Long Time Gone

i tend to take on others' pain too much, and bear it on my shoulders. i need to learn how not to do that. i do this whenever other people get really upset. what would it mean to let go, to let other people have their pain? fear. fear they might hurt me. fear of not being needed, of being abandoned. life and love are scary. other people can up and leave whenever they want to, leaving me holding whatever deficits and emptinesses i have that can only be filled temporarily, until they can be filled permanently. i don't know how to do relationships. there is something about close relationships that throws me off, draws me in, takes me off kilter. how to remain intact while intimate? every time i check my email and there aren't any new ones, i feel empty and unpopular.

I feel lost and confused. I do not know how to discover my interests. Or find a job a like. Or have any idea at all what kind of job I want. How do I find out? What do I want? What about grad school? I'm so lucky I'm getting $21,000 in Cal Grants for next year. Hopefully the Eli Lilly Scholarship will cover the rest, plus my Mills scholarships and any federal aid. can i be happy when others are happy, when they make progress and i do not? not feel left behind or abandoned? the only constant is change, and that frightens me. i do not know how to remain whole.

I don't know where to begin looking, and fear that schools like Stanford have a leg up on all the good jobs. I'm really bitter about not having the opportunity to apply there.

I'm afraid that if other people don't need me, they won't stick around and they won't love me. I don't like subconsciously trying to get others to depend on me, though. I don't want that. I have boundary problems that make my life miserable sometimes. I'd like to work on them but I don't know how. I really need support and answers and guidance these days, and don't know where to look. I'm daunted by this summer.

the most powerful people are wealthy men and beautiful, young women.

where do I go from here, other than up? establishing my own life is scary, and I do not know where to begin. I have such negative connotations when it comes to getting beyond the illness and trying to function in the real world, and don't know how to break that pattern. I'm afraid of never being connected to people and places where I feel connected, not ever finding a meaningful internship or earning enough money; of always being on the outside. After all, isn't that what I've gotten, all these years, despite my best efforts to claw my way back to where I do belong? Separated from meaning, from my self, from my life.

what does this entail? how do i not continue to alienate myself from myself and insist i'm someone i'm not?

what do i need to say or do to relieve this tension? that is what i should be focusing on, not protecting others from the natural course of things.

only in English defeats its very purpose. people need to accept that the only constant is change, and that the face of things will evolve even though the underlying principles remain the same. just like the theory of relativity; the laws remain the same even if the facts change. sure, it's discomfiting for some folks to hear our anthem in Spanish, but our country has always been about incorporating peoples from all over the world, hasn't it? just because something makes one uncomfortable does not mean it should be done away with. that is unexamined cowardice. i need to let go a bit more, and leave room for reciprocity. sheesh. i'm the one who should be going back to al-anon. yes, there has been imbalance. that should be remedied, but that doesn't mean i'm throwing the baby out with the bathwater. you and i are changing, just as you and he are changing. the outcome is not up to any of us. yikes. trusting in god is the only solution, which is a bit hard fo...

what do I have left for myself? it is entirely too easy to abandon my life in favor of someone else's. the pain is still there, and i feel like a black hole no one wants to look into. i feel like a dead weight. i need to establish my own life, and i am petrified. i do not know how to do that. i have to take the plunge, but i do not know where or when. mills has its moments, but it is not the real world. i've been cooped up long enough, to put it mildly. i feel like i need someone to do for me what i have done/am doing for you. when you find clarity, i am left to grapple with my own, or my lack thereof; to gaze into my own abyss rather than other people's. i want to figure out what i want to major in. i need purpose and meaning, and income. i have been neglecting my own life, and i feel it. a deficit. throwing everything else overboard. imbalance. there are entire worlds i have yet to discover, and time is running short. i don't really have the luxury of mak...

taken from the title of a novel by Elizabeth Wurtzel, one of my most favorite writers. hers is a story of addiction, but mine isn't.

Maybe I "should" let go of all my false impressions about who I "should" be and simply fall into the reality of what is. More later.

i have boundary problems. undefined, indefinite, ragged edges. it all seemed like such a good idea at the outset. what am i not seeing?

and not finding. what does that mean?

and do not know where to go to fill up--i need healthy, constant sources that do not cause pain. i get too caught up in other people's oceans and gravitational fields. i still want to love you but you are so far away; your signal strength is weaker. there is a wall between us, but maybe there should be; maybe that was part of the problem? i need spaces in our togetherness, room for myself. there's a lot to be learned from each other, but almost equal amounts of pain as well, it seems. i've lost perspective here. i must regain my foothold on reality. maybe i should go take a bath. i do not seek to change your present situation, although I have difficulty accepting it. i languish and whither like a flower on a vine without water. i do not have any solutions. i am turned away from every door i knock on and am again left alone with my thoughts on a dark, deserted, wet road, lit only by faint glows from the occasional street lamp. I was meant to write. How do I pursue t...

Because we were almost killed last night, literally. Some students put up really ignorant and naive posters around our dorm that say, "Why are you so afraid of Oakland?" It's a really lame attempt to address the very real issue of racism. We finally got home after our ordeal, and heard ten shots fired from an automatic weapon.

not around. lately i have felt able to face issues and tackle them head-on for the first time in awhile. bite the bullet, face the enemy. very empowering.

and establish itself as the regional hegemon, or the US of the Middle East. I think the Cold War never resulted in nuclear war because everybody was just a little too smart to actually use the weapons, since it essentially meant mutual destruction. Iran's president is not that intelligent or that wise. That is why I am afraid of him. Am I playing Winston Churchill to everyone else's Neville Chamberlain? [image courtesy of infoplease.com]

like a labyrinth. I carry around a lot of baggage with me. A lot. Anxiety and fear and anger and bitterness.

i feel better when i trust my instincts. when i don't, i feel unwhole and divided down the middle and without my inner compass. very damaging. this is an important lesson for me. it is safe to trust my instincts, and when i don't, i can bounce them off others to get a reality and a sanity check. if i'm being unreasonable, people will tell me, and if i'm not, they'll tell me that too. i feel so much better. i've been foundering for a little while and not knowing how to handle it, feeling like i could not reach out for help. i know i've made the right decision when i feel free. freedom from the burden of self, from the tyranny of the ego and from self-centeredness. part of the reason i feel so much better is that my reality has been validated. all along i felt it was ok to talk to others but i didn't. the problem is that in so doing, i ignored my instincts. in speaking to others, i took a leap of faith and trusted my own instincts, and it paid o...

and I don't know how to fill it. We admitted we were powerless over [whatever it is that's bothering us], that our lives had become unmanageable. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. Took a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

and is North Korea becoming more bold re its nukes because Iran has so far gotten away with it? does this resemble pre War-II Germany in any way? dangerous countries arming themselves to the teeth with allies doing nothing?

I understand that this is about me. I am so confused and I don't know what to do or who to trust or what decisions to make. I often don't trust myself and then I do things that don't feel totally OK with me on the advice of someone else. I think one lesson here is to trust my judgment and instincts over those of others, sometimes.

I'm still so confused and I don't understand how or why. I have no access whatsoever into my mind. I'm frustrated because I feel so blocked and I don't know why or what to do about it. I just have all these survival mechanisms put in place because of bipolar and I think some of them are getting in my way now. But I don't really know that; it's just a supposition. I can't do my schoolwork, or when I do, it's like pulling teeth and I don't enjoy it. I don't know why. I don't enjoy much other than escape. I like doing almost anything else other than my schoolwork, which doesn't help me figure out what I actually *want* to do, I just know that I don't want to be doing schoolwork anymore. Not after 11 years of college. I lost my love of learning a long time ago and don't know how to recover it, so "learning" has been about survival and trying to get back to a four-year college so I could finally graduate. I spent all...

that I spit out. I can't stomach it anymore. I'm not talking about regular stress; I'm talking about bipolar stress, which is a different animal altogether. I would probably not understand it, had I not experienced it first-hand.

emotional scars. no one gets through life without a few, though, i guess.

what do i mean "sometimes"? it's ALWAYS good to be me! i should never, ever allow anyone to make me doubt myself again--as God is my witness!

but abortion is not, and let me tell you why. I'm not totally OK with the pro-choicers, and it's because abortion rights aren't just about the right to choose, but the need for personal responsibility as well. i'm not talking about victims of sexual assault or incest, obviously, but i think a fundamental change in the fabric of social society is in order in order for the abortion issue to fall into place.

that resembles a cirrhotic liver, with scar tissue all the way through.

scruples, virtues, and morals for sale! discounted ethics!

I'm incredibly sad and shocked to announce the tragic and untimely passing of my friend Mike Ty. Both the Mercury News and the Boston Globe have articles about his death. We went to Menlo School together for one and a half years and Harvard Summer School in 1994. I think the last time I saw him was at Stanford in 2003. Apparently he'd become a doctor. He is one of the few people I've ever described as brilliant, possibly a genius. A really interesting guy, and I'm genuinely saddened and shocked at this loss.

my problem with Couric is that she's made her career acting like an immature schoolgirl. it bothers me that a woman who does that can get so far in the corporate world; i don't know whether it's an act on her part but if it is, that's even worse. the idea that a woman should have to feign immaturity or stupidity to succeed is repugnant to me, and that is to what i credit Couric's "success." she acts subservient around men and that really gets under my skin. i don't like dan rather because he was a power-hungry hypocrite who took himself too seriously (see Bernard Goldberg's book "Bias" for first-hand accounts), but that somehow isn't as repellant as a woman like Couric to me.

Don't give convicted terrorist Zacharias Moussaoui the death penalty because it's just what he wants. It would make him a "martyr." i'd prefer to see him live a long life behind bars in the nation he detests, eating our jail food, talking with other American inmates, watching our television programs, etc. i think it's repugnant to him to have to suffer the lifestyle he hates and to release him into death where he can be forever admired by his fellow terrorists would be a mistake, though I understand the sheer hatred of him by most Americans. death might be the emotional response of the jury, but i think life in prison is a more calculated and appropriate punishment.

I really feel focused about schoolwork, and I'm looking forward to accomplishing all I can, and attentuating any loss of points to the greatest extent possible.

one of the nicest compliments I've ever received, I think, and very sincere. i feel loved.