What things give you energy?
I am addicted to caffeine because I’m not on Adderrall currently. When I’m on Adderrall, I switch to something innocuous like fruit punch, or stick with diet soda rather than coffee/energy drinks. I still have to have a little to avoid withdrawal headaches. The problem becomes upper limits on dosage with caffeine, because in order for it to keep me awake, I need twice or three times as much as everyone else. The first few doses are just to keep my brain functioning normally. To stay awake, I need something like cold brew at regular intervals. Cold brew is high in caffeine on its own just due to how long it steeps, but also frequent re-upping to keep the bus from going under 50.
Caffeine will manage my symptoms up and to a point, but I’ll need the Adderrall back eventually. I can’t do a drug holiday forever. Sometimes I just have to suck it up and choose sick over crazy. The struggle is real.
Right now the thing that’s giving me energy is Pepsi Max, or Pepsi Zero Sugar, whatever they’re calling it this week. If my mother wasn’t dead, knowing I drink Pepsi now would have killed her. The fact that Pepsi gets any of my money at all is exclusively due to her untimely demise. You only think telling her I’m queer was hard. I didn’t even bother on this one. Too emotionally fraught.
I now know sugar gives me energy, or at least it does in other people’s eyes. My second day at Alert Logic, I asked one of my coworkers for a Sour Patch Kid and she said no. I asked her why and one of my other coworkers said, “you haven’t blinked since you got here.” I always thought it was them that gave me energy and not the candy. I remember Dana asking my supervisor why she didn’t keep me in line and she said, “I don’t hit children.” It was really funny because I must have been at least 10 years older than she was. Said supervisor also said I was “prehistoric” and I said, “why do you think I have so many dinosaurs on my t-shirts?”
Alert Logic fed all my addictions- coworkers where it actually felt good to be together after hours, the ambience of a room full of hackers when we weren’t on the phones (the sound of everyone typing at odd intervals is addicting to a writer), and a Starbucks machine that would fuck you up six ways to Sunday. You don’t leave Alert Logic when you separate from the company. You leave the Starbucks machine. Especially working overnight, those multiple free Americanos saved my ass. I got a Starbucks habit too expensive to maintain on my own.
In terms of my personal life, emotional intimacy turns me on. I want to know everything about a person down to the nth degree. This is because I don’t see people in 2D. I want to know all the things that make someone tick. It is not for malice, it is for curiosity. I am exploring the things that make up your character, what has affected you and what hasn’t. It gives me so much energy that I have to feed my inner sociopath once in a while. I do not mean giving in to any kind of dark side, I mean cutting off my emotions to protect myself from taking on everyone else’s. Clinical separation, not Dexter. 😉
I know quite a few people like that. People who cut off their emotions so they can even handle their shit at all. It’s the one thing that generally comes out of a reality break in childhood that’s useful. You’re not always cutting off your emotions to hide the secrets you protect when you’re being abused. You’re protecting your own energy so that you can put yourself first.
If you have been abused, you will never be first until you find out why that should be. Your abuser will be God in your life, the one on that you protect at all costs even though it would help you. After you get away from them, they’ll still be God, it’s just that now they’re the monkey on your back and the ghost out to get you.
My emotional abuser gave up her relationship with me when I put it together that she was God in my mind for all the wrong reasons instead of the right ones. The choir members who knew us both finally got through to me, but there was still doubt in my mind that it was abuse. We were just quiet, sweet music nerds and kindred spirits. You just couldn’t tell that we were quiet nerds because we both had huge show modes…… which honestly in retrospect I see why I was so attracted to Dana. I found someone who expressed love the same way my emotional abuser and I showed love, not good or bad but fact. We loved each other’s show modes and quiet moments equally. In fact, Dana had a crush on me six weeks after she met me. It took me three years to get on board because I needed her to let me in to the point where I could see if she had a mode besides show. I could not be with a show at home. Sometimes I was, but for the most part we were both introverted, preferring to spend time with each other more than anyone else.
The clash came in when I starting growing rapidly and she didn’t. She didn’t know me anymore, and vice versa. Supergrover was the first person I told my story to who didn’t have a dog in the fight. She could see what I refused to acknowledge, but couldn’t anymore when someone was reading the facts blind. Dana and I could have made it with more support, but I was sick and so was she. I have to believe that she was sick when she hit me because all people who abuse physically have some kind of screw loose. It makes it easier to move on than thinking of her in terms of good or bad. Thinking about our funny memories is vastly preferable to feeling phantom pain when I tap into those memories.
It stops me from dating other people, and I just happen to have another very good reason to avoid it. Someone else already has a piece of me that I can’t share and don’t want to because it’s just too painful. So I don’t. I don’t want to take the chance that I’ll have another relationship where I feel like I need to sneak around and hope it doesn’t get noticed. I’m not very good at it, so I don’t engage. I have to have Woodward and Bernstein ironclad boundaries with no capability with a girlfriend. They go through phones and are extremely entitled about it.
I’m not angry that I have to keep secrets. I signed up for this. I’m angry that I need things emotionally from someone who drains my energy because she can’t love me in a way I can hear it, and I drain her energy by being the least accessible person in her life due to the nature of where we live. From where she sits, Maryland is a different country. It is to all Virginians. Zac thanks me profusely for absolutely not going out of my way. It’s hilarious to me. I think that’s because I still have Houston geography in my mind. Everything takes a long time. On the train, I zone out. When we get there is when we get there. Going to Zac’s gives me energy, it doesn’t take it.
It’s not just Zac, it’s his house and starting to feel more at home there. It didn’t occur to me that Zac felt bad when I said coming to his house felt like a vacation to me, because it lifts me out of my real life for a while. I meant having the house to myself for a bit after he leaves for work without having to worry about my housemates making noise, especially when I’ve been recording. I also don’t have any other friends in intelligence, so those conversations always give me energy, too. Sometimes the vacation is just getting out of my head and into Oliver’s (Oliver is a dog).
Zac’s point I didn’t think of but value is that he is my real life. Thank God for that. I didn’t want to go any longer without a companion, because I learned from The Doctor that I can’t travel alone.
It zaps my energy.
Stories That Are All True 