Things are better now. Well, at least I hope so.

My friend (I guess she is my friend??) tells me that I need to get over my thing of thinking that feelings are icky and embarrassing. Suppose they seem that way to me because they aren't entirely rational, predictable, and often scare the hell out of me. Also, I don't like to be or feel weak, and nothing makes me feel weaker than (ugh, I can hardly stand to write it!) stuff like crying.

I've always felt that crying is for girls, and everyone knows that girls are weak, frail things who wear impractical shoes and clothes you can't climb trees in and who can turn on the tears like a faucet. Girls are prey. Girls can be hurt. They can be hit...and intimidated...and forced to do things they don't want to do...and raped...and treated like property. So naturally, I've spent most of my life trying not to be a girl, not in the sense of wanting a sex change, but more along the lines of being in denial.

It hasn't worked so well. Because I'm naturally sort of obsessive and anxious, things bother me a lot more than they should. If I were the faucet type, I'd be crying a lot. I'm like this machine where you put just one small input into it, and it generates a whole lot of output, except most of that output just stays in the machine churning around until a gear of something breaks. When other women talk about "having a good cry", I don't know what the fuck they're talking about. As far as I'm concerned, crying is a truly gut wrenching experience, occasionally accompanied by lovely stuff like migraines, chest pain, stomach cramps, and vomiting. Oh, and it's, like, the most embarrassing thing on earth short of being publicly incontinent.

So (trying really hard to make this coherent) naturally anything that has the potential to lead to that kind of pain becomes sort of frightening. You know what, I totally lost where I was trying to go with this. I am so sorry. I guess that to resolve this kind of stuff better, I am going to have to keep writing on the other blog, because what happens before too long there is the shittiest thing that ever happened to me, and honestly, it still reverberates through my life today.