I like fighting the good fight as much as the next girl, but why does the good fight have to involve so many papercuts? Mass mailings, they are evil.

To backtrack, I’m on Planned Parenthood’s volunteer list for all sorts of volunteer jobs in addition to my clinic escorting stuff, I just almost never get to do anything else. The other things usually need to be done during the day, and while my boss is very easygoing about my time off, I’m not sure if I could get away with saying “Hey, I’m taking the day off to go teach kids how to use condoms.” I think that might be pushing my luck. So I was excited when an evening volunteer slot opened up this week. They needed people to spend yesterday evening downtown helping out with a mass mailing for the March for Choice. Apparently I had a little brain freeze and utterly forgot how much I hate doing mass mailings, because I signed up quite merrily. And then took a bus downtown last night and spent hours folding, stamping, addressing, and sealing many, many packets of information. I got many papercuts and I think I had nightmares about stamps afterwards. I must remember not to do mass mailings anytime soon. They make me cranky.

That said, it was still interesting. The people there were mostly from the local chapter of the National Organization for Women, and I haven’t had much involvement with them, so it was neat to meet a new local feminist crowd. A little sad that there were very few people my age there, but still, an interesting bunch of people. (Other than the woman who was an Avon lady and kept trying to get me to buy her products. I don’t wear makeup to begin with, and I certainly don’t go to feminist gatherings expecting to be hounded by someone who desperately wants to badger me into letting her give me a makeover. I think not.) And there was free pizza. A few papercuts are perhaps a reasonable price to pay for an evening of good conversation and free pizza.

It was also of interest to note that I was much more comfortable than I used to be with taking the bus to and from downtown by myself at night. I stopped doing that a few years back when I had a scary experience with a creepy guy getting in my personal space and trying to follow me home, which really freaked me out. But it didn’t bother me at all last night. I guess all the time I’ve spent downtown this year doing clinic stuff has made me much more comfortable finding my way around that part of town on my own. Or possibly I’m just older and wiser and more ready to kick people’s asses if they try to bother me. Either way, it was good to note that, since I have sometimes refrained from going to a movie or show that no one else wanted to see with me, if it would involve being downtown alone at night. Maybe I will be able to stop doing that now.

I am totally without the ability to focus on anything in my life right now for long, including writing an actual coherent journal entry. So a few random bits and pieces instead:

1) Ow. Ow, ow, ow. Every once in a while, I develop some weird urge to at least pretend to be a healthy person. Eat better, exercise, whatever. I have no idea what triggers these phases, but I seem to be entering one now. I rescued my exercise bike from the obscure corner of my apartment in which it has been hiding and have been putting in some time on it for a couple of weeks. And then this week I went totally insane and started going to the gym, which I haven’t done in probably a year. I am a total arm muscle weakling and my poor arms are whimpering in pain from being subjected to actual exercise with weights. I suppose that either I will lose motivation again, or I will keep going and get more used to working out, and either way my arms will recover and feel better. But in the meanwhile, ow.

2) The inability-to-focus thing is only mildly annoying in most areas of my life, but where it’s really driving me crazy is that I’ve developed some sort of mental block against reading. For the past month or so I’ve been picking up books and liking the first chapter or two, but then I can’t make myself read on, so the stack of begun-but-not-finished books by my bed just keeps growing. Reading is usually one of my very favorite things and a major part of my recreational time, so not being able to do that was mildly annoying at first but is now getting upsetting. What kind of self-respecting bookworm doesn’t finish a single book in over a month? Maybe I need to switch to short stories or poetry for a while, or something along those lines that I can polish off in one short-attention-span sitting without feeling like a failure for not sticking with a whole novel. And maybe I need to come to terms with the fact that I am probably not going to be able to read Ulysses with the book club despite my best intentions, because when you’re already having trouble sticking with long works of fiction, Joyce is probably not the best thing to be working on. I do seem to be having a certain amount of luck listening to audiobooks while I walk to and from work, but I can’t really imagine Ulysses working in that format. And at any rate, Audible only has an abridged version, and I loathe abridged books.

3) We’re tentatively taking a quick road trip later in the month, just to get the hell out of town for a couple of days. I’m very pleased with this plan. Road trips with Len are among my favorite things, and I can’t even remember the last time we went on one. We went on a few vacations by plane last year, and those are fun too and certainly make more sense for faraway destinations, but I particularly like road trips and I can’t remember the last time we went on one. Plus I’m always up for a film festival. Although I’m a bit of a snob and am skeptical of whether an Ohio film festival can possibly measure up to the Toronto one. I have hope, though, and even if the festival isn’t much good it will still just be nice to be somewhere else for a little while.

4) I spend a lot of my life being wistful at being unable to help people I care about through rough times. I’m usually too far away, or my experience is too far removed to have any useful advice, or I just don’t have whatever resources are required. But for once in my life this week I was actually in a position to provide some actual concrete help to someone I care about at the exact time she needed some help, and I’m really happy that it worked out that way. I’m sure soon someone else will be having a problem that I can’t fix and I’ll be dejected all over again, but in the meanwhile it feels really nice to have for once been able to do something worthwhile for a friend.

5) I realized yesterday that the hotel I’ll be staying at in DC while I’m there for the March for Choice is right across the street from the Library of Congress. I’ve been to DC several times, but somehow I have never made it to the Library of Congress. I always get sidetracked and wind up at the Smithsonian instead, and much as I love the Smithsonian, it is clearly time to avoid its charms and head for the Library of Congress instead. I am far more excited about this than anyone should be, and have been telling everyone who might possibly have even the slightest scrap of interest. Sometimes I suspect that I am far dorkier than any one person has the right to be.

And I’m sure there were other things I meant to say, but my journal-writing attention span just ran out. I will be coherent again someday, perhaps, once my brain shakes itself out of whatever malaise has taken hold of me of late.

A lesson I learned yesterday: When you are sick, or at least fairly sure that you are in the process of getting sick, it is not a particularly good idea to go spend five hours outside in the freezing cold and light snow. It will definitely not improve the sickness quotient. Plus, when you’ve got that my-head-is-stuffed-with-cotton-candy feeling, who the hell wants to be surrounded by a bunch of raucous drunk St.-Patrick’s-Day-parade-goers? Not I. I actually thought maybe I had escaped catching whatever dire flu-like sickness Len had a week or two ago, but it has caught up with me at last. Or maybe I have a whole new set of germs.

At any rate, while I am not on my deathbed or anything, I am sniffly and sneezy and stuffy-head-ish and tired and whiny and miserable. There was no way I could have ducked out on clinic escorting yesterday since we were short of people, but I really should have skipped the additional two hours afterwards spent handing out free condoms at the parade. Of course, everyone was very pleased with the offering of free condoms, so I was very popular, but I do not aspire to be popular among people who drink green beer at ten a.m.

So after that I returned home, sent Len some whiny miserable email, downed some cold medicine, and took a three-hour nap from which I awoke groggy and not entirely sure who or where I was. Yay, illness-induced delirium. Len did come over to spend the evening with me cheering me up and giving me backscratches, which helped. And I discovered that when I am sick and hating the world, murder makes me feel better. So I watched the special features on the Silence of the Lambs DVD and then watched Hitchcock’s Rope and that improved my mood greatly. Which I should perhaps be worried about. But then, it’s entirely possible that it wasn’t the murder that cheered me up so much as the barely-veiled homosexual subtext of Rope, which never fails to crack me up. It also made me want to re-watch The Celluloid Closet, an excellent documentary about the evolution of gay film characters. Especially now that I know Len’s never seen it, because I think everyone should at least once see the extremely funny section on how Charlton Heston was kept out of the loop on the gay subtext of Ben-Hur.

So that’s my weekend so far. Sickness, delirium, and murder. What more could a girl ask for? I suppose a weekend free of green beer would have been nice. Perhaps I will make that my goal for next weekend.

As much as I like to pretend that I am not a domestic-type person, sometimes I am forced to realize that I may secretly be harboring a few domestic tendencies. Len and I went to look at a possible rental house this morning and both quite liked it, and though we have agreed to think about it for the weekend before signing a lease to be sure we’re not just jumping at the first decent thing we see, inside my head I think I have already moved in.

I just finished pulling up bus schedules so I could find out the best way to commute to work from the possible new place. I have mentally gone through all the furniture in my apartment figuring out what I could take with me and what Len would be bringing and what I would have to leave since the place is a little small. I am busily trying to figure out the best way to cover up a scary mirrored living room wall if the mirror squares can’t be removed. There’s a lawn out front and a neglected little yard out back, and I am already thinking of things I could plant and grow there, even though I have killed off almost every plant I have ever possessed, and places I could put birdfeeders so the cats will have birds and squirrels to watch. And the dinner parties we could have in the summer on the big back patio. And how pretty the view from the big front windows must be at night, with the house perched up on a hill and the city lights sparkling.

I guess given that I do spend most of my time at home, it makes sense that I should care a lot about living in a place I like, and making it somewhere I want to be. But nonetheless I really should not get all excited about this place, because maybe we’ll decide it’s not right for us after all. And even if we do, there were other people looking at the house this afternoon and maybe they will like it too and grab it on the spot. And then I will just have to start all over again getting excited about turning some other new place into home. Of course, it’s also possible that I’m just excited because the basement has been fitted out as its own little suite, so it has a second stove and sink, and I’m having visions of playing Iron Chef with the two kitchens. But maybe that’s as good a reason as any to move to a new place.

I’m not going to write a journal entry today. If I did, I would write about the house. Because the house is practically all I’ve thought about for days, and I’m sure I’m driving everyone around me crazy, and I know I’m driving myself crazy. I just came back from the realtor’s office where I filled out a long and intrusive application, through a very silly process of having Len on the phone long-distance from his business trip to answer questions. Because nothing says “Honey, I miss you very much” like calling your partner and starting off the conversation with “Hey, have you ever been convicted of a felony, evicted from your dwelling, or sued for child support?”

So now we just sit and wait for the credit check to come through. I have no money but good credit and Len has decent money but mediocre credit, so my working theory is that between the two of us we make up one financially responsible tenant, and they will give us the house. And then we can start moving our stuff in next week. Not that I’ll actually get to live there for another month or so, because first the utilities have to get turned on and then we have to move enough of Len’s stuff so that his cat can move in. Since she’s outnumbered, it seems only fair to let her move first and have an advantage. So once she’s settled in we’ll move Dimitri in, and then eventually the other two cats and I can settle in as well. God only knows how long this whole cat-acclimation process will take. I fully expect to be living in both places for at least another month.

And, oh look! That quick explanation of why I’m not writing a journal entry about the house has turned into a journal entry about the house. I have gone totally crazy obsessive about this damn house. I hope they either approve or decline the application really quickly, so one way or the other the angsty waiting period will be over and I can deal with the rest of my life. And stop boring the hell out of everyone I talk to. Or at least go back to boring them with cat stories instead of house stories.

That’s about it for my life right now. Except that Len’s off on his business trip, and I feel as if I should be using the opportunity to do scandalous things I can’t do with him around, only I can’t think of anything I can’t do with him around that I would actually want to do. Except maybe order sausage pizza with nary a vegetable in sight, which I plan to do sometime this week. Down with healthful eating!

I don’t talk about depression or self-injury all that much anymore. It’s still very much a part of my history and shapes the choices I make, and I live with a constant awareness that either or both of those things could swallow me up again any minute. It’s a very typical profile of a self-injurer, a female who cut herself as a teenager and perhaps in her early twenties, is able to stop for a few years, and then starts up again in her mid-twenties, more seriously than ever, and with less chance of being able to stop again.

So that’s all there, in a corner of my head I don’t go too often anymore, but that I’m always aware is there. And then every once in a while like today someone asks me about it, usually someone I’ve forgotten even knows, and I’m transported back there all over again.

And there I am, fourteen and crying on my bedroom floor, or nineteen and locked in a dorm bathroom with a razor blade. Or twenty or twenty-one, no longer cutting, but still lying awake some nights late into the night running my hands over the fading scars. Cataloguing, chanting my own personal litany. When each one happened, where, why, how. There was a girl once, in one of my classes, who saw the marks on my leg once when my skirt had slipped up. She came up to me after class and told me she knew what that was like, and that I could talk to her anytime. And she gave me a hug and told me to be careful. I never did talk to her about it, and I don’t remember her name or what ever happened to her, but I still remember her opening up like that to some girl she barely knew, and I want to cry and wish I could thank her.

This can be so hard to talk about.

Which is why I do it, now, when someone asks because they hurt themselves, or have a friend who does, and they want to know what to do. I don’t have the answers but I talk anyway, because half of the problem is about not talking. It’s about secrecy and shame and the only thing I know to do about that is to keep talking whenever you have the chance, even if you’re not sure what to say, even if it hurts and is scary and you think maybe people are going to laugh or not like you anymore.

So here I am twenty-five, scars gone, still taking a moment every morning to stop and look at a tattoo that symbolizes a promise, feeling it slightly raised like one last scar, reminding myself all over again that I promised to love myself more, to care for myself better, not to hurt myself anymore. Because it’s not a decision I made once, it’s a decision I make over and over, sometimes every day, and I suspect it’s a decision I’ll have to keep making day by day until I die. So I take the moment, and I remember, and I make the promise again. And then I go about my day and don’t think about it much, until someone gives me the chance to talk about it. And then I do.