Today

I must have adrenal fatigue, some kind of shot nervous system or something, which makes absolute sense, and getting to meditate again should hopefully really help. I am sure this has been building up ever since I got back to the United States late last year. Now I’m afraid Mexico feels like such a distant dream and maybe I’ll never see it again. My spirits the last few days to couple weeks have been considerably lower than they were when I started thinking about walking dogs and reteaching myself math and I have not touched Oliver Twist for such a long time. I have read little bits of various non-fiction books but… I think when I stop doing those things it means I am despairing or frightened and it was a whole lot of triggers very closely related to ‘family’ that made me feel so ungroundedly hopeless again snd it took ever so little actual conversation. Even the memos used to send me money were triggering beyond belief and intentionally too; I got into an argument about that but it’s not worth getting into an argument about anything.

I just don’t know how to deal with the realisation that I do not have a family and it’s messed up but arguing even when I’m sure they all hate me including the one I was sure never could may make me feel more alive than trying to find some way to fill the emptiness. My psyche still needs to stand up for myself around little things that have happened, and since I’m not allowed to stand up for myself and nothing important I say in text is ever acknowledged though that is by far a much better way for me to communicate than through phone calls, I found my spirits actually lifting a little bit when I wrote something out which is what I *would* say to my mother if she could communicate with me rationally and I knew she really cared. I’m sure actually trying to talk about any of these things will bring me down to the depths of the earth but I think I felt better and it was therapeutic when I wrote them down anyway; yet then I felt like I wanted to actually communicate with her so that I could get it out of me anyway. I called her very briefly and she said I must hate her because I didn’t end up having her cone see me the other day and she asked why; I explained in a text and then went to Wal-Mart and it felt sooo good to finally be able to get my own groceries again and to eat vegan or mostly vegan (I wish I *had* bought a vegan pizza instead if the cheese one I bought). I heard a song there that somehow just made me feel good and I decided I didn’t really want to check for her messages when I got back and for now I have blocked her again. I can’t keep doing this emotional roller coaster though and I am terrified of being dependent on it.

We got back to the house and someone called with a gentle boice checking up on us and seeing how we were doing and hoping I was rested and my spirits are better than yesterday. Well, yhey are, a bit, but in other ways having more time to feel what is actually happening to me and having less hypervigilance so I can feel my heart is absolutely terrifying. I just don’t want to dive downhill into deep clinical depression when I am in such a generously offered space. There are a lot of ways I am worried like what happens if I disappoint people or mess up and then end up back in the shelter again? Some of these people feel like father figures or grandfather figures and it is always nice to be around real ‘loving dad’ energies; it brings back a part of me that has been so missing for so long and it is really comforting to actually feel the energy if someone who models that even though it is so painful that I never got it from my own family. Maybe it helps me remember how to ‘self-parent’ and bring uo energies in myself that I so often forget how to do.

So, I must have started going into a depression when I started reading and doing math but staying with a peace and climate change activist retired physics professor is inspiring me to maybe pick up those books again. It’s just heartbreaking, like, how degrading it was to feel ridiculed for being vegetarian that I couldn’t even own my veganism and sometimes I’d have to deal with meat on my plate or meat that was taken off my plate without them bothering to give me a clean one and it just hurts like what if something happens and I have to go back to that. Or what if I can never go back to Mexico so why study Spanish and what if I end up terminally exhausted and can’t fo math, what if once again I pick up a guitar and I lose the space for it? Why learn things when you can get as dissociated and heartbroken as I have been lately and forget everything you know? Life shouldn’t be this fragmented, life shouldn’t be this hard. I was thinking of writing a bunch of songs to or from the perspective of the inner child. I was thinking for me A Whole New World is one of the best inner child songs but what if I can never show it to her? Why get excited about life when there are those ready to snatch it all away from you at a moment’s notice? My friend wrote a book that I’m hoping to start looking at tonight about appreciating the universe and his motivation was so that we don’t throw away what we’ve got, which it seems we are doing, and that is such a worthy reason for writing a book. My being a child of this universe though is not something that can be taken away from me. Maybe soon I will be ready to pick up this math book and do math problems again or study Spanish or see if I can get my guitar over here somehow without losing my mind in the process but if it’s not one thing it’s another and I think I’ll just wait. See if I can get into a gentler, more contemplative space for a little bit first. Oh, yes, we have been doing experiments testing products for lactose and apparently at least until today all of the products he has tested with ‘natural flavours’ have lactose. I don’t know if it is out there in any way but these sort of loose informal experiments seem to suggest that 20 out of 21 times ‘natural flavour’ in foods, including vegetarian meat substitutes contains lactose. He said Burger King’s Impossible Burgers, which have made his digestive system sick and me sick just tasting them (something is not right with them) contain lactose. He said the Beyond Burgers we tested today are the first of three meat substitutes he’s tested that seems to be lactose free… I would have to know more about his experimental protocol and such to know whether I totally buy it but it seems many products marketed to vegans that list ‘natural flavour’ in the ingredients actually have lactose

I think I do have allergies to the air in this room but hopefully I will get used to it or I can figure out some way to mitigate it because I’d rather have allergies here than spend another night at that shelter as nice as a lit of people were; it was getting to be way too much for me. I had allergies to smoke that gets inside the main room of the building really easily when people were outside smoking but that mostly went away after a while especially after I moved into the dorm so I am really hoping these allergies will go away too and I don’t end up coughing all the time…