new things

i've been at my parents' 4 or 5 days now and it's nice; i've mostly been drunk or sleeping since i got here (when i'm not wrapping gifts) which has been a wonderful reprieve.

i went to louisville with ivy and dustin for dana's 23rd birthday and i had a really good time; it was just what i needed. and i'm not sure why i'm hesitant to write this here because it's not like anyone is going to judge me for it, but i was kind of drunk and trashy and liked it. i got hit on by several guys; one guy bought me a drink, two boys kissed me, and i kinda hooked up with one of those guys in his car once i started sobering up. scandalous for me, i know.

but it was good. he was sweet and from germany. it's funny, i wrote a note on my phone before i went to sleep that night about how we are able to direct to us the people and experiences that will help us progress, and how the universe will bring them to us. i feel like this experience was one of those. it just seems like if i'd left the bar with anyone else in that whole place, i wouldn't have felt right about it. i know my instincts, and i'm glad i went with them on this one because i feel like what happened was absolutely supposed to.

he had bought me a drink and been talking to me all night, and we kissed for a while on the porch of the bar. i was freaking out when he asked me if i wanted to leave the bar and i talked to my friends about it; dana was giggly and ivy was egging me on, but i was actually really nervous. dustin just came up to me, without context, and said "he's over you. it's okay. you're allowed to do this." and i think i probably teared up a little and was like "yeah, but it's the sentiment of it, you know?" and he just said "he's over you in that way, too." and it was harsh, but it was sobering and true. (looking back now, dustin was absolutely shitfaced and ended up going home with someone he'd known 5 minutes, so i'm not sure why i took that statement as sage advice, but i'm glad i did.) i am so god damn sentimental about everything and i don't want to be that way about dylan anymore, i haven't wanted to be for a very very long time. so last night helped.

it was awkward and kind of weird, and we were moving super fast and i just kind of freaked out and stopped and told the guy to wait, and he stopped, fixed my skirt, gave me his coat, and just talked to me, hugged me. and he was so sweet. after a little bit, we started kissing again and fooled around for a bit, and ended up talking a lot afterward. he told me it had been a while for him and he was glad i freaked out, that he wouldnt have enjoyed it as much had we had sex, and i agreed (not like i planned on going that far anyways). he talked about his life, how he ended up in kentucky from germany, told me how grateful he was for the generosity of his parents, and asked about my life. and i didn't fucking think about anyone else in those moments except for myself. it was fucking wonderful.

i'm not saying that i want for every night at a bar to be like this, but i didn't realize how empowering and fulfilling it would be just to mess around with some guy and then never see him again. i felt sexy and confident; i was fucking proud for a fit 26-year old guy from germany to whisper "god, you're a good kisser" to me under his breath, to tell me i'm hot. and i feel happier since. less attached to whatever weird headspace i was living in in which i was going to bump into dylan in evansville and actually give a fuck about what he thought. in which i owed it to him or anyone else not to have fun and be a single 20-something.

so it was good. maybe a little scandalous, but good.

peace

friday night was my friend erin's birthday, and we went to this polish bar/club near her place that was absolutely ridiculous. fog, lights, weird remixes of gagnam (sp?) style all night, and the support pillars had been turned into surprisingly realistic fake trees surrounding the dance floor. and it was empty, completely. so we all got pretty drunk and were dancing, then we went back to erin's and had more drinks and danced on her pole (she does pole classes at flirty girl fitness)

the next day i woke up and daniella was still gone. it was overcast and a little rainy out (my favorite weather) but really cold. when i woke up (sore from head to toe and hungover) i wrapped my top half up in a big fluffly towel and drew a bath with the bath bomb blake sent my for my birthday. i listened to music, slept for a while, and then just sat there and thought until the water got cold. it was the most relaxed i've been all semester...maybe even all year.

i'm trying to recreate that now, to work on my final for my type class tomorrow (which i haven't started) but mostly i'm just hot and sleepy and feeling like i need to get up before i ruin my final by sleeping through the few work hours i have left.

but still. that morning makes me excited for living alone, for not being in school. for having a job that allows me to actually have a day off every week (or maybe even just every two weeks), not just guilt-ridden nights of fun followed by 5am work mornings to make up for it. blake has been sending me pictures of her art and talking about her free time and i'm insanely jealous; i want that.

in the last half of this semester i managed to drain my bank account and had to borrow money from my parents to print this week, which makes me feel icky and needy. this semester i slept, on average, 3-4 hours per night. i'm pretty sure i only biked to school three times. i ordered at least 20 pizzas. i either drank or smoked at least once a week. i've gained 10 pounds. i've backslid in my progress with moving on from dylan, lost track of how long it has really been since i've even seen him. i've been a messy shithead of a roommate. i talked to my mom maybe once every two weeks, didnt talk to jaime at all between when i left and thanksgiving.

this semester was hard on me, physically, mentally, emotionally, and i felt out of control and guilty for 99% of it. i felt like i had to be selfish just to get through the week. i am so ready to put this semester to rest, to gain back my peace, to feel like a real human being again.

SAIC

i've been working on this press kit for my school for half of the semester, and today is the final day of tying up loose ends and sending the files off to the printer. it's scary and nerve-wracking and i started off hating this project, but the more and more i've been working on it, the more fond i've grown of it.

i was working on it last night and a friend of mine who left SAIC to go to columbia chicago was sitting next to me, and read over my shoulder one of the quotes "the most influential art and design school in the united states" (which, btw, was quoted from Columbia's (the real one, in NYC) national arts journalism survey) and scoffed, and i got really offended.

i don't know what i'm getting at here, it just pissed me off. i really like this girl as a friend, but she shits on SAIC when she's in Columbia's design program and didn't even know what i was talking about when i was using easy design vocabulary like the rag (the edge of the paragraph where the words don't line up) and leading (the space between lines).

anyway. i was reading over the core values of my school today and i started tearing up. i guess it's just a good sign, that i obviously made the right decision, and i'm not sure i'm ready to be done next semester. the paragraphs are kind of cheesy and self-promoting, but there's something there, and there's something reassuring in saying that i am part of a community of explorers, of artists and scholars, of people making history.

We are explorers

At SAIC, we exceed boundaries. Our commitment to an open structure is embodied in a curriculum of self-directed study within and across a multiplicity of disciplines and approaches that promote critical thinking, rigorous investigation, and playful creativity. Through interdisciplinary practices and in deeply focused media, faculty and students conceive and accomplish exchanges in cultural study, production, and research with artists and scholars around the world. We are a community that challenges the notion that any field is ever beyond rediscovery.

Meaning and making are inseparable

At SAIC, we believe that meaning and making are inseparable, existing as a perpetual and productive cycle driven by experience, research, and critique. Our commitment to a wide range of media and processes supports our assertion that the artist, designer, scholar, and writer are uniquely qualified as makers to provide leadership, creative perspective, and hands-on skill for shaping today's world, as well as contributing to its opportunities. Critique, as a fundamental component of the creative process, provides assessment as well as new ideas, possibilities, and directions that enable our community to sustain argument, rigor, experimentation, playfulness, invention, subversion, and mutual respect.

We are artists and scholars

The students, faculty, and staff of SAIC are engaged and innovative creators of art, design, scholarship, and writing. The faculty drives our curriculum, and each member brings the diverse experiences of his or her practice directly into the classroom and studio. Our students are viewed as emerging peers and full participants in the learning that occurs in collaboration with faculty and each other. Through their diverse practices, the staff participate to support the learning process; promote the overall well-being, growth, and development of students; and enhance student success and the realization of students' full artistic potential.

Chicago

Our symbiotic relationship with the city radiates outward as students, faculty, and staff connect themselves to the diverse communities of Chicago and the entire world. Forming a city within a city, a campus, close and yet not contiguous, we are urban. The city's richness, complexity, and contradictions are the perfect environment for our own diverse community.

We make history

Our major encyclopedic art museum, libraries, special collections, and public programs create an unparalleled environment for maintaining a thoughtful and tangible relationship to history and the ways in which it is continually revisited and represented, fueling our innovation and experimentation and keeping our historical and critical discourse completely active. Students, faculty, and alumni of SAIC have made significant and groundbreaking contributions to the art, design, and scholarship of the 20th century, and continue to do so in the 21st.

lazy day

this is not a real post,
just a reminder of how badly i have procrastinated this semester

December is so much harder on me than November is

how could I have forgotten that?

hashtag blindsided

roommate jives

tonight i was talking to this guy who's in my class, chris, on facebook about design & parks and rec, and dani was like, "hey you know that chris guy? he totally likes you, huh? well, i want him to at least, he's cute. you guy's'd be cute"

sometimes i'm just glad i live with someone who gets me & likes me as much as dani does
(i secretly think chris and i would be adorable even though hes a lil shorter than me, hah)

time flows in strange ways on sundays

haruki murakami said that & i love it; sundays are weirdly transient for me.

last night was phenomenal. i got to meet a design idol of mine & met another designer who quickly became a design idol by the time i got to shake his hand. it was surreal. plus i got to sit in a car with erin and talk, which was good for our friendship. because we have so many classes together, a lot of the time i worry that our friendship has become a giant complainfest.

i fell asleep on the couch and woke up at 4 am, carried gitsy to bed with me, and had a really peaceful sleep. i had the worst cramps ever this morning (enough to wake me up at 8:30 and make me nauseous) so i sleepily filled the bathtub with the hottest water my tap would allow, wrapped my shoulders in a towel i left on the radiator so it was warm, got in the tub, and fell back asleep until 9:30. it was honestly a great way to start the day. it's been stormy all day so i've been lazily napping on and off, doing work in between little sleeps.

i have a ridiculous workload for this week, more than might be possible and definitely more than i've had all semester, but i'm feeling strangely okay with it. i'm sitting on the floor at my grandma's farm table working in front of the tv and drinking coffee while gitsy sleeps in my lap. (i planned on going to starbucks but it's tornado-ing outside and i'm still nauseous, but it also just feels good to spend time at home today.)

i also got into advanced studio, which makes me feel really great. erin said something last night while we were at the conference about how at SAIC, everyone is great and you are constantly having to prove your worth and work as hard as you can to keep up and try to get to the top, but when you go elsewhere (we were at NIU, a state school with an arts program, but not an art school), you feel a little bit more experienced and prepared than other designers our age in school. and i agree with that, there is obviously a difference in the work. but it feels good to be recognized as good at my school, within my very closest design community.

kokopelli face tattoo

hey dude i hate everything you do
but i'm trying really hard to not hate you
hating you won't make you suck any less

nausea of the heart

today a high school friend who i talk to a lot through facebook messages about design & music invited me to go to this camping music festival this summer, and it is super exciting to me that i might get to go; i love a lot of bands who might be playing and it's only $45 for several days of camping.

but i also immediately felt heartsick and guilty about the idea of going because of the fact that all of the other people he invited are close friends with dylan. and that means that dylan might go. or that even if he doesn't go, his friends would treat me like shit. or that even if his friends don't treat me like shit, they would tell him things about me that aren't his business.

i'm so fucking tired of feeling like this. like my hometown is somewhere i can't be myself because of all of the shit that happened between me and one! other! person! almost two years!!! ago. i don't understand the toxicity that exists around small town communities like that. thinking about this shit gets me confused and wound up and i'm just tired.

i've been reading a lot of osho lately, about how the conscious mind gets into the habit of dwelling, of replaying the past, and that getting in tune with your unconscious mind (meditation, essentially) is the only way to drag all the hidden shit out and just feel all of the emotions and let them go instead of trying to suppress and rationalize them. and i've been feeling really good because of that, because i've been studying and trying really hard to do that. i just need to stay in that mindset, to not let someone who i really don't like have this kind of control over my emotional state and my future plans.

things i'm going to start doing to start feeling more like the person i want to be:

• keep putting back money into savings. i have done a wonderful job of this this semester and hope that i can continue so that i have money to support myself when school is out and i maybe don't have a wonderful job yet
• start fucking writing things down when i think of them. turn this into a blog of my writing that i allow to be seen by others because it will start out anonymous and not linked to anything of mine
• get my etsy going again, even if it's little stuff at first
• organize the junk bins in my apartment. throw things away. let go.
• start running again. or start biking to school again, but it's hella cold already so we're gonna stick with running for now.
• art for fun, then vandalize with it.

november.

it doesn't feel right to me that november is already here. september and october are my most fulfilling times of the year; being a september baby, i have always loved fall. but november is cold. living in chicago, november means preparing for a winter that won't end until mid-april, and i'm just not ready for that yet.

this semester i have put on weight. i have had to be careful with my body because my mind is under so much stress that my body literally can't handle any. i haven't even completely broken in my beautiful new doc martens because i can't stand even the idea of going through a few days of my feet hurting. i haven't had the downtime i've needed, so any time i drink a beer or take a hit, i spend hours freaking out that i wasted time when i could have been working or cleaning or getting my body back in shape. but i have been trying not to do that lately. i have fun when i can and roll with the punches when i need to, and somehow literally everything always works out okay. i've discovered that if i accidentally fall asleep and don't finish my work, the universe shifts a little and somehow there's time for me to finish my work in class (or on break) before i have to present, with absolutely no problem. somehow it all works out.

so i have felt really good about discovering that i can relax a little. (hence why i'm allowing myself to write this when i should be working.) but there's just some stuff i have to write down. because i've been working on this project about memory, i've been thrust back into processing stuff i should have processed a long time ago. and i know that i've written about this, so i'm not going to go through all of it again in this post. but last night i went to my friend kelsey's house, someone who has become a really great friend to me this semester. she's from boston (so of course she loves big d & beer) so we've been hanging out a lot. last weekend i met her boyfriend, patrick, who still lives in boston, and she asked me what i thought about him. i could sense an edge to her voice, as though she wanted us to tell her that he was just okay or something. i did like him, and i told her that, but he seemed incredibly needy and childish, whereas kelsey can be child-like in fun, but is actually really mature (i didn't tell her this.)

anyway, we were drinking and all got pretty drunk, and kelsey disappeared off to the bathroom for a really long time. the walls are thin in her apartment, and we could hear her sobbing on the phone with pat. she was devastated after he went back to boston, so we thought that's all she was crying about, but it turned out that pat had tried to kill himself in the past week and she has really been struggling. it was obvious when i saw them together that she loves him so dearly, and i was just immediately taken back to the night that everything broke between dylan and i. (god, i'm crying at my computer in starbucks right now.) and i just feel so bad for her, i want her to move in with me so i can make her cookies and cry with her and tell her that things don't really go back to how they used to be but that you are okay eventually, that it becomes a scar you keep but you don't see every day.

alea and i are going back over there today (kelsey is having a halloween party) with cookies a couple hours before the part starts so she can vent a bit. i got this wonderful poem book by clemetine von radics yesterday that i'm going to let her borrow in hopes that it will help her process.

anyways, i don't have a way to end this post. november is always so hard on me, but i'm hoping that by being there for kelsey this november, maybe it won't be. that things can start to close and heal again. i know that this timing is kismet; i don't believe in fate or whatever, but i do believe that my choice to get hurt this way in this life lines up to help other people, that being forced to process this right now is supposed to line up with her life so i can be there for her, and that kelsey came into my life for a reason. you just have those feelings about certain people.

list 123go

• emailed jonathan saying i felt some chemistry there & we should get coffee
• this happened because i spent 2 nights waiting up for some okcupid guy to message me back about the date we were supposed to go on
• there is currently a circus (literally) happening 100 feet from my apartment
• i have way too much work to do
• im halfway (maybe) done with my dress for halloween
• it kind of looks dumb but its a good first try considering i made it from a vintage pattern
• it'll look fine once i figure out what to do with the skirt
• i have 2 concepts due for tuesday, progress on a poster due for wednesday, and a final project due for thursday
• also a midterm on thursday
• i'm not really worried except for the posters due on thursday cause they're watercolor and i skipped last class so i dont even know where to go with it
• i need to buy art supplies when i go to the loop
• aslo a pink cowgirl hat and a white turtleneck
• i kinda wish i'd gone out this weekend
• but i cleaned my room (shoved most stuff in the closet)
• hmm ok back to work

baggage

i feel weird writing so much lately about dylan and things surrounding our relationship because i am over him, i have been for a long time. but i guess i'm not over everything that happened, and doing more artwork about that recently has helped me realize that i might not be for a long time, if ever. the fact that he tried to kill himself hurts me. the fact that i helped put him in the dark place he was in hurts me. it might always be a soft spot for me, because i loved him and he was broken and i hurt him.

right now i'm working on a type project in which we have to use text we write (representing two separate memories) and an outside source of text in two posters on a theme (most people are using an emotion or set of circumstances). i decided to use moments that i look back to as critical periods of growth; moments that made me more Real either because they built me up or stripped me of everything i had known. the first memory i'm using is the night i texted dylan's mom and told her he had tried to kill himself, and the second is a night i spent with ivy and dustin lying on the pavement by the riverwalk, talking deeply for the first time after a year apart at college. when i got up to talk about my theme, i couldn't keep myself from getting red-faced and no matter what i did, my voice shook and stuck in my throat.

when i was at ivy's this weekend, we were drinking and ivy kept telling dustin & i to go dance with boys, that she'd introduce us to the ones we thought were cute. we told her, and she ran off the find them, and i immediately felt scared and nervous and guilty. all of a sudden i didn't want to be there, but more importantly, i didn't want to be in my own skin. i didn't go talk to the guy, so nothing happened, and the feeling went away.

tonight i was thinking about that, wondering why i got worked up like that, and i remembered some stuff that i had forgotten (or maybe blocked out) about the last time dylan and i had sex. and maybe this is too much to be writing about on a blog. but it made me panic for a second that i could have forgotten, and then i felt the tiniest bit better. i probably still need to go have a good cry in the shower about it, but i'm finally dealing with things that i don't think i was able to process when they happened. and i'm hoping that doing so will allow me to move on and to open back up so that when someone good and kind walks into my life, i don't have all this baggage keeping me from making a connection.

fucking dreams

I'm at Ivy's for the weekend & I just woke up from an exhaustingly long and horrid dream, crying. I'm going to try to sleep for a bit more and make this feeling go away but I'm just sad & I can't figure out if I'm justified in feeling this depressed over a dream or not

perspective

i follow this plus size fashion blog of a girl who lives in chicago, in the thick of it (here) that i like a lot because
a.) she's close to my size and shape (around 220 lbs, 5'9", pants in the 16-20 range -- she looks like she has a smaller waist than me, but most fatshion blogs i follow are of girls who have a much different body than me, so i like this blog best)
b.) she's edgy in her style & does a lot of thrifting/bargain hunting, which is what i'm all about
c.) she lives in chicago, so i know the places she shops at & am able to frequent them myself

i kinda talked in my last post about how i haven't been feeling quite right in my body lately. i've put on about 10-15 lbs over the course of the past few months of being stressed to the max and not sleeping, and then being too tired to bike or run like i was doing last semester. i had been maintaining about 205-215 since the end of freshman year of college, and back up to 225-230, what i was in high school. and it's not a huge change, especially for someone as tall as i am, but it feels huge. i feel huge. and the fact that something in my mind is relentlessly tearing me down about it has made it really hard to change my habits; i'm an emotional eater & always have been.

so anyway. i was reading this blog today, and the girl is in london. in her most recent post, she said that in the UK, most places stock up to a US size 20 in the regular departments. and i had to do a double take. i just think about how my life, my perception of self-worth, would be drastically different if i lived in a place where i could find clothes that would fit my body in almost any store i walked into. it just amazes me that our culture's fucked up perception of size normality could permeate so deeply into my psyche that i spend every day sitting in ways that make me look thinner, stressing out about every calorie i eat or every time i take the escalator instead of the stairs, guilt tripping every day i take the train instead of riding my bike.

anyways, i lost steam with this & i have work to do, but you get the point, which is ~brb moving to london~

good enough

this weekend was wonderful. my parents came up to see my first show & it was just so good to see them. since the beginning of this school year, i've been so fucking overwhelmed that i haven't felt like i could catch my breath, and my self esteem has been suffering greatly. it's nothing like the sadness that gripped me around the the beginning of february last year, but it's been a significant problem for me lately. it's like no matter what i'm doing, there's a voice in my head telling me that i'm not good enough: that dress is too short, everyone is staring at you because your clothes don't fit, your hair is messy, your work is sloppy, you shouldn't have said that, he isn't into you, you can bike faster than this, you're weak if you have to stop running now, you've gained weight, you should be working, you should be working, you should be working.

it's just been relentless, and it was good to have my family here supporting me and making me feel validated for a little bit. at the show, i drank with my classmates and i felt so popular; people were hugging me and telling me my work was awesome. it feels really good to finally be "in" with the STA kids & seniors in the VCD department. being a designer is all about making connections & i'm finally doing that.

i hadn't looked at any of dylan's social media in a really long time & i did earlier, which was dumb of me because now i'm thinking about everything that happened again. he's dating someone else now & i'm actually happy for him; she's really pretty and seems like a nice person. i was even proud of myself because my heart didn't even do the dumb floppy thing or sink down in my stomach; i didn't have a physical reaction or even really that much of an emotional reaction & that feels more amazing than i can probably express.

i think sometimes that i have worked so hard to prove to people (who? i have no idea) that i came out on top; that i was not broken, that i'm ok. i was pretending to be alright for a long long time and i realize now that i thought i was still pretending, and i don't think i have been for months. i look around me and i have a 2 bedroom apartment in the 3rd biggest city in the US with my dog & a wonderful roommate, i am thriving at an amazing design school, and i have literally everything in front of me open to opportunity. i could up and move to london after school if i saved up enough for a ticket and had a job waiting. i live an amazing life and i don't have to prove myself to anyone, not even myself.

lessons

i'm sure there's something to be learned in all of this chaos that happened tonight (namely in-progress saves, since i couldn't really help that i was sick all week/end) but mostly i am just tired and stressed and want to be asleep right now. i have to leave for school at 5 to make sure i have enough time to print and mount before my 10am proposal. it's 3:20 now. so, do the math, no sleep for me ever again.

a real update

i feel like this moment is the first real free time i've had in two weeks! this is an exaggeration, of course...i've managed to fill my time with countless episodes of law & order SVU and unnecessarily long showers, by seeing blue jasmine (finally!!!) and sleeping late on the weekend. lately i have just been extremely busy, and it comes in stark contrast to one of the most relaxing summers i've ever experienced.

i've been ditching class because my work isn't done, and on the rare occasion that it is done, it's not me; it's rushed and lacking so much of the passion i pride myself on putting into my work. i've been so busy that every attempt to clean my room gets thwarted halfway through, so every weekend i have to start cleaning from square one all over again. gitsy has probably peed on half of my clean laundry that somehow ended up on the floor because i was too tired to pick it up off my bed and hang it. i didn't have groceries for a week because i literally couldn't find the time to go to the store, and i haven't eaten most of what i bought when i finally did get to go shopping on monday because i haven't been home or had the time. i spent 2 days this week getting home from 8 hours at school to do 5 hours of design work for amy only to be too tired to even start my homework. i feel so unbearably and deeply lonely, constantly, obsessively so. to the point that it's scaring me that i can feel this level of dependency or need for attention. to the point where i am unable to concentrate on anything other than the fact that i have to be doing something wrong for no one to be interested in me. for my work to be so uninspired. for me to feel this low.

i was sitting in class this morning with work that i'm not proud of, work that has no concept behind it, and i started to have a panic attack over the fact that i'm mostly behind in all of my classes already, with no inspiration and no way out (add/drop ended on tuesday), and i realized that i'm actually not ok right now. this is how it always is with me, the eternal optimist. i complain a lot, but it's a unrepresentative habit i have; i think i'm fine until i look around me and realize i've been flailing underwater.

i feel guilty all the time, and then i feel even more guilty for wallowing instead of pulling myself up out of it. i went to a noontime lecture today, for a designer named mark mcquade (who has done work for wired UK and the new york times), and it was probably the highlight of my week so far. i was so inspired after he presented his work and his process to us because i realized that that's what my work is lacking (process work, the hard stuff, the stuff i love doing). so i guess at this point it's just trying my best to put in the hours on my work and seeing what happens with everything else. i'm hoping it's the type of situation that will get easier with time and habit-forming.

wow what a hell of a week. I've been sleeping on & off all day after several days of getting about 2 hours a night. had a nightmare I texted dylan (it's his birthday) that woke me up & now I'm just watching a movie with dani.

I'm mostly pretty lonely these days, but I'm good. I ran into dan, who remembered that it was my birthday soon, and that was nice. friends have rearranged schedules so I know someone in most of my classes now. aside from the stressful mess of not sleeping, this week had been good. I'm pushing my design styles in new ways, I finished everything I needed to give to Amy, and I can relax for the night. tomorrow I have to spend the day fixing my bike up and cleaning my room, and then do lots of homework on Monday, but it will be worth it to have taken a day to rest. I'm physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted and I deserved to take a break. wish I hadn't slept away so much of it, but feeling a lot better than I did this time yesterday.

friends

on dustin's 21st birthday, he introduced me to everyone at the table as his "best friend, my other one is ivy but she's in europe," but he consistently tells me how hot dylan is, says that he'd sleep with him is he were gay, does stuff like feel up my little brother when we've been drinking & then refuse to apologize.

tj was so fucking needy (and to whom i offered everything--my house, my food, my money, my companionship, my time and energy--without a second thought), but then when i ask for help, he can't be bothered unless he's already with me, especially now that he has a girlfriend.

don't get me wrong, both dustin & tj (and a lot of my other friends who do similar things) have been there for me at times when no one else was. but it's like i'm growing out of those relationships & it just hurts that the people i have put myself on the line for & given so much to can so often do things that it seems obvious would hurt me.

coba & anne & ivy called from their apartment tonight, they're having a party. and i'm the first person they call, they wondered if they could come up to chicago for my birthday. and it's not the first time they've called me when they're out together. to feel wanted by a group of people just feels so good. it's like when blake brings me a chai or sonic by surprise or leah calls me with a pint of raspberry nebula soy ice cream & says to meet her at unique thrift in half an hour.

because i'm that friend, the one who plans everyone's surprise parties but only gets 7 people to show up for her birthday. the leslie knope of gift giving. i try so hard to pump every bit of myself into all of my relationships and, with the exception of my very close friends like blake & ivy & leah, i never get that in return.

i'm not trying to come off as ungrateful, because i'm not. friendships are delicate relationships & so many of mine are long distance right now that it's hard. it's just frustrating that i seem to give so much more in so many of my friendships & it's nice to know that not all of my friendships are that way.

too much

I'm on my period and I've already bled through 2 of my favorite pairs of panties and a skirt today. because I'm not in the best of moods, I really didn't want to write anything tonight but I feel like I have to put down something.

my family is awesome at having huge explosion fights during vacation and I thought I had managed to escape relatively unscathed, but the 17-hour drive home proved me wrong in the absolute worst way.

let me just say that I don't think my mother and I have ever fought as hard as we did last saturday. and I was a complete bitch in the morning, so I deserved some sort of smack down, but I didn't deserve what my mom did to me.

ever since my bike got stolen, my baseline self-esteem has been really low; I locked my bike incorrectly and left it outside for too long. it was my fault my bike was stolen. my haircut is growing out weird and I've been feeling down about myself, especially because of the fact that my parents helped me buy a new bike.

and don't get me wrong: I am the most grateful person in the world that they were willing to do that. but I am so embarrassed and guilty of how privileged I am. I have friends whose bed frames are milk crates, whose parents don't pay their rent, who have worked for everything they have. I haven't done that; I haven't needed to. my parents lived that way and have worked hard so I don't have to, and I really shouldn't feel guilty. but I do, it's like survivor's guilt that I can't shake. and because of that, it has become a trigger for me.

I honestly don't know or remember how my mom got onto the subject of my ungratefulness (we had been fighting about how i had been yelling that morning), but she just kept accusing things like, "you've been given a lot," "you've never been asked for anything in return," etc. and every time I told her that she was going to trigger me, she told me she didn't care. so it escalated until I was dry-heaving on the side of the road in North Carolina, playing an endless loop of all the times I have wanted more in my life and all the things I have ever been given. (guilt over dylan, gitsy, my car, how I used to trash my room, etc.)  after I spent our whole dinner crying to myself and fighting back sobbing, my mom started crying and told me that she was sorry, that she meant it but I was still a "beautiful" person, was afraid she did something seriously wrong. changed her story to say that she meant that I am selfish with time I take to process emotions, that I can't keep it together, that they give me a lot of emotional space.  I told her I deserved it (which I didn't and don't believe) and she said she knew, that her mom "kicked her ass to set her straight" when she was my age and she was so grateful for it.

I just decided that I'm too tired of fighting her over this shit. i've gotten to the point now where, im some ways, i feel more progressed than my mom. she's dealing with a lot at work and in her personal life right now, and I need to consider that when thinking of things she has said to me lately. I would rather let her think that she won, that she was right, than tear my family apart over it. when I am in Chicago I am not guilty or depressed, for the most part. I am given the space to process my emotions when and how I want without being made to feel bad about it.

because I am so grateful for everything I have and the people who are in my life. I'm not an ungrateful person. I don't continually shit on people with my emotions like my mom says I do. I may not have had to work hard for the things I have, but i have had to work through a lot of heavy emotions and tough situations in my life.

my mom has always been one of my idols, the person I look up to the most in my adult life. when I was a kid, I used to have nightmares that I was blind or deaf and would wake up crying because I was afraid I'd never hear her or see her face again. and through the blood clot thing, that all came rushing back to me, because when I was 15, I was a selfish bitch, i was the person who deserved what my mom said to me last Saturday.

so even though I don't think I deserve the things my mom said to me last weekend, I'm deeply hurt by the fact that someone I idolize thinks those things of me. that I did things that made her feel that way. that she would willingly trigger me. and I can tell by the fact that I couldn't even get through this post without breaking down that it's probably going to take a long time for me to get over it.
{{super emotional period feels rant, sorry}}

self perception

i saw this quote the other day that really hit me hard, that "it's good to hate yourself, because if you don't, everyone else will," and it just really pisses me off. sure, coming off as a cocky jerk makes everyone else feel like shit. failing to see flaws in yourself will piss your friends off. but who the fuck could use that logic to say that self-depreciation is necessary for others to love you? That others won't hate you so long as you hate yourself?

Because what i have to say is this: i have my bad days (today is one of them) when i don't feel at home in my skin, when i feel weak and fat and like i'm a spoiled brat for the privilege i have grown up with. but lately, i have fallen in love with me. i love myself when i wake up in the morning and my hair is crazy. i love the way my boobs look when i'm naked. i love the way that my friends come to me when they need help. i love that i would rather pay for 3 friends' dinner than not include them in our plans because they can't afford to go out. i love that i'm a good writer and a good designer.

i don't like that i never do the dishes or take the trash out, that i make literal and figurative messes bigger than i can clean up. that i can be really selfish and lazy a lot of the time. that sometimes i would rather stay in bed all day than go out and live life that day.


but like Blake was saying the other day, i'm the one person i've got for sure for the rest of this life. and i'm proud of myself for where i've come from (a vast pool of self-hatred i thought i'd never escape) and most days, i fucking love myself despite my flaws. and days like today when i don't, i'm nice to myself and i wait for it to pass.

crying forever

my bike was stolen and i literally feel empty

really living?

stuck in this really dissonant state of feeling very productive and active and at the same time very lazy. extreme productivity in class and biking 7.5 miles to school & back every day makes me feel amazing, but when i get home, all i find myself wanting to do is curl up on the couch and drift off while watching netflix, half-eaten dinner in hand.

afraid that i'm about to start my period/fighting off a cold, because once i get tired lately, i am deliriously tired and can't get any work done, which is not me. i feel extremely disassociated lately.

hoping to wake up tomorrow not feeling like i do currently

Sometimes my mom can say really hurtful things off the cuff, jokingly.

I have worked really hard to get to where I am, literally on the map and in the sense that I am standing head and shoulders above any level of happiness and stability I've ever experienced.

on emptiness, things that are over, and romanticizing silly things

no but seriously. it's like every time I come to evansville, it's the same old loop and i always write the same thing. aside from select friends who don't piss me off (blake, ivy), I generally feel reinforced in my decision to leave evansville by the time my visit is over, soaking in the few sun-streaked bits of happiness from coffee with blake or campy horror films with ivy & time spent biking or driving alone with music. these introspective moments are what I take from evansville, because there is always so much going on in Chicago that I don't get quiet moments like that in the hustle & bustle.

I hate writing so much about Dylan because when I am in Chicago and am happy, I don't think about him. but being back in evansville puts me in this weird state of being in which I am always on guard that we'll end up next to each other at a stoplight or something, and I just hate it. it makes me really self-aware, and not in a good way. I just feel like the whole breakup was this big childish thing, fuel for a melodramatic novel about the two of us standing five feet from each other behind the desk at Solaris, singing along to the same song in spite of the other. Even almost a year and a half after breaking up, he's still commenting on mutual friends' facebook statuses about how funny he is (literally "what a great comedian I am," wtf), right after I comment on it. it makes me laugh! and I'm just so glad to be over that inbred Midwestern, immature bullshit. I am thankful for the real love that we shared, but I'm done feeling sorry for myself and I'm way past feeling sorry for him. romanticizing that bullshit is over.

anyways! driving home tonight from Dustin's, the Smiths came on (melodramatic sadcore to the max) and I sang along the whole way home like an idiot, drumming on the steering wheel and everything. and I thought about all this, and how I don't want to go to Chicago on Sunday but I also don't want to stay here because I feel static. and Chicago makes me feel not static, my classes push me forward to internships and jobs and bars and relationships and becoming a real human being, not a child in the body of an almost 21-year-old. listening to sadcore music on 41 with the windows down is the only static I always enjoy, and it will probably always make me happy and will therefore get romanticized 9 ways to Sunday on here.

I'm going to paint my room when I get back, and find ways to keep moving forward.


Also, Blake: my blogger was somehow malfunctioning and didnt show your last post until just now. had I known you were feeling empty I would have brought you chai and told you all the reasons why you are my best friend in the world. I hope you are feeling less empty now <3 p="">

pan

for someone who has so intensely loved peter pan her entire life, i'm really surprised that it never occurred to me to read the original j.m. barrie novel until this summer. i knew that my favorite version of the film (with jeremy sumpter as peter) is heavily based on the original text, and have always loved "finding neverland," which delves into barrie's process while writing the original play & novel.

but i am amazed with how dark the novel is for a children's story, and how realistically the children are portrayed. it just fills me with such joy and fulfillment to open the book that i save it for the quiet moments before i sleep, and it has become a very special routine of this summer. i've always dreamed of having a neverland-themed wedding, and with chantel's wedding so close & being so involved in it, romance and weddings have been on my mind a lot lately.

i don't know what it is about peter pan, but it's one of those things that i love so much that it makes me cry if i think too long on it. kind of like leslie and ben, "romeo + juliet," and my interpretation of zelda and f. scott fitzgerald's relationship, it's just one of those things that i think will always make me feel a melancholy type of fulfillment.

sometimes i feel the same way about old happy memories of dylan and i, and when i get messages from my uncle bill or mamaw eileen at church, like when my mom tells me that the way my pinky fingers curve in when my hands are working comes from my dad's mom, who died right after i was born. something that feels right and sad and spiritual and meant to be all at once.

5:36

today's the last day of classes before my senior year of undergrad & i'm feeling incredibly calm for such a ridiculous day.

pretty much, i woke up at 430 to finish some work for my class today, already going off of sleep deprivation.

i forgot my wallet & couldn't print anything for my final crit, so i have to put all my work in my teacher's mailbox by next friday (no big, but stressful & embarrassing)

i had to say goodbye to tj

a red line derailed over red & brown tracks, so i had to take 2 different trains to a bus just to get home. it took over an hour and a half, when it usually take me about 30 minutes to get home. frustrating.

then i slept from 2-7, at which point i went to lakeview to get art supplies & work. i didn't end up leaving the area until 3am, at which point i had to get a cab because the brown line was closed for the night.

since 3 i've been finishing up this project, and after fighting with my dumbass printer for the past hour, i'm finally just a few quick steps from being finished for good. and that's super exciting.

the sun is coming up right now & i don't have to be at class until 10, and although i'm tired and have a lot to get done before i leave my house, tomorrow is Summer. like, SUMMER. summer in the city. i can ride my bike and walk gitsy and do art for fun.

i'm just really ready to be able to process this semester, do fun stuff, relax. and to get a break from daniella for a bit. things are just stressful with school, but hopefully that will be fixed after tomorrow!

anyway my prints finished so i have to go work now!

love's not punk (first draft)

sometime in the last year, something within me changed. i find myself overwhelmed with love for the people in my life. i cried all day at a friend's bridal shower a few weeks ago. i can't even make it through an episode of grey's anatomy without choking back tears.

when i told my mom i thought i was broken,  she said you are not broken, you are grown up. you are looking at the world around you and seeing the possibility for your future. you are appreciating the human experience.

emotion is described on dictionary.com as an "affective state of consciousness." feeling is a form of consciousness, something that lets us know we are human. we fear pyscho- and sociopaths because they lack empathy. horror books and movies villainize the rise of unfeeling robots and computers. almost every romantic movie delves into the pitfalls of unspoken love between two people. stories of people like kitty genovese, who died because of social indifference, are widely televised.


 
and yet every day, i am amazed at the indifference i see in the city around me. by the time we are teenagers, we have been trained by society not to show people that we care. it's cool to not give a shit about anything. it's easy to numb yourself to pain, to keep others in the dark about who you really are and what's going on inside you. when i was in high school, i wanted to be blase. in training to be indifferent, i didn't tell anyone i loved them or permit myself to hate. i learned to love in the dark.

but when you are 16 and your mom gets her own room in the ICU of Mayo Clinic,
when you are 17 and your best friend gets so guilty she stops eating,
when you are 18 and you are alone, hundreds of miles from home,
when you are 19 and the only boy you've ever loved puts a gun to his head,
you have to stop loving in the dark.

eighteen

i held the bloody hand of a boyfriend after he punched a hole through his door big enough to match the hole in his heart. i watched friend after friend break down, drop out, lock themselves away. i saw family members betrayed and stomped on by people they trusted. i witnessed my mom cry for the first time. these experiences taught me that telling someone to chin up, to feel better, to stop crying, denies the right to having that emotion, the right to humanness.

your emotions are important and relevant. you are not less valid for waking up crying or pissing yourself laughing. you are not stupid or childish for being so happy you could scream or being mad enough to break an entire china set. cool indifference is bullshit. letting yourself become numb only works for so long.



i never saw my best friend cry until she fell in love with someone her parents hated. somewhere between putting her family relationships at risk and knowing it was the right thing to do, she grew up, became secure enough to be vulnerable. she was 19.

the summer before i moved to chicago, my mom covered up her sorrow so severely that i thought she didn't care that i was leaving until she broke down a week before i left. she was 44.

my great-grandma spent the better part of her life spewing disdain and dressing herself in callousness. when she got dementia in old age, she forgot how to be indifferent. she cried, told us she loved us, asked us to stay with her. she was 92.

it has taken me 20 years, a lot of heartache, and my best friend saying, "i am so glad you wrote this" to get here, to this paradigm shift. to realize that apathy is overrated. to appreciate my own very human experience. to bleed compassion. to let love in.

i always used to stress out about whether or not i was happy, whether or not i was still a good person, whether or not i was whole. in the last year i have come to recognize that as long as your emotions aren't permitting you to harm others, you are still a good person. that the point of life is not to be happy or whole, it is to be chipped and broken and real. to appreciate the ups and downs of being a fallible living creature who has the very special privilege of experiencing emotion.




following is a collection of quotes i have found relating to this topic as well as lyrics, art, stories, and poems that were submitted to me by my friends and colleagues for use in this zine.

groove

i told a friend earlier this week that i would cut her hair tonight & we could watch grey's anatomy together.

somehow more and more people heard about it & wanted haircuts/to hang out, so tonight emily, alea, sam, leah, dan, juan, and tj all came over. we got 4 pizzas and a couple 6 packs of mike's hard & just sat around talking. i cut emily's, dan's, and leah's hair, and then we watched tv and played mario kart.

it was probably a stupid idea and a waste of precious precious time to get this zine done, but i don't care. i missed my friends. i did the dishes after, piled up bottles and boxes and took the trash out, and i just kept thinking about how i feel really fulfilled in my relationships here, which hasn't always been the case.

sometimes going to art school it's a little hard to maintain friendships because artists and designers are usually very introverted and somewhat selfish. but i'm so proud of my friends, and nights like tonight when my friends need and want me, i feel really good about myself. everyone just kept saying how much they love how we've decorated our apartment, asked to see my portfolio and told me they were super impressed, told me they liked my hair and the way i was dressed, sought me out to consult them on how to cut their hair...it was just a good night. i'm so happy that i have friends who lift me up, especially lately when my life is a giant ball of stress and emotions.

mouse hunt

one of my favorite movies when i was a kid was mouse hunt, but let me tell you now that trapping mice is a lot less fun than the movie made it seem.

a few weeks ago, we had our property manager set traps around the kitchen and front closet because we had discovered that a mouse had eaten a good 1/8th of my favorite beautiful tapestry that hung on the wall between the kitchen & front hall. we hadn't noticed because there was a shelving unit in front of it (full of other things of mine like my extensive collection of thousands of precious cupcake liners i've collected over the years, completely shredded. i cried over those.)

we caught one pretty early on, a couple of weeks ago. it got snap trapped & i threw it out. it was gross, but he didn't suffer so it was fine. yesterday a mouse crawled into daniella's shoes by her door, and i trapped it in a trashcan before transferring it to our terrarium container with some food & water. (we're taking him to a huge park several miles away from here tomorrow.) tonight, another mouse got stuck to a glue trap we nudged a little bit from its usual position. and of course it squealed and cried and tried to rip itself off the trap, so daniella came and got me from my room to help her.

she wanted to pry it off the trap, not understanding how strong the glue is. she didn't want it to suffer, but she didn't want me to kill it either. she was scared for it to die. so she called her parents, who got upset at us for not using no-kill traps. (can you imagine the deadpan look on my face right now?)

i was thinking how daniella & her parents must think i'm such a hardened, horrible person to be able to drown a mouse stuck to a glue trap (by the sounds of the call, it's the impression i got. maybe it's not true at all.) but i think part of the problem with it was maybe our difference in spirituality--daniella is an athiest, and i'm not at all. i think that she holds a very high reverence for life & not harming other creatures, as do i. and i'm not trying to say that athiests don't in general. but i think that maybe her belief that life and death are black & white equips her with a fear of death that i don't have.

that's not saying that i want to die or think that it will be easy when my time comes. but i was raised knowing that life doesn't end with death. i was raised communicating with my "dead" grandparents and great uncle. i can even hear my family's voices reciting that 4th principle during service, "we affirm that the existence and personal identity of the the individual continue after the change called death." i don't know what i think about mice going to heaven or whatever, but i do think that my remorse was enough to honor his little life, and it's part of the circle.

everything is a lesson, and i'm glad that the mouse gave his life so i could grasp the concept of holding life and death in my hands and giving the poor little dude serenity when he needed it.


(that's not to say that the other five glue traps positioned around my house are staying, because they're not. i could do it all again if i needed to, but i don't want to witness that suffering again.)

the first good visit

i didn't post on my visit back home, and as i was reading back through some earlier posts about how evansville has been a sore spot since leaving, i realized i should. i'm happy to say that my last visit home was wonderful.

i got home friday night, helped my mom prepare for the bridal shower until about 3 am, and then we had two back-to-back showers the next day. i wore my dress (which is now my second favorite outfit) and parted my hair in the middle and felt really great all day. saturday night i got ihop and old chicago with dustin, and i went home and went to bed. normally i drive around and listen to music and get reacquainted with my hometown. this time i didn't, and i feel like it was a good decision.

sunday my mom and i had cupcakes in bed for brunch, and then she drove me to kanpai for solaris' earth day celebration. it was really great to see everyone, meet the new people, and catch up with amy and cole. as much as things can get tense doing design work with amy around deadlines and miscommunication, i really do like getting to just hang out with her when i'm in evansville. same with cole, and his partner is the sweetest & just gets me. it was good to be social. sometimes because i have such a small social circle in chicago, i forget what it feels like to have a community of people. and that was nice. we just talked about things at solaris and shopping and everyone's babies. amy and cole bumped into dylan at fresh market apparently, and they said he followed them around trying to talk to them the whole time, like he used to do at the salon. my mom said that sometimes it's just nice to hear someone else call your ex a weirdo and i think she's right. being so distanced from the situation now, it's easy to slip into thinking i made a bad decision. but i didn't, and i'm happy with how i am now.

monday my mom and i got breakfast at cross-eyed & then i got a haircut. it was so good to catch up with mashae. she's got her life all planned out, and has babies and a house, but i can still talk to her and i have always loved talking with her. she's far from a best friend, but she made working with dylan bearable. she was a friend to me when i felt alone and inferior at work. and i'm happy to see her building a life. especially with blake finishing school and moving across the country and mashae having another baby and getting married in alabama, it's easy to feel static and boring in comparison to my friends. but it's a process. this time next year will be my time, and until then, i have the freedom to be young and a little reckless. and i'm grateful for that.

and i'm grateful for the fact that i was able to go home and not hate it. i felt like an outsider, but in a good way. in a way that i have found a new home and niche elsewhere in the world, and am happy.

pantydropper

i know that this is way way way way way way WAYYYYY too early to be thinking about this, especially considering that all i've got so far is a smile and some intriguing conversation, but damn it i NEED things to work out with cute smiley boy because i don't think i've been this attracted to anyone ever and it's starting to interfere with my life for reals.

i've thought this guy was attractive all semester but something about today has just got me going crazy. i literally spent all afternoon and most of my night class imagining him in my bed & his adorable little skinny pants and oxfords on the floor.

uuuuuuuuuuuggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
here's hoping he responds to my email asap

good things and scary things

a short post while i wait for files to upload & then finally getting some sleep

i was talking to my mom on the phone the other day about college and plans and whatnot and she told me that although it isn't a longshot for me to stay in chicago, she doesn't think it's plausible. a mediumshot, she said. and it just kind of threw me off kilter. i've been existing in a space of pretty high expectations for my future, so maybe a dose of reality from my mom is necessary. but it also hurt my feelings and created a rift of self-doubt within me that i don't like.

it's strange to think that this time next year i'll be on my own, out of school. scary strange. and unfortunately i am not giving myself the grace period of grad school to figure my shit out; i don't have the safety net of a serious significant other to help me pay for rent and food and what have you. and that's terrifying. but mark my words, i will not be moving back to evansville long-term. literally every time i've been back to evansville (save the two times when dylan and i were still dating), i have been disappointed and left empty by my hometown. and i can't exist there after college. i can't move back in with my parents as much as i love them.

maybe i'll end up in north carolina with my aunt and mamaw. maybe i'll go to cincinatti, or iowa city, or savannah. i have been happy in those places before and know that i could exist there if only temporarily.

my long term goals change like crazy, but at this point i think i'd like to end up in san francisco or somewhere abroad. i want to travel the US with gitsy and my bike, maybe by car or train. i think i still have a lot of soul searching to do. but i don't want to live in my mom's house for longer than a summer. i don't want to go back to a town in which i'm constantly worried about running into people from my past, being judged. i want the end of college to be a fresh start.

the good thing? i tried on dresses at forever 21 today & am officially too small for the plus size section. the larges are generally still pretty tight/weird looking, but the plus section were all much to big, too long, too bulky. i ended up getting a normal f21 sheer maxi dress that i LOVE, i just have to find a slip because the one that came with it literally suffocated me. so im excited to be going home for this weekend with an awesome new dress!

plans (and maybe something more, and definitely things that i will regret writing later)

tonight i planned to get good & drunk (2 shots & a beer and i was far more gone than i'd anticipated i'd be), write and sketch the outline for my zine while listening to music, and watch mulholland drive & ink some of my sketches while i sobered up. ("write drunk, edit sober" ...i'd never tried it & thought it might help stimulate flow of words i was hesitant to put down)

right as i sat down with my sketchbook, i got a notification that tj had tweeted something & it was about how he was crying on the train & didn't know what to do. so i pulled on some clothes and walked my drunk ass to the train station to meet him for coffee.

it turns out his big ex, his dylan, had texted him out of nowhere asking if he was happy and it was just too much for him to handle. the kid who listens to death metal and mercilessly destroys all life in halo every time we play, and he was sitting with an empty cup and eyes full of tears when i got there.

i don't know what i'm getting at here. i just hated seeing him broken. and it's not like i havent seen him break down before, but it just hurts. it's something ive been thinking about a lot lately in the making of this zine, how this city has done so much for me, how i blossom here and am driven by what surrounds me, and how he wakes up every morning wishing he were somewhere else.

i like to think that i'm the type of person who fixes things. i always have been. even if i'm sheepish about it, i do what i can to help. the other day i listened to an HRC rep on the phone for 15 full minutes before telling her that i really have no spare change at this moment in my life but to please call me back this summer. today i gave my uneaten snacks to a man on the train with a teardrop tattoo and dirt-caked fingernails who was apologizing to strangers as he asked for charity. i couldn't make eye contact with him or speak while i did it, but i listened. and i'm the only person on the train who acknowledged his humanness.

so maybe that's why everything with dylan has affected me so much. why it's been fucking forever and there are still tiny pieces of me shattered on the floor, why i can't let myself get close to any of the boys who have taken me out to dinner, bought me sweet wine, and opened themselves up to me. i have always been a guilt internalizer and i feel bad for what i did to dylan. even though he could be so dismissive and emotionally abusive. i still feel bad for leaving him when he was at a low point because ive seen what that does to people.

this semester i've built a shell around myself that surprises even me sometimes. daniella has tried at least 3 times to talk to me about how tj is leaving school and i straight up closed the bathroom door & told her to stop talking to me last time. lately when i'm down, i don't call anyone. i pretend i'm not down to everyone but me. i don't let myself even write down half of what im feeling because i don't want to admit it's happening. but i'm a little bit tired of that. it's hard to be like that all the time.

so this is an open apology to dylan because right now i need to get it out of me:
i am sorry for leaving you when you were at your worst. i am sorry for helping break you. i am sorry that i wasn't there to put you back together. when i broke us, it was my intention that we would get to know ourselves better & after that, things would be ok for us to be together again. and then things got too hard. but know that it was never my intention to leave you broken--i wanted to be there for you again.

i am not sorry that we are apart, i am not sorry i called your mom when you told me you tried to kill yourself, i am not sorry that i lashed out when we worked together last summer, i am not sorry that i texted you saying sorry so many fucking times. i'm still fucking pissed at how you and your friends treated/treat me. the way you publicly demonized me multiple times on facebook was inappropriate, cruel, and immature. but even then, i am training myself to look to the future without picturing you somehow back in my life, and it's fucking hard. i debate with myself all the time about whether i should give a shit or not, and maybe i'll never know what's right. but im sorry for leaving you when you were low. i'm sorry for being the type of person who walked away when someone needed me.

genetics

i just finished writing a paper i'm really proud of (completely last minute, about fat & beauty and (in particular) this stunning, bizarre photoshoot of priscilla ono for slink magazine) and was stretching my arms and neck, thinking about how happy i am with the paper.

i caught myself in the mirror and saw my dad's self-satisfied grin on my face, a smile i've also seen my three-year-old cousin carter pull when he thinks he's got you tricked.

it just made me really happy. when i was younger, i looked a lot more like my dad than my mom. my hair was straight until my teens, and my natural hair color matches his, not my mom's. i was a total daddy's girl. i still am to some extent, because my dad and i have a connection over music that i don't think my mom or brother will ever understand.

now that i've grown up, people always say how much i look like my mom. sometimes it's just nice to see my dad in there too.

wanting someone

lately i've been feeling lonely, something i really haven't felt for a while. the downer days a couple weeks ago really threw me off kilter & tonight is another low. i'm just tired of holding it all in, of being the only person to really love me in the way that i want to be loved. i'm lonely. and i know i'm not going to find someone i want to be with long term on some idiotic site like okcupid, but i'm not really sure where to look other than that, and it has me feeling helpless. people at my school aren't attracted to me. i'm just stuck in a rut i guess. i'm in no rush, god knows i have forever. i just don't want to be alone right now.

Big D

why does depression take the people I love away from me?

everything with dylan, leah is in the hospital on suicide watch, and tj is transferring back home.

this week has completely wrecked my emotional stability and my motivation. all I want to do is sleep and cry. I haven't spoken to daniella in days, I can't eat, I can't sleep when I try to, and I can't focus on my design work, for school or for work, and deadlines are crashing all around me.

I am lucky that my bouts with being depressed are fixed with therapy sessions and changing my thyroid dosage. i get depressed sometimes but i do not suffer from depression, and I am so grateful for that. but it doesn't make things easier when I'd rather sit under my desk in my room than interact with daniella or even gitsy. since last week I've been lower than I've been in a while and I'm just scared because I don't know how it's going to get better.

I feel like tj let me down. I just don't want to talk to him or see him or think about him. I feel betrayed. and that isn't really fair, but that's how I feel and I can't help it. I feel alone.

needing/wanting/getting

today i was a half hour late to class. i fell asleep working last night and hadn't set an alarm. luckily with most of my work done, it wasn't really a problem. still, i didn't get a chance to eat breakfast, so when i finished my daily iced coffee from the school cafe, it left me empty feeling...hungry, clear-headed but still feeling deprived of sleep. and i realized how much i like that feeling.

of being sleep deprived to the point of feeling like a zombie because i stayed up so long pouring my soul into a piece of art for days beforehand. of the empty, healthy feeling of a growling stomach by 4pm because i chose a salad for lunch instead of the french fries i really wanted. of sore muscles one day because i did the whole 20 minutes of Jillian michaels 30-day shred the night before without putting down the 3 lb weights.

of being single, going through the slight inconvenience of occasional loneliness, because i refuse to settle for someone who isn't going to love me as much as i love myself.

the feeling of doing what i have to to get what i want. of making sacrifices, pushing myself to my limits, creating the change in my life. it's not a way to live long term or day-to-day, i'm sure i'd keel over from the stress. but sometimes it's nice to taste that little bit of bitter in your pink lemonade.

(not a harlem shake video, i promise! rather, a song by the band the Harlem Shakes that fits the mood of this post)


SPEAKING OF, i'm officially in training for my first 5k! i'm starting this weekend to prepare for the Hope in Motion / Run in Color 5K in Evansville on April 20 (which I'll probably just walk/jog with my mom) and then i've got the actual Color Run 5K that i'm going to RUN, not walk (a big goal for someone who has never EVER been a runner, even as a kid), on June 16! i'm really, really, excited about it. so here's to actually sticking to my new year's resolution for once

tonight is a low night,

one of the lowest i've had in a really long time. binge ate twizzlers & cried in the shower & have been lying in bed since 10 and i still don't feel any better.

i'm tired of this cycle, of having this same fucking thing creep up on me and drag me down whenever it pleases. sure, my nights of panic attacks and crying and wondering if i've completely fucked up my life and any chance i'll ever get at love used to be a nightly thing, and now they only come every 4 months or so. so i'm getting better. but i just don't want to feel this way anymore, i don't want to doubt myself and the entire foundation my recent life has been built on just because of some nagging fear that i'll never get anything better, or even as real as, what i pushed out of my life.

i have nowhere to put my love, it just sits there and keeps on loving.

so glad to see blake on here again!

(those 5 pageviews were from me, haha!)

and glad to be back on here myself. i actually sat down to draft a post between my 9-12 and 6-9 classes today but got caught up with other things (gitsy & i went for a walk and she jumped into several puddles of mud, so i had to give her a bath which is always hellish).

anyways! yesterday i got a weird chat invite from my ex on a new email account, and i messaged him despite not really wanting to. i made a promise to him that the lines of communication would always be open on my end if he needed anything, because i don't see myself as the type of person who could completely turn her back on someone--even after having gone through so much because of them. so i messaged him and he messaged back, and i didn't get that weird heart-racing feeling (the goodbad kind, like when you get an anonymous message and wonder if it's going to be  friendly or make you cry), and i'm really proud of myself. especially after not having seen or talked to him in over 4 months. so all is good there.

school is good in that i have less of a workload, but i've been thinking seriously that i might have seasonal affective disorder (funny you mentioned it too, b). it's like no matter what i have to do, all i want to do is sit in the shower or sleep. i constantly fall asleep on the trains. all i want to eat is sweet things and bread. sometimes i literally have to choke back tears when i look at the forecast and realize i have to wear my coat and scarf and gloves just to walk to the station. i've gained at least 10 lbs. and that's all incredibly frustrating to me, which makes it worse. i feel like i'm just empty. i miss the sun and warmth and not having to wear a gigantic coat.

but not to complain
i'm doing a lot of work, and therefore making a lot of money. like having enough money for NEXT rent even though my rent check has come out. and that's awesome. i'm getting to spend money on things i've wanted for a while, and i'm really happy about that. school is easier than it's been in a while, and i think i'm finally winning over my type teacher.

ugh
i have so much more to say but a lot of work to do tonight
so i'll finish this later!

new year

today begins a new year and,  while I have goals and resolutions for myself, I will not be working on a "new me" in 2013; I have found myself more mature and stable on my own two feet than I could have ever imagined I would be at 20, and I've accepted that I am human and that I am allowed to make mistakes, break down from time to time, take a few days off when I need. I have accepted myself and can see for the most part my shortcomings and areas for growth.

I think the paradigm shift this year was realizing that there aren't rules for living; I had set so many boundaries and restrictions for and upon myself, and I realized this year that those weren't necessary and were, I'm some cases, extremely detrimental to my personal growth (and my sanity).This year I have overcome both love and hatred that were doing me no good, and it has been really hard. I hate to think of myself in that context of being not whole, or broken up about someone who hurt me so much, but also of being hung up with hatred for that same person who helped me open the door to who I am now.

I am more open than I ever used to be, more self aware (in good and bad ways I guess) and more appreciative of the things I am fortunate to have: a loving family that does its best to support me in every way possible, a best friend who really gets me, a solid handful of good friends in Chicago and throughout the Midwest, financial backing to do what I love, an the opportunity to live in the third largest city in the US and attend the nations's #2 ranked college for art and design. I am seriously talking to a lovely guy named Zacharias who is worldly aware and sweet and kind, and I like him a lot.

In the past year, I have moved to Chicago with Gitsy, gotten into the Viscom department at SAIC, been to bonnaroo, found a new favorite movie, gotten drunk with my best friend, gone on a road trip with my mom, gotten 2 tattoos, and made a lot of art that I love. all in all, 2012 was hard but wonderful, and I hope that 2013 brings good vibes and lots of new beautiful experiences into my life.