I didn't wear glasses 'cause I thought it might rain
now I can't see anything
hi everyone.
I'm 24 now. It's kind of an anticlimactic birthday. I got a new crop of grey hairs for my birthday, and yesterday i went to the state fair, baked a cake, and was pleasantly surprised when Mike and Ivana brought me over to their house, and discovered that they had put up balloons in honor of me.
it was way rad. And the cake turned out to be really tasty, even though it's kinda sliding over. i'm still new at this whole layer cake thing.
In fact, the last layer cake I made was for shannon's birthday a bit less than ten months ago.
Anyway. It was a pretty cool birthday. The best bit was that I got to take it off from work and get paid from it. considering that it's probably my only day off for a few weeks now, I really, really needed it.
*****
i'm experiencing a weird paralysis of the soul. I feel like parts of me have frozen over or are only moving with great reluctance. I can't tell if it's grief or sleep deprivation, or a combination.
I feel like I've been packed in cotton, to buffer my broken-glass emotions. i'm grateful for it, at the moment. I keep waking up in the morning and David is still dead. When i found out Renee was dead, I had years of distance to buffer the grief. This is still a raw wound.
But it's getting better, I've been able to live despite it all, and we'll all be okay one of these days.
I could still use a long session of cuddling, but I can survive without it.
*****
There is a glass wall between me and the energy of the world.
I used to be a spectacularly sensitive empath. Now if I can get a general fix on another emotions i'm doing pretty well. And I can barely sense the currents and eddies of energy around me, but when I reach out to focus and change them, I run into this wall.
I know why it is--I was living with shannon, who is what I call a null. Workings around him just...stop. shields unravel, sendings fail, empathic fingers report nothing. He doesn't absorb them, he just stops them. You can tell he's there--he's not a pit of light, like another acquaintance of mine--but he's sufficient all by himself to basically undo everything one Worker can do.
Which is, at first, comforting. After all, nullness pretty much cancels out any other Talent he might have, and it's okay to live shieldless around him, because there's nothing to shield from. But after a while, it's both unnerving and frustrating to live so naked. And when the anger comes, it hits like a rain of hammer blows.
Every trained Worker and many untrained Workers--as well as most people with receptive Talents--have an original shield. This is the first shield you ever make, and in many cases it's the strongest shield, because it's so damn instinctive. It's almost always a simple blocking shield--nothing gets in, nothing gets out. It's so instinctive and integral to one's personality that it often survives tribulations that wipe "normal" shields out of existance. The largest problems with the original shield are that it's damned hard to modify, it blocks everything trying to get in or out, and most people don't understand their own original shields fully. I'm certainly no exception. My original shield is a wall of obsidian. It's the thing that separates me from the outside world, and it protects the the tender insides of my mind.
So, in panicked frustration at my inability to protect myself, I managed to modify my own original shield. Instead of simply protecting the most delicate bits of me, I expanded it so the entirety of me could hide behind it.
Which explains why i can't "see" it unless i'm really concentrating on it.
Unfortunately, knowing what it is doesn't suggest any really easy ways of remedying it. I've only ever modified this shield out of desperation and was generally pretty much unaware of what I was doing at the time. But it's the first thing that needs to be done, because everything I need to do in my work depends on my being fully functional, awake, and Aware. and right now i'm still half-asleep. So that's my project for the moment. Blowing my own mind away.
Or, rather, shrinking this shield so it's where it should be and doing the job it needs to do--protecting those parts of me that should never, ever, ever be exposed.
*****
strange creatures moving in my depths today. parts stirring that have been asleep for a long time, leviathans of personality disturbed by whatever it is i think I've been doing lately. i bought children's books today.
i know it well, the ugly and sweet
i temper madness to believe in this dream
I want to write. I want to have time. I want to sleep till i wake and on waking, stretch hugely and salute the new day. I want to have the rain fall on my face like kisses.
I recognize this. This is the fall feeling, the seasonchange ringing in my soft parts with whispers of change. This is the movement impulse. This is the knowledge that soon there will come the time of lying fallow, of the quiet deep work that happens in winter.
My own internal year is ending. after the growth, there is always a season of rest and quiet work. I have set my own path, I know what I want and need, and the thing that remains is to do it.
Fall cleaning. soon. I may need a couple of days. Turn off the phones and the computer, unplug the caller id, don't answer the door. Cleaning during the day, candles and ritual during the night.
Next weekend, perhaps. It'll be a nearly-full waxing moon, which is a good time of the cycle to do this sort of thing.
*****
Last night, the moon was a tangerine rind, the orangey-white inside part, large and low, tangled in the power lines between two towers. The red warning lights in the towers blinked on and off. I looked up and saw an owl fly overhead, belly reflecting the light of the city.
There are nights that are just like that. When the moon is edible and you can see owls high up, and the land isn't any kind of animal but just itself, dark under the wide sky. It's almost enough to let me forgive myself for living in the day.
*****
This journal is now a year old. check out where i was one year ago today...
