Christmas is coming.
I’m in a very bad place right now and it seems to me that it’s gonna be the saddest Christmas since the one we spent in total silence, because my father chose to give us the silent treatment. For a year. That was when I was in primary school.
My kitty is very, very sick. We don’t know if she’s gonna make it. And I know that you think, it’s just a cat, but she’s so much more to us. She’s been with us for almost ten years and she is a member of the family. I almost lost her once, when she got lost when we were in the mountains, in our friends’ house. But this is so much worse. To see her slowly passing, getting weaker and weaker and having all those lashes of hope that arise only to be shut down by bigger uncertainties… She’s not doing well. I don’t want to loose a friend, and my kitty is just as much a friend and a part of the family as any human would be. I don’t want to loose her and she’s not doing well.
My mom was taken into the ER yesterday. She has pancreatic problems, she has had an operation some time ago and she’s better now than before, but still there are times when it attacks and yesterday was one of those days. She told me only today. She doesn’t want to worry me, but it only makes things worse. I love her beyond reason, more than anything or anyone else, we have the connection that not many mothers and daughters have. We have our differences and I can’t exactly tell her everything – not yet, anyway, but someday I will – but she’s been always my biggest support in life and my best friend. We have never had an argument. We disagree sometimes, we don’t have the same priorities, we upset each other sometimes, but we have never ever had a real fight, even when I was a teenager. Teenage girls are supposed to have fight with their mothers. I didn’t have even one.
Of course I worry. She does all the time too. It’s probably genetic, my grandma is a worrying-too-much type too. And yet with all the worrying my mom never banned me from doing what I wanted, to reasonable extent, of course. She always had faith in me and my sense of responsibility. Sometimes I didn’t deserve that.
My uncle lost a suit against his old co-worker who cheated on him for millions of zlotys. Apparently she bribed every judge on her way. My unlce is gonna be forced to sell his beautiful house and his awesome car and he already has alimony to pay for his two previous wives and three kids from those marriages. He has his third wife, who is a PE teacher in high school (or maybe it’s a middle school? Anyway, her salary is minuscule) and two children, boys of 7 and 9 years, from that third marriage, to provide for. So we made a general consensus that there will be no presents this year, except for the boys. Kids deserve to have some kind of normal Christmas, they don’t need to understand how bad things are.
And we won’t have presents either. I couldn’t care less. We payed around 600 zlotys for my kitty’s treatment and we’re gonna pay more if it’s necessary. I just want my kitty to be okay.
But all in all, it’s gonna be a very sad Christmas. And right now I’m in such mindset that I can’t look past that. I know I’m set for awesome New Year’s party and then to go to Gdańsk to see Cirque du Soleil’s Saltimbanco, and to go to Glee Live in London in June, and to get a traineeship in European Parliament for July and August, if I can. But it all seems so distant now. Like how can I ever be happy again if my kitty’s not gonna be here? I still hope she’ll get better, but it’s starting to be very difficult to stay positive. And I know it doesn’t work like that, grief is not perpetual. But I know this with my mind, my heart says otherwise. And I just can’t get over what my heart is saying right now, no matter how I try.
I’m sad.
This is a deeply personal post with a therapeutic goal.
I’ve had a very bad week.
My Group Dynamics professor keeps telling us that when we talk about our feelings, it helps us to canalize them, and therefore resolve the tension, calm emotions. If this is true, that’d be the first useful thing she said during that class. I’m not convinced, but I can’t just sit there anymore and be silent, and I have no one to talk to about it. I mean, I guess I could… but then I think that I don’t want to burden anyone with my bad mood. It’s enough that they have to put up with me in a state like this.
So my blog is an ersatz of this therapeutic conversation that I need. I could write in my own personal diary, but here there’s at least a potential that someone sometime might actually read it. I probably should be freaked out about it, but the thought is surprisingly soothing.
So let’s start with this: I am beyond exhausted.
There was a complaint from one of our clients, and the fault for it was pinned down on me. Let’s not dwell on the fact that I have NO decisive power in my job, so basically I do what I’m told, thus it couldn’t be my fault. Let’s not. Let’s just say that due to that client complaint I was instructed to do something very boring, very time and effort-consuming and I had to finish it before 6 pm today.
So basically I’ve been doing it at work all week, and then I realized there was no way I was going to make it on time if I leave it for office hours. So yesterday, after work and classes at Uni, I came back home and started working on that stupid thing. It was around 10 pm. At 7 am my spine gave in and I had to lie down for a while. Woke up three hours later. Didn’t go to classes. Sat on my butt in front of my computer and worked instead. Finished at 5 pm.
16 hours of working, contorted on my not-so-comfortable chair, with spine killing me and brain slowly shutting down. I drank a sea of Yerba Mate to stay awake and got through it.
The worse in it?
I probably won’t get paid for it at all, because it’s due to a client complaint.
So yeah, I’m really exhausted, but I overdosed Yerba Mate and can’t sleep yet. Welcome to my personal brand of hell. And, oh yeah, my spine is still hurting.
But it’s not the end of the story. Or rather, it is the end, but I wand to take a step back. Because the whole week was like that: I slept for 3 hours tops, went to the office and for classes at Uni and basically worked my ass off. (Or arse, as my British friends would say.) (You know that stereotype about British English being the elegant and sophisticated one? SO NOT TRUE. At least judging by what I learn from Eleri and Lou.) (Eleri and Lou, and Bri, are my new friends. Together we are KLOT4. I shall add the appropriate note in my “The Cast” sub page.)
And before that, there was Falkon. Falkon is an annual fantasy fan convention held in Lublin, which is 5 hours away by train. It lasts four days and is pretty awesome. But you don’t get to sleep that much during it. I mean, there are all those distractions… like my friends whom I see roughly once a year, exactly then, during Falkon. And a night before that I’ve been preparing questions for our pop quiz on the Witcher Saga (we, that is me and Jod, held it on Friday and it was a success). So all in all, during that five days, I’ve slept around 12 hours. Which is 3 hours per night. Well.
So you can see why I am so damn tired.
But of course there is more than physical exhaustion.
(You didn’t think this post would be short, did you? Well. It won’t be. It will be, however, rather personal, so you can ignore it. Ooops. Maybe I should have said it on the beginning. Welp.)
So I met someone during Falkon. Not that it’s strange, I met a lot of new people. But that person was pretty special. Mainly because it was the first girl I got interested in that wasn’t helplessly straight.
You know, I have a long record of failed loves and crushes. I’ve been in love with my best friend for ten years before I found out he’s gay. Then I’ve been in love with my other best friend who was straight and I still thought I was straight too, so I pretty much pushed it out of my conscious brain. There have been moments, though, when I wondered. I remember one time in particular, when we were lying on a huge bed in a hostel in Wrocław, me, M. (the gay friend I’ve been in love with; it was after he came out to me and after I managed to get over him) and our friend A. (we were all classmates). I’m trying to remember whether I talked with them about it and I think I did, but I’m not sure. But I certainly thought about it. “What if…?”, I thought. “What if I’m not just very close to her? What if that’s love? After all, I don’t know much about love.” I never admitted to that friend that I was in love with her. Mainly because I was never sure until recently, because only recently I came out to myself as bisexual or pansexual, or whatever you want to call it. (I really don’t like etiquettes. They’re good for clothes, not people.) And we don’t speak anymore. I mean the contact just faded away, died naturally. Which is very sad, because I really liked… well, loved her. Even if we could never be together, I still grieve the lost friendship. People grow apart and I don’t like it, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
After that, there have been a long list of guys and – recently – girls that caught my attention. I suppose I could call them my crushes. The problem is – all the boys were either gay or taken and all the girls were straight (and sometimes taken too, ugh). Well.
The story of my life. I think I should preside over a club for Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys. Also Girls Who Like Girls Who Like Boys. Oh, fuck it.
Anyway, Falkon. First time in my life when I met a fellow bisexual girl that I actually got interested in. (I’ve met bi and les before, of course, but it doesn’t mean I was immediately drawn to them.) And for a moment there it seemed she was interested in me too. Or maybe I just misinterpreted the signals. Did I make it all up in my mind?
“She’s weird”, this was what my friend said about her. I agreed. Yes, she was weird. But apparently I like weird. I thought she was cute. And pretty. And, omg, when she put on that shirt with a low neckline… well, let’s just say my IQ dropped significantly for a while, before I could pull myself together. I never knew it could be so… animal. The infatuation.
Yeah, I kinda developed a crush on her.
Only to see her getting together with our mutual friend. A boy.
So…
Yeah.
I’m a tad disappointed.
Not that it’s a big thing anyway. My world didn’t collapse and shatter into little pieces like it was with M. I’ve known her for a day before the situation was made very clear. It’s not like I was ready to jump into a relationship with her just because I thought she was cute and my heart rate raised sligthly when she was close. I’m far too picky for that. I also have high standards. Probably too high. But there, right there, I saw a glimpse of hope, an opportunity that doesn’t happen a lot to me. Or maybe I was only interested because she seemed to be drawn to me. I’ve been single my entire life and I long for a grain of… something. An emotion. A feeling of being close with someone. Absolute acceptance. Confirmation of my purposefulness in this world. I don’t know.
I’ve been single my entire life but it’s only after something like that happens when I really feel lonely. And sad. This isn’t something frequent, I’m usually a very happy person and I embrace life with full positivity and openness. But at times like this I go back to that time in my life when everything was dark and there was literally no one who could be my sparkle of light. When I felt so lonely and worthless and unimportant that stupid thoughts got into my head. Sometimes, in some very rare moments of absolute self-doubt and self-pity, those thoughts come back. They’re just glimpses, but they’re there. I’m an overly emotional person, my mood swings are rare but very deep. (Unless I’m on pills. Then mood swings happen every ten minutes or so.) (That’s why I’m usually not on pills, though I should be.) (I’m a bad patient.) I had a moment like this today. Coming down the stairs, barely alive after those 16 hours of working, painfully aware of my every flaw, forgetting all the amazing things in my life. Feeling like I’m only a burden to all those awesome people in my life, feeling like I’m worthless, like I don’t matter. If I had a gun in my hand in that short moment… I don’t know. I don’t know.
But that lasted only few seconds, a minute at most. I went out, felt the freezing air biting my cheeks, put on my headphones, took a deep breath and everything returned to normal. I’m still exhausted, I’m still sad and disappointed. But it’s manageable.
Also, if not for three bright spots in the darkness of this week, I’d go totally nuts. I mean like take-a-sharp-knife-go-on-streets-and-attack-innocent-passers-by-and-then-cut-your-own-veins kinda nuts. (Exaggerating only a little.)
And those three bright spots were: my Morpions, whom I barely saw this week, but even this little of them could push me into a tad better mood; new episode of Glee, because that’s my obsession and I love it and I totally invest in fictional characters of this show as well as the actual cast, and I do so way too much; and my KLOT4, that is Bri, Eleri and Lou, who all three have inadvertently kept me sane throughout the week by just being themselves and putting up with me.
Thank you, guise.
There, I said it all. (Well, almost. But that’s far too private to share with anyone. I guess I’m gonna have to canalize it with my mirror or something.) I don’t know if I feel better. Maybe a little. I’m still very tired and not sleepy at all, damn you, Yerba Mate. I love you too much, I shouldn’t have overdosed you. Ech. I’ll try to take a bath and maybe then the sleep will come.
Goodnight, I guess.
