Tag: communication

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Blue, Black, Silver, Water, Moons, Death & Ghosts Charleston, West Virginia My Life Story On My Own Writings

A Time To Be Blue

Summer is over. I feel so sad. It was beautiful, all the green and sun melting everything down. I gave myself those three months to live as an idiotic welfare queen while adjusting to single life. Summer is all about hearts and love. I wish it could last forever.

But now comes the fall. A time for brains and being serious. Its color will be blue. I’m afraid I won’t cut it in this crisp new world. Only 9 months until the women’s shelter stops paying for my home. I need good ideas to enter my brain, but they don’t.

I haven’t crisped yet. I’m trying but the sun is still hot and yellow, melting brains down and hearts feel like fire. The sky is so blue, the EBT cupcakes so delicious. Everything green and frothy. I want to roll in the grass like a pig.

The world is a green paradise but beneath it a dark soil of fear, pain and panic. I bat it down with stress gummies & cough syrup. I say “It is what it is” when disturbing thoughts enter. This locks them in a magical box. I can’t face life head on yet. I’m not safe.

And until I get smart I won’t be safe. I need to think clearly and formulate a plan. But life is a bowl of puzzles and I can’t solve one of them. The second I use my brain I start to cry. I feel like my initial goal of becoming a millionaire this fall is not going to happen.

So I’m choosing a smaller goal. To become a good communicator and learn how to clearly express my needs and desires. To express my will. Which is hard because I’m not always sure if I have one.

When you’re a wife, you don’t need a will. Being willess is almost an asset since it gives you increased flexibility like a body with no bones. But then fate dumps you on the streets and you are expected to have a will. A will as strong as any man’s. People don’t realize wills can’t pop up overnight like a forest.

The only time I am sure of my will is when I am hungry or in extreme pain. Cause I have the will to survive. But even then speaking up on behalf of myself feels like sticking my hand in a blender. I am terrified of displeasing the people around me. This isn’t the same as wanting people to like me. I’m willing to be hated to give the people what they want. Cause sometimes they want a bad guy. They would generally prefer to keep the good guy role for themselves.

Wanting to please & wanting to live up to social expectations are two different worlds. People are rarely in the mood to admire someone. More commonly they need someone to feel superior to. This is where I excel.

I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember. Throwing myself under the bus to appease a hot spot in someone else’s psyche. If a friend needed to feel fast, I’d pretend to be slow. I’d lose contests on purpose so the other person could win. I’d perform horribly in plays so someone special in the audience could have the satisfaction of knowing I sucked. I don’t know why. Its just this feeling of terror that I can only be safe by giving people what they want.

I have my finger in the undercurrent of every dynamic. It makes me act strange because those undercurrents are intense. They are made up of things people don’t want to acknowledge. When you touch them they cause weird things to leap out of your mouth as though you are possessed. Like a touching a wire. But I need to release that underlying pressure to feel safe. If there is an undercurrent of anger I try to be the person it can be released upon. Then things feel safe again.

I don’t know how to stop doing this. So I’ll put that puzzle back in the bowl for now. And focus on the immediate task. To clearly express my needs and the desires to the extent that I am aware of them. Even when it seems certain to lead to pain and disaster. Perhaps as I express these bits of will, larger chunks of will will start drifting into my consciousness.

Every morning I’ll tell myself that as I speak up for myself, new doors open for me.

Two blue stones that I’ll keep in my pocket. I hope they teach me how to express myself.
Hillbilly diamonds found on a sidewalk. I hope they’ll make me rich.
Vines climb a barbed wire fence. I wish I could climb it too and reach those lights on the other side.

Mama I ain’t gonna lie. I gone done bad things.
Feeding bits of stick to ducks at night. Summer is so woozy. But you don’t see the bad part. I got here on a motorcycle. Somebody help me.


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Charleston, West Virginia men Uncategorized Writings

A Meducation

Have you read “Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus”? It is insane. The author describes my conversations with James word for word. He states the exact words I am hoping James will say, then the exact words James says instead, and explains the reason for the disconnect. It’s incredible.

I was going to share some muggets I learned, but decided I must first read it over and over, every day for an hour or so, until it becomes a part of me. The principles make so much sense while reading, but in real life you get lost figuring out how to apply them. I just need to simmer in this wisdom until it becomes part of my bones.

The basic gist though is don’t wear yourself out doing nice things for men. They don’t like this because it reminds them of their mother. What a man really needs is:

A) Permission to be emotionally unavailable so he can do man things, like think about problems. Men go into robot state to recharge and they must fully recharge before they are capable of bonding.

B) Approval and acknowledgment. But this doesn’t have to be as exhausting as it sounds. Think of the man as a robot. He only needs a straightforward acknowledgment of tasks completed and problems solved. “Thank you for taking out the trash.” No goo, no frills.

The most important mecret though is that men hate criticism. And they hear criticisms in statements which females would find loving. Because their core insecurity, is “Am I powerful? Am I capable? Am I being viewed as powerful and capable?” Females, on the other hand, are wondering “Am I lovable? Am I loved? Do I have care and support?”

For this reason, females love it if someone offers to help them. They share ideas and advice as a form of affection. They like being fussed over. Offering a man help, advice or fussiness, however, can easily be construed as an insult. You are telling him he is a pathetic little boy who can’t do anything right without mommy’s help.

So never offer to help men. Don’t give advice or suggestions, unless they ask. (When men DO ask for advice, however, this means they truly want it, whereas females may ask for advice when they are actually seeking care and affection.) And avoid criticism as much as humanly possible.

Now I’m still not 100% sure what you are supposed to do in cases where you are riding bucket seat in a car that a man is driving off a cliff. Is there some way you can suggest he turn left that won’t mortally offend him and cause him to press the accelerator harder? I can only hope multiple readings of this book will reveal the answers to me.

Still, the good news is- give less. Save your care for yourself. When you make yourself happy, that will make your man happy too, since he will take credit for your happiness. Likewise, when you are unhappy, men take credit for that. Hence, the expression of natural emotions like sadness and anger can be construed as insults by a man. Your tears may be telling him that he sucks as a husband and you wish you had married the neighbor.

This is the other tricky part. Females thrive on expressing the full range of emotions. If we emit happiness all the time, we become frayed and brittle. Negative emotions are our healing waters, where we go to regenerate. They give us depth and wisdom. But to men, they are threatening. And an insult to their competence as husband.

Women talk about negative feelings to heal and create bonds. Men don’t do this. If they express negative emotions, it means they are trying to attack or blame someone. So when they see women being negative, they feel attacked. And they counter-attack. Then women go into shock because they don’t understand why they are getting attacked when they were looking for love and bonding. Degeneration begins.

Now, the book says that if men can truly understand that expressing negative feelings is part of female nature- and not intended as an assault- they can gradually restrain their defensive impulses. They can learn to just listen and even say things like hmmmm, oh really? and tell me more. Then they discover that by simply listening, the female’s negative feelings magically transform into positive feelings, including love and appreciation for the listener. This gives men the sense of accomplishment they crave.

So the real challenge lies in convincing men not to be threatened by female style expression. How to do this though, when there is no chance men will read relationship books themselves? * I don’t know, but it must be done. Cause even if a female does everything right- gives space, appreciation, zero criticism etc- if she can’t express the full range of feelings there is no chance she will feel satisfied. She will either pop or fade away, and the man will be left with the very sense of failure he was trying to avoid.

A picture James took of his fingers. This is supposed to reveal something about his manhood. Isn’t it fascinating how we are basically living with a foreign species yet go through life imagining we inhabit the same reality?
Male and female. Living in happy harmony. (Slippers has a shaved leg since she had an operation for a sports injury. The truth is, I am afraid she got the injury from Patton humping her. Something for which I feel a lot of guilt. It was so easy to train Slippers that I didn’t realize what a challenge Patton would be. But I think he has been successfully trained out of this and she is recovering well.)

* I just read this to James and he said you could get men to do this by simply explaining it to them. However, you may need to be patient and remind them over and over that you only need them to listen until they are able to retrain their defensive reflexes.



Categories
men My Life Story Uncategorized Writings

I am a Good Wife

Conventional wisdom always encourages people to be vulnerable, open & honest. But I struggle with the reverse- the feeling that it isn’t okay to withhold & keep thoughts to myself.

Especially in marriage. James wants me to tell him everything & says it is damaging if I don’t. Which is great in theory, since I have the desire to share all my thoughts & feelings. But in reality it doesn’t work out so well. Frequently he will get angry about my thoughts or tell me why they are incorrect & then I am forced to go through an endless wrangling process trying to defend them. The process is confusing & doesn’t end until I have either accepted his replacement thoughts or am too tangled up to function anymore.

Now to someone else this might be no problem. They would just share what they wanted to share and keep the rest to themselves. But I have this compulsive feeling that my perceptions must be validated by another person before I can trust them. I can hardly be certain the sky is blue without first asking someone. And I also have this compulsive feeling that I must obey James. I can’t withhold information unless he gives me permission to do so, regardless of how much confusion & discomfort sharing may cause. Basically I don’t trust my own mind & have no will of my own.

I guess this traces back to when I was a teenager & my first husband was my spiritual guide & I needed to tell him absolutely everything so he could remove my ego, realign my thinking & enable me to achieve enlightenment. The process involved lots of screaming & public humiliation, including sexual, since these are the most tried & true methods of ego removal. Since then, I have never been able to regain that feeling of trusting my own mind and feeling that I am my own master. I don’t even know how to explain it to people who take having their own mind and will for granted.

I am trying very hard to put these boundaries back in place but it is a struggle. I don’t feel I have the right to make choices for myself without asking someone else’s permission and am scared of what will happen if I do.

My husband likes control. I don’t mean this as a bad thing and maybe it is even a quality I admire. But one rule of our relationship is that he is allowed to make decisions while I am not. He can decide what to do with money- and spend enormous sums- without consulting me. I cannot access money without consulting him and telling him what I wish to buy. The flip side is that he is much more financially generous with me than he is with himself. Generally he will get me whatever I want- even if it is frivolous or wasteful- while being stingy with himself. And this same pattern applies to all aspects of our relationships. If I want something & it is within his power to give it to me, he probably will. But I am not allowed to make decisions without consulting him, whereas he is allowed to make decisions without consulting me.

I am supposed to trust him. But he isn’t supposed to trust me. I am deemed incapable of making any significant decisions even if they impact no one but myself. As an example, I want to see a shrink & there is one nearby I can see for free. Not because I am looking for guidance, I just want the experience of talking to a human without feeling it is such a struggle to get my thoughts out and have them heard and accepted. I just want to experience something new- the feeling of noncombative communication.

But James is against this. So what are my choices? Try to change his mind? Trying to convince James of anything is impossible. The certain outcome is that I will end up adopting his perspectives because anything else becomes too unpleasant. I could go behind his back, but that would violate my compulsive need to be transparent with him. So the only real option is to tell myself it isn’t a good idea anyway.

The official justification for obeying him is that he is more grounded than me and makes better choices. (I should add here that I am sometimes allowed to make choices- it is just that he decides which choices I am or am not allowed to make.) But the truth is I am just scared of what will happen if I don’t obey him. I am afraid he will find a way of punishing me or else stop loving me which is a punishment itself. Any time I attempt to assert my will it turns into a horrible fight from which it can take me a long time to recover.

I feel like everyone reading this will think either A) Holy shit you are a dumbass or B) Wow, what a horrible wife writing something which could cast her husband in a bad light.

And I have no defense against being a dumbass. I am a fucking dumbass and I live this every day. But I am not a bad wife.

The other day I told James I was suffering from having no one to talk to, that I couldn’t be real with anyone or even on my blog. He said, “Why not? You can write whatever you want.” I said, ” Well I’m worried that you won’t like it.” He said “Just try it and find out- it will be fine. You’ll see. Trust me.”

So I am trying it. And trusting him. Just like he told me to do. I am a good wife.

Categories
Charleston, West Virginia men Writings

dry words, testicles, men & things which are hard to relate to

Recently I have been feeling it is pointless to say anything in dry words (words with no music) because you can never really say what you mean and if you DID say what you meant it would be inappropriate and everyone would hate you. Consider the lyrics of any song and imagine speaking them to a person. Your life would be over instantly. But somehow when words & music combine it becomes okay to say what you really feel.

Still there is a practical limit to how many songs I am able to write so this forces me to use dry words to fill in the gap. In order to record a song, I must ask my husband has to disassemble the microphone from his computer & attach it to a different device so I can use it. Then, I have to get him to move the song from this device & put it into his computer. Then I must ask him to let me sit at his computer for a few minutes to do the sound. So basically I must make three requests of James & separate him three times from his computer in order to record one song. Each request must be carefully timed to avoid conflict. His schedule is quite odd and windows of opportunity are infrequent. Sometimes it takes days or even weeks for me to get up the nerve to ask him. If I could just write songs & post them directly it would be much easier & I would hardly need dry words at all.

There is just something about musicless words that always ends up feeling pretentious. They are so lofty & detached. I always end up getting this weird Butler feeling, as though I am impersonating Oprah. The meaning of what you are trying to say gets warped by the dryness of words and you end up seeming like an asshole.

Plus, so many social rules apply to dry words that do not apply to music. You can write a song called “Please Help Me!” and that is totally cool, but to say it in words would make you a pariah. You can express feelings, needs & desires in music when expressing them in words would make you seem like a narcissist. You just have to be very careful how you use dry words. You must never reveal to much & always follow the rules. There is really no point.

*****

Perhaps though it is the case that dry words belong to the world of men. I have really been trying to understand men these past few years, but I’m not sure I have made much progress except to realize that there is something very, very strange about them. I don’t think anyone really accounts for how differently their brains work & this is the cause of much conflict. Here is the small amount of info I have gleaned so far…

  1. They are more attuned to survival than women. Their testicles seem to be two extra brains which feed them info related to survival. It is possible that their testicles may be two separate beings altogether who feed information to their host in exchange for warmth, food and shelter.
  2. They are more attuned to status, rank, respect, & prestige than women, although they will not admit this. Hence why they believe women seek out men of high status, something which, in my opinion, is fairly uncommon for women for whom love is the ultimate attainment of life and not a means to an end.
  3. They are also very attached to their dicks & sexuality… somehow this ties into their sense of self & power at a core level.
  4. They think in blocks, which makes it easy for them to work with certain types of info but more challenging to work with others. They don’t seem, for example, to have the same access to feelings and inner states that women do.
  5. They are less trusting. Women are more geared towards dependency & caretaking while men seem geared towards independence & battle. If you ask a woman how she is feeling, she is likely to see your interest as a welcome sign of concern. A man may view this same question as a potential trap and try to choose his words carefully.

    The end result of this is that if you treat a man the way you yourself would like to be treated, he may see you as a foreign invader. In general it seems that maybe women like to be probed, while men do not.

    ***

When I was a kid my friends were mostly female. We would do creative things together. Then at some point men began to seem more interesting. But still there is a constant friction which feels like an unbridgeable gulf. Your actions are viewed through a lens of suspicion. Gestures intended to heal are batted down defensively. Words are translated through some mysterious lens leaving you with no idea of what you are supposed to have said. The culture tells you again and again that talking things out is the solution even when talk itself seems to cause all the problems.

What is the answer? If a man reads this, will he believe I have insulted men? I hope not, but based on my experience, this seems likely. Perhaps when dealing with men you must stick to facts and figures or be prepared to pay the ultimate price.

***

What if men interpret words in a more solid manner- as pronouncements on the official nature of objective reality- whereas females interpret words more as fluid & subjective expressions of feeling states?

For example, “Men are dumb” could mean “I am trying to establish a permanent belief in the group mind that men are intellectually inferior. Submit to my view, insects!” Or it could mean, “I am upset because I just had a bad experience. I wish someone cared.” Females tend speak & interpret language more through the second lens but I’m not sure men always get that. The language women use to bond, express emotion & seek caring seems to trip off wires in men which relate to power, domination & control.

Luckily, songs are automatically interpreted through this female lens- as expressions of mutable subjective states. Thus we give them a wide berth. Sometimes I wish men would give this same berth to women. To see them as songs rather than barbarian hordes. Then men wouldn’t want to be with elevator women anymore than they want to listen to elevator music.