Where were you when the world walked out?

I heard my name and I knew the voice but couldn't place it. I turned around and looked for a familiar face but it took a minute to register when I finally saw her. The shock threw me off; she was twenty pounds heavier, had an eyebrow piercing, and wore a hemp necklace. She caught up with me and grinned, her smile the only thing that seemed the same. I half-smiled back and managed a "My God, how have you been?" but my mind was reeling.

Here was someone I once considered family. My sister. The same little girl I laid next to in a sleeping bag at summer camp and talked about our pets and what actors we would marry. Who went with me to see Fall Out Boy at little shitty VFW halls and The Muse Cafe. This was the same little girl who would take me to her dad's house with her every other weekend because she didn't trust him enough to be there alone.

This was the same girl who said we would always be close. Who, in a 7 year friendship, I trusted more than anyone I had ever met. The same girl who I loved even when she started choosing sex and cigarettes over our friendship.

(This would be my first experience of loving more than I was loved.)

So we're standing in the blistering July heat and I'm staring at the sweat on her forehead while she's talking about where she's living these days. She talks about her brother in jail and then asks what bands I came to Warped this year to see.

All this time I'm wondering why she was ever in my life to begin with. And then I realize that I grew because I lost her. Because I suffered my first heartbreak in losing her, not a boyfriend. Because she made me angry and hurt and lonely. And because I had no one when I moved to a new neighborhood, I had to learn to be my own best friend.

I'm still applying that concept.

On that summer day, she said, "We really should get together sometime." I said, "Yeah," and gave her my number. Angry and half in love with her, I turned and walked away, knowing she wouldn't call.

She never did.



You know who you are. You might stumble across this one day. I hope that when you do you are better off than the last time I saw you.

How much money does it take to sell your dreams?

I've been sitting at my desk since 6am answering the same phone with the same greeting.

"Hello, and thank you for calling Volvo. How may I direct your call?"

And as I push every button on the switchboard, page every "important person", and tell every customer to "hold, please," I keep thinking that I can't do this forever. Live someone else's dream. I need to do something productive and worthwhile to me.

I need to keep creating.

Living.

Breathing in color.

Luckily, I'm not trapped yet. I have a few years of college ahead of me and this job is only a menial, part-time thing. But so many people are backed into corners. So many people settle for less because they don't want to push themselves and do the hard work to get where they need to go. Sure, a lot of people wake up when they're 50 years old and say, "Yeah, my life turned out good." But how many people get to wake up and can look back and say, "Wow, my life was fucking awesome,"? How many people get to look forward to going to work? How many people kiss their wives or husbands of 20 years the way they did when they were newlyweds?

My dad is the smartest man I know, but he spends his days doing finances in a cubicle as a car sales manager. He works long hours, mostly 9-9s, and is always tired when he comes home. He watches some TV before bed and then wakes up and does it all again. He makes good money and has always provided for my mom and us. But does he love it? No. What he does love is political science. He went to law school, but some time after college someone offered him a job crunching numbers and he took it because it wasn't a risk.

I will always choose passion over security.

My magazine journalism degree can only get me so far, I'm told. My professors say things like, "Oh, it'd be easy to write for Men's Health or Women's Day or Parenting Magazine." Yeah, but who wants that? Who says "easy" is the best way to go? I'll be damned if I use my intelligence for something I know it wasn't made for. I'm going big. I'm going to write books and poems and letters. I'm going to meet as many people as I can and go everywhere I get the chance to travel. I will never settle for "good enough", "content", or any of the other bullshit people feed you to make you feel like did something great when you didn't.

I want to love my job. I want to write books and earn a name for myself. I want to learn high-fashion makeup and how to give a good massage. I want to take bartending classes. I want to go to the Amazon for a year and take care of orphaned gorillas. I want to live in California for at least a year. I want to learn and experience everything I can.

I want to kiss and smile and breathe and run and sleep knowing that I'm doing the best I can.

My dreams are varied and so many people have told me at least one or another is stupid. But I'm not doing it for YOU. I'm doing it for me. Call me naive, stupid, whatever you want. But take a look at yourself before your point fingers. If you're not striving to be your best, too, I feel sorry for you.

Just watch me.

I am at a turning point. This is it... I can feel it.

It's been building for a long time. Since I was twelve and laying in my bed with the lights off and not sleeping because I was terrified to turn over. That something would be staring at me through the darkness. The past. My nightmares. Monsters. I'd pull the blankets to my chin and fold my hands over my chest because if something was going to get me, my heart would somehow be protected.

I've been doing it every night since. And every other hollow, fleeting minute of the day. Protecting myself. Finding excuses to get angry at (and subsequently push away) the people who start to get close.

Because the truth is, I'm scared that no one will love me up close. That if you stepped up and peered at me long enough, you'd see through my I-don't-give-a-fuck-eyes and right down into my jealous, dirty little heart. You'd see the guilt and the anger in its guise of sadness. The insecurity and hurt glowing from the same girl who told you she knows she's a looker. You'd see the past that I can't let go. Until now.

I have to if I want my life to go anywhere. I'm getting over what I can't control and I'll admit things I could never bring myself to admit before because the pain and embarassment they brought with saying.

There have been times in the last several years that I was so full with grief I felt I might combust.

But so what? Shit happened and I'm tired of holding it on my shoulders. I'm not the same person I was four or three or two or even one year ago. I'm more mature and more composed. And despite how many things I might've screwed up in building walls around myself, I'll do the best I can now to tear them down and fix whatever I can.

And tell people what I think.
And allow myself to be as vulnerable as I can handle being.

Because despite the names, the abuse, the eating disorder, the death and the lies, my bruised little heart is still beating and I refuse to waste even a second more of my life dwelling on something that is done with.

I'll let people in as much as I can bear and if they can't stand the look of a battered chest, it's their loss because I know that deep down, somewhere, I am still a good person.

First you take a drink and then the drink takes you.

The other night, a friend of mine bought a fake ID. I took one look at it and said, "you'll never get away with it." We were having dinner and our waiter brought me another glass of water. My friend held out the ID to him and said, "What do you think?"

He said, "I think you could pull it off. Just tell them you lost twenty pounds." Then he asked me if I had one. When I told him no, he seemed surprised and asked me, "So why don't you drink?"

I told him I think it's strange that in a culture where people pay money to lose their inhibitions and forget themselves night by night, someone who doesn't drink is perceived as strange.

From what I've noticed...
Some of my friends drink because they like to start their stories with, "So last night I got SO drunk and...".
Some of my friends drink because they don't know what to do with a night they'll be able to remember.
A lot of my friends drink because that's how their other friends want to spend time and they're too lacking in confidence to say, "You know what? Let's just go bowling."

Fine. I don't care about who drinks and doesn't drink and how someone is going to spend his or her free time. It's not like I won't respect someone just because they choose to knock a few back on the weekends. But be responsible and do it for the right reasons because what I don't respect is insincerity.

What I don't respect is someone who has to have a few drinks just to look a stranger in the eye. Just to feel comfortable having a deep conversation. Just to be honest with others-- and themselves. Just to have the confidence to dance and laugh.

What I don't respect is someone who uses incoherence or alcoholism as an excuse to do stupid, shitty things.

i.e. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say that. I was drunk."
i.e. "I didn't mean to sleep with him. I was drunk."

I don't respect people who use alcohol as a coping mechanism. Who use kegs to forget their problems and martinis to do things without consequences, at least for the night. It's sad that a lot of very intelligent, beautiful people walk into clubs and bars and stumble out at two a.m. with someone they barely know.

I don't respect putting your money in a glass and drinking it in order to feel something other than sadness.

I understand some people are incapable of expressing their feelings.
I understand my character is stronger and I make better decisions. That unhealthy habits are reflections of an unsteady will and a lack of true expression and honesty.

I think all addicts are weak. I think weekend alcoholics are sad and lacking in character. And that's why I will never respect them.

I know some people need to escape. Emotions are horrifying. Memories can be overwhelming. The urge to hide yourself is instinctive.

It's the giving in part that I can't comphrenend.

Chewing on a plastic straw.

I guess I've been lacking in the update department. Day to day it feels like I have a lot on my plate and am struggling to find a balance between things, but when I look back at my week or month I don't really remember accomplishing anything significant.

I think I read somewhere something about hypothetically having an extra $5,000 and the ways you could spend it. The author reasoned that you could either pay your bills on time or you could take a trip to Europe. Paying your bills would be the responsible thing to do, but one or ten years from then, what would be more significant? What would you remember more?

Europe, obviously. But I'm the bill-paying type.

I was taught from an early age to go exactly by the books. In second grade I cried in school because I spelled a word wrong on a spelling test. Nothing less than an A+ was acceptable to me or my parents. I got a job three days after I turned sixteen because that was the responsible and the right thing to do. I still save half, if not more, of everything I make (having a reliable checkings account is the "right" thing to do, too).

I went to college because it's what I was supposed to do.
By the books.

I decided to major in journalism because my mom always told me I would be a writer, so when I was a senior in high school and I still couldn't figure out what made me happy, I chose the second best thing: what made my mom happy. If she said it was right, I reasoned it must have been.

I can't even fathom the number of times I've applied the "right" concept to a situation. More and more it feels like I'm doing things for purely logical reasons instead of doing things that really make me happy.

More and more, it feels like I'm just a machine with shiny cogs and levers but no drive to get any real work done.

Sometimes I want to be able to know that I am capable of doing something completely unpredictable and out of my element.

But I and everyone I'm close to knows I am not there yet and in turn, I'm barely tolerable.