Almost to another Christmas.

How long have I been writing this blog? Years, right? I remember a few Thanksgivings ago—making an entry then from a grocery store parking lot. Things are different now, but I’m still a vampire. The holidays bring on the usual triggers. I can see why folks make New Year Resolutions. After a while, if I’m paying attention to what I’m doing, I start to piss myself off.

I spend too much time on the internet (especially on my phone), and yet I can’t live without it. I don’t think the people I admire the most waste time like I do. The internet is always a way back into obsession for me, too—I can go and look up all my old victims. I can look up the ones that got away. I can look up their friends. It gets more and more pathetic as I go on.

I’m supposed to speak at the treatment center in a few months—to share my story of recovery so far. I feel like I have to make some changes because I don’t want to go up there and talk about how great recovery is while I know deeply I’m living a boring life. I’ve got to be doing more with the time I’ve got left, if I’m not going to be immortal anymore.

Today I picked up the guitar while Jedd took Fletch to the grocery store. And I decided I need to get over myself not being the best. I need to get over just being okay. If I’m on a permanent plateau with my skills, then that’s where I am. Why not write a song from here and just do my best without having to be somebody?

I also picked up my embroidery project I’ve had going for over a year. There isn’t a goal or an end in sight for it; it’s just there so I can see what needs to happen as I go. I find myself doing a lot of processing while I work. I think a lot about how using my hands is so much better than being on the internet to the extent that I have been.

What’s rad for some people isn’t going to be rad for me. What’s rad for me is doing some creative work while taking care of a 14 month old while also working part time while also being in recovery. I make the homemade muffins with carrots and zucchini, the homemade smoothie pouches, the eggs with spinach and cheese. We dance to Jerry Garcia Band with Fletch on rainy days, hoping the good music we know gets through to him. It’ll be cool to see one day what kind of music he likes on his own.

I stitch and I play guitar and I write—none of it for money. Do I wish I had what it took to make any of these things profitable? Right now, yes, but at the same time I’m just here to accept my plateau right now. Accept that I might not ever make money off of what brings me the most peace and fulfillment. Accept that I’m going to have to do these things in the background of my ordinary life, because I’m not exceptionally dedicated or smart or whatever combination of things I’d need to be in order for that to happen. I need to be realistic, not live in a fantasy world where I get to make money doing what I love while only some know my secret—that I used to hunt for human blood. How could I be so entitled to think the world or this life owed me anything, once I stopped hunting?

This isn’t to come across as beating myself up. I think it’s just that I need to get real with myself. This doesn’t mean quitting my creative pursuits that continually find their way back to the back burner time after time; this is to simply accept that where I’m at isn’t a successful place in terms of becoming a way to work. It means that I can create all I want, but it’s for my mental health and not my pride.

Dangerously close to relapse

The other day, I was sitting with Fletch just watching him play. And I zoned out. It was like being there but not being emotionally present. And my thoughts went to something like “If I could find a way to hunt just once, the blood rush would feel so good while watching Fletch and doing these things around the house…”

I did all the things my recovery has taught me to do in this situation: played the tapes through, as they say. I set myself up for a meeting that afternoon. I said a quick prayer. But this time, it all felt like the desire to hunt was greater than my efforts to resolve it. This time, I wasn’t entirely sure which voice I was going to listen to.

It was a pretty dreadful feeling. I got sad, because I was watching Fletch and able to see him there, playing innocently—and yet I felt so detached. I started to think that maybe hunting would help me get through some of these Fall days—with stress levels higher than usual, birthdays, holidays and anniversaries of some of my most brutal hunts.

It had also been about 24 hours since I’d stopped using social media. I think social media was making me want to hunt. I think social media was also making me want to be human in ways I’ll never be able to. The fashion for the hip chicks is nothing like my wardrobe. All that stuff does is make me want to track down the neck of a hip chick—her looks made so much edgier with blood blooming onto fitted white and high-waisted denim.

They call this blood-craving a burning desire. When I first came into the Union, where hybrid vampires can recover from a life of hunting, I remember thinking that having a burning desire sounded beautiful. I’ve had a burning desire for a lot of things.

The afternoon meeting helped a lot that day. Some hybrid out in Sonoma, CA (with a lot of clean time) shared that he caught himself full of vampiric rage over the thought of potentially not getting the Halloween costume he ordered on time. It’s funny how the rage comes up like that. You never know what could provoke you right back onto the streets and into the bars and clubs.

The topic of choice was Faith, which will make any pure vampire wince. Hybrids can learn to understand it though: when we come earnestly into the rooms of the Union of Vampires (the only requirement for membership being a desire to stop hunting), we have tried everything. We are ready to let others help us. That first attempt to show up at a Union meeting is a step in Faith.

When the topic was introduced, I thought about how it had all started with Faith over seven years ago with me. And I thought about how it’s been a long time since I had that kind of Faith. When Fletch was sick and in the hospital, or when Jedd had to go get help himself—those things shocked me, but there was so much work to do in order to keep things going that I’m not sure I had time to do anything other than pray and stay on the right path. My form of prayer is to ask the air and sky, without directing my words and thoughts anywhere in particular, for wisdom and clarity and right-decisions. It all worked well for me then. But lately, not even during a particularly stressful time in my life, I find myself drifting. I guess that’s how the disease never really leaves.

Coincidentally, today is Fletcher’s first birthday and Jedd’s six month birthday celebrating going without a hunt. I made Jedd some cookies—six big ones. We aren’t doing anything for Fletch’s birthday today because it’s a Friday and family would have a hard time making it here after work hours before the birthday boy goes to bed, and tomorrow is Elle’s wedding so I’ve got to go out of town for that. We will celebrate Fletch next weekend on Saturday.

I’m not worried about a blood relapse at the wedding because there will be several Union members there. That’s not to say I won’t crave it. I know I can leave and call Kathy if I need to. Kathy has been guiding me through the process of the Spiritual Steps and Principles since the very beginning of my shift from active to inactive hunting. She decided it was time to quit when she narrowly escaped obliteration by a stake through the chest that missed her heart by a millimeter. She has the scar to prove it, and it’s wicked.

Fletch will be up from his nap soon. I haven’t felt any burning desires today. After the meeting the other day, I realized I didn’t want to have come all this way to have relapse be a part of my story. But I’ll admit, sometimes I really do lust over what it would be like to break someone’s skin again, just one more time.

Hunter’s Moon

I feel like Jedd and I really need to stay inside. Fletch will be a year old, and even though it might be fun to take him out looking at all the lit-up jack-o-lanterns and stuff, it could be triggering for us. I don’t know how I’ve held out this long with the stress of having an infant. I mean, I’ve definitely thought about hunting. I’ve daydreamed about what it would be like to be one of those stay-at-home vampire moms—the kind who hunt with their gal-pals. Girls’ night out. Blood-thirty in the morning; blood-thirty in the afternoon: who cares? They get through all the stresses of parenting by having their hunting habits neatly tucked away when it’s appropriate, but rage on when their real appetite strikes. These ladies ain’t playing pickle ball.

I was going to spend a while writing, but it sounds like Fletch is up from his nap. We have to run some errands and go by Jedd’s office. He left his energy bars here at the house and needs the iron. I thought after we dropped off the bars, we could go to the bookstore. I need a paper calendar/planner for work. After that, we’ll go and visit my parents.

It’s been hard lately spending less time on the internet and filling that time with actually doing stuff. It keeps my mind busy, but at the end of the day, I’m beat. I had to do something about my social media habit though. It was making me depressed with all the vampires I’m still friends with starting to post their Fall pics. There’s probably going to be an adjustment period before I get used to being more productive with my time. I feel embarrassed saying it, but my internet use was making me stressed and dysfunctional, because I was wasting time and then feeling pressured. Something had to change.

Did Fletch go back to sleep?

I played guitar for 30 minutes today. I have the basis of the 4th song I’ve started over 4 months. I don’t know what it’s about, but lately I’m drawn to the similarities between the wars going on in the world and the history of the vampire-human wars. It all seems so pointless sometimes. Even saying it’s pointless is pointless.

In America, we are so far away from it most of the time. I wonder if it’ll always be this way. It would suck (in a bad way) to be a vampire during a human war, if you were trying to stay off hunting. The smell of fear is intoxicating for a fiend. Vampires have a term called Blood Economy, and I haven’t found another human word more similar than Ethos. The Blood Economy takes in the collective mindset of the hunters and the hunted. When the Blood Economy is good, the state of humanity tends to be chaotic and fearful. When the Blood Economy is bad, you see more hybrids trying to get clean.

It’s noon here. The sky is gray. I have all but given up on the backyard landscaping for the season.

I’m back. Blood dreams again.

I mean, I was never gone; I just stopped checking in for a while. I had a hard time taking care of Fletch on my own when I discovered Jedd was a vampire-in-hiding himself, and had to go to rehab. That’s another story. There never seems to be enough time to keep up with sharing this story.

What matters right now is that Jedd is back, and I have an almost-one-year-old with a small biting habit. Of course, this is both normal for typically developing human babies at the same time as being a hallmark of infant vampires. Honestly, I’m getting exhausted by wondering about it and analyzing Fletch all the time. Can’t he just be a baby, my baby, and we’ll see what happens and adjust as needed? Would being a vampire even be that bad? The statistics aren’t in our favor for having a human unaffected; now that Jedd and I both are recovering vampires, our young is going to be at increased risk. Was I silly to think Fletch could be a normal human?

All family stuff aside, I’m writing to get something out in the open. I’ve been dreaming (twice) of Jim lately. He was this gorgeous guy I met while I was in college. He was really into me, but I was neither mature nor sane enough to be a good match for him, and the “relationship” never came to be beyond two or three dates. He came from a good human family. After having the blood dreams about him I tried looking him up, and I couldn’t find much about him other than that he appears to be happily married with a beautiful daughter. I have been intrigued by my own dreams because they seem to have come out of nowhere, yet are intense and sensual and disarming.

I don’t believe that dreaming about someone means a connection is bound to happen (or that it should). I doubt that dreaming about making someone my victim means anything at all. It doesn’t mean he’s been thinking of me; it doesn’t erase how horribly I botched my part in our dating days. I’m absolved of nothing. I don’t feel there is a spiritual purpose of thinking and dreaming of Jim other than to look for something I need to uncover from the past.

Thinking of Jim took me back. It took me back to how we met (at one of the more upscale bars on the main drag of campus bars). It took me back to the sense that he was so interested in me, I could have said anything and he would have thought it was great. Well—hopefully not anything. I need to keep reminding myself that Jim never knew the real me. If he’d known the real me, he wouldn’t have taken me out at all. Nobody wants a relationship with a vampire. We’re not made for that.

Thinking of Jim took me back to all the men that got away—and I mean that literally. I claimed many victims in college, but the men and women I remember the most are the ones I never bit. There is something about those untapped veins that haunts a vampire forever.

Back before college, I was obsessive and compulsive in high school. Before that, I was obsessive and compulsive in grade school. The focus of the obsessions differed, but the message I told myself was always the same: that this (whatever it was) would fix me. So I think before I began hunting, I was already walking around believing I was a broken child. I was looking for someone or something to save me. I was really sick.

I don’t even believe that pure-blooded vampires are broken. I don’t think anyone is. I think the brokenness comes from inconsistent perceptions of love, confusion, environment, and uncontrollable circumstances. I think it comes from learning and/or being taught negative core beliefs about ourselves. So it’s not our fault, hybrid or not, and just like humans we have to live with the consequences of who we think we really are.

So what’s the point of this entry? I just wanted to say out loud that I’ve been having vivid sex dreams clouded with vampire lust—and those dreams are not of Jedd. But Jedd is the man who walks into the den to find me reading, and delivers a kiss with a drop of raw dessert batter on a fork. Jedd is the real thing. He is not my fix because I am not broken.

I guess it just feels good to say for sure that I know how sick I’ve been, and that there couldn’t have been any other way this story worked out. I wasn’t going to be with Jim or any other guy. My mind was barely ready when I met Jedd. So over the next weeks, I’m looking back on the past to check in with some of the old habits and core beliefs. I thought maybe working on myself might help me to improve my mood especially. It’s better than spending hours on social media or whatever.

That’s all for now.

What are you doing for fun, pleasure, and enjoyment? (Step 1 Contd)

Not much. Everything reminds me of hunting. When Jedd or any of our family steps up to help so that I can get a break from being a 24/7 mother-at-work, my time away from the house mostly reminds me of how I used to isolate before going on rampages. Even on the occasions when I’d only take down one kill, it would still be disguised as a quick trip to the grocery store, a friendly jog in the neighborhood, or a trip to the park to practice guitar. I did all of these things posing as a human, and would lure my victims with my congeniality. Then, I considered hunting to be fun—even though the hangovers were awful.

It’s hard to go and do those old things now without wanting to take things to the extreme. It’s really difficult to separate the innocent processes from the acts of violence themselves. The other day I went to a local park and set up a blanket. There, I played guitar for about a half an hour. I had trouble separating my old self from my new self. When a group of teenagers walked behind me as I played, I caught the scent of their blood in the loose breezes. I improvised the moment, and I knew they were listening and I knew it was wrong of me to draw them in. It was hard to stop playing, but I couldn’t keep going.

Playing the guitar hasn’t lost its magic completely, but when the magic was black to begin with, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to play it purely. I’ve tried studying music theory on its own, to take a mathematic perspective. I’ve tried memorizing scale patterns. The only thing that seems to work (enough that I think of only the moment and the music) is playing with my eyes closed. And then, it sounds a lot like one might think: like someone trying to make their way in the dark. Having fun would be finding a groove somewhere in there.

I write for fun, I guess. I mean—it’s not fun fun. Writing is more like therapy. I like the feeling I get when I string some good words and thoughts together. And I like the feeling I get when I sign off feeling accomplished.

I have fun watching Fletch learn how to do things. He’s so proud of himself when he does well at tummy time. To see him smile at me is a great joy. And when he laughs—I swear, I feel a love so great I couldn’t have ever been a fiend in my life. No vampire would deserve such a wonderful thing.

I keep lying to myself that I’m going to get to bed early

What’s early for an ex-vampire though?

Lately, early for me means 8pm. That must sound so boring to a lot of folks. It’s because Fletch goes down between 6:30 and 7pm, and I need that time in the evening to decompress and hang with Jedd after Fletch is in bed. By the end of the day, I really need that break. And then, by going to bed early, I get a jump on having to hit the ground running again about twelve hours after he goes to sleep.

When I was still in blood psychosis, I didn’t need much sleep. It was actually pretty awesome. Apparently it was mania/hypomania; I just didn’t know it. Anyway, it was like my mind was so alive that I couldn’t stand to sleep more than five hours. Those five hours felt restorative. When I woke up, I’d be excited about starting the day. I thought maybe that was just how I was going to be from then on.

The truth would turn out to be almost the opposite—that eventually the mania would wear off and I’d find myself needing way more sleep than the average human or non-human. I mean, like, I would be totally unsatisfied with less than ten hours of sleep. I think my high sleep needs are part of what has made having a child so difficult. I had to make some drastic changes. I’m still getting 9 hours of sleep on most nights, but more like 8 if I count the time I’m feeding Fletch or lying awake trying to fall back into dreams. Also, the 8 or 9 hours are broken into at least two chunks of time.

It’s fuzzy, but I’ll take it.

For tonight, I could spout off on some updates about my organization and some changes it’s going to be making this year, but that would be more boring than an 8pm bed time. Tomorrow I have plans to walk with a friend in the neighborhood and her one-year old son. It’ll be fun to get the babies together.

I wish I could get the fire out of my mind, and how it called to me.

A fire in the night

At first, I thought it could be rain. Big heavy drops—the kind that start off a storm. The big heavy drops woke me up, and then they started to sound so loud that I figured something had to be leaking; something wasn’t right. Was there water from the rooftop falling down the three stories of our house—converted attic to main floor to slab basement—and onto the back patio? Drops? Pops? Something was off.

Before I got out of bed, I reached over to touch my phone enough to light up the time: 12:36am. Fletch hadn’t woken yet since we put him to bed. I softly walked to the bedroom window that faces the patio. The orange glow of the back yard was enough to help my brain recognize the sounds were coming from the neighbor’s fire pit. He had been adding scrap wood to the fire pit all day, and had evidently thought it was weak enough to be left unattended overnight.

I may have been the only person in the neighborhood who woke for it, but it was quite a show. The pit was completely ablaze with what had to have been at least a 8-foot tall fire. It was casting sparks and embers high into the sky, all the way up toward the hanging power lines streaming above across the yards. Because of the time, and the fact that no one was down there tending to the fire, I became nervous that it was about to get out of control. I went upstairs to wake Jedd.

Jedd wasn’t concerned. He mumbled that leaving a fire unattended was a stupid thing to do, but that it looked contained enough. He said if it made me feel better I could call the fire department. I didn’t feel a need to do that if Jedd wasn’t bothered. But I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep. Jedd went back to bed, and I stood at the window.

Coincidentally, there was a storm coming. Within about twenty minutes, the fire was completely out. It was such a strange few minutes: waking to hear the fire at its peak, and then witnessing it as it calmed down to nothingness. Long after the blaze was dead, I still had a picture of that raging orange light in my mind. It flickered across all the space outside the windows. Beautiful and scary. It was like a soul finally saying something after years of silence.

The timing seemed eerily appropriate. I have been thinking a lot about the disease of being a vampire, and how it lives in us hybrids despite being in remission (for those of us in recovery). The disease can manifest in the form of any obsession as well, and vampires are known for being obsessive over certain things. Some of the oldest vampire lore goes back to tales of distracting vampires with our own OCD: you can leave something out in large numbers (like sand or grains of rice) for them to find, and a vampire will become lost in having to count and sort the substance. This is likely why The Count (a puppet vampire) on Sesame Street likes to, well, count.

Anyway, obsession. That fire and the way it raged just as easily as it fell silent. I haven’t seen or heard anything I’d call an omen in a long time—maybe not even since blood psychosis. But this fire—this fire was something different.

Something about that fire was telling me it is time to pay closer attention.

Wounded pieces of the vampire self

Today I completed a New York Times crossword puzzle (I’m no Jon Stewart; I sometimes can’t even complete a Monday puzzle without getting a hint) and one of the answers was “CDS” with the clue relating to how compact discs are now obsolete. This made me a little bit sad, but in a way that felt sweet and romantic in its nostalgia. Back when I was a young teenager, CDs were the thing, and I remember going to the local music store on the regular to spend all my allowance money on albums I’d heard were good. I was mainly into pop and rock music, with a mild preference for alternative—but I was a mainstream kind of kid, so nothing I listened to wasn’t on the radio.

I felt right at home in the music store though. I would start at the beginning of the alphabet and look at every single album the store had. I would buy stuff I’d heard was good, and that was it.

I didn’t know it then, but now I’m sure this was a very human side of me coming through. Music was a soft place to land for me; it was a way I could be in love without anybody knowing my name. It was a way I could rage without saying a word. Between then and now, I wonder what has happened to me. I don’t search for music like I used to. I don’t listen to albums on repeat like I used to. I used to spend so much time listening to music that it’s one of my strongest memories during that time. So what happened? Did becoming a vampire fry out my desire to keep finding pieces of myself here and there through someone else’s sound?

I don’t know what kind of music would do it for me now. There are still some lost and hurt parts of me, but I don’t know if music would heal them. Maybe I’m afraid that music would just make the pain worse. Maybe I’m afraid that if the music were as good as it could be, it would change me and then my relationships would change. I need everything to be stable. I don’t know why I no longer search. I wonder if it’s just that I’ve been too hurt to feel again.

Less angry as a human

I’m less angry as a human, for sure. Up until I came into recovery and the Union of Vampires, I thought that anger and frustration were permanent hitches of my personality. I figured I’d make an extra angry human once I quit hunting. Surprisingly, I don’t feel the same sort of burning rage I used to. I mean—before recovery, I would actually hate others irrationally. I don’t know where it came from. The disease, I guess.

Tonight I’m recognizing that I am indeed much more peaceful than I ever was. I still get wrapped up and obsessed with things; I can still be petty and a monster behind another person’s back. But I’m starting to want to loosen up on my expectations with the world. That’s helping me not to be so hard on myself.

I really need to go to bed. Maybe I’ll be able to grab some free time tomorrow. An hour uninterrupted to write would be fantastic.

Triggered

Sitting on the couch in the morning before 9am, and I came across a Pierre-Émile social media post where he re-enacts the dance from the film Dirty Dancing, editing it so that he is starring the different characters himself.

It reminds me of finding out that the place I went to rehab is close to the place where Dirty Dancing was filmed. It gets talked about while you’re in treatment—I guess because it adds to how special the experience can be (if you let it be special).

Fresh out of blood psychosis, or perhaps not quite fresh out of it, I arrived to the campus in April of 2016. At the very least, I was happily manic, though not experiencing magical thinking beyond thinking I was being filmed most of the time. I really thought I was on a vampire movie set. I really thought I was the main character. Over time, it was clearer and clearer that “cast members” were actually just regular vampires seeking treatment. But the effects of blood psychosis can linger for a long time. You just sort of let them slip from your reality as you go, while you grieve the beautiful dreams you thought you were living out loud.

So sometimes a memory gets awakened, and the feeling is sad and beautiful at the same time. In my time spent in recovery as a human, I believe the human life is exactly that: beautiful and sad. To feel and understand these two words at once, in my opinion, is a way of knowing yourself as the human you are. What have life and death taught you about beauty? And what have life and death taught you about sadness? As a vampire still actively hunting, I’d never get to understand what death truly is; nor would I ever appreciate life. Human life is a painful, precious gift.