Monday, Mar. 31, 2003 - 2:30 p.m.
Note to self: staying up until just before 4:00 in the morning and going to work four hours later isn't such a good idea. I'm to the point right now that everything is uproariously funny to me. If this carries on through tonight's play rehearsal, I'm in for an interesting time for sure.
I'm certainly not saying I regret staying up late last night, though. I spent about three hours in a deeply psychoanalytic conversation with Lyss that I think really helped me clear my head a bit. Here's a basic run-down of what we determined is up with my life at the moment:
1. I need to distance myself from my parents' drama. Yes, it sucks that Mom may be out of work in a few months and is currently on antidepressants and Dad is living yet another childhood (his third to date). But, I shouldn't let that affect me the way it has. I am twenty-three years old and haven't been with them for more than 48 hours at a time in about two years, for crying out loud! I need to live my life and stop taking on the role as Mom's sole confidante. For the last five or six years, I really needed to have parents when instead I have been the one being a parent to my mother.
2. In the same vein, I need to come out to my parents. I need to stop obsessing over finding the "perfect moment" and just get it over with. No matter when I do this, it will be tense and uncomfortable. The longer I draw this out, the more painful it will be. Also related to the first point, I don't need to worry about how this will affect Mom's health/mental well-being. If she gets herself so worked up over the fact that her son is a homosexual that it puts her in the hospital, I really have no control over that.
3. Getting involved with Josh has been such a good thing for me. Since meeting him and simply allowing myself to love and be loved, I have been a much happier person. The long-distance aspect of the relationship sucks, but I would rather have somebody I truly care about who I can seen once or twice a month than have nobody - or worse, be stuck in a relationship of convenience with somebody here. I honestly have no inkling of an idea what the future holds for us, but I am more than willing to stick it out to see. He is completely worth it.
4. I need to contact the Counseling Services office to get into some kind of group therapy or some such so I can work through whatever is going through my head at any given moment rather than burdening my friends with it. I consider myself so fortunate to have built such a supportive group of people around me, but I think it would be beneficial for me to have an impartial ear or two to bounce my problems off of from time to time.
5. I need to get more sleep. Perhaps after the play is over with, I'll take a couple days off work to just decompress.
And that's pretty much what we covered, but much sniffling and snotting and blubbering in between. Sometimes it's really cathartic to stay up until the wee hours of the night with your "hag" and let the latent estrogen take over.
Thanks, Lyss. I owe you a million (as if I didn't already).
As for the weekend in Oh-Hi-Oh, I had a wonderfully relaxing time as I expected I would. Due to hellacious scheduling nightmares, this may have been my last shot at being with Josh for quite a while... performances, exams, work schedules, and the like are building hellacious roadblocks between Lexington and Marietta.
But, like I said above, the future is impossible to predict. Somehow, that doesn't bother me as much as it once would. Perhaps I'm making more progress than I think.
