as the bad stuff. It´s a weird position to find oneself in because doesn´t that mean that ultimately everything is as un/real and morally ambiguous as the next thing and the only thing that separates bliss from suffering is how we find the taste. To God having Nera go through teeth extraction in her last month of life, because I didn´t know that she already had a cancer, was probably just as lovely as the moments she spent rolling in fresh grass. Because it all just "is". Just like my psychosis was as much of an important part of my life as graduating Uni. Or falling in and out of love with my ex. But something about that thought makes me angry and makes me to not want to accept it. I don´t want to live in a morally ambiguous world where material conditions just give raise to things that melt away never to be seen again. If that were my view of existence I´d be a Buddhist. But I don´t want to leave it all to God either. I don´t want to be a good Christian anymore, I want to be the worst possible Christian, to the point of being heretical and denying that the system is good. The system is shit. The world is terrible and it has so much suffering in it that we either tune out or get broken. No matter where I look, the only two emotions that have made my life worth anything are anger and amusement. Love is a reciprocal process, not an emotional response, so it doesn´t count here for what I´m trying to say, although I value it higher than any other thought process or state of existence. Anger makes us want to make things not the way that they anger us anymore and amusement allows us to enjoy the rest and also to partake in another beings´ amusement, which gives raise to love.
Anyway, I´m rambling. What I´m trying to ask myself, I guess, is did I give in to psychosis or did it sweep me like the ocean swallows a surfer? Was there something I could have done better? I think I held on as long as I could; if anything, I should have allowed the wave to take me sooner, to shave said sooner that I hear and see things, I can´t trust my own senses anymore. But of course my senses told me to not do that. And some elements of the madness were seductive. I was sober and still my experience was so heightened, so bristling with meaning, it felt like my body couldn´t contain it all. Which is the reality of it, of course. The black eyes I saw in the mirror were a result of hormonal changes, adrenaline running my system on overdrive. I´d spook at shadows and miss eating for days on end. My body ran hot enough to wear shorts in Finnish October. And all this, at the end of the day, is meaningless too. One broken man´s one broken mind puppeting a body that didn´t get the memo that the time to break down was last Tuesday.
Does it matter? The ER nurses won´t remember me anymore. The neighbors who witnessed my naked escapades when I thought I was having a witches´ sabbath will talk about it until spring, maybe, or whenever a new nuisance pops up. The mental hospital is still gonna be there, I will probably need to go in again at some point. And the ward will be largely unchanged and so will the personnel because we all age in unison, so slowly we barely even notice it anymore.
But on the other hand there were those instances, those glimmers were I felt like the world at large had it wrong and that maybe me and the other patients saw things the right way round and the rest of the world was nurturing a shared illusion. When that one old man comforted me by offering me a bowl of sugar right in the moment when I was crying bitter tears about the impossibility of finding love with the mind-body discrepancy that I have going on. There´s honor among the insane.
I should eat. Isn´t that why I started to keep this diary in the first place? To remember to eat. To keep the body going because without it the mind goes too.
I bought myself a Christmas present. A small peach-colored moonstone pendulum. It´s pretty. I showed it to my ex and realized I was more protective against him touching it without permission that I had been about my own body. There´s a lesson there. But I do like the pendulum for the expected reasons, too. I ask things of it. When it swings and hovers, I know what answer I want it to give me, and that´s the whole point of this type of "divination" if you ask me. To cut the conscious mind, the middle man, off and to live in the realm of true wants. I don´t ask the pendulum of it´s opinion, I ask it of my opinion.
My opinions and my dreams, those are the things I want to chase in the year 2024. I have the pendulum and I have a dream diary, just a simple calendar I only use for writing down something about what dreams I had the previous night. Last midwinter I got sober from alcohol and the year 2023 was largely built around the changes that had for my lifestyle. That´s a very daylight type of change. Visible in many ways - waistline, wallet, life expectancy. I need different changes for the upcoming year. Quiet, foundational, dark ones. Changes that may not look like anything to outside spectators but that I will know intimately. I think that in order for me to experience true, reciprocal love, I must first change but not because I´m not lovable as I am. I am very lovable. I have been picked up and played with by a lot of people who thought I was adorable and sweet. And I froze like a deer in headlights and played to the expectations of lovability, like a dog. I didn´t stop to think: is my love actually deserved? Am I getting as much as I am giving? Sometimes I did and the answer was always no. Because I wasn´t playing a fair game myself either because I, as gross as it sounds, was subconsciously loving an "owner" instead of a partner, I was looking at something or someone to put first, so I wouldn´t have time to notice how starved and hurting I was. When I was a child, I loved to carry stuffed animals around so that whenever I would get scared, I could protect the stuffies and not feel scared myself anymore. I just kept that energy going into my romantic relationships, like a mother that pretends the spoon is an aeroplane to keep a baby focused and entertained, distracted from the necessity of nourishment.
By god I should have bought more of those microwaveable fish dinners because I´m terrified of eating something else than those after eating them for a week straight. I´ll have a soy pudding and if it feels scary, I´ll walk back to the grocery store and get my safe fish dinner.
Also, I may or may not have toenail fungus in my left pinky toe. Might also be a runner´s nail because literally nothing but the discoloration fits a fungal infection, but of course my OCD ass is still freaking out about calling the doctor and trying to get a toenail fungus treated when not even psychosis gets you anywhere in the healthcare system. I should do stand up comedy.
