"your love lives where your scar is"

Is it redundant to call a post "all the feels"? 

I feel so angry sometimes. And it's such an unfamiliar feeling, this desire to stomp my feet and say "no, mine, my turn, give me all the things, pay attention to me, think about hard things for me, take care of me, pick me, let me be selfish". And even typing that out makes me feel ungrateful and ugly, that I should be taking what people want to give me, and believe that it is enough. I don't know how to express anger to other people,  I'm too afraid of being left, of being unruly, of being difficult, of being unreasonable.  Most of the time, I know how to eat the anger, to turn it on myself, to feel like it's my fault in the first place for wanting things outside my scope. 

So maybe it's not unfamiliar, I'm just not used to it running so close to the surface.

I keep trying to give up on asking "why me?" because the answer is never satisfactory, even when it's a positive thing I'm asking about (maybe especially). The question "why me?" gets filed in the same drawer as words like deserve and fair and hope (and sometimes faith and grace).  Either I've done something and that's why things happen, and if I was smarter or faster I would have been able to keep them from happening, or there's no reason they happen to me, and I might as well just get on with the process of coping with my feelings about them happening.

 

I feel like this paints me too much as a victim. I'm chock full of agency. I'm just as much my own hero and my own villain as I am my own girl tied to the tracks, waiting. But I do want to control everything, and know that I can't control what anyone else ever does, so I try to control my reactions. I try to almost never say the first thing that crosses my mind, instead spend that split second running it through a reasonable filter. But I still can't remember most of my disagreements, I can remember the feelings but not the words, so I can never cite text when I want to talk about what we talked.  Mmm, stress response.

 

I tried to explain to my therapist how my wants were unreliable, it was hard to figure out which ideas were good or bad, the be busy all the time, the never leave my house, the desire to just pack up and flee, leave everything behind. Even writing this is making me cry at work, and I'm so afraid that I've got another depressive episode coming on, where everything seems hopeless and unfixable, and whatever calm I've managed to create around the chaos of my life shatters.  

 

But Tank still smiles when he sees me, and sometimes leaps off of things assuming I'm going to catch him and even if I don't know what kind of help I need, I have people in my life who will help me, and Tanning (who will henceforth be known as skitterypoof) still chirrups and demands pets, and these entries are indicative of the structure of my thoughts, where I dig myself trenches and then try to remember that things exist outside the trenches.  And then I read Marge Piercy's "For Strong Women" and tell myself that metaphorical throwing up does in fact develop metaphorical stomach muscles and listen to Dar tell me I'm aging well.