24 hours of silence
I am a bit scrunched up.
But I am in a far better place. I’ve just read through the past couple years of my blog and it started to hit home that I’ve been doing my best being a negativity slayer and didn’t realize that I needed to be a better vampire slayer.
My closest friends pointed out that I’ve had a string of leeches these past couple of years that have been compromising my energy and goals. Several had shared words with me trying to save me some grief much earlier. But I had tangled myself in social circles that took time to extricate myself from. Anyone who knew me during my pre-L the roommate times knew that I had been living independently and was doing well and it was bringing a roommate into my life that paved the beginning of a path that would shut down jnetsworld.
I got distracted by people who are no longer in my life… who were here for the “party” but who I had to kick out when they didn’t understand that I needed to have my life back. They got attached to a buzz that no longer had anything to do with me.
“This is my favorite restaurant.” Someone joked while I was busy in the kitchen. Everyone left, leaving the dishes for me.
It was nice to have my place buzzing with life. But I see now that it was a poor substitute for what family is… and real friends.
My real friends were busy with their respective lives and could only check in with the occasional phone call between projects and traveling. But those that were able to witness the “carnage” told me that they felt that I had let in a lot of leeches and parasites.
It was hard to have my boundaries respected… it got to a point where I had to let them know to stay away and at regular intervals. People didn’t want to wait to be invited… since I have a habit of disappearing… sometimes for weeks at a time. And so… they persisted and insisted upon my attentions. It felt like being forced to keep a television on… loud and at a channel that you didn’t choose.
Try living this way for two full years to oblivious” well meaning” people. My attempts at making boundaries for myself had been met with conversations that I was fearful and angry. I became the psychology project to fix. Little of the boundaries were respected and many many more futile conversations drove me to a silence where I didn’t have a life worth writing about.
And the things worth writing about… I didn’t have enough quiet time to collect myself and be able to celebrate them. In the past two years, I’ve danced at the Ford Theatre, the Hollywood Bowl and in Acapulco. In the past two years, I learned a lot about photography, got into underwater photography for a summer, took a shark dive and was part of a project called Candy Wax Cutie and recently enjoyed a huge gallery event where my behind the scenes stills for fashion shoots flashed on television screens through out a fashion show event.
And I never wrote of these huge events because I allowed people to impose themselves on me that I had little thought and energy left for myself. I kept my spirits up so that I could continue functioning to grow my work and projects.
Yet, I allowed them to impose themselves on me that I was physically sick for a good amount of that time, needing medication when I’ve never had even a mere sniffle. I couldn’t breathe…literally. And I broke into hives every day.
Running off to my work gave me some time to feel like myself; feel like I was creating success though I lived in a vacuum.. And now that I’ve been on that jacked up space of workaholic / chasing solitude to recalibrate whenever I can squish a thought for myself for so long -I’m only beginning to return to that quiet place where I can write and begin thinking again at the piano… and not feel like a ghost of a person.
And it is so strange that I had tried to build friendships with people who didn’t think to contribute to my life unless I asked and made specific demands. I remember many moments where I did share with them my frustrations and made requests and in that space of trying to be forthright, I didn’t see that the whole friendship was on their terms; conditional.
They are no longer in my life. I could no longer sustain myself under their conditions that I invited them out the door indefinitely. It was useless trying to defend myself with another conversation that I needed to deal with fear and hurt or that I shouldn’t have to get in a huff over not having any privacy or quiet time.
I see now that what I was hoping to enjoy was a sense of family. I gave these people a safe place to land but they took me for granted. They never got to know me nor what my world meant to me. They never got to know my dreams and because of that, they will not be part of my future.
E-moo “Why didn’t you just ask me to leave?”
JNET: “I never invited you to come over. Why couldn’t you have waited for that!”
Every exchange was agitated and I was the only unhappy one. And that little piece of disregard led others to follow suit and take their advantages because they were under the impression that e-moo was the “man of the house”. Every single person that was a mutual through him gave me the same oblivious disregard.
R: “He set the energy going …. that neediness to be a leech to your life. And lots of people took advantage. You’re just getting to a place where you are leech-free.”
JNET: “L, began the path… E-moo just paved it and everyone else walked on it. I don’t think I’ll ever let people get into my life like that ever again. It wasn’t my style. I explored making new friends to stretch my world and found that jnetsworld stopped belonging to me.”
I’m reclaiming myself and my world. I want to enjoy my life and have time to write of a life worth writing about. If you see me drop off the edge of the world again…
Then maybe you’ll know like my closest friends knew and were concerned about…. that I’m not doing well.
I’ve just spent over 24 hours inside intentional silence to heal myself and counter the choking silence that a noisy life created. I’ll be spending the next season rebuilding JNET… and rebuilding jnetsworld…
A place where I write of manifesting my dream future… bitty blog by bitty blog.
I can breathe now… and I haven’t broken out into hives in months.
I need to be a negativity slayer AND vampire slayer.
JNET
