Men, I’ll let you in on a little secret. If a woman goes off her rocker and becomes completely unreasonable and impossible to deal with, it’s virtually always because of one thing: she is hurting and/or scared.

There are a lot of women who spend their entire waking hours feeling hurt and/or scared. It becomes what defines them – what gives them power. Some even actively resist anything that will make them feel less hurt/scared, because it’s such an unknown.

We girls can be pretty fucked-up like that.

It gets even more complicated because the last thing a hurting/scared woman wants to deal with is the possibility that she’s hurting/scared. That would mean facing the fact that she’s vulnerable. No, no, not just everyday, vanilla vulnerable – we’re talking FUCK WITH YOUR MIND vulnerable. If she wasn’t over the edge before, acknowledging that she’s losing control of her thoughts/emotions will certainly finish her off. So there’s no god-damned way she’s about to let anyone else know that she’s hurting/scared – she’ll flip out and be pissed off instead! That isn’t nearly so risky.

Fortunately, in a unhealthy-but-society-can-still-function way, you have to have a decent amount of self awareness to ever realize, let alone admit, that you’re losing your ability to cope. And since self awareness is about as common as common sense, you don’t generally see females the world over publicly freezing up, shooting up, or cracking up in mass numbers.

But I, I am self aware. Granted, I’m also stubborn and proud as fuck… but I’m self aware.

Eventally.

My family is fine, my marriage is fine, and everything else truly important in my life is, I think and hope, now fine again. But I’ve gone fairly loopy lately, with the recent surgery following an almost comically unbelievable number of life hits and frustrations. I’m not far enough through the mess yet to be able to blog about it easily. I’ll get there, and when I do I might write in more detail about it then. Or I might find that it’s not something that I feel the need to write much about, after all.

Typically, I write when I’ve got a good chunk of a concept in my grasp and it’s… aargh… oh, so… close… but not… quite… there… yet. Writing helps me hear it back, which often fine-tunes and polishes it. I’m not sure yet if I’ve found the edge of a deeper part of myself that I need to pick at and process and face, or if I’ve just stumbled from one shitstorm, into another, into another, and there’s not really any significantly deeper or life-altering meaning behind it, beyond survival!

I’ve blogged before about personal and emotional stuff (on my old blog), but whenever I do that, it’s always after the fact. After I’ve gotten through the muck of it and am well on my way to having a handle on things and have grown from it and don’t feel so vulnerable. I write when I can see the light again and am secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) feeling pretty cocky and proud to have dug my way back.

I’m not feeling cocky and I’m damned sure not proud of myself right now. When I was sinking in life’s quicksand, I thrashed about and made things worse, so I’m in a pretty deep humble hole at the moment.

And I’m still hurting/scared.

But I’d like to try to blog at least *something* about it all, because I also have a somewhat faulty and selective memory. If I don’t document it to some extent, I’m liable to lose perspective over time and there’s NO WAY I want to ever have to revisit or re-learn this. So if it seems like I’m just skimming along the surface, or if I start to dip my toe into a subject but then don’t step whole hog in, please forgive the shitty and disjointed writing. I’m not being deliberately vague, or dramatic, or self-absorbed.  I’m just trying to get back on my rocker.