15/05/03 - later
my head is ok at the moment, but i don't feel particularly healthy. i've got a lot of time on my hands. i would like to take some new photos and fool around with them, but gk took the digital camera with him. he often needs it when he's working. it sucks because often when i'm alone i feel a bit less hesitant to try things out. but even if gk hadn't taken the camera, i still might not have felt up to it.
my dreams have been fairly complicated lately, and i've been remembering lots of details. i think it would be too difficult to try to put it all here. in addition, these dreams don't really leave me with very good feelings.
when i lived alone in toronto for four months before coming back to be with gk for good. i was just constantly in such a panic. i was trying to apply for disability, but it was too much for me, too discouraging, and it didn't sound like i was going to get it. i could not contact my family for help. no one approached me. if anyone would have contacted me, i think i would have been afraid of breaking down, losing control. they may have thought of me as cold, because when jamie told me that my father's ex had cancer and was going to die very soon, i just could not contact anyone about it. i wouldn't have been able to hide the state i was in, and i didn't see anything any of them could have done to help me, and i just felt i would have been judged, or that if i hadn't been judged that there was just nothing they could do to help. if i wasn't going to get disability, i just wasn't going to get it, and if they offered me money, it wouldn't have done much because it couldn't have lasted long, or if they offered me a place to stay it couldn't last forever, and the problem seemed unsolvable, and i couldn't imagine staying with any of them anyway. i would feel so much stress. and so it was best for me to try to deal with it in my own way, without involving any of them. and in order to do that, in order not to break down, i *had* to stay away, even when my father's ex died.
i was in a really pathetic state, and didn't go out except to buy food. i did exchange emails with a few people, and someone i knew from ash visited at one point, but other than that, i had no contact with people. i was embarrassed of how i was behaving with jamie, wanting him to buy food for me, and i eventually told him it was better if we had no contact any more, because i couldn't control my behaviour. i had no inner resources, no plan, and i was feeling desperately alone. i felt constant panic. i didn't want to face anyone.
i kept resisting the idea of going back to australia, because i didn't think gk really wanted me to go back, and what i felt i myself wanted was some time to live on my own, in my own way, if only there wasn't all this stress involved with how i'd manage to live. i think gk pitied me, and this pity led him to do what may not have been right for him. i think he's probably got some interesting things out of life since i came back, but i can't help wondering if it was really worth it to him.
i walked to the bloor viaduct one night, to see if i was getting closer to being able to jump. i thought that if it seemed right at the time that maybe i would, but mostly i just wanted to check it out. the walk there wasn't all that long, and i went i think sometime after midnight. the street i walked down, my street, wasn't a main downtown street or anything like that, and it wasn't a busy one. and yet 2 men in separate instances actually got out of their cars to pursue me on foot when they saw me walking along. other men yelled out comments. it was summer, and i wasn't even dressed in a revealing way. just loose black pants and a black cotton t-shirt. my hair was all wild. it was annoying and even distressing at the time, and i just wanted the men to leave me alone, but i don't think that was all there was to it. i think i absorbed that somehow if i still caused this much of a commotion at my age, that if i could manage to get out more i'd probably at least have some chances for romance and excitement in life.
i haven't told anyone in my family that i'm married. i don't know if they've given any thought to how i've been able to stay in australia. maybe they just think it isn't all that difficult to arrange things like that.
i sometimes wonder if one day the department of immigration here will somehow discover that i'm not really psychologically healthy, that i put on an act to get a visa, and if i'll be booted out of the country for being a disgusting liar, or whatever. immigration policies and attitudes towards immigration here are fairly stringent, harsh, unforgiving. australia is not the dumping ground of the world's troubled and dispossessed. it didn't seem to me like i had any other choice. i was going to be homeless in toronto. if i took a risk here and lost, was i really worse off?
