Final Words...

It's 12:32am. Officially Monday. This weekend was a good one. I am almost ready to come out of my cave. I am finally finding my life again, able to get my radar in tune to the quirky little corners of life and follow the signals, towards hopefully, weird and wonderful anecdotes to share with you all.

I wish I could stay up all night and finish watching the first season of 24 (I'm at 4am-5am. Or, Episode 5). That Jamey chick looks like a drag queen. Reminded me of this Asian girl I worked with last year. I also started Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk who also wrote Fight Club. I'll share the two passages I like so far:

"To stand here and try to fix her life is just a big waste of time. People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown."

I liked those lines because earlier today, I made a resolution to avoid as much needless drama in my life as possible. I have a tendency to attract drama. A lot of times, it's because I'm willing to listen to people, to be compassionate. I get drawn into the intimate details of other people's lives quite consistently. And while I learn a lot and become wiser with each interaction in terms of my own life and human existence in general, often times, those traits get me into situations I absolutely shouldn't be in. I'm a magnet for all kinds of weird situations. Just ask my friend Matt, who I stopped talking to for a couple of years because I heard through the grapevine after that really bad situation with the evil ex, that he was at a party telling people that I had gotten myself into a crazy situation again. "As usual." [And then I called him on it and he was embarrassed and apologized and said he would call me later and make it up to me, but then he never, ever, ever contacted me again for years. Until I finally ran into him. Coward. But that's in the past since we're talking again.]

I think drama was what we did when we were younger, because being young can be boring sometimes when you're waiting for life to happen. So you have to fill it up with some excitement. We would go out looking for it, drumming it up, jumping into it, getting sucked into it, whatever.
And it was fun for a while, like playing with firecrackers--dangerous yet exciting until it killed our senses and we get tired of it.

But the older I get, the less I want to go near it. I think I figured out why Geminis don't like to get close to people. Why we're so mentally/emotionally detached. Because everyone knows we're high strung. We have issues with anxiety. We're the chronic worriers. And when you get too close to other people, as is required in order to have human relationships, emotional intensity is sometimes directly correlated with emotional drama. And high intensity (close emotional proximity) means risking the dangers of being too close to the furious fires of emotional drama. And when a Gemini gets a worrisome thought in his or her head, trust me...it will consume that person, whether the people around them realize it or not.

Usually people can't tell. I'm always "fine" and friendly. Only those closest to me know just how obsessively I can worry. And I don't know if even they know to exactly what extent I can obsess over nagging thoughts. Drama makes me physically sick. Because first I worry about the littlest things, from if a comment might have hurt someone's feelings to if a friend is in an unhappy situation. And this thought is a constant throughout the day(s). If it's not at the forefront of my mind, then it's on a shelf where I can see it from whatever thought I'm currently thinking. Sometimes, the worries even take the place of thoughts about sex (God forbid!), which, if I have no drama in my life, I'm usually thinking about constantly. And then my stomach is constantly wound up, I'm nervous and jumpy, I have a constant tension right behind my eyes that I can't seem to shake, and sleep becomes something my body forgets how to do. Once this process has started, it is very, very difficult to disarm. Unfortunate but true.

So I try to keep my life "clean," avoiding people who are co-dependent and want more out of a generous person than is reasonable, and trying to recognize people who want to play out negative cycles, and give them a WIDE berth. But the only problem is, my idealism makes me think that if I see a problem, I need to fix it. I see someone who's unhappy and I want to solve it. As Sarita says, I like to pick up three-legged kittens, even though I don't really want a kitten, but I'm afraid that if I don't do it, that kitten will never have a home. And before long, I'm some old lady with a ramshackle mobile home that always smells funky because it's filled with cats (disfigured cats, no less!), and I only venture out in public to pick up cat food, carpet cleaner and last week's National Enquirer at the 99 cent store, always wearing the same purple mumu and that filthy chewed up straw hat with piss stains on the brim. Not pretty, I tell ya.

But since life has it's ups and downs and its natural occurrences of drama, usually it's fine. Most people just want someone to listen to them, to feel like they are being heard, and to maybe get an objective opinion and to be able to see their situation from a different angle. But sometimes, when you get into the oppressive and tenacious whirlpool of people who thrive on drama, require drama, invite drama and use drama to keep you in their lives, that's a really bad situation. Completely draining.

I think I'm jaded these days. I've met so many people who have kept me around because they wanted me to play out something unhealthy with them, and who created drama just to keep me in their lives and bat me around, that I'm so wary of almost everything that is dramatic. How can you tell if a person is really someone in need? Or if the person is just pretending they're drowning so that when you reach out to help them, they pull you in because they're intent on drowning, but they don't want to do it alone?

I said it a long time ago. "The devil likes to play a drowning man." Be careful.

I think the difference is what you do with the people in your lives. I know I've had my share of drama in my life. I know that I'm not completely blameless in some of them. But these days, I've done a lot of soul searching and have gotten better at recognizing things that shouldn't be in my life, that will create needless drama and endless suffering on my end (endless because someone who craves drama will NEVER be the one to let go of the person whose presence helps them whip it up). And it all comes down to: Set reasonable boundaries, and STAND by them.

When a person is truly in need, they ask for your support, and you let them lean on you so they can heal or figure out the situation. But at the end of the day, they want their suffering relieved. They want the issue in their life resolved. I'm all about being supportive of that person. Because this is healthy. But then there are the people who don't really want the things resolved, even though they say they do, or they honestly think they do. So often, drama is so engrained in these people, that they can't imagine a life without drama, so they cling to it, and will whip up more if they feel the current level of drama in their lives is being threatened. STAY AWAY FROM THESE PEOPLE.

These are the people I was afraid of when I wanted to go into a career of clinical therapy. I've got a woman's intuition and empathy, but a man's mind. I'm logical. I'm solution-oriented. And I go nuts when I give people advice and it becomes clear they don't really want to solve the problem and are just making me go through the motions for attention. There are a lot of people who go to therapy and it's like emotional masturbation. They get to outlet about their misery, wallow in it, and the therapist is the audience. And they want to do it over and over and over again because it feels good. Masochistically good. And when you don't want to feed this cycle anymore, they get upset with you, acting like you're abandoning them. But they would never want to solve the problem so they could end the misery. It would mean not getting to emotionally masturbate anymore. I mean, if you were told that once you achieve an orgasm, your sex organs shut down and you would never feel anything down there again, wouldn't YOU avoid having an orgasm at all costs? Most def. You would FIGHT against that orgasm so that you could keep masturbating and never have it end.

Anyway, now I'm talking about masturbating and I sense that I have severely digressed.

I'm just saying, Survivor is a good book, drama makes me sick and depressed, and I don't want any more three-legged, one-eyed kittens.

Second passage from the book:

"To calm this girl down, to get her to listen, I tell her the story about my fish. This is fish number six hundred and forty-one in a lifetime of goldfish. My parents bought me the first one to teach me about loving and caring for another living breathing creature of God. Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet that someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground."

Yeah, of course I would like this passage. I was talking about this in September, I think. About, how people have to realize that the statement, "I would never hurt you" is always false and misleading, because they will hurt the ones who care about them, just by being human. People you love will eventually hurt you, guaranteed. Because they die. You'll care about them and best case scenario is that they're awesome and bring all kinds of rays of sunshine into your life...................before they DIE. And that's tragic.

I have trust issues with God.