There’s Still Pain Hiding Somewhere Inside Of Me

6/6/2025

I spent time today copying some of the journal entries I had in Evernote. There’s a lot more stuff, including clusters of pictures, but I only concerned myself with diary-style notes.

Reading a couple of them, from back in 2018 after I separated from G, my heart skipped a beat and my eyes were on the verge of tearing up. For a brief moment I felt a fraction of the pain I was under at the time, and I felt a little lost.

I composed myself, but I realize now that there is an aged, unresolved pain like a stone in the middle of my chest, camouflaged yet still weighing me down, low key suffocating me. I have clearly not processed my emotions as thoroughly as I should, 7 years after the fact.

 Affect

Friday, April 9, 2021

An interesting thing happened to me today. I have often in my life expressed annoyance as a flash of anger, raising my voice and complaining, often cursing. This tends to happen when I am under stress, and most often with family. It often goes away quickly, but it is felt very intensely.

This morning I finished a particularly taxing mental exercise at work, and had barely 15 minutes to feed the cats before a conference call. When I reached the kitchen I saw they had made a complete mess of some stuff that was on the counter, throwing it on the floor. I move fast to pick up the trash and start to raise my voice at them, then it happened. 

All of a sudden, mid-sentence, I find myself looking at the  performative nature of my behavior as if I were an outsider. A clear thought popped in my head: "You don't have to do this." I stopped talking and realized there was no feeling of anger anymore. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. This wasn't being angry and then calming myself down; this was detachment, as if I had started acting a part and stopped to ask for a script rewrite. And it was all pretty much instantaneous.

 I Was Many Things But Myself

6/10/2018

I was invisible, a fixture, a homing beacon

I was a broadcast, its volume turned off

I was a postcard from home, stuffed in the junk drawer

I was, at various times, a portrait, an exhaust vent, a shapeless blob, background music, an oven, a terrarium

An ideal

An illusion

A security blanket

I was never me

The year of Our Lord, 2024

 I'm dusting the digital cobwebs away. Yes, I'm still here, bitches!

[Insert chirping of crickets here]

Blogging still exists, I'm not naive enough to believe it's completely gone. It's just not what it was back in the early 2000's. And that's OK.

I'm a fifty-something, not-quite-yet divorced, tired af but still plugging along at a corporate career because I have a college-aged/gap-year taking child, woman. I had to take a deep breath after writing that.

Since I last wrote I have been on a spiritual quest of sorts. It began in the pandemic years, a little over a year after my mom died from Alzheimer's. For most of the time this quest was a solitary pursuit, consisting of reading books and Tarot cards, with the ocassional study group Zoom meeting. It wasn't just the pandemic-related isolation. I was not ready to come out of the closet as a spiritual seeker.

In early 2023 I ventured out and attended a local shamanic event I found via the meetup app. I met nice people and learned that there's a Spiritualist church in Houston, where the shamanic meetings are hosted. I also had some interesting sensory perceptions that night of the sort that people would call supernatural.

This event was the catalyst that made spirituality something communal for me, something lived as opposed to read. It hasn't been quite a year yet and I have such a long road ahead, but the way I live my life and what I conceive as spirituality has changed in ways that are deep yet not readily apparent. For that I am eternally grateful.

Yo soy de P-Fokin-R

 No hay más nada que añadir.

Seeking

 My mother, atheist activist extraordinaire, passed away two years ago. Almost a year after her death, we were on lockdown due to the pandemic. Was it COVID-19 or was it freedom from my mom's judgment that got me on the path I am in? Probably the freedom one. COVID-19 got me baking bread, but after being committed for a few months, I have not made bread in a while. 

I also have not been working on my quilting much lately, but that is because my sewing room turned into the overflow room when we did the home improvement projects last year. It's hard to move in there lately.

In the 1990's my significant other was into alternative spirituality. Through his mom I learned about Tarot cards. I even bought a couple of decks, but never really learned to read the cards. By the end of the decade I had a child and a broken marriage. The year 2000 brought the promise of a new beginning, a total Ace of Wands moment (though I had no clue it was such at the time). I crossed over water and moved to Texas, leaving behind my Tarot decks.

Twenty years later, in early 2020 I purchased new copies of the same two decks, and resolved to try to learn how to read the cards. Of the two decks, one continues to be my favorite; the other one is more a memento. I have gotten several more decks since then, along with books and online classes. I use it as a way to understand my path and what do I need to work on.

My Personal Code of Honor

• Do not care so much about what others think of you

• Live and let others live

• Accept you know very little about life, the universe and everything

• Actively tell your loved ones that you love them, and demonstrate it with actions

• Work to recognize your biases so they do not control you

• Do not allow yourself to get carried away by "woe is me" emotionalism. Instead, try to understand what is at the root of your moods

• It's OK to believe in the spiritual side of life

• Always be there for your daughters when they need you.

Limbo

What are we going to do?
We've opened the door, now it's all coming through...

"How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful", Florence + the Machine



Today I found myself sending LinkedIn invites to old college friends from the Honors Program at the UPR, members of my old tribe. I miss them, or rather the idea of them, the possibility of finding myself through their eyes. Who knows what they would think of me nowadays, if they remember anything at all. They'll probably take one look at my profile and yawn, and no lifeline will pull me out of the fog. They have all gotten PhDs and done interesting, even important things in the same span of time I have failed at two marriages, made a career out of Excel pivot tables and become a master at predicting the immediate past.

As my eyesight has gone south, so has my memory. I can't be trusted to keep all this shit straight. I need friends to tell who I am. But I have no friends. Or rather, the few I have barely know me. I have done a great job of limiting access to what's really on my mind and curating my persona so as to avoid controversy. But the result is that nobody fucking cares, and I am slowly vanishing into the ether. I am becoming translucent. Not long from now, only my cats will be able to see me.One day this specific recipe of neuroses and idiosyncrasies will simply disappear. There will be traces here and there, pieces of a puzzle, mostly in the memory of my girls and my exes.

I should have been paying more attention to building memories, maybe trying to practice some mindfulness, but instead two, perhaps three decades have been lived on cruise control.

Social distancing is easy for semi-hermits

I had the flu at the end of February. I get the flu shot every year in the fall, as most people in high risk groups do. By the end of February, the vaccine's effectiveness must be minimal, as the influenza A hit me like a ton of bricks.

I can't recall feeling sicker in a very long time, perhaps ever. It took me over a week to get back to a semblance of normal. It's scary to think that scores of people lose their lives to the flu every year.

I'm scared of SARS COV 2. I'm scared of catching it and getting the disease. I am barely recovered from the flu. I am struggling with seasonal allergies. I have not done a breathing treatment for asthma in days, but every day is a struggle to breathe deeply. And that is with clear lungs. I don't want to picture the struggle if a lower respiratory illness is thrown in the mix. I've had pneumonia before.

Authorities are asking people to practice social distancing. Our school district has cancelled classes through April 10th. The city and county have ordered bars and clubs closed, and restaurants to close their dining areas and only provide drive-through/pick up/delivery orders. My company has instructed all personnel to work from home, unless their presence in the office is required to perform their job (labs, manufacturing, some customer service roles).

None of this impacts me greatly, except for the madness of crowds hoarding basic goods. My daughter, a teenager, is capable of amusing herself and knows better than to interrupt me during business hours. I've been working from home since the day before I got flu symptoms. I telecommute more than half the time anyway, and have my home office set up for this, so this is not hard for me. I also have a tendency to stay home for the most part when I am off work. Still, everything feels so weird when it is not by choice. It's scary to think every single outing puts me at risk of severe illness or possible death.

Wistfulness

We want to be seen. We recoil at the idea of being invisible. Oh, but we are.
Each year that passes we become lighter, shadowier. We become stronger and clearer about ourselves, just in time to dissolve in their eyes.

Every wrinkle, every age spot carries the entire history of us, even the faintest parts. But only we can see. The book has but one reader.