Jan 30 2025
Runaway thoughts
I opened this up and then immediately had my daily hard cry and now I can’t remember what I wanted to say. These crying jags are really getting tiresome. Between desperately trying to ease into some sort of “new normal” and shaking with rage about EVERYTHING happening in this country and broken society, I just want to disappear for a while. Even if that just means sitting in a dark closet for a few hours.
Or a tent. A kids tent. The vinyl play tent kind. I had one of those in my first apartment but god only knows what became of it. I remember baking Jeff a pumpkin pie and making him eat inside the tent even though it was way undercooked and raw (this all so euphemism-y and it was so chaste actually).
Today I realized that I missed the anniversary of the day we adopted Drew and Penelope from Sandy’s friend’s parents’ basement (lol) by a week. So then I made the fatal error of going back in my blog and reading those posts from the first few days after we brought them home and I had to shut it down real quick. I knew I would be really sad about this for a long time but I didn’t think that my grief would be almost at the same level as it was over the summer after Drew died. I feel so stuck. We did talk about this in my session on Tuesday and I think we are going to revisit EMDR with this and try different positive reinforcements or whatever, I can’t remember now because my brain feels like it’s stuffed with faux fur.
When I woke up Monday morning, I was on the heels of some very real and vivid dreams about giant cardinals that were supposed to be her, and I just lay there in the dark crying, and my mind was spinning with all of these memories of her and suffice to say, the next two nights I slept on the couch because I was feeling super averse to the bedroom after that. I did sleep in bed last night though and it was OK.
It’s just weird because when my friends are like “how are you?” I just say I’m fine because it seems like saying, “I miss my fucking cat and I can’t stop crying” makes people feel uncomfortable, I don’t know. So instead, I’m like, “please watch this Kpop video I’m obsessed with” because I don’t know how else to really function right now, not to mention the high anxiety caused by Trump not just every single day but multiple times a day, basically hourly. If I could just punch him repeatedly in the face while kicking him in his shriveled carrot dick, it would solve a lot of issues in one fell swoop. Dare to dream.
OK I’M DONE.
MOVING ON.
When I was in elementary school, I was super into collecting stickers and had a ROBUST repertoire of sticker books. I remember specifically having a big, deep purple tote bag that was stuffed to seam-splitting proportions with some of the books and I loved sitting on the floor and taking out all of the books so I was surrounded by them, the fruits of my dedicated card shop and drug store scouring, gumball machine treasures, card pack freebies. Puffy stickers, scratch n sniff, holographic – I had no favorites, I loved them all. (I did have a special book just for Scratch-n-Sniffs though!)
Anyway, my therapist was like, “Is there anything you can do to get some of that old happiness back?” when I was telling her that I have taken to reading old blog posts from the past 8 or 9 years before bed so I can try to fall asleep with happy thoughts of when things were better and we were still all together as a family and we went on road trips and had both cats and I didn’t cry every day.
I didn’t really have a viable answer to that right away, short of going back to carrying around my security stuffed animal, Purple. But now then I started thinking about those stickers apropos of nothing and maybe I should collecting something simple like that again? Something that will give me joy when I find a thing I was looking for?
Like, maybe JUST STICKERS?! Let’s not overthink this, Erin.
My sticker book story has a really tragic ending though because as I got older and wasn’t collecting them anymore, I moved my treasured accumulation to the basement and at some point MY DAD THREW THEM ALL OUT without so much as a heads up. (It was probably during one of our many I WISH YOU WERE DEAD standoffs but still, it was MY property. And by the way, he also threw out my entire collection of Rainbow Brite dolls, Sprites, Starlite and all!
Dude, I can FEEL THAT YARN HAIR IN MY FINGERS like it was yesterday!
EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM – IN THE TRASH. Can you even imagine?? All of my Babysitters Club books – gone. Sweet Secrets, too.
This…is not making me feel any better, lol.
Maybe I don’t want to start collecting stickers again.
Maybe I’ll just stick with collecting kpop biases lol.
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