4:20am And Anxious

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4:20am.  It's almost time to take my meds so I'm anxious.  The meds are for anxiety.  I'm not anxious about them*, I'm anxious about everything else.

People tell me, "Why don't you worry about the whole world less and worry about yourself?" It's not a question, though, it's an admonishment, as if they know what it's like to feel the wings fall off a butterfly somewhere in Ethiopia, or another tree go groaning down in Madagascar, monkeys shrieking, as if they know what I know about... everything.

I AM worried about myself, and I DON'T know everything, and I know I'm going to run out of time before I win the war on ignorance.  It sounds arrogant.  I happen to know that compared to some people I am a dullard, a dim bulb.  I'm anxious for how THEY must feel about me, waiting for me to catch up, like a small child, running for their outstretched hand, but tripping on my shoelace and falling down, scraping myself up... again.

I HAVE closed down my world to a very small work area in the physical sense. That's why many people think I don't go anywhere or do anything but type.  I take care of my parents, and they, along with my doctors, take care of me (I'm recovering from minor surgery as I type.  An abscess near my lymph nodes under my armpit formed faster than I could keep it lanced.  The antibiotics are killing my gut flora, so I don't feel well.  At some point we're going to learn that it's a stupid thing to do to kill gut flora because it's they that have much to do with immunology, but we haven't yet).  I'm enabling my parents to do what they want in life, to the best of my limited abilities, for the rest of their lives if need be.

Every few weeks my mother says to me, "What would I do without you?" and I say, "I don't know, what would I do without you?" which is bittersweet because she's getting old, and I'm an alcoholic.  Either of us could go.  The results would be devastating to the other, but I know she's had a good life, and she isn't yet sure about that for me.  I know I have.  But it has been scarring.  Much of my skin and all my organs, my brain, is scarred.

I live with my father.  I keep the house I grew up in (without him) from falling down.  I keep it a loving, but sometimes barely in control place to live.  I learned how to do most of the things that my father should have taught me how to do by myself.  He, along with the rest of the family taught me how to love nature and books.  

My grandmother, who helped raise me in my father's stead from the age of five, taught me about rules and regulations and respect, and gender roles.  I was raised by three generations of women, like a wolf pack finding a little youngling ape.  I am loving and will lick your neck and run my fingers through your hair (only figuratively, if you are a male), but if I am rubbed the wrong way I bite--hard.

My mother taught me to always think for myself, though, to the point of sometimes letting me make mistakes, in order to think my way through them.  I understand rules and regs, I understand respect.  Rules are what you break through to find something better.  Regulations are how anarchy is kept at bay while you are breaking rules.  Not everyone should break the rules, just the ones who know how and why, and what must be sacrificed to find something new.  Respect is earned with a smile, not a command, but sometimes the truth needs to be told to get to something better, not just to win an argument.  Often the truth hurts the status quo.  Even if one loses friends and unimpresses people, the truth will set people free, and you may not even know them.  Eventually people recognise that.  The ones who are saved do, even if they don't remember who did it.

I'm still waiting for people to recognise that.  Many, many women say, "I just want to meet a man who can be honest with me." Yeah, right.  I'm that man.  In ANY relationship people don't want to hear the truth all the time.  In the absence of you telling lies, they have to find other things to bitch about when they are unhappy, like "Remember that time you told me the truth?!"

"Yes."

"You jerk!"

*sigh*

My attempts at "success" have been ill-timed and somewhat half-hearted.  I don't want fame, I'm too private.  I like to observe, not BE observed.  Oh, I don't know, I can play the game, but I always get anxious about it.  I'm anxious by myself, at 4:20am, how would I be if everyone was watching me?  They would be judging me.  I could say something and two different people would get two completely different meanings from the same sentence, and neither would be exactly right about what I DID try to say.  Fame would BE a sentence.  History is written by the biggest jerks.  Because those are the ones who people listen to for some odd reason.  Then it takes thoughtful people hundreds of years to actually get closer to the truth.

For one thing, I never thought that I'd be in a position to help my parents.  I assumed, like most people, that I would move out and start my own family the way my older sisters did, or started to do.  But I'm anxious, and I medicated with alcohol for many long years.  When kids were studying U.S. History and Geography, I was drinking Jack Daniels' and trying to keep up with Jim Morrison and Roger Daltry.  Then I discovered Led Zeppelin and things got really interesting.  Unfortunately I couldn't REALLY sing like Robert Plant until I was twenty-seven, and by then I was sober.  But I remembered all the poetry, lessons, and amazing talent in those bands, and got my own education.

"It is hard to get the news from poetry, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."    --William Carlos Williams

I was determined to try every street med I could find, to soothe the savage beast, while I waited for people to catch up to me, their hands held out like small children, tripping on their shoelaces.  I was tripping on SOMETHING, and breaking the rules of perception.  Like the way that wood glue is stronger than wood fibers and so won't break at a join, my perception was STRONGER when I put it back together, and still is.  Me?  I'm a wild one.  The beast that most people have soothed by school and work, and falling in line, I soothed by finding the beautiful in the everyday, but with that truth comes the flip side.  There is a dark side to truth.  There's a thorn in every rose.  It helps people to know where the thorns are, but it also makes one seem like that's all one cares about if one repeatedly points them out.  Truth isn't truth at all,  It's just reality.  It's OUR reality, which means a combination of everyone's until we start excluding people.  Truth is Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.  Reality is what we think we are doing with them.

We are good at excluding people.  We don't like people messing up our status quo with truths that we won't figure out for another twenty years, when some FAMOUS jerk tells us it's true.

I was a wild one.  Now I am reserved to the point that people think it's boring.  I have little money.  I can't afford to take many risks.  I get bored with myself, too, and that's dangerous.

Would I really want to be anywhere else?  Sometimes.  Sometimes I want to be almost anywhere else.  I want to go where nobody knows my name.  I want to go where everybody knows my name, and knows who I am, a reunion of old friends, face to face, not just what they read on facebook.   My family knows, and they love me.  My parents got me started in this world, and the least I can do is help them along at the end of theirs.  It's working out.  I don't get all the help I need, or all the money, or all the respect I would like, but it's working.

All things could change tomorrow.  If so, I've faced down death and bullies and taxes many, many times.  I can take on anything.  I am not afraid.  I am anxious.  Two completely different things.  Or maybe not.  You don't have to believe everything in a book. Maybe it's PTSD. Being afraid probably is an extreme sense of anxiety, but I've broken through it to the other side so many times I get calm, my mind gets incredibly clear, and I do absolutely whatever it takes to save the people around me, pull them from the overturned car, stand in front of them when someone has a gun or knife or closed fists, push or pull them out of the way of moving cars, turn them on their side so they don't asphyxiate, feed them when they won't eat, talk them down from suicide.  I might have stopped for the adulation, or the t-shirt or the fame, so someone could give me a field promotion or a medal but I was busy at the time.

When I'm working, when I'm doing the Mom & Pop thing or the corporate thing, I do get field promotions and adulations to the point where job titles have been created for me specifically.  I just get the job done.  Whatever it is.  When the fame has worn off I'm still getting the job done.  I illuminate.  I break the rules and make them better.  Sometimes that's rewarded, sometimes it's punished.  I don't care, I do what's right.

But all I do is type, don't I?  All I am is hot air, and nuzzles and bites.  And sometimes I howl--for butterflies, and trees...

*takes meds, relaxes*







*Ok, I AM worried about my meds.  Who knows what the long term effects of anti-anxietants/depressives is.  There hasn't been a long enough term yet to know.  I keep waiting to learn that they cause Alzheimer's, Parkinson's AND Multiple Sclerosis.  I'm anxious about that--for all the people that would harm.


J. Shidler, 2015-08-15, 4:20-6:20am
© 2015 - 2024 vikingjon
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naikki's avatar
it takes courage to write with an honest voice, and even more to speak about the truth of inner workings publically..i think you did that in the most genuine way!

i don't know if this is of interest, but i thought of including it here:
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/…