tinea:any of a number of infectious diseases

�what is Man? a miserable little pile of secrets.� - andr� malraux

"i desire to live in peace and to continue the life i have begun under the motto, to live well you must live unseen." - rene descartes

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clearing the last of the dead ends.

2018-05-15 @ 10:02 p.m.

mother's day was fine, really good even. i wish my family was a little more sensitive when we had guests, and didn't insist upon having really awkward immediate family conversations in a really confrontational way in front of them, but whatever, that's on the person who started it. all in all it was a nice time with no anxiety and my brother and SIL made it which was even nicer.

it was beautiful yesterday but ridiculously hot today but i'm thankful i have an AC unit that works wonderfully for my space. honestly, when i was in the process of moving that was one of my biggest fears, that i was going to be super uncomfortable in the summer and be forced to lose the few windows i have to window units, but i found a great workaround for that and now my whole place is cool and comfortable. we'll see about the electric bill when we get there.

last week i made a major decision and did a major haircut and restyle. i don't remember if i wrote about it when it was happening, but a LOT of my hair broke off and/or was totally fried from overstyling with heat, and even more fell out from a medication i was taking and stress from everything boy was doing to me, so for the past year i've kept it up in a wrap in a protective style and have used NO heat whatsoever on it.

at my last therapist appointment, i was telling her how when it was super damaged and delicate and brittle, near the end of our relationship, i washed it one night and it was still damp and i told boy NOT to touch it. we were about to have sex and i said repeatedly to him, do not touch it. it will get tangled REALLY EASILY and it will take me hours to comb it out. do not touch it. PLEASE do not touch it.

so what do you think he did? of course he touched it, and he touched it a lot. he was on top of me and i could literally feel him like grinding and mashing it together. i know he was doing it on purpose. he touched it more after i asked him not to than i think he had ever touched my hair in our entire relationship. when we were done i was super tired so i just fell asleep. the next morning i woke up and i could feel that the entire back of my hair was just fully matted together. like one big flat dredlock on the back of my head. i was literally in tears when i felt it. i went downstairs and before work tried to pick it out, but after a good 30-40 minutes i had only succeeded in ripping out a massive hairball and the rest of it was still really bad. i tried to wash it again, hoping that the conditioner and wetness would provide a little bit of slip to help me loosen it, but it only made the whole thing worse.

i had wasted a bunch of time and had to go to work so i patted it dry, wrapped it, and went to work. when i got back to my house i tried to start picking it out again, but it was done. it was over. the entire back of my hair, which had grown down past my shoulders for the first time since i was probably 10 years old, was completely knotted and matted down into two giant dreds. my crown had a huge bald spot from the medicine and the stress. i looked in the mirror at myself and just cried. i knew there was nothing i could do.

the next time i went to boy's we were in bed about to have sex again and he started pulling on my wrap, trying to get me to take it off. i said NO, my hair is really messed up under there. i have it in a protective style and it cannot get messed up. instead of just respecting my wishes he started arguing with me about it and demanded i take off the wrap because he didn't like the way i looked with it on, and i said no. i absolutely won't. i had it pinned into place with bobby pins and the whole time we were having sex he was trying to rip it off but finally stopped because i kept yelping in pain from the bobby pins tearing into my scalp.

the sociopath dumped me the week after that, or maybe it was two - i forget because he was ghosting me. that first week after i could barely function from the shock, but one day i was getting ready for work and took a good hard look at myself in the mirror before i put my wrap on. i was like, you know what? and i just went and took out my scissors and cut off the entire back of my hair. there was only about an inch left in some spots, maybe two at the most in others. but it felt so good to just accept that there was nothing i could do about it except start over.

my hair ended up being a good metaphor for my life. i kept it wrapped and protected, did deep conditioners and took care of myself (improved my diet and such as well), and last week went back to my hair guy and told him i was ready to come back to him and straight hair. the only reason i stopped getting it chemically straightened was because of boy. because who the fuck cares what i preferred, right? fucking stupid. but now i know better.

so i came out looking, smelling, feeling like a million bucks - ahh!*

when i went to work the next day everyone was like omg, you look amazing. you look so good. boss wasn't there when i arrived and called me later on and was like - did you go!? are you happy!? send me a picture! and i said no, he had to wait to see it in person until he came back. seriously like 5 minutes later he came busting into the office like omg. all night he couldn't stop looking at me. he kept saying, "you just look so different. so feminine. so much younger."

so anyway, all of that backstory was to say that i said to my therapist that i felt like i was cutting away one of the last bad things he left me with. it was the last tie to my life with him, you know?

now i have all of these sunny days. i look at myself and feel good. boy did nothing but criticize me, about everything, all the time. i remember probably 6 weeks before the breakup we were in the bedroom and i was wearing something, and he started criticizing my outfit, then he started criticizing his own and tearing up his closet trying to find something different. he was like "don't you think x? don't you think you should x?" i wish i could remember exactly what he said. but i looked right at him and said, "no, i look and feel fine in this. stop trying to make me feel insecure about myself because YOU are feeling insecure about yourself." i wish i could describe the look he gave me. contemptuous is a good start.

so for now and for the foreseeable future, i'm dedicating myself to self-improvement. i'm growing my hair back and it's going to look how i like it to look. i'm going to start taking my vitamins again and eating better because my skin is suffering and i miss how it felt to be strong and energetic. i don't want to impress anyone but myself, and i don't need to worry about someone cutting me down and insulting me, making me second guess every single choice.

everything is good, and i am getting better. the other night boss and i were alone, where we have most of our personal conversations, and he asked how long it had been and i told him it had been since august. he said "you know, a year ago you thought your life was over. you didn't think you were going to survive." and i said, i knew i would survive but i thought it was going to hurt more, to be more difficult. you know? like i didn't think anything was going to work out, i was going to be homeless and broke and depressed and unfortunate forever. but look at me now. it hasn't even been a full year yet and i have almost everything i want.

almost :)

okay. gotta go to bed. i keep staying up stupidly late and then i wake up stupidly late and have no time to do anything before work.