There is something so utterly ironic and frustrating about being sleep deprived on a regular basis due to your four toothed cheese eating crawling roving smiling 10-month old, only to have your husband thrash around at 3:00 a.m., get up to go to the bathroom, heave his 200 pound frame back into bed so hard that your 5 foot 9 inch frame literally BOUNCES off the bed. Then he pulls all the covers off you, leaving you awake and shivering. You spend the next 60 minutes thinking about evey person you ever slighted, every shameful thing you have done, every decision you regret, and you analyze all of these events and wonder if you were just truly manifesting your own shameful dysfunction, or if all of this was just part of what led you on the path you are on. Who the Hell knows? The path may just end up leading to elightenment. Hell if I know.

I have cut people out of my life because they disappointed me. Because they made me feel small and ahsamed. I have cut people out of my life for my own self-serving purposes. My load was lighter without them. I am thinking back on a particular time when I was careening through life, gooning wine like I was being chased by someone who was going to take it away. Trying so hard to make things feel right. And Failing. I was doing things that were damaging to me, and to other people and feeling terrible and ashamed.

I wonder where that all came from. How long it built up in me. I wonder if I am really done with that dark stuff. I sat in bed for an hour, staring at the clock and feeling the shame over me like a pall. Now that it's written into actual words, I see that perhaps it's not as huge and crushing as it felt an hour ago. I think maybe I can roll that huge boulder a little to the left and pull my squashed, pulpy mangled soul out from underneath it. I would really like to put my pulpy soul back to bed where it can go back to sleep and let go of this horrendous guilt and self-inflicted angst.

While I am at it, I hope to take that little voice in my head that tells me "you are a goddamned idiot" behind the house, put it out of its everlasting misery and bury it for good.

My therapist told me the reason I was feeling more keenly emotional about things was because I am writing more. I suppose that can't be a bad thing. I am just afraid of what rotting carcasses I might find as I clean my mental house and clear away the newspapers, take-out boxes and beer cans that have been cluttering my landscape and hiding all the monsters that I can't see, but can hear. They make creepy rustling noises. I am scared to see what they look like. It makes me think of the time I was babysitting my younger sisters and Betsy, the youngest and probably six years old at the time, came upstairs from the basement TV room looking pale and scared out of her mind. She told me there was something moving aound under her chair and she didn't know what it was. I went downstairs and there WAS something under there, making a huge racket. I didn't know what kind of scary creature was lurking there, but I just squeezed my eyes shut and pulled the chair away. A blackbird flew out from under it. We started shrieking and laughing and running around. After it flew upstairs, we closed all the drapes and opened the front door to guide it out. It flew right out the front door to freedom, never to be seen again.

Originally posted on I'm Ablogging on June 28, 2005