Follow ups

My divorce was finalized on 2/3.  Shortly after, I was able to reach the void and burn all the bad memories, anger and hate.  Now, all her stunts do is make me laugh.  I haven't been angry with her in months. That's made a TON of difference in my life.  I am a completely different person.

Dating Sites & Miscellaneous

Oh, for fuck's sake. Why do I even bother? I get hit up by women that I want nothing to do with and women that are what I'd deem to be my type don't look at my profile once, or don't reply.  Or both.

I'm not lowering my standards to "fugly". I'd rather stay single that do that. It's just not worth it to me for that. I'll probably delete my account and just go with "fuck it". 

Seriously, people with no education, damned ugly, etc. I just can't. I guess that I'm doomed to fly solo from now on.

I came into work tonight and I didn't think that I have reacted any differently than normal.  I passed Ed and one of the other nurses, Leslie (whom I had at one point asked to dinner, merely as dinner and nothing else) as I was doing something and he asked me, "What's up?", I just raised my eyebrows  and shook my head in an indication that nothing was going on.  Leslie seemed to take that as a sign that something was wrong. I just shook my head in the negative to her query. I guess some people don't read my facial expressions well.

The Flame and The Void, Part II

So today (or yesterday, rather) when I got up, it seems that I had lost the spontaneous "Void" that I had from Wednesday. I have tried quickly meditating,  picturing a flame in my head and attempting to burn everything in it. I can achieve brief periods of calm, emotionless states, but nothing like the all-day state I had yesterday.

I guess that it will take a lot of practice to achieve more than a minute or two at a time. I don't know what it would take to get back to the all-day state. But having had all the emotions of the day before burned away, just...gone...while I couldn't really feel it at the time, amazing. It has definitely made being at work tonight a lot easier.

I'll post more about TF&TV as I work with it.

The Flame and The Void

I woke up today for class and the dark feeling that I had when I got home from work was gone.  I didn't feel "normal", just empty. No, not empty.  Detached is a better word:  There's no hole in me.  If I could describe it, I would have to say it's as close to what Robert Jordan described as the Flame and the Void:  You focus on a flame in your mind, then shove all emotions into the flame, burn them up and then you enter the Void.  In his books, those who knew this technique would use it for focusing their concentration.  In this case, I don't know that I would say that I have heightened concentration, but just lack of emotion and better control when something would have been provocative.

I basically had it out with Cecelia tonight.  She called me a child, and made a few other insulting comments regarding parental control.  She has a point, to an extent.  But that extent is that I live in my parents' house; so I live by their rules:  Landlord/tenant.  She's lied to me three times in the last two days, including about finding out about Sarah and how she found out.  Then, she finally admitted tonight that she knew there was nothing there:  She's been grasping at things to be mad at me for.  So, she threw that at me and then finally got to the truth.  I told her that I held no malice, I hoped that he treated her well.  I hoped that he treated her well even after this "honeymoon" period.  I also said that she could always contact me to talk, but that I will leave her alone.  If she wants to talk, she'll have to make the first move.

I also talked with Shannon because I wanted to take James to see Iron Maiden in Charlotte on June 9th (2017).  She made every excuse in the book before finally finding a technical reason to be able to keep me from taking him:  That's the first week after school is out, so that's her week of summer vacation with him.  Such a bitch.  I got to call her out on having overnight guests of the opposite sex while he's there, though.  I jabbed her hard on that, without calling out her boyfriend Alex by name - or letting her know that I knew.  I phrased it as "I'm not giving him drubs or alcohol or showing him porn or taking him to the church of Satan. I don't have overnight guests of the opposite sex when he's here. Just like you requested."  Boo-fuckin'-YA!  Injest excrement and die, twit.

I type that and I felt a slight amount of elation, but it was gone in an instant: It just slid away, like how R. Jordan describes emotions sliding away from Rand al'Thor.  This is the oddest thing.  I've woken up from those black states feeling detached, but it's never lasted long.  Usually it goes away in an hour or two.  It's 0216 on the 26th and I woke up at 1700 on the 25th.

I could grow to like the Void.  It's much nicer for dealing with things that would be emotionally inconvenient, like the two...conversations above.  I'm going to have to practice meditating to find it on my own.  I've done some digging on the Internet and it seems there is some actual basis for RJ's inclusion of it in his books (as I suspected, because nearly everything in his books had some real-world connection).

Enough for now.  Another entry later.

I

I fucking swear

I don't know how I do it. Why do I keep torturing myself? One batshit crazy female after another? All of them? Lori in high school, Susan, Lynnette, Shannon, What's-her-face  in Las Vegas (boy, that was a near fucking disaster. Glad I dodged THAT bullet - cut contact, and left) and now Cecelia. Jesus...this one...ugh. Claims to be pregnant after sleeping together for a week...and she's on Implanon. Too many things just not quite right, here. So then when things go south, two days later, she's taken up with a fucking MARINE?!?! Someone PUH-LEASE tell me how THAT works?

What is it about me that keeps me from finding a normal woman? Is it too much to ask? I mean, shit. No drugs, no narcissism, no sleeping with everything that moves, no fucked up phobias and daddy issues, no wanting a fucking litter of kids. A woman who will let me be ME and not control me, not trying to dress me, change me. A woman who can be my equal, not someone who makes me feel like shit because I'm smarter...or more educated and she's too lazy to want to learn.

I love to learn. I get bored when I'm not learning. Why should I feel stagnant because she doesn't have the capacity to learn or the desire,  or is intimidated by me? That was a big problem with my marriage. Shannon was intimidated by me and my family and had no desire to participate. Then she made me pay for it later.

Is there something wrong with me? What's wrong with me that I can't seem to meet my equal?

I know that I don't make friends very easily. I don't like crowds, I don't like people in general. I only do social stuff where I can control the interaction:  Same interests, etc. I'm an introvert always have been; when I took it in undergrad, my Meyers-Briggs profile was INFP.   Self-fulfilling prophecy? Dunno, but I'd been socially isolated long before that.

I find myself venting my pain playing my guitar, playing the strings a lot harder than necessary:  Digging my fingers in (yeah, I'm still learning and working on callouses, but I still don't need to press that hard).  I play my stereo just a shade too loud. I've hurt my back at work, so I can't vent at Tae Kwon Do in a healthy manner. It's not...really self destructive, just not...healthy, borderline dumb. I know that I should tell someone about all this, too. But I just...can't. I don't cut myself, and the only pain is sore fingertips. I dial back the music pretty quickly, too. It's just a brief...steam outlet? And I can still hear myself talk, so it's not so loud as to be damaging.

All I do know is that one way or another, something has got to give. I'm not sure how much longer I can keep this up. I was really blah until I met Cecelia. Then things seemed great. Now I feel like shit.

Don't get me wrong. I'm NOT going to do something stupid. I DO have a son to take care of, after all. I'm certainly NOT going to leave him alone with his mother and that shitty excuse for a human being she calls her father. But that's all another blog entry...and I'm done for now.

I just got home from work. I just feel so fucking dark. I'm glad that I had the pod to myself last night: I don't know if could have dealt with having to be sociable all night. I wanted to punch shit, break something...but more than that it would have been to feel the pain in my hand and take away from the darkness in my head.

I've been like this since I was hospitalized. It's never gone away. It's only here when I'm really depressed, though and I don't usually do anything. I certainly don't do anything that causes permanent damage to myself. I have an aversion to that level of pain. I know it's not healthy, either. But what other outlet do I have, especially right now? To answer my own question, "None".

To paraphrase Metallica, I'm so fucked...

Catching up...

Been a while since I've written anything here.  I've been in Greenville since October 1, 2016 and settled into the job.  I get James every chance I can.  I've made an appointment to see a psych/therapist, but the soonest is in May.  I'm using the EAP as a bridge in the meantime. 

Somehow, I let myself get involved with a CNA at work.  She was quite attractive, and therein lay my downfall - along with being alone since the separation.  We slept together for about a week when she claimed to be pregnant, while on Implanon.  One week pregnant, to be exact.  We'd slept together for the first time on 1/10.  I'm told that Implanon is labeled for 3 years, tested good for 5, with no pregnancies.  She'd only had it in for about 2 years.  You can't be "one week" pregnant.  Symptoms don't start showing until about week 3 to 4, implant spotting at about week 2, not one.  So, if she truly IS pregnant, it can't be mine.  I know that she was flirting around with some guy from the ED, and in fact, stayed in his hotel room during the ice storm on 1/7 or so.  Although, I was assured that nothing had happened between them.  In retrospect, I'm doubting that.

She had told me that she and her husband had had problems before and she'd gone and gotten pregnant, deliberately, by the father of her son.  This pregnancy resulted in the birth of her second daughter.  So, it seems likely that this girl fools around on a regular basis...and has admitted to having sex with multiple people at one time (when she was a teenager). 

Dad found her in the house last week while I was out and kicked her out, telling her that all contact with me was to cease.  I might have tried to work around that if she hadn't threatened to blackmail me with contacting Shannon and James to tell them about the alleged pregnancy.  She even threatened to tell everyone on my unit "what [I] did" to her.  

Tonight, I got a phone call from her (they go straight to VM) and then a text message.  The text said that it was "Chris that called [you], not me".  Chris is the name of the guy from the ED. 

This whole thing really sucks because I really did like her.  How do I find the crazy ones?  Why do they seem to find me?  It's really depressing.  I can't even relieve stress with TKD because I've hurt my back.  So fucking unfair...

Then, on top of ALL of this, James tells me that the Broom Pilot has been letting her boyfriend, Alex, spend the night at her apartment while James is there.  Of all the fucking GALL!  This is after the bitch tried to demand from me that no one she didn't know could stay the night while James was with me.  I hate her, I hate her, I hate her.  Oh, AND, fucking Jumbo, godsbedamned Shrek, is still talking shit about me to James. 

I asked James how it made him feel when his grandfather told him that I "broke his mother's heart" (hard to believe that you've broken someone's heart when they fly off to Las Vegas with someone else for a weekend six months after you SEPARATE). He said that it made him angry, but that he wasn't anymore and that when Shrek talked bad about me, it just made him (James), upset and his feelings hurt.  I told James that "some people talk about others so as to make the person they are talking to get mad about the person that is being talked about". He knew that I hadn't abandoned him, that I was still here for him and that marriages don't work out all the time.  So he doesn't believe his grandfather's bullshit.  But the fact that Shrek talks about me, crosses a line.  A line that Shannon has been warned about before, when Jumbo threatened my life in front of James. 

Enough griping for now...