The Movie That Weighed a Ton

Tonight Mom and I watched "Montage of Heck", a documentary about Kurt Cobain.

They did a good job of capturing the hopelessness of Generation X. It is a time period I remember all too well. It is the generation I am a part of. 

And Kurt Cobain was a good example of how fed up we were, and for some unknowable reason I want to talk about it. Maybe because I see young hipsters trying to recreate a scene they know very little--if anything--about. (Worse, globbing on to music they know nothing about.) I want to talk about how it felt back then, which is different than it feels now. Frustration is typical for any generation of teenagers, but the vibe I get from the emerging "Millennials" is of a different sort. I'd like to put Gen X's particular frustration into words, if only to define it for myself. 

The problem I'm running into is that my view might be skewed by my own mental illness, which was diagnosed around the same time Cobain ate a bullet: 1994. So, maybe all of what follows is being said because just *I* felt that way. I've never had the occasion to be anyone else, though, so just bear with me. Hear me out. 

I was not the only kid I knew in the 90's to land in a mental hospital, and what I'm talking about has nothing to do with schizophrenia. Kids in the 90's were sent to mental hospitals (though we weren't institutionalized in any sense) the way kids before us were sent to summer camp. We were not kids, we were "problems." [I see loads of youngsters today with a myriad diagnoses and frustrations, but we were the first generation to be treated that way. The difference was we weren't coddled over it; we weren't even told certain meds would make us better. We were left on the doorstep of disappointments and left there. We were dismissed.] 

The way I remember it, we were all seen as delinquents. We were told we would never amount to much and most of us didn't give enough of a crap over it to prove anyone wrong. But (in the grand tradition of adolescence), we were angry. We were a disenfranchised generation. We had nothing to rally behind. We didn't have the Vietnam War, or the Great War, or the "silent majority" to topple. We were (or at least we felt) INVISIBLE. We were forgotten too easily, our struggles overlooked.

So our music got loud. And it got raw. And it got lazy, too. Cobain often went out on stage in his pajamas (I believe he was married in them too). [Oh gawd, and look how all the kids today have taken this on!] But it wasn't just that we were lazy, we were in protest: we stopped dressing up; we stopped showing up; out of rebellion, we gave up. We all felt like nobodies, so we acted like nobodies. (Maybe that's the reason for all those "beautiful loser" songs that came out of that era.)

[See: "Jeremy" by Pearl Jam. See: "The Nobodies" by Marilyn Manson. See: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by (you guessed it) Nirvana.]

And I had forgotten all of this until I watched Montage of Heck. If you're old enough to remember news footage of Cobain's coma in Rome, if you're old enough to remember playing The Cure's "Disintegration" on the auto-reverse option on your Walkman, if you're old enough to remember Perry Ferrell's humanitarian awards, if you're old enough to have cared about ANY of this, please give the film a watch. I'll warn you, though: it's a trip down a rough memory road, and it weighs a ton.

I've hit rock bottom and have started to dig.

Well, that's not exactly accurate, but I'm getting there.

I am sooooo tired, friends. Tired and need to sleep. The Horrible Hands make this impossible tonight. I've had a busy day, so there was a bit of hiatus on Day 7 of 30MIAC. It'll pop up soon, I promise.

I was trying to sleep when The Hands started up. I was being used. Strangely, after being used, I was rejected. My "Fantasy Man" (the current guy in the mental Rolodex my fantasies have fixated on), left me for dead. I couldn't stop the delusion. In the psychosis I was killed while pregnant with his child, and he didn't care.

Pencil sketch of Self, circa 2004

I keep having little loops of delusions (they're almost like .gif files that go horribly wrong inside my head). In them lately, I am almost always killed while pregnant. And it reminded me of the child I can never have because I am too sick. Too sick and unable to be so selfish as to bring a helpless being into my world of insanity and lethargy. I love my imaginary/potential child too much to have it. I hope that makes sense. Anyway, to plow on into the world I inhabit when no one is looking, I thought the child was a Me, a Self I was trying to form. But no. This one is so literal and so obvious I missed it.

I grieve for a motherhood I cannot have. And Fantasy Man? I grieve the impossibility of him, too. And then my thoughts connected in that strange way they do when one is almost asleep. It startled me awake. I have always been rejected by the guys I am attracted to. I was always put down by them as well. (I was that nerdy kid who brought a massive poster of the Millennium Falcon to summer camp, instead of photos of her family.) And then THAT thought connected to something else: my hatred for compliments, and why I have trouble accepting them.

Compliments hurt. Now I know why, and this is important: it's because I know they're TRUE. I can feel you shaking your heads across the ether in misunderstanding, so I'll clear it up. I know they're true deep inside, but I am still rejected by the people who I want to see all those "wonderful things" the most. If it's true that I'm nice and compassionate and funny and intelligent and fun to be around, why am I always teased and put down by men? Especially the ones I really like, and who I want to like me back? I may be all those incredible things people want to be, but -- here's the clincher -- most people don't give me a chance to show them how incredibly cool I can be. I'm dismissed and invisible.

Which brings me back to Fantasy Man. In my psychoses and delusions, he never never ever gives me even the slightest chance to prove myself. He assumes, and then leaves (but not before he kills the child I want so badly). And then I discovered what is so depressing about all of the baby-wanting thing: I would feel like my life meant something if I could pass on a piece of myself to a kid. (I know that's damn selfish, which is why I persist with rigid birth control. I do have a conscience.) It was a shock to discover in myself that I put so much massive meaning on motherhood. But I do, and that is why I had to type all this out. I had to so I wouldn't cry anymore tonight. I'm tired of hurting.

Sleep and Ass Kicking

Hello all!

I don't have a fabulous picture or collage this time, because my creative juices have not been flowing. If you are dead set on eye candy, visit "The Number Garden" on Tumblr for edgy, off the wall pics. I'm sure one of them might convey the way I'm feeling right now.

My pshrink has reduced my secondary anti-psychotic in hopes that I will achieve more REM sleep, but that has left me hazy and In My Head most of the time. Some days it just feels like there's no fixing this thing upstairs that rattles my days and makes my nights horrifying.

I did find a sleeping pill that actually helps me sleep almost uninterrupted through the night, but it wasn't on the insurance formulary, and so I had to wait for a prior authorization from the doc and the insurance. After 2 weeks of no sleep (except for every 3rd day because I was so exhausted, and then only for a few hours), my insurance finally pushed the medicine through ... and VOILA! sleep!

The only problem is that I like to watch things like The Walking Dead or a Joss Whedon movie during the day. Now every time I close my eyes ... zombies! And they're eating me alive and then I die and it blacks out and starts over again. Unfortunately, this usually happens when there's no one else in the house to comfort me, so I'm getting my ass kicked by dead things and things that want me dead every waking moment. Sleep is the blissful interlude, but I find it is hard to wake and that the pill has me sleeping around 12 hours a night.

Off I go into the spiral of delusions and paranoia about death. My therapist doesn't want to talk about this, and tells me denial is how most people get through their days. I argued that denial keeps me dissociative and numb to the moment and the world around me. So I have been isolating myself to the nth degree, avoiding situations which cause me stress and discomfort. Since I have school during the week, this is proving difficult. I have a research paper due at the end of November. Just the thought of it stresses me out. Where to go from here?

Aspies?

I've been frustrated lately. Really, really frustrated. I drew this image, as it popped into my head while Bryan was discussing his novel. I've been distracted by my own thoughts and moods, and can't seem to get outside of them. I can't poke my head through the tiny hole I've made for reality. I always seem to make my outlets much too large and real life way too small.

So I took a break. My best friend flew in from California, and we had two weeks of just sitting next to each other (sometimes quietly talking), while each was absorbed in her own tasks. This is where the interesting hair on this picture came from. I've had bursts of creativity, and more and more of a foul mood when dealing with the world around me. It was nice just having someone sit with me, even if we said nothing. I even began the arduous task of crocheting my first pair of socks!

But everything else suffered.

I discovered that tension displays itself in my jaw. I clench up into near teeth-grinding over things. And then come the headaches. And then I wonder where the heck my real self is gone, lost as it is in a miasma of phantasy and refracted reality.

When I came back to the world from my self-imposed sabbatical, I discovered a nice article by a blogger named "Bad Cripple" had been pinned to my social networking wall ... by my awesome friend Lori, who must be psychic. (P.S. You should read his blogs!) The article was on disability and identity. Down by the corner at the end of his wonderful little rant was an online quiz for Asperger's Syndrome. Being the naturally curious type, I took it. My scores in the Asperger spectrum were quite high, but what if it was a simple problem of the  internet not being able to factor in severe schizophrenia? Here is my score sheet:

Noted, this test also showed me as "gifted" in the explanatory pages that followed. Always when I get a gifted score, my faith in said test is undermined. I feel utterly out-of-sync and unable to do the smallest things. But is my frustration part of a deeper neurological disorder?

*Deep thanks to the folks who created this "Final Version 2" quiz, and to Lorifishes, who always knows just what to say.