The stories we tell matter.
Still getting back in touch with my sexuality at the moment. To catch everyone up to speed, I’ve been on birth control since 2010 to control pre-menstrual symptoms. I always had rough periods, even as a teenager. The kind which… Read moreEbb and Flow
Once I’m feeling overwhelmed, it starts to feel like nothing will ever change and my options for making a difference in my own life are limited. All I can think of are the reasons I can’t do things or why even if I tried it wouldn’t matter because of course I’m just a failure and incompetent at life.
In other words, my brain lies to me.
Stress also makes me feel tired and fatigued, which makes me able to do less because I lack the mental and/or physical energy.
Which only feeds the cycle more.
Because my brain can then say, “See? You can’t even do your laundry or keep up with the dishes or clean the cat box. How will you ever manage X, Y, or Z?”
Then, the stress and guilt from not being able to do even the simplest adult tasks piles onto my other stress and makes me feel even more that I ought to just stay in bed with the covers pulled over my head forever.
Someone told me that when poor people actually manage to have money, they don’t know what to do with it and it becomes a source of stress. That’s kind of how I feel right now.
I have a couple hundred dollars in my bank account somehow, and I will get another couple hundred before the end of the month.
About half of that I will need to help cover rent and bills at the first of the month, but I’m so used to not having any money, or having just enough to buy gas and groceries that it’s still weird.
I feel like the first step toward achieving a goal is to state it in some concrete way. I’m still waiting for my Passion Planner in the mail, so I might as well do it here for now. Here are… Read moreThings I Want
I have a lot of complicated emotions surrounding the coverage of Leelah Alcorn’s suicide in the media. I’m not transgender, but I am queer and the child of conservative Christian parents who did not deal well with my coming out…. Read moreSurviving Abuse
I don’t have a maternal instinct. I hardly know how to talk to kids, let alone raise one. Besides that, I have a lot of things I want to do with my life, and children don’t factor into that.
In a lot of ways, having kids is still the default setting for women. But it shouldn’t be. The response to a woman saying she doesn’t want children shouldn’t be a wink and the word “yet.”
It just really gets under my skin. Having some straight, married woman tell me that I’ll probably decide I want children sometime in the next ten years.
Sometimes I think I could let myself off the hook more.
Maybe doing what I love can be enough.
Maybe I should stop worrying so much about whether what I’m doing is the most important thing I could possibly do, and worry more about if I feel alive.
I want to feel that joy and exuberance Julia Child felt when she graduated from cooking school, and again when her cookbook was published.
And if I was full of that joy, maybe I’d have the energy for something else, too.
I recently started watching Cutthroat Kitchen on Netflix. I’ve seen it once or twice on someone else’s cable TV and wasn’t a huge fan, but I love Alton Brown. Plus, let’s face it, I’ve already powered through all the episodes… Read moreCutthroat I Ain’t
I was bullied mercilessly growing up. It wasn’t until middle school when I was in class with the other smart kids that I started really having any friends. Having someone to defend me meant a lot, even though the teasing continued. Yes, I am smart. Yes, I am fat. Yes, I do have hairy legs. Yes, my accent was different from that of my classmates. The difference is that none of those things actually (should) impact my ability to be loved. None of those things make me an inherently bad person. And that is what no one ever told me when I was 12 years old.
Overall, life is going better for me. Being in therapy is making me realize how far I’ve come with developing coping mechanisms, and that’s positive. I am slowly creating the kind of life I want. Just more slowly than I thought.
I’m still not where I want to be creatively. It’s just hard to have the brain space to think about crafting performances when I work so much. And I have some creative people in my life, but I’m not surrounded by a creative community like I was when I was in school. It feels harder. I am rusty and less brave or willing to make mistakes as a result.