"burnt my eyes on the moon last night"

 I nearly cried this morning because I couldn't find packing tape.  Because I went through all the unorganized parts of the house looking for it, and there's a lot of unorganized parts, and because I'm not going to get them organized before surgery and then I'm just going to be out of it and the boys are going to move things and that really doesn't sound like it should be a big deal.

I sometimes think of my ability to remember where most of the things I touch are as a tradeoff.  Sure, there's chunks of my college years, and the rest of my twenties that my memories of are vague or absent, and I suspect that's some blunt-force kind of mercy.  I know where things are, that's my shtick.  That's what makes Light tell me I'm a witch.   But it isn't anymore, and all these gaps in my knowledge feel like chinks in an armor I didn't know I was even wearing until it melted.  Or maybe I knew it was armor and pretended it wasn't, because I felt like that would skirt dangerously on the edge of yet another diagnosis.

I used to know where half of everything was in Delight's house as well.  I didn't know that mattered to me until it stopped being true, but of course it was always going to stop.  They moved, they got well enough and restless enough to rearrange the house to their desires, and I'm not there any more to track the changes.   Which is perfectly reasonable.  But I've realized more and more these days that perfectly reasonable doesn't make something feel like less of a loss.  
 

surprising to me, at least, trying to semi-organize and run this meeting for Primrose feels like it's more disspiriting than the work that I actually think of at the hard emotional labor thing that I can do.  I know people are routinely crappy to each other, but everything just feels unkind and like no one's listening and I just want to stop.   I know this is a place where I'm just going to be perpetually critiqued and not doing the right thing, because the constituency is such that there's not one right thing to do, and I was prepared for that in one way and not at all in others.

 

I just went and looked up emotional activation to make sure that I was using it correctly in my internal dialogue, and I sort of am.  but google also took me to a huffpo article about controlling your emotions, which included forgiving your triggers.  And for a moment, I wondered if it would be worth it, to force myself to forgive my parents just so I could get a little peace and feel less like hiding from the world when I get myself into positions where I don't know the rules, I just know the things I'm doing are wrong or not good enough.  (or ungrateful, or selfish, or any of those labels)

Talking to Bespoke the other night, about how we spent our respective 90s/early 00s got me thinking about my past, about people who don't know me as I was.  I wonder sometimes how to communicate to people exactly how feral I was back then, or if it's necessary.  Light was the first relationship I got in that lasted longer than a year, and he didn't even see a lot of the feralness,  I was trying so hard to hide the crazy and he was caught up in his own stuff about his divorce. 

So I think about all the reasons that I don't have friends from decades past, and I get it, I was a tar pit with an attitude and an addictive personality, who was intermittently furious that I'd trapped myself into staying alive by some combination of a puritanical need to pay off my student loans and fear for what would happen to my cat if I didn't when the only thing I could remember planning to be was dead.   But I also understand myself as having been simultaneously too much and not enough to keep.
 

Also, I realize I'm not a possession or a burden, I'm a fucking delight and a firestorm and my very own person.  But still.