Be the change you want to see.

Late last night as I started to fall asleep, I dreamed briefly of my father (gone since April 1994)

And I felt and thought, "I *miss* you, Fred," and then I saw his face near mine, in 3/4 profile. He looked just the same, his silvering hair and cowlick, stupidly handsome face... He smiled, looked down, back up, and then a hand on the back of my neck shook me gently back and forth, and I cried.

Saying this now, I'm crying again, those slow fat tears that roll back into your ears.

...

And then I got anxiety dreams about the Black Plague, and then where my mom was the FLOTUS (I only now see the connection with my dad dream NOW) and bad men with guns were coming through our house And there was no place to hide. Giant piles of laundry vanished when I went to hide myself under them...

Idk where mom was in the dream, I forced myself to wake around 6 am, it was still dark, I drank 2 cups of water and went back to bed.

Unrelatedly earlier that same night I'd gone to the grocery store with Jeff for the first time since March 25.

Anxiety dreams. Valid, but they SUCK.

This weekend Jeff is travelling with our gf Jenn. So not to feel lonely, I set myself up with a lot of social things, in multiple cases things I'd never done before.

Friday night I went to Renee's birthday party.
Saturday I went to a Halloween party that Amy and Bill and Kimberly were invited to, and they included me.
Sunday I went with Luisa to a Sikh temple for what I thought at the start was a Diwali celebration but upon reflection, may have been a regular Sunday service.

I could unpack and tell stories about each of those days, but this morning when I woke up I realized there were two specific things I wanted to write about.

one is: three straight days with extroverting.
two is: two straight days with going out around new people while dressing high femme. Even did makeup and hair. wow

yeaaaaaah. that was kind of a lot of effort, you know? Both those things.

I have tried to convince myself for literally YEARS that I'm an extrovert. I'm actually coming to realize that I'm almost certainly an introvert EXCEPT FOR THE FACT that my default mode when I "introvert" is to HERMIT.
and then I don't see people, I don't touch or get touched, I get depressed, and it sucks.

maybe I just suck at the introverting. Today's a kinda gross brainweasel kinda day already, I'm working on managing my pain and getting some food so I can brain better, and I still have to take my morning meds.

maybe I don't suck at the introverting, but there's something else going on there.
but I'm pretty sure I do suck at the introverting.

also, though, i seem to have hard anxiety at the extroverting. GAH
or maybe it's just that I did three days of being around People I Don't Know and that's stressful.
*sigh*

okay, now it's time to take a moment about the femme thing.
I've been tending to dress butch for several years now. Jeff never expressed that he cared about how I dressed except to say that he didn't really like women wearing makeup and that he didn't do well with lots of perfume. So for several years I dressed practically. I didn't have any kind of expected or cultural dress code to meet, not since graduating waldorf in 2011, so I've been wearing a lot of jeans, cargo shorts, nerdy tee shirts, sandals, and or boots.

this year I decided I was going to try and reclaim some of the femme I used to *think* I knew how to do.

yeaaaaaah.

Briefly, dressing butch /feels/ like blending in, dressing femme /feels/ like "look at me, look at me!" and I have anxiety over being seen. I don't feel like I know how to handle it when I am /seen/.

when i was a kid i was humongous levels of anxious (I was going to say "ridiculous levels of anxious" but this shit ain't ridiculous it's fuckin' SAD because I didn't have any safe place or people growing up. I couldn't even trust my parents). I used to pretend I had some means of being invisible. Because if I couldn't be safe with people, maybe I could make them leave me alone.

I can trust and relax around small groups of people. five or six seems to be the maximum.

Eye contact is hard except when either I don't care or it's low emotional stakes, like with a waiter or a clerk in a store, or when I really trust someone.

I don't know if that makes me odd, "normal" or just me.

I feel a little better just introducing this topic here (these topics? is flavors of anxiety a single topic or a multiple topic?) and also incidentally finally getting my breakfast and caffeine an hour or more after waking.

self care yay!

body still hurts, going to see what I can do about that. I feel like a tightly wound spring, if a tightly wound spring could still have healing soft tissue damage post RSI and post broken bones. UGH

i'm fuckin ridiculous.