Clouds

I saw Cloud Atlas tonight.  It probably wasn't the right movie to see at this moment.  Themes of love and death and the continuity of personas over time... it's not something that I can take comfort from or even be enchanted by the magic of it all.  Although it was an amazing movie.

Throughout the movie I had one panic attack after another... just the mini-things that I've been having with some regularity, feeling like I have to leap up, to get free.  Feeling like I can't breathe.  The trouble is that I feel trapped in my own body as much as anything else, and I see no way of freeing myself of that.  It's hideous.

I thought I'd gotten past that, but I think that too much caffeine today plus a bunch of other things tipped that biochemical balance over.  I'm pretty sure that chemistry is the catalyst for these things, because the worst times have always been related to other stuff.  But it doesn't matter that much, except that maybe I can prevent them.  I hadn't been feeling so much this way since I started meditating and yoga... and deep breathing was the thing that kept me from screaming tonight.

But it's all larger than that.  Love and death and despair, and my anger with pretty much all the men of my life... and myself, too.  That I keep hooking myself into things that bring me heartbreak, tying myself into love, or what passes for it, and then the bonds smother me and close me in.  I'm torn, all the time, between wanting arms around me and wanting to be free, to breathe, to not want those things at all.

I don't know how to find any peace with this.  I feel like a victim of the legacies of Michael's family and mine... trapped in the cycle of damage that all the previous generations created.  And at the same time, the one complete and perfect thing is my son.  The one thing that I haven't screwed up... although that's more of a tribute to him than to me.

Phillip Larkin was so right and so wrong, all at once.

I don't have any idea where to go from here.  All the paths that I can see from here, including the one on which I have my feet firmly planted, feel wrong and alien.