Adventures du jour!
Slept in a bit, woke up feeling waaaaaaay better than yesterday, skipped yoga so I could get outside before it got too hot, promised myself I’d do it later–didn’t.
On the walk, I had a couple of moments where my solar plexus tightened up again, just like my traps did when I first released them. The traps, when they tighten, feel like someone’s trying to claw into my back. Dread. The solar plexus feels like a sudden wave of horror and nausea, and burnt hair when it’s particularly bad. “What have I done?” was a thought that came to mind twice when that happened this morning. The tension there was triggered when people “caught” me taking pics. One guy said, “Do you need something?” in that tone that service workers use that means “WHAT NOW?!?” Which, fair. I told him, “I’m just being a nerd” and left. Another time, a guy was out for a smoke and looked at me.–That one was pretty valid. He was staring at my chest and licking his lips. (UGH.) I booked it on out of there. I think now that I don’t have a wad of tension permanently settled in my guts, I may be able to fine-tune my instincts a bit so it’s not “100% anxiety” or “100% reckless” all the time. When your internal gauges are maxed out, it’s hard not to react in black and white terms.
Today was groceries and getting stuff ready for Ray’s 21st birthday. I’m making tonkatsu ramen with broth and pork belly, and we’re doing taijin margaritas, probably extremely weak ones. I’ve been trying to get her to “practice” drinking booze for a while, but she’s always said no. It surprised me when she asked me to come up with a special drink. She’s had alcohol in cooked things, and a couple of random tastes of it here and there (and a jello shot at the Zombie Burlesque thing we went to in Vegas). But she’s never really drunk anything intentionally. It’s better to do your first real drinking around people you trust, though, so I’m grateful to have been asked.
Writing stuff: the characters were not supposed to solve this particular set of problems yet; they solved them in two seconds and brought up things that I hadn’t even thought about, and I’ve been stuck off and on, trying to keep up.
Mr. Assassin said something (about the Goob) that made me feel better about myself, about how creativity looks a lot like luck from the outside but is really the ability to keep trying while ditching successive failures.
“Logan’s the creative one. He just fails so fast that it looks like luck. Hand him a Rubik’s cube sometime. He won’t remember how to solve it. But he’ll solve it, by taking it apart and sticking the pieces back together in the right order if necessary.”
Just so. Speaking of successive failures…
Midjourney: I’m trying to roll up the last of the main characters, the Goob. I’m giving up for tonight; something weird is going on, and right now EVERY SINGLE TIME I try to roll up a character with any sort of East Asian background I either get horrifying stereotypes or people who look stiff as a board, or non-sequitur nonsense. I’m hoping it’s just the system undergoing some minor update drama. It’s easier to get interesting-looking Black people than it is to get Asian people, though. This is NOT my first attempt to get the Goob; I rolled up a freaking fantastic Connor (who is Black) on like the third try.–I did manage to get some halfway decent Asian people, but it was by running “multiracial” with the description. As soon as I switched to “Asian” or “Korean” things went off the rails.
While bipping around between grocery stores trying to find things, I did a lot of thinking about things from yesterday. “I used to know how to do this” was a thought that kept coming up. I used to know how to connect to people.–That’s a skill that I’ve been regrowing since before the split with my ex, but mostly the connections I’ve made since I got together with him in college come from other people reaching out to me, not the other way around. I’m trying to think of a single instance where I made a friend of my own where the ex didn’t try to poison things somehow, and I can’t. And when I became too close to ones that he’d made or ones that we’d made together, he sabotaged those, too. (Although some of them hosed things up happily on their own, too.) There was always some fucking drama. He was really only ever happy when he had me all to himself, or when he was leaving me behind (particularly that one).
So: if I ever blew you off in a way that wasn’t just ADD, know that I regret it. Because the people I still actively want to blow off (or the ones I’m not sure about) aren’t on this list. I wish I’d gone to the thing you invited me to; I wish I hadn’t made some dumb ass excuse. I wish I’d responded better to gestures of friendship. I wished I’d picked up better on when people need support. I wish I were able to clearly remember PPWCs, too, but that’s mostly ADD making a tradeoff between “presenting at sessions” and “OH GOD MORE THAN FIVE PEOPLE TO TRACK AT ONE TIME.” I can’t tell you the number of times I did a writer group thing and felt ill with panic for days that I’d said something stupid. All of them, before I got divorced and for like a year afterwards.
Some days I honestly just feel like being antisocial, it’s true.
But usually it was just a case of me not wanting to deal with the ex’s drama, or generally feeling like a failure of a human being.
I used to be in a tight-knit friend group in college and it was bliss. I miss it. Things fell apart in a way that wasn’t totally or even mostly my fault (although wow, yes, I was an idiot, and not just over my ex). I’ve been trying to rebuild something like it without really understanding that’s what I’ve been doing. But that’s what came to me while I was out driving today.
I feel like I don’t know how to do this anymore without fucking *something* up (although, did I ever know how to do that?!?). And everything’s more complex because everyone’s long distance. Where in the college it was easy enough to get everyone into the same room for multiple hours, multiple times a week, now it’s just not possible. And everyone’s so *adult.* AHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhh. I hate adulting.
On the other hand, it seems like almost everyone else is even worse at this. So I guess it’s on me if I want it to happen.
Anyway, I’m grateful to the people who put their loops around me over the last couple of years as I felt like my world was falling to pieces. I don’t know what I would have done if they hadn’t. I reached out and they were there, not judging me, saying, “I’m so glad you said something. I like you. What do you need?” I’d like to at least be able to do that.