it’s in the smile

I’m back from a short vacation.  I always imagine that every trip I take will be life altering.  And I guess it is, just not necessarily in an immediate, choirs from heaven showing me the answer kind of way.  This trip, while fun, was exhausting both emotionally and physically.  Despite have spent all of yesterday evening doing nothing I find myself still wiped and barely able to think.

In a way the best part of my trip was going to breakfast with Dandelion before she took me to the airport.  It was really good to connect with her again.  You know how some friends can drift on an out of your life and some when you see them, not matter how far between, you are instantly back at a point of mutual understanding an love?  It was like that.  I gave her sort of a short run on down on the past couple years (and didn’t have to explain a lot of background because with good friends it’s just like that) and the only really painful emotional response I had to talking about stuff was about my teeth.

I spent a lot of the weekend meditating on that. So while I know a lot of my suffering over Hawthorn is about me feeling I’m not good enough or not feeling the confidence I once had and some other things that are purely about me.  I wonder how much of that is actually tied into my health and my view of myself after the accident where I lost my teeth.  My mouth hasn’t been comfortable since then, I worry about it a lot, I have terrible dreams about losing my teeth and I still suffer some pain, both from the original problem and the surgeries and solutions after.

So I am resolved to see a dentist this month and find out how much it will cost to get my teeth fixed. Really fixed, like the underlying problems, my bite problems and the cosmetic issues.  I will try and figure out how much I can get insurance to pay and I will borrow the rest.  I think if I can get past the dental anxiety (which is great, I’m crying just typing this up) and get to a place where my smile is pretty and I’m confident that I won’t just be losing teeth or physically suffering that that will go a long, long, long way towards getting me back to myself.

That’s my plan for August, to at least make the initial appointment and find out all the work I still need done and how much it’s going to cost. And spend more time with Dandelion and my other friends, as I will surely need as much support as I can possibly get through all of this.

does my map show which way is up

I promised myself  when I started this blog that I would keep it going for one year. I’m just past the halfway point and my interest in talking about problems is definitely flagging.  It’s not that I don’t have problems, they are just the same ones and I don’t know how many times I can tell myself to just get over it, that I need to work on letting things go, that I need to give myself a break.  So if I’m going to keep this up, I need to figure out a different tack to take.

I think I am in a better place than I when I started this.  I thought about going back to the beginning and revisiting some early posts for comparison but that seems like it’s asking to recreate heartache and I have no interest in that.  As I said, my problems are even starting to bore me, so doubling up talking about them surely isn’t the way to go.  Making a list of good things in a given day/week seems so forced and alien to me that the few experiments I’ve done with it were very unsatisfying.   Still I doubt I can maintain this a dumping ground for my troubles and my drama so positivity seems the only direction to go.  Maybe my best bet is to do what I set out to do, which is talk about things I”m not talking about anywhere else.

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I’ve been reading a lot lately.  This is my personal, classic escape and it’s good one.  Not only do books take me to place out side my troubled mind, but even the trashiest of novels gives me something new to think about.  Based on limited research, I’d say that prolonged reading actually pulls me out of myself enough, over a period of time to leave in a new place at the end.  It’s not a cure per se, but if I am remembering correctly, it has boosted me out of some pretty low places.  Also it seems to send my thinking to enough different places that I end up feeling more creative.  And sometimes affects my dreams.

I finished the 7th Sookie Stackhouse book before bed last night (sidenote, reading does, unfortunately interfere with how much I sleep, as often I’d rather read than do ANYTHING else) and this morning I awoke from a dream in which I was the main character.  Except in my dream there were no vampires, nothing supernatural, and my maybe gonna be my new man was Anderson Cooper, and that parts of Eric and Bill were played by (no shock here) Oak and Hawthorn.  Okay brain, thanks for giving me a gay man as my dream ideal.  No more guacamole before bed for you.

I also had the weirdest memory while reading earlier in the evening. Just a really clear memory of the entirety of The Monster at the End of This Book.  The whole ‘plot,’ followed by a memory of  getting that book out of the library multiple times when I couldn’t have been more than six or seven.  I remember pouring over the book, finishing it and starting it right over again.   One reading of this book reveals the secret, that the monster Grover is so afraid of is just him, lovable, furry Grover.  What spurred this memory? That all our monsters are only ourselves, or created ourselves or to be discovered in ourselves, or something not to be afraid of after all.  What was I looking for, pouring over this book as a small child?  Did it just tickle me that he was so silly to be wrong every time I read it?  Is there a deeper philosophical means in the story?