Return of Conflict Girl

I’m doing a lot better today.

I had a Zoom call with my guide for the ketamine treatment. She really gets me and we clicked immediately, which makes things easier.

I told her that I was having a hard time integrating “real life” with the glimpses I’ve been getting of the spiritual world and that I felt almost like I was losing my mind.

She talked me through that and led me to find my own answers. Overall, it was really helpful. I asked her if she was familiar with tarot cards (which of course she was) and I said I feel lately like my life is embodied by the card The Tower. She said she got chills when I said that and she thought that was very insightful.

I do feel like my life is being shaken up by its very foundations lately and I can’t fight it. Instead, I have to try to stop fighting it, which is easier said than done.

But I have so many new beginnings lately, both good and bad. Of course, I’m still coming to terms with my sexual identity and realizing that I’m actually a lesbian. That would be pretty huge in itself.

I am also remaining friends with that guy from India, who is truly an interesting person and a good friend to have. I told him that I was really a lesbian but that I really liked him as a friend, and he was very happy with that. I think we might go dancing at an 80s club soon, which just sounds like a fun time. I trust my gut absolutely and my gut told me that he was good, which seems pretty accurate so far.

I still think a lot about leaving Texas but it’s probably not the right time to go yet and I don’t know where I’d want to go anyway. But it’s a really good thing that I’m meeting new people who are really trustworthy and think highly of me.

Between Cat and this Indian guy (whose name is Nash), that’s just two new people I’ve met since losing J and they both think very highly of me. Honestly, that’s still kinda surprising. During my marriage to J, we were so insular. That was comforting in its own way but it was also limiting in many ways, too.

I didn’t really know who I was without J or how to view myself without him. It turns out that I was actually suppressing some of my best traits and I also wasn’t getting out and meeting new people of all different ages. I’m discovering that I actually have a lot to offer, which feels kinda new.

It turns out that the person I am without him is still plenty worth knowing. In some ways, even more so. Some of the things J convinced me to believe about myself weren’t exactly accurate. It’s hard not to see that as an overall positive thing.

I think just maybe I’m going to be okay.

I’m feeling so uncertain and afraid.

I only have so much money left. I am sure that to my former “friend” it would sound like it’s a lot but it’s really not, not to last me for the rest of my life.

I don’t know if I’ll ever see any of the money back from her and I can’t be sure that I’ll get by without it. Right now, things aren’t looking too good for me. I have no career prospects and Chloe is still having a lot of trouble finding a job.

On the one hand, I feel enormously grateful that Chloe and Dylan have my back. But I also absolutely hate that I’m so dependent on my kids for my own survival. This is not what I want for their lives or for mine.

I suppose that things could turn around for me at any point. And I know that if I chose to, I could probably find some guy that I don’t love at all and whom I’m not attracted to because I’m really a lesbian and convince him to marry me.

But that would be selling myself out in a huge way and I know that I would hate it.

I no longer feel as actively suicidal as I did before I started the ketamine but I don’t feel good at all, either.

I’m still panicked about the future and how bad things look, especially for me. I went from thinking I would definitely become a therapist and be set for life to feeling like I have no options at all.

I’m sure I must have them somewhere but I can’t think of them right now at all. I just feel horribly panicked and it’s not getting any better. I feel like everything in my life is just getting continually worse since J died.

And also factored into this is the fact that I’m getting deeply involved in the spiritual world and I don’t know how to integrate that with the real world at all. I almost feel like I’m losing my mind. Being in the spiritual world while I’m high feels so comforting and I know that I will experience it full time when I die. But I don’t know what to do about it now.

I have a call tomorrow with my guide about the ketamine treatment and I’m going to ask her about this. A big part of me wonders if I made a huge and horrible decision trying ketamine to fix me. I was so desperate for something that would relieve my lifelong depression but I’m not sure this was the right thing to do.

I did my second ketamine trip last night. Remember, the whole point of this is supposedly to resolve my depression and anxiety. Just thought I should state that as a reminder that this ketamine stuff isn’t just for getting high but has a legitimate purpose.

Going into it, I set an intention that I wanted to try to tap into my creativity and remove any of my lingering creative blocks.

My second experience was rather different than my first but the amount of ketamine that I did was higher by 50 percent. During this one, I felt much more out of my body and detached from reality. I’m not sure if I liked that or not, to be honest.

I spent the entire trip mostly focusing on my sexual identity, which was kind of a surprise. What I came away from it with was the very deep realization that at the core of myself, I am and always have been a lesbian.

I thought about a couple of girls that I was friends with in elementary and middle school. I had major crushes on them but didn’t recognize at the time that’s what I was feeling.

I am not actually bisexual at all. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what that means in terms of my relationship to J. I absolutely and unquestionably loved him; I have no doubt in my mind about that.

But I was still always a lesbian by natural orientation. Women are just so much more attractive to me in every way, physically and emotionally.

I also really felt an increased sense of love for myself, too. If I love all women, that also includes myself.

I see men as a fascinating “other” sometimes and I’ve confused that with attraction. There are plenty of men whom I think are great humans. They have great energies and a really attractive vibe. But even when I like them a lot, it doesn’t translate into being turned on by them. I think that it will but it never works.

I think I need to really pay attention to this and get to learn more about what it means.

I got back from spending another wonderful and amazing night with Cat. As usual, I have a whole lot of stuff to process.

The biggest thing is that I am absolutely, definitely a lesbian. I’m still struggling to come to terms with that, to be honest. But I can also no longer pretend at all that I’m somehow attracted to men. I mean I still miss some things about them (even their bodies) but I just can’t do it anymore.

That meant that I had to message that guy I met for the date last week and tell him what was going on. And granted, that’s not going to come as a big surprise because I had told him that I’d really been trying to come to terms with my sexuality lately.

But still, he wanted to see me again and to take our relationship to a sexual level. The “old me” would have had sex with him, not really enjoyed it, and told myself that everything was fine (even though it obviously wasn’t.)

So I guess that’s major progress that I’m not selling myself out so easily anymore. But it’s also kinda bad because it means I’m hurting other people in the process, which I hate doing.

Last night Cat and I were in the middle of an almost ridiculously lengthy sex session and at one point, I told her about my first sexual experience with another girl. I was 10 years old, which seems kinda shocking now. Then I demonstrated on Cat what I had done with that girl when I was 10.

When I was 10, it was still pretty innocent. We kept all our clothes on and I just basically dry-humped her because it felt really good. (I have to say that it feels even better as an adult without clothes on. 😉)

J always believed that my early sexual experience was because I must have been sexually abused by someone. And I swear to God that I really, really don’t think that I was. His awareness of sex as a kid was much, much different than mine, much more unhealthy. I really think mine was just age-appropriate sexual exploration.

But for so long, I really bought into his belief that someone had damaged me in that way and I just couldn’t for the life of me recall it happening. Now, I doubt that I ever even was abused at all. I’ve asked my parents if it was possible and asked a childhood friend who knew me well and none of them had any recollection of it happening to me.

That makes me wonder something else though: what if he was wrong about me in other ways, too? For so much of my adult life, he was the lens through which I looked at the world and myself. But maybe he didn’t know me as well as he thought he did. Maybe I accepted his views, particularly of me, too uncritically.

That brings up another thing that’s really weird, too. Both Cat and I feel very strongly like something really big and really good is in my future. We don’t know if that’s related to my career or money or both or if it’s something else altogether. But she feels it super strongly and so do I and I can’t figure out what that means. We talked about it again today when we were both 100% sober and it was still true.

I’m also failing to keep up with my new freelance assignments as well as making time for more introspective writing at Medium. I have several posts I want to write there and just can’t find time.

Everything feels so exhausting lately and I just need to sleep through most of a day to catch up. But I can’t because I’m not letting myself. I really have to find a way to do that because I think that if there is indeed something good (nebulous though it may currently be), it’s probably going to be on the other side of this aching and desperate need for sleep.

I have so much to do and I feel like there’s not enough time to do it.

I have an article I’ve been wanting to write for Medium since two days ago, when we had to make the decision to have Dyl’s elderly cat put to sleep. I’ve never been particularly pro-euthanasia and preferred to let our cats die on their own timeline.

But his cat was slowly declining and we did everything we could reasonably do to prolong her life and it just wasn’t working anymore. In reality she was probably ready to go a couple of months ago because she noticeably stopped eating as much. But we took her to the vet then and got appetite-stimulating meds for her, which seemed to help for a while.

Then this week they stopped working and she wasn’t eating or drinking. She could barely move her legs on her own and I’m not sure when the last time was that she used her litter box. At that point, it just seemed cruel to try to keep her alive. But because she was Dyl’s cat pretty much exclusively, he had to make the final call when it was time.

It was an agonizing decision for him and for me as well. There’s no way to avoid that. And honestly, it reminded me too much of what I went through with J, especially in his final hours.

The last dose of Valium that I gave J was still within the range of what they said I could give him. But up until that point, I had been giving him smaller doses, just enough to take away his panic.

That final dose was enough to let him fall asleep in a deeply relaxed position. If I had given him another small dose like the previous ones, he might have been alive for a couple more hours.

But I chose to provide mercy and compassion to him, even though it meant that I lost him a bit earlier. I don’t regret that decision, as it was one made out of absolute love for him (even though I wanted every possible minute with him.)

Dyl now understands the same thing. Sometimes real love is doing what is kinder and more merciful to someone you love, even if that means you have to take some initiative and ultimately say goodbye to them sooner.

I’m thoroughly convinced that making a decision like that is painful but it’s also an act of great love. I’m just so sad that he now understands what I’ve been going through.

I want to write about that for Medium but I just don’t have time right now. My freelance work has more than doubled, which will be great because I’ve had some huge vet bills recently. But my time management isn’t great as it is and it’s so much worse when I’m dealing with stresses like this.

I just want to lie down and sleep for a few days but I can’t. I just have to keep pushing on and hope that things get better soon.

I’ve been thinking about it all day and I really don’t want to go out with that Indian guy again. He was nice and interesting and committed to safe sex blah blah blah but the reality of having sex with a guy is just really not that appealing.

I know that probably really means that I’m a lesbian. Sigh. I really don’t want this to be the case but I think it is anyway.

It’s probably going to result in hurt feelings on his part, which is very understandable. But I also don’t feel like I can go through with it when I really don’t want to. I’ve been there and done that before and I actually think that’s worse (at least for me.)

Sex with men is almost always disappointing. I know that probably has more to do with my lack of attraction to them than anything wrong with the men themselves.

Meanwhile my son’s cat appears to be dying and I really don’t want to deal with that right now.

This has been such a hard year, especially for him. We lost J on the first day of the year. We lost Miney cat just 2 weeks later, which was absolutely brutal to witness and was way too much like what I went through with J.

And now Dyl’s cat, too. He is so bonded to this cat and I know he will be absolutely devastated by losing her. It’s not entirely a surprise as she’s 17 years old and outlived her litter mate Cammy by 5 years. But this just really isn’t a good time for it. Not that there would ever be a good time but this is an especially bad time for it.

I’m worried about him. This is a lot of deaths for me and I can’t imagine the effects it will have on someone so young to lose so many important figures in his life in such a short period of time.

I have a lot of writing to do, both paid/assigned writing and other projects I want to do. But right now it’s really all that I can do just to hold myself together and try to be there for my kids.

So I went on a date last night with a 31-year-old guy and it actually went very well, kind of to my surprise.

He’s Indian and he’s only 31 years old, which was a big surprise that I was comfortable with him despite the 17-year age difference. He has a master’s degree, so the fact that he’s well-educated meant that we had a lot of things to discuss. He’s pretty intelligent and so am I and both of us are what they call “sapiosexual,” which means we’re turned on by intelligence.

We went to dinner at a hipster pizza place and split a vegetarian pizza because he’s veg. Because I have been vegetarian myself in the past, it’s no problem for me to do it now.

He’s also uncut, which is a strong preference for me. And he’s not weirded out by any of the things that I do sexually and in fact finds them a turn on.

We made out in the car like teenagers and that was a lot of fun.

He told me that I was really pretty and that I easily look 10-15 years younger than than I am. I’ve heard the same thing from others so I know he wasn’t lying just to flatter me.

I can’t help but feel like this is another spiritual connection like I have with Cat. I don’t know if J’s arranging this behind the scenes to give me a taste of what it’s like to be so desired, especially sexually, because that was always the weak spot in our otherwise-good marriage.

I don’t know what the reason for it is but I’m really happy. I get to have casual relationships that give me really good sex and someone to talk to, which is really what I need at this stage of my life.

And now that I’m not on the grad school plan anymore, I think I’m just going to ramp up my writing career even further. It’s not a fluke or an accident that I’ve been so successful so far and I think I can be even more successful.

Maybe my life is actually going to turn out okay and all on my own terms. I have to say that I really like that. And apparently I think I’m truly bisexual even if I have a strong preference for women. Some men are actually good ones.

I went to Cat’s house this week on Saturday night instead of Friday night because Dyl and I had appointments scheduled for tattoos on Saturday morning.

I initially expected the tattoos to take much less time than they did, so I gave Cat a wildly inaccurate estimate of my arrival time. In the end, Dyl and I ended up taking 6 hours for our tattoos, which made for a super long day.

I had to drive Dyl home from Dallas, grab my overnight bag, and leave for Cat’s back in Dallas immediately. It was kinda crazy, to say the least.

But at least she ordered hibachi by takeout for both of us and it was already waiting for me when I got there. So I finished off a bottle of wine I’d left over there and we watched a couple of episodes of a fun and entertaining show (Insecure with Issa Rae…loved it!) And then we got down to our usual stuff, which I hesitate to describe as a fuck fest even though that’s pretty much what it is. 😉

I didn’t really have any major revelations this time like I usually do. I only felt strongly that everything is going to be okay for me and got more confirmation that whatever bond I have with her is absolutely magical. And since J knew so much about it, I can only take that as some type of endorsement from him.

So I’m a day late with my re-orientation to the world again and I still feel kinda hazy and surreal. Part of that is because we took edibles, which always affects me for at least a day later. I picked up Dyl’s girlfriend before going to get him from work.

I have a date this week with a guy. (!!!) But he’s interesting and very spiritually-minded and he kinda snuck past my filter. That’s usually a rare and positive sign but I have no idea what to expect from our date.

He’s really young, which is probably the most surprising part. He’s only 31–which is 17 years younger than me. But he’s really good-looking and he said he prefers to date older women, so I guess we’ll see what happens next.

I asked for more work from my regular freelance client and got a bunch more, so that should help. I also want to do a lot more of my personal writing projects, both for Medium and an unnamed Amazon project I will discuss more later. (Maybe.)

I’m just kind of in a weird limbo where I’m not sure what I’m doing next but it’s very good overall.

Yesterday was just weird. I think it was mostly due to the after-effects of taking the ketamine but it was also due to a major mistake that I made.

I took a muscle relaxer last night because I couldn’t take my usual sleep meds. I looked up the potential interactions between ketamine and the muscle relaxer. The muscle relaxer was listed as having a “moderate” interaction, while my usual sleep meds were said to have a “major” interaction.

My usual antidepressant was also listed as having a “moderate” interaction and I wasn’t prohibited from taking those, so I figured it would be fine.

I was definitely wrong.

Not only didn’t the muscle relaxer help me to sleep but it also had exactly the opposite effect of normal. Instead of relaxing my muscles, it actually made them tense up a lot more than usual. My legs were in just about the worst pain that I’ve ever experienced.

So needless to say, I won’t be doing that again.

I’m also trying to focus on making sure my mindset is right as part of the integration process. I have to admit that that’s a lot harder when you’re trying to recover from a medication mistake.

I also looked back on FB at the post I made when J died and I reread all the responses that I got from people. And that just made me feel sad all over again that J’s really gone.

And it also made me actively feel angry again at Christi because of course I was vulnerable and still am.The difference is that I’m not going to dwell on that anymore like I might have before.

But it just reminded me that there is no possible way in which she acted like a real friend to me when I most needed one and that sucks. If anything, it just confirmed that I am absolutely right to get far, far away from her. Because if she’s really trying to be a better person, she still has a very long way to go. I did nothing wrong.

So I started my ketamine trial last night and it was very, very good. I can’t wait to do it again. It will be at least 6 sessions, each spaced about a week apart.

I have been doing various drugs since J died, which itself is kinda interesting because I never really did them before. I mean, I got high on occasion as a teenager but I didn’t really like it and it wasn’t a part of my life for decades.

The ketamine trial is supposed to have major benefits for depression and anxiety, which was my primary reason for doing it. But it also turned out to essentially have a “tripping” component. It was also kinda funny that I was required to have a designated “trip sitter” (what they called a “peer treatment monitor.”) I chose Dyl and had Chloe on hand as a backup if needed.

It’s so interesting to me that I’ve become more interested in this sort of thing since J died, and it’s linked to that, too. It’s like I’m trying to expand the limits of my brain, ultimately so that I can maintain contact with him even though he’s dead.

And even weirder is that it seems to be working. I’m very aware of his presence on a lot of occasions now, to the point that I no longer see it as weird. I can’t really explain how I’m feeling his presence or what the encounters are like, either, but I know I’m not crazy (even though I probably sound like I am.)

It’s more like I’ve always had a very strong sense of intuition and this is a bit similar, like a sidebar to my intuition or something added onto it. I feel very special and grateful for this in every way. It’s like I tapped into something new and I’m leveling up. I keep testing my mental limits and powers and I remain extremely open and curious to what’s possible. I also try to work on meditation but it’s super difficult for me still.

Anyway, as the ketamine was wearing off but I was still under its influence, I was advised to try to journal. This is what I wrote:

Write about all of this

Your connection to the spirit world is growing stronger and it’s not an accident and you have to find a way to explain it in words

You’re looking for J and Sue won’t understand because she can’t but that doesn’t mean that you’re wrong about any of it

You’re healing and this is only the beginning, keep going

You’re becoming more aware of the spirit world and that the world we think we live in is not the real one. We’re actually on a totally different playing field than we think we are but most people don’t know that

Everything around you is so much love

You have special talents to explain this to the world and you will figure out how to get it out

You should do LSD next and look up guided meditations to listen to while you do it because you’ll learn even more

Write write write

You will always find the other people who also understand the spirit world no matter where you go. Cat was only the first of many people you’ll meet that you’ll have a spiritual connection to

You are good

You are safe

You are pure