"It-itis" Redefined HAWMC #18

See also at  http://ulteriorharmony.org/blog/2013/04/18/if-i-coule/

Today's prompts:

• Write about a time that you lashed out at someone close to you because of frustration/fear/anger resulting from your health condition and you wish you could take back. Forgive yourself and let it go.

• On the flip side, write about a time that someone said something to you that they wished they could take back. Did you forgive them? Why or why not?

I was stumped by today's prompt for too long, and so here I am again doing my post late in the day. I have lashed out at or said things I regretted to so many loved ones at one time or another, from calling someone (like a romantic partner) an asshole to telling my mother I wished she'd never borne me (implying heredity of health conditions) to asking people to help me suicide to assuring people I was going to suicide and acting in that direction, causing much dread...to all kinds of manic ragey nonsense I can't even remember in a coherent repeatable sequence and don't care to repeat anyway. On the other hand, I know many people have said things to me and regretted them, from comments about my weight to "snap out of it"-type comments to "this is why you'll never amount to anything and you're bugging my life too"-type comments.

You know what? It happens, both ways, because I've been unconscious enough to allow it in my life, even attract it. What "it"? "It" the negative energy that is fed and nourished and glutted and delighted and greedily gleed by psychically whipping my soul. Every time I'm put down, whether by myself or someone else  "it" gets a combined calorie and endorphin hit equivalent to eating a large and luscious hot fudge sundae made of all natural ingredients, so "it" roars with strength and satiation, and craves more, and pushes for more. Every time I yell and call names and smash things (I haven't done these things of late), I'm slamming myself into the ground  as I do so, and the ground under "its" feet is made firmer by my transfixion in it.

And I let "it" have all this. I let myself be less powerful. I empathize with "its" craving, I feel the roar of satisfaction simultaneously with my own pain (is that the definition of masochism?) I let "it" influence my probably-too-smart and analytical brain toward 

So, I'm sidestepping the prompt because I don't see value in reliving one example of a paradigm pattern. Better to acknowledge "it," the negative energy I'm feeding; the negative energy I'm inviting other people to pick up on in my psychic space. Is this pattern a component of my health conditions? Let's just say, if...when...I can break the habit of giving in to "it," my health and general wellbeing will be improved. No matter whether it's part of the diagnoses or not. 

My MFA mentor last year, who is a phenomenal editor as well as poet and essayist, spoke of "it-itis," a disease from which many writers suffer, whereby their sentences are peppered with the word "it" as a placeholder for everything, concrete and abstract. Becoming more attentive to that (N.B. not "to it") has helped the clarity and beauty of my writing, I believe. But here's another definition of the disease, also predicated on allowing the ubiquity of something poorly defined but ready to colonize.

It's one thing to live on the edge, as I always have...

 

But it's another thing to let myself fade away. I have been feeling like the Cheshire Cat of late, perhaps without the smile. Between many dimensions, realities, localities, time zones, temporalities... I leave for Georgia in just a week.

(And yes, these are pictures from last year. How much has changed? Such a good question. I will put up a more recent pic soon.)