kinda dark, sorry

song+ Young Volcanoes -Fall Out Boy -Save Rock and Roll
book+ Gotham City Sirens
quest+ resocialization
upper+ i have ice cream?
downer+ intermittent dark thoughts
attire+ pajamas
drink+ Dr Pepper

i had strange dreams last night. i'm sure the origin of the strange dreams was a conversation with Kyu that danced on the edges of Things I Don't Talk About, and therefore made me think Thoughts I Try Not To Think. those thoughts largely have to do with the thing that happened nearly 14 years ago, i'm still not ready to talk about it, even if i have felt myself getting closer to dealing with it. everyone deals with trauma in their own way, and it was pretty much half my life ago, but really i just haven't been ready. talking about it makes me think about it, and thinking about it makes me re-live it and i hate that, but i'm just getting to the point where when my mind makes me re-live it i can see all the wrong and think it into something else. kinda like the concept of using lucid dreaming to reshape nightmares. when i can think or talk without feeling it then i'll talk it all out.

rape is about power. i know that, i knew it before it happened, but power takes different forms for different people and the ways he chose to take power over me left me with some pretty intense lingering issues. most of the sex ones have been more or less resolved, i know now what i like and what's on my not ever gonna happen list, but the stuff tied to the emotional manipulation and posturing is stuff i've had more trouble shaking. getting over the acts of obvious assault were comparatively easy, emotional abuse is harder to recover from because it's not visible to anyone else, but there are things he said or did that i can't stop hearing, or seeing in myself and i HATE that 14 years later he still has any power in my life at all.

at some point my mind apparently decided enough was enough and it gave me a more pleasant dream. i saw a possible future. a good one too, even if the glimpse was brief. basically i had a pottery setup in a garage i don't think i've ever seen before in my waking life. shelving for drying projects, small buckets for glazes, a moderately sized table for sculpting, kiln for baking, and a wheel for throwing. i know i was living in whatever house the garage was attached to, but i didn't see who i was living with. what i did see was that Ren was visiting and i was teaching her how to throw. we were working on a bowl, and while i couldn't say for sure how old she was, i'm pretty sure she wasn't 12 yet. when i woke up i was satisfied. throwing (clay work in general really) is something i forget how much i love. there's something viscerally satisfying about taking a lump of mud and holding it steady until it feels like it wants to be something beautiful, then helping it get there. that's what throwing feels like to me. i rarely set out to make anything in particular since i had better results when i let the whim move me. now that i think about it i really miss that feeling.