I woke at 4.30 am once again. Nothing unusual about that. Pottered around making tea and reading the news. Unusually I went back to bed and for four hours I dreamt: dreams of reconciliation.
I found myself at Victoria Station (London) waiting at a platform. Then, I am on a road trip in France with a man I seemed to know but at day break no longer recognise. Then, I am in a strange bedroom with a girl and a boy who are fighting. She is crying. She lets me hold her, console her.
Back at the station there is a large white dog who is lost, I can hear her owner calling out her name and they are reunited. The dog plays in a sand box, performing tricks as if she were not a dog at all. Burying herself comically in the sand.
Now the boy and the girl are there at the station. There is still tension between them but the girl thanks me for holding her. I ask if I can talk to her friend. When we are alone I look into his eyes and ask him if he had ever, in fact, loved me. He smiled wryly and I knew that he never had. I was disappointed but not surprised. He let me kiss him on the lips. He was being very brave. I said my goodbye and they left, the girl and the boy.
Some man wrote to me last week, an anonymous man (might have been a woman) telling me that I had ‘borderline personality disorder‘ well, I looked at the symptoms on-line and well, yes I could very well be that man. But, so could almost every body else that I knew. I thought, ok..so take away these symptoms..cure me. What am I left with? Not much.
What is it to be normal? To have ‘normal’ aspirations? To have ‘normal’ relationships?
I am willing, as I have all the way through my recovery..to remain teachable. To consider the options. To seek, to find, to mine my happiness without compulsion. I have failed again and again but I try and I try.
Perhaps the fight in general, the war..is over? I don’t know. I am not suicidal. I am not unhappy. Today I find myself in my own body, seeing out of my own eyes. Feeling with my own fingers.
If indeed it is true that I am as mad as a hatter then I must learn to live with my madness. I am not, any time soon, taking psychotropic drugs or committing to therapy that declares some sort of vegetable normality. Regardless of what or who I am I shall continue to make the best of a bad lot.
If one really could change out all of ones shortcomings what is one left with?
Yesterday we chopped down the tree that fell on the house. Jody arrived from the electricity company to oversee our work. We stood on the roof and fearlessly chain sawed the branches out of the live wires.
Roger, my assistant, emailed, called, swept paths and generally made my life a great deal easier. Started making a list of things to be packed up and sent back East.