Up-to-the-minute....

Oh blog, dear blog, how I have missed you!!! It's Thursday again, supposed to be an HNT day... but it's not going to happen - at least no physical revelations... though there's about to be some other ones. I'll make it a goal for next week.

Quick update:
- It's that time of the semester again, and during this one I'm also about to propose my thesis and begin piloting a research study. I am so busy I find myself here, avoiding the to do list that is crushing me, because I need some mental peace to get back to tackling it.

- My conference went... amazing! I wish I could go into tons of detail and gush for a while, but it would just bore you anyway. I'll summarize....
It helped revitalize me in many ways - from my passion for my degree and what I do to my own confidence in my abilities, intelligence, and in the people I have at my fingertips to work with (Officechick E is the exception, not the rule - and just because I'm constantly exposed to a selfish brat who has a negative image of me doesn't mean everyone else has that image of me... no matter if she tells me they do or not). It also spurred some involvement in some new projects, which is super exciting, but means my already extremely limited time is going to be further stretched.

- Medical issues are back rearing their ugly heads.
None of the testing I had to have done was covered - though I was told it would be. Of course I elected to purchase glasses before that with the 'credit' I get to put toward medical expenses every year (since every doctor always tells me how healthy I am I figured that was a safe bet, damned hindsight)... and I did need them for when I exhaust my eyes... but considering I am going to have to pay for school and my living situation for 3 months out of pocket this summer.... this could be a very bad situation soon.
My sleep issues have never gone away - I just stopped whining about them. They affect me less sometimes, more others. I wish anything seemed to work, but it doesn't.... so yeah. Whatever. I guess I just keep to try dealing with it as it comes. Roll with the punches. What I wonder though is just how AWESOME I would be (how much smarter, how much better my memory would be, how much less I would have to fight to stay thin, how much more energy I would have, etc.) if I actually could sleep the right way even once a week.... I'm having very short odd dreams and some sleep paralysis pretty regularly. I dreamed of Sasha the other night, of twitter, of my closet, and then of much more oddball unimaginable things.

I have a couple other pending things/relationship updates I'm about to do other posts about... so here goes wiping the slate clean....

The Bi Problem.

Ok... so I noticed something this week that came out of those dark halls I woke up in one night late a few weeks ago. I think I realized this deep down before that... but I never consciously noticed the connection until now.

My admittance of and being bisexual has caused a lot of problems in my life. What I don't get is why in many instances, because it doesn't change how I am in my relationships. Anyway, on to the list...
1) My first boyfriend, who I thought was it for me forever, couldn't handle it at all. It was a large part of our breakup, though certainly not all of it. It sucked.
2) My desire to have 3somes and my second boyfriend's acceptance of this in words but not fact really messed up our relationship too. It emasculated him. I turned into a jealous lovelorn shrew over his and Q's relationship (she was my first woman and them wanting to be together without me involved when he and I were living together and serious about things was... painful to say the least, they eventually had sex behind my back). She will hate me forever for the stupid things I both said and did. He might too. Not that either of them is worth heartache, but still. This was the darkest personal chapter of my life so far due to how I acted.
3) I have had several men angry at me because Q and SS slept with me rather than them. In fact, I've lost friends over it. I feel like the group of friends we were all connected with believed me to be morally corrupt due to my sexual proclivities. (They sure condemned me without evidence fast enough and now I retain a whopping 2 out of 20 of them as friends - those 2 barely talk to me.)
4) When one girl discovered my sexuality here at school, the commentary on possibly sleeping with me never ended until she left 2 years later. In fact, she told her boyfriend and it got weirder than weird. He hounded me to seduce her whenever he was in town. Gross. She also turned out to be fairly open with others about MY sexuality. That led to further odd moments and weirdness with people in our department, people we would meet, and parties I attended. I have wondered what could have been different these past 2.5 years had she not caught me drooling over a gorgeous blonde one night.
5) My bisexuality caused a lot of my attitude with my department to shift to 'nothing' on the all or nothing involvement scale. Part of that was from when I overheard a condemnation of our cohort's token gay guy. I just can't approve of people speaking in their graduate office about how someone's going to hell for his preferences and then giggling about it in a group - "at least he's nice", they said. No thanks. Plus my sexuality eventually became known to most if not all of them, yeah, underline the no thanks and add an exclamation point. I don't need people like that in my life beyond a professional level.
6) With a budding friend her man found out I was bi and immediately wanted to talk to me about how to get his girl to have a 3some. I attempted to persuade him out of it. She decided to hate me anyway, because I talked to her boyfriend too much (um, he talked to me, but ok) and because I even talked about sex in a hypothetical way with him. My boyfriend also spazzed about this incident, because I talked about sex with another guy. Does no one understand I didn't bring it up, I never would have slept with him (hello - I'M IN A MONOGAMOUS RELATIONSHIP), and while I didn't mind the conversation it was purely hypothetical... I was honestly just trying to help.
7) This also influenced my 'break-up' with Officechick E, I am sure of it. She considered a 3some with her and her now-fiance, but decided she'd be too jealous. Nevermind the fact that I wouldn't have done it, she didn't even ask that question. That wasn't the big deal - but #4 & 6 were good friends of hers, and they + her boy's opinion of me after he vented about her to me = no more friendship.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm flattered when couples want to sleep with me - I choose to take it as a compliment on my attractiveness. I also am happy when someone either figures it out (that means they're open to people having alternate sexualities, yay!) and accepts it, or is told by me and does the same (hooray tolerance!). These times afford me such wonderful opportunities to tell people about it as well, if they want to know. It allows me to explain that sexuality is not a choice (which I of course firmly believe) and to talk about sexuality issues sometimes - all of which are very nice things I heartily enjoy.

Still - do you see between these stories the underlying assumption all of these people made about me? That somehow my being a bisexual means I'll sleep with anyone, just about anytime. They always seem to assume it's their decision whether I will sleep with them or not, even when the decision is about them and their partner. All I have to say to that is: WHAT THE FUCK? Since when did my sexual orientation mean I don't have morals? Values? Standards? Rules for myself?? Seriously. When I am in a committed monogamous relationship it means the exact same thing as when any of them are. I just don't get it.

So the real question is: Is it them making these assumptions? Or me projecting something? Does my commitmentphobia make me come across in a way I don't mean to?

I wish that's what it was, but I doubt it.

Waking up.

I wrote this on january 24th... and didn't post it because I wanted to find a better headspace about this.... and I may have, finally. I wanted to post it now to get it out and to work through it further, and so my rebuttal to these feelings will stand out in appropriate contrast once I get it nailed down.

Sometimes I wake up feeling lost in the realms I walked the night before, as if they're superimposed over the real world. For me those dark halls between wakings last night were places of pain, of darkness, of regret... places from a time past. I still seek resolution from unfinished business. Dealing with one of my friendships (Frances) that has spanned that time and this newer time in my life is part of what has brought it all back to the forefront. So has Facebook, oh good old Facebook. Knowing that one of my remaining friends is taking a trip to Providence - and that trip that I took 4 years or so ago to Providence was ... well... providential. Not in a good way though. My first serious boyfriend (7 years) is now married. My first female experience (who I was so infatuated with it didn't even make sense) is also now married. It's odd how you find these things out, and how they feel like they shouldn't matter, and yet the knowledge seems to play peek-a-boo at the most random moments.

I mean... everyone goes through their own private hells. I thought when I was younger that it must have been my childhood which would always stand out as my hell. My father's drug addiction and brother's death left an initial stain, my mother's rages, the repeated abandonment and betrayal and verbal/emotional abuse from all parental figures in my life, the almost sexual abuse from within my church and the subsequent dismissal of it by my pastor leading to my subsequent break with Christianity -which had previously been my lifeline-, deaths of friends, my own self-imposed isolation due to trust issues, but.... no.

What ended up being my own true hell was when I had to learn who I had been denying I was for years. When I recognized my sexuality for what it was and realized who I assumed would be the love of my life couldn't accept that part of me was the first hint of the brokenness to come. I shattered us. Walked away. That was the easy part.

Before that the only real thing I regret is saying something horribly unfeeling to my family after a member of it passed away in a horrible accident. I learned then that while I may choose to laugh to relieve pain, others don't always want to do that and it's not the right thing to share sometimes.

Then I had my first sexual fling with a guy, my first experience with a woman, and fell for someone new. After that is where I really have my first deep regrets.

After that though... there's a list. A painful list I don't think I can ever atone for. A list I never saw myself having. It's funny that I woke up this morning feeling those old, deep wounds aching as if they were just inflicted last week. So I came here...to my reader and then to my blog. And in my reader I found some wisdom.

I.. I can't say sorry... Because I know sorry isn't enough...
But I can say thank you.
Thank you for showing me who I really am.
Thank you for showing me that light in my life.
I'm ready to change now. For the better.
Thank you.
- Paraphrased from Sunny on So How Was Your Day?

That's all there is from those times for me to do, and I have. I have changed so much since then. I know things now about myself and know what to watch out for to make sure I never become that insane, unhappy, jealous person I remember (with horror) being. Sure, circumstances helped to push me to be that way, but I can't believe I didn't find some other alternative to the things I did and ways I acted. It's not like I want those friendships or my old relationship back, because I don't believe they were good for me at all, or that I was good for them... but I also don't want to be a stain on anyone's life. I don't want to be that ugly memory, and if I am for me I can't even imagine what I am for others. My biggest hope is that by now, years later, I just don't matter at all anymore. That time will wear my memory away for them, but not for me. Not for me. I have to remember to make sure I am NEVER like that again.

There are still things I could work on... but I don't always know how. What I console myself with is that I try, and for now I guess that has to be enough.

Weird dreams

I had the strangest dreams last night. The kind where you wake up wondering if they happened they were so real, then you start to connect the dots to your current life and realize that they don't in fact connect at all. Here's a few vignettes:

- Right before I got up: My sister Cami and I with my ex K and his little girl (who I still regularly feel pangs over, whenever I see a cute blonde girl around the same age , or when I find one of her socks in my things, random moments like that) were on a roller coaster. I was sitting with the little blondie, my sister and the ex-boy K were in the car in front of us. And the coaster's track kept changing. I kept waiting to be afraid, since I HATE coasters, and I never was. I couldn't get my belt fastened either, and of course the ex saw this and ignored it, and I finally got it belted myself right before a section where I needed it, then I woke up.

- Once or twice throughout the night: Officechick E was around constantly, acting like nothing had ever happened. Like all of a sudden we were buddies and she was calling me and it was like she never sent me a weird e-mail saying she didn't want to be friends anymore. And the friendship wasn't work anymore the way it used to be. It was odd. It was all just my normal activities, but she was occasionally there. Strange, since honestly I feel pretty good about stuff and don't want the friendship back.

- I woke up super disturbed around 5 am: I was living with kids for some reason, a little boy and girl (the boy was 8 or so? maybe 10?) and the boy had gotten ahold of some kittens. He somehow managed to put ping pong balls inside these kittens (2-3 week old ones). It was AWFUL. And they were alive, little silent balls of fur all pulled out of proportion with these things in them (no way could this actually be physically possible, but it was a dream). I freaked out and started psychobabbling at him about his psychotic behavior and how sociopathic it was and where did he get the idea etc. He finally showed me a photoshopped photo on the internet.... so I took the kittens to the vet to try and save them... and woke up. I was crying over them in the dream, and I woke up with my whole system on full alert and intensely horrified.

I think I had some more somewhere, but whatever. Those were freaking weird enough. The scarier part is that it has been since last school year that I had a dream that got mixed up with reality to the point where I wasn't sure which was which. This time I could tell they weren't real, but they FELT real. These things used to happen to me a lot. And that is extremely SCARY. It has made for some awkward situations before when people thought I was nuts and had to explain that these things didn't happen, and finally some detail doesn't add up and I realize what the deal was.... I don't want those kind of dreams back, ever.