Whoever Dances is One with the Universe

Last Tuesday I learned that my preschool teacher, Miss Stacy, was held at gunpoint and sexually assaulted on her wedding day.

In response, she started an agency that provides assistance to victims of trauma, from helping a Iraq war veteran with PTSD find counselling after the death of two of his children in a fire on Christmas, to finding a foster home for an abused baby, to providing medical care for a mentally retarded homeless man some folks found in a truck in the woods last winter. One of her biggest goals is to get her clients to a point where they can join in the helping: thus the veteran offered his spare camper as a temporary home for the homeless man while the agency found a place for him to live.

So, people are pretty amazing, I guess.

She offered me a volunteer position. It's a forty-five minute drive, but I kind of think I should take it. You know? There's not a whole lot of time left in the summer, and it seems like it might be more important to do this than to sit in on Daphne's meetings in her air-conditioned office two days a week. And it was such a coincidence to meet her--went with Daphne to talk about ways to get money/support/useful information for a shelter for domestic violence victims in Perry County, since Miss Stacy has been running her agency for a long time and knows who to contact and what's feasible and what's not (she even knows which restaurants will give leftover food/free food to people if the Food Bank is unavailable and was hooking someone up with one such restaurant when we came in), and she just happened to recognise me--anyway, if it weren't such a tricky theological thingy and a statement that makes me seriously uncomfortable, I might be tempted to say it was purposeful.

Which, granted, it is so hard to know what is just ordinary life coincidence and what is God saying HEY YOU DO THAT OKAY. There are never any angels or sparkles, which would make it SO much easier. But.

Should I give up my internship to volunteer with this agency, or should I keep the internship since it is providing some practical experience and will certainly look good on my resume?

I really miss my school friends right now. It has to do at least partly with this unholy terror I have that if I'm away from people for too long they'll just forget about me, or they won't want me any more--it's not really logical, it's just one of my biggest anxieties, and it's completely paralysing. Maria's friends are all visiting her over the summer--Lydia's coming next month, as is Elena, and Emily may come after that, and she had Will last week, and later on in the summer she'll visit Will and Elena and Monica.

I got to go see mhari in May, which was wonderful, but otherwise I'm going to be spending summer alone. Like always. Which, when I was still in high school and didn't really have any friends in the state, wasn't a really big deal, because it was par for the course, I never had any friends that I saw on a daily basis for a whole eight years. But now that I've spent two years of my friends being available almost all the time, I feel really, really emotionally cut off.

It's also wrapped up in the fact that I really like to be able to touch people, or else I feel distanced from them; I like to hold hands, or cuddle, or just be physically close to people, it makes me feel safer. So I don't have anybody for that (Maria is not a touchy-feely person at all), and also I'm just so scared that I'll get back to school and all my friends there will be all 'whatever, who are you, why did we even like you?'

and for some reason I'm having a depressive episode, and I haven't had one of those in about three weeks, so I'm disappointed. And there are some things going wrong with my plans for the summer; I wasn't able to get hired by any of the places I applied, so my summer job is doing odd jobs for a man at church once a week, I've had writer's block since before I came home and my poetry won't come out, so my MS is still at forty-eight pages and I'll never hit the fifty I want before I try to start sending it to publishers, and I'm only going to get rejection letters anyway, and I never have time to go to Selinsgrove to get the things I need to finish my Big Damn Art Project. And then the priest of our church [Daphne] told Mama she would give me an internship so at least I could get something official out of the summer, but she kind of reneged on that. She's giving me the connexions to meet some people, but nothing really official, and she refuses to believe I'm serious about wanting to go into the priesthood; she keeps referring to it as "[Soujin]'s discernment process" where I decide "whether she really does want to go into religion or not". I know that I want to do this. I really hate talking about it in these terms, because it feels all faux-spiritual and pretentious, but I really do feel called to do this. It feels like I'm finally making the right decision. And even if it's true that kids my age usually change their minds about their career plans and whatnot, it's still at least polite to pretend to believe me when I say this is what I want to do. It really upsets me.

And I feel like Mama's disappointed in me for not being proactive enough, but any time I have to interact with Daphne I just end up feeling so disappointed and depressed that I don't really want her help. I wish so much that I had a spiritual counsellor who didn't make me upset. I'm meeting with her husband Ed to-morrow, who was a spiritual counsellor (and is a retired priest) at Penn State for years and years, and hoping that since he's an actual human being and not an alien ambassador from planet Daphne we will possibly be able to communicate in a way that does not make me miserable, cross my fingers. I just. I want to learn how to organise a fundraiser and run a vacation bible school and pick out the week's hymns and connect the readings together with the season and current events into a big thick woven sermon. I want to learn from someone who loves God and loves the earthly church, too, someone who visits sick people and helps make prayer shawls and runs the book club and teaches Sunday school because that person wants to, but whenever I talk to Daphne she talks like it's all a huge burden that God's placed upon her and she's only doing it because she knows it's the right thing to do. I don't want to learn from someone who feels that way. I want to learn from someone who loves it.

And I want the sink to start working again and the smell of turpentine to go away and for my heart to stop hurting, and I wouldn't mind if only one of those things happened. It just feels like too much of a buildup.

Also, I have to drive to Duncannon to-morrow morning to see the doctor for my physical for my visa for Greece, and that just reminds me how scared I am to go to Greece and how maybe it's not such a good idea and I won't know anyone and my depression will come back and I won't have anyone to reach out to, and my friends will definitely forget me and I won't be able to connect to people because I'm a stranger and the wrong nationality and I'll fail all my classes or I won't be able to get the classes I need to graduate and it's going to be expensive and maybe I should just stay home-- and then I start to have a panic attack. I want to go, but I'm scared.

And really, really lonely. >_<

tl;dr Soujin is a whiny emo kid with hell of anxiety disorder, hi.

Oh, my God. They fired me. They fired me. It's over.

Got sent home early to-day because I'm useless.

Now I can't stop crying over the CMO DNR pt. She's been refused.

( here, have a shite pseudo-sonnet )

scatterbox again:

Worked in drug and alcohol rehab to-day. It was really actually pretty great, and a really nice facility--infinitely better than the ward I went to when I was in the hospital for my bipolar. Colour me really, really impressed. They take dual diagnosis, polysubstance, &c, and their psychiatrist appears to have a clue what he's doing (I sat in on clinical report, which was officially the longest meeting I've ever been in but in no way the boringest; so I got to listen to him talk for around an hour).

Another vaginal bleed pt. yesterday. Dr. Jesus would definitely have a job in our WHW.

Am going in to-morrow for a meeting with a possible mental health counsellor person thingy for possible therapy while I'm here. May fall through.

Mama said to me on Sunday, "It's awful that you have all those ugly scars. You look awful." Had not really thought before about it. I do, up my left arm and down my back, from when I was cutting regularly, and down both legs, as well as the little knot at the small of my back from my surgery, and the one across my forehead from when I was little. I had not really thought of them as ugly before, just as being.

I kind of enjoyed this article a lot.

I have no idea what is going on in my Arthurian murder mystery. Wtfeven.

Pt: Will this [new blood pressure med] make it so I can't cum?
Soujin & Resident: ...
Resident: ...Nah, you're good.

WHY IS THIS MY LIFE YOU GUYS. I need to start driving home why am I even on the computer my car is melting.

I HAVE SRS BSNS TO POST ABOUT BUT I THINK I WILL WAIT UNTIL I GET BACK. I hate how cities are always hot. I need to be driving. I have a headache in my eye AND I AM SLIGHTLY MANIC. Also had a panic attack in the back room at the AFP this morning wtf HELLO WORLD.

Resident: ...This woman has had vaginal bleeding for two months.
Soujin: (under her breath) This looks like a job for... Doctor Jesus.

Dr. Lin kept calling me his 'wery wery smart student' to-day, which was very generous of him.

Apparently there is this thing on the internets called Dreamwidth or something and people like to have codes for it, and apparently I have some, so, you know, comment if you're interested.

To-morrow is OMT day and it is either going to be awesome or deadly boring, I haven't figured out which yet. On the plus side, FREE FOOD.

Well, my life has always been a series of disasters of different kinds--big disasters, little disasters, the housing disaster--which I managed to fix myself, by finding the one room in Altoona that was willing to rent for six weeks for under five-hundred dollars--the car disaster--they didn't tell me that this internship requires a car, and I haven't got one, so we're currently trying to fix that problem, but for now I am biking the mile and a half between my home and the home office; once I have transportation I will be going to the Williamsburg and other rural offices. It's a little overwhelming.

Also on the way home to-day I stopped to buy groceries, and when I got out of the store it was pouring rain--I walked through it, and I've finally started to try off, but my crackers are somewhat damp. I bought crackers and cheese and bread and peanut butter and rice cakes and some soup and a rotisserie chicken, and that's what I'll be living off for the next three weeks, probably, but I can handle that.

Anyway, yesterday I stopped in Huntingdon to get the key for my room and the lady's dog was having her first litter of puppies, and the lady was having a panic attack, so I was impromptu midwife to a prize-winning Shitzu. For some reason she couldn't figure out what to do with the puppies once she got them out, so I had to tear the amniotic sac, and as soon as I'd done that she got right to work cleaning the puppies and eating the placenta and all the normal stuff, so she was fine, she just didn't touch them while they weren't breathing or moving and I had to help with that. And I got blood and amniotic fluid all over me, but it was worth it.

And now I am exhausted and think that I will take a nap. I am really working, guys, forty hours a week, eight to five with an hour for lunch. One of the doctors made us do treatment plans for his patients to-day, it was amazing, I got to write up differentials and treatments and roleplay an office visit for a patient with epilepsy.

Okay! Nap!