Resolve myself

• I hate how Christmas interrupts everything, for like a month you can’t find time to do half the things you normally do because there are parties you have to go to and shopping to do and lots of gatherings – it all feels like such an obligation and I like my life the way it is normally!
• Christmas inevitably involves a trip home and because there are no trains over the holidays I end up stuck there for days, sleeping in my tiny childhood bed. Advanced complications of B this year – we haven’t been apart for more than 36 hours since we met and it would feel even worse to be so at Christmas, but my parents are certainly not going to invite him to stay, even if they had the space, because it looks bad. So that leaves the option of hiring a car and driving down and back every day with crazy Christmas drivers and not being able to drink which is the one thing that might get me through the endless silent guilt tripping about why I am I not going to church?

OK sorry gripe over. I really want to veto the whole thing this year and have done so in the past but only by being in Japan. Christmas will happen whether I like it or not and I guess I have to try and find more enjoyment for it and stop being such an old grouch. Bah.

that screams “ask me for help!” (or maybe just a sign with “MUG” and a big flashing arrow floating above my head!!) – people are always asking me for directions or trying to give me things (not usually things I want, mostly free newspapers or calling cards) OR asking me for money!

I’ve always seen this as a bit of an intrusion really (you’re walking along, in your own world, humming a tune and get disturbed by some irrelevant nonsense!) and I’m still not interested in the latter two, but one thing about me is that if I have information that other people need I am desperate to give it to them! So I think I need to resolve these two parts of myself and not just wave people away when they ask something – I know London well enough to be able to answer a lot of direction queries these days, and it’s fun, sometimes it gives me the chance to use a different language too, so I will keep track of just how often it happens for a while!!

• earlier this week: directions to hotel near office
• Thu 22 October – Westminster from Victoria? Circle & District baby! (note to self: use colours rather than names with foreign tourists!!)
• Fri 23 October – Victoria Coach Station (a common one!)

I’ve been having (and I’m not sure where it goes so I’ll put it here) is that this year has seen so many good things happen, so many dreams come true – not just random good things but things I have wanted to happen for a long time – and yet for much of it I felt like I was struggling and floundering and down in the dumps. It’s only now I see how things have kind of fallen into place in spite of me and things pop up and suddenly impress on me how grateful I am. I find this particularly in my relationship, it is everything I want and yet I have this kind of terror that it won’t last or there must be something wrong with it that I don’t know about.

It’s almost like I have to take a step back to see how great everything is, which means living in a place one step removed from my natural thoughts and feeling closer to happiness but somehow further from that inner me.

I think this is the core of the choice I face in this resolution process. For most of my life staying “true” to myself has meant being a bit of a depressed loner. I look at the stuff on the album and I think, I’m tired of identifying myself as melancholic, but I can’t deny that it’s good for creativity. If it’s true that the darker side of myself is a permanent characteristic then that is not a sadness I can ever lose, but at the same time I know that if I let that side of me live completely there can never be a healthy happy life for her and good things won’t happen, because she’s destructive and sabotages everything that is positive. I know I can have so much more than that but the idea of decamping completely to a more positive place makes me uneasy, like a kind of betrayal. Healing seems to me like it requires an amputation of part of my emotional range and I can’t quite commit to that, which means that I can’t quite embrace all the happiness there is for me either. This is starting to sound insane.

• live with it, go along with whatever happens
• resolve it
• bridge it – find some way to incorporate the two sides in a healthy way that doesn’t feel like I’m selling my soul.

one of those terminally uncompletable goals, or it could take years and years… but I suppose there is always hope for a flash of inspiration, a single moment that sets all the pieces together in harmony. Maybe internal conflict is just what defines me, the force that moves me forwards – but I would like to at least attempt to resolve some of my internal contradictions, or decide on compromises between them so that they are working together smoothly rather than trying to tear each other apart.