What my insides look like, right now. (Not fluff, and not what I expected to be writing when I sat down.)

So. I'm fasting.

We're still in the toddler stages, yet. I had a couple of chocolate covered marshmallow eggs before midnight, last night, and it's 3 pm now. I've had a little veggie broth, a couple rounds of "detox" tea (Yogi Tea's version), and a couple sips of juice and coffee, and I'm about to start into some Jasmine green tea. So it's a modified juice fast. No food, though I had to write myself a note to remember. I've applied more food to my body than usual, though (homemade oatmeal brown sugar scrubs, milk/oatmeal/honey bath, and so forth). I almost forgot and nibbled at parts of that stuff, but otherwise I've behaved. I may go through Thursday (starting back on food Friday morning), which would be four and a half days, or I may just go until Wednesday morning (two and a half), and share some (small, gentle) meals with Chris before going back on fast with him, for Thursday. I'm going to see how I'm doing Wednesday before deciding, I think!

So. Why?

I just haven't been feeling up to snuff, mostly. My last fast was a flop (changed my mind) and I haven't had one proper in at least a few years, and I do think they have a good place in health. Especially when one isn't doing so well. I had some fast food and restaurant food over the weekend (as is often the case when visiting Mama), and that never leaves me feeling quite right. And mostly I've had issues with dwelling, lately. Feeling very emotionally clogged and sluggish and irritable; a good physical cleaning of the innards will help me with the less tangible stuff. (The food on body stuff is part of the same thing, really; cleaning my body thoroughly and well.)

See, it's getting on towards two years that I've been here, together, with Chris, and they've been beautiful. That means, though, also, that it's been on towards two years since I broke up with my ex (simultaneous events), followed by many months and later spurts of unpleasantness, none of which was beautiful. I fall in and out of dwelling and depression and anger about the lot of it with some frequency, but it was much, much better for a good while, there. There's just been a sort of upsurge, lately. It's been two years for some of it, seven years for some of it, a few months for some of it. But it's been long enough that I feel like I shouldn't still be upset, you know? I can still feel weird about my dad, sometimes, 8 and a half years later, because that was my dad dying, but a breakup (etc)? It doesn't seem right.

Part of it's the weather. There's been a lot of gloom and grey, which I love, but sometimes it does things to me. Being one of the many sufferers of depression and anxiety, I also just get to deal with periods like this, due to my wiring. Plus tumult related to graduating, figuring things out, etc. And, I think part of it's because of all the pretty awful things my lady friends have been going through lately (or that I'm learning about them having gone through). Some of it looks really familiar, and maybe that's part of what's keeping this shit in mind. Some of it just feeds the feeling or shakes my good feelings about the world. And then I just remember the things that have happened on their own, for no good reason, and can't seem to shake them.

Most of you have heard all about this stuff, I think, but maybe it'll do me good to write a little of it down in the open.

When I left my ex-, it was a big surprise to everyone. One of the things she said to me was, "But please don't tell everyone what a bad girlfriend I was," advising that she wasn't down with talking shit on one another after a breakup. She was crying! She was professing more emotion and care for me than she had in the previous few years combined, she was saying she understood and still loved me. So I, crying, said that I wouldn't. And I didn't.

She did not follow the same rules. She at least only had the material of my leaving, though that got used for all it was worth, by her and our formerly mutual friends and so forth--building it into assumptions that if I could leave like that, I must have been lying about loving, about caring in the first place, etc. Handy for disparaging someone who's been good and nice and sweet. Because frankly, I was a good girlfriend, a good friend. Fed into the codependent tendencies, clung, etc, but I wasn't cruel, I wasn't unaffectionate, I did what I could for her and with her and didn't hit her with the car when she asked me to. I was friendly, I was warm, I was loving. I dragged her through school. And when I left, I didn't admit how miserable I had been, and I didn't admit that a lot of the reason I left so abruptly was that I had been afraid of her, and that I didn't think she loved me--or even liked me--anymore, and so wouldn't care except to be mad. Because I didn't want her to feel worse about it than she already did, being left, once I realized she did care, some. I didn't admit that the way she'd treated me for most of the 5 years we were together was horrid, and the main reason I was leaving. I didn't say what I meant, when I told her I had to go because I was in love, which was really, "I'm not leaving you for him--I'm leaving you because I have to get the fuck out, and he's just finally made me realize it, made me realize I deserve to be happy and not miserable, made me realize I deserve to be treated with some fucking human respect, which is not how it is, here." I didn't bring up the time a year or two earlier that she had slapped me for defending her to my mother, or that I'd thought honestly about leaving then. I didn't admit that, once, because I couldn't really handle it anymore, and was so desperate for an out, that I left her alone to the bath without checking on her, so that if she really wanted to kill herself there (I'd just pulled a bag off of her head a few days before, though I think she was probably shitting around rather than being serious), she wouldn't be stopped by my accidentally catching her part way, or be in an easily recoverable state (which is, I think, the most foul, disgusting, weak thing I've ever had go through my head). I didn't tell her that I thought a car crash that killed one of us or a terminal disease held some appeal. I didn't tell her that I stabbed myself with sewing needles and leaned my throat into hard things until I was dizzy from the asphyxiation, towards the end of the relationship. I said I was sorry, that I'd been unfair, putting it to her so quickly, and that I should have known better than to think she wouldn't be so upset as she was. I should've trusted her more.

That's the first time I've put any of that in print with the intention of putting it up where it could be seen.

Because it didn't seem fair, you know?

I didn't send the emails and letters I wrote in fury and plain desperation to be understood. I didn't post on the old journal--ever again, in fact! I didn't post on LiveJournal at all, in case of searches for me, in case of discomfort. I didn't even post anonymously, or make a new journal, or make phone calls, or tell people who might still want to be around my ex-, since it might be uncomfortable. I didn't tell her to be better to her new girlfriend than she was to me. I switched accounts to post my poetry, and didn't submit the stuff about leaving her to the creative writing rag, at school, even though it was good. Nothing like that. Even if I was being trash-talked. Even if the things I had done and I had said were being posted up publicly and misinterpreted wildly until I was the clear villain. I knew and know it wouldn't make a difference in the way anyone thought about me, it wouldn't change anyone's mind, it wouldn't get back any of the friends I lost. And it didn't take long for me to lose all fucking interest in getting them back. I'd lied and said it was okay if they felt they had to stop speaking to me for leaving my poor, unoffending ex- the way I did. And I believed it for a moment, but then I stopped. The few people who went the route of, "I don't know if I can forgive you for what you did, but I understand and still want to be friends," who all either ceased contact entirely or only answered when I asked them direct questions, I eventually stopped addressing, because I was sick of it, and it wasn't fair, and it was pretty clear they wouldn't be too broken up about it. And I actually broke off a friendship myself. Admittedly, one I had thought had gone the way of the others. Another thing I was trashed for. But I was sick of being talked about behind my back and told love to my face. I think that's fair. I stopped missing them all. I got much closer to the people who were still there. I realized how lucky I was to have them. I felt more love for them. I've gotten angrier and more peaceful and then angrier again about the rest.

So. I know people were hurt. By me. And I do feel bad that anyone's gone through grief on my account. Sometimes I even feel bad that I let them get away without hearing/seeing any of this, since I think it's probably not good for them on some kind of spiritual level, before I remind myself that it would be left unbelieved and viewed as an act of desperation or pettiness at worst, and just make people uncomfortable to know at best. And maybe it would be petty, especially now. It would've been mean, then. I want to let it lie, I want to let it be dead and done and through with. I don't want stray emails about it, I don't want to be roused in anyone's memory, as I don't want them roused in mine. But in my moments of greatest clarity, where I try to be fair to myself as well as to others, I think my actions were understandable. And that while I could've tried to avoid the situation getting to where it was, there wasn't a better thing to do once it was that fucking quagmire that it became.

And I've still got it. I still carry it. The breakup, the abandonment, the uncertainty, the mass of hmming and hahing from those who hadn't quite decided whether or not I was too scummy to be involved with and lied about it to me, and the whole mess of a relationship that preceded the lot. I hear about a girl who trashed on me, and I fume. I remember being slapped, and I relive the insult and the hurt and am amazed (and upset) that I could have excused it then (she must've been very insulted and hurt, herself, after all, by my repeating what she'd told me in confidence about being upset [which I did in my attempts to fix what had made her upset][not that she hadn't done the same to me, chiding me to grow a spine and stand up for myself], if it was enough to make her slap me. . . "Make her slap me"--Is that a little sick? Isn't that a little too abused wife? I think it is). I only just told my mother and a few of my dearest friends about the slap, within the last two weeks. It's been eating at me. "Oh my God, that's so fucked up," "Why didn't you leave then?" "If I'd've known, I'd've come cut you out of there, even if you didn't want to go," "WHAT? Oh, no, I'm sorry, you'd've had your bags packed, if I'd known. . ." It's a comforting if stark change from, "Well, I guess if you say you weren't happy you weren't happy, but I don't know if I can forgive you for going that way. . . "

So. There's been a certain amount of bitterness recirculating through my veins. It feels toxic. But I feel a little bled, now, to have written it down. I'm finally going back on my assurance, but I don't think anyone involved is reading. And, you know, they'd have to be looking for it, if they were. So I'm sorry if someone's upset by reading this, but it's a matter of preserving my health. And I think this should probably exist somewhere outside of the clamoring in my skull that results from my thinking about it all and not writing it down, anyway, as long as I've avoided it.

I feel a little better.

On with the fast.