Some importance of stories

[Where we say today read Friday, now a couple of days previous. Writing went slow.]

Today reminds me sharply of the importance of writing the second Kays' World story. It managed a usual amount of good and bad, perhaps a bit more than most days. Industry placement, performing library work. Today was short-handed due to sickness and I had to manage the front desk alone for some stretches in the morning. Was very sluggish to start and wondering if might be coming down with a bit of sickness. But it got managed and so did other stuff, enough to be complimented at end of day for the help provided (unless that was regular make-nice).

Still, this place is showing me limits. Putting me in sight of the place where I can't make sense of my surroundings, where all those colours and shapes and noises stop meaning anything. Fortunately not crossed into, despite fear it might be. Perhaps I am fortunate to have been only potentially rather than actually having to deal with that. I did on a couple of occasions experience sufficient dissociation as to be observing my body performing its tasks without my conscious input. We might call that a state of enlightenment... it is not entirely hard. And there is a bit less stress as we keep coming back, despite the anxious whimpering on the drive there, and back home, and in those moments alone. But there were also some moments of feeling calm in the day, tentatively capable and not in every moment fraught with stress.

So. There were moments of calm and that made it better than previous days doing this work-thing. There were moments of dissociation from my own body and its actions, moments in which I felt near to losing my ability to parse coherently external input. That suggests worse than previous days. And later on, well. Mind got captured in an obsessive thought spiral, and a heavy layer of dread. Because people keep connecting this swine flu thing with the zombie-plague-apocalypse idea and that was a whole big mess of waking nightmare for me half a year ago. I suppose that is my fault - I had first the connection and though not saying it first did say to others the steps that led me there. They followed that readily, out loud. But that had been two days before, so perhaps it takes a while.

I was having no success shaking that despite repeated attempts at self-distraction. At least there was no imminent panic like there had been last year, no feeling of impending or realised reality. I think. And it was a combination of relief + deathtrap to see so many unpanicked people about. It still seemed not a good situation, terror obsession + infirm grip on self awareness and sensory processing. Fortunately I got to take a break. In it I took up to rescue myself the book I'd previously labelled a wallbanger.

It was on page seven, the passage in which our male lead reflects that it would be nice to have a woman in his life, and though he sees someone occasionally it is not love between them.

Invariably, after they'd completed their lovemaking and were lying together, she'd tell him, "You're the best, Robert, no competition, nobody even close."

He supposed that was a good thing for a man to hear, but he was not all that experienced snd had no way of knowing whether or not she was telling the truth anyway. But she did say something one time that haunted him: "Robert, there's a creature inside of you that I'm not good enough to bring out, not strong enough to reach. I sometimes have the feeling you've been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you've dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about. You frighten me, even though you're gentle with me. If I didn't fight to control myself with you, I feel like I might lose my center and never get back."

He knew in an obscure way what she was talking about. But he couldn't get his hands on it himself. He'd had these drifting kinds of thoughts, a wistful sense of the tragic combined with intense physical and intellectual powerm even as a young boy growing up in a small Ohio town. When other kids were singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," he was learning the melody and English words to a French cabaret song.

So. Wallbanger. Well, I thought so. Needn't be. Could be subject to interesting development, alternate interpretation. But for me, yah. Because it was represented to me as a human story, a love story, something that gives hope to people at what they could find in their own lives even if it seems impossible. But then we get this and suddenly our male lead is inhuman. He is not some person who might find love intense and unlooked-for, he is a god wandering lost upon the Earth, exerting a mysterious power on those whose lives he passes through. Suddenly and not yet contradicted by my resumed reading, it seems instead this story is of a lonely woman enchanted by the hidden depths of a passing masculine stranger who sweeps her off her feet.

But perhaps not. Perhaps she has her own inhuman depths, her own uncontainable qualities which set her apart, and then we have not a story which offers hope to anyone of what they might find, but two inhuman entities finding each other in a world of faded mortals. I suppose unless people, generally, are identifying with this as themselves being separate, above the most of the species.

It could turn out differently. I might be mistaken. But that's what I saw when I started and why I wanted to cast the book away. It did however help me then, to dive back into for stabilising, immersing in distraction from my own thoughts. Mostly the rest of the day went well, though some times still approached overloading senses and highlighted to at least myself slowness of putting things together.

So that's why I am reminded of the importance, personal, of writing the second Kays' World story.

Coming out is hard to do

This past week was the first back in classes, back at industry placement after a couple of weeks on break. It was a holiday period at TAFE and they wouldn't let us continue our placement during that period because their insurance would not cover it. Fair enough.

Wednesday, gave Q a lift home. Just before she got out, warned me to expect questioning the next day at the placement. The libraries she and I have been placed at are twins, basically, part of the same overall system, closely located and having complementary collections. A lot of what we have been doing at our placements involves managing the books being transferred between each, the ones returned to the other, the ones requested by students from elsewhere. That's the scene.

One of the women who has been working where I was has since been snatched up by the location Q has been placed at, working there in the last week before we were sent on break. They were talking and Q, apparently, was asked if I were gay. The answer to that was actually no, and that I even have a fiance. Well. But moving on, she thus warned me to expect lots of gossipy questions.

I was expecting something less pleasant than what transpired. It turns out people were mostly interested to have a detail from my personal life and wanted to know more. Q and I had shared a bit of mutual culture shock at realising people of roughly our age cohort really do such things. Aaanyway.

"Why didn't you mention this before?"

"It didn't come up."

It's true. I was asked variously about broad details of soltice and meeting her, what she does, our plans and suchlike. I tried to mention pazi_ashfeather but what I said seemed to get ignored in favour of something which better fit accustomed social patterns. Considered trying to be open about other stuff too, but it's hard to find moments when those things would be at all relevant, so we didn't.

Tricky, huh? And unfair.

Is like what Q said a while back: "I think if you die in Library and Information Services, you die in real life."