Archive for the 'Being Mrs. Carlson' Category

The Mansion

Published on February 13, 2012 by Corinna Carlson | 1 Comment

Update: Mrs. E passed away over the weekend of February 25th 2012.

Sometimes I get to thinking about how long I’ve lived in this apartment building, I didn’t see this as a place that I‘d be stopping over in for long. I have lived in two different suites but it isn’t like that changed the day to day happenings of the residence.

When I moved in here, I was only 22 and already had so much furniture the place almost didn’t fit it all. The landlady was old and creepy, already in her 70s. She’s still alive, but barely, she isn’t the landlady anymore and she needed to be put in a home ages ago but she wasn’t, she still lives next door. She falls a lot, I helped get keys one day when she was trapped in her place. I thought she was going to pass over Christmas; they had to bust her door down to rush her to the hospital. When I got back from Bali at the end of last month, she was still going.

We’ve had the strangest relationship, myself and Mrs. E. We went from despising each other to the point that I used to write hilarious blog posts about her, to realizing that I’m actually closer to this woman than I have ever been [was] to any of my grandmothers. I see how sad that is; it isn’t like we’re all Tuesdays with Morrie close, but when you consider the fact that I have lived in this building for twelve years, longer than I have lived anywhere in my entire life and have spent little time with any of my family outside of my parents, to me, it makes perfect sense.

I can hear loud, strange sounds and coughing coming from her place, nights are the worst, listening to someone slowly dying. I don’t know what normal numbers would be but a number of residents have died since I’ve lived in here including one Gus Greeper and another of them being Mrs. E’s husband. He used to smoke out near the hallway, tucked away in the stairwell, where the smoke would billow, it couldn’t escape properly and it would hang in the air and seep under my door. Many tenants tried to have it stopped over the years but you just didn’t mess with Mrs. E when she was landlady, oddly you still don’t mess with her and she hasn’t been the landlady for a couple of years. Sometimes the smell of cigarette smoke will wake me up out of a dead sleep and I will swear it’s his ghost. Sure, my bed is directly under the window but I smell it when I’m awake in other parts of the apartment at random times as well.

This is a woman who came into my locked apartment when I was literally naked from the waist up, uninvited, and WOULD NOT LEAVE and now I’m SAD she’s dying. I would say that her NOT having keys to the suites anymore with her retirement has strengthened our relationship. I don’t think I will ever understand the majority of her behaviour but the life progression that she has seen me make from 22 to almost 35, well shit, I’ve gone from cops at my door to so calm it can be creepy. Let’s not fool ourselves of course I still have a temper. I remember one day years ago after we’d had a row, her muttering under her breath, “not a nice girl, not a nice girl.” That is a post for a different day, but even little things like that, when at the time she was just as evil, make me sit back and actually take a moment to be proud of myself.

I’m not even the longest standing occupant, there is a dude down the hall who lives next door to my old suite and I know for sure he has been in here longer than me, he gave me a book on farts one time, and my neighbours on the other side of the suite I’m in now out resident me as well; their bed hits my bedroom wall while they’re having sex. There might be one tenant on the first floor as well but I’m not 100% sure. A few people have come and gone that I’m still in contact with but for the most part, as with almost everything else in life, I keep to myself.

Of course I don’t know whether Mrs. E will die alone in her apartment or whether someone will put her in a home, where I suppose she could also die alone. There is no happy ending there. But I remember being upset in Bali that I might not get to say goodbye. I’ve gone through so much living in this building that my shrink doesn’t even think living in here is healthy for me and even though Adam and I outgrew this suite before we even became an Adam and I, I’ll always have devastatingly fond memories of my extended stay in The Mansion.

We just got a rent increase, it’s balls.

On Today.

Published on July 14, 2011 by Corinna Carlson | 6 Comments

Today how overwhelmed I am from the happenings of the weekend decided to nail me at the best time and place, the gym. Tuesday’s workout was fine I felt great, I was still in denial happy la la land, but today as it generally goes I was triggered by something small and innocent and bam apparently I have to deal with my feelings. Fucking feelings always making me feel shit.

Doesn’t so much matter what happened but for the first time ever on Friday evening I admitted on Twitter that not only had Adam and I had a fight but that he wouldn’t be coming home that night. Many people were very quickly very supportive and I can’t thank you enough we are both very lucky to have the friends we do. Sometimes I just get to a point where I don’t care, if people want to pretend their marriages and relationships are perfect fine so be it that works for them but I think it is unrealistic to think that an eight year relationship / [almost] five year marriage wouldn’t have a few hick-ups. Since last July, we’ve been going through the first real rough patch in our marriage and I’m quite frankly tired of pretending everything is fine. I don’t feel the need to elaborate further but I do feeI that I needed to be honest with myself about it. At this point all that really matters is that we want our marriage to work.

Friday evening also brought the horrible news that a friend had again tried to take his life. This is a friend who I’ve visited in hospital before, someone we both care for deeply, but for me when they get to the point of hospitalization there is a part of me that sometimes shuts down, I simply cannot handle it and I feel physically ill. When you are dealing with friends who suffer from depression and you yourself suffer from depression and have tried to take your own life on multiple occasions, in some cases you have no choice but to protect yourself first and immediately pull down the oxygen mask, but in others you have to put the triggers and nausea aside and step up to the plate walk into the fucking ward and visit or in this case you and your husband who you’re not really talking to spend the day following day with them.

It took a few hours for my body to relax on Saturday, for me when I hear someone say something to the affect of “a few people would’ve missed me, some I’d really hurt, most not.” I can’t deal because already losing someone to suicide was by far the worst pain I have to this day ever felt in my life, I know for a fact that any variation of that statement is bullshit. And from the most selfish place in me I won’t lose another person that way, I fucking won’t. But I also won’t not be friends with someone or abandon them because they suffer from something outside of their control.

And so today I’m freaking out a tad and feeling yet again unaccepted for my depression because I tweeted my feelings today and was instantly unfollowed by someone I’ve met so yes, I take it personally. Now, let me be clear, if someone doesn’t want to follow me on Twitter I’m fine with that, long gone are the days I’d freak out, I didn’t even understand social media back then, but fuck it, whatever, that was until today because you know what? If you know the person, even if you don’t like the person show some fucking tact, wait a few hours, don’t make it so glaringly obvious how big of an asshole you are. I get it, not everyone wants to see people who suffer from depression talk about their depression but that’s actually kinda funny too, because most people will keep following the person who suffers from Cancer and support their battle but unfollow the person struggling with depression. I’m trying to calm down and relax I obviously know I’m not in this bad of a rant mood over Twitter, I’m honestly sort of amazed I cracked this soon, normally I can hold shit it and make it a fuck lot worse before I explode so I guess I’ll call that a baby step in the right direction of feeling the feelings.

This is What I Know

Published on September 29, 2010 by Corinna Carlson | 11 Comments

I know I haven’t been able to post. I have been letting things get to me and everything is starting to pile up and I feel like I may explode.

I have had a really shitty few months. I was hoping that after I quit my job that things would level off but as it turns out that is not to be as Gus is in her last couple / few weeks here. It sort of puts into perspective how ridiculous everything has been but it is also just a distraction. I can blame being depressed on the fact that Gus is dying for reals now. But I’m still depressed, I was before we got the news that she was taking her final turn on Monday.

I’ve been thinking so much concentrating on any one thing for more than a minute is futile. There are things I’m accepting about myself. And I say accepting because I’m attempting not to feel guilty about them which would mean that instead of feeling guilty all the time, I’m basically saying take it or leave it.

I’m accepting that I am never going to be easy to be friends with, or become friends with. I over share, I open up to fast, I wear my heart on my sleeve and in my twenties when I was dating and building friendships I never hid who I was, how messed up, self centered and selfish I was, I just was. I’ve always talked a lot, I’ve always been a story teller and if people didn’t like it I was in most cases able to have it roll right off me. I was young what did I really care if so and so didn’t like me. When a guy would dump me I remember I would try and help myself get over it by picturing their age if they were older and thinking how at their age I’d just be a notch on a board and they’d be a fleeting memory. But over the last few months I don’t think it is that wearing my heart on my sleeve isn’t working for me anymore it’s that my asshole meter and I keep trying to become friends with these already fucked up narcissists who just end up stomping my heart into a million little pieces. It is my fault as well, why not open up to friends I already have why do I need new ones, granted I figured that was healthy given I’m trying to work on getting out more and being more social. But I also feel like I’m getting older and that if people don’t like me, for who I am, then who am I? It feels lonelier than normal and I don’t want to change.

I wish I believed I deserved good things and good people in my life, I do have many but question why with how much and how badly I fuck up and I’m starting to feel too old to fuck up with the regularity that I do. It isn’t like I don’t know that people love me I just need resolution and when I can’t have it I go a bit insane or it is one of the things that sends me reeling.

Sometimes I think I’m a really shitty friend but then I also know that whenever someone really needs me I’m fucking there. I have always been a pretty recluse person and as I get older it only gets worse. I know that I’m hard, my walls are steep even with the extensive prologue I provide, but I know that I’m worth the extra effort. Life in general just doesn’t make it easy to remember that at times.

de monster me

Published on August 8, 2010 by Corinna Carlson | 7 Comments

Normally when I use the word demonstrative on my blog I use it very loosely, it is a word I happen to love and on the level that I have written about myself up until now the context in which I have I used it is always simply to mean that I am not an affectionate person. Having exposed some of the things I have about myself in the last couple of posts l’m feeling more comfortable writing of things that make me who I am, but they’re things that I haven’t spoken about on here in detail before.

Regardless of how bad it is, and it’s really fucking bad, it is refreshing to be able to finally say, yes, Adam and I have problems, we’re normal. Of course people know we do, but I get sick of the online facade. Sure we have a fantastic relationship but we are, hands down, going through a tough time right now. Why hide it, when it is affecting so many areas of my life?

A week or two ago I tweeted a line from one of my old poems “how can I feel so alone when you’re sitting right next to me”. This facet of my personality leaves me an excruciatingly lonely person at times. Wanting to reach out so incredibly badly, feeling frozen and not being able to do it.

It is no one’s fault. Neither of my parents grew up in demonstrative families and that wasn’t their fault either. My parents always told me they loved me but until I left home three months after turning nineteen I had never said it back.

In small ways as a teenager I was able to open up physically but back then the problems I had with affection I deemed for the most part normal adolescence stuff. And because of general teenage angst and insecurity I was able to fake being more affectionate than I really was. How I don’t know or remember, because I can’t fake it anymore as an adult, even craving every single person I meet to like me it is still more common for me to use snail mail [you should see my stationary collection] or my fingers on a key board to express affection, to reassure people I care.

I know it is difficult for people first getting to know me to understand how I can open my heart so freely in writing and then presumably close it off in person. I’m not a particularly closed off person, but if you don’t know me, let’s just say I [can] take a while to grow on people. I have friends who ask if it is okay before they hug me and some who just do it. I’ve had friends convinced they could break whatever it was holding me back and would try to force affection on me, mind you, in a caring way; but still not for me.

This runs a lot deeper for me than simply tensing up when someone hugs me. For years I couldn’t look people in the eye when I spoke to them, I know that to most it comes off as being rude, for me it was from feeling insecurity and fear.

Although it was something that always bothered me about myself, when it would come to my girlfriends, I always wanted to be able to be affectionate with them when we’d have sleep overs and give hugs without a back pat or loose arms but for the most part I couldn’t. I’d send them an affectionate note saying how much the weekend meant to me instead.

I think the best of example of just how bad it is would be how I used to treat my cat. In 1999, there was an incident that made me realize that I had an actual problem, I wasn’t just a cold bitch on the outside. Gus has always been a needy cat, she was the runt of the litter and she is spoiled rotten. But she never used to be. When Gus would jump in bed with me and try to snuggle with me I’d push her away, I’ve always been a non cuddle sleeper period, and mostly a non cuddle person in general, so having a cat putting her paws in my eyes and mouth was all fun and games during the day but when I was trying to sleep or read and she’d sit down right in the middle of whatever book I’d be reading, I never really thought anything of it; just pushing her off. I thought she’s a cat they’re supposed be independent why does she even want so much attention.

I was living with someone who also had a cat, this cat hated Gus, this cat wasn’t so much mean as she was just a total fucking terror on four legs. We never got along, myself and that cat, but she had a close relationship with her owner. It wasn’t until I saw how affectionate he was with his cat and how affectionate he was with Gus that I realized that I was depriving my cat of affection. I ignored it at first, it wasn’t as if, except for pushing her off the bed, that I was mean to her. It was years ago so I don’t remember exactly how it happened but Gus must have been trying to get some affection out of me and I wasn’t having it and this person basically yelled at me “Corinna, pet your fucking cat!”.

It didn’t happen overnight but just opening up to my bloody cat changed me, actually letting her jump up on me when I’m upset and comfort me, letting her sleep with me and not tossing her off the bed when she was ready for me to be up and walking all over me. How did I live without that before? With it being eleven years later, I’m glad I changed this behaviour towards her when I did. But then again how do I live with so little human to human contact? I have found being a good three years into my thirties now that it’s something that bothers me, a lot. And it is something that I have for a few months now been working on because I want to learn how to get over this before it’s too late, before people are gone from my life forever and I never got to give them one of those hugs that I’m starting to get better at giving, the ones where I will actually pull you in tight to me. And so far it has felt good every time I have been able to do it.