I'm grateful for: better health; easy Hebrew books, I'm reading them again; settling in.

I stare at the empty white box. I go away. I come back again later, or the next day, or a few days gone, and stare at the empty white box.

Life's been full. Not terribly bad, not terribly good. I've been enjoying putting pictures on the walls, settling in someplace for the first time in over five years.

There's a definite reduction of stress. Even though relations with the husband are at a low ebb again, a chicken died, money is slipping away at a terrifying rate, Havva hasn't found work, well, and so on.

I'm doing better, getting around. As seems to be too normal in my life, as soon as I finally had a definite answer and treatment plan ready to go, the dr.s all agreed and so on, I stopped bleeding. So far I've just done nothing. I expect I'll have to at least let my dr. know that I'm not following the treatment plan. If I'm not bleeding, and my health is improving, I don't want to do anything to mess with that.

This is our big holiday season, which leads to an extra measure of busy-ness. We invited a family of new olim (immigrants to Israel) to be with us for Rosh HaShanah. This is very exciting because it was our first chance to host someone else since we'd been the new olim on the block the last three years.

It went incredibly, amazingly, almost unbelievably well with the result that now they are coming down for the whole of Sukkot. The kids will be here for at least eight days (I haven't counted it out on the calendar yet), and the mom is coming down for the first day (a yontif, holy day) and at the end for Simchat Torah, Eliyahu's birthday and Shabbos.

I'm nervous. Because of the length of the stay I worry about guests starting to stink after three days, but I also worry about the inevitable reaction, at least it's been inevitable so far in my life, that people who get to close to me pretty much always end up disliking me. I'm not talking about people like John and Neil/Arye. It was axiomatic for more than a decade that whenever I met someone new they would like me initially, become friendly/friends, and usually between four and six months later would suddenly (from my perspective) hate me. I'm not making this up, exaggerating or anything. You could (if you knew any of them) ask almost anyone who knew me through those years.

And that was an improvement over what I had experienced most of my life, which was that pretty much everyone I ever met hated me on sight. Some probably merely disliked me or found something about me distasteful. When you are on the receiving end, it really doesn't matter much, does it?

Some of that changed with my learning to look for different people, the sort of people I hadn't usually met before. Some changed as I got better at acting 'normal.' Mostly, though, it's still true that me getting too close to other people is fraught with anxiety, and tends to bring less than happy results. I am not a 'normally socialized' person, and I can only fake it for so long.

Actually just writing this here is a bit nerve-wracking for me. I suspect one of the reasons I've been having so much trouble writing here lately. Because I am good at acting 'as-if,' and the last several years I've not actually run into so much of that sort of thing, doesn't mean all of that hasn't left quite a mark between my ears. I seem to be doing better at relating to others, and also better at finding people who are not going to be horrified or appalled or threatened by me to too great an extent. Or whatever it is. One of those questions I would like to ask Hashem someday, since I can't read people's minds, but can only guess based on their actions.

Anyway, it's all scary. I am so bloody tired of being scared.

Well, anyway.

That is quite enough for one night. And tomorrow is going to be another really big day. It's a good thing my health has improved, I don't know quite what we would do otherwise.

I'm listening to my fan, and my thoughts, neither of which is particularly soothing.

:: Yesterdays : Tomorrows ::

~~~Last Five Entries~~~
Hi and goodbye - 2010-10-15
I'll be moving on - 2010-10-10
Gold membership and stuff - 2010-10-10
Decisions, decisions - 2010-10-07
Days to go - 2010-10-06