k, here goes.

It is may and I just finished my first year of college. I was walking through the Oakland airport thinking about how life feels so confusing and disorienting because we live it in pieces. “This is the end of an era,” Tanya said, looking at my empty room. And she’s right. This is the end of many eras. I guess sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, or the other way around, I’m not sure how that saying works. But life is like a porcelain bowl and time is two hands dropping it on a floor and to live is to sift through the pieces in an order that doesn’t make sense, and only at the end will we ever be able to see why each thing happens and where everything goes and how everything causes everything else.

It’s like what’s Neil Hilborn said; “we will all be part of each other one day.” That’s the truth. I had no intention of going here, I only knew about Berkeley because of Moli, I went here because I drank a smoothie and had a feeling and my god, I had some of the worst moments of my life here but I also had some of the best. I have lived the last eighteen years looking through the rear view window of a vessel going light speed into the future and maybe the problem has always been in believing that somehow I can control the drive.

I can see the stars out the plane window. I can see the city, like the night we drove the hills and i thought he was going to kiss me but it never happened. I thought he was the answer but it’s never going to be that easy. I wish I understood why things happened the way they did. But on the good days, where the light is gentle and not harsh, when the vines climb the overpass towers and i am a clusterfuck of patterns with messy hair, I find it in myself to trust the current. I have never been a religious person, but I do believe there is something bigger than us. I believe the universe has hands and shapes the world. There is a reason I could find galaxies in hazel green eyes, that Lauren and I crossed paths with AJ in the parking garage and that under the mountain of things I had to pack I found a fortune that said “comfort zones are best expanded through discomfort.” Or it’s all pure, random coincidence. In that case, coincidence is beautifully intricate. Who knows.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, a year ago I could not drive down Scenic Dr. without my breathing rate increasing. I couldn’t listen to the song “Tiny Cities” by Flume without getting chills. And I lost again, and I’m a terrible loser, and every time my heart breaks my bones shatter. But I am still here, and somehow I feel like I am more me than I was before. I shed my skin and it comes back thicker, bolder, even if each time the breaking becomes more painful.

So, that’s what I’ve been reflecting on lately. The way you slipped your hand around mine under the pillow the one night we spent together. The way my gut has never been wrong, not when I knew we were a bad idea and not when I knew it didn’t matter, because I wanted you anyway. I wish you could’ve been the person I imagined you as — sun dipped and warm and golden like October. But we don’t get to choose how everything falls in place. The more time I spend walking these streets alone the more I realize that as much as I wanted you, I will always want myself more. I have always been my own worst enemy, have always felt like I would give up so many parts of myself in exchange for someone else’s. But I don’t want that anymore. My life is the most beautiful, chaotic, riveting thing and I wouldn’t want it any other way. I have some of the most awful days, and I have woken up sobbing, I have tried to give my life to razors and busy intersections, but I’m still here and that means something to me. It means everything to me.

It’s like Lauren said the other night, “you have to be everything for yourself.” And I’m still learning. But in the last year alone I’ve made so much progress. I don’t need a boy who feels like gold when I am made of Sunday afternoon sunlight and moon dust, when I am a hurricane on the west end of mars and my bare feet pave roads and my veins are made of rivers. I am an ocean, a tidal wave about to crash— I am a galaxy on my own and I don’t need those hazel green eyes I loved 3 years ago, I don’t need the sculpted collar bones of my high school love, I don’t need january sunspots I have my hands, I have my heart, I have myself and I am everything.

peaches

I bought canned peaches at safeway the other day, because I don’t eat enough fruits here and it’s honestly pretty depressing. It’s hard to stay upbeat and happy a lot of the time, but I’m trying. Canned peaches were a step in the right direction. When I was fourteen, there was a season I would eat three or four peaches a day. It was when I ran cross country, when I had just started high school, when I could smoke half the guys in my grade in the mile while simultaneously braiding my hair.

It got exhausting, always trying to compete. I didn’t really think about it until tonight, after our weekly intramural futsal game, when everyone offered congratulations and praise to the guy who had scored the most goals. Because this is how men work. They can only ever see the obvious, and it’s not entirely their faults because it’s how they’re socialized, but I’m really fucking tired of giving them that excuse. I’m tired of defending them in groups, tired of defending myself for hanging out with them, tired of being around them and seeing how little they see every single fucking day.

I can’t even count how many times I have had to move over on the street to prevent someone from walking straight into me, how many times I have had to cross roads on my own or go down better lit paths because they don’t notice when there’s threatening people in the way, or when there are corners people could jump out of. They live oblivious to all this, and it makes me understand why most girls like to hang out with other girls. But I have never really wanted that.

Since I was a kid I’ve always wanted to be the best at everything. I wanted to be the smartest, the fastest, the most popular. I was always in the top five mile times at my school up through eighth grade. I got the best grades, and I’ve always been that kind of person that everyone either knows or knows about. And it’s never enough. It wasn’t until we were walking out of our futsal game, and these guys I’ve been on a team with for several months were congratulating a stranger on his goals, that I realized how fucking frustrated and let down and tired I am. I assisted 6 out of the 7 goals we scored, and I scored the other one. Those goals would have been nothing without me, without everyone else on the field, but they don’t see that. This is a stupid instance, but sometimes it takes something dumb to recognize the bigger picture. And that’s what this is.

How many times have I carried the people around me and had that weight gone unrecognized? How many times have I had to reach out, initiate conversations, get phone numbers, apologize for being too much, apologize for doing not enough, apologize for existing because I don’t exist in the exact right way I am supposed to exist and holy fuck I am so fucking tired of it. I walk myself to safeway twice a week and I carry my own fucking groceries and I get my own drunk ass to dinner and I will do everything for myself from here on out because I’m done giving men the satisfaction of doing anything for me, without recognizing how much I do for them.

Don’t tell me not to generalize, don’t say “It’s a joke,” “he isn’t ill intentioned,” I don’t fucking care. Maybe for once consider the impact of what you say/do and not the intention. If the world was defined by intentions no one would ever be to blame, but I still find myself crying myself to sleep some nights, angrily scrubbing the skin off my body some nights, screaming at everyone every night because I don’t know how to make it any more clear.

I have spent my entire life trying to be “one of the guys” like somehow being the ‘cool girl’ will make me more respectable, like somehow because other women don’t really accept me, men will. I can feel the internalized sexism in the way I put other women down, in the way I try to seal myself up, the way I see caring for other people as some sort of weakness.

And none of it ever matters. No matter how many assists I have, no matter how many goals I make, no matter how many times I carry the weight no one notices or cares or recognizes. I will spend my life trying to be something I can’t, because I was born without the privilege of ignorance. I was born without a penis and without respect, always having to do twice as much, work twice as hard, to get half the recognition. I am always the person putting in the most and getting the least out, from the time I was a kid, and I just never thought about it until right now.

My identity is reduced to trivial things; peach girl, with the low rice purity score, loud and crazy and wild and maybe the only reason I am any of that is it’s the only way they recognize me. I never grew up and learned to be noticed in a good way. I grew up learning that I had to shout to be heard, that no matter how certain I was someone would always fact check me, that even when I was proven right there was probably a reason why, like my truth is circumstantial, like my experience is circumstantial, like I am circumstantial.

I don’t know what else to say. I’m fucking tired. Men won’t read this, and if they do they probably won’t understand and will feel triggered by the word ‘privilege’. I feel like I could say a lot more but I really want to go to sleep. Peace out.

snow

It hasn’t snowed like this in Colorado since I was maybe nine years old. The kind of snow that pours and sticks to the ground and stays for day. My therapist calls it “proper winter,” and I guess she’s right. Like that’s the thing Gaby explained to me every time I said I wanted to live in California because the seasons are less harsh. I said I hate watching everything die every winter, and she said “that’s an important part of life too though,” and I didn’t really understand how being physically distant from winter would affect me. But there really is something about being in winter that my body is accustomed to.

I don’t know. I might just be having a rough semester. I went home five weeks in, because I was waking up every day feeling pain in my chest and the idea of home was the only thing making it go away. I’m trying to outgrow my victim mentality. I’m trying to hold on to myself while EMDR reorganizes my mind. Some neural pathways of mine have opened up, and I suddenly have access to all these images and scenes of my childhood that I lost for so long, and it’s really hard to not break down with overwhelming emotion every time I think about all of it.

I really think I grew up too fast. I was so ready to get out and go somewhere and now all I want is to go back. I know at this point that’s pretty much all I talk about. I just don’t really know how to be alive anymore. Last night I had a dream where I was talking to my AP Lit teacher, and it was really weird because I woke up and had to reorient myself. This is happening almost every morning. I have a dream where I’m talking to someone who doesn’t talk to me anymore, and I wake up and I feel really alone and I have to figure out where I am again. It’s like a daily struggle to decide who I want to be and what I want in any given moment, and I get it wrong so much of the time and the damage is irreparable.

I remember when I left home on Monday morning, my dad woke me up to say goodbye. He said “I know it’s a struggle sometimes, but it’s so that you’ll appreciate it more,” and he patted my shoulder like he always does and hugged me goodbye. I wish all the recent memories I have of my father weren’t instances where one of us was saying goodbye, but I don’t live in my parent’s house anymore and even though I know the door is always open it’s 1,000 miles away and it’s really hard to not feel so alone all the time.

I know it will be a struggle no matter what. I know the idea that someday I will find a happy ending is a fallacy, because life doesn’t end until it does. But knowing doesn’t make it easier. I don’t know. I feel really confused all the time, and I can feel the universe responding to that with the bizarre state of everything in my vicinity lately. I don’t know. I need to get out of here again. I need to go home again. I need to walk through a foot of snow and have to find Kati’s grave in freezing weather again. I need to cry and to have my mom holding me, to wake up in my own room, alone, not in a cabin, hungover, in someone’s arms, feeling disgusting and ashamed of myself. Which is where I woke up this morning. So.

It’s a struggle. All I want to do is run away. I want to drive the pan-American highway. I want to go to Japan. More than anything I want to make things the way they were before. I didn’t need a tarot reading to tell me that there is nothing left for me, that what has been broken cannot be repaired, but hearing it still burns like acid in my kidneys. I miss walking. I miss talking about housing like it would be fun to all go out and look at places. I miss playing pool with Charlie when I was stoned. Last semester, we won our first futsal game in this surprising complete turn of events, and this semester we auto forfeited. And I guess not to make a dumb comparison but that’s really how this semester feels.

I was the most fucked up I’ve ever been last night. I don’t know what happened. It all felt like a blur. I know I’ll just block it from my memory to deal with it. I wish that wasn’t how I dealt with things. I’m trying so hard to change. I’m trying to stop closing myself off from the past until I’m so far removed I just look back and miss it, because sometimes the missing is unbearable. I know the only reason I’m able to cope with losing Kati is that I buried so many of our memories in some place I can’t access. Like the parts of my childhood that EMDR is bringing back to me, most of the emotions related to Kati are locked somewhere I can’t reach them. And I know I am doing that now. It just hurts too much to open them.

That’s why some nights, I’ll let myself look at Eli’s website. I’ll log into a different instagram to look at his photos. I’ll go through his spotify. I guess maybe this is weird, but sometimes I just need to feel the pain again. It’s the only thing that ties me to that entire part of my life, and sometimes I want to remember. When I went home I spent a lot of time driving around late at night, thinking about how I separate my life out in distinct eras, and how I have such a hard time looking at it as this one, continuous narrative.

I’m trying really hard to change all of it. I’m trying to reach out before it’s too late. I miss Kati. I miss Jared. Some days I even miss Eli. I don’t want to end up missing anyone else more than I already do. I’m so tired of missing people. I’m trying so hard to change.

everything's fine until it's not

Izze has it completely right. It’s the feeling underneath everything, behind every situation, even when we’re screaming out car windows and driving 100 on the freeway. It’s like a weight on my chest. A couple days ago I learned that we hold our grief in our chests, in our lungs, that’s why it is so hard to breathe sometimes. I believe it. My chest is where I feel everything. It’s where my anxiety comes from, where my excitement takes off, my chest holds the weight that never really leaves, the feeling Izze described while trying to explain how she was happy today but there’s that deep, underlying thing. That’s depression. That’s grief. That’s the mark of struggle. Once you have it, it never goes away. If you’ve never lost, you can’t understand it. 

When I say lost I don’t mean the little things we go through every day. I mean losing parts of yourself to time and people, losing someone you love, losing family, losing homes; you can’t lose if you don’t risk anything. If you hold your pride and decide to shut the world out, then yeah, you’ll never lose. Laugh and say I am going through the five stages of grief when I’m merely grieving you, but I live in these stages. I’ve lived in them since I was fifteen. Since I lost possession of my body. You don’t suddenly wake up one day and accept losing, you just forget. We slide between the five stages. This is all theory applied to lived experience. It does not work smoothly. 

Josh is asleep, and I’m sitting here, and I feel okay. My life is full but that does not change the underlying feeling. I am living and breathing and resilient but that doesn’t mean the weight ever goes away. Josh has his own weight. Izze has hers. Almost everyone I know has lost more than they have won and that’s a fucking tragedy but I can still feel them a thousand miles away. Phone calls and letters hold us together and I know we are a generation that fetishizes tragedy but we are trying our best. 

Sometimes for a while the weight will go away, in the spaces full of love. This sounds cliche and vague and I’m sorry because it’s 11:59pm and I slept for four hours last night and I’ve been running around all day so I’m sorry, but it’s true. I think about the way calling my dad makes me instantly feel better, the way my mom’s texts take anxiety off my chest, I think about the gig cars full of bad raps on bad beats and crossing the bay six times over and I think of Lauren looking out for me and checking in on me and Izze always sending me songs and listening to me scream about my vagina for an hour over the phone and Laurel letting me call her at 1am to sob and I think about all the times I have been held in my life, and the times I have been held safely, and how even if those people are gone there was love in those moments and love heals.

I think about Kati, a lot. I think about how I feel love when I am alone, driving at golden hour, or walking across campus, and for a brief moment the weight is lifted off my chest by no more than the sound coming through my headphones and I know that she is here. I know that even if Kati is no longer physically present on the earth, she can still love me. Even if my family is about to separated by continents and oceans they will always be seven numbers and a dial tone away. I haven’t seen the Big Dipper since the first night I got back, but honestly I haven’t been looking to hard. I don’t need to look to see. I don’t need to see to feel. Sometimes this place feels like it’s made of cardboard but there are so many people filling the space between the walls that it doesn’t matter what any of it is made of or where I’m going. 

Everything is arbitrary except love. And fuck, I sound like my parents, but the thing is I was always imagining love wrong. It’s not one person who holds the world together for you. It’s all the people who make up the world around you. I can’t imagine choosing anything else over that. But maybe that’s just me. Maybe that’s what happens once you’ve lost so much. You’re suddenly willing to stay up to make sure someone else is okay, willing to give up more of yourself and your time and your life because it would be worthless without other people. 

I’m going home next weekend. I never thought I would want to go home. But I get it now. I miss my parents. I miss my brother. I miss my sisters. I miss going downstairs when I was eight to a family room filled with light and sound and people laughing and joking around. That was family. That was home. We don’t get time machines, but if we did I would go back to that. I wish I could grow up again, knowing what I know now, watch myself walk through life until I end up in this exact chair in this quiet room in a cardboard building full of strangers. 

I am proud of what I’ve gone through. I am glad I give so much. Yeah, living hurts a lot. But what the fuck would it be without that? I can’t imagine feeling okay all the time. Okay is such an arbitrary and meaningless and worthless way to describe something as intricate as living and I finally understand what Charlie was saying that one morning over breakfast, about not striving for eternal happiness. Fuck that. There is no pushback. We live at the fringes, we live in friction. Without that there’s nothing. What’s the point if there’s nothing at stake? If you’re not willing to give up contentment for something real? That’s not living. 

I don’t know. I live in an existential rut and I’m always thinking about this shit. I need someone to ground me sometimes. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m going to leave this room, turn out the lights, shower and fall asleep alone, watching the same memories play out in my mind. And honestly, that’s better than okay. I like the quiet.

2/18/19

I’m really conscious of landscapes, like where I’ve been and where I walk and the places I frequent with certain people. And sometimes I have to go back and reclaim those places when they tie me to certain memories.

So, it has been a season of reclamation.

saddddd

Hi it’s me and I’m high for the second time this weekend because being alive sucks major ass sometimes and no matter how many things are going okay it’s really hard to be happy. It’s hard to feel like you keep losing and to not really know what to do, and to need time and space to figure it out but can’t keep enough distance between yourself and someone else no matter how hard you try.

Honestly, fuck being sober on a sunday night. Fuck trying, and trying, and hoping, and setting yourself up to make the same mistakes over and over again and be let down. Fuck prioritizing school and having anxiety and being sad about things that really don’t matter. I hate how quickly things can be taken away. Suddenly spaces that were mine feel out of place and wrong and sometimes all I can think about is how dark it is outside, how many things I’ve lost to time and space and how nothing can ever be the way it was.

I can’t go back to driving around at midnight with kati and skinny dipping in january, or to devin pushing my car out of the snow or my parents driving me to school before i had a car, and I can’t hold on to any of the memories I feel to be mine because people are always changing and coming and leaving you alone and no matter how much effort or thought you invest it doesn’t amount to anything tangible. It’s very sad.

It’s sad and I’m sad even though I know this is good for me and I know there are lots of good things out there. The saddest things are the ones you can’t understand, where you don’t get reasons and you’re sort of left to wonder why things happened the way they did when you' already feel like the memories are mis-recalled. I’m beginning to forget what every word in english means and I don’t know why I started typing this but I know I wanted to say something.

Sometimes it’s just nice to pretend you’re talking to someone even when no one is there because life is lonely and I can’t imagine putting anything above caring about someone. But I guess if you don’t care it’s not that big a deal. I guess when it comes down to it, the truth is I don’t matter enough. And I wonder what it will feel like when I get to the other side of this week, and I wonder what it will feel like when I do matter enough. Comparison is necessary to define anything, and so nothing is inherently sad in itself, but is sad because of the alternative. And the alternative is usually an impractical, non-realistic daydream we’ve been high on since the beginning. The alternative is a world where I matter more than highlight videos and basketball games and sorority events, where the people I put almost everything else aside for do the same for me and where it’s not sunday night and I’m not sitting outside in the cold and the dark filling my lungs with whatever it takes to get through the night without having a panic attack or crying, not knowing what makes me this way and not wanting to feel so fragile and weak and void.

Imagine being more than a distraction, more than a sum of every shitty thing that happened in the past. I feel like I’m full of all the questions I didn’t ask and things I didn’t say and moments I lost to worrying, and every time I warned myself and every time I knew and I did nothing to change it and we’re all behind our own doors now and in our own cars and I keep giving away so much without thinking. On the worst nights I have to think about how to breathe, and I have to remind myself to breathe, and I can’t see past what I don’t know.

I feel like I’ve said all this before. I feel like I write the same lines over and over again and maybe that’s how I live too and maybe that’s why my life is a revolving door of people I get close to and I like pretending I’ve changed. I mean I’m definitely growing and making progress but when you’re actually in the middle of that process it’s not as empowering as it is in hindsight. Whatever honestly though. I’m gonna double major and change the world and do all of that while still being a pothead and prioritizing dumb shit even when everyone else is too busy doing not dumb shit instead of dumb shit. And I don’t know how to fix the bridges I’ve burned, and I don’t know how to keep myself from burning them when I’m hurt and not thinking and I can’t get the space I need and I can’t read the way things are and my back HURTS but anyways. I’ve done almost all my homework for the week and I wrote some bomb ass poems for this cool as shit poetry class I’m taking and I know I’m made up of planets and stardust and I will keep getting up and getting through, because there is no other way.

the space between

Listening to Taylor Swift is my guilty pleasure.

I’ve spent the last hour squeezing drug store pink #200 dye into my recently bleached hair, jamming out to TS’s entire discography. I mean all of it, from the antebellum teenager I grew up hearing on the radio to the red-lipped multi-millionaire who seems to have killed the former.

Why does this matter? Well, I’m always bashing Taylor Swift for selling out to the industry and becoming like every other serial-dating pop-star on earth. And at the same time, I could sing you 92% of her songs with all the lyrics and no need for music.

i do this when I’m driving a lot, because where i’m from it takes at least fifteen minutes to get anywhere and half an hour to get anywhere good and over an hour to get anywhere that’s somewhere. Just to prove my point, four days ago I drove an hour on the interstate six different times in the span of 24 hours. This is what I have always known. Long drives and music have always filled the space between where I was and where I’m headed.

When I drive south on I-25 from my hometown, I am driving directly towards the city. Slowly, the fields and distant strip malls become concrete overpasses, two lanes become four (I know, crazy right), and the gentle hills of the front range roll into a greater metropolitan area. At night, going north, the lights fade into the distance and eventually I can only see as far as my headlights go. I love that. I love the way it feels like returning to a simple place, backed by the mountains and untouched by the bustle of life. Now that I no longer live here, there’s something special about the things that used to be routine.

See, I was raised on a decade of romcoms, love songs, 97.3 KBCO, and Taylor Swift. Every Taylor Swift album is distinctly paired with a different era of my life, and in a lot of ways I feel like I have grown up with Taylor. I’m realizing now it’s unfair to call her a sellout and to say she transitioned to pop music simply because that was the way to make more money, when maybe she has simply evolved as an artist. Everyone changes as time goes on (returning from college has made that abundantly clear), and I can’t love Miley Cyrus for growing the way she did and shame TS for doing the same.

We’re all growing up, in some way or another. Some day I’ll make peace with the way we walk through life alone, and how it’s okay if other people can’t completely understand me or the things I’ve been through. It’s like Lauren said, they’ll find a way to be there in their own way. There’s a good chance I often feel the way I do because there is a chemical imbalance in my head, because I am not standardly hormonally, but I’m past the point of caring. I have made it this far with who I am, and maybe it makes me hard to be around sometimes and maybe it makes me difficult to love but I don’t care. I’ll do the trauma therapy and I’ll try to get in the habit of shutting out negative thoughts, not to make myself better or normal but because I should be allowed to bury my sad stories without worrying.

The reality is, what I’ve always wanted more than anything else is the kind of love that’s manufactured by popular culture. The kind that supposedly makes your life better and whole and fills the empty spaces between things with meaning and feeling. I don’t know if this kind of love is real. I want to believe in it, because I grew up believing in it. The problem is I’m always anticipating the future instead of letting it find me. I suppose we all sort of anticipate the future too much. We’re all always putting forward this idea of achieving happiness as being “that easy,” and I have never felt that. It’s because we’re socialized to glorify the idea of being okay, of being content and happy and to want that all the time. But that doesn’t work, at least not for everyone. I need discomfort to push me forward, I need friction to understand where things can improve.

This is living as I have always known it; passing the time between where I’ve been and where I’m going with music. With the right playlist, I could drive forever without getting where I thought I was going, and I’d be happy. I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make. I love listening to Taylor Swift in the car, as much as I’ll pretend I am above that, just like I love falling in love with different people on different days of the week even when I know things won’t work out. Because these are the things that make me smile, because maybe happiness isn’t “that easy,” but some days it feels that way and some days are enough. I have a suspicion I’m not actually trying to go anywhere, but rather waiting for the right music, the playlist I could listen to indefinitely, that makes the destination and the horizon all part of the same meaningless backdrop. See, the most important things exist in the space between what we feel like matters.

dear 2018

You were a good one. Not that 2017 was a particularly hard act to follow, but I honestly didn’t expect the abundance of happiness and growth and challenge that i got out of the last 12 months. New Year’s is a weird time to me, and has always been a weird time. I’ve always regarded this as my favorite holiday, because it’s like getting a chance to start over and cut ties with the past. But the more new years I live through, the more I realize that if you’re living right, you don’t need a holiday to feel brand new.

The thing is, no matter how anything is at any particular moment, it can always change. And as scary and terrifying and literally anxiety-inducing as that is, it’s also exciting and spectacular and invigorating, and that unpredictability is one of the greatest forces I feel pulling me forward through life.

Perhaps not everyone everywhere has felt this way at some point, but many of the people I have known growing up (myself included) have struggled to find reasons and purpose in day to day life. I know that feeling of getting to the end of a year and thinking, “well, I guess that’s it then,” and wondering if anything really changes or gets better. But things do, and I wish I could share that with the people I know because everyone deserves the sense of internal gravity that comes from knowing you have control over the direction your life is headed in.

I found myself at dinner with my family tonight, something I used to take for granted, and I realized this might have been my best year yet. Maybe it’s just because this one year contained both the end of high school and the beginning of college for me, and those were both things I had long anticipated. I saw Hamilton on broadway, my extended family came to town for my graduation, I was in my last musical, I chose a college, I saved up and was able to go to France, I settled in somewhere new, I made memories I wouldn’t trade the world for and spent time with friends (new and old) and family, doing things I love and trying to make the best of the things I didn’t. A lot of my favorite moments this year sound stupid to put into writing, like my senior prom or my graduation party or halloweekend at a college, but they really were some of the best times.

In a way, it’s sorta sad. Like I’m 18 and what if this is where my life peaks, with minor amounts of substance abuse and some good concerts. But I don’t think I’ll let that happen. Instead this idea that things were really, actually good this year makes me excited for next year. I will always have bad days, and I can’t help but cry myself to sleep every now and then, but the existence of suffering and tragedy don’t have to weigh me down. I want to tell that to my friends back home over and over again until they punch me for being a broken record, because sometimes I think that we absorb a lot of ideas subconsciously just by hearing them over and over again and maybe if I say it enough times I can help things change for them too.

I don’t know. I never seem to know, but honestly I couldn’t care less. Maybe all this effort and all these attempts to make more out of my time will amount to many more december 30ths full of sharing ridiculous memories over dinner tables and inarticulate blog posts and endless hours of thinking about how weird life is. I hope everyone gets to have a happy new years, if not this year then the next, and if not then, I hope you don’t ever lose hope in having one. New year’s eve three years ago was probably, at the time, the most miserable experience of my life. It’s a night I still bring up to my therapist, and still remember even after all this time. I didn’t think I’d ever have a happy new year’s eve again because of the things that happened, but here I am, a few attempts later, living in spite of it all.

In the end, isn’t that all that matters? Being able to be here and see the clouds change color before the sunset and know that tomorrow is another story, that next year is another chapter, that even if I look back and only see the path I took to get here, there’s still an infinite number of possible roads ahead of me.

I like that.

ambition

Returning to a small town is comforting, in a weird way. I guess going home anywhere is comforting, but something about this place eases my mind. There’s not the constant stress of academic performance, or the anxiety that comes from trying to be socially adequate among people who probably feel just as self-doubting and unsure of the future. No one here is running to make billions before they hit 30, or talking about anything computer-science-related that creates an uncomfortable barrier of comprehension.

I hadn’t thought much about how severely different my hometown is from the place I moved to five months ago, but coming back I feel like my body has lost the sensory adaptation it built up for eighteen years. I knew when I left that I would always be on the outside when I came home, simultaneously knowing this place like the back of my hand and not quite fitting into it anymore. What I didn’t realize was how different everything would feel. For months, I couldn’t quite understand why my friends ditched futures elsewhere to return here, to this compact town that manages to dig up every memory I’ve tried to bury. I let them make the choices they knew were best for themselves, and I let myself settle into the choice I made; a fast lane a thousand miles away, headed in a direction I haven’t figured out, but headed somewhere, and rapidly.

Now that I’m back, I feel the weird sense of relief that I can only guess my friends felt upon returning. It’s not just a change of pace, it permeates in everywhere all over town. There’s no pressure to get anything done, no pressure to go anywhere or do anything or even think about doing anything. In a lot of ways, this is nice. I don’t feel like I have to be well rounded and hyper successful and well articulated and good at everything or anything at all, honestly. It’s enough to wake up and get through the day and return to sleep. There’s no pressure, no anxiety, not a significant amount of stress to keep me up more than two nights a week. And I guess I understand why people craved coming home so much.

My dad said once that the biggest problem with growing up in a small town is that people don’t have much ambition. He said that because most people are doing fine, they don’t have the incentive to change anything. I understand that now. Growing up, I always hated living here. I hated it more than anything else. I felt like if I could just go anywhere else, things would be better. And I left, and they are, but not without a price. In California, I feel like I have to be someone more than who I am. Everyone is on a one way track to the place they want to be in eight years, and I’m just along for the ride trying to learn new things when it’s really too late to try. And I know this is a generalization, and I’ve met people who don’t look at the future like it’s a map, and the people who do will probably end up changing their minds as many times as I already have, but that attitude of perpetual motion, the high pressure, high anxiety, high stress, high stakes mindset has an atmosphere of its own. Whether or not I actually want to be super fucking rich and super fucking successful and super fucking monumental in five years, I get caught up in wondering if I’m doing enough, if I am enough, if I should be padding my resume more and learning six new languages and doing all the things I quit ten years ago not because I actually want to but because I feel like I have to compete just to exist, to take up space and breathe air and it’s exhausting.

And I lived and breathed that energy for months, and then I came home to a place where my old teachers congratulated me on not quitting yet, and I remembered how easy it is to be here. It’s like marinating in ambition-less, nothing-really-matter-flavored broth, until your skin gets wrinkly and suddenly you’re buried six feet under the ground without ever having left this area code. That scares me. It always scared me. It’s why I knew I would go to school anywhere far enough from this place to feel the ties break and to leave it all behind, as much as is possible when it comes to the one place you lived your entire life.

I never liked it here because I have always had more ambition than my body could hold. But not useful ambition, like the kind that’s focused and driven and guides someone to the places they’re supposed to go. I have the kind of ambition that works sporadically, sometimes giving me the motivation to power through things for months before seeing the gnarly details, the kind that feels like screaming stuck inside lungs, that builds up too much and leads to choking when it matters most, and results in desperately trying to latch on to some straightforward path towards success. It’s still ambition though. Every now and then I do something impressive and I wonder if there really is a future where I achieve at least one of the far-fetched things I daydream about. I was driving in april and drinking a strawberry banana smoothie when I got the gut feeling about where to go to school, and that makes me sound more crazy than promising, but it led me to a place that was, in all honesty, the best choice I could have made. Regardless of how many times I verbally doubt it.

The thing is, coming home I’ve realized I’m not made of endless drive and effort. Some days I just want to lie in bed reading E! news articles about people who don’t matter, or try to remember where I got each of the pictures stapled up on my ceiling. I am happy kicking a soccer ball around in the back yard with my dad and my brother and knowing I’m not good at it, or failing to bar chords on the ukulele but passing the time trying, because here I don’t have to be “faking it” as Josh would say. Here, it’s okay if I am not spectacular at anything. There’s books to half read and coffee shops to loiter in and old stuff to go through and old friends to see and that’s enough to fill the time. And is there really much more to life than filling time?

I don’t know. This is the existential rut I fall into. There’s a really great Shakey Graves song called “Dining Alone,” and when he played it live he said “No matter what you do in life, you’ll have times where you really just feel like you’re stuck in a rut. And this is a song about that,” and the song talks about thinking about all the things he’ll never get to do and trying to escape from that understanding. And I really relate to that. I have a bad habit of getting lost in thought and ignoring the present, which is honestly the worst way to go about spending time. High stress environment or not, it’s better to be there in the moment and take what you can get from where you are.

Maybe this is the enlightenment I was looking for when I started writing, maybe it’s emotional maturity, maybe it’s the influence of new people in my life, or the result of getting away from old people, or, more likely, a combination of all of it. Some days I feel like I could change the world, and other days I feel content with the thought of bringing someone home for the holidays some year. There’s definitely a middle ground there, and a way to find a balance between everything in life. There aren’t really “answers,” but the right mindset is somewhere between where I’m from and where I’m going, which means it’s somewhere along the way.

Anyway, it’s nearly 2am and I’m not sure this is making sense anymore. But does it really matter if no one else will read this?

my parents are hopeless romantics

and that has really ruined me.

“Isn’t love all we’re really put on the earth for?” my dad says over thanksgiving, while we’re all watching The English Patient and I’m trying to figure out why being alive is so hard for me and why everything feels so complicated and confusing when it really is quite simple.

“I guess,” I reply. I don’t feel like I agree with him, because there are so many other things that I want for my life outside of loving other people. There are places I want to go and things I want to achieve and works of art I want to make and none of that really has to do with fostering love for anyone else. Every time my mother has told me that my parents are together because they are both hopeless romantics, I’ve rolled my eyes and assumed that they’re together because they need each other, because their lives have become too entangled and it’s easier to stay than to ever change anything.

That says a lot more about me than it does about my parents, who are actually, truly hopeless romantics and who really do love each other, regardless of all the stuff that irritates them about one another.

I never thought I shared the same affinity for love that my parents do. I’ve found that relationships (of any kind) are more frustrating than they are rewarding, and often involve a lot of effort on my part to be interesting and to hang out in the places where other people will be and to know a little about a lot of things so that I can talk about (almost) anything so that the pressure is never on anyone else to carry the conversation or go out of the way for me and, as tiring as this gets, I still do all these things and put a significant amount of effort into the people I choose to know because without them, my life really would have no meaning or purpose at all.

The more I think about how I am, and how everything I see reminds me of someone or another, and how I share almost everything in my life with other people, I’m beginning to believe that I might have the same crazy, fucked up notion my parents have. And that really sucks, because no one likes admitting that they desperately, whole-heartedly crave other people. Especially not me. I’ll try to pass it off a hundred times over like I could spend a day by myself, with only a book or a ukulele or my thoughts and feel content, but none of these things make me feel full the way other people can.

Today alone, I cleaned another corner of my room and accidentally melted a plastic trashcan on my roof and spent another 10$ at a coffee shop and wrote and deleted three whole blog posts and watched four crash course videos on chemistry and learned two songs on the piano and cooked eggs for myself and yet none of this made me feel productive or happy because it involved being alone for pretty much 15 hours straight which is my version of a living hell, especially when the people I want to talk to leave me on read or are too busy to finish conversations and use three words to reply to the things i heavily deliberated while writing and thought through thoroughly because I really, really like talking to other people and I really, really care about the conversations I have with them.

But this is beside the point, because some days I just wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Or more accurately in the wrong mindset. And some days I want other people to prioritize me the way I prioritize them, but other people didn’t have parents who passed down a genetic affinity for personal relationships and they didn’t grow up wanting nothing more in life than really wonderful, fulfilling connections with other people that could just instantly fix a natural tendency to have a shitty attitude. I had those parents.

I will deny I said it (except now I’m putting it on the internet so I really can’t), but some part of me has always thought the idea of marriage was nice. Having a family, eh, it has never been super important to me, but the idea of having someone to share your entire life with; that’s kinda spectacular. Granted, 50% of marriages end in divorce and people talk about how marriage is literally just becoming someone else’s property and it’s supposed to be super hard and awful and another empty promise that people make each other, so maybe it’s not that amazing. But in theory, it’s really something.

I almost cried listening to someone play the piano last week because something about the melody felt like a wedding. I didn’t know how to describe that without sounding weird, so I didn’t, but the keys were rolling off one another and I daydreamed flowers and my parents crying and hands and this feeling of contentedness and it almost brought me to tears because I knew exactly what I was imagining and at the same time I knew I would never find that.

I know that sounds pessimistic and dark but the thing is, I’ve been given incredibly unrealistic ideas about love. Maybe marriage is a flawed concept and people really change too much to ever make a commitment like that, and I can accept that. But the problem is I have this idea that somewhere on earth there’s someone that is supposed to just “get” me. And I have this belief because my mother met my father halfway around the earth from she was born, in a chance encounter that could have easily never occurred, and because my sister met her husband while working a summer job in Alaska, and this guy she barely knew just up and went to Costa Rica with her, because the best stories are the ones that sound absurd and don’t make sense, that make you feel like there’s magic in ordinary things and places.

Isn’t that what makes fictional stories so appealing? They’re a world where there are happy endings, and people have soulmates, and everything feels as simple as it is at its core. Because life really is simple. It’s nothing without other people to share it with.

I haven’t fully given up on the idea that there’s someone who can take care of me in the ways I need, someone who could make all the complicated things about life feel simple and irrelevant. It’s more like, I wonder how many places I’ll have to run from before I happen-stance-edly run into this person. I’m also pretty sure that if I just stopped looking around every corner and being hyperaware of everything in my life, things would fall into place much better.

But, I can’t help it. Like I said, my parents are hopeless romantics, and this has ruined me. Two hopeless romantics don't result in the upbringing of a girl who wants nothing to do with relationships and detests the idea of caring about another person, as much as I want to (and try to make myself) feel that way sometimes. They say “I act, therefore I believe,” but no amount of being physically abrasive towards other people has made me care less about them, and I’m starting to think I should accept that reality. So, maybe I do invest a lot of effort in other people, and maybe I overshare, and I invite imbalanced relationships, and I expect more than most people can give, but these don’t have to be signs of emotional backsliding. I know I’m growing because even on days like these, I believe life can be as simple as “I like being around these people, so I will be around them,” and all the bullshit worrying about coming across as crazy or obsessive can just fade into irrelevance because that’s what it is; Irrelevant, and bullshit.

In conclusion, to better reply to something someone said to me at 3am over a pot of mac and cheese, I could care less if I had a stay at home husband. What I really want is someone I can come home to, from wherever I go on different days of the week. I like to believe that there’s someone who will be there when it matters most, because no one can truly be there all the time. I wouldn’t ask someone else to give up a life for me, I just want someone who knows the things that hurt me and cares and does their best to avoid doing those things, someone who wants to invest effort in a relationship. What I really want is to find a way to stop believing this person exists, and they’re out there somewhere, because maintaining unrealistic hopes is crushingly exhausting.

the language between words

I have always wished I could write music. It’s like another language I can’t speak. I sit down sometimes when I’m bored and I’ll scribble half a set of lyrics on whatever scrap paper I can find and at first it will sound good and slowly it will become worthless and meaningless and I’ll remember I don’t have the musical capacity to write a good melody for it anyway and so I’ll staple it to my ceiling or throw it away, and that is my short lived experience as a musician.

My mom says that when I used to play piano, I could really play. My parents say I was good. My parents also believe I could have gone to stanford or that I could be be the leader of the free world some day so that’s not really a good measure of anything, but I think I was alright. The problem was that I knew some people who were musically phenomenal, and I have a hard time continuing to do things when I’m aware that I’m not very good at them.

I wish I had never quit trying to learn, but I could feel that it was something I could never really understand. There has always been a barrier between myself and really, truly understanding music in the way that someone who can really, truly play music does. I recognized that when I would watch some of my friends play. They were a part of the music in a way I never really was, and it didn’t feel like a place I would ever belong.

So I found other languages. I started taking photo classes and I realized that I could see the world through a lens in a way that other people couldn’t. In some weird way I felt like people who can really, truly play music feel and understand that music in the same way I can feel and understand images when I’m taking them. Sometimes I can feel that slipping away too though, I can feel the neural pathways being pruned and when I hold a camera I have to think before I shoot, which was never the case before.

I hate that time takes things from you like that. There’s only enough space in your life for the things you can do every day, or for the people you see very often. We lose parts of ourselves and parts of our pasts as quickly as we forget the words we learned to say in foreign languages when we were children. I don’t like losing things like that. I don’t like digging through old boxes of letters and birthday cards and finding thrice folded up sheets of wide lined notebook paper scrawled over with half finished songs and wonder why I find it so hard to put a melody to my feelings now.

When I was eight I used to ride my bike in circles on the driveway and sing about things I wished would happen, like my friends moving in across the street from me or waking up and being able to fly. I don’t sing my own made up songs anymore, and I don’t wish I could fly. I mean that would be cool, but there’s sort of a hierarchy of wishes, if you know what I mean. Before I can wish to fly or wish to time travel I have to start with the simpler things. I’ll wish to wake up feeling okay, to find patience in between the places where I see other people and they help hold me together. I’ll wish to stop feeling let down, to be “mindful” as Addie used to say and keep my head above it all.

I’m eighteen now, and I never learned to play the violin. I say that I wish I had learned because I think it would help me destress. You say playing music isn’t something you do to destress. I never said it was. I wish I would stop sharing myself with people because I don’t understand 99% of the things I give away, and before I can make sense of them myself someone else interprets them for me.

Maybe you don’t play music to destress, but I would. Maybe you don’t shuffle your song library and listen to Jóhann Jóhannsson and Frank Ocean consecutively, and maybe you can leave a conversation unfinished and not feel bothered by words hanging in the air, and maybe we just speak different languages and I have not yet learned how to stop the words from getting lost in translation.

I could never glide my fingers across a keyboard and feel a wave behind me, because music is not my language. I could never speak it, but I understand. You say if someone has a trained ear, they would hear it. I don’t need trained ears to listen. In the same way I understand my brother as he rattles away in Spanish at the dinner table, a language I have never learned, I can understand emotions conveyed through notes. I can understand silence from hundreds of miles away, and I can tell when a piece leaves no room for harmony.

Plain, simple words will always be my language of choice. I use too many of them for my writing to ever be elegantly beautiful, but it’s because I’m always trying to say precisely what I mean. What we say to each other matters to me. The conversations I exchange with other people, in whatever language; I really, really care about them. I am starting to understand that this is not always mutual.

Maybe the next time someone is really, truly trying to say something to me, I won’t jump to share every thought I could give on the matter. When words go running through my mind I’ll shoot them down. I’ll stop trying to speak languages that are not mine, in the hope that I could somehow learn. When you give me your ideas, and when you are the one overflowing with words in any language, I’ll keep it simple;

“yeah that’s interesting”

i'm afraid a girl is going to rip my limbs off (a happy blog post)

It would appear my life is in danger (again) because I enter these very precarious friendships with people who are so totally not good for my health in all the best ways that it’s almost impossible to stay away from them. I’ve always known I’m prone to make bad decisions, i honestly think it might run in my family. I didn’t think that part of me had changed much, but I was still incredulous when I heard the way it was phrased.

We were eating dinner, and it was a sad meal because the dining hall food is sad, and Stirling said, “she would rip your arms off if she knew you were friends with him!” And I think i probably cackle-laughed loud enough to turn half a room of heads, because I don’t understand why these ridiculous things are always happening to me, why I make other people so fight-y when I feel like I’m pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

No one has ever threatened to rip my limbs off before, so this has been an interesting, new experience. The closest thing I can think of was when one girl told people she was going to fist fight me at prom because I got elected to prom court and got paired with her boyfriend. She didn’t fist fight me so that was good, because I was very intoxicated and definitely could not have adequately defended myself and I doubt anyone would have stepped in because anyone who knows me knows I put myself in these situations. Or at least that’s what I used to believe, because that’s what it seemed like everyone else thought.

I’m not so sure anymore. Sometimes I tell Lauren stories about back home, and they’ll always end with “I’m so fucking stupid,” or “Why do I do these things to myself?” And she always stops me to say something along the lines of “Why on earth do you think you are at fault for all the things that happen to you?” And when she asks, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know why I blame myself. But I do.

No one else has ever threatened to tear me limb from limb, but I have gotten my fair share of hateful text messages, slut shaming finsta-posts, baseless rumors, the look-me-up-and-down thing that girls do when they feel like I’m a disgusting abomination of the female race, like the sideways out-of-the-corner-of their-eye glances that signal a distaste so strong they can’t even bear to look at me. And I’ve always assumed I provoked these things, and these responses are reasonable and I deserved them, and eventually they were just something funny I would laugh about alone in my car.

But in all honesty, I’m beginning to wonder why should I be torn limb from limb for spending time with someone I enjoy spending time with. I’d like to believe that my arms and legs are worth more than nonsensical piety, but at what cost am I willing to continue living vulnerable to a theft of my body parts like this? Is a friendship really worth the potential loss of my elbows (the most essential body part)?

I don’t know. I’ve been asking myself that question for a while. Maybe it’s dumb to consider the opportunity cost of relationships you choose to maintain with the people around you, but when you’ve been through shit the way I have you can’t really help it anymore. Questioning other people becomes ingrained in the mind like a reflex, and object permanence never really applies to the good things in the world like it does to the bad. I get cynical at irrational times, and it makes me wonder if it’s possible to ever be damaged so much that there’s no way to ever get past it.

I think about that a lot when we go anywhere. I wonder what the world looks like to you, what it looks like to anyone who hasn’t experienced the things I have and who isn’t the person I am. I want to know what makes a shade of yellow offensive, or why high ceilings are so essential to a house. I want to know what it feels like to meet other people when you’ve never been let down before, if it’s as exhausting as it is when you have. I think about how I don’t know who I would be if christmas songs didn’t make me nostalgic for a childhood I never had, for the adolescence I never got. I want to know what it’s like to still be able to talk to someone you’ve dated, I want to ask how that works. Do you see them when you go home? What do you talk about? Does it hurt? Is it confusing? Do you ever miss dating them? I always regret how much I talk about myself, but I know it’s because there are some things I feel I can’t ask. I know if I did you would take it the wrong way, and you might think I was way too invested in trying to learn about you. So I try not to pry and instead I speak volumes about the mess of experiences I’ve had.

Sometimes it makes me feel crazy, and I don’t understand why I’m so jam packed with anecdotes and dumb facts and small snippets of meaningless memories from a time that doesn’t really matter anymore. And even when I’m alone, there’s still a part of me that never stops talking, never stops generating ideas of things I could say to you, things I could say to anyone. It reminds me of the Watsky line, “you wouldn’t respect me if you heard the typewriter chatter tap tap tapping through my mind at night.” We’ll joke about it but being around me really is like being on a tour, a tour of everything I’ve ever thought or learned or known. And I feel like that must get old at some point, but I’ve also been trying to not default to negative opinions of myself. Like maybe, my thoughts and feelings and experiences are valuable, and maybe my presence can be a blessing, and maybe there really is someone who likes hearing about other people’s lives as much as I like talking about my own.

And I guess at some point my internal calculator decides that some friendships are worth the potential de-limbing of my body. I suppose knowing someone who can name more times you’ve been happy than you can yourself is somewhat beneficial. Even if sometimes they’ll choose to deny things they said at 4am or make reasonable, smart choices regarding when to go to sleep and when to not waste time with you. Maybe, if you have the kind of friend that makes you want to call your mom just to tell her someone walked back from safeway with you, a mile in the rain and carrying your groceries, or the kind of friend who lets you use them as pillow both emotionally and physically when you get tired of holding your head up, maybe that is the kind of friendship you’re willing to risk your arms and legs and trust and hope-in-all-humanity for.

The reality is, I am predisposed to caution and I don’t let people in easy, and I’m *deep*ly afraid that I can’t change. And it’s funny to me that someone sees the bulk atrocity of my personality as “layers,” and it’s funny that people here think I’m smart because back home I was always an idiot putting myself in idiotic situations. What’s funniest of all is the way boxed mac and cheese and miles on foot are somehow helping me write resolutions to a lifetime of sad stories, how driving through the hills and making milkshakes at 3am and wrestling over cell phones and judging houses for their exteriors and people for their interiors and arguing about the number of times we managed to walk to class together (which, for the record, is 4 times), all of these things have helped fill the empty spaces in my life.

When I go back to the place I grew up, I’m still constantly bursting with things to say. My family picks me up from the airport and says almost nothing and I am overflowing with stories about putting it’s-it’s in blenders and driving across the golden gate bridge. I tell them about how I found Gaby’s house again, about being high in the city, about hiking at night and trying to pick out constellations through the light pollution, and I tell them about finding new music, and finding new places, and finding new people, and realizing that somehow the people you find a thousand miles from your hometown can make an unfamiliar place feel like home. So I suppose at the end of the day, I’d give up my arms and legs for that I-really-am-in-the-right-place feeling. Sometimes the right place is the whole bay area, sometimes it’s with a group of people, and sometimes it’s simply the shoulder I lean on.

giving season

That’s what people say about the holidays. What matters is what you give other people, not what you get in return. Maybe if giving season was only once a year, this would be true. But I think some people live in an eternal giving season. I think I might be one of those people.

Kati was the first and only person to ever tell me I gave other people anything. “You give and give to people,” she wrote in the letter she gave me on my sixteenth birthday. I remember reading that and thinking, I have never felt like I give anyone anything. I’m terrible at being there when people need me to be, and in most cases what I give people is sensory overload from being around too often. To be fair, Kati misjudged me sometimes. In that same letter, she wrote that I taught her to “put the gas mask on yourself before helping anyone else,” and I don’t believe I have ever adhered to this rule. I could be beyond exhausted, literally on the verge of tears, and I would drag myself out of bed to play card games with people I’ve known for two months. And most of the time I do that because I know that being around other people, even if it’s occasionally irritating, will always be more interesting than going to sleep or doing one of the seven billion class readings I never seem to catch up on.

I couldn’t help but wonder tonight why I am that way. It has made me angry for the longest time that other people aren’t like that. Even back home, I remember friends turning down offers to try to sneak into clubs or run around the golf course at night, and I could never fathom why and it made me so angry. I can’t tell if now I’m actually growing emotionally and beginning to understand that maybe other people aren’t as captivating to everyone else as they are to me. Maybe, when my friends don’t want to do something one out of the seven nights in the week, it doesn’t have anything to do with me. Is this maturity? I don’t know. Theres a good chance I’m just growing numb to the anger.

I think at some point we just grow numb to every possible emotion there is to feel, and we call that maturity. “Personal growth” is when I don’t feel rage, but instead feel disappointment. It’s when I stare out the car window thinking, mindlessly driving might be the most pleasant experience I’ve had in a month, and I feel like I should be more angry but I am not.

What if children are the only people fully experiencing life? What if those new, high intensity emotions are the only reality there is? And all we do is experience them so much we start to go numb and we call this growing older? I can say that most days, I’m glad I don’t feel black-hole anger like I used to. It takes so much for me to get blindly angry, to the point where I blame everyone, and when I do I feel that way it makes my life feel dark and twisted in a way it hasn’t for years.

Maybe emotional numbness is a good thing. Maybe life is slowly slipping by and speeding up because there is not so much to hold on to anymore. If there’s only so many emotions on earth, at what point does it matter what we experience anymore? We’re feeling the same things. Loss, regret, anger, love, grief, sadness, excitement liveliness, happiness, joy, pain. What happens when there are no more emotions to experience?

I like to pretend that if things ever got boring I would fly to Iceland and hike a glacier, or take the LSAT. Some of the kids I’m in school with laugh at me because I can’t decide between taking Acting or Data Science, and sometimes I want to drop everything and go to art school, or drive back to arches and see if it’s as bad the second time around. People are always shocked that I don’t have a direction, but I don’t really get the point of trying to plan for anything serious like that. Plans are disappointing and upsetting because 99.8% of the time things don’t happen the way you want them to, and usually people bail and things fall apart and the things you thought you could do you no longer can, and none of it really matters anyway because for all we know being alive is a fabricated experience.

I need a lot of things to be going on around me to feel anything at all, otherwise I start to slip into space. Sometimes I give other people the ability to make me feel boring, which I don’t really comprehend because I get so bored with everything around me that I’m constantly reinventing it in my mind to make it more interesting. And still, other people get to pick and choose when they find me interesting and when they find me to be too much.

I don’t know how I feel about that. I feel less and less in general every day, as I become more and more numb to all the emotions I’ve already felt a thousand times over. Maybe I will never go to law school or get to walk on the moon, I probably couldn’t do anything to help cure alzheimer’s before my father can’t remember who I am. I might never get a photo published in national geographic, or marry someone I’m meant to be with. I’ll probably take the easy way out at every challenge I encounter and settle for whatever works then and there. I’ll probably never do half the things I want to do. I can’t make other people see me the way I want to be seen, I couldn’t make someone fall in love with the way I think, and I’ll probably never fully work through all the things that have happened to me because time doesn’t stop and more things keep happening and eventually you just give in to feeling numb about all of it.

Perhaps, in the end, this is what Kati meant when she said I give and give to people. I can’t help it. At some point, I’m not even giving to anyone else in particular. I’m just the kind of person who is always overflowing with things I have no place for, good and bad, and other people just happen to be there a lot of the time because I can’t seem to stop being around them. I’m not sure if I can call it giving when it really is more like bursting at the seams with thoughts and feelings and memories that never go away.

I wonder if she thought that one day, when I couldn’t sit in the passenger seat of her car and let all of these ideas take up the space in the air around us, I’d resort to letting my thoughts spill over into a corner of the internet no one sees. I’ll never be able to ask her what she meant. And even that phases me less and less with every passing day.

lana again

I was going to call my dad tonight, because it feels like a crying sort of night. But I forgot though that I don’t have a space to myself here and it’s freezing cold and windy outside, so I have nowhere to go to call him and instead I’ve been lying in bed running through the conversation in my head.

The phone rings once or twice, because that’s usually what happens. He says “Hello?” and I say “Hi, dad.” and he goes “What’s up, daughter of mine?” And I say “Are you busy?” and he says “I have a little bit of time/I was just in a meeting/I’m about to go do an operation” Which usually means, yeah but you called and when you call I answer.

This is about when I start to tear up, because I think about how stupid I am as a daughter to need this much help when my parents have already given me the world, and I wish I could tell him the things that are really on my mind. Instead I settle for “I don’t know what I’m doing here/I want to transfer/I don’t know what I want to do with my life.” And he’ll tell me to give it more time, to not worry, that I don’t need to know. I can hear the patience in his voice from 1,000 miles away, or at least remember what it sounds like. I can’t even call him, but the silence somehow finds a way to be patient too.

I tell him about the way I’m always having to deal with the things people say. I’ll ask him why people are so mean to me, why they always single me out, why I always feel like everything is revolving around me when I don’t want it to. I’ll ask him if that makes me narcissistic. He’ll say yes.

He’ll also tell me I’m a “very intelligent, very successful young woman,” and that that makes people more abrasive towards me. That always makes me feel better about myself, as untrue as it is. He’ll probably tell me he has to go after that. And I’ll say okay, thanks for talking to me. He’ll hang up and I’ll be alone again.

I’ll lie there wishing I could tell him the whys and the reasons but I never could. When things are good, things are fine, but when things are bad, I feel like a shell of a person. I feel like I am here, like I don’t matter here, like I don’t matter back home anymore, like I no longer matter anywhere. I feel like my irrelevance swallows me up whole, and all I need is for someone to reach out to me and, on most nights, no one does. I have to actively seek out help. When I feel I could barely lift a finger I have to extend out an arm, so that maybe, just maybe, someone else can catch me.

Is this what depression feels like? I have always wondered. I stopped thinking I had a clinically diagnosable disease because a lot of the time things are swell. I often wonder if it’s not a chemical imbalance, if I don’t have a disorder but instead I have grown accustomed to other people picking me up. Maybe after all this time, I really have learned helplessness.

I have learned to rely on other people to feel whole, and most of the time other people exist to do a lot more than make me feel whole. So I remain burdened by the weight of that constant feeling of being unwanted, in every room, by every person who looks my way. Those days, I want to recuse myself from the world, to slip into that place where I listen to flatsound or lana del rey and think about how baseless and dumb and utterly uncalled for my sadness always is.

“Lana Again,” I always think to myself. I wish listening to lana del rey didn’t immediately remind me of a time in my life that felt very similar to now. When I had some of the best times, but the bad ones were almost unbearable. I remember my father on the porch in the dark while I sobbed, my father driving the car the back way to Boulder while I tried to make him understand how damaged I felt inside. How can you convey a loss of your own body without saying “his hands” or “his fingers,” without letting your father know about how disgusting you felt. How do you ever learn to take ownership of your body when it has been taken from you time and time again?

I did not tell my father about the hands. I would never. I only tell him that sometimes, I want to call Kati. Sometimes I feel like Kati made the right choice. Sometimes I really do feel like this is the only universe in which I am alive. In every other version of the world I did not make it here. I have this weird feeling like, there is not a universe in which both Kati and I live past seventeen. I can’t even imagine what she’d say to me if I could call her today. I can’t remember the sound of her voice. All I can do is lie in the dark and think about where I’d rather be, and I sink further into the comforter when I realize I can’t think of anywhere at all.

The only place that comes to mind is a world where I am not walking through quicksand. One where being happy is effortless, and not detrimentally fragile, and where all the planets don’t have to align for me to feel okay. I want a world where I am not waiting for other people to hurt me, where I am not afraid to admit what I want or how I feel or what I think, where I am not afraid to try my hardest. If there is another universe in which I am alive, I hope that that version of me is living in all these ways I can not.

Contrarily, this is the version of the world where I can survive. And I’m very good at surviving. Surviving and being alive are two very different things, and sometimes, in this universe, the only way I survive is by not being alive. I wonder if it’s worth it.

So, this has ended on a very dark note. I don’t have much else to say, and I have a lot of work to do. Tonight, it’s starting to look like survival will be a large hot chocolate and the mindless sound of a keyboard.

the plight of the asshole

Call me a dumb bitch three times in ten minutes, drunk and high on the Sunday night before thanksgiving. It’s my favorite way to start off the week.

I like to hear the way he slurs the words, the way they pile out of his mouth like the thing he has always wanted to say while sober but that gosh-darn frontal lobe stops him every time. He could never call me a dumb bitch while he’s sober. No one would let him, someone might even look at him differently.

But that’s the mystique of a Drunk Boy. When the Drunk Boy calls me a dumb bitch, I am supposed to take it lightly. When the Drunk Boy tells me to shut up as I sit in silence, I am supposed to laugh along. The Drunk Boy would never be held accountable for his words. The Drunk Boy is not expected to be responsible for himself when he is Incapacitated.

The Drunk Girl is a different story. When the Drunk Girl shouts “dumb bitch,” she becomes Messy, Crazy, or Too Much. When the Drunk Girl is Incapacitated, she is expected to be responsible for herself. If someone happens to Assault her or Hurt her, it was her fault for being Incapacitated and not Taking Care of Herself.

Funny how that works.

He was looking me squarely in the eyes as he called me a dumb bitch. I find it frustrating that every time I have been called a dumb bitch in my life, the person doing the calling has never quite understood what it means. A Dumb Bitch does not assume responsibility for Assholes. A Dumb Bitch will argue with you, will hold her claim to thoughts that are as legitimate as anyone else’s. He may only call me a dumb bitch when he is Incapacitated, but in that simple phrase there is a Shit Load of Desperation. He is not used to people rejecting his Way of Thinking. As an Educated Progressive Male it is his job to dictate what the right Way of Thinking is. He does not appreciate someone telling him that maybe his Way of Thinking is flawed and maybe there are other Ways of Thinking that are more Educated and Progressive than his own.

As a Dumb Bitch I take it upon myself to unceasingly infuriate every Asshole by having my own Way of Thinking. I refuse to give up my Way of Thinking simply because he has a status quo advantage. His Way of Thinking preexists mine, simply because he is the Educated Progressive Male. Every time a Dumb Bitch enters a debate or even simply a conversation, she is at a disadvantage. Nothing in the life of a Dumb Bitch plays out on home court, and every day is a competition to prove that she is Worth Something. A Dumb Bitch must choose words and actions purposefully, so as to not upset the Assholes. Her opinion is always Valid but never quite Understood, and therefore she seems Aloof and Uneducated.

Only the Non-Assholes understand the eloquence and complex beauty of being a Dumb Bitch. They listen, and they watch, and they do not try to force their Way of Thinking on anyone. A Non-Asshole would not have called me a dumb bitch, drunk and high on the sunday night before thanksgiving. Being Incapacitated does not excuse the actions of the Asshole, being Incapacitated only removes the delusional facade of Educated and Progressive, leaving the truth behind.

You will not remember this tomorrow, but I will. The problem with words is that they’re really very easy to say, and really very hard to take back. And no, I will not live the rest of my life remembering this one night, it will probably not even significantly change the way I see you. The world is funny like that. For some reason, it is always my job to brush things off my shoulders. When things bother me, it is up to me to change the way I think about them, because no one else is going to change themselves for me.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory: when a person holds two conflicting attitudes, they will alter them to be harmonious. It is much easier to dismiss these moments. It is always easier to throw away bad memories in favor of good ones. So here I am, altering myself one more time in order to get through the night.

when you ask me why, I don't know what to say

I can look back as many times as I want to and tell you how I wish I had done something differently, but it won’t change the things I do in the future.

As many times as I have been made to feel uncomfortable, I have never learned not to make the mistake of remaining in uncomfortable situations with the hope that they’ll improve. I would say that I like to see the best in people, but that’s really not true. Most of the time I see the worst in people, and I expect the worst from every situation, and when things start to feel unsettling I assume that perhaps it’s just me. So when we’re standing in the dark and I’m telling you about the way he treated me, and the things he said to me, and you ask me why I kept talking to him after that, I really don’t know what to tell you. I feel my nails pushing into the skin of my palms as I clench my fists in frustration, angry but not quite sure at who. I am upset that you’ve reminded me of how stupid I am and I’m upset at myself for being stupid in the first place. Mostly, I am upset that this is the way things are for women everywhere, and that the common understanding girls have about these situations is something lost on you. I am upset that the burden has once again fallen on me to play translator for victimhood, to try and explain a response I barely understand. I know I sound angry at you, but I am not. I am angry that this is the way things are. But it is not your fault that society raised you differently, that you have never been in a situation that feels like walking on a tightrope over lava.

Asking me why it takes so long to distance myself from the men who harm me is like asking me why I find concrete buildings beautiful. I don’t have an answer for you, and I don’t always have the energy to state my claim and defend myself. In all fairness, I’m usually aware that someone is not good for me a long time before I fully accept that. But everyone tells me I’m overcritical, so I try to give people as many second chances as I can bear. When he jokes about screwing me, when he invades my personal space in a way that makes my stomach sink, I look the other way. I let these things go because all my life people have told me that I read too much into every situation, that all the times I thought someone was trying to take advantage of me, I was simply misreading the atmosphere. So I’ve learned to live with my feelings of regret. It’s a tedious routine, letting people bother me and only later acknowledging it, but if I acted on every instance when someone has said something that made me uncomfortable, I would not be able to bear day to day existence.

I know this isn’t something you could understand. I know that the way I continue to let people mistreat me will never make sense to you, because you have never been in a position where you are virtually unseen and unheard. I’m not even sure I can explain it in a way you could understand. Just imagine for a second that you have spent your whole life either being told you’re pretty or being told what part of you inhibits your ability to be pretty. Imagine every compliment you receive having to do with the way your makeup looks, the outfit you chose, your waist or your thighs or your cheekbones, always something about your physical appearance. No one regularly compliments you on the way you see the world, or your knack for getting large groups of people to cooperate, or the way you can synthesize academic information across disciplines. What people see you for is what is on the outside, and you know this. You also know that if you give them time, they can learn to look past it. Because you have been socialized to perceive yourself the way other people see you, you have learned not only to see from their eyes but to think for them as well. And as if this is not enough, you subsequently have to fit yourself into their way of thinking, because getting someone to change the way they see the world, or even just changing the way they see you, is too difficult. It is much easier to accept that someone wants to take advantage of you physically and try to work around that. If you have no one else to talk to, if this one person makes you feel happy minus the times they are trying to make a move on you, you’ll work with that. When you move to a new place, and the first thing you experience is being the subject of a rumor, and it feels like you can’t escape the way people treated you in high school, you will take what you can get. Sometimes, what you can get is someone who listens to you talk, even if they are only listening because they think in exchange for their time they get another pass at your body.

So in this world, where you amount to no more than your physical existence, it’s very easy to let people walk all over you. In so many cases, I have been in conversations where what I say is completely disregarded. I once said, “I have to go,” to a guy in the hallway and he literally replied “not bad, I just went home. It was fun.” Rather than listening to the words coming out of my mouth, he imagined the question he wanted to be asked, he imaged the conversation he wanted to be having, and he responded based on that. Men do this a lot. And no, it is not all men, but a fair amount of them seem to recognize that they don’t really have to pay attention to reality, because someone else will do so. That someone else is women, who are constantly having to alter situations and adapt themselves to fit whatever narrative is being put forward by men.

This may sound very abstract and vague, and you might feel like saying something along the lines of “Yeah, but, you’re generalizing about half the earth,” or, “I don’t really understand the point you’re making,” and that’s fair. I guess all I’m trying to say is that I constantly feel like I’m holding space and time together for other people. Even when we are standing there in the dark and you are asking me why I would keep talking to him and I don’t tell you that maybe it’s because my first instinct is to alter myself. When you say I am influenced by everything everyone else says, that I don’t generate ideas on my own, a part of me sees the truth in that. A part of me understands that I am that way, I am malleable. I am easily swayed because I have learned that to hold everything together, to fit into all the roles you expect me to play. I can’t be strong and unwavering. Maybe when you suggest something, it sounds good to me because I have learned to adhere to your suggestions. As much as I want to be my own person, that is painstakingly difficult when every day calls for something different, and within every day there are dozens of people who call for something different, and at some point all I can be is a blank canvas, ready to accept whatever version of me you see as who I am, because that is easier than fighting.

You’ll argue with me that this is not always the case. You’ll tell me I have worth as a person, that not all men are like the ones who have overlooked me. And I know that this is true. Sometimes, on the best days, with the right people, I find myself. It’s like spotting something out a car window and it passing by so quickly you can only glance at it. It’s a feeling of “I am this way” that is followed by an overwhelming amount of love for whoever that girl is, whoever I am without all the bullshit I’ve learned.

There’s a time and place in the future where you ask me “why?” and I have an answer, and it is not a posted in a corner of the internet that no one looks at. It is not coupled with clenched fists or a downward gaze, it won’t force you to say “It’s okay,” or console my choices. It is spoken to you with strength and honesty, in a way that allows you to understand, in a way that allows me to move on.

The First Almost All-Nighter I've Pulled While Sober in College

It’s 2am on a Tuesday night and I’m awake watching New Girl and eating craft mac and cheese and trying to write this post while my contacts try to peel themselves out of my eyes. I’ve decided I won’t be going to my 8am class, because I barely sleep anymore, and I have so much work to catch up on. I feel guilty about it sometimes, the amount of financial investment going into this education and my inability to take it very seriously. But life is weird like that. It’s like the world encourages you to care about things that really don’t matter, like the numbers and letters assigned to your intelligence or your net worth in terms of years labored away in educational facilities.

Life is weird in a lot of ways. When I think about home, it feels like this distant place and time. When I see pictures of the places I know, I can picture them in my mind but it feels like I would have to travel and insurmountable distance to reach them. I don’t feel homesick, but rather like I’ve finally gained the space to look back on the last eighteen years and think about all the things I’ve experienced.

When I left for college, my dad told me that so much of the benefit is in the social experience of higher education. The longer I’m here, the more I really understand that. I sort of always knew that I would have a better time meeting people in college. Maybe I’m saying that prematurely, and I’ll lose the connections I have here like I did back home. But it really is a different experience. When you find the right people, being around them doesn’t feel like a chore. They aren’t ever people I grew up with, or people I recognize from school. I see Stirling around every now and then, but other than that there is the absence of familiarity and I have grown to love it. When you are separated from everything you know and all the vices you’ve learned to use as a coping mechanism, it’s like this sort of intuition kicks in and seeks out people and places that will make you feel whole and okay. Without the places and people I’ve learned to trust, my body has somehow managed to define a new sort of familiarity. People I have only known for a couple months can fill hours of my time and it doesn’t feel hollow the way it did back home sometimes.

Maybe this is just the way I experience growth. Maybe I always feel this way when I am around new people, and over time things will settle back into the melancholy rut I was so used to back home. I guess right now I’m not really worrying about it. I try not to worry so much anymore. Sometimes I’ll miss class and sometimes that might detrimentally affect my grade but I am still here, and that in itself is enough. I’m doing my best. I don’t have an eight year plan or a five year plan or even a this year plan but I have never been the kind of person who lives life in blueprints. Things just sort of happen and sometimes it’s exhilarating and sometimes it makes me feel purposeless and sometimes I can sleep it off and sometimes I need a little help.

I hope the way things are now is not just some peculiar transitional phase, because I like the temporary mentality I’ve developed over the last few months. It’s so easy for time to be fluid when you’re not tied down by a locational history. Sometimes I’ll walk somewhere in town that I have been before, and that is enough to keep me grounded.

There’s a lot more I could say. Not that any of this makes sense or matters to anyone else or is important in any way. I’ve been joined in this study lounge by two other kids. I wonder if being awake right now is weird for other people. It’s not super normal for me. Tanya and I are having a nice talk now.

I suppose this is a good place to say goodnight.

a letter to the girl i wish i was

I hate you, bitch.

I know hating people you feel inferior to is a really shitty way to deal with insecurity, but logic and rationality are oftentimes foreign concepts to someone in a position of self hatred.

A rational person would say that the successes of two distinctly different people are not mutually exclusive. A rational person would be able to recognize the intelligence and composure of another woman and not feel threatened by it.

But I am not a rational person.

I once drove six hours to a different state to try and prove to myself that I am capable of going somewhere on my own. I got a flat tire and cried in the trunk of my car for five hours while my dad drove out to help me.

Case in point, rationality escapes me.

When I was fifteen, I thought that the only way to get the boy I liked to like me back was by pretending I wanted to have sex to him.

When I was fifteen, I learned that sex is the direct route to attention.

If you want the attention of a boy, you dangle the idea of sex in front of them.

I’m not kidding, this is infallible.

The problem arises when you inevitably have to give in to the expectation of sex, and shortly thereafter you don’t seem to have any more male friends.

It’s kinda funny how empty you can feel after someone exchanges your body for their lack of interest. It’s kinda funny that I never learned from the multitude of times this happened to me.

See, the worst part about being friends with guys is noticing the girls they check out. I always want to roll my eyes and say something like “Really?” Because it’s always the girls with delicate frames and tame hair, girls with nice skin and unpigmented upper lips, girls who don’t resemble their brothers and are probably really, really fucking nice. Fuck those girls. They’re so nice.

The worst part is that it isn’t their fault that they are looked at like a fucking divine intervention, but I want to blame them anyway. I want to blame them for being something I cannot be; graceful, confident, composed, nice, gentle, interesting, ladylike, pleasant. And the reality is they probably don’t conform to all those shitty ideals anyway, but they can pull it off. I’ve been trying my entire life, and I can’t.

I’m interesting in the way that driving by a burning building is interesting. You’ll slow your car down to watch other people try and salvage the foundation, but your interest is restricted by the understanding that there’s not really anything you can do, and as such you drive on while I turn to ash.

Generally, people are more likely to date girls who are cute and quirky, and not girls who like saying “fuck” and comparing themselves to burning buildings.

But there’s only so many of those nice, cute girls to go around, so lots of times when my friends like one of those spectacular, monumental women, she’s tied up in another relationship and can’t see how good they’d be together, and I get the pleasure of hearing all about how lost she must be and how clueless she is. As if these cute, nice girls are dumb and aloof to their immediate surroundings. Even if that stereotype was true, why the fuck are people so into the idea of a girl who’s oblivious to the world around her? What on EARTH makes that trait desirable?

I can’t speak for all women, but most of the girls I know are hyper aware of their surroundings. We have to be, to survive. You literally cannot go anywhere or do anything as a woman without recognizing every miniscule detail about the world around you.

I would kill for the luxury of not noticing who I’m around or what they might be thinking about me. I would kill to not overanalyze everything from the movement of their eyes to the direction their feet point.

This idea that girls are clueless and just wander around being cute and helpless is a myth, and beyond that it’s fucking degrading.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine commented on the way I never ask for help when I clearly need it. I walked the whole way back from wherever we were contemplating why I do that. It led me to a really upsetting realization.

I am not a cute, aloof girl. Even if I had that sort of nuanced, comforting kind of pretty, I could never pass as unaware. I notice things and I remember them, and I have never seen the appeal of appearing to be less aware than I am. I don’t carry myself with poise, I don’t hold my head above my shoulders. I am often angry, I am often hateful. I don’t like how muscular my back is, from constantly carrying weight I refuse to delegate to others, even when they offer. My arms are the same way. I am not the kind of person who fits easily into an embrace. I feel awkward and angular, too tall to fit in but too slouched to look self assured.

The girl I wish I was carries herself with the kind of grace that draws eyes. I draw glances now because I trip easily on sidewalks and I wear exposing clothing so I can pretend people find me compelling.

The girl I wish I was doesn’t need to be looked at, she doesn’t need to be heard. She doesn’t need her existence to be validated by the eyes of men.

The girl I am now still does. No matter how hard I try to change things, how many times I think to myself, “You’re better than this.”

Maybe I’m not really better than this.

I’m not above jealousy, I’m not above exercising the only power I have to feel wanted. Even if in the end it leaves me lonely, exposed, and hollow.

Old habits die hard.

In a different world, my body is respected. In a different world, my body is not the burning building. Instead it is a forest, or an ocean. Something no one can claim, or conquer, something they can only revel at in silence and awe. In a different world, I would not hate the girl I wish I was because I would not need or want to be anyone else.

World Mental Health Day

It’s not technically world mental health day anymore, but I think that every day is a good day to advocate for learning about mental health, because I feel our society and our dialogues do a poor job of addressing the overwhelming severity of mental health related issues afflicting people not only in the US but around the globe.

If you’re looking for a simple place to start, The National Institute of Mental Health (nimh.nih.gov) is a good resource for understanding mental illness and it’s effect on the US in numerical terms. The website has information explaining a variety of mental illnesses as well as how they’re often diagnosed and how they are proportionally represented within the population. With that in mind, I’d like to argue that we can’t keep measuring human well-being in terms of diagnosis and death. When you hear a story, see a statistic, or make a comment in passing, those things are generalizing and desensitizing issues that affect millions of people, oftentimes to an extent that cannot be understood or fully empathized with.

I’ve grown accustomed to brushing off fragments of conversation where people say things like “I’d kill myself,” or “I wanna die,” because I recognize that not everyone has had the experiences I have had, and to the vast majority of the country this is just how people talk. Which is the truth. Most people have not lost a close friend to suicide, most people have not experienced suicidal tendencies themselves. It’s hard to tell complete strangers that the way they talk “triggers” you, especially when it doesn’t feel like it should be your place to tell people what’s okay or not okay to say. More than that, it’s hard to tell them why. About a month ago, a friend told me she refrains from using the words “crazy” and “insane” because she feels that they perpetuate a stigma in relation to mental health that we should be trying to change, and that they bring up old memories of hurtful names people used to call her. I regularly use these these words, and I had never thought that they would stick out like that to another person because they are a part of widely accepted colloquial language. 

See, in a lot of ways, our failure to recognize the reality of this growing desensitization to issues of mental health is not “our fault”. It has been passed down to us through popular culture, from comedy shows where someone screams “I WILL KILL MYSELF” as a punchline to music that can turn the word “suicidal” into a melody. Self-harm and suicide jokes are often found funny because the punch line is so audacious, and the sad reality is that acts of suicidal intent are no longer so unparalleled.

I could tell you that the CDC estimated over 44,000 deaths caused by suicide in 2016, or that between 1999 and 2016, suicide rates have risen by 28%. But this couldn’t possibly describe how to feels to hear a word, or a turn of phrase, something as simple as “imma die,” and to suddenly feel your stomach drop. It’s not as if it’s fundamentally inhibiting, but without fail it recalls a time I spend every waking minute trying to avoid. It’s a lot like walking on a tightrope, trying to balance a need to validate past experiences by recognizing the pain and grief still harbored, and at the same time recognizing the need to let those comments go because they are unavoidable on a day to day basis.

I’d also like to point out that suicide is not the only mental health related topic that should be more taboo to talk about. Clinically diagnosable conditions like bipolar disorder and depression are often appropriated into adjectives and used to describe people or situations. Malapropisms like this are detrimental to improving the quality of mental health care, and are generally disparaging to a community of people who are actually, legitimately afflicted by mental illness. That in mind, it’s incredibly difficult to change the language we use, and it’s definitely not going to happen just because you read this post, or you know it can hurt people. I used the same phrases, joked in the same way, up until I lost someone to suicide. It’s almost as if there are two different worlds. In one of them, death is a distant, vague joke, and in the other, death is very real, very unyielding, and very irreversible. 

It’s going to take a long time for us to correct the way we perceive mental illness. It starts with thinking about the way we speak, the things we say, and the implications behind them.

Thanks for reading.