Proud of the fact that I got some cleaning done.
Filled a garbage bag with garbage and another bag with paper. There’s still a heck a lot more stuff to throw out and/or clean up but it’s a start.
And here’s a note for my deeper self : I was not miserable the whole time I was doing it. I was, in fact, quite happy to finally be doing something productive and purposeful. I just put on a YouTube video and listened to it while I cleaned up.
I am going to keep cleaning whenever I can and keep resisting the STUPID voice in my head that makes me think effort is the enemy when it is, in fact, my SALVATION, and pretty soon this place will but suitable for human habitation.
I just wish I could do the final stage – actually making the refuse leave the apartment anf find it way to the proper receptacles – myself, but alas, it’s rather hard to carry a garbage bag and use a walker at the same time. plus I am not at all sure about navigating the way to our recycling room that way, so for now I have to ask Julian to handle that all important final step.
In general, one of the main causes for this place turning into a pigsty, besides my being too depressed to clean, is that I had no system in place for getting that final step done. And when the garbage can’t go out, it piles up. Obviously.
So I am going to try to work out my own miniature “garbage day”…
…for this little one bedroom universe of mine with Julian so that I can know for sure that I can clear out whatever has been piling up at least once a week.
Small things like that will contribute greatly to me being able to live like a human being for the first time since forever.
I still need a solution for the other half of the sanitation equation : showering. I know that I was supposed to get the loan of a shower bench and some very nice people arranged for that for me and everything but the problem was that I would have had to arrange with Julian to drive out to the middle of nowhere to pick it up and then figured out how to install and use it by myself and those two things combined were far too big of a gumption trap for me to escape and so I just…. forgot all about it, more or less.
I’m not the easiest person in the world to help.
If I was less Avoidant, I would have at least told somebody that I needed a lot of help with the whole deal and then people might have helped me solve it.
Nothing about the individual steps is beyond me, though many are challenging. I can ask Julian to do stuff for me. I could probably figure out how the bench works and get it put in there.
Of course, someone would have to clean my shower first. It’s been out of use for coming up on two years now. It’s pretty grody in there.
And if I was healthy enough to do it myself, I wouldn’t need the shower bench in the first place. I would have been showering this whole time.
When I asked the lady on the phone about installation, she said, “There’s nothing to install! It’s just a chair!”.
Um, no. If all that was required was a seat, I would have just stuck a lawn chair in there a long long time ago.
But in order for it to be safe to use, there has to be something in there to keep the bottom of the chair from sliding around and/or tipping over.
Plus at one point, I was told I would be getting a shower bench, which would be placed halfway in and halfway out of the shower and then I would have had to sit on the outside bit then sort of scooted over to the inside bit.
That sounds horribly awkward and unsafe to me.
Handicapped people should not have to “scoot”.
More after the break.
Yet another vid, this one from m’man Sisyphus55.
Sharing this because it more or less set my brain on fire.
Sorry it’s not an embed. YouTube wouldn’t allow it.
It does that sometimes for some reason.
Anyhow, my mind ignited during the part at around 5:30 where he starts talking about building a wall around yourself to protect us from reality only to find yourself trapped inside of it.
Like, yo. I’m right here. Hi.
Only my wall is extra thick because it was formed against the truly horrible reality of being raped as a toddler. Thus I ended up shutting almost everything out except for the world of the mind where I felt self.
My body, and indeed all of physical, sensory reality, became just a nuisance to be dealt with as minimally as possible until I could retreat back into my mind.
That’s so sad.
And thought does seek certainty, but that’s a doomed, nay Sisyphean task. There will always be a limit to how much certainty we can have and we will always be subject to forces beyond our ability to foresee and/or control, and so our deep desire to control outcomes must be balanced by an ability to handle the unexpected.
I’m not real good at that. Hence my hating surprises.
And oh my god, this video just made me realize that I have been living in the past. Not in the nostalgic sense, but in shutting myself off from new experiences because my old experiences dominate my thinking and make me scared of the world.
But all those old “tapes” are bullshit now. None of them apply to who and what I am now. They are the experiences of a shattered and scattered young boy who was thrust into a social world he did not understand and therefore could not cope with.
Well I’m all grown up now and I am far more capable and sophisticated and aware that I have loads of charm, intelligence, charisma, and wit to contribute to the world and therefore I have nothing to be ashamed of.
Well, except being a 51 year old loser who has never had a job or a boyfriend.
It’s um, a work in progress.
I still don’t know how to get over that.
Suggestions, as always, are welcome.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.