Yet Another Panic About Cocoons

Apparently I am really not the person I was. I’m surprisingly okay with this and simultaneously freaking the hell out about it.

I do a lot of self-eval. Like, probably too much for my own good. I am completely aware of myself, and yet… somehow I didn’t realize I was changing.

I guess I got distracted. Getting sick a few months ago, followed by aftershocks that just won’t scram, has kept my focus more on my body than on my mind. (I haven’t been this skinny since middle school, and I’m quite a bit taller than I was then. And turns out gaining weight back is way more of a project than I would’ve expected before I ended up losing like ten pounds I barely had to begin with in about a week.) But the more I think about it, the more likely it is that this all started before a new part of my body turned traitorous.

That’s the weird thing – there’s no real origin point here. At least, not that I can find.

I could’ve gone on oblivious for at least another couple of months if one of my friends hadn’t accidentally triggered the realization last week. Total accident, as such things always are – all my friend Lauren did was write a meta about something we’re both into. Even allowing that I use fictional characters to deal with my life, this really shouldn’t have been a problem. Except that it was.

There’s nothing like seeing your questionable-but-effective survival mechanisms outlined perfectly. Nothing like seeing your soul exposed.

I know myself better now. I know that I have stronger caretaker instincts than I previously thought. I know that I just wanna fix people, I wanna be decent and I wanna wrap my pack up in bubble-wrap and keep them somewhere no one can ever hurt them again. I know that my love is fierce and protective and my heart is so much bigger than I used to think it was. I know that I’m going to be an amazing partner for someone someday. I know that I’m going to be a good mother when my time comes.

Sometimes new perspective changes everything. Sometimes it saves you.

I’m not the disaster girl I thought I was. I’m still reckless and heart-driven, but there’s more of a purpose to it now. I’m not as dangerous, but I’m more powerful than ever. I don’t wanna set things on fire (as much); instead, I want to create them.

The day after all of this went down, I was trying to explain it to my friend Liv and the phrase “lay your weapons down” kept repeating in my head for no apparent reason. I’m not sure what this means to me yet, but it’s something.

I’m not who I used to be. I’m so much better.

I feel alive now in ways I didn’t know were possible. My heart’s racing a lot like it does when I have a crush on someone new, except that I’m not fluttery for anyone at all right now (cute unattainable girl at work Does Not Count because even at my worst I’ve never been that kind of self-destructive). I have plans, and they’re ambitious and good and I’ve never wanted anything more in my life.

The storm is over, the cocoon is wasting away, and I’ve got my wings back. Now to figure out what to do with ’em…

The Long Nap That Wasn’t

(content warning – I’m talking about the time I nearly killed myself here.)

Permanent Reminders

Summer has descended on Cincinnati, which means it’s t-shirt season at work and even I – normally borderline reptilian and prone to wearing long-sleeved shirts all year ’round – am settling for tank tops for layering purposes instead. This year, there’s something of a complication:

Excuse the questionable laptop-camera pic, but… that there is my second tattoo and first that’s visible to the general public. (The other one is on my lower thigh and thus way easier to hide.) I had the sense to get it in mid-October of last year, right before it got really cold for the winter, sooo the last week and a half has been the first consistent round of puyblic visibility and boy has that been a little of an ordeal than I expected.

People aren’t judgy, mind you. I think at this point I’m enough of a Presence that most people know better than to go there. No, it’s worse – they’re surprised.

I get it. I’m a delicate-looking girl and apparently I am Really Not That Type. Oh how little they know.

I like crazy ambitious projects. This blog has become more about that than attempting to have an Online Presence for when I’m trying to get one of my books published. And one of said projects is the fairly epic list of tattoos I wanna get. I’m not actually sure where this idea came from, but I want to get one quote from everything that’s seriously influenced me. If it’s saved me in some way or caused a major change in my perspective, I want words from it on my body. Eventually, I want someone to be able to look at my skin and be able to piece together the important parts of my story without me saying a single word.

And it helps, in some ways, that a lot of the things I want permanently on my body are reminders to myself.

Maybe not all of them will be, but all the ones I have planned are. The two I have so far definitely are. The one on my lower right thigh, a line from a Vienna Teng song, is a reminder that I will never let myself descend to the emotional place I was in back when I used to hurt myself. The one right above my left elbow, all cute and visible now, is a quote from a trash show that saved my life and a reminder that I’m a survivor in so so many ways. And the one I want to get this summer, a quote from a questionable but fun YA series that got me through high school, is a reminder that a lot of what happened is Not My Fault.

I’m taking control of my body. I have a plan here. But please, can people stop looking at my arm like I just grew an extra limb??

Wolves In Captivity

I finally got around to watching The Wolfpack and boy do I have feelings.

First, however, a slight disclaimer. I usually hate documentaries. My idea of what makes a good movie is as many of the following as possible:

• explosions (I really like watching things go boom)
• PRACTICAL explosions (example – my primary reason for going to see Mad Max: Fury Road BEFORE the internet latched onto it for various reasons is because I read somewhere that it had the largest practical effects budget EVER and like… that is so, so relevant to my interests)
• pretty people (which for me is a little different than for most people, but whatev, I’ve still watched my share of trash movies because of various actors)
• pretty people making out (and yet not rom-coms because I hate them unless Amy Adams is involved. I’m talking more like weirdly sweet romantic subplots in action movies here, and no I can’t think of a good example)

Needless to say, the average documentary doesn’t even register with me as a thing. My attention span is questionable at best, and I’m not gonna use it on anything involving real people. Like, ever. But rules are made to be broken, and sometimes exceptions happen. And oh what an exception it was.

For those of y’all who have not heard of it, The Wolfpack is about the Angulo brothers, six teenage boys raised in almost-total isolation in an apartment in New York. (There’s also a sister, but she’s irrelevant in the film.) Until shortly before the film picks up, the boys had never been allowed into the outside world without supervision, and even that was extremely rare. However, they were allowed one window into the unknown – movies, and lots of ’em – and that completely shapes their view of human behavior.

It’s tragic, yes, but I couldn’t look away because I understood that. I could relate because, to a lesser extent, been there done that. Sure, I got out a lot more, but just try to tell me that homeschool culture resembles the Normal World in any genuine way. Fact – it really doesn’t, and most of what I know about how the outside world works, I learned from books and TV. It’s a running joke that most of my sex-ed came from reading fanfic, and considering some of the things I have seen, I got lucky on that front. (I got the technical details in a Human Sexuality course I took towards the end of my college attempt, but thank yooou people who were writing a particular ship in the mid-2000s for informing this particular Bubble girl that women CAN want and enjoy sex.)

It’s also a running joke, albeit a slightly less funny one, that my weird background will come up in just about any social situation. When I know I’m gonna be dealing with people who don’t know about that part of me, I like to play a game called “how long before this comes up?” because it will come up. It always does. The fact that I have a very different starting point than most people is something I can’t avoid or ignore, and it changes things.

Sooo, back to Wolfpack. If you want your heart to get broken over the course of an hour and a half, you should watch it. If you want to watch teenage boys reenact scenes from a variety of classic movies from memory, you should watch it. If you want an interesting look at how isolation can shape people… you know the drill.

Reclamation As Survival Tactic

I’m taking my life back this year.

As some of you have probably noticed, ridiculously ambitious goals are kinda my Thing. And as I’m all too aware, they tend to fall apart pretty quickly. But it’s the end of February right now, not a normal time for resolutions and plans and whatnot, and yet here I am – revamping myself yet again because it’s necessary for my survival.

What happened, you ask? Short version – I had a Realization at a weird time and I’ve spiraled a bit since then and it’s beautiful.

It’s one of those moments I don’t think I’m ever going to forget – towards the end of a bridal shower for the fiancé of someone I’ve known since high school, sitting in a room of middle-aged women and already-paired girls my age, and realizing that I am so so lucky it is not my time yet. For a hopeless romantic who’s spent the last ten years just wanting to be loved, that’s big. That’s terrifying. And yet I knew, in that one very powerful moment, that I still have a few years yet before I’m the center of everyone’s attention and that that’s good. I don’t want it to be my turn yet.

It’s frightening, realizing that your primary hope is suddenly your worst nightmare.

I like attention. I like beautiful boys who could probably change the world if they would work through their assorted unresolved personal issues, and I like pretty girls who could light up the night sky with their smiles. I like the idea of meeting somebody someday and knowing within heartbeats that this is the glorious person I’m going to spend my life with. (One of my childhood best friends apparently had that happen to her with the boy she’s now married to, and I almost cried when I found that out because I hadn’t known it was a realistic hope and then it happened to one of the most solid people I know.) I like my unflinching hope for domesticity, and I like the fact that there are a few utterly epic plans with various friends involving my future wedding, but I’m not ready yet.

I’ve realized, out of the blue, that I need to focus on me for a while.

I need to make the best of where I am right now, fully exist in my life here and continue the long ridiculous process of making myself whole.

I’m writing less and working on other projects more. I’m knitting, painting, making the space I inhabit a little more beautiful.

I’m letting my hair get long and dying it purple and yesterday I managed to get it into a decent braid for the first time in years and I felt so proud of myself. I’m trying to gain weight because I like myself better when I’m a little more squishy (and because losing ten pounds because of weird unresolved medical problem kinda screwed me up). I’m accepting that at this point in my life, my sense of style is long flowy skirts and fitted t-shirts and maybe I look a little Bubble and maybe that’s not a terrible thing.

I’m reclaiming myself, I’m accepting that right now my journey has nothing to do with romantic love, and I feel free for the first time in so long.

Someday it’ll change. I know that. Someday I’m gonna meet someone who breaks down my walls and makes me want to flutter and fall and get tangled up. But not yet. And that’s okay.

For now, I am my own person and I’m taking my own damn wings back.

Life As I Feared It

Episode One of the 2016 round of “fascinatingly questionable ideas I have had” – revisiting the source of a recurrent nightmare and learning some interesting things about myself in the process.

First, a little bit of context. The source in question is a book – Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. It’s a pretty standard apocalyptic YA novel, ended up being the first in a series (the rest of which I have not read), and was published in late 2006. That would’ve made me 13 when I originally read it, approximately a year before my mother stopped censoring what I brought home from the library. (That’s another story and a post I am still several years and probably several hundred miles from writing.) For the purposes of this post, what you need to know is that paranoia was heavily involved at the time and I wasn’t allowed to read anything that might “corrupt” me in any way shape or form. With very few exceptions, that ruled out the wonderland of hellscape girl-centric YA.

And yet that book was an exception, and it was the first book I ever read in that category, and it messed me up big time. Again, I was 13 and very sheltered and had a very active imagination. This combined with a frighteningly realistic portrait of a world falling apart, written in the form of journal entries by a girl several years older than I was at the time (and therefore the height of cool), led to a nightmare that I still have about once a year. It’s always vague enough that I don’t remember details afterwards, but it’s vivid and I’ve accepted that it’ll be a ghost in my brain for a very long time to come.

A normal person, upon accepting this, would stay the heck away from whatever had caused that scenario. I, on the other hand, decided that it’s been nine years and a reread was in order because how could that possibly go wrong.

Answer – in so many more ways than I thought.

I like to credit the aforementioned genre of hellscape girl-centric YA – a term I use to describe dystopian and post-apoc novels alike, since both fit the necessary criteria – for a lot of my formative development as a person. That’s what kept me alive during high school, and looking back I can see that most of the results were positive. Okay, so I never quite figured out how to be rebellious while still being the person I generally am in my core, but I tried. I didn’t let anything get to me. (I also learned to emotionally isolate myself and put up thorns, but I’m unlearning that now. Slowly.) I needed role models, and being the Right Age just as my ideal type of YA fiction was becoming a THING basically saved me.

But there’s a twist to it, of course. It’s me, there always is. In this case, the twist is my fear of the unknown.

Let me put it this way – if the world ever does go to complete pieces, I have a suicide plan. I’ve had said plan since somewhere in my early teens, since before my depression became something I was aware of and as something completely separate. On my self-destructive days, I’m fascinated by the idea of drowning. The end-of-the-world suicide plan? Completely different, and that’s all I’m gonna say.

I’ve watched a lot of post-apoc shows (it always seems to be TV shows for me, never books, that have the unpretty emotional impacts) and women like me never survive. At least, not in good condition or not for long. I’ve found most of my role models as an adult in that one little genre of media, but I’m not delusional. If shit happens, I’m not taking that risk.

I am not brave.

I used to think I was, when I was a little bug who didn’t have any idea where her life was headed. I think all kids have that delusion, but mine was less physically reckless than most. I wasn’t a risk-taker back then, just pretty convinced of my own awesomeness.

Then the Bad Thing happened, and then the horror of high school era, and then the emotional upheaval of my late teens. At that point in my life, bravery wasn’t a choice – it was a requirement, period. I was not allowed to fall down. I had to fight, if not for myself than for what would happen to my mother’s reputation if I fell. I had to fight because Good Girls don’t get their hearts broken (Good Girls don’t have hearts to break), Good Girls don’t want to die (Good Girls never get to live), Good Girls survive. And rebellious as I was, I wasn’t stupid.

But this last year or so, I’ve learned some unexpected things about myself, and one of the main ones is that I’m a pretty fricking terrible lone wolf. Sure, I’m great at isolation and barriers and all the stuff people do when they don’t want anyone to get close, but on my own? On my own, I’m borderline useless.

I am not brave. I am only a survivor because that is what has been required of me. It’s time for me to admit those things and move forward and continue finding my softness again.

And as for the nightmare, well… someday that’ll go away too.

Resolutions + Realistic Perspective

If I’m gonna continue with this cliché thing for a little while longer – and since I’ve already done the reflective posts necessary for it, I might as well – it’s time to look ahead to 2016. Already I know this year’s gonna be an interesting one. I have so, so much on the horizon, and unfortunately I can’t talk about a lot of that here. Half because it’s so vague and indefinite, half because there are things I’m not ready for certain people to see yet. (Hey, at least this time that’s for more innocent reasons than usual!!) But I do have plans and ambitions I can discuss here, so here goes.

There’s just one little complication beforehand, though. As some of y’all might remember, my goal list for 2015 was epic and extensive. I did exactly none of it, and yet 2015 was still the first year I can look back on and say that I ended in a better place than I started. I still grew a lot as a person – just not in any of the ways I expected or hoped for. So, going into this year’s list, I’m doing it with the mindset that my personal dev will probably be wildly different from anything I put on here. I don’t know where I’ll be a year from now, and these things I list off here are just one possible path for me. I’m at a point where the world is full of potential, so… we’ll see where that leads, but until I get some clearer direction (and figure out if the two major weird things in my head are actually real), here’s what I’m hoping to accomplish this year:

• finish Scarlett. It’s time. It’s really time. That project has been my baby for five years now and I think the rest of the world is finally ready for it. Ideally, I wanna finish it by the end of June and spend the second half of this year trying to find it a home, but… deadlines and I are not friends unless someone else is making me do them, so this is fluid.
• maaaaaybe latch onto a TV show that doesn’t bring out a personal issue I’m avoiding. Realistically, this will not happen. I have the worst luck with media and I seem to spend half my time on here talking about that, but it’d be real cute if this pattern would… maybe not stop, it does have its uses, but at least take a breather for a little bit? Or if the stuff I end up watching and loving has to mess with me, maybe something that hits an issue I know I have and not one of my deepest secret fears?? Just a hope here.
• become more open. I know, I know. I don’t hide things from people and sometimes that’s the problem, but… not that kind of openness. More the kind where I’m a scared little kitten most of the time, afraid of trying new things. I need to change that and continue the progress I made in 2015 and just keep fighting and maybe find myself in the process.

Three goals. Maybe more like two and a half. Nice and simple. I can do this, right??

Finding.

It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m a cliché.

I know, I know. For those of us who suck at keeping journals, the end-of-year reflection is a necessity. For those of us who are determined to document our lives in blog form because maybe someone out there will think it’s interesting, even more so. And for me, well… it’s an excuse to talk through some of the emotional weight I’m currently dealing with, so ‘least there’s that.

If 2014 was the year of trying to walk away from everything that hurt me, 2015 was the year of finding new light and centering myself.

A big part of this was friendship. For most if not all of my life, I’ve been very distant from people. In a lot of ways, I still am, but I learned a lot from some of the most important people in my life this year. I learned that distance changes nothing if what you have is real. I learned exactly how tiny one of my dearests is, providing one of the funniest moments of my summer. I strengthened what I had with people who’ve been around for a while and found a new cluster of darlings in a semi-unlikely place. I feel, now more than ever, like I belong. I have some of the best people in the world on my side, and the fact that I can’t physically see them changes nothing.

As part of that belonging, I finally found a subculture that suits me. I wrote a bit about that here, but as I’ve started making plans and actually building stuff for 2016 con season, I’ve realized that this is the therapeutic activity I need. That world, or at least the part of it I’ve tangled with so far, is warm and open and non-judgey. Maybe it’ll be different if I end up doing a more popular character this coming year (and I just might later in the summer, once I see what’s already being done with her), but for now… I’m building a SHIELD. I needed an outlet and I found one.

I saw reflections of myself in a few people. It’s weird watching history repeat; it’s a little less weird when you can try to stop it. This time, I tried.

I fought some personal wars. I struggled with the concept of faith, and I’m beginning to find focus there. One of the things I’m most excited for in 2016 is learning exactly where that’s going and whether I might have a different path ahead of me than I initially thought. Even if ultimately not, it’s still going to be an interesting thing to explore.

For the first time since I was a tiny, I came out of this year in better condition than I started it. Here’s to more of the same in 2016. xoxo

Strange Hope

It’s amazing how frequently “I told myself no” turns into “look what I just did!!”. I get it, I really do – impulsiveness is a pretty common trait in directionless twentysomethings, and at least mine is pretty harmless. Except when it leads places. Like my current crisis – facing one of my great character flaws at the same time my life is going to pieces like it does every December.

In this case, the “I told myself no” act is watching emotionally compromising TV the week of IFTS. I’m not even gonna try to explain what that is because it’s a complicated nightmare of a thing, but the relevant details are that it’s a three-day charity sale during which I will have to tangle with almost everyone I have ever met in the Cincinnati area. Srsly. It’s practically tradition that someone I’m quite cool with not having seen in at least five years will turn up, and inevitably they will be in my line (I run a cash register for the whole thing because it’s a good reason to mark off work for three days and because I’m apparently way competent at rewiring that system) and inevitably they will realize they know me and it’s awkward at best. It’s also tradition that I will side-eye the heck out of various inevitability couples, small children, and… really everyone. I’m not a good person. IFTS brings out a lot of that.

So, the emotionally compromising TV thing. Last year was an accident. Last year involved something I was keeping up with at the time, and the ep that aired that week included (among other things) one of my favorites shooting her romantic partner in self-defense, the beautiful phenomenon of Promo Death Bait, and cannibalism set to the one Christmas carol I don’t actively hate. Really, there was no way I could’ve called that one, and yeah watching it on the first day of IFTS was a bad life choice but it was also a “I need to know what happened so I can appropriately deal with people in the tags” life choice. And an important lesson (or so I thought). Do not watch anything that will complicate my headspace during IFTS week. I repeated that on occasion over the entire last week, and I was doing So Well, and then last week happened and apparently I like shooting myself in the foot.

Honestly, I blame my friend Liv for this. Liv has been around for long enough to know what I’m into, and if she tells me I ought to watch something, she’s usually got a point. Current example – Jessica Jones, which I really didn’t plan on watching because… well, I got burnt out on superhero stuff. Not my angle at the moment. But Liv knows me better than I know myself, and she said it’s one of those weirdly cathartic shows, so I figured “okay, what the hell”. Never have I been so unprepared.

Yeah, the premise is intense (do your own research on that one because I can’t say anything here that hasn’t been said better by about half the internet, but basically the entire plot of the show is the title character dealing with Serious Issues and the show handles it spectacularly). I can deal with intense. I am not easily emotionally affected by things, and my thoughts on overall plot details amounted to “that’s pretty badass but not gonna do anything to me”. The subplot none of my darlings thought to warn me about, on the other hand… not so much.

Short and non-spoilery version – title character Jessica is an avid practitioner of about every slightly destructive coping mech one could ever think of, but one of her best is emotionally shutting herself off from everyone who even tries to take up space in her life. Everyone. Best friend, concerned neighbor, person she’s kinda in love with, everyone. And that hit me somewhere around ep 4 and it felt familiar in a way that very little in anything I’ve watched ever has. It hurt, because I know how that is, because I do that. And like most of my issues, and like the fictional darling who caused this personal crisis, I’m great at pretending I don’t. I’m great at pretending everything is fine, even when that’s total bullshit. I don’t let people in because I’m scared of what they might do to me if I give them space to wound. And then I lie to myself about it because what if I really am better off like this?

(I’m not. No one ever is.)

For me, media is best when it’s cathartic. Best when I’m forced to face my issues head-on and reassured that they won’t be the end of me. Because that’s the other thing that hit me about Jessica Jones – for being as dark a show as it is (and believe me, that’s an understatement at times), the ultimate message is surprisingly hopeful. “Yes, these things are real. Yes, they almost always happen to the undeserving. Yes, they leave scars. But it’s not the end of you. People can still want you despite your tragedies. You don’t have to be alone. You don’t deserve to be alone.”

Pretty good territory for a show about a woman on one of the most justified revenge quests in fictional history.

Just, y’know… maybe not the best timing for me to be watching it. But I’m a solid believer in the idea that I find stuff when I need it, and this one… I’m sure the timing will make sense eventually…

Plan?? What’s A Plan??

A year ago, I posted a list of goals for 2015 on my old blog. Welp, it is late November and I’m looking at that and… I get that it’s a little early for year-end reflections, but I freaking Went For It last year and… here we are and I was almost completely wrong about everything. Again. At what point should that stop surprising me?? I dunno but apparently I am not there yet.

Anywho, without further adieu, the fabulous list of stuff I thought I’d accomplish this year and the magnificent ways I failed at it.

THE GOAL: disconnect from the awful people.

THE RESULT: completely failed. My issues with organized religion have morphed into a “better the devil you know” situation, which means I remain in crazyland and it is absolutely Something. But hey, turns out that a lot of people within that world are trainwrecks, and some of them are much more than I’ll ever be. If nothing else, I’m enjoying the beginning stages of watching cosmic payback wreak havoc where deserved.

THE GOAL: find new media to get into and stay out of fandom drama.

THE RESULT: mixed mess. Turns out I can’t latch onto anything unless it’s emotional hell for me, and none of the new shows I’ve tried to watch have had that effect. So, maybe it’s a good thing that I didn’t find anything new to ruin myself with. On the bright side, however, I learned how to block people. That makes things a lot easier on that side of my interests, and it’s kinda beautiful. (Oh, and my little shippy corner of the internet has turned into a beautiful sisterhood and sometimes having almost no one in your corner can be good. There’s not space for drama when it’s half a dozen girls idealizing the same thing. Total win there.)

THE GOAL: make major project with writing stuff.

THE RESULT: I wrote a lot of fanfic, at least?? Original writing was not my strong suit this year. I have some stuff in progress that I’m kinda in love with, and hopefully that’ll be something I can talk more about in 2016, but… with a lot of the stuff that’s happened this year being what it was, it’s prolly for the best that writing hasn’t been such a success. Less stuff for me to have to destroy later.

THE GOAL: restructure my life so I can deal with my shit.

THE RESULT: turns out I really am getting better. The fog went away. I still have to plan around it, because random Episodes in movie theatres (or other inconvenient places) still happen, but it’s under control. This, at least, I won at.

THE GOAL: meet better people.

THE RESULT: living in a fishbowl has its perks sometimes. A few doors opened this year that, while not successful yet, have brought new activities into my world and a few new people I’m interested to explore things with in the near future. We’ll see where that leads. I guess I’m neutral about how well this went, but at least it wasn’t a total calamity??

THE GOAL: check off firsts.

THE RESULT: did not happen. Really, really did not happen, much to my annoyance (and inability to crush on people who don’t have serious girlfriends and/or major emotional baggage).

THE GOAL: not have to remind myself how strong I really am.

THE RESULT: there’s gonna be a separate post on this one because I tend to flail, but… I guess I did okay??

Overall, things went… differently. I’m not sure how to feel about that, but it’s interesting to look back and see how wrong I was. I wanted to be right, and yet… this has been much more of a transitory year than I expected, and as my yearly reflection begins, the biggest surprise is that I’m still standing at all.