random notes, mostly about dreadlocks

I am taking bits of Vivarin pills, and I am also taking a little bit of St. John's Wort every few days, but not every day.

I took Vivarin this evening to get myself up out of bed to go to the storage unit and take out a couple of boxes to sort through. The Vivarin is making me talk, and talk, and talk, and talk. That's why this is long and obsessive.

'The real problem is elsewhere.' I talk to the voices all the time when I'm lying in bed. They wake me up and then ask me questions and make me talk about things and make decisions with me. I used to hate them and fight them, constantly, but that's when I was on a lot more drugs, and also, I had a metallic dental filling back then, which made me even more hateful and sick and uncomfortable. I think they're not as abusive as they used to be, either, although actually, if I were on drugs and in withdrawal, I would be getting angrier a lot more often, and when I get angry, they are just as abusive as they ever were. They cause a lot more damage whenever I'm working lots of hours and desperately need sleep, but right now, I have only one job, so it doesn't matter as much that they wake me up and destroy my sleep.

Anyway, 'the real problem is elsewhere' means that there is a barrier preventing me from making any progress, from being happy, from getting anything done. My apartment is full of garbage, and I can't walk on the floor because there are ephedra residue footprints that have gotten into this house, so I always have to wear sandals around the house - and I refuse to clean any of it up. The voices can't make me clean it up. They can't force me to work on cleaning this up, because I won't, because it's hopeless - it would waste a lot of time and energy, only to get contaminated again. I've had so much experience with contamination over the past three years that I know all about what happens when you waste lots of time cleaning something over and over again. Carpets are hopeless. It's not worth cleaning anything up, until I have dealt with the real problem... the storage unit. All of my contaminated belongings are in there. If I ever get them out, they will re-contaminate the place that I bring them to. So I can't clean up my home until I've gotten rid of, or cleaned up, the stuff in the storage unit. Everything in there is a 'bomb.' That is what the voices called it whenever I brought the ephedra seeds into the other apartment. They said that it was the same as bringing a bomb, or a lit stick of dynamite, into the house. It causes an explosion. The voices knew all about ephedra residue contamination already.

So if I want to feel like I'm making progress, I have to get things cleaned up or thrown away from inside the storage area. That's the real problem preventing me from getting anywhere.

So I got a couple things out of there tonight and I will sort through them. I found some things that I might be able to throw away. I have a box full of papers. Some of the papers will be put into another box and saved, but a lot of it is just garbage papers that I never sorted through. Another thing is a blanket. My blankets got contaminated like all of the laundry. No matter how many times you wash them, there is still residue on them, because the washing machine just recycles the dirty water around in it, to save water. It doesn't constantly flush fresh new water over the laundry. It sloshes the old water around in there for a long time, spreading the residues all around so that a tiny spot of residue gets everywhere instead of in just one place. Ideally, I would want to wash my laundry in a creek, where the water was constantly new, but I won't be doing that. I just throw laundry away nowadays when it gets contaminated. I get the cheapest goodwill clothes and I make sure that they're not nice, and not unique, and not special, and I make sure that I don't like them too much, so that I won't mind throwing them away. I don't wash laundry anymore. You can't imagine this unless you have experienced a toxic drug residue contamination.

The voices were wondering about why I am antisocial.

We've been talking about what would be needed for me to be able to tolerate the company of other women. I used to have a best friend Rachael for eleven years when I was in middle school and high school. I haven't had a female best friend as good as she was, ever. My friend Valencia in college was my best friend there, but we aren't in contact anymore, and still, I felt as though she didn't really understand me either.

There are two women at McDonald's who talk to me. Both of them are usually telling me about their problems with men.

An enneagram Four has a hard time relating to other people's problems. I've always felt that way. I usually find it very hard to see something from their point of view, to care about it as much as they do. When these two women from McDonald's tell me about their problems, I always feel as though their problems aren't as bad as my problems, and I don't really want to be friends with them... but the voices have been asking me for more detail about WHY.

I want to DO things. When you value something, when something matters to you, when something is important to you, then you want to DO things about it. You want to get the things you value, and avoid the things you disvalue.

If I were going to be friends with women, or if I were going to have them in the Order (which is what the voices were asking me about) - they were asking me, why would women want to join the Order? And why would men want to join? Men's and women's roles in the Order are different. I looked through a book called 'Rumspringa,' about Amish teenagers, about their rebellion, and about how some of them, lots of them, decide to come back and officially join the Amish. You aren't born Amish, you join it as an adult. And some of the people they interviewed said that they returned to join the Amish because the Order takes care of you. That was how they phrased it. The Order takes care of you. The church takes care of you. Maybe they said church, not Order, but either way. It actively participates in your life. They DO things for you. And you can see this. The Amish community really does the 'barn raisings' that they talk about. The whole community works together to build a barn in a very short time, and I think it really might be one day. They help you with getting married, and that kind of thing. I would have to find out more details. But that is what I want my Order to do. I want my members to get real, material benefits from being in the Order. It isn't just an abstraction or an idea. They will physically participate in your life and help you. This means things like work, food, money, knowledge, gifts, and real-world help of all kinds. That's why I call Retmeishka a practical religion. You DO things in the material world. You receive physical benefits by joining. You quality of life, in the material world, will be better, easier, healthier, and wealthier.

So I was talking to the voices about why women join the Order. And we were wondering what would be needed so that I could stand the company of other women. Well, my first answer was that I wouldn't want us all to stand around gossiping and complaining about the men. I don't want to be in one of those man-hating groups of women.

And I want to be action-oriented. I like to talk about *doing* things. I like to make plans and strategies. What will we do, how will we do it, when will we do it, when can we get started, when will we finish, what's the goal.

But I don't want to just be too goal-oriented without a deeper understanding of the big important things going on in the world, or their significance. There are people who can talk about goals and actions, and they can get things done, but they never see what they're doing or why they're doing it or why it matters. I want to talk to people who are goal-oriented but they also see, and feel, how much it matters, why we're doing this, why this is important, how it fits into the big picture. I want them to *feel* that it MATTERS.

But I don't want to work with people who have contempt for me. I don't want to be with people who are *too* competent and strong and don't have any problems. There are people who can't imagine how terrible and how difficult my life is. There are people who are so healthy that they can't imagine how hard it is to get out of bed every day with chronic fatigue, and how it's a big huge achievement just for me to get one small task or project done. I don't want to talk to people who will have contempt for me when I'm proud of myself for doing one tiny project today. They would have contempt because I'm not doing enough, because I can't do a hundred tasks every day the way they do. I've talked to women who are competent and goal-oriented, and they always act like I should be able to just push a button and magically fix everything that's wrong with my life, quickly and easily. I try to explain that my chronic fatigue is real, it's terrible, it's overwhelming, and I would try to explain that I'm being attacked by murderers who burn me and de-focus my mind whenever I try to use my brain, but they don't understand those things. They don't believe that mind control is real or that I'm being attacked, and they don't believe in chronic fatigue, or they think it has a simple solution. ('Why don't you just go to the doctor?' HAHAHAHAHAHAH! Don't you think I already have??? The doctor won't do anything. They'll prescribe pills. If I want pills, I can buy my own pills. I'm using Vivarin, a caffeine pill, for my chronic fatigue right now. I don't need a doctor for that.)

So I don't like to be with people who do nothing but complain about men, and I don't like to be with people who are so extremely competent and goal-oriented that they have contempt for my tiny achievements ('I sorted through a couple of boxes today! This is a huge big deal! I made progress on disaster recovery!') And they would advise me to do things that are a waste of time and money ('Go to the doctor') that I've already done and that didn't work, or things that violate my values and my beliefs ('Go apply for welfare, and medicare, and get food stamps, and get help from the government'). I'd want to talk to them about doing things that work with my values and beliefs, things that I believe will be useful instead of a waste of time and money.

So the voices continued to ask me questions about what I would need to do to tolerate the company of other women. And here is one thing we thought of. I imagined us taking a walk together, me and a big group of women. But we would be forbidden to talk. We would be forbidden to speak out loud to each other. That would be an official rule. This is because we wouldn't have to be uncomfortable or strain to make conversation or chit-chat or small talk with each other, or talk about things I don't like to talk about, or have disagreements and conflicts with each other. So we would be forbidden to talk to each other at all. And I imagined me and this big group of women walking together, dressed in uniform, walking through town, a silent procession. We would walk a certain distance down a pre-planned route, and then go home. When the walk was over, we'd be allowed to talk to each other again. It would be like a parade of the Order. In the parade, we're not supposed to talk to each other. And I've actually been in parades several times, because I used to be in band class in middle school and high school (I played the flute). It would be formal like that.

These would be women who were following the grooming rules with me. That's another thing that I need in order to tolerate other women. I don't like the way they groom themselves. I don't like makeup, I don't like eyebrow-plucking, I don't like haircutting and hairstyling. So they would be following the grooming rules and we would do a silent procession together through town. And if they had been following the grooming rules with me for a long time, they would have longer and longer hair, so that I would enjoy the sight of them. I enjoy the sight of other women with very long hair, even if it's longer and more beautiful than my own, even if I envy them. My hair is very, very thin, and it only grows to hip length, and no longer. That's the ultimate length of my hair. It stops growing, and the individual hairs fall out and then start over, because they are only 'programmed' to grow that far. So I will never have floor-length hair if my hair is loose. Other women can have floor-length hair. I will envy them, but even so, it is required, and I am required to tolerate my envy, and to find other ways to compete against them, and find other ways to show the world that I am a special, important person, and I cannot use 'longer hair' as a way to show everybody that I'm special.

However, I have dreadlocks now, and so, according to the theory, my dreadlocks are able to grow longer than that hair length limit. So far, I haven't had them for a long enough time to notice it. 'Dreadloops' cause the hair to get shorter for a little while. The loose hairs tangle together into loops that pull part of the hair upwards and sideways, so that it loses length at the bottom. My hair has done that a little bit. So it's still about the same length that it was before I let the dreadlocks grow.

I've been reading about dreadlocks, about other people doing them, and I went to a website devoted to dreadlocks. On the website (I think it's 'dreadlockssite.com') they advocate natural dreadlocks, the kind that I have, instead of artificial dreadlocks. I read about people taking hours and hours and hours to create artificial dreadlocks. And there was this guy who approached me when I went to Papa John's Pizza a month or two ago, and he asked me about my dreadlocks, and he said his roommate was doing them, and it took lots and lots of work. I was puzzled, I was like, 'Work? What work?' The guy said it took hours and hours of work to create the dreadlocks and to constantly maintain them. I am not doing any work at all. All you have to do is stop using shampoo (and conditioner, and any other hair product). Just wash with water. The grease sticks the hair together and it gradually mats, starting up at the roots (not the ends). The ends can stay loose. The real mats are up at the top, not the bottom. Then, as it grows, and as the short hairs stick to the existing mats, they tangle together tightly and densely all by themselves. You don't have to do anything at all.

Anyway, since the hair no longer disconnects and falls out, the locks will get longer and longer. That's the only way my hair can grow longer than hip length. And it's true, my hair isn't falling out anymore since I started the dreadlocks. Back when I used to wash and comb my hair, I would get big clumps of hair in the drain in the shower. I had to have a hair catcher over the drain and I had to throw away the clumps of hair every day. These were just the ordinary loose hairs that disconnect and fall out by themselves all the time. It's normal. I don't mean that my hair was 'falling out,' (although I did have a time when I lost more hair than usual). I just mean the normal individual pieces disconnecting. That's not happening anymore at all. There is no hair at all falling off when I take a shower. All of the disconnected hairs are tangled into the locks. I don't have loose hairs all over my clothing and all over the carpet anymore. It used to be that the hair would get all over my carpet, and if I ran the vacuum, or ran a brush over the carpet, it would pick up wads and wads of hair. Now there is nothing. So the dreadlocks have been successful at keeping the disconnected hairs together in my locks.

I had one tiny lock under the hair on the back of my neck. It was a tangle of the short pieces. There is short hair that never grows longer than a few inches. That tiny lock of hair actually fell off yesterday. It's the first lock that has fallen off. I kept it. It's sitting in the shower on a little shelf. I have to decide what to do with it. It was a baby dreadlock only a couple inches long. The whole thing fell off. It wasn't connected to any of the long hairs that keep growing for years and years.

I've taken lots of caffeine this evening. That's why there is no end to all my talking.

Anyway... there are other reasons why I'm not making friends here. It's partly because I don't know if I'll stay here forever. I'm at an apartment group and I'm not going to the neighbors' houses or getting to know them. I don't want to do that if I am going to leave in a year or two. But it's also for a variety of 'they don't understand me' type reasons which 'we' are still talking about.

I'm going to post this even though it wandered through various topics and never really finished anything.