Summer Update: No Work and Sexting

I suddenly have free time due to the fact that nobody hired me for summer work. I have decided to take this as a positive in that I can study for my intermediate computer programming class I am enrolled in for fall, my last semester at the University.

I am about to complete my Master's degree in my field, after two years. I started this blog as a returning adult student attempting to complete my Bachelor's degree. I just needed a safe place to ramble on about my mental illness and the loss of my loved ones, this blog became it. I had no idea that I would keep blogging off and on throughout the following years. Over time, I have built a sense of purpose: I must advocate for the rights of the mentally ill and prove, through my own actions, that a mental patient can be fully reintegrated into society and be productive and live a fulfilled life. Most recently though, I have found myself ranting against the social stigma and posting links to online articles about mental patients who became successful in life despite their illness.

Sometimes my purpose is too strong and I feel that I might be alienating some people. Other times, I feel that I must speak out, even write all in CAPS, to express the deep-seated fear that has been instilled in me by the mental asylums.

But everyone needs a breather now and then....

I promised this guy I would not tell a soul. I made him swear not to tell anybody either. We've been webcamming. Yes, webcamming. I invented a new verb and it is a sexy verb. Basically, we just take turns in front of the camera for hours at a time, trying to please each other visually. He made me swear not to tell, for some reasons which I cannot deny: a) I am overweight and he is fantastically fit and ripped everywhere....and hung. He could do better than me and we both know it, b) he is about ten years younger than me (21 to my 31) and that in itself is kind of taboo, and c) He is auditioning for movies and getting call-backs, which means he has to be on his best behavior and only date the "right type of woman." So, due to a, b, and c, I can not tell a soul. Except maybe you, reader, who are privy to practically everything that goes on in my private life. Also, I might be bragging right now, just a little bit. Sorry.

My therapist told me I had issues with intimacy. Not sexual intimacy but at the crossroads where sexual intimacy and emotional intimacy meet. I usually have a sexual partner for my sexual needs and a male friend for my emotional needs. I am seriously not selfish, I just can't wrap my mind around how to get one male into both of these roles. My therapist told me that it sounds like I need emotional distance from sexual partners and physical distance from my non-sexual friends. I hate this, but I think he is right. I blame my natural skittishness and a series of unfortunate encounters for my ambivalence towards relationships.

I like webcamming with this particular guy because he provides both sexual and emotional support for me---from a distance, a distance larger than the length of the Pacific Ocean (he lives overseas). This means that I can feel incredibly close to him and know that I might never actually meet him in person, ever. Rather than take this as an experiment in soul-crushing heart-ache, I am rather fond of this arrangement....and I really feel weird about being fond of this arrangement. To make matters more complicated, my male friend (platonic friend only) invited me over to his apartment to hang out. I went over there, honestly, wanting to sleep with the guy, but I couldn't work up the courage to seduce him so instead we talked for four hours straight. Then I went home and sexted with the guy overseas. Did I feel guilty? Yes and no. My local friend is also younger and I don't want him to get enmeshed with an older woman who has relationship issues (me), but I adore him and he makes me laugh. I always feel warm and cuddled after we hang out together. I do not think he would mind at all if I mentioned that I was webcamming with some guy, but I would rather keep that to myself, especially because I secretly have a crush on my local friend. Webcamming guy, on the other hand, would definitely not approve of me hanging out alone with my local friend. I don't tell him anything. I do not want to lose what we have, but I do not want to lose what I have with my local friend. The solution I have stumbled on is to just keep my private life private even from those within my private life. Does that make sense?

Most women I meet are socialized to want to marry one man, to love one man, and to sleep with one man. I am not like these women. I am fiercely loyal, but my idea of loyalty is slightly different. Flings mean little to me, they are like annoying mosquito bites that I have to scratch, illicit trysts that do not reflect my true feelings, just pure sensation. Yet I love the sensation of a tryst! There is nothing so fleetingly magical, so ephemerally fantastic, as a one-night stand. Yes, I am like other women in that I get angry if the guy doesn't call back (although for me, a call-back might be a month down the line, which is fine for me), and I get jealous if I see my fling flirting with other women, but overall I do not share the same singular passion that other women have. This would be why I still live at home, have never married or had children, and is the reason why my "relationships" last a total of 5 months per man.

I sigh as I sit here, wondering if I suffer from some horrible cougar-esque Peter Pan complex or if these guys themselves have some mommy complex that dooms me to immature and unbalanced relationships. Whatever it is, I love them in my strange ways, deeply and intensely.

This summer I have done nothing except practice programming, look for work (to no avail), and gotten myself mired into bizarre pseudo-relationships to the point where my shrink needs a diagram to sort through the male characters in my life. Don't cry for me, Argentina. I might wail about my confusing private life, but in the end, I love it, I love them. In a way, I love you, too, just for reading through this post.

Empty Summer Days

My classmate died this week. He was a very kind man who spoke to me in a gentle voice. I miss his presence already. Next semester will be a little difficult not having him in my graduate classes anymore.

I still have no therapist to replace my last one. I am slowly adjusting to the new cocktail of medications my psychiatrist put me on. I have no job and all I do is care-take my grandmother during the day and take walks in the evening.

Some days the reality of having a public blog makes me feel doomed. "What have I done," I think, "I am too exposed." But, I cannot help that I am mentally ill. Maybe my little wails and rants in cyberspace will make somebody else feel a little more normal. Also, it is healing to feel so emotionally stripped. I have nothing to hide anymore, my deepest secrets are posted online for people to root through and pass judgment on. Well, I always did want to be a confessional writer. I just never wanted to actually confess. I guess I wanted to be a fiction writer but that did not pan out. None of the writing panned out. Instead, I have milled about in academia, making friends who have no idea about my mental illness, feeling both accepted and alienated at the same time, struggling to come to grips with how society perceives me, and back in mourning after another classmate passed away.

In case you have been reading throughout this blog's timeline, I have actually experienced quite a bit of loss these past few years. My cousin committed suicide a few years ago. That was actually the impetus to start writing online. Next, my classmate whom I was secretly infatuated with passed away at a young age. Later, my grandfather passed away from a heart attack. Now another classmate has died at a young age. My mother mentioned to me that it was strange that so many people close to me had died the past few years. I really wish she had not mentioned that, because it actually is true. Three out of four of my close contacts died before the age of 40. That is far, far too young.

Now, I feel mortality like a chiffon dress that is delicate, transparent, and quick to rip. I wear my mortality like my new tattoo-- on my sleeve and open to the elements.

Tragedy always brings to mind the shame I feel over my own anger. Anger in words, anger in print, anger in general makes me self-loathe. I feel like anger is arsenic, slowly devouring my insides until one day I will stagger into the desert and die. I don't want to die with anger. I want to live. I want to be free of anger. How to escape the anger of being hurt, traumatized, alienated---that is something I have yet to answer. I try to find positive things in life to focus on. I try to accept that I will get angry and learn to control it so that it transforms into a butterfly and not some mutant caterpillar.

I will now list positive things about my life for balance and peace of mind:

I knew two great and kind men who were fond of me and whose memory as classmates I will hold in my heart for the rest of my life.
I am half way to earning my Master's degree.
I am sticking to my new diet of raw vegetables and I am not weighing myself obsessively.
My grandmother and mother spent the majority of their lives taking care of me and I will become a better person so that they will be proud.
John Nash is awesome and a genius whose schizophrenia did not stop him from winning a Nobel Peace Prize.
Despite having schizo-affective disorder, I achieved a B.A. and entered a graduate program.
Puppies.

Finals Over, Diet Begins

Every finals week I start to binge eat. I cannot stop. I will literally sleepwalk out of bed and rummage through the kitchen in the dark and stuff whatever there is into my mouth and crawl back into bed. I woke up once with little graham crackers packages littered all over and crumbs in my bed. Then, the guilt, the all-consuming remorse, the weight gain, the looming diet in my near future.

Well, finals week is over. I failed pre-calculus. The professor posted a message online saying that it was very common to have to take his class twice. That did little to quell my feelings of failure. I had just gained about 3 pounds during finals week. To fail AND to gain weight. No. Bad. The rest of my classes were A's and B's, but that class dropped my cumulative GPA significantly. Now, it is summer, I am not working, I have a lot of free time, and my primary goal is to lose weight.

In 2011 I weighed 194 pounds and I was at my heaviest. In 2012 I weighed 155 pounds, having dropped around 40 pounds in a year. Then, I dated some guy who liked to fry all his dinners and he was always making me dinner---I gained 15 pounds. Then, we broke up and I felt completely dumb for letting him stuff me full of deep fried salmon just to be polite about his cooking. Never again, I vowed. I enrolled  in martial arts classes, but alas, I still gained weight over midterms and the dreaded week of finals. Now, at 167, I am back to being at the borderline between obese and very overweight on the BMI chart. 

At 167 pounds my pants fit, which is not good. I was starting to get used to the loose waistband and the need for a new wardrobe. I am determined to lose at least 20 pounds before the end of August. I did it before, I can do it now. 

My diet since I got out of class about a week ago has been dramatically altered from my high caloric finals-week-diet. Now, I drink a lot of tea and I wait until after 6 pm to have a normal sized meal. By "a lot of tea" I mean somewhere around 6 cups during the day and another 3 cups of green tea at night. I always put a bit of fat free half and half or almond milk in each cup, which does add calories, but that 10 calories per cup (or 100 calories per day) is equivalent to a small, single snack. I run on chai (tea). 

For example, today I had 3 cups of coffee, 1 cup of tea, 2 plain flour tortillas for breakfast, and a large diet Coke from McDonalds. It is 1:30 pm and I kind of feel full. I have no desire to eat more flour tortillas, even though my relative just finished making delicious home-made tortillas from scratch. 

Dieting is an old friend for me. I think to some extent it is healthy, but then again, maybe having 2 tortillas for breakfast isn't healthy and also those are pure carbohydrates. For lunch I will have a nice tomato and cheese sandwich on flat bread, followed by 5 cups of tea with fat free half and half. Maybe some shots of espresso after that...who knows? If you're trying to lose weight, see a doctor. I am not a doctor. I am just a desperate, unemployed graduate student with little money and little control over my life. I am only relaying this information because I want this blog to be as honest with the reader as I can be. I know that obsessing about weight is never good. I applaud those women who are free from the self-disgust I feel. I also know that I have body issues, food issues, and overall issues. This blog was started to show the real human behind mental illness (I am schizo-affective who gained a lot of weight taking the anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa). Now that it has been a year, I still want this blog to be honest, even if that means showing my ugly bits. 

To some people, summer is a time to relax. For me, it is the time when I exercise daily and limit my calories. Sometimes, summer also involves getting involved with some guy and maybe even smoking marijuana now and then. I would prefer not to smoke marijuana or get involved with some random guy for three months, but that has been my pattern for the past 3 years. Maybe I will sign up for classes at the dojo near my house. :) Cheers to summer, kickboxing, espresso, tea, and you!!