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}}