Category: Smashed Potatoes

Sighs.  So torn right now.  Giggles?  Irritation?

I’ve been trying to avoid things in my head for a while.  That compartmentalization thing I’ve been mentioning.  Usually, this works for me, to let go of bullshit.  Not working right now.  Neither is distraction.  Although, what just happened is giving me quite the giggles.

Humor has always been a good way for me to simply be.  It became a drama thing in my family, especially related to me.  Control issues.  Blah, blah, blah, blaahhhh.  Doesn’t change the mischievous side of me.  Only forced it down.  More of those “didn’t actually have anything to do with me” circumstances.

At the moment, I am in four different situations that I’ve been in so many damn times, I can accurately predict when the explosions are going to happen.  Over things that could be pleasant.  Notice the word “could.”  My anxiety?  Not sure that’s the right word there, but it’s high.  Not where I want it.  What I’m feeling is nothing new and I really am sick of dealing with it.  As I’ve been saying since I was 14.  Nothing I do really seems to get me to a better place or a place where resolution can happen.  I don’t believe in forcing a fit and I do believe that, in so many contexts, I have no control over any of these four situations.  I only know that I don’t want to keep living through them or the mental sandpaper and burn that occurs around them.  That’s the avoidance deal.  I don’t want to be a dick, but I’m sick and tired of the emotional ping-pong where I am always at a loss to stop the problem and then made into the bad guy over it.

So.  Crossroads.  I am at this impasse, yet again.  Deal?  Speak?  Ignore?  Walk away?  When I’m not responsible for them in the first place?

It’s around 10 AM.  I’ve been awake for a bit.  I have classes that I need to finish, (they take about an hour or so for each), for a license that I have.  I need to concentrate.  Two down, two to go.  I have bills to pay.  I have an event tomorrow that I’ve been looking forward to for a while, and I am even more cranky l because of these 4 problems, when I just want to enjoy my day.  I have books I want to finish and a new board game I’ve been working on for a bit.

So the giggles.

Now that I live alone, for the most part, my pets are my chaotic side, come to life.  So it’s little wonder I would choose to be around them instead of… ____.

My cat, the one that’s had three operations for cancer, is waiting for me.  I love to see his prance.  He wants fed.  His wet food.  He dances into the kitchen and sits on the counter and gives me a look.  Not irritation.  Anticipation.  I get so amused when he does this.  Because I know he’s going to start barking like a squirrel in a moment, nodding his head.  Cracks me up.

I wait a moment.  I talk to him.  “Yeah?  Yeah?  You want something, huh?”

The yawn.  The big yawn where I can see almost all the way down his throat and his head bounces up.  A little squawk.  And then… Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck.  More squeals.

This morning’s rendition has me going “nyuck, nyuck, nyuck” right along with him… and then… it happens.  Completely out of the blue.  I wind up with Curly Shuffle going through my head.  Dancing around the island of my kitchen, with a fork in one hand, a bowl in the other, bouncing my right foot as I sling myself backwards…  Sighs in amusement.   This is going to stick with me for the rest of the day.

I’ve mentioned bubbles, in regards to writing, several times in these “answer questions” posts, so that’s what I want to focus on for this one.  Bubbles are, to me, those moments where there is a sense of connection.  They help set tone, pacing, emotional connection to the reader, and level of depth in the writing itself, sometimes even more than language or wording selection.

They don’t have to be happy, even though the word “bubble” has a pleasant meaning for most of us.  They can serve as a sense of belonging or as a sense of threat.

In Star Trek, Deep Space 9, there is an episode where Sisko is pulled into different times in his life.  It’s shown that we, as humans, live forward in time, but our existence is actually several moments lived and relived repeatedly.

In my Haven Point series, Jaimie, it’s explained several times, could have gone just about anywhere for her career yet she chose to go home, despite her high school experience and dealing with her mother.  It is a point that her partner, Drew, finds fascinating.  They don’t discuss it.  The Haven Point series is written in a more serious setting than Novo: Ridge Lake is.  Jaimie feels connection to her hometown.  To her aunt.  To her dog, Moe.  She is driven to do what she does for a career and where she does it.  There is history to her choices, weight, determination against several odds.  She chooses Moe above just about everything else.  Living with the K9  24-7 is not simple or easy, but for her, it is.  Those are all bubbles.   The story for Haven Point is not one about beating the odds.  It isn’t about Jaimie finally being accepted by her family.  Nor is it about her being the best or finally doing something right.  But those bubbles of Jaimie’s connections build who she is as a person.

There is a murder in LampLight.  The thoughts of the perpetrator are shown, every once in a while.  I chose this format so that the intimate act of passionate, sudden death can be understood, instead of putting out details in the form of lab or incident reports.

When Jaimie’s life and this murder collide, it isn’t as simple as investigation.  And it isn’t one where she becomes obsessed with the outcome or discovery or chase.  There are several overlaps that will, ultimately, change at least part of her day to day routine.

If a bubble works, it gives both realism and surrealism to the reader.  Not necessarily one where the boy who can’t hit the baseball finally slams a home run when it’s the bottom of the 9th, with two strikes against.  Too much realism in a book can be quite a turn off.  Too many twists and turns can do that, and too much triteness, as well.  There needs to be some sort of realistic reasoning why the connection is happening, but the outcome of it or the existence of it does not need to be.

I used to hate romance novels.  Passionately hate them.  Obviously, I don’t anymore.  When I went on a research slew for Haven Point, I read a lot of different genres that weren’t my own preferences.  First, I didn’t hate all romance novels.  And second, I was very much into horror or murder mysteries at the time.  What started changing my mind was Elizabeth Peters’ Peabody series.

While I completely understand that putting words to paper and actually publishing a work is an incredibly brave and hard thing to do, as a reader, I wasn’t emotionally satisfied by many.  I remember thinking, many times, why are these two people even involved with each other?

The bubble, for my tastes, wasn’t developed enough.  Or it was too realistic without enough depth, changing the tone of the read from seamless to unending.  But I also realize there are different reading styles and what doesn’t work for me would for someone else.

One of the scariest books I have ever read is Anne Perry’s Bluegate Fields.  Perry’s writing style is very detailed, without having several pages for description.  There is depth and seriousness and grit and passion.  She has a way of weaving many themes, bubbles, story lines, and characters together into a whole world that left me breathless and scared witless for nights after I was done with the book.

One of the funniest I have read is Jennifer Crusie’s Agnes and the Hitman.  She, too, writes in a way that has you stepping into her world and not wanting to leave it.

The tone of these two books is vastly different.  But what I was drawn to, and aspire to be with my own writing, is the seamlessness of story telling.  The connection between characters is very strong and well-crafted, overlapping and adding new layers.

When I have an idea hit me, whether or not it’s trite, I try it on for size.  Does it fit the character?  The arcs I have going on already?  Can I see the scene occurring, whether or not it’s extreme, unlikely, improbable?  What’s the twist?  Is there some detail, like hair color or a particularly specific phrase the character would say, that sticks out like a sore thumb?  Is there a sense of timing difference, the same way we would experience when something is boring and ceaseless or goes by too fast?  What one or two aspects of that idea, when changed, changes the outcome or do they pop the bubble for me?

This is why I don’t write with fully developed outlines.  I have scrapped whole books or sections just for this alone.

When I began writing “Oak”, my female lead’s name was Marel.  I liked it.  At first.  I was about half done when the name began to get annoying.  I found that it flavored the character in too serious a tone.  That the name alone changed my writing style and how I was developing her personality- one that didn’t fit with Oak, Libby, or six other characters. I stopped being able to hear Oak’s voice speak “Marel” in any way other than droll.

I wound up changing her name to Bryn.  I walked away from the novel for a couple of weeks.  When I re-read, I was astounded.  I need to re-do more than half of what I put down because I found that the details surrounding Oak were dead wrong.  I had dropped story lines, accidentally changed details from other books, and the scenes between Oak and Marel stopped being funny, even if they were when I wrote them the first time.

Those same scenes between Oak and Bryn, with just the name change, made a more fitting impact and I have better developed the female lead, giving her depth and purpose.  This helps create a more seamless connection between the two and Bryn’s story doesn’t wind up sounding the same as Bet’s or Rowan’s.  It’s now unique to her- the way it should be.  All because of a name that was leading to disconnection.  There are now ways of connecting Bryn to the other characters, because I stopped, unconsciously, ending conversations too quickly, with “Marel’s” more serious nature.

Another connection I am building is that of Jaimie and Drew, in the Haven Point series.  Jaimie is very resistant to having a new person in her immediate environment.  She is silent, moody, obnoxious at times, hypocritical at others, snide, and sand papery.  Yet, her new partner also brings out her compassion, even if it’s still on the quiet side.  Her outlook on life doesn’t change much, but enough little pieces shift just barely enough to smooth out her rough spots, refine, and sometimes even harden, her already deep set of preferences.

Drew, on the other hand, is emotionally exhausted, more social in several ways, and is completely all over the place when his world turns upside down.  His viewpoints change hour to hour.  Guilt, disgust, overthinking, repression, apathy, relief, and he is drawn to the puzzle that’s been shoved down his throat by Lieutenant Silva.  Something his boss knows that he can’t resist.

These two aren’t polar opposites.  They aren’t meant to be.  Different, yes.  But there are several similarities that the two share.  And what changes between them, individually, at having to deal with those differences, is what helps create their bubble and their own language.  Shared experiences, pleasant or not.  It actually winds up separating them from the rest of the squad and will cause them both grief in future books.

So if, for me, a bubble doesn’t fit, or it’s forcing a fit in a way I wind up not liking, I take it out.  Play with it.  Change an aspect and see if the flow is better.  See if I like the way the words sound and if the scene still comes up as an almost movie in my head and if it leads to some sort of “next point” or another “what if.”

What if you meet the love of your life after s/he has been severely wounded?  Or right before?

What if you meet that person, and it isn’t anything like what you had originally picked out for yourself?  What if it was?

What if you meet someone you feel incredibly close to, but you know you would wind up crushing that person completely if you were just yourself?

What if you met someone who could become your best friend and they were about to be murdered?

What if you meet someone who has the same exact habit as someone who critically wounded you, emotionally, but you love everything else about that person?

The what if’s lead to bubbles.  The bubbles help define who a person is, directly and subtly, and shape the outcome.

We had a very nice holiday that will keep going all week.  So happy about that.

I’ll be going back to answering some of the questions I’ve had about why I do what I do.

One of them is do I write every day and another is do I have a scripted plot outline.

The answer to both is mainly no.

As much as I love to put word to paper, so to speak, I do find it mentally exhausting at times.  Sort of like… okay, I’ve run this marathon, time to rest.

While, as of this date, I’ve only put out two finished books, I have about 15 that I’ve written in one form or another.   Two are non-fiction.  A couple I won’t be putting out for public consumption.  Several others, well, after getting basics down, I found that there wasn’t enough to write about, even though I did have a cool idea in mind.  Some I’ll go back to, maybe, at some point.  But I’ve also found that those people make really good secondary characters.

I don’t write every day for a couple of reasons.  One, I can’t.  I do need to come up for air and I do have a simple, personal life that I don’t ever want to go back to as thinking about requiring my attention like a task list.

The second is that if you “live” too long in your designed world, it can start to lose it’s appeal.  Books and phrases can sound too similar.  Same with characters.  Especially if you’re writing a series.  The concept for Novo was born, as I’ve said, out of a moment of inspiration with watching a TV show, but it was also because I was very frustrated with my Lamp Light series.  I’ve lived with Jaimie, Jesse, Drew, Moe, and other characters in my head for so long that I gloss over what they see.  Or I wind up trying too hard to put down what they see or experience.

It’s good to step back for a while and not look at the work.  That’s when I do research, demo something in the house, quilt, etc.  When I go back to tighten up a book, I see it with fresh eyes.

Plot outlines- I find can be both helpful and annoying.  If you walk in my front door, you would be confronted with a slew of white boards.  These are where my ideas are held.  I never have enough space on them.  Some of these boards haven’t been changed in years.  Others can’t hold it all and I take pictures of them, so that if I need to go back and look something up, I can.

When I’m actively writing, there’s a part of me that opens up.  I can see the road ahead, book wise, and having that outline can be extremely limiting.    It may not wind up fitting.  This is normal for a writer.  I may have a character that I absolutely love but they wind up being that really cool thing that I am just dying to have a place for, but it doesn’t work out.  The idea I have may not fit the tone of the world, may not fit with the other plots going on.

For example, Novo started out as a writing exercise.  It was an attempt to deal with a problem I had in my Haven Point series.  It wasn’t the only one.  The other was a five book serial romance I dubbed the “Watch” series.  I wrote LakeWatch in a matter of four weeks.  It isn’t complete or even polished.  I put so much of myself into that book that, even though there are whole sections I didn’t write, emotionally, I’m content with it the way it is and I couldn’t do much with WoodsWatch.  I had completed the point of the series in one book.  Could I go back and finish it?  Sure.  I just might.  But probably not.  It’s one of the ones I don’t want to publish.  At least, not at this point in my life.  I feel such a connection with it, the way it is, that I’ve frequently gone back and re-read it, still content the way it is.

“The Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing” was my first attempt at writing a long story.  It began as a horror novella.  I’ve been working on that one for over thirty years.  I’ve had it almost completed for the past fifteen, never quite happy with portions of it.  I can’t tell anyone how many times I’ve torn it apart and re-written and I’m about to make another attempt.

In my Novo series, I had Hawthorne a third written before I threw out the entire concept and started fresh with a completely different Hawthorne character, different plot, different view point.  I’m about to do the same with Oak.

I also can’t write happy or funny when I’m personally not feeling it.  And, if anyone’s read the blog at all, you are well aware by now that I have PTSD.  That’s a choice I made.  To reveal it, knowing it will turn off readers.  The reason I did reveal was a choice.  It wasn’t meant to be a place to air my dirty laundry or to scour away at my ex, only seeing the bad effects of his personality.

If someone else who does have PTSD or is dealing with a horrific experience connects, great.  They can see the struggle and know there is a way to deal.  That, even with my serious tone, someone who doesn’t have it can see it IS a daily struggle.  It isn’t something that goes away in weeks.  Or years.  There is no magic pill.  Each person who goes through that, it’s personal.  To them.  They may find something in my words, as I have with others, to deal with their internal conflict, even if it’s just once or only a small portion of what their own history is…  If that’s the case, GREAT!

The choice was my personal commitment to not fall backwards again.  I lived for a long time with people who felt that talking about that sort of thing was wrong.  Living for or within an image.  While a lot of people don’t read me very well, and everyone does live at least part of their day to day behind a mask, I’m choosing to rip more of mine off so I stop stuffing myself in a box.  I’ve been advised that, as a marketing concept, this is horrible to do.  Too negative or realistic or discomforting.  It isn’t meant to be one.  No one’s life can live up to the intense scrutiny by others.  And one of the points of writing, or reading, is to live someone else’s life for a while.  I’ve lost friends that could have been incredibly close because they think I have it all together, the ones who are more aware of what I have lived through.  Honestly?  I don’t.  I don’t think anyone does.  I think it’s a choice on how it’s managed, those parts that don’t ever go away.

I can say that, while I don’t know exactly where the humor comes from, that for me, even with the serious tone of the blogs, there is the fun part of me that I am doing everything I can to reconnect with.  In my personal life.  In my writing.  To stop analyzing.  To enjoy, the same way I explore and build my environment and home.  I don’t write with a plotted out script when I sit down to work on a book, so that the crazy or whacky or funny is there to be found.  I try not to do scene work when I’m down so that I don’t wind up pulling myself into a rabbit hole that is better left out of a book.  I may put it in a letter or in a blog, so that I can find that light at the end of the tunnel.  To deal with the frustration or to find a funny way of dealing, which is so much better than the blah of daily therapy techniques.

It has to do with what I choose to remain open to.  Personally.  Professionally.  I chose to be human, with my flaws and benefits intact.  I can’t write with an outline because it’s too limiting.

“Broaden your horizons. They’re the only ones you’ll ever have, so make the suckers as wide as possible.” ― Jennifer Crusie, Anyone But You.

“Its the heart afraid of breaking, that never learns to dance
Its the dream afraid of waking, that never takes the chance
Its the one who won’t be taking, who cannot seem to give
And the soul afraid of dying, that never learns to live”

— Bette Midler, The Rose

Take a chance with a plot.  Explore.  Breathe.  Go off-script.  Raise anchor and sail…  Katrin Greene

Happy Holidays!!!

I am having such a wonderful day.  Jana did a really good job with my tat yesterday.  I don’t have a pic of it yet, and that’s okay.  I know it’s there.  Feels good to get a wonderful memory commemorated.

We had a wonderful visit.  On a day that is normally crappy for me, with the three deathversaries of my kids that happened in December, 23rd, 22nd, and the 10th- the second, third, and eighth, I got to spend an awesome afternoon with Jana and her daughter.

It was amazing.  Two whole games of Go Fish.  She did not, however, want to learn how to play “52 card pick up in your face.”  I got to see her line work and hear about her newest plans to become an art teacher.  Massive ticklefests.  Giggles.  Poor Sky couldn’t breathe by the time I was done.  Love that little girl!  What a spectacular heartshine she has.

For a holiday I used to dread, since our uncle had rightly sent us a card a few years back:  The front has a picture of a largish family, dressed in the seventies, and the caption reads:  “Christmas with the family.”  Inside, it reads, “Adjust your meds appropriately.”  I love the sarcasm of that, especially with how true that was.  So hits my funny bone.  But this year?  None of it.

Hang on a minute.  Phone’s ringing…

Right now, I am on the phone and my sister is discussing a prank with me.  One to play on a friend.  AWESOME!  She hasn’t plotted one of these with me in almost forever.  I can’t think of a BETTER Christmas present.

Heh.  Recon snowmen.  We threw out the first couple of ideas.  Friend is going to work shortly.  LOLOLOL….

Love it.

My cats have been bouncing around ever since I woke up this morning.  Wrestling matches on the bed, three games of Zoom up the stairs, and one of them pretended that the Christmas Tree attacked him and began chirping all over the place.

Tomorrow, we’ll do the holiday like when we were kids.  Pajamas.  Cartoons.  French toast.  Sure beats the heck out of our other family tradition of extremely fancy dress and stuffing 30+ people into a small house.

Board games all day.  I have a half a duck for dinner, and almost eight pounds of potatoes that will all be mashed up.  (I can see Shepard’s Pie in the near future.  The very near future.)  Acorn squash, corn, peas, parsnip strings, cinnamoned squash seeds, popcorn.

I went to the store today.  Had to.  I miscounted the cat food and there would wind up being a mutiny here if I didn’t rectify that.  But I am glad I did.  I met a very nice police officer doing his duty in the parking lot.  Brave man.  Very pleasant to talk with.

Even though the store was chaotic, and I had originally no plans to visit the Realm of No Return, I ran into an acquaintance of ours who’s stepson, a marine, was able to come home for the holiday.  She got sent to pick up extra supplies, due to the football game going on.  But her smile was so bright and happy that her step-son was home, and the visit with her new extended family.  What a gorgeous smile across her face.

My heart is full.  Laughter.  Love.  Fun.  Practical jokes.  Looking forward to games with my sister and our annual viewing of Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas and the cats winding up with maple syrup on at least one tail.  Such simple pleasures in life and it doesn’t get any better than that.

Super excited today.  Going to see Jana for a new tattoo and to view the basic sketch of Ash’s book cover.

Days with Jana are always full of laughter.

The tattoo is for one of my recent movie moments.  A moment of clear understanding between myself and another person.  A rarity for me.  This particular one is sort of a kicking off point.  A line in the sand that I refuse to cross again.  I’ve hit that particular cross road, oh, only about a hundred times.  It was the when and how it was said that just put the icing on my cake.

Stories… I had this post all set and half-written in my head that I was going to continue answering the questions about why I write and what I do at night after work.  Well, I decided not to write that one, but this one instead.

MASH and Hogan’s Hero’s will always be two of my favorite shows.  They are my go-tos.

One of the aspects of my mother that I will absolutely love is her gift of laughter.  I did watch it slowly die over the years and, this morning, I think I have a better understanding of why.

I do remember a lot of good-natured teasing when I was young.  Ice cube wars between her and my sister.  Changing the salt and sugar around in the kitchen.  Dying the milk green.  Mom and her stuffing everyone’s shoes with leaves on a Girl Scout outing.  Or painting everyone’s faces with ketchup in the middle of the night.  Goodness, there were a lot of screams resounding in the woods the next morning.

I remember once that I took my rubber bat and hung it on a piece of fishing line.  Placed the bat on the door to the bathroom so it would drop down when the door moved.

I giggle at that one a lot.

She pulled back pretty hard when I turned twelve.  Into herself.  She was very tired.  Out of respect for her, I let it go most of the time, but, now, as I am feeling what I am, maybe I should have reached out more.  Not that there wasn’t affection, or teasing.  Mom used to crack me up at times.  It just fell out of our daily routine.

It also fell out because my ex and I had vastly different senses of humor.  He did not care for practical jokes.  While I don’t care for most surprises, and I don’t like mean jokes like scaring the crap out of someone, I do enjoy a good one.  I love stupid jokes and I very much enjoyed shrink wrapping my sister’s car with multicolored tablecloths.  My friends, when I was young, had a massive practical joke war that lasted well over two years.

I do build amusement and humor into my day.  Mostly with the cats.  And over the past three years, I’ve tried like anything to put that sense of mischief back into my life.  I’ve lost some of the spark and skill at it.  But mostly?  I don’t have that person to “bounce off of” anymore.

That’s okay.   I’ll get that back.  And that is part of why I write.

Back to MASH.  There are two episodes that I absolutely love.

One is the episode when Colonel Potter joins the unit.  At the end, Potter, Hawkeye, and BJ are getting drunk in the Swamp and they begin to sing.  There is a moment, right at the end, when the voices harmonize.  Love that moment.

The other episode is “Dear Sigmund.”  I just love Sidney Freeman as a character.  His willingness to participate in jokes.  To incorporate that into his therapy and observations.  That he plays (another episode) imaginary basketball with Hawkeye one night and he just goes with the flow with Klinger’s outfits.

Freud said there is a link between anger and wit.  Anger turned inward is depression. Anger turned sideways is Hawkeye.

“Margaret’s an interesting woman. On the outside all discipline and strength, and on the inside six kinds of passion looking for an exit. Some people will not accept pain. They just refuse delivery.

I guess what draws me to these people is that faced with aggression in its most brutal form, they have regressed to a state of antic of not lunatic pleasure. There has been a rash of practical jokes lately. Who ever the perpetrator is, he or she is becoming a folk hero. Rank makes no difference. No one is safe from the mad joker. … If there is a way to preserve your sanity in wartime they have found it. The slide their patched up patients into the evac ambulance like loaves into a bread truck, and yet they never forget those packages are people.

I love the practical jokes in this episode.  They may be simple.  They may be complex.  But watching this takes me back to those happy memories with my mom and sister or to others with my friends.  Mom made rules as they were needed in the house.  Mostly out of things that she instigated and not expecting the creative force of two daughters coming at her, becoming overwhelmed.   “No pea fights” is a good example.  Over the years, that slowly evolved into no food fights in the house and no food inside balloons.

That is some of the glue that holds Jordan, Oak, Stew, and Gabe together.  What keeps Ashley going.

I don’t know where some of the things in my books come from.  They have become jokes between my sister and I and she will text me one of our catch phrases, like “Pickle” or “Twinkle Toes,” that come from scenes in my books.  I love watching her amusement come out when she reads one of the passages.  She says I absolutely love to torture my characters and yes, this is part of the fun of being a writer.  Poor Duncan.  All I have to say.  Poor, poor Duncan.

One of the things I have learned is that I can’t necessarily plan those things out.  If I do, I wind up trying too hard.  Not as funny that way.  Or it falls flat.  There are people I have met, since my breakup, that … oh, shit, it’s a bad idea to put us in the same room.  A very bad idea.  The world becomes a lot less safe and I expect that some sort of something-stuffed balloon would be involved at some point.

I hope someone gives you the gift of laughter this holiday season.  I know I have been enjoying the cats inspecting our tree, which is bolted to the wall.  I have deliberately laced the floor with kitty caltrops (their toys) to help encourage the chaos…

There are lots of reasons why I write.  Lots.

But I’ll tell you a “secret.”

There are things in life I’m passionate about.  And the number of them has significantly decreased over the years.  This is normal.  Happy to say that.  VERY happy to say that.

I think one of the best “pair” of changes, directly related though 2 decades apart, was accepting the changes I decided on in therapy as whole.

I state that my ex and I fought a lot.  We did.  It’s why I accept my half of our relationship not working.  I stayed in it too long.  He may have been ____, but I chose to stay.  And I don’t consider that as me calling myself an idiot or a survivor or anything like that.  I called him on his shit all the time.  That was both me standing up for myself and me not walking away when I should have.  I accepted less and less as normal.  I gave up on a lot of personal choices.

I think what frustrates me the most as a person is speech.

When I speak, a lot of people have a hard time understanding me.  I state… well, not facts, as they are my impressions of what I consider to be facts.  To me, it is what it is.  Good, bad, healthy, unhealthy.  I’m pretty direct.  Over the years, I’ve learned that the personality some would call “thug” or “raw” doesn’t suit me.  I prefer cushioned honesty.

I’ve also let go of a lot of things that used to get under my skin.  I don’t let them bother me.  Sort of like a brick wall inside.

And that question of “what do you want to be when you grow up?”  That one used to drive me nuts.  Like a blank slate inside.

For me, speech with others can be… difficult.  If I hear someone say, all the time, “I need better people in my life” or “I want ____,” well, in my mind, DO it.  Do what it takes to get there.

A lot of my frustration comes from people who think they are being polite when, really, they are putting the onus on the other person.  I know of people who have to ask questions before they can tell me what they want from me.  It becomes a tug-of-war.  My point is, good or bad, just get to the point.  I wind up getting to the point where I fall back into that “raw” state, where my life becomes a task list and I wind up treating EVERYTHING like it, because it’s too bloody irritating and I shut down.  To me, that’s like another ex I had.  One who, from his own insecurity (not a stalker), had to follow me EVERYWHERE.  Before school, after every class, call me when he got home, after dinner, before bed.  When we were together, in the same space, even to the bathroom door.  He was so happy with our relationship, and that he had someone in his life that did give a crap about him, he had no clue how smothering he was becoming.

I found out I’m that way with subject matter.  Fields of study.  Where my brain says- okay enough.  Why I’ve never been able to answer that “what do I want to be” question.

The therapy reasons why may be plentiful.  But I’m happy to say that those have decreased.  Significantly.

I’m able to be curious and learn.  Free-style learn.  As in depth or as shallow as I wish.

It’s also my way of making those magic moments.  A cool image in my head of a flopping fish.  Or what would a kayak look if it was lodged in a tree?  What does old cloth smell like?

My sense of humor is rather simple.  Or inane.  Or on the twisted side.  Most of it comes from my mother.  Her joy.  Watching her laugh at our cat deliberately knocking things over.  She loved to enjoy other’s excitement or enjoyment, and it didn’t matter very much what the source was.

I remember a day when we both played hooky.  Her from work, me from school.  It was after her knee shattered.  My own legs were messed up, still, years after having been straightened.  We were both in pain.  One morning, she looked at me and said (and this is the only time this happened), “The gimp patrol should have a day off.”  We drove around for a couple of hours.  Wound up at a park.  Something my immediate family did on weekends.  Mom and I both had canes at the time.  Eventually, we came to a bench, and without speaking, we sat and watched the squirrels run around.  It was one of those days, where neither she nor I could look at each other without bursting out laughing, because one of those little buggers had found a twinkie and there was a massive, five-way free-for-all amongst blobs of bobbing grey and one streak of yellow.

See?  That is a story.  One of my stories.  A day of laughter and amusement over something simple, between mother and daughter.

Would most enjoy that?  Probably not.  Yet another animal story.

So what?  It’s something I love and cherish.  For what it was and what it wasn’t.

I think those are the bubbles between people.

When I write, that is, in essence, what I try to create between characters, in one form or another.  Or between a character and a place.  My own life is rich with those stories, good or bad, and I don’t step away from them being inside me or making up who I am.  It’s what I remain open to.  What I also connect with in books that I read.

So while I do work out the drama of unresolved conflicts, it’s also that acceptance of accepting.  To uncomplicate.  To be able to turn to someone I care about and say- hey.   That’s the real passion inside me.  And not all the ins and outs.  What my inner light is about.

Well, I fell on my ass a bit there, didn’t I?  And off the wagon with a little bit of overgrooming and I did wind up buying a pack of smokes after a week.  I’m still proud of myself.  I handled so much pain in the past three days, all across the board, without completely shutting down or getting too sucked into it.

I’m still on my Billy Joel kick.  Speaking from my heart.  To my heart.

Days like these, tons of memories come back.  Shame.  Misery.  Loathing.  Anger.  Frustration.  They are like acid on the wounds that never close.  I wind up chanting- “Let it go.  It doesn’t matter, let it go.  You can’t change it.  Let it go.”  Most of the time, it works.  I’ve got lots of little meditations or chants like this to help me deal.

Being open to people is hard.  They will hurt you.  Will.  That’s part of loving them and accepting them.  So, here’s the deal.  For me, it’s the intent I see as to whether or not I get crushed inside and how intense that crushing is.  On top of how often it happens.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”  I fully believe this.

What’s going on in the back of my head at the moment is a memory I have of my shy mother standing up for me.  Outside of our family, she was ferocious in a graceful way.  What she saw on a daily basis- people not thinking about their actions and the damage it can cause… well, unfortunately, she brought that home  and internalized a lot.  It wound up crippling a lot of what she allowed herself to do or be capable of, within our family environment.  It taught her fear and she lived it.  Every day.  On top of the horrific experiences with her husband, my father.  She had too much of a conscience, to the point where she stopped being.  Where she stopped me from being.

This particular memory, though… it is a precious one.

I was young.  Perhaps eight.  Perhaps twelve.  I can’t honestly remember.  I had received a set of watercolors for my birthday, the brushes to go with them, and some pre-printed mat boards.  The ones where the pictures are already drawn in lines.

Water colors are not supposed to normally have sharp edges.  The drying of pigment saturation is supposed to give shading and shapes.  Brush control and amount of pigment…

I was in the sunroom of my grandmother’s house.  Playing with my birthday presents.  Making pictures.  Mom, my sister, and I went to a lot of museums in those days.  My mother’s joy with art.  The joy.  I can still see the joy on her face looking at impressionists.  The joy on her face when we were out in the woods and I would wind up covered in mud or my sister in grass stains.  All of it was exploring our world, in it’s beauty, inside, outside.

My grandmother, on the other hand, was an artist.  Of sorts.  Not one that you would see in galleries or anything like that.  The typical high society lady, of the era from her own childhood, where women painted, drew, played the piano, etc.  She was my teacher, in a way.  It should have been a share.  Should have been.

Mom came home from work, right in the middle of my grandmother berating me for going outside the lines on the mat board with the water and the colors I had chosen were all wrong.  I had hunched in on myself.  The joy that my mother was trying to teach me, share with me, died so many times under the perfection my grandmother tried to mold me into.  That day was no different.

Before someone thinks of this as some rich chick bitching about how hard life is, let me say that while my grandmother had money, we did not.  My mother walked away, for the most part, from that life and I have always been grateful that she did.  There were several days she went without proper meals so my sister and I could eat, and several needs of her own that she did without for us.  We were taught, in my mother’s home, to cherish life.  To live simply.  To enjoy the complex and the simple.  To be self-sufficient and to see all the wonders around us.  Like her own childhood had been, with her own father.  My grandparents, though they loved each other, were polar opposites.  Grandma had her own maid as a child.  Grump, on the other hand, lived on a farm and slept in the same bed with more than half of his brothers.  He worked hard for his family and wow, what he became is a way cool, interesting story (and not into the family business of psychology).  Grump very nearly gave Grandma back the lifestyle she’d grown up with by the time he retired.

That day, with the watercolors, was the day most of my remaining innocence was ripped away.  With everything I had been up to by that point, the abuse, violence, molestation, that day was too much to bear.

My mother said one sentence to my grandmother.  That it was my choice what I did and she had no problem with me going outside the lines.  There was anger in her thin, erect form.  For me.  On my behalf.  They went elsewhere to speak as I continued to sit with my paints.

I overheard their argument.  It was then I learned that all the opportunities and classes my mother presented to me, to have fun and some sort of a normal childhood: art, piano, violin, gymnastics, dance, tap, ballet, swimming… all of it.  Most of it was paid for by my passionate grandmother in order to fix what she saw was wrong with me.  Physically, from the birth defects, and mentally, with the little they knew that had been done to me by my father.  The gifts weren’t gifts.

While I know my grandmother loved me, it was her driving need to have the perfect family that produced those experiences.  Not love.  Of all her children, my mother was the least type A.  Grandmother’s denial of who other people were was at the heart of most of her interactions.  Whatever didn’t fit her mental image of ideal.

The real gift my mother had been trying to give me was harshly dented.  I learned that people are usually quite selfish in what they do for others.  But that day, I also learned two other things.  One, that my mother was, sometimes, willing to bend her own pacifistic moral compass for me when it wasn’t life or death and two, what it cost to remain with the family in order to at least attempt to give my sister and I what we needed.

I love her even more for it, despite the damage caused by buying into family bullshit.

My anger with Mom, for the most part, has been that she stopped seeking that joy.  She was so tired.  Inside.  And she refused to get herself the help that she needed or to do the harder things to learn to live free again.  This is how I learned to step on myself.  The overbearing, harshly critical, opposing ways of my family.

I mention all of this because I don’t normally care for surprises.  This is why.  What was shown to me at so young an age was that they are rarely gifts meant for me, but are built up in someone else’s need.  Many, many things were done to me that I had little control over, little say in the matter, little way to object.  Rape, beatings, food, gifts.  It is all one and the same in my head.  It is the intent I look for.

The past week?  Someone I care greatly for who is incredibly well meaning, telling me that one pain I have is not personal.  Guess what?  Most of what was done to men wasn’t personal.  It had nothing to DO with me, even though I was the object of the circumstance.

My grandmother’s gifts had nothing to do with me.  They were  her way of obtaining that blond haired, perfect child.  And the violence from my father had nothing to do with me, either.  I was simply the means to destroy my mother.

That is what I have been facing down the past couple of days.  It isn’t a question of speaking it out loud.  “Getting it out.”  When your wounds are constantly reopened by the people you love, that care about you, you can not heal, so speaking it doesn’t help.

What does help is when that person who has caused you damage listens.  I was very angry with someone, held on to the anger instead of turning it in on myself again, worked it, worked through it by simply feeling it, then spoke.

She listened and I do not think that two parts of the problem will ever come back.  She makes an effort to see, even if she will remain what I feel is self-serving and overly stifling.  Because she knows what I gave up for her.  Because I know she does love me, without understanding me very well.  She is one of the few that at least tries, and that is a gift worth accepting and remaining open to receive.

She is also one of the two people in my life that have managed to surprise me in a good way.  A Christmas gift that I had not picked out for myself or put on a list, one that was simple, not overwhelming, not in martyred self-sacrifice or hardship, one given without guile, one I would have picked for myself, from someone who has done the same kind of damage my Grandmother did.  The gift, the real gift.

That is what I held on to, with the other damage this person did.  A cherished memory from three years ago.  A moment of clear connection without drama.  Only joy and happiness.

So while I have fallen on my ass, and off the wagon, I am back up again.  Dealt with the memory of violent harshness- physical and emotional- within my head without causing harm.  And I am back to feeling the world can be better than it was yesterday.

Okay.  So, what’s happening right now is- was half the point of starting this blog.  PTSD.   At the moment, I’m crashing and I’m so fucking proud of myself.  I actually feel hungry, so I’m making something nutritious to eat.  I’m not standing in a blistering hot shower.  I’m not overgrooming.  I’m not cutting into my skin.  I’m not running for a pack of smokes.  This is all good.  I’m frustrated and angry.

I’ve had several small good things happen lately.  I’ve been happy.   I may have another piece of the puzzle for when my brain chems go off.  Lack of folic acid.  I’ve had a medical condition for 10 years now.  Somewhat on the serious side.  I know where some of it stems from, family issues and shit from my past.  I had a severe vitamin D deficiency for a long time and I’m almost permanently anemic.  So, the folic acid issue is a pretty good bet.  So far, it’s been making a massive impact on my outlook.  Noticeably, like only two other treatments in the past 10 years.

My therapist, from when I was a teenager, was awesome.  As I’ve stated several times.  Same as the doctor I currently have for medical stuff.

That I am hungry at the same time as being royally angry right now is a good thing.  I actually feel hungry.

I know the person who tried to talk to me earlier meant well.  But let me tell you something.  When your voice has been muted repeatedly over the years when you say – “hey, I’m hurt and pissed off about something that I actually should be hurt and pissed off about” and the person you talk to tries to reason away what you feel, even though they mean well, it fucking sucks.

I’ve only said this a million times.

You learn in therapy how to tell the difference.  When you’re actually hurt.  Deep down hurt.  This was really fucking hard for me, coming from a whole damned family of psychologists and therapists.  They use logic (and yes, that is one of my red-bull red-flags waving in the air hot buttons) to explain, once again, that no, it’s not me and what happened has, yet again, nothing to do with me, but the lack within the other person.

So the fuck what?

Doesn’t change my pain.  Doesn’t mean I deserve to get treated like shit.  And the person who is telling me that there might be a reason the third person acted the way they did, while well meaning *another waving red flag*, yet again demonstrates that I don’t mean shit to them, either, because I’m being told, once again, that what I’m feeling isn’t anywhere near as important as the cause of the problem.  Gee.  Wonder why I’m numb half the time…

You know what?  I don’t deserve to be pushed aside because someone else is afraid.  ‘Cause if I can sit here, right now, and face down my worst fears and not do any of the bad habits I’ve done in the past, face down the pain threatening to take me over, face down the memories, face down the millions of times I’ve been verbally and psychologically been silenced by my so called adoring family, face down the sheer number of times when my own needs- not wants, not little pecadillos, not hey that would be cool- have been pushed aside because someone doesn’t get that while I don’t need much, I’m still not a fucking rock, face down not shutting down, face down the black hole I still feel inside no matter how whole and happy I can be, I don’t think there is a single person out there that has the right to tell me to suck it up simply because, yet again, it wasn’t personal.

And tomorrow, I will get back up, get out of bed, face the day, as though tonight never happened.  As though the person I spoke to tonight didn’t say those things that treated me, once again, as though I am less than human and don’t have the right to have my own feelings, which is why I was hurt in the first place.  The sarcasm is dripping in the back of my head- “thanks so much for compounding the problem.”

So, instead, I am going to be proud of myself for eating and not doing all sorts of fucked up shit to myself.  I am going to watch Tim Minchin’s graduation speech again.  Let it inspire me.  And anyone out there with PTSD?  You can get through it and be your own damned light.  If you haven’t ever seen this speech, WATCH it.  It’s become another one of my movie moments, healing up a lot of stupid, fucked up drama from my family.