on being gwyneth

Sometimes one snaps. More often, one just slips to one’s knees, kisses the snow and forgets to get up.

I have gone where I had to go to find the love I needed.

I’ve had a total of three beers in the past three months, and no other alcohol at all.

If you don’t know me very well, then take my word for it that this is an achievement.

If you do… well, then you know.

i often respond to the anthropomorphic with more emotion than to actual people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el4eUKmLujg

I really do believe that death – or more properly, our awareness of it – is the engine of art. It is the soul of the creative act, which is our only real hope for something like immortality, and also the truest expression of its impossibility.

Siva was my first god.

many months ago, someone i once considered a friend compared me to a comparatively well-known psycho in the online trans-sphere. being a thoroughgoing narcissist herself, it never occurred to her to actually bother to explore what she thought she saw in me, what might be going on in my own heart and life that could give rise to whatever led toward her own characterization of me.

i took that as a kind of license.

i consciously gave myself over to a lifelong tendency toward dissociation and fracturing, distilling those parts of my persona that others find variously abrasive, cryptic, thoughtful, etc. into distinct partitions. i compartmentalized and focused all that anger or intellect or whatever that people think they see when they focus on a single facet. “wholeness” seeming a lost cause for me, i gave free rein to an internal chaos that organizes itself by seeping out through differently-shaped apertures in my personality.

i’ve never been a multiple personality, but it did reach a point (which has not really receded), where the effect was of leaving my selves messages in lipstick on a mirror.

but the core shut down. the real me, the gwyneth behind cigfran, became more and more self-editing. behind all those defensive – and offensive – postures, i hid the sadness and fear that have been slowly taking over my life.

i can’t do that anymore. i can’t pretend to be stoic. i’m depressed and terrified… some days suicidal but most days just grey and mortal. i’ll spare the litany of specific woe for now – most of which is repetitious, mundane and all too common – but nothing feels right, now. i feel like i’m riding the wave of a lifetime of mistakes, a sloshing crest of my own bad karma catching me and bearing down on the miserable shore of a pointless death.

i can’t suppress this anymore, or i’ll suffocate. this is who i’ve become over the past few years, and if i’m ever to maintain a shred of the dignity of honest self-expression, this is what i need to expose. this is my dark, and it has a voice.

i grind my teeth so much that some of them are faceted, like ivory prisms.

has anyone noticed that this is actually the same topic as this?

i used to write long essays that took a reader (and myself) through a complete train of thought. i don’t anymore. i tend to write the observations or the understandings, but infrequently together and even more rarely with full connective tissue.

i’m not sure why. it’s certainly due to a more hunkered life, in which i really don’t have time or energy to be so self-indulgent. partly it’s because i’ve given myself over more and more to the fragmented, disjoint nature of my thinking and awareness. without question, simple impatience plays a part, as well.

but it makes it harder to get certain things across, that i think are important… or that at least are interesting to me.

i feel myself moving to a mode where i stop trying to weave altogether, and just toss a bunch of ideas into a box like half-polished pebbles, give the box a shake and hand it over to someone like a mandala, asking “do you see?”

apparently, the radical makeover of my endocrine system over the past few years has had the unpleasant side-effect of altering what i used to think of as “stable points” in my weight, and quite possibly lifted the upper limit altogether.

i now weigh 190 lbs.

being six feet tall and with a classic “medium build” frame, it’s hardly noticeable to those who only ever see me dressed. most of it is in my lower abdomen, but enough is distributed that i only appear a bit robust, as opposed to “trim.”

but i’m hyperaware of it. i’ve had to augment my wardrobe. i feel it in the strain on my knees and in my complete lack of stamina. worst of all, i see it not only in the mirror, but in alison’s eyes… and given how gracefully she handles it, i’m more conscious than ever of just how shabbily i treated my own ex on these same grounds.

so… guilt. shame. depression. and a lack of stimulus on more levels than i care to discuss, which fuels what is already an almost pathological relation to food.

so i bought a bike.

i hate exercise… i mean deeply loathe it and everything associated with it so completely that it doesn’t take sigmund fucking freud to see some programming there that really needs to be dug out. but i love biking…. i used to ride around all the time, and it’s a “zone” for me, a place removed where i can exist only in and as myself. so in desperation i finally choked down the unbelievable price for a decent current bicycle and picked up something i can feel at home on again, and hopefully forget about exercise and fat and work and “trans” and all the crap that isn’t just riding a bike.

now, if it would just stop raining.

written in my notebook while taking the rail to work:
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