This is how it goes. My opinion of me is very fragile. When it is damaged by someone - or by me - it hurts a great deal. It’s at that point when I want/need to not only be told I’m okay but feel it too. You know that feeling you get when someone gives you a hug? Or that feeling when you snuggle up close to someone on the sofa? Or when you’ve just had sex? It’s a feeling of closeness, warmth, being wanted, being loved. It’s a special feeling, a deep one.

I have linked to this page before and it’s description of bpd and I do again because when I have a bad day or a series of bad days what I need, what I really need, are those good feelings above. And because of my wife’s disability I can’t. I know she loves me. She can say all the right words but there is no physical side to the relationship. It’s not her fault, it’s just how it is. And this means it is that much harder for me to get back to what passes for normal. I have to rebuild the wall each time.

There is no such thing as a touch too much.

I want to have to choose a safeword.

I want to really want to use the safeword - but not.

I want to listen for a safeword.

I want to feel safe enough with someone that I’d trust them with a safeword.

I would like to think there is someone who would trust me with their safeword.

I want to think that if this opportunity ever arose I’d do it - and not find some excuse not to.

I’ve been fairly level for a while and I was pondering yesterday why. I was wondering why because as yet I’ve heard nothing from Francis Dixon Lodge about their pathways group and although I want to I know it’ll do nothing for me.

There are many things that seem to be going okay and that’s why I’m okay. Work isn’t stressful (though I do need to up my game), meds are okay, diet is okay and body image is improving, family life is good. So as I type this right now I can’t see any stress. Looking back the visit to that town after Bristol with the square in the middle whose name I have forgotten but I’m sure it began with A was good. There is one hanging issue which I need to deal with and I don’t know quite when to do that. I know most of the how, just not all of the how or the when. But dealable it is and stress (of which there is none) will drop further after that.

The headaches are firmly back and part of my head again. The propranolol did something but it doesn’t work every day - or my diet is so whacked out that my body is having headaches as a way of communicating to me that it has an issue. This may well be the case. Today’s food - 1 slice brown bread, 1 small apple, 1 Madiera cake. (That’s a whole cake - the ones that cost about 80p in Tesco). That’s pretty good for me. So yeah, diet could be a problem but as I’m not yet ‘sans cakebaby’ it’s staying that way.

So I think as everything appears to be balanced that I too am level. Which is good.

I’m getting some more tattoo on Tuesday - if you’ve seen my left arm it’ll have orange and similar colours put in so the machinery turns somehat Victorian/Steampunk. I’m having second thoughts about my leg tattoo though - it won’t signify anything so it’ll have no meaning so it’ll just be a picture and I don’t want ‘just a picture’. I could get bored of a picture. I have no regrets about ‘this too shall pass’ on my left hand though.

If I could get back into the work groove all would then be better. Part of my slacking there is that I’ve looked at the same stuff now since 2006. Only there’s more of it these days. It’s getting a little boring. But it shouldn’t be so. I must refind my motivation.

I’m old again in 2 weeks. I just realised that if I don’t have a drink for another year - and I have no reason to see why I would - then I’ll have been dry for all my 40’s. But then I’ve also been mentally unstable for the same period of time. Drink and get sane? Ya’think?

And games. I need to buy less and play more. And read. So those two + work points to a lack of concentration. How the hell do you develop that back? Pomodoro! Nope - I have those apps. I have a Chaining app. I have all the anti-procrastinate apps but if you never run them…. I should use Concentration as that one can block a lot of stuff.

I’d still like more people to talk to.

Woke this morning at around 6am. I was lying on my left side looking across the pillow toward the wife. I could see something odd in my vision. I closed my right eye. The view looked perfectly normal - my pillow, a gap, her pillow, her hair. I opened the right eye and closed the left. The view was very different - there was a dark shape across the gap between the pillows. I switched eyes and it went away, switched back and it reappeared. Opened both eyes and propped myself up on my elbows. Looked at the gap and there was definitely something there when my rake deployight eye was looking. Lay down and did the eye open/close a few times, rubbed my eyes but the effect stayed the same. So then with my right eye open - and I could see the dark shape - I put the back of my hand toward my face and then pushed my hand through the space where the shape was. I felt nothing. I watched my hand move, all was good and when it had stretched out through the space the dark shape had gone.

This is I think the 4th time I have had this odd experience. At least twice before I have been looking down the bed toward wardrobes after waking and my right eye - only that one - sees a dark shape. It was much much bigger then. Left eye sees the normal room.

Very strange.

By chance I had a regular optometrist appointment today. He did all the usual flipping of lenses - “Is this better or worse” stuff - and looked into my eyes with some torch gadget they use. I didn’t say anything to him and he declared my eyes very good inside. And it’s not floaters.

I have no clue at all what is doing it.

The title of this post was caused by two things: the first was the chocolate I ate earlier. I decided that today I could eat anything I wanted and chocolate was it. And the second reason was the topic of the latest fetish post at Sensible Erection. (You should consider that link NSFW). I miss sex (one day they’ll cover the kink that does it for me … ).

Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of. Angelina Jolie.

You can’t control your head so well can you? You can’t control what you will think, the intensity, the emotions that come along. Or maybe you can but at what cost?

So being scared of yourself - is that challenge that should/could scare?

Last night I wrote this on twitter: Realised there is something I have never written about on my blogs. Wondering if I should, why I haven’t. Odd given what I have written..

This was caused by my logging into Facebook (as my fake ID) and looking for someone, getting sidetracked and then finding a photo of someone I once worked with. The reason I have not written about it - I wondered that last night and here I am over 12 hours later with the answer - it’s still a mess. This has occupied my thoughts, my sleep and was on my mind as I woke. It needs packing away again. Revisiting will do me no good. It would probably do no harm either to be honest. So why pack it away? I think it’s because I am annoyed at me and I think that you would think less of me if you knew. Maybe I am wrong.

I am thinking again of joining Facebook. Not to add information, get friend lists or stuff like that but because if I want someone to talk to maybe there will be people there online to chat to? I miss online chatter be that IM or IRC.

I’m getting pre-migraine sickness a lot these days.

Something changed yesterday, maybe the day before but I saw it yesterday.

I’ve had episodes before when I get an overwhelming desire to sleep. It feels like my face and head just want to close, to shut down, to relax completely, where even just having my eyes open is too much input, too much work. I have said before that this has been side-effects and I am certain it has - drugs like Mirtazapine are known for this (horrible drug, I will never take that again) but it has also happened when I have not been taking medication - like now. Well, when I say No medication I mean nothing that would do it. I’m on Prozac 60mg but that’s stable, I have no side-effects that I know of. And the tramadol? That’s good. I mean it’s varied to be less if anything when I’ve forgotten to take it, I haven’t taken more. So this sleep is something that has happened before. (Maybe if I read back through these posts I’d find where it happened but hey, who reads their old posts?) (so why do I do this? to write, not to read, that’s why).

I sat in silence for nearly all yesterday afternoon/evening. No TV / game / music, just whatever noise floated upstairs and come through the window. I sat silent and very very calm. The word ‘serene’ fits best - silent, still, calm, pleasant. That was me. And I have no clue why. This .. event .. just happened. I hadn’t completed anything which would provoke a “Ahh, done!” moment of repose. I hadn’t fixed anything, solved anything. I just realised after a while that here I am sitting in total silence and that I didn’t have a reason for it.

So silence + the desire to sleep. Every night when I go bed I lie down before I am tired. I lie down on my back, hands by my side and open flat on the bed. And I breathe. I focus on my breathe and clear my head. After some time - it varies - I roll onto whichever side works that night and I drop off really quick. Two nights ago I barely started before wanting to sleep. Last night was the same. And this morning I just didn’t want to get up, open my eyes. I was awake, I felt fine, I just didn’t want to get up. Only it’s more than that and I can’t explain the desire to just lie there and let the world happen.

It’s 17:12 now and if I laid down I’d sleep. That’s after just 2 tramadol which I had at lunchtime and over a litre of caffeined pop. I think I got up at 11. There is no reason at all for me to feel this need to sleep. It’s not tired, it’s not bored, it’s a real want to just stop, shut down, close, sleep.

Out with the dogs and it’s been an okay day. Woke with leg cramps so asked the girls if they’d get some bananas while out and about (which they did) and I’ve been careful to cut the caffeine a touch and add more water. Anyway, weedkilled the patio and the drive and took the dogs for a plod in the field. I wasn’t that energetic - not that this matters, just mentioning - and while big dog seemed okay little dog had a bit of a limp after being out yesterday so I was taking things slow which I suppose gave my mind more time to wander. And it did.

Partway back and as I’m looking for a dirty green tennis ball in long weeds and grass I suddenly think “I wonder if X and Y would cry when I kill myself”. I have no idea where that thought came from. And while X is someone I think would I don’t think Y would and I’d never thought of that person in that context before. And my mind very definitely said “when”, not “if”.

This is just rambling. Really. I’m writing because there may be a thread in my head that wants to out and this opens the way for it. And there may not.

The last 2 days have been taken up with a constant migraine. It never peaked to the top levels of pain but it kept the nausea and unwellness and lots of pain around. Nothing touched it including an imigran (though maybe it would have peaked without that) so today I’m in a post-headache mood where I can’t settle or concentrate. Managed 15 minutes of meditation which I suppose is the highlight.

And I know I’m in a strange mood because I’m listening to old trance and that has been off the aural agenda for some time. It would be ever so useful if I could give a service my last.fm login, blog logins and various IDs and it pulled it all together and spat out some graph of mood / activity. We never see listed in newspaper articles what people last listened to do we? I’d say I wonder when that will change but it will when a track fits the bill - when a killer has listened to M Manson maybe, rather than Daft Punk. I changed it to Milkman/mash. No, changed it to 80’s stuff. Madness. My Girl.

I was going out with a girl called Kathryn back then. She married a guy called Mark. She’s a teacher and since she rang me in 1983 to call the 4 year relationship off we’ve never spoken.

I wonder if this is post-headache or I’m cycling moods. I don’t know. You’d think after all this time I’d know, that I’d realise when things change but I don’t. I don’t want to do any of the normal stuff - game / film / news / random clicking / downloading. Even this music is slightly irritating.

(It’s now Fatboy Slim). I think the Fluoxetine 60mg is doing good. Work is improving, concentration / motivation is on the up. I’m not at 100% yet but it’s also hard to know what 100% is - how do you know how productive you are when you only have yourself to measure against and you’ve had to work stupid hard hours before? I think even for a good day I might feel like I was slacking. Though I’m not yet there, I know that, no excuses.

(It’s now AC/DC). I’m STILL 84.xkg and I still feel like I have a barrel attached to my torso so it’s time to up the diet I think. It feels like I have something extra attached that I need to get rid of.

It’s now this:

I had registered for the Yahoo group ‘dbtclass’ some time ago and it rolled around to the start of the programme a couple of weeks ago. I blogged it, posted the first lesson and said I’d post each lesson and my homework for it. Good intentions.

I unsubscribed yesterday. I just can’t do it.

The homework is basically wanting me to examine my thoughts critically - but how do you do that? It’s one thing to think “Oh crap, I shouldn’t have said that” 5 seconds after you said it and quite another to describe the situation, your reaction, what you should have done and why in writing some days later. It’s not the writing, it’s not way it exposes to yourself that you did it in away that could be improved. It’s the whole process. I could do it talking (I think) but writing it down I just hit a wall, I just couldn’t do it. I looked at the work for the first 3 homeworks and could do none. I don’t know how and I know that probably sounds daft. But I couldn’t. I read over all the lessons, read the homeworks, read the replies others had sent in and realised that I just couldn’t write like they were. I experienced similar emotions, I reacted in the same way to some things but I just can’t write it down, can’t express it. I took a day to think about this and then yesterday I unsubbed. It’s pointless to keep getting the emails “just in case” and it’s not fair on the group mods to have me along for the ride so to speak. A group needs active participation not passive observers.

My intentions were good but writing like it wanted just didn’t suit me.