Singing the Same Song

In the middle of all the chaos, I wrote a song about how Former-Friend and I seem to be saying the same things about each other. I have the lyrics worked out and I have the melody in my head. I'm really crappy at getting it down on paper, though. It's taking forever to ferret out the notes. But here are the lyrics. The song is a duet. The red is one part, the blue is the other part, and the purple is together:

Singing the Same Song
We’re both saying the same things
But about each other
Can we both be right?
Can we both be wrong?
Can we learn to be okay after hurting so long?
Why can’t you see?
We’re singing the same song

How could you betray me?
How could you demean me?
How could you say the things you said?
How could I have trusted you?
How could I have fought for you?
When you cut until I bled
Like a knife into my back
Like a bullet through the heart
Why can’t you see
You’re tearing me apart?

We’re both saying the same things
But about each other
Can we both be right?
Can we both be wrong?
Can we learn to be okay after hurting so long?
Why can’t you see?
We’re singing the same song

I was always there for you
I always have cared for you
I thought we had each others’ backs
All that I gave up for you
Everything I gave to you
After all I’ve done for you
I promised I’d die for you
I promised I’d live for you
Why can’t you see
What you’ve done to me?

We’re both saying the same things
But about each other
Can we both be right?
Can we both be wrong?
Can we learn to be okay after hurting so long?
Why can’t you see?
We’re singing the same song

I thought that you’d be here
I thought that you’d be near
And now you’re gone
I’ve never had to walk alone
I never thought I’d be alone
Now I’m the only one here
You threw everything away
You ruined all that we had
Why can’t you see
I’ll never be the same

We’re both saying the same things
But about each other
Can we both be right?
Can we both be wrong?
Can we learn to be okay after hurting so long?
Why can’t you see?
We’re singing the same song

We’re both saying the same things
But about each other
Can we both be right?
Can we both be wrong?
Can we learn to be okay after hurting so long?
Why can’t you see?
We’re singing the same song

We’re both
Singing
THE SAME SONG

Time

There are so many quotes about time and its fluid, ever-changing characteristics. I find myself thinking a lot about time today. How it drags or zips by, how it heals or creates scars, how everything changes given enough of it.

Life is what happens to you when you're busy planning other things. -John Lennon
It seems like forever that I have had the mindset that I will get x done as soon as y happens and y just doesn't happen. I will go back to school as soon as we can afford it: 14 years I said that. This year I put my foot down and made it happen. I'll have time to write as soon as I finish paying bills, chasing kids, clean the house, etc. All things that never quite get done and so if I want to write I have to set that aside and just do it. I'll start exercising as soon as the weather clears, but it is always too hot or too cold or too wet or I'm too busy. No wonder I'm fat and out of shape and generally disgusting.

The Shrink often advocates being mindful of the present and staying in the moment. It isn't just an important part of not dissociating. It's about watching the kids play their everyday games, noticing the expression on Hubby's face as he talks about his day, taking note of the details of the life that is all around me right now. Because if I am too busy double-checking next week's schedule, I'll miss today's golden moments.

Time flies when you're having fun and its twin A watched pot never boils
The other phrase that goes right along this one is "wibbly-wobbly timey-whimey stuff" (a quote from Doctor Who, of course, episode "Blink"). These observations about time highlight how my perception of time is not consistent at all. The time spent in a doctor's waiting room can be the exact same amount as the time spent engaged in interesting conversation but the former drags and drags while the later is over before I know it. Perhaps the secret to evening out the perceived pace of time is connected to mindful awareness. Finding the things that make that "long" wait unique and fascinating as well as taking the time to feel the awe and happiness in a pleasant conversation... it seems to me that these things would slow down the rushing train and speed up the infinite wait.

Time heals all wounds
This is a common platitude but I truly wonder if it has any merit at all. Just because it's been 15 years since I was betrayed by someone I trust doesn't mean that I've forgotten it or that it hurts any less. I think time may give us the distance we need to affect our own healing but I don't think it is the distance itself that does the healing. Unless it is intended in the same vein as All bleeding stops eventually and means that once you're dead you won't be hurting about incidents from high school.

Time has passed since the initial volcano between Uber-Bitch and me. I need a new euphemism for her since I no longer feel that red-hot anger and vicious pain. I don't know what to call her now. I can see where she is coming from and I can see where she is going and I hope that she never does to anyone else what she did here. No one needs that kind of pain, not her and not anyone else. I learned a lot from her and I'm grateful for that, even though not all of it turned out to be good lessons. There is no doubt that I will continue to struggle to find where her grains of truth end and the cognitive distortions begin, but eventually I think I will be able to tell the difference. In the meantime, Guardian Angel and The Shrink and Hubby and many others will continue to smack me upside the back of the head (Gibbs-ing me, as the kids say) to put things back into perspective. And lord help me, I will never break myself to rescue someone else again - people don't need to be rescued; they need to be helped. So time has passed and I still hurt and still get angry but it doesn't consume me anymore, permeating every area of my life and saturating it with unbearable emotions. Did time affect this change? No, I did - with a lot of help from my friends.

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- Of cabbages--and kings-- And why the sea is boiling hot-- And whether pigs have wings. - Jabberwocky (Lewis Carrol)
The walrus said this to the oysters to continue the deception he and Carpenter were perpetrating to lure the oysters from home and them eat them. He spoke of all those things to oysters to distract them from the fact that they were being eaten.

So many of the things I write, the posts that actually get completed, are of surface issues rather than the underlying causes. I speak about all the fires in my life that I rush around putting out, rather than finding the cause of all the fires springing up in the first place. And so it is with this post as well. I am rambling about time, sorting out the things that make it such a curious creature, without talking about the things that have made me examine time's characteristics. It's strange, for someone who claims to love writing as much as I do, there are so many things that I can't seem to actually give the power of words written or spoken aloud.

Habits are hard to change.

Why Do I Write?

I received confirmation of the long-suspected truth that Uber-Bitch (who doesn't care for that label) does read my blog. I knew that, have known it for a long time, as Guardian Angel and I have discussed. She finally decided the time had come to speak up and vent her reactions to my blog, current and past. I am now a liar and two-faced, I broke the friendship first by the rantings in my blog, she kept the family going last fall/winter, and I have been spouting lies the whole time. She also feels sorry for me because I "don't even dare look in the mirror for fear it'll crack" whilst she knows she has flaws and is trying to fix them. She also is not trying to start a blog war and would not be fazed by anything that I or my "little dumb friends" have to say and she doesn't care if I think she is wrong. You can read the entire comment here. You can read her blog post detailing the backstory of her comment here. Or browse her blog here (although this may be what she meant by sending my "little dumb friends" to her blog).

I did return to her blog after her comment and sent a return message. It was long and intended to have the overall message that I don't care what she does, that I already knew she had been here, and that I will think what I want while she thinks what she wants and really it's better off that way. And then, because I am incapable of learning from my mistakes, I sent it without saving a copy. Since she never lets comments go through that means I don't have it saved anywhere. You'd think I would have learned from the hard drive fiasco...

One thing that her comment did was make me think about why and what I write here. I have always made a point of not giving out my blog address to the people in my daily life. If I know someone is reading it, I have the tendency to censor what I write for fear of hurting or offending or angering them or giving them ammunition against me. I use my blog to purge myself of the thoughts and feelings that are uncomfortable or that I need to sort out. My blog is public because unlike a diary/journal or a private blog, having it open gives me a feeling of casting my thoughts outward and, as I said, purging myself of them. That is one of my (many) little weirdnesses that I don't normally need to justify.

The second component to this public blog is who I write for. That is unequivocably ME. I have a few regular readers and I have a couple of posts that get regular hits from the search engines but I don't cater my writing to them. If they enjoy reading my blog, that is great and I'm happy to have them here. If they don't like my blog, they move on and I'm fine with that too. To that end, this blog is not about proving myself to anyone but myself. It's not about justifying my thoughts or actions to anyone but myself. It is not a daily chronicle of all of life's ups and downs to be read at a later date to see how far I've come, although I do use it for review at times.

I write on my blog so that I don't have to vent my feelings to someone who might feel caught in the middle between me and whoever I was venting about, or to someone who would judge me for the content or someone who would use it against me. As Uber-Bitch demonstrated, I had cause to fear those things. I write on my blog to make sense of myself, a difficult task at the best of times. I have almost as many "drafts" of posts as actual posts because before I finished the entire post, the situation I was trying to unravel took care of itself or I had a chance to talk to someone about it and made sense of it already. Because I write for me and me alone, I don't feel pressured to complete those posts or to update frequently to appease my readers or chronicle every notable incident in my life. I write what I want, when I want to write it and I don't worry about the effects on others because they aren't supposed to be here.

That said, anyone who knows me even a little bit could easily find my blog. I am well known for my Silent Voices, my SV. Most people that are close to me know that I blog too and most of those people know that I use Blogger to do it. I never use names; everyone has a moniker. This is to maintain privacy from strangers although someone truly psychotic could easily track me down from context clues if they really wanted to. It is also to reduce the number of viable searches someone could make to find my blog. But truly, try a google search on TheSV or the sv blog or "silent voices in my mind"... All of these are known keywords to people close to me and my blog shows up within 3 pages on each search.

The really twisted part of this easy searchability comes in when I consider the fact that I am completely aware that my blog could easily be found by anyone who wanted to. This is reflective of another one of the ways in which I am completely fucked up. It's one of those tests that can't be passed. If someone doesn't go looking for my blog, it could be interpreted as not really caring or being interested. But if they do find it, they aren't respecting my privacy.

Like I said, it's totally fucked up. But I do recognize it as skewed and while I don't change the blog to something obscure and unsearchable, I have actively chosen to see the good side of that "test" - those people that don't seek and find my blog are respecting my stated wishes to not give out the URL and those people who have found my blog on their own (there are 3) are simply concerned for me and want to know more than I am capable of directly telling them.

To counter the paranoia I feel over leaving myself vulnerable to searches, I keep close tabs on where the hits come from and how they got to my blog. Every so often a search comes up that makes me nervous because I can't identify it. Or I have a couple of repeat viewers that I don't know whose locations aren't from here but have suspicious timing. (It is very easy to cloak your IP city and state intentionally and a lot of IPs don't reflect an accurate location anyways.) In that manner I have recognized when people I know are reading my blog. Sometimes it takes a while for me to catch on, but I've caught it 3 times. It really is no protection against someone reading, but it gives me the illusion of having "control" over it.

So there it is. This is why I write here, what I write here, and why I write what I write. Now I just need to determine if I can continue to meet my objectives here now that I have confirmation of Uber-Bitch's readership. I refuse to make it private or invitation only to "prevent" her from reading. I truly don't want to pick up and move again. I like this blog and where it's at and the history I have here. But can I continue to write without self-censoring?

On one hand, she judges me by it (and always has, as it turns out) and being judged is one of my greatest fears. On the other hand, there's a good chance she will stop reading as soon as I stop mentioning her since she no longer has any incentive to care about my life. There is still the issue of what I write being used as ammunition against me but there is nothing new that she can do or say to inflict additional damage so I think that is no longer a concern. Normally, with people in my daily life reading, I would be concerned about hurting someone or angering them or generating additional conflict with them. Obviously that isn't a problem since she is no longer in my daily life.

And that statement right there may be the key to the whole question. I am uncomfortable with people from my daily life reading my blog. But she is no longer part of my daily life. At this point, she can only hurt me if I care what she thinks - which I don't. I can only hurt or upset her if she cares what I think - which she stated that she does not. There is no area of my life that she has reason to complicate now so the issue of ammunition is resolved.

End judgment: I keep my blog, and my writing style, as it currently is and let her deal with herself.

Frustration Over Lack of Talent

Recently I've really been relying on my creativity to get me through some rough emotions and circumstances. I've been painting about the raw emotions that don't quite have words, just colors and images. I've been writing, trying to get down the hard truth of 16 years ago. And I wrote another song.

I'm trying to sort out the situation between Uber-Bitch and me through it. I have the lyrics down. I had them typed up but it was on my hard drive. Lucky for me I printed a hard copy to edit by hand so I didn't lose it all.

So I have this song, the lyrics and the melody. I can hear it in my head as crystal clear as a song from the radio stuck in my head. But, despite 8+ years of rather accomplished (pardon my "modesty" here) musical training (1 year of recorder, 5 years of violin, and 3 years of voice training), I simply don't have the skill to get the song out of my head and onto the score. I know music composition and music theory. I can translate a musical score into violin fingerings or singing. I can even, though very slowly, pick out the notes on the piano. But I can't translate the sound in my head to notes on the staff without a HUGE amount of trial and error. I have been working on this for over 8 hours and I only have the first 5 lines done (12 measures in common time).

Even once I finally manage to get this song transcribed, I know very little about creating harmony and almost nothing about turning the whole thing into a complete song of the right genre. Nor do I have any idea at all where to find a resource to help me. And if I could find a resource, it would undoubtedly cost more than a pretty penny. After all of which I might have a decent song (that I could do nothing with) but what about all the other songs that float in and out of my head? What about "I Miss You" (a song that I wrote last May)?

Ironically, it isn't even like I plan to pursue finding someone to perform the song commercially. I don't care if it ever goes anywhere outside of my own knowledge. For all I care, it could remain as a file on my computer forever or someone else could claim it as their own, perform it commercially and make a million dollars off of it with me not seeing a penny. I don't care. I just want to be able to use the creativity inside me to help myself heal.

Just like my writing, which I do because I want to and not with the specific intent of having it published, I paint for myself, and write these songs for myself. But unlike the painting and the writing, which may suck but can be completed, I don't have the skill to complete the musical creations.

And this frustrates me to no end. I have a problem that I can't see any viable solutions for. It's not like the problem I have in keeping the house clean where I know what the problem is and how to fix it, I just can't seem to actually do it. It's not like the emotional healing I am in therapy for where I can see the direction The Shrink is leading me but can't figure out how to walk the path laid before me. With the songwriting, I can see where I am and I can see where I want to be but I have absolutely no idea what the steps are to get there.

GGRRRRRR!!!

Random Thoughts

My laptop's hard rive is toast. And clever me: I haven't done a backup in forever, like since December or before. I am so frustrated with myself! Okay, I'm not frustrated, I'm pissed. For goodness sake! I know better...

Uber-Bitch's daughter is sick. Despite myself, I am worried about her. She has the stomach flu and while I cannot believe that Uber-Bitch took her to emergency room for the stomach flu, I still wish I could be there to give her hugs and tell her it's going to be okay. And believe it or not, I feel bad for Uber-Bitch herself. She has never handled vomit well and gets so stressed out when her daughter is sick. I wish I could be there to tell her that everything will be okay, to give her a break to get some sleep and a shower and food.

I got into the Honors Ethics class I was trying for. That puts me up to 10 credit hours in 4 classes including 1 honors course. It also puts my out-of-pocket costs up close to $700 which royally bites. This had better get sorted out by spring term or I am going to be royally screwed. Unlike some people, I'm not going to take out limitless student loans with a Scarlet O'Hara attitude. We have a hard enough time living within our means without adding on that. I am incredibly blessed that Daddy is going to cover this semester as a "birthday present" - he says if I had stayed in school 15 years ago, he would have owed a lot more than this. I think it is obvious that he is pleased that I am returning to school.

In therapy this morning, The Shrink and I tried to work out how to handle Kid-1's tantrums. I think it is significant that since Uber-Bitch left, we haven't had a single problem with him refusing to take his meds. And in the past week, now that he is back on the extended release mood stabilizer, we haven't had a single tantrum from him. Perhaps I just haven't pissed him off yet or perhaps he just needed the little bit of extra stability. Or perhaps making him walk the 2.5 miles home last week put things in perspective for him. Time will tell, I suppose.

Does She Really Not Remember What She Did?

Every day I tell myself not to go and read her blog. I know that all it does is stir up painful emotions. The degree to which Uber-Bitch has deluded herself is absolutely unreal. If it weren't so close to my (broken) heart, it would be a fascinating clinical study in delusional projection. And yet every day I find myself wandering over there, wondering how she is doing, hoping her daughter is surviving despite having such a horrible mother, a woman so self-absorbed and narcissistic that she actually believes she has her daughter's interests in mind. And most days I find at least a little bit of vitriol about me. At times her statements are downright laughable. Sometimes they are painful in their inaccuracy. They all serve to reassure me that her leaving was actually a blessing, despite the pain and loss she rained down upon my family and upon me.

Today she revisited the age-old theme of "my ex-best friend kicked me out at the worst possible time" and how I turned on her and how I ruined her life. She went off about the doctors that said she needed to go. She reminded herself that she did no wrong and I am Satan-Spawn who destroyed her trust forever more. She is so far gone away from reality that she clings to her assertion that I kicked her out abruptly for the main purpose of sabotaging her.

Does she honestly not remember that conversation? The one where I explicitly and directly said that although the Med-Shrink wanted me to boot her without notice, that I would never do that and that The Shrink and I had discussed it and didn't think immediacy was needed or appropriate. I asked her to START LOOKING for somewhere. She got defensive immediately and informed/reminded me that she had tried to leave and I "wouldn't let her" and that we had shot her down when she wanted to. She was referring to the time when she was thinking about moving into the projects and Hubby and my's immediate reaction questioning the safety and suitability of such a place. I, in return, got defensive as well - that she chose to blame me for discouraging her from taking that route back when it was originally presented. I told her that maybe it was time for her to revisit that option.

Then she screwed up: she chose to attack the personality and integrity of Kid-1. Did she expected me to "side" with her and change my mind because my son has issues? I had tried to make it very clear that I wasn't blaming either of them exclusively for their irreconcilable differences but that it just wasn't working any more. And yet she tried to air her laundry list assassinating Kid-1's character and expected me to sit there and take it. True or not makes no difference, I am not going to listen to her trash him at a time that it serves no purpose. It didn't matter what she did or what he did; she had to start looking at other options. So I cut her off. I told her that I wasn't going to discuss it with her and that this wasn't up for debate. She got pissed because I wouldn't let her "express her opinion" and stomped off.

Even after that, I had no intention of starting a war. I was all set to apologize the next day for the direction the conversation had taken. I recognized that I had gotten defensive about her blaming me (again). But she was still in Uber-Bitch mode. She was trying to get ready for school and I was trying to get the kids around so I didn't push it. Then came the curt emails which I tried to respond to with no animosity or tenor of attack. Her response tipped the scales - I had been considering whether or not I should read her blog to get her side of it. So I did.

Wow! The venom she had begun pouring out shocked and stunned me. Still I supported her. I tried to find a way to repair things. I was hurt and angry at what I read. But in her defense, she didn't know that I was going to start reading again (despite specifically asking me a week or so before). So I sat on it and tried to hold my tongue - I neither needed nor desired a confrontation. But it didn't take long before I reached my tolerance level. When she proclaimed on her blog that she could never trust me again and that she would no longer put anything into our relationship, I lost it.

That is when I gave up on her. That is when I stopped thinking of her as a sister. That is when I made the catty remark about guests not cleaning - and she's right: I said it for the shock value and as subtle attack. She lost her position in our family, in our household, not because of a longstanding issue that I had never bothered to bring up but because she decided she didn't want to be close to me.

She accused me many times of harboring negative feelings against her that I didn't express until I kicked her out. But the fact is, I didn't have a problem with her staying there and I didn't expect her to be doing anything different than what she had been doing. I knew very well that the relationship was lop-sided but every time I tried to expect more out of her, she fell down and I ended up angry. So I dropped my expectations and I required nothing more from her than what she was giving. As for the conflict between her and Kid-1, I didn't blindside her with that either - we had been talking about it all along, as problems arose.

Uber-Bitch has gone through many variations on a theme in her blaming me for her issues. She went through a phase where she was convinced I was jealous of her because she was living out her dreams and I was stuck in hell therefore I sabotaged her to bring her down to my level. She went through a period of blaming Kid-1 for everything. She decided that I had never been her friend and had done everything I did for her to make myself feel better. (I never did understand that one...) She blamed me for her math grades as if it's my fault she incompetent at math. She went out of her way to spite me during the move, first by changing her mind about the desk (AFTER I had promised it to Kid-3 because she said she didn't want it) and then by purposefully refusing to take her mattress and box springs despite me giving her plenty of notice that she needed to do so. (And when I blew my top over her passive-aggressive attack, she filed a police report against ME - that was funny!!)

The odd thing about all the garbage she has been spewing is that it is largely the same things I have been saying/thinking about her. This bothered me quite a bit: what's to say she's not right and I am the one that is blind. But after going over and over the situation in my mind and with anyone who would listen, after sending many people to her blog to get her point of view, after discussing it endlessly with my two best advisors (Guardian Angel and The Shrink), I came to the conclusion that she is projecting her short-comings onto me so strongly that she truly can't see they are her own.

Here is some of today's antics:

Sometimes this world we live in really makes me shake my head in bewilderment. We hurt each other all the time. Why? What makes us do that? What makes a doctor think, in spite of the Hippocratic oath (do no harm) that kicking someone out for no good damn reason is okay? What kind of human beings are these people? Where do they come from? The relationship itself was wrong and I knew that. I was going to fix it in time but on my terms. I was simply going to let the relationship take it's natural course after I left and let it fade. It would have been less painful that way. And I ask how I possibly could have overreacted? A woman you've known and treasured for 12 years suddenly turns on you - how do you react? When your future hangs in the balance, could you react calmly? Or would you panic? Would you be pissed at having trusted this person implicitly only to realize too late that you shouldn't have? I'm the viper? I'm the snake? Sorry, look in the mirror honey cause you're projecting yourself again.

It amuses me that she says I am the one projecting and I am the one that overreacted. We really are saying the same things. And we are each completely convinced of our own position. I seriously doubt she will ever face reality and see what really happened here. Her ego wouldn't be able to handle the realization that all of her problems are her own doing and that her victim act doesn't hold any water. She has to cast the blame off of herself because she is too immature and emotionally incompetent to accept responsibility for herself and her endless list of personality problems.

How I would love to castigate her. It would be so easy to go off on her and lay out the real reasons her life is so pathetic. And I can't believe it took me that long to see that she is irredeemable. She is too damaged to ever function normally in society. She will never understand what it means to be a family or to take responsibility for herself. She will continue throughout her life in the same pattern of black and white thinking, of placing people on a pedestal until her ego is threatened or someone actually wants her to accountable. Then she cuts them from her life rather than see that is truly is her that is the root of the problems. The very fact that she continues in the same cycles proves that she causes her own misery yet she would much rather claim the role of the poor, put-upon, misunderstood, always beaten down victim than face the cold hard truth. Thank god she is no longer my problem...

My Immortal by Evanescence

It seems like everywhere I look, something reminds me of Uber-Bitch and her daughter. And it still hurts. Sometimes.

Sometimes I hurt because I think of everything that has happened in the past several years and I can't believe that in one argument it is all gone. I get this soundtrack playing on repeat in my mind: "After everything I did for them, everything I gave them, after everything I sacrificed and almost lost to try to help her... how can she say I was never her friend?" Over and over like fingernails on a blackboard and I don't know how to make it stop. I want to cry. I want to understand how this could have happened and how it could have been prevented. I want to make sure I never get caught so totally blindsided again, so no one can hurt me like that again.

But other times I just get angry over it all. Ironically, it's the same record that plays in my head, the same words. Except instead of it hurting like an unexpected knife in the back, it burns with anger like laying a hand down on a hot stove top. When I feel like this, I want to hurt her back. I want to go off on her, tell her exactly who she really is and say the most crippling things I can think of. I want to say things to her that she won't ever be able to forget, no matter how hard she tries. I want to scar her, like I feel that she has scarred me. I want revenge, emotional of course, rather than physical.

Then there are nights like tonight when I am too tired and too overwhelmed to even have an emotional response. She continues to vilify me, even now, and I wonder if she will ever look back and see that I had her back the whole way. Somehow I doubt it. I guess numb is better than pain and more comfortable than anger. But I still want to know how long it will take before I can breathe again.

This song by Evanescence reflects how everything around me reminds me of her and her daughter. It all is still so fresh, it's like being haunted by the ghosts of what used to be. The bolded parts are especially fitting...



"My Immortal" (Evanescence)

I'm so tired of being here
Suppressed by all my childish fears
And if you have to leave
I wish that you would just leave
'Cause your presence still lingers here
And it won't leave me alone

These wounds won't seem to heal
This pain is just too real
There's just too much that time cannot erase

[Chorus:]
When you cried I'd wipe away all of your tears
When you'd scream I'd fight away all of your fears
And I held your hand through all of these years
But you still have
All of me

You used to captivate me
By your resonating light
Now I'm bound by the life you left behind
Your face it haunts
My once pleasant dreams
Your voice it chased away
All the sanity in me

These wounds won't seem to heal
This pain is just too real
There's just too much that time cannot erase

[Chorus]

I've tried so hard to tell myself that you're gone
But though you're still with me
I've been alone all along

[Chorus]