emotional vomit. hand me a bucket.

This is going to be one big fat purge, and it's for me.
I'm using the blog today as one big fat broom.

added after writing all of the text below:
This is unedited, not even spellchecked. It is stream of conciousness style writing. If you are new to this blog, thanks for coming, and it's okay to slink away quietly...because if you read this, you are going to think I am completely fucking insane.
Even if you have been coming here for awhile and are not so new, you also might think that I'm completely fucking insane.
That's okay (it might just be an accurate assessment).
If you've been reading for a long time, or if you know me personally...you know that this is "process stuff" and this is how I tick and truly, honestly, in the long run, I'm okay.
(But if you feel compelled to call and say hi or stop by and give me a hug...do it.)
This is how I move through my shit.
Sorry I have to do this on the blog, but I also have to make a NaBloPoMo post today, and I dont have time to both process and write...so this is what it is. It is what is.

I'm a wee bit out of touch with reality at the moment.
Or maybe it's not that I'm out of touch with reality, but that I am totally in touch with reality, and it's more like I'm overwhelmed by reality.
Which is a good argment against reality for wanting to be out of touch with it, I guess.
Lordy, who has the keys to the padded-room??
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It is NOT all fluffy handknit toys over here.
I know that.
I'm sure YOU all know that, too.
My knitting of small, repetitive, playful, feel good items, is indicative of stress and potential insanity.
I hope my mom won't hate me for mentioning this, but recently we remenisced over a time in her own life where she faced an equally stressful period, and I would find her at the diningroom table until the wee hours cutting out teenytiny things out of magazine print to make the most beautful and detailed (read as: obsessively intricate) collages you've ever seen. I have one very big one she made and will keep it forever, and I love it, but for her, it reminds her of crazy times.
Knitting tiny things and felting little balls of wool and trying to use a spindle even though I have no idea what I'm doing is exactly that same thing for me right now.
It is very comforting to have my mom understanding me.
We haven't always understood each other. That's for sure.

Hildred called and we talked about the post I wrote. She was moved enough by it to let her family know the post was there and have them read it. One of her sons was worried my use of the term "Crone" for her. I had to explain that my spiritual background is fairly pagan and based in Native American culture, and Crone is an honorable title. A Crone is a WiseWoman.
I'm here typing and crying becaus helloooooo...if we live long enough, we ALL get old. Why does our culture not place our elders on a pedestal worthy of respect?
I want to go live in a teepee.

Yesterday at the AttorneyMan's wasn't bad thing on the surface.
But it really spun me out on some deep levels that cropped up later in the afternoon.
AttorneyMan talked a whole lot about numbers and bottom lines and annuities and things like that, and all the while he's telling me that during the mediation he will be there, and so will be AttorneyMan2, who is also representing me....and so see?? I won't be alone....excpet I am told that in the end, the decision of whether or not, or when, to settle...in the end THAT IS UP TO ME....and then suddenly I feel alone again.
Alone.
I have to say something about Alone.
I'd gone through life like the rest of us, having periods of time alone. Wanting time alone. Not wanting time alone. Having times of being alone when you'd rather have someone near. Having times when you need to go out into the forest alone for four days (I've done that twice). I even spent a chunk of time in my 20's investigating the difference between lonely and alone...and finally understanding they are not the same thing. Understanding that one can be alone in a room full of people...understanding that in my spiritual picture, I am never alone, for we are all interconnected...that kind of stuff.

About a year after the accident, I started to develop all kinds of wierd problems. Having flashbacks of the moments after the accident was the big one. There is one big thing that happened to me as part of the car accident. It was the time I was trapped in the car alone for a couple of hours, totally awake, feeling myself daying, but nobody seeing me off the side of the road. The flashbacks brought along anxiety and depression and insomnia and stuff like that.
I saw a therapist and amongst other things, did some hypnotherapy.
We found that there was one prominent truth about the time trapped in the car.
Amidst the panic, and the determination to get out or to be seen, amidst the bargaining with God/Spirit, amidst the pain and the fatigue and the calm and the chaos....I experienced a sense of alone that I don't even have the words to begins to describe.
Although I should probably try.
Sheesh. I just realized I might have a better time trying to dance it. Hmmm.
Anyhow.
For me, it was a kind of alone that goes wayyyy beyond any wordly level of alone.
It's the kind of alone where you meet your maker (which in essence, is anything but alone), but for me it was somehow terrifying in some way, becomes it was an experience that reminds me that really everything else I've been experiencing in this life is compartively trivial (which is concurrently enlighting and terrifying to me).
It's an alooooone alone.
Honestly. I have no words for it.
Once someone told me that people who have experiences like mine, neardeath experiences, all recount the same panic and fear...and then the peace they found moving towards "the light". Expcept the paramedics showed up before I got to the light, so maybe I'm just stuck knowing the panic and fear. Interesting theory.

Back to yesterday in the AttorneyMan's office, I flipped through the 3" high stack which was supposedly a "breifing" of my case prepared for the mediator. I don't know WHY I skimmed through it, but I did. I saw a few things disturbing, but the one that apparently impacted the rest of my day was the a photo of me trapped in the car taken by the Highway Patrol or someone like that. The rescue crew guys were surrounding the car. All I could see of myself was my black chef pants with the white pinstripes. The ones that made me feel serious, unlike the ones with the cherries on them that I wore when I wanted to feel playful. My face was covered in a blanket to protect me from flying glass and metal (I remember that moment, a fireman was under the blanket with me whispering into my ear that it would all be okay...even though he didn't believe it, as a year later told me he had chalked me up as not surviving).
They were there.
I remember them being there, and the great sense of relief at not being alone.
And I remember letting go.
Yet.
I am alone.
And I can't handle all of this information.
So go home and I sew the arms on the knitted toy and I fix handknit sock problems.
I didn't get even one bit emotional while in the AttorneyMan's office, I don't think.
I just left and went about my business. Task oriented mommy-mom sprinkled in with obsessive crafting.

I also went for my weekly visit with James, my buddy at the convalescent hospital.
The visit with him was quite nice, but of course we were surrounded by used-up-crone people left there to die, who are experiencing that type of alone that I can't bear to describe, but everyone says they have alzheimers so they dont really know that they are alone, and I'm sorry but I just cant believe that to be true...because if the minde doesn't know it, I've got all that I'm worth sitting here telling you that their bodies know it.

Later in the afternoon, I had an argument with my ex...he was trying to cancel out on one of his days to be with MyFK this weekend...a day that I had planned to use to decompress a bit and turn my home into a spa-weekend, and be compulsive over making more little knitted thingies.
I argued with him well beyond making my point, totally justified in my reason for the argument, but misdirecting a whole lot of tension and anger because, well....I'm an ass.
I finished the phone call(s) with him, then I started to panic over all that needed to be done at home in my emotional, exhausted, single-mom state.
I panicked about feeling alone in that way, too.
TheMIG called and offered to come over and hang out for comfort's sake, and I tried to turn that into an argument, too....because what I really needed was not comfort but help, I was overwhelmed...and so he generously offered to come and do some things to help, and I somehow turned that into a "You dont understand me" thing, which is ridiciulous, because at that moment even I didn't understand me.

He came anyhow. We cuddled and watched another episode of Six Feet Under.
Then we just kind of looked into each other's eyes for moment and then I said, "I think that seeing that picture of me in the car was too hard."
"I was wearing my chef pants. I don't wear those anymore."

This morning I looked at the pile of cat toys that I knit up last week, and thought about why they are still sitting there instead of being mailed off to their respective patiently waiting kitties...and it's because I can't just put them in an envelope and send them. Nooooo, I have to be all compulsive MarthaStewart-y about it and wrap them up all nice with ribbons and bows and make a handmade card and say something witty....not to mention finding the time to get over myself long enough so that I can go to the post office.

And all I really want to do is swatch for the lace shawl I've been dying to knit.
But I feel like I need to finish the "shumps" first, but I can't seem to make myself work on them and now I am thinking it's because they are a garment to cover my amputated limb and I'm right in the middle of legal crap about why I have an amputated limb.
But my leg is cold.

And so I grab my chai this morning, go to the computer, and see that Jodi has a new post...and I see that she has lost another cat....and I know that she is not at her home (the home home)...she is somewhere else...and doesn't have the option of gaining comfort from a late night visit from her beloved like I do...and she spends a lot of time alone...and so I cried about that for awhile...because now I'm back to nobody should have to feel alone.
And now here I am.
Staring at the screen.
Thinking about how awesome it is that MyFK said he prefered to walk himself to school without me, a first...which is beautiful...but (do I even need to draw the lines for you?).
Trying to figure out if I should go replace the alarm clock I broke yesterday by accidently dumping an entire glass of wine I poured and never drank into it...or if I should swatch....or make more little toys....or wrap up and send out the toys that I have already made...and it's very quiet here.
Excpet the chirping of the crickets my son keeps in a tank for feeding his gecko.