Brother John

8:23 AM 8/6/10

My brother visited yesterday and we ate lunch at Aunt Jeannie's. He wondered why I had dropped off the face of the earth, so I told him that actually, I've been writing Retmeishka. So he is here now. Welcome John.

Talking to John brought me back to life again. When somebody comes in from outside, and they're different from all the people around you - I thought of the girl, and I can't remember what her name was, who tried to tell Truman Burbank the truth - Sylvia. She told Truman that yes, the world around you is crazy and there's something wrong with everybody. And he never forgot her because of that. That's how I felt when my brother talked to me yesterday. I remembered that yes, there IS something wrong with this world, and there is more to life than just this, and there are people out there who understand.

I asked John a few questions.

1. How can you stand to move from place to place and leave behind all the people you know?
2. Other questions about dating and love

It was hard to articulate what I wanted to ask him, but he told me enough that I could get a sense of it.

I 'ended up' in State College. I decided to stay here because I was sick of moving around all the time, going back and forth to college every year, and because I had moved several times in my childhood too, so I didn't have 'roots' - I don't use that word, but it means, I didn't know all the people around me really well since birth. I thought it would be better to stay in one place even if I didn't like it here, so that I could focus on other goals, like financial independence.

John has moved from city to city in his adulthood. He has lived in Ithaca, NY, Boston, MA, Tucson, AZ, New York, NY, State College, PA, and maybe a few other places I've forgotten.

He says that in the big city, New York, you can find every kind of deviant. Every strange, weird person can be found there. I've been frustrated lately with the people living in this area - not enough people able to understand me. I told him that I wouldn't feel comfortable living in the city because I don't like to live with too much concrete and asphalt and exhaust fumes - I like to have trees and grass around me. So I don't know if I would be happy in the city even if I could find people who understood me.

(The murderers are still doing 'delusion support' for Curtis, telling me things like, he's only with Carrie as a way to make me jealous, but he doesn't really love her, and *I* am everything to him.)

(My mind has some iron law of consent. I've asked him for consent many times in many ways, and haven't gotten an official answer. He is an adult and he is capable of speech and writing. If he were a baby, he could not give consent to be touched, and we would assume that he needs to be touched and picked up the way babies do. But as he is an adult, it's almost impossible for me to break my 'explicit consent' rule and just start touching him and assume it's okay. The voices like that idea, but I can't force myself to break the 'explicit consent' rule unless I'm on drugs.)

(They've been making it almost impossible for me to even *think* about leaving him, and when I do, I get attacked with 'delusion support,' false ideas and false beliefs about Curtis that are used to make me hang on to him and not give up.  They tell me that he reads my blog, for instance, when actually, I think he hates reading - he hates ALL reading - and he told me in a text message that he doesn't spend much time on the internet.  But they still make me feel like he reads my blog, and I know he doesn't.  No matter how much I try to tell them that he hates reading, and that he doesn't care enough about me to be curious about my blog, they still insist that he's watching everything I do online.  That's one of those delusions made to make me think that I have to keep trying to get him to talk to me.  In reality, he and Carrie are sitting at home in front of the television.  Television is their universe.  He doesn't know my world.  And he doesn't care enough to find out about it.)

I asked John about how he could leave behind his girlfriends when he moved from place to place. He has moved around mostly because of needing to find new jobs in his field, and also, he is paying child support. So he has to have high-paying jobs.

He says that every girlfriend he has ever had is still in his mind. And I know exactly how that is. I can list every boy I had a crush on all the way back in elementary school. I can list all the guys I've kissed, although there might be one or two incidents where somebody kissed me and I don't remember it - I think I remember sitting with some guy on a bus a few years ago when I was going to Washington DC or someplace, as part of a temp job assignment, and I think he might have kissed me once. So I might forget things like that. But everyone I've actually dated is still in my mind. And I still remember some people who I had only one 'incident' with, like the guy who put hickeys all over my neck when I kissed him at a party where everyone else was drunk except me, because I went along to a party with my co-workers from Gino's Pizza in West Virginia, when I didn't drink. I never saw that guy again either and I didn't really care.

John said it hurts the most when they break up with you and refuse to speak to you ever again. I know how that is. Martin ignored my messages and blocked me on Facebook and did everything possible to stop speaking to me, although I've sometimes thought he might still read my blog. I've talked many times about the incidents of being forced to try to contact somebody who refuses to speak to me or acknowledge that I exist.

He said that online dating made it possible for him to find much higher quality relationships. There were people who it would have been impossible to find in the real world if all you could do was meet friends-of-friends or go sit in bars.

He isn't having any more children, so for him, having a relationship is something you do for the sake of enjoying the relationship. I am planning to have children, but right now I would like to date some people that I'm not having kids with first. And 'they' redirected my attention towards the younger men, so that is the kind of relationship that I'm looking for right now. But when I am looking for someone to have children with, I have to think of things differently than I would if I were enjoying a relationship for its own sake. I see people who I could have a medium-length relationship with, but if I am thinking about having children and giving them a stable family life, then I must think about someone who I can stand to be with for several decades. I like it that my mother and father are still together. There is a feeling of safety and stability there, even though I don't see them having a *passionate* love relationship. And I know what passionate love would feel like, if only in my imagination, because I've had enough experiences with female friends who I 'merged' with, not sexually, but in conversations and in understanding each other, that I can imagine what it would be like to merge with a male friend who was also a lover.

John said something I was familiar with. He said when you meet new people it keeps your mind alive. You always learn something from them, from who they are, from what they know. That is what I want to enjoy doing. I don't want to just talk *to* somebody, I want them to talk to me. I want to learn from them. I want to see how they see the world.

There was a question that I couldn't really articulate to him. I have weak bonds with everyone around me, everyone I work with. I think it would be painful to break those weak bonds too, even though they are people who I don't really know and don't really like. It hurts me to leave behind 'familiar faces,' and I have done that many times before, because I have lost jobs and I have had temp jobs that were never meant to be permanent. It always hurts to leave, even though those people didn't understand me and never would have.

But Peter is the main reason why I don't leave. If he were physically healthy and taking care of himself, I wouldn't feel so bad about leaving. If he were online, like if he had his own MySpace page, as pathetic as that might be, I wouldn't feel so bad. Maybe I should show him some of the internet forums and social networking pages. It was Eric's daughter Tiana who made me make a MySpace page to begin with. I didn't really want to be on MySpace. But I'm glad I know about it now.

John made me feel like I could survive the grief of losing a relationship. He has left many people in his life. He has lost many relationships.

There is something that you can learn. It could be a good thing, or a bad thing to learn this. When someone goes to war, and they see people die, they learn to survive the non-uniqueness of all people. It's hard to explain. Relationships can be that way too. You can understand that people are not unique, and that this one person you love isn't the only person you will ever love for the rest of your life. But it's traumatic to learn that. That's why there is the religious belief about never having sex before marriage, and then, marrying only one person who you will be with for the rest of your life, and never being unfaithful to them. It's not just because of preventing sexually transmitted diseases, although that is one of the most important reasons to do that. It's because you protect yourself against the traumatic knowledge that people are non-unique, that love can happen again, that you can survive losing someone.

That knowledge can be harmful in some situations. For instance, I've read about adopted children. Sometimes they get the realization that they can 'choose who their parents are.' They then develop a sort of dating relationship attitude about finding themselves the perfect parents. They realize that the adoptive parents they have aren't the ONLY adoptive parents on earth, and they could choose better ones. It makes them bond less deeply with the adoptive parents they have. It makes it hard to bond with anyone at all. You have to be able to form some kind of stable bond with somebody. If you realize that people are non-unique, and if that realization is the strongest center of everything that you feel about people, then it will always seem like you can quickly leave one person and go to the next and nothing ever matters and nobody will ever be with you for very long at all. There are different time periods that this feeling can be set for. It can be a day, a week, a month, a year, or five years. My relationships have all lasted quite a few years, but none of them have been permanent marriages. Moving from place to place in my childhood probably affected how I view the idea of permanent, lifelong bonds with people, although lots of other people have moved around in their lives and they are still able to marry someone and form a lifelong bond with them.

I compared this to the feeling about death, which comes from being a soldier and going to war. Every body that you see around you is able to die. When you see people dying in war, and when you yourself have killed them, you have a violated feeling, a knowledge, which says 'You're able to do that.' You've crossed that line, and you survived, and you're able to. You've killed a person. You could kill any of the people around you, and you'd survive. Although actually what happens is the soldiers get on psychiatric drugs and they kill a bunch of people and then kill themselves. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a traumatized feeling that you have after killing someone in a war, where, even if you're not on drugs, you still feel a sense that everyone around you is able to be killed, and you feel differently about all relationships forever because of that.

If it becomes 'too easy' to kill people, or to break up with people you love, or to move from town to town, then you have an unstable life and you cannot get past the 'deepness limit.' There is deepness, and there is also stagnation. In a long-term marriage, you can get past challenges and problems, and have a deeper relationship because of it. Or you can endure the problems and challenges and unhappiness, but not really have a deeper relationship because of it, and you just deny the unhappiness and stagnation and lack of life. So you aren't always getting a deeper relationship merely because you stay with someone forever.

But there really is a 'deepness limit' where you can gain something valuable if you go past that boundary. I am thinking of an example that happened with me and Rachael, my best friend, a long time ago. Whenever we were together, I would gradually become exhausted, and after a while, I would need to be alone. One day Rachael insisted that she would stay with me even though I told her I was tired and I needed to be alone. So I broke the rules of rudeness and kindness and I showed her my irritability and my bad mood and my meanness, because that is what you get if you stay with me whenever I want to be alone. (That is the reason why I rage at the voices, and talk about killing them, and that kind of thing. The murderers are continuing to interact with me whenever I need to be alone.) There was a limit to how long I could stand to be with her without breaking a rule. If I stayed with her longer, eventually I would break the rule of 'be nice.' I would become irritable and I would express my irritability out loud by being mean and unkind and saying whatever I wanted to say.

Except it wasn't that simple. In reality I become sort of quiet and withdrawn. The murderers, zapping and torturing me, have often pretended that they are masochists who want to be yelled at and who want me to kill them, or, in reality, they want to fantasize that I'm going to kill them without it really happening. You have to use certain kinds of drugs and certain kinds of torture to make somebody yell at you if that's a person who has a 'rule' that says, don't yell at people. I have been a mind control victim for several years now and when I think of this subject, I feel sadness, and I feel traumatized. But it's the same thing people are doing whenever they have domination/submission relationships, or sadomasochistic relationships. You break the rules, and you bring out other parts of yourself, and you say things you're usually forbidden to say, and feel things you're usually forbidden to feel. Because of my being tortured against my will, without consent, I still can't feel comfortable right now about exploring certain kinds of sexual relationships. But if I were not being traumatized, I would. It's different when it's being done to you against your will, and it's every moment of every day, every second of your life. I did not consent to this. If I could stop them from doing it, I would.

There are longer-lasting behavior changes besides merely saying something mean to somebody because you're allowed to break the 'be nice' rule. You can have more valuable personality changes than that. Sometimes people try to break bad habits forever - stop drinking alcohol and never drink it again. Religious people probably try to do that more than other people do - they try to make their mates more perfect, to make them stop all bad habits in general, like procrastination, or try to make their mates get a better job. You can do 'self-improvement' type changes like that in a long-term relationship, especially if your bad habit was the result of not having enough support in your life. Alcoholism can happen more easily if you're malnourished, if you never cook for yourself, if you never eat any healthy food, so if you get a mate who cooks for you and you eat three healthy meals a day, it might be easier to stop using alcohol forever.

I would mention self-acceptance here too. Sometimes there are things about ourselves that we don't necessarily like, but they are a stable part of who we are, and very difficult to change, and all we can do is accept that those things exist. That has to happen in a long-term relationship too.

John said that he knows how it feels to love someone so much that you can tolerate their cheating on you. You love them so much that you would just want to know why they cheated on you, and did they enjoy it, and what did they gain from it, and you can still stay with them afterwards.

I like talking to John because he tells me things I already know, but it's coming from a different person, someone other than myself. I agreed with everything he told me because I had sort of thought of it myself. The difference was the feeling that you can survive leaving people behind and not seeing them anymore. For me, right now, Peter is the issue: I don't want to leave Peter here unless I have done something to make his life easier.

It's terrible how much I have lost because of chronic fatigue. I was thinking that I don't have any music because I'm on dialup (it's cheaper), and it's hard to search for music when you're on dialup. But even worse than that, I have chronic fatigue. Chronic illness makes it so hard to do even the simplest things, anything that requires the slightest ambition or motivation, that my life is much more depressing and lifeless because of that. I feel a sense of my *potential*, because in the past, when I was young, I was much healthier, and I could read, and learn, and study, and make things, and do arts and crafts, and meet people, and have conversations, and have adventures - I had more life. I know that is my potential. If I were not sick, I would still be living that way. So, huge amounts of my life's time are being wasted because of chronic illness. Years go by, but nothing gets better. This is so depressing, that it makes it hard to meet new people and share my life with them: there's no good news to share, nothing to give, except years and years of stagnation and misery. And I'm not merely sick, I'm also being attacked by the murderers, so I am sleep-deprived, every day, and my dreams are *always* hypnotized fake dreams, instead of letting my brain process whatever it needs to process on its own. I wonder what my mind would think of if it processed its own dreams without being hypnotized by murderers while I sleep. So all I have is unmet potential, instead of expressed potential or actualized potential. How do you convince people, 'I really am good, I really am worth something, but it's locked inside me and it can't get out?'

I think I will post this now. I'll probably think of more stuff to say afterwards.