Focus. Breathe. Begin Again.

“If you’re running into obstacles, it means you’re doing the right thing.”

I don’t remember who said that, and I know that isn’t the exact wording, but the general concept is resonating with me right now. Yaaaaay.

I know this project here is a cliché at times. One more bitey former-homeschooled twentysomething ladybug with a score to settle. Um, yes. Therapy didn’t work out and meds turned me into someone I didn’t want to be and this is the next best thing. (Well, this and projecting my issues onto fictional characters and writing fic from there, but this is somehow the easier-to-explain coping mech.) (Also sometimes the second mech doesn’t require that much projecting. Guh.) I’m not really doing this for anyone but myself, and it’s more of a public journal than anything about Issues.

But, y’know, the key word there is public, and I’ve been assessing things lately. Making plans. Figuring out where I want to go with my life, what I need to do to be ready for it, and how this little experiment here ought to factor in. And with that in mind, I have a few fall projects I figure I should warn y’all about in advance.

The first one is a series of posts about fictional ladies I’ve strongly identified with over the years, be it because of Bubble similarities or other things entirely. There was a post in this vein on the original version of this blog, but I’m gonna revamp that (in light of it having been written almost a year ago and some of the similarities becoming so much more painful) and bring it over here. I have a list of other things that I want to do for this project as well. For those of y’all who don’t know me (or even don’t know me that well), my taste in media veers towards what some of the people I know would describe as “the questionable”. Those of you who think you’re too good for YA fantasy novels or FUN sci-fi shows, be ready for this, because I’m going to be running through some under-appreciated things that mean a lot to me and it’s going to be a wild ride of personal reflections and “why have you not watched this?!”.

In a similar vein, and a much smaller one, there are going to be a few music-related posts. Well, maybe just two, but if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s expanding ideas. There are two planned ones, okay? One on my absolute favorite Public Figure, who has provided years of life inspo for me, and the other on an album that still resonates as hard with me now as it did when it came out nearly five years ago. (That one’s gonna be fun – half of the songs on said album are linked to certain moments of my life, and some of them ought to hurt more than they do.) But those are the planned ones. It’s entirely possible this beastie will spiral, and I’m not sure how or where but that’s the beauty of it.

And then, on a completely different note, I’m going to attempt book reviews. Yes, she who speed-reads just about everything and has the attention span of a goldfish is going to try to analyze things – and not books I’d read of my own free will and desires, either. Oh no, I have a list of Christian “purity”, womanhood, and relationship books that I want to take on. There might be some unexpected gems in there, but I have an eye and magnetism for crazy and that’s more the angle I plan to take. (There’s one book on the list that even this one friend of my mother’s, who is very gullible and clingy and moralistic and was even more so than usual at a particular point several years ago, figured out was bad. And yet said book is still wildly popular. Oooohboy.) My starting assumption is that none of the authors I’ll be reading for this have any idea that one can get their heart broken without actually being with someone, which is something I really wish someone had warned me about when I was a little bug, but I’ll be keeping a list of anything that ruffles my feathers and it’ll be interesting to see what comes of that.

Last but not least, personal stories. Obviously, I’m better at processing stuff through media than actually explaining myself, but there are a few more stories I want to tell here. I know, you’re probably wondering who I’m gonna ruin next (contrary to what one particular person thinks, I have NOT done posts with that purpose), but the stories in question aren’t in that tone. Some of them, such as a situation currently occurring involving my mother’s obsessive desire to buy a pingpong table or our family’s “unique” relationship with another family from our homeschool group, are funny. Others, such as my experience with speech comp (a story I’ve wanted to tell since I started proper-blogging a year ago), are less about people and more about systems (and yet that one is completely about people because so much of me was shaped during those few weekends over the course of three years). None of it is aimed at specific people, and the goal is to be a little less vicious and a little more reflective.

Again, however, I have the span of a goldfish… but putting these here makes it more likely I’ll follow through, so please remind me. I’m not doing this thing for attention, but sometimes it’s nice, y’know??

Beginning Again // Why I’m (Still) Doing This

I guess I have no attention span. I feel like I’ve written about that before, but it’s really kicked into gear lately. Example number one – this relaunching of my blog on a new platform. Which, admittedly, is something I’ve thought about for a while now. Basically every blog I follow is on WordPress, and popularity has to mean something, right? Plus, easier subscription services. Trust me on this.

So here we are. Blog 3.0. I’ve been attempting to do this thing for about a year, since a few people I know in passing said I should either write a memoir or a blog and I decided that blogging was less likely to make certain other people look bad. (Well, it still has, but the venomous rant about certain girls I grew up with hasn’t happened yet sooooo.) A sort of controlled chaos, if you will.

Over the years, various people I talk to online have said that my life would be an excellent TV show, or variations on that concept. “Your life is basically a soap opera” is a common one. As soon as I start talking about the people I know and the misadventures that seem to find me despite my best efforts to have a quiet life, people have that reaction. (Well, either that or they look at me like I spontaneously generated an extra limb. Depends on what phase of the moon cycle we’re in and how quickly I mention the hospital adventure of 2011.) I thought this would stop once I put some healthy distance between myself and my community of origin. I was wrong.

Obviously, ranting about it to my friends is only cute for so long. I save that resource for more important things, like my series of “my brain doesn’t want this one but my body definitely does and we have a problem” attractions (oh the joys of being a perpetually single hormonal disaster). I am the worst at remembering to keep a journal – I’ve tried, but it doesn’t work out. And as mentioned, turning all of this into a book that would ruin the conservative homeschooling community of southeast Indiana is not a viable option, as satisfying as that outcome would be. (I am not a nice person. I am well aware of that character flaw. It’s fun.) So… blog. Gotta do something with this mess, right? When life gives you lemons, make… some lovely citrus-flavored alcoholic drink? Idk.

For those of you who are new to this madness and/or would like to see previous installments of me overanalyzing myself, the previous home of this blog is right here and not getting deleted anytime soon (if ever, I’m infamously bad at remembering to do that). There will be shiny new content here whenever I get to it, and at least some of the posts I’ve threatened at various points are on the to-do list for this summer. Then again, my track record with remembering I even have to-do lists is questionable at best, so… we’ll see what happens. (Famous last words.)