buckets of moonbeams...

For about 2 weeks now things have been good, really quite good, continuously quite good. After an outburst about two weeks ago I got some important messages of support, and since then something in me seems to have clicked. Admittedly I've had a few moments, but they've had traceable causes.

The biggest difference is being off the drugs. I realise now that they were keeping me stuck in a false sense that everything was ok, when it most definitely was not. I have just had to go through the shit, just like everyone else, to get out the other side.

Partly, improvement in my state is due to a renewed sense of hope now I have a sense of home to come back to. And with home a coherent narrative of self. It has been a concern at times that that is an unreasonable expectation, but it's important to me, and that's what is at stake here: a sense of self. So much of my time in the past seems to have been spent flitting from one partially-real self to another, where I have inhabited a part of my personality distinct from the other parts and sometimes the different bits just don't add up together: no core, no contiguous self.

And with home, community, and a place within community. A purpose. I clearly remember the devastation at Carlisle street focused around hopelessness without purpose, and that was at least 10 years ago.

Very early on in therapy a main preoccupation had been drawing a coherent map of my life. I'd construct minutely detailed time-lines, showing months spent in this place or that, who with, how I left, what car I had, how much money, what length my hair was...sometimes trying to construct new countries that might explain absences and actions when there were bits missing, or they were there but the whole just didn't make sense. It was a puzzle to fit all the pieces together and make sense of all these gaps I felt in me. Every time I poked my finger under my ribs or into my thigh I’d touch the edge of a hole; it was disconcerting.

But I just couldn't map the territory, I came away dissatisfied that it was still a piece of two dimensional paper with a couple of lines drawn on it. I don't remember when I gave up trying to map my self.

When I stop whining about rmit I have to admit that one of the greatest liberations I have gained from my studies of landscape architecture has been a sense of the immensity. And with that a realisation that no one person can fix it.

con·tig·u·ous (kn-tgy-s)

adj.

1. Sharing an edge or boundary; touching.

2. Neighboring; adjacent.

3. a. Connecting without a break: the 48 contiguous states.

b. Connected in time; uninterrupted: served two contiguous terms in office.

Always, for as long as I can remember at least, there have been bits of me that fear the actions and words of other bits, worrying they’d say and do things that I'd be completely embarrassed by later, when I returned to 'sanity.' So I screwed the lid down tighter and tighter - which of course meant that there'd be a blowout somewhere else and the most feared things would manifest.

But lately I'm tracking it all, being kinder to the bits, and feeling, for I don't know how long, a sense of wholeness. Iguess in simple terms, it's making friends with the darkness instead of wall-papering over it.