Stress Dreams

So for the past week or so I've been having these weird dreams that at first seemed disparate at first, but now when I look at them all together, I am dubbing "the stress dreams" because that's what they are doing; they are stressing me out on a mental level that I do not appreciate. I just woke up at 1AM bawling my eyes out from a major guilt trip and I need to do something before I try going back to sleep.

1. I am in some kind of educational hospital room. There is a doctor there, male, with a bunch of slides on a projector and also some students. Once mentions that they had my results, but were waiting until I was there to open them. "All negative," he said. The tests all came back negative.

"So what is wrong with me?" I ask.

*wakes up

2. I am dressed in a tuxedo in a ballroom with the "snobby" people I knew in high school. They weren't necessarily mean to me or anything, but they definitely exuded that they were of a higher social status than me. Kalimov. Reckart. Jessica W I can't think of her married name. Greg. That group of people. Anyway I am with them and we are gathered around a pool table or fancy green dining table when I realize I have to get to work to teach. However, many of the students also had to go be in the orchestra performance that day, so they were gonna miss my class.

*Then the apartment maintenance people start lawn trimming at 7am and enter themselves in my dream and then I wake up.

3. Part of my car key breaks off. It looks like some kind of hardware screw connected to the top of the regular key part. I have only had this car/key for a few months and I am distraught. My mom goes to the nearby hardware store to find an attachment lookalike so we can least start the car. I am criticizing how stupid it is to have basic screws on top of the metal part of your car keys (seriously it looked like a stupid alien head with the bolts sticking out like ears)

*This was the dream I forgot the longest until it sprang up once I pulled my car key out of the ignition and looked at it

4. I am gathering up all the remaining baby toys my family had (teddy bears, squeaky toys, etc.) and of course I am playing with each of them as we reminisce about each toy and whose it was. We're getting ready to donate them "to the new baby" but then I told my mom I didn't have a baby yet. She immediately threw the whole bag into the trash.

Half awake, half not, I start berating myself for this biological...duress? How the f** have I not had a kid by now? My mom was 27 when she had me. My dad my 24. I'm still a f***ing virgin because I "haven't got it figured out yet." I call myself names. I call myself fat. I say that while I have a big heart I have no one to give it to and that's why I'm so fat so I can pretend my heart belongs to two people. I call myself a faggot.

*I wake up, in tears, feeling like a genuine piece of shit.

And now we're here. I can say I WAS feeling better until I had to write that last paragraph, and then I mini-barraged myself again. It hurt to write that, Staring at it now feels a little surreal. I am also still sleepy and angry and I don't know what to think right now.

Fact is, I'm not wrong. I am a piece of shit. Now I'm telling myself subconsciously, too.

This is definitely some kind of funk I have been in for over a week now. I always get depressed about my birthday because it feels like a reminder that I haven't made a lot of those "traditional" milestones in life, and a lot of them feel like they're slipping further and further away. The only way I was gonna come close to affording a home was shot when I failed on Wheel of Fortune. I'm too ashamed to go back on any dating websites/apps because I don't know WHO I am interested in. I sure know no one is interested in me. I have a lot of amazing, caring, and wonderful friends who, when I'm with them, I feel good, I feel... normal, but the second I come back home it crashes down back on me like the clamor of a thousand pianos. I stole that from a poetry book I read in college.

It popped back in my head that a lot of my favorite songs either say one of two things:
- you can always change who you are
- you cannot change and you are you and that is awesome
and I honestly feel like I'm stuck somewhere in between. Nepantla again. It always comes back to Nepantla. Not Mexican enough and not American enough. Too Mexican and too American. Not gay enough and not straight enough. Too gay and too straight. I look at my feet, tan except for where my summer sandals go on, and I see the Mexican I'm supposed to be (tan), and the Mexican I really am (ghost white).

When I got my last haircut, I legitimately fantasized about f***ing the hair stylist and her co-worker. There was nobody else there; it was not a busy time. And my 14-year-old straight happy self was so stupidly pleased with this idea. Then of course "maturity" kicks in and rationally dismisses the idea. You have no condoms. You have no skills. You've never had sex to start with. They would get fired. They would not have a good time. They would call you the pervert you are and make you leave.

This has definitely gone on longer than I expected. I would like to go back to sleep now. I would like to like myself again now.