true or false?

God, I think I might simultaneously feel like crap and green mixed with orange.

Okay, yeah, so it should just maybe be clear: the people who hurt us simply cannot be the people who help us mend -- a downside in the case of "hurting the ones we love the most." Also a downside when we hurt those we don't care very much about. The temptation (if you are me) is to ask those who made decisions to give and explain their reasons so maybe you can understand (behind your own sense of failure), but apparently the arrow is not always remembered, or perhaps we don't intend, or the moments that don't affect us personally won't be remembered in the routine byways of other people's memory. Plus 'we' might be crazy, and use the pronoun 'we' to make ourselves feel better.

Maybe the only thing one can count on others remembering is the pain someone else caused, the trust someone else destroyed, the things nobody else remembered. Sometimes life is most like a two-way street that only goes one direction.

One reason I'm seeking a counselor soon is that I spend significant, horrifying amounts of time going over past injuries, which basically ensures that I spend the most amount of time in my life with the people I dislike, and the least amount of time with those who bring me pleasure or joy. On an every day basis, here's who I hang with: anyone who has made me feel like crap.

But here's who I adore and want to invite regularly into my time: surprising, innovative people; big hearts; black furryheads; impossibly-constructed creatures; success stories who want to give a hand; success stories who are simply amazing; people who recover; people who send baby beast teeth in the mail; people who make themselves over past their past; bright bulging lights that spill out misspoken and exuberant; nearly-autistic savants who aren't brave and tell endless sad sap stories; hidden corners never explored but open like dogs that bounce up cliff edges; daggers and winks.

I want to start hanging out in my brain with the latter and to rarely speak, up there, with the alternate.

Is that what a counselor could help me with: who I speak to in my head? I've become so doubtful that they could change my thoughts, which seem so rigid and limiting. But I want to one day become the person I want to be.

(It may seem off topic, but I am still feeling grateful for Six Feet Under, to remind me that I am not crazy, not too much or not enough to qualify as worthwhile.)

I did something I can't quite decide as stupid or not. Clearly, not stupid = finding a clever smart counselor; getting Herald; stopping the whole friends-with-benefits thing; talking even if what I think S wants to hear is other than what I have to say; befriending the people I have; listening to music whenever I can; listening away from my own experience, and towards my love of other people's stories; anything I can do for my family.

But, what = not smart? Coveting that miniature giraffe on the commercials--the one that gives kisses? Teaching? Taking Lambert on a hike, accidentally letting him loose, watching him go over the edge of a ravine that I will have to carry/push/heave/cajole him back up (I've honestly never been so scared in my life, although there have been other life-death situations)? Okay. What about trying to repair my relationships, whatever that might mean, with XYZ-ABC people I've loved? What about giving someone who's hurt me the chance to speak, to repair, to give as well as take? Isn't it just inevitable that they are all busy, all pregnant, all full-uterused with their created, hard-won lives? I three-quarters agree, one-quarter wonder why I am different.

Ah the counselors of my life. Number one after death of my undergrad adviser, nicey person but solved nothing and spoke of life as if I were only an undergrad in a wealthy private-school environment. Nothing about half of me here, half of me there, none of me anywhere specific. Then the ceritonin-reuptake-inhibitor counselor who didn't talk much. Then the one that told me to squeegy my experience off the windowpane of my mind, though I couldn't sleep, eat, trust, speak, stop crying. Just squeegy, gal, that's all it takes. Then the recommendation from the friend who got together with the woman she knew I loved: it was a cost-benefit decision, sorry we hurt you, maybe women shouldn't invest in love, let me recommend a counselor, my old counselor, and then never go out of my way to speak to you again until our mutual friend is in crisis six years later and I need information from you. Cheers and thank you for your concern. And later at SAIC, wanting a counselor but that option only being in the same school office as the person who told me (in an email during the winter holidays) that since she's pregnant, she can't be my friend outside of work and life's complicated, what a fucking bummer, sure you understand, that.

I need someone to talk to but damn if I'm not scared and worried and skeptical. But I'm not able to be the person I want to be. And I've been trying for awhile.

I don't want to spend a second more with the people I dislike. I want to hang out with so many others--babies, voices, dreams, successes, laughters, grandparents, heat, the prayer flags attached to ropes along my garden, my changing sister, my crazy brolaw, books coming out from friends, books I've only just discovered, wind, books I want so badly to finish, hay bales along the side of the freeway that I want to steal away, the 30GB of music just gifted to me, and the stories/poems I might discover if I wasn't so consumed by the voices I dislike that tell me how stupid, jealous, unworthy, manipulative, unfortunately complicated, wrong, non-parent aware, delicate, untrustworthy, etc etc etc, crazy, mistaken, discardable, can't remember any of that... I am.

Tomorrow, JS, baby creature teeth.
And less people dying in Bville, less truly sad stories.