I’m a mess

Every time I feel like I’ve got a grip, I break down.

ND says I need to get balanced before I leave my job.

I resent his saying I’m unbalanced, yet I know it’s true. I think there’s something wrong with me. I think I need to take a vacation by myself. Go to Kripalu for a weekend, even just stay in a hotel in Manhattan. I wish ND would go away for a weekend, so I could be in my house alone, quiet.

I’m more terrified than ever to be in the passenger seat in a car. It’s irrational, I see us crashing around every turn. Sometimes I have to close my eyes so I don’t spend the whole time with adrenolin rushing through my body. I see us upside down in the car. My head smashing into the windshield. Shards of metal slicing through my chest from the side as the car has been crushed. I think I’m developing a full fledged phobia.

I feel like I’m afraid of everything. Afraid that I won’t have all my taxes ready. Afraid that I won’t come up with the big idea at work. Afraid that no one likes me anymore, that my friends are sick of dealing with me. Afraid that I’m sick.

I’m a mess.

Messy. Inside. Outside. Relationship. Work. I want to scream, and cry, and sleep. Sleep sleep sleep. I want to take drugs. I want to take a vacation. I want to be numb. I want to scrach my skin off my body. All my fat flesh, scraped and clawed.

Is this borderline? Am I becoming phobic like my mother? Is the world becoming black and white?

Plane to NYC from Charlotte

It’s really bumpy, and I’m scared. This is just about the bumpiest I’ve been on, and there’s a thunder storm around us and the plane is swaying back and forth and up and down and rolling… I wanted to write because I’m scared. Tell ND that I love him, and that he’s on my mind. I feel bad that I got mad at my father for yelling at the Time Warner lady, and hope that if I die he’ll be nicer to people who do work for him. And I wanted to write how much it hurt that my mother doesn’t want to come to my house for Christmas, that she’d prefer to go to Ali’s. I didn’t expect any different, but I hoped.

Creative Offsite

I think I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about my own death. Visioning it. Sometimes I imagine that I’m being hit by a car, a taxi slamming into me face on while I’m walking uptown or a truck plowing into me with such force that I’m thrown backwards, a limp rag doll… Other times it’s flying. We’ll dip in the air and I’ll think “I might die now.” Or as we hit turbulence I’ll think “I hope ND knows my last moments: drinking 2 Jack Daniels + a diet coke, reading Breaking Open the Head and playing the Sims on my laptop.” I’m not sure why I like the idea of his knowing what my last moments would have been. I think maybe it’s just a warm feeling that comes from knowing that someone else gets me. He’d be sad, but he’d also smile to himself and think “that’s Lexi.”

I feel trapped. Is it New York that isn’t working? Is it western society in general? Is it working and I’m just not fitting in right? “Last Tuesday night”, the Tuesday we did A on the playa, I could see the most powerful ball of light as I lay with ND looking up at the stars. I thought “this moment is perfect, and could only be made more perfect if we were cradling our child in our arms.”

I feel a powerful urge to have a child with ND To have an embodiment of our connection. And when we’re back home in New York, stressed out, working, focusing, it doesn’t feel like the right time. In the desert, when we’re open, it feels right. I feel protective of our child, even though she’s unborn. And I well up with an incredibly strong emotion and swallow back the wave as I write “she”. I feel very strongly that we will have a girl. Maybe we’ll also have a boy. But I think we’ll have a girl first. I think it’s my lesson, and I think it’s where my growth lies as a human. I spent my childhood sure I wanted a boy. Desperate not to have a girl.

Jenny? Is that the name of the little girl we’ll have? The name I picked for myself at 6 years old, but since, never felt was truly me? I’m crying now. I feel that Jenny is one of the most honest statements I’ve ever made. Partly to honor my great grandmother who I never met, apocryphally the first woman to walk across the George Washington bridge (?), and partly to be like Jenny L. – the girl I most emulated.

I don’t know why I emulated Jenny L. I think she seemed confident and aloof, and that she had some mysterious mystical side. She smiled and there was something caged inside her, a secret only she held on to. And I think there was part of me that longed to be able to hide myself as a secret. Instead my heart and soul were shared – given up as part of a larger “we” that was my mother and I together, best friends. I think I saw in Jenny L. as a pure soul, someone who belonged only to herself. And oddly, as much as I hated all her friends, the circle that was around her, and that rich Upper East Side socialite world, I never disliked her. She was never mean, even though she was strange and distant. She was never cruel or social climbing or even particularly interested in the world around her. And perhaps not surprisingly, I discovered later that she lived in her own, private, hidden prison of anorexia.

Maybe I’ll call her someday. I don’t know what I’d say. Maybe I’ll read her book.

Was naming myself Jenny my private way of stating who I really am? I disguised the name as an honor to my great grandmother, and while not altogether false, it was full with the double meaning of my hidden, quiet, knowing self.

I think we have to leave New York. I think I have to have a calmer life. Maybe with ND as a writer. Maybe with me as a mother and an artist, a friend and a connector. I am a connector. Not a networker, but someone who can create powerful experiences for other people. Help them feel connected.

Can I create that most powerful experience for myself? Can I REALLY jump headlong into the abyss with ND, eyes open, hands clasped, laughing? I want to. I’m also scared to let go.