who only by moving can balance

The chambers of my heart are lined with mirrors
that repeat and multiply beyond perception
each and every scrap of poison gifted me.
Fuck self-reflection. If I were an oyster
I could coat this grit with self-recrimination,
employ it as a scaffold to support some greater truth,
some greater beauty, smooth the lines
of pain, the whispering self-loathing.
Even stone will, with sufficient patience, wear away.
And in the darkness of the empty cavern
drips echo as they filter in through cracks
beyond perception. Nonetheless they leave their trace:
these grim uncompromising monuments,
these fragile archaeologies of guilt and hate.
Or, from some lofty self-assured perspective,
an entirely different metaphor's presented:
cruelty exposed--diminished in its endless repetition, neutralised
through being bathed in light; and stalagmites
are evidence that love, like water, can create
not just destroy, in furious flood;
can fertilise; can bring new shape and life.
Nevertheless. From here it seems
that stalagmites and pearls and hearts alike
are simply evidence of our belligerent last-gasp defence--
the hopeless scars left by our dying dreams.

It is a delight to me that I had a conversation on Sunday night in which I pointed out to facesfriend that I do not, in point of fact, know them very well -- I started paying any consistent attention to their existence about 6 months ago and we started dating about 4 months ago (which is weird for me; I am really not used to getting to know people by dating them); he looked gently baffled and said he thought that, in fact, I knew him pretty well. I paused. "Okay," I said, "my predictive model for your behaviour is based on a relatively small sample size, and what data I do have isn't necessarily representative." "Right," he said, "that makes sense." Hurrah for human interactions wherein I get to express myself like that and it's just okay; this is, of course, some of why Hel bemoans that there's no way they can ever write dialogue that is an accurate representation of conversations they have with friends, because nobody would believe people talk that way in real life.

(Tangentially relatedly, but only sort of sideways rather than directly: I am having a pretty bad case of the I-am-not-allowed-to-want-things/I-am-not-allowed-to-be-wanteds this week. Not entirely sure why, but it's a thing; sorry if I go a bit spiky and weird on you.)

(By which I mean: I own more button-up shirts than I do clothes hangers. I tend to wear button-up shirts to work if I have anything resembling a healthy amount of grip, so when I am making it to work regularly in clothes that aren't the ones I slept in, this isn't an issue - enough shirts are in the wash that I've always got a couple of spare hangers in the wardrobe. Currently I have two shirts sat in the bottom of the hanging-section of wardrobe, because insufficient hangers. I think I am probably going to ask my GP to a bloods workup checking - among other things - vitD levels, because I'm already at max dose of antidepressant and on a daily vitB supplement, and ruling out other easy fixes seems like a plan, sigh.)

In addition to crossing the housework items off my list (not therein discussed: emptied green bin, moved lots of things through to recycling, etc) and somehow managing to get all my chemistry done in an approximate 9-5 (... 8.30am to 5.15, okay), I have finished up responding to poem prompts:

• The Threshold As Home (prompt: Heimat)
  
• Granat/Garnet (prompt: your favourite gemstone)
  
• (the world will end in fire) (prompt: Monsters that are also landscape features)
  
• Love as praxis (prompt: wheels within wheels, geared to annoy you; content note for abuse & domestic violence)

(today I made it a little under 10 metres from my front door before I first got catcalled)

(I walked past an SWP stand on my way into work)

(I am very, very mad, in that I'm compulsively vocalising in public and not managing to stop myself)

(I am wearing the haemetite-and-lava necklace. Wearing iron is protection, sure, but much more than that: if I know myself to be monstrous, if I know myself to be non-human, and still I can wear this - it reminds me I am strong)

I spent about an hour last night crying my eyes out, in desperation, and I'm still not sure of all the reasons, except that once again I am circling back around to trust, over and over and over again. Here's a thing, though: I find the Samaritans via e-mail rather less helpful than my lovely people in IRC.

Here's some of what set it off, tangentially, in all the ways that really fuck me up with Buffy as identity figure: she's a P!nk fan.

We are told, canonically, that she is a P!nk fan.

We are told this via her making a flippant remark about Get The Party Started.

Oh, Buffy. Oh, Buffy.

(And, of course, trust? That is some of why the second half of Buffy s7, which I marathoned last night, hit me so hard.)

... Is there a community for it on DW?

• Sort of, but not exactly, in that I apparently signed up the day that Open Beta started (belated happy birthday to Dreamwidth, and a simultaneous belated and early happy birthday to me...) but I only really started thinking of it as my Primary Online Home in about 2011, after meeting noldo and getting dragged delightedly into Avatar fandom.
  
• Yep. Oh dearie me yes. And: because it is the show of my heart, because it is beautiful and heartbreaking and enriching and wonderful. Here is my normal pitch for it:

  Avatar: the Last Airbender is a mainstream US kid's TV show. Within the first five minutes of the first episode of the first season, a female character calls a male character out for sexism, in as many words, and she is taken seriously.
  
  One of the main characters is a six-legged ten-tonne flying platypus-bison. He is a stealthy, stealthy getaway vehicle.
  
  This is a show that contains no white people, that features disabled people, that is full of a wide range of women, that contains a canon trans character - and that deals with abuse and genocide and war and colonialism in nuanced, complicated, loving, difficult, varied and above all target-audience age-appropriate ways.
  
  There are three moments of Fail that I can point out to you.
  
  That's three moments in a three-season series.
  
  Show. Of. My. Heart.

  
  
• Yep! white_lotus.

---

I'm not very okay at the moment, and I'm not sure why. I'm safe and I'm functional and I'm managing self-care and I'm enjoying the world (cherry blossom and bluebells and daffodils and tulips and cowslips, and chaffinches bathing in puddles and wagtails bathing in fords, and silk aviation maps and family and--) and I'm reading and I'm even managing work, but I just seem to be... not very okay. I'm not used to being this kind of not-very-okay, and I don't know how to deal with it, and I don't have tools for it, and I don't know what the problem is. I don't know how to deal with depression that presents without anhedonia.

Hmm. PHQ-9 reckons I'm currently scoring 10, dysthymia/minor depression. I suppose that sounds about right? I just- none of the normal triggers are in place, and I don't know why. Or maybe this is what a stressful situation (viz, Finals) looks like after several weeks of pretty intensive mindfulness training? Maybe I'd be much worse off if I hadn't done (as much of) the course (as I have)? I don't know. I don't know what to do with this.