Crossposting from the LJ entry I'm writing.
If ever an entry had a soundtrack...
Runaway Train - Soul Asylum
On top of everything from the last week, I finished a book tonight after dinner and cried my eyes out as I saw myself in the main character.
Sometimes I'm in the cave and sometimes I'm in the sun and sometimes I'm really deep in the cave and sometimes the sun is blinding and sometimes I am outside but a glass bell comes down and I can see the sun but I can't feel it.
Sometimes I am a tree screaming in the forest, screaming and screaming and wanting to be heard, but my screams drown out the responses.
They also drown out the other screams.
For all my rants about seeing, about people not seeing my art, about people not seeing me...I haven't been seeing other people. Not really. I give out hugs and rainbows and unicorns, but...not really. I have this reputation as this caring giving person, but I don't deserve it. What do I do? I say *hugs* and "I love you!", but...it's like Lost in Translation. When my husband and I first saw it in the theater and the main female character's husband would say "I love you" as he kept ignoring her and leaving her alone, I leaned over and whispered "He keeps saying that but I don't think he knows what it means".
I guess...I guess if I could recognize that then somewhere, I do know what it means. Somewhere, I know how to actually be loving. But it gets lost. It gets lost in my need for recognition, for compliments, for ego boosts. I get lost in my glass bell. I see my friends through the glass, their faces all melted and runny and at weird angles. And their mouths move but I can't hear their words and I feel so alone and I rage and I beat against the glass but that doesn't help. That doesn't help.
I guess I am making progress. I'm not beating myself up too much here. I do know, really, that I am a good person. That I try. I mess up and I do things wrong and I hurt other people and I get lost inside myself, but I try.
And you know - maybe...maybe I don't need to be perfect. Maybe trying and learning and getting better as I go is good enough. Maybe I'm good enough, and maybe that's okay.
I wouldn't hate someone else for this. I'd tell them that it was okay, that everything is okay, that people mess up and learn and it's okay to make mistakes. Maybe it's time to tell myself that, to not hate myself, to accept and love myself as I accept and love others.
I'm glad John has his earphones on and is absorbed in his streaming Netflix thing so he can't hear me sobbing and doesn't see the tears running down my face, because this would be hard to explain.
Spoke too soon - he just asked what was up. Told him it was okay, I wasn't upset, you know me, I just get emotional sometimes.
I meant for this post to be about isolation, alienation. The glass bell. Which, okay, it is about that. But I was going to approach it as though I hadn't put the glass bell there, as though there was no way out of the glass bell, as though it'd come down by itself and that was that and there was no changing things.
As though I was Seth.
But I'm not. I'm not. I'm Seth, yes. But! I am also Lilith. And Jason. And Caitlyn. And Bella. It's like the freaking Power Rangers up in my head, right? And perhaps...perhaps they need to all come together and make this giant killer robot T-Rex to lift the glass.
It's what Dabrowski would call reintegration, I believe.
And in Valley Theory, it's called going through the fire to reach the waterfall.
Maybe the glass will never be completely gone. At least not while I'm alive, while I'm locked inside this bag of skin, this border between me and the rest of existence. But you know - I can at least remove the bits that I put there. I can let other people in. I can go and visit other people in their glass bells.
I can be quiet. I can listen to the responses to my screams. And I can listen to the screams of others.
And most of all - I can accept myself the way I am, the scared bits and the brave bits and the selfless bits and the egocentric bits and the silent bits and the screamy bits. I can see myself through a glass, clearly.
And I can love and accept that self, and then, through that - I can love and accept existence, with its necessary separateness and eventual, unescapable end.
To be within the glass and without it, to be separate and whole, to be both fire and water and to take wing and fly. This I can do.
Because I have friends.