Last Night

Last night I slept through a thunderstorm. It helped that I took something I know will knock me out. I hate doing this. The whole notion of not being able to control when I fall asleep (I can't say lose consciousness, as I believe we retain some level even if we are not awake) is terrifying. I imagine it is a combination of some sort of early childhood fears and a trauma response from a suicide attempt that thankfully failed that makes me feel that way. Nonetheless, I'll resort to artificial means of getting to sleep just to make the usual tornado of thoughts to quiet down, if only for a little while. So, because of this, I slept through a thunderstorm. Usually, if I sleep this deeply, the storm inside my head kind of goes away. This time, it didn't. I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders. I feel the trauma resonating. I feel the panic of people experiencing profound trauma for the first time. I feel the resignation and sadness of people experiencing profound trauma for the umpteenth time. I feel all the emotions within and of myself. My mind is making up scenarios and playing them in my sleep. It's my deepest fears and past pain wrapped up in the emotions I perceive from others. I am only an interpreter. I can't know if my perception is entirely accurate. I do know that what I feel is absolutely real, to me anyway. 

I feel like I'm losing my grip on sanity. All I can do is keep myself grounded in joyful things and maybe through my joy, others will be comforted. 

Thursday Dreams

Usually, my nightmares and weird shit that I see in my sleep burns off like fog on a sunny day once I'm awake. Lately, there's been shit that has been sticking around all day. It replays in my mind over and over and breaks through most efforts to ignore it. Lately things are getting a bit bizarre while at the same time being very plausible. This is annoying to say the least. Not sure if manifesting bullshit out in the world or if it's just my brain chemicals acting foolish. Likely a combination of both.
For context, here's an example:
I feel myself slowly rising to consciousness. I'm vaguely aware that the bed I'm on is super uncomfortable and something smells and feels like metal. Something is vibrating on the table beside me. I realize it's my phone. I never have my phone on vibrate. I pick it up and stare at it for what seems to be forever and see that the call is coming from a restricted number. I suddenly become aware of the time and day. It's my therapist calling and she calls at a specific day and time from a restricted number. This makes sense to me. It's the only thing that makes sense as everything else is a swirling mass of blackness. I answer the call.
"How are you?" she asks, normal as ever. I answer that I honestly don't know. She asks if I know where I am. What an odd question but one I can't answer which is even stranger. The rest of the conversation is a blur and then the scene changes.
I'm in something that looks like a conference room. The chairs look nice but are really uncomfortable. There's a really shitty photograph of some sort of flower on the wall. There's some sort of paperwork on the wooden table. The table seems new-ish but at the same time looks abused. There's a stern looking balding man in a suit that seems a bit tight. His face is slightly pink. I think maybe he aught to loosen his tie.
He starts talking at me and it sounds like the teacher on the Peanuts cartoon. I stare at him, puzzled. What the fuck do you want me to do, guy?
"I want to see (therapist's name)" I'm not sure if I said it out loud or just thought about it strongly. He gets up, frustrated and walks out of the room, slamming the door. I am alone for what seems like hours but my perception of time can't be trusted at this point. Finally, therapist shows up. She stares at me for a while and I can feel the concern. She starts to say something and then suddenly I'm awake in my own bed, my guys snoring on either side of me. My heart is pounding but calms after a couple of minutes. I feel like I have run a marathon though.
I can't get how real this all felt out of my head while at the same time am sure that none of this happened nor will it happen. I'm sure in a few days this will fade and I'll forget about it like I always do but at least by writing it out, I'll remember the details and hopefully it will help me process things.
If you made it this far, thanks. If you're struggling right now, know that you are not alone and you are loved.
TLDR signing off.

Emotions and stuff

This sticker is a support message for MS (a terrible illness and I fully support research for a cure) but it got me thinking about life in general. I usually try to be as invisible as possible mostly because I really don't like attention. Go figure, I am a fairly popular online radio host and make a fair bit of coin off of promoting my creativity and calling attention to myself. In reality, I'm calling attention to my work and try (mostly subconsciously) to heap the focus on to my actual creative output and not myself. Love the work, admire the work but don't see the artist. It's a bit weird with the radio thing. On air I am a personality. As genuine as that personality is, it isn't the whole of me. It also is somewhat of an act. I am a character in a role and as much as throw the real me into it, the fact remains that I am acting. I do it all the time because it is therapeutic to entertain. I like being a bit over the top, a bit larger than life. I like the attention the act gets and I love that other people enjoy both the act and the way I present music. Music has always been an emotional comfort to me and what I groove on at any given moment is a reflection of what is going on in my head. Recording all of my shows and mixes has given me a huge diary that anyone can go back and look at. I can only hope that years from now when I've ascended to a different plane of existence, someone will understand me through my art. I hope people get it while I am alive too but eh. I'm pumping creative energy into the void to distract myself. In all honesty, it is the drive to express experience that keeps me alive. I have lots of things to value, don't get me wrong. I have love and companionship. I have wonderful friends and family. I have adorable cats. But the truth of the matter is that all that isn't enough to keep me alive. The burning ember in my soul that is expression is what keeps me from pulling the trigger. Also, the odd curiosity of what existence will yield definitely helps. What pushes me to the absolute edge? Grief, certainly. I get painfully close to people. I suppose that's why I tend to seem standoffish to people not in my inner circle. That's not to say that people can't know me through art and I do tend to overshare a bit. But that's that over the top thing I mentioned before. My creative expression is certainly personal but it's not the same as letting someone in. The people I truly open up to are incredibly few and far between. I knew a person for a few years. I talked to them on a weekly basis. Sure, we had a professional relationship on the surface but as with anyone I completely expose myself to, we ended up in a deeper relationship. No, it wasn't romantic. Oddly my closest relationships aren't really romantic in nature. Sure, there's romance involved with some but that isn't the important part, at least for me. I do wish my romantic partners understood this and I hope that they do not take my feelings on the subject personally. Anyway, I've been talking with therapists for a long long time off and on. I notice the grand majority of them, helpful though they may have been, didn't seem comfortable with how I ended up being somewhat close to them. I can't open up without an emotional connection so we usually end up at a roadblock eventually. B was...different. From the first meeting we just vibed with each other for lack of a better word. We shared a common history, saw some of the same shit, felt some of the same confusion. I have a feeling had we met on the street, we would have become incredibly close friends. Alas at the end of it all, he was a therapist and I was a client. There's a level of closeness that just doesn't happen or at least it shouldn't. For better or worse, it happened anyway. One day, though I didn't really know it, we said goodbye for the last time. The last thing he said to me was "hang in there." Nothing out of the ordinary, but I somehow knew that would be the last time we spoke. Call it a gut feeling or whatever. Part of me was hoping that he'd be back, that whatever called him away was temporary. The other day though, I found out that he was just...gone. No closure, no goodbye, no point of contact. I don't know if that would help really but I would have liked to tell him that I deeply care and that because he put himself out there and let me become so emotionally close, I've progressed further in my mental state than I ever could have expected. The flip side is, when it was over, it hit like a ton of bricks. I feel like I have lost one of my best friends.  Even though I am somewhat close to other people, the relationship I had with B was something profound and unique. The guy knows things about me that absolutely no one else knows, not even my partners.  Some of that is because the relationship I had with B enabled me to share things I simply don't share with other people. Another part of it is as a professional, he just knew the right questions to ask. It is an old habit of mine never to give up any information that isn't expressly asked of me, even when I am oversharing through art. My partners, close though we may be, don't ask.  Some things are implied through our close relationship, some things just never occur to them.  Regardless of the reason, they don't know every little thing about me. B managed to coax things out of me that I didn't know myself, which is probably why it was such an emotionally helpful relationship.  I'd like to think that it wasn't entirely one sided even though for professionalism's sake it probably should have been. I don't think it would have been so helpful if it was a one sided deal, though. I have lost people close to me. Friends have passed away through some really shitty circumstances and that was and is incredibly sad. I miss my homies that have passed away daily.  I have lost two children, one to death and one to the fucked up court system. Not a day goes by that I don't think of them and the lives I wish I could be a part of but can't. This...this is something entirely different.  This hurts in a way that I can't really put into adiquate words. This on top of the total and utter bat shit craziness that is the scope of human existence right now. I have a feeling that the state of the world is a factor in how much this hurts. Hell the state of the world simply hurts right now.  Seems like humans are always living through something though. I guess history has to make itself somehow, but living in the middle of it happening is really...weird. I feel like I have some sort of purpose in all of this though but fuck all if I know what that purpose is. I have lived through a lot and even my conception and birth was somewhat of a miracle. Did I really go through all of this just to take myself out? Can I truly live and then die on my own terms or is that something I shouldn't even think about? B talked me out of suicide, a couple of times actually.  That's something not a lot of people know. I was 100% going to jump but he convinced me that there was something more. That's something not even my partners were able to do but to be fair I would never ask them to. I try to keep how close to the edge I am a secret, mostly out of a fucked up sense of not wanting to burden the two people I love the most with something so upsetting. If I did just off myself, I'd almost want it to come out of nowhere so they couldn't blame themselves in any way (although I know they would).  My current therapist is a wonderful human who seems to get it.  Again, we share some of the same history and life struggles. I feel like through our conversations, I'm getting close to her too.  Through B (the guy kept incredible notes), she knows quite a bit about me and I vibe enough with her I feel like I can say things without it becoming some sort of classic hassle. Sucks right now I can only speak to her on the phone because I feel like there's something lost a bit in translation.  My body language is stupid hard to read but she's seemed to figure it out.  She's figured out how to read my vocal tone too, which is something no one has been able to get right, other than B. Maybe that's just because we've been talking on the phone for a couple of months and she knows what the fuck she's doing. There is something to be said for good old fashioned intuition combined with professional training. I feel kind of stupid for only being able to get this close to a professional. I shouldn't have to pay for emotional comfort but at the same time, no one should have to be a dumping ground for my profound emotionalism for free. I absolutely expect no one to be able to handle this sort of baggage without compensation especially since you really can't deal with this sort of thing without some sort of training. That's what therapy is for, right? I have absolutely no idea where I was going with this.  I hurt, a lot.  I put on a huge air of confidence, of peace, of contentment.  I love life, I really do. It's a blessing to experience and blessing to be able to share that with others in a way that resonates and gives joy. At the same time I'm fucking tired. I feel the boot of the universe on the back of my neck and I see how hurt and upset and frightened people are. I see how angry people are at others and at themselves. I am but a lone speck of star stuff in a storm of absolute chaos. I am powerful yet powerless. There is so much more to life than this but this is all we have. 
I am visible, I am invisible.