Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Here's the angst, and potential for psychodrama. I'll try not to do this to my readers too often, but right now I'm in a lot of emotional pain over this.

Some of y'all can figure out who the other person in this is. On the other hand, some of you might guess wrong. Don't try too hard -- I'm not trying to throw a spotlight on her all sneaky and backdoorwise; I just really need to "think out loud" here so that when I feel ready to actually read others' thoughts (and I'll need some outside-my-own-skull viewpoints sooner or later), the reactions will be there for me to read. (Right now I'm too upset to really process what I read if it disagrees with my gut, but at some point I should calm down a little. If I calm down enough to read comments before the other person's deadline, I'll need the insights in a hurry.) Plus, this has been gnawing and gnawing at me and I really need to vent.

I don't deal well with ultimatums. Or with things that sound like implied ultimatums. That's one of my buttons. Being told what I can and can't say is another of my buttons. Now I'm being told that something that used to be okay to say has to be buried. Let's rewrite history!

Being told, "I'm ashamed to be associated with you," hurts. Being told, "I'm afraid to be associated with you," sounds close enough to "ashamed" to also hurt. A lot. Especially hearing it from someone I love, who has loved me in the past. Actually, what she's saying is more like, "I can't afford to be associated with you." I'm not sure whether that's better or worse than "I'm ashamed".

If this post sounds like my buttons got pushed, well they did. At some point I'll need to figure out whether I'm overreacting or not. Right now I'm not sure I'm ready to hear aye or nay on that -- right now I'm feeling (anger, hurt, loss) more than thinking, and I know it. I don't know which is more scary: the thought that I might be overreacting, or the thought that I might not be.

I'm still not feeling ready to be reasonable about this situation. My gut reaction is to say, "[Expletive] you -- sue me." And, more to the point, "It was nice knowing you, but I guess we don't know each other any more. If you can't afford to have anyone know that we're friends, then we're not friends at all." Actually saying those things would be kind of ... final. So I don't want to say anything at all until I trust myself to know whether or not I'm being reasonable. Oh, I might still choose an unreasonable reaction, but I figure I ought to know that's what it is if do.

But she's set a deadline. Great.

What happened in July with a different person left me with a "knifed in the gut" feeling -- that was carelessness or cluelessness or cowardice (not that I can tell which of those). This, on the other hand, while it leaves me with that sick feeling in my gut, feels more like being stabbed in the back. "I hope that I don't hurt your feelings..." How could this possibly not hurt like Hell?

Am I really such poison to be associated with that a teacher can't afford to have me say in public that we dated N years ago? Or that I even know her? (That's the part that *for* *now* is rhetorical just because I'm feeling too fragile to hear the answers yet. The fact that I'm even considering the question at all, in addtion to showing how much this person means / has meant to me, is enough to raise hob with my self-esteem. "Gee, I'm a [expletive]ing danger to those I love, wonderful.")

The part where I'm already sure she's being unreasonable is her request that I remove a page that relates an anecdote in which she is mentioned by first name only, and the only other clue to her identity is one of the musical instruments she plays. How can that be a threat to her? And that part of her request makes me feel -- reasonably or otherwise -- that the whole thing is being driven by paranoia more than sense.

What really sucks about all of this is that I'm pretty sure I just lost a friend one way or another. Not just any friend, but one of those special-connection friends. So not only am I hurt and angry, I'm grieving. And I feel a little bit more alone. (A lot more alone when the "I'm a danger to my friends" thoughts sneak in along the edges.) I may have lost two friends: another was advising her.

The friend who hurt me so badly in July can be forgiven once the pain subsides a little more -- we'll still be friends, but I've needed to run away a little because it hurts too much right now. Oh, we might wind up not quite as close as if she'd never hurt me in that particular way, but we'll resume being friends. This matter, on the other hand, at least the way my gut feels right now, seems rather more permanent. I hope I can feel differently about it later, but that's now it feels right now.

I do wish she weren't insisting on my response before I've had time to find out whether I'm going to feel differently later or not.

Current state: somewhat calmer, still feeling terribly hurt, frustrated about how my weekend went, trying to relax.

That I spent Labor Day weekend working and never got out to visit anusara as I'd planned is not the fault of a slavedriving boss or anything -- it's because my health interfered with my getting the assignment done by mid-Saturday and my own stubbornness kept me from fixing that problem more quickly. I hit the end of the authorized number of hours to spend on the assignment and sent in what I had in the wee hours of this morning, then spent all of today sleeping. When I woke, it was kind of late to be starting travel, and I still felt kind of wobbly.

So I spent the weekend alone in my house. I did see someone face-to-face this afternoon, when my landlord and serpent player dropped by. I never even got out to the grocery store, and supplies are running a bit low. Tomorrow on the way home from Thrir Venstri Foetr rehearsal, I'll probably stop by a supermarket and see how much of my shopping list I can squeeze out of the amount of money in my wallet.

To try to relax and deal with my frustrations, I've started reading a cool explanation of hexachords in early music, while listening to some XXth Century jazz. (It's an album which usually cheers me up a bit. Last night I was more in the mood for the Liquid Sky soundtrack, but I didn't feel like going downstairs to look in the box of LPs for it.) One of these days I should set up the piano (Fender-Rhodes -- it's been sitting in its case since I moved in); it'd be useful for making sense of what I'm reading. Tonight I'll wind up noodling on the bass or guitar instead.

Dinner (which is also breakfast) is a frozen burrito with a packet of that mushroom sauce that comes with a tray of portabellos (I never use the sauce with the mushrooms -- I save it to do things like this with) squeezed over it, and rice that I threw a bunch of spices into. Funny thing is that the rice makes the whole thing seem almost like a "real food" meal instead of the mediocre frozen burrito that it is. *shrug* Whatever: it worked. (There's actually some irony in the rice, but only if you know a bunch of otherwise irrelevant details.)

I'm about to crawl back into bed with the printout of that music theory article and try to convince myself to keep things slow long enough to let my body recover from the weekend. I do find myself wishing that hypertext worked on paper as well as on the screen. Some things are just easier for me to deal with on paper (and some times I just want to lie in bed and read instead of at the computer), but it'd be cool to be able to follow the links off-page.