The Glue That Binds Us

I've been experimenting on myself. For some time now. I don't talk about it often and I may have only fully accepted it recently but I have OCD. Not OCPD where I like things neat and how I like them and I'm cool with my level of attention to detail. I have life changing, can't control it, inhibiting my life with intrusive thoughts and time consuming behaviors OCD.

I recently discovered my panic attacks have occurred with enough frequency and strength to be considered a panic disorder. When I read the part about the anxiety and shame knowing that the behaviors or thoughts are standing in your way of a normal life it feels a lot like floating above oneself. Like I must be reading about a clinical study of a patient and not what my life feels like. I spend every moment I'm not trapped in irrational terror really laughing it up and enjoying my time.

It is standing on the other side of sound proof glass.

It is having the world tell you, don't worry, nothing is wrong at all, only to not have them realize that compounds the problem. People with OCD are perfectly aware that something is wrong with us because otherwise we appear in reality perfectly safe. Yes it has occurred to us to stop doing that to ourselves. Yes we may realize where the behaviors or thoughts were developed. But that doesn't make the patterns of chemical reactions in your brain that cause floods of cortisol and adrenaline pumping through your veins any more controllable or feel any less real.

I know what the treatments and available options modern science has for my disorder. I've taken multiple courses on it in high school and college knowing from age 12 that my family is "crazy". Being leery my entire life wondering if I'd suddenly wake up on the full moon a werewolf never realizing I Already had a disorder. The obsessive thoughts wondering about death and what terrible terminal illness I was unknowningly walking around with, or whatever other intrusive thoughts I was having Was my disease. I thought for almost all of my life that other people's minds are as busy and full and inquisitive as my own. I've learned in my old age to see other people's perspective. Which is probably thinking about themselves, and wondering about their own anxieties. But maybe without as much intensity.

I've studied abnormal and child psychology. I know that I would be immediately put on an SSRI drug. And I'd be switched from one to another (experimentation) until I found one with the least awful side effects. That is if I don't kill myself because there is a 1 in 4 chance you'll have a bad reaction to an SSRI and really badly want to commit suicide. I've had that happen. I won't treat myself like a lab animal again. Suicidal thoughts are especially dangerous for people suffering from obsessive thoughts. Once a wound has been suffered it festers and consumes you until you can think of nothing else.

I've had obsessive thoughts about people, money, being a mother, school, work, social interactions. They are also referred to as intrusive thoughts. In elementary school and high school I'd lay awake at night for hours or all night long agonizing about every syllable of every word of every sentence that came out of my mouth that day. All the times I felt I should have held back. All the times I felt I spoke out of turn, or hurt someone's feelings. Or annoyed someone by just being who I am, where I am, with them around.

I know where the seeds were planted that grew into the trees of my mind. My mom, my grandmother's, the foundation, my trunks. My immigrant heritage my roots. But the branches are all the people who I've ever met. The limbs that need to be pruned are memories of who told me in my life that I talk too much. I am too loud or I have too much to say. All these vines and weeds in my beautiful garden. 

I am hyper sensitive and attuned to other people's emotions when I talk to them in person. I watch their eyes. And their shoulders and their body language and if they show any indication they want a turn to speak I shut up. People who are my very good friends will cut me off, some people don't know how so they are cruel and funny and say shut up. But the best way to shut me up is to try and speak. And to say something confidently. Whether a story about your life, an idea you have about a theory, or your opinion about anything. Most likely I want to know. I find people are more comfortable sharing with me when I openly share with them first. As a child and into adolescence I was taught my ability to open up, trust, and connect with others was a weakness. Something to be ashamed of. It is my greater strength. It is my gift. But it does drain me.

I was raised to perform. Literally I had formal singing and dancing and instrument lessons. But in another way from age 4 I was raised in a business. I was raised to talk to adults. To entertain people without annoying them or offending them. I was raised to dress and act appropriately in any environment wearing the proper amount of make up. 

It was entirely exhausting to be me. I had my few years of High School where I refused to appease and conform with my dress and hair. Blue/black hair. Black lipstick. Black clothes. Anything to make strangers or assholes in high school want to think twice about touching me uninvited. My OCD doesnt keeo me from toucing people all together. But im selective with who I hug. When you become a pretty boob ladden teenage girl, grown men and everyone in general has no qualms about touching your body like they own it or commenting it however they see fit. 

But in the salon and many other places like Catholics school I still spoke accordingly. Educated, not too loud, not about controversial things, like a good young lady should. All the while cultivating another personality with my friends who were only my own where we called everyone who was mean a cunt and declared the world was as fucked up as we were. Eventually became one kid in a graduating class of 218 who was on the side of women and choices in the abortion debate and the only 15 year old screaming that we were going to war in Iraq on lies. Everyone loved George W. "He's the kind of guy I'd like to sit down and have a beer with."

I love raw people. That's probably why I thought I could be a psychiatrist. And why I went to school for it Just long enough to know I wouldn't spend my life giving people experimental drugs that affect parts of the human mind's chemicals and energy that we don't fully understand yet. I love people torn open who don't have the choice or privilege of keeping up walls. Everyone has things they are ashamed of. Often when people criticise me for my awkwardness or my talkativeness I remind myself that I am not awkward, I am not overly talkative in my opinion, and that is their personal insecurity spilling forth onto me. The more secure and accepting I am of myself, the less I have the desire to hurt other people with my words and the more I try to think about what I say so I don't hurt anyone by accident with an unresearched opinion or a matter I don't know is personal to them because people keep their most guarded secrets sometimes only to themselves.

Those of us who are surviving life well know that the key is in telling other people your story. The more people you can trust with your truth, the more your ability to love and forge new connections grows.

In all of my research into mental health I've discovered that modern sciences answer for me is that I will develope chronic depression from not being able to control my obsessive dermatillamania. That one will constantly fuel the other until I die from that or something else unrelated. But that answer means it will always inhibited and dampen the joy in my life and I don't accept that answer.

Many times in the past, science and the modern consensus of the time has gotten reality very wrong. Mental health, specifically OCD and depression I've personally experienced are entirely mishandled. In my second hand experience I've seen other anxiety and psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia completely misrepresented and mistreated.

Much of what we know about the human mind and how it developes and works is from research done on people who lived in cages. I think all of the experiments we take for granted should be thrown out and all further studies should be done without allowing for testing on humans. Studying life is one thing. Experimenting on people or animals in cruel ways should be against the ethics of modern science.

We should not ever start from the assumption that other humans are animals we need to study and fix. Humans are fellow beings of energy and light who need knowledge and guidance. You can not force change onto people, you can not "fix" them. Teach them history. Let them see all we know of technology and science and the universe. They don't need fixing. We are designed to heal ourselves with help from one another. And that's not to say that we don't all get a few chips and cracks around the edges before we leave this life. Relationships of love are the glue that binds us together. The epoxy that smooths our edges. The spackle on the walls we've built to protect ourselves.

Feministing Reminiscing

I have had this conversation before with many women. People compliment us when we wear make up. And when we don't people tell us we look tired, or ask if we are ok. Some interaction with a negative response.

When my hair is brightly colored people tell me they like my hair often. It is always brightly colored now. It has been every variation of the color spectrum of light and dark of shades and tones and any day now every combination of every color variation. I like it that way. It changes with my mood.

When I fear severely like when I had to leave my mother's salon. The salon I grew up in since I was 4. I had one step next to buzzed, severely short hair, I liked it, it was easy to do. I always dried it, it took two minutes. And in the weeks before I left I died it hot pink.

I kept it very short for some time. Having odd asymmetrical haircuts is hard for me with the OCD. I'm home a lot. I was home more than usual last winter. With my son. With my dad. I needed to be outside my comfort zone and yet I was home with incense and candles and meditation and musical instruments and video games and netflix as distractions.

I watched all of Lost in a month last year which seemed insane and childish. Everyone said it was life changing and epic when it was on. It was vague and intentionally manipulating. You can tell more when it is watched without commercials or having to stop when the episode is over. T.V. designed for the adrenaline rush. Designed for the anticipation.

Lost seemed so fake next to the horrors real life has witnessed in the wake of the hurricane. Hurricane Sandy for those people not near the shores of the east coast and don't drive there for Christmas dinner where you can't see because there aren't enough street lights fixed yet and there are ditches dug across many roads so you have to k turn a lot even though you're in a place where everything should look familiar and nothing does. Real life problems are so much more complex than Hollywood makes them. After all these years they still can't top the vibrancy of the human imagination spontaneously forming mental pictures from plain text words.

I hope this new year brings a flood of emotion and with that I can talk about all that has happened this year. When Grandma Jackie died in January I cut my now 3 month grown hair again. I died it the deepest blues. So many blues like the ocean I couldn't go see because it was still filled with debris. When I finally went to the spot that is sacred to me. The spot where I go to see forever. It looked similar. It still said Funtown on the sign on the cabin even though everything else was gone. But all the sand on the white beach was new. It was cold and drizzling in July. The wind whipped me on the boardwalk in Seaside Park as I looked out on how much was gone but also at how much was still there. A month later all those boards and the cabin burned to the ground.

This winter you can see that this summer was all for show. All the Progress made at The Jersey Shore Was for the commercial success of Chris Christie's re-election and this winter proved it. Things are not much better or maybe even worse for the victims of the storm. Although we all have good holidays because we appreciate even the little things more. Electricity for instance. Warm socks. Someone to be with who you love whether or not you're not blood related.

Family comes in all shapes and sizes and there is no right way to be a family. As long as you have love and compassion for the people you connect with in life. And hopefully you can at least respect  those you don't, enough to leave them alone, and not be a catalyst for pain in anyone's life.

My goal is to be a positive influence in peoples life. And not let their judgements and insecurities effect my happiness because I no longer want to live in fear and pain. In fact I flat out refuse. As mad as that makes some people, I say good! Mad is the first step. Passion for something. Then you start to question how to fix what you're mad about. And you realize you can't fix the world's problems through anger and fear because they are bread in anger and fear. Love a lot of times takes stepping out of your comfort zone. It takes making sacrifices or compromises. Love requires that you consider someone else's feelings as important as your own when making your big life decisions. 

My hair is starting to grow in. The roots come in and I lighten them and make them pink. The blue can't be entirely bleached out at this point because the ends of my hair have been blue for over a year. I don't want to cut myself off from the year that I've had entirely. No matter how painful it has been. But every time I dye my hair, it gets a little more pink.

For this Christmas it was very light blonde with brown roots and baby pink and baby blue. It feels faded to me. I feel faded when my hair is. And it is likely true that if I haven't even had 2 hours to myself to paint my own head and play around with mirrors listening to music I probably am pretty fucking tired and faded. But people tell me it looks nice when I wear make up and style my hair.

No matter the length or color, if I conform to social beauty norms of makeup, blow dryers, and flat irons I get compliments. But I find them always to be double sided, every time someone tells me my hair looks good because I took a half an hour to fuck with it, it makes me feel like it doesn't look good when I don't. Same with make up, all women know they get comcompliments on their skin and beauty with make up on. With out it you're demoted from goddess who is incapable of opening doors for herself to a human just like errbody else. Not to mention that similar or the same people will say things like, what happened to your hair, if I don't do it and it looks flat and wiley as straight hair often does.

I don't think girls with curly hair should iron it straight. I don't think they should blow dry their hair straight for so many years it's always a semi straight frizz from heat damage without more leave in conditioner spray and a flat iron. We shouldn't wash our hair everyday. We need oils in our hair. We shouldn't put cream on our face. No one makes sure all the ingredients are safe.

My skin looks like porcelain with makeup on. I can contour and blend like no other. Flawlessness is my gig. The OCD makes me very good at my job. I can spot a symmetrical flaw from a mile away.

People are not symmetrical, people are not flawed. People are all unique. Every single one of us, even genetically identical twins raised in the same household by the same parents with the same siblings. Everyone is the same material component, the same elements, the same energies. We all view this experience from a new perspective. We all contribute just by being here. The standards of what women should be are outrageous and unacceptable.

Happy Winter Solstice! Love, Jackie Lane

I give my husband and son socks and underwear in their giant over-sized Christmas stockings. Some people think those are boring presents. We appreciate small privileges. I am going to buy them this time of year anyway because I only buy things when they are on sale. So I stuff them in giant over-sized stockings, along with other small gifts to make socks and underwear more exciting.

It's not every year. But sometimes we need to remember some people don't have the luxury of buying new socks whenever they want. Warm feet are a security everyone should have so we assume they do and take ours for granted.

Not everyone has brand new warm socks. It's not about how much you spend but small comforts or fun that mean more because someone else cared enough to take care of them for you.  

Happy Winter Solstice!
Let the lengthening days warm your heart and remind you of the light that is inside all of us.
Love ~ Jackie Lane

Duck Dynasty

My husband is having a rough week.
"Hey, did you hear about Phil?"
"...Phil who?"
"You know, Phil on TV!"
"Dr. Phil?"
"No. Come on, you know..."
"..."
"Duck Dynasty!"

He's not exactly the conservative they are expecting. Surprisingly not all men with beards are conservatives or watch reality T.V. contrary to popular opinion.

'Tis the Season For Anixety

I wanted to be more productive than I feel like I've been since I woke up this morning. Morning only has an hour and 15 minutes left. I fell asleep around 2am promptly after finishing working. Zack was up until 11:15p. I'm still so tired and I can't get up thinking about all the things I have to do in the next few days. I just want to put covers over my head and wait. It would be easier but less fun and memorable.

I'm going to try and start posting my thoughts I want to save on my blog instead of just my Facebook because of app luxury, blogger works better on this phone. I bought a micro recorder on sale. I'm so exited. Up to 1100 hours of audio, get ready.

I often have good ideas while driving. Or figure numbers or connections out while driving. I have tried many times to write down a Great thought at a stop light only to have it change and get every green on the way home or a phone call, and it is gone forever into the ether.

I am keeping my contract with the devil that is Verizon Wireless. I have no real choice. I have plenty of illusion of choice but no matter what the alternative is pay $400-500 for a phone that was made for pennies by someone who makes a dollar a day. They own the towers. 4 choices isn't competition, when one raises the anti so do the others. Four "choices" in a country of 330 million people.

I got an LG G2. So far it is amazing. I am blown away with how much better it is than my exactly 2 year old HTC droid. I suppose it benefits my readers to know how I balance a full active family, work, and social life and still have time to blog, talk to 400+ people on Facebook all the time, and post anywhere from 2-10 articles and memes I've read throughout the day. People keep telling me to get on Twitter more to reach more people. I have a hard time using or understanding too few words. It is not my language. I also still enjoy not being sucked into technology 24/7.

We live in a world of privilege and technological advancements and we completely take it for granted. 1/7th of the world's 7 billion people have regular access to the internet. It should be all of us. But I guarantee most people with access aren't utilizing what they have at their finger tips.

We can not come up with advanced technologies in a vacuum. Everyone should have a right to access all information and science at this point. It would only benefit humanity because with minds and beings working at their optimum function we will advance even more quickly. There is no reason for starvation or violence in this world aside from greed. The love of power is undoing all we have accomplished.  The power of love is the only thing that can save us at this point.

Be My Friend

Object of My Affection

I’ve had a boy I only held hands with tell me, "I love you". My favorite moments during my teenage years were during long one-on-one conversations in cars or sitting on curbs with friends. Hearing their thoughts and listening to music. 

I wasn’t the type of girl you’d try to have sex with unless you wanted to keep me around. I’ve been called crazy more than once. I only had my sights in that department set on two goals that were finally obtained after years of planning on my part. This post isn’t about sex.  Although I’d probably have more readers if it was. 

I’ve been remembering all the hugs I gave and all the hands I held as a teenager. For someone who considered herself angry, ungrateful, and failing I sure spent a lot of time foraging intimate emotional connections with those I came across. In my opinion none of my time was wasted. I have all of my life to learn science, read literature, and practice math and instruments but some moments are once in a life time. 

I often skipped out on my responsibilities. My homework, classes, and practice were often sacrificed when anyone called out in need. I couldn’t say no to my friends. I felt they were all as lonely as I was and I always wanted to help them. I have a savior complex I learned to let go of recently. It isn’t our job to save people. They need to save themselves and it is our job to offer support. 

I can remember being lonely, now I am anything but. I recently had to fight tooth and nail to regain control of my life and bring myself back to a place where I have alone time. It was hard as a mom with a supposed career path and a child. I needed time to think and process all these connections I have to people. I was on a path of convenience instead of a path I chose on purpose.

I see now how not knowing about my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder may have hurt someone I loved very much. I didn’t understand as a kid that goodbyes are rarely forever. The only permanent goodbye is death. I didn’t know yet that most of life consists of waiting. My lack of patience and inability to handle changes hurt more than one person I never meant to. 

My life had always been jam packed with a schedule of activities. Swim teams, swim clinics, dance classes, CCD which is Catechism classes, choir rehearsals, piano lessons, guitar lessons, are among the many things I was busy with all the time on top of school. I didn’t know that not working hard at life was an option. It wasn’t for me. I felt and still feel that I am never doing enough. 

I think now I didn’t do my homework for a couple of reasons. The first being that if I already understood the concept and it was just practice I wouldn’t do it. If there was no artistic aspect (writing, painting, drawing) I wouldn’t do it. If it was busy work I felt I knew how to do I wouldn’t do it because if it wasn’t done perfect without a single mistake it wasn’t worth doing at all. That was the OCD. 

It was thought perhaps I skipped it for attention. Like the cutting, it is said we do these things for attention. That is why adults think children do everything, for attention. A lot of the time that is correct except when it is not. The last thing a kid with a social anxiety disorder wants is negative attention. The fear that causes the inability to get something done is the same that comes if you screwed up and just didn’t get something done because you are human and forgot. Sometimes I forgot to do my homework because my outside of school life was too busy. I never ever made an excuse. Perhaps it seemed defiant. I thought there was no excuse valid for the failure to fulfill responsibilities. 

My dad worked nights and needed to get to sleep, my mom worked all the time, often well past dinner time or bed time. I was there in the basement in the salon doing homework or watching T.V. on the nights I didn’t have an activity. I was there before or after that activity if I did. I liked being in an adult environment a lot. I had cousins to hang out with kids but I didn’t always like kids at school. At school there are too many kids per adult. I was an only child who was raised in a business. I knew how to talk to adults. I thought it was ok to talk to adults. Although I was very smart and I hated being laughed at. People will tell you they are laughing with you or because whatever you did was funny, especially when you’re a kid. To someone suffering from anxiety you are not laughing with them, there are two very different emotions attached to being laughed at and laughing with someone. 

I found out as a teenager that embarrassment is learned. You can only be embarrassed if you let yourself be. In high school I knew I was clumsy and fell down a lot but if you are the one to laugh and see the humor in what happened you don’t have to worry about what other people think. In reality we should never worry about what other people think, because in most ways we will never know. 

I paid little attention to adults as a teenager. I thought my teenager peers would leave school and grow into adulthood and wind up as mature, accepting, and smart as I was. Turns out when you are smarter than most people, they don’t get the chance to catch up, whatever stage you’re at in your life you are always one step ahead of the pack and left out. Luckily there are a lot of people like me out there and I have found some of them.

When girls reach puberty it is like a wall goes up around them. Adults in their lives no longer what to touch them, they are hormonal, they bleed now. What to do with all these crazy teenage girls? I don’t understand why we separate boys and girls still. Our culture is so obsessed with sex that we can’t even realize that nakedness and sex are not inherently linked. Nudity isn’t shameful and only because of our overtly sexual culture that objectifies children and is rampant with abuse do we think that they are. 

Why do the boys get to go to the gym and play basketball while girls have to learn that from this moment on one at a time each one of us will start bleeding for one week a month? Except we mustn’t tell the boys what we talked about lest they think we are dirty because they just cannot possibly understand. How about it is time we teach them to understand? the part of patriarchy I am just as tired of as female subservience is this belief that girls are somehow superior creatures to men. Men are not incapable of learning to clean up after themselves or of processing complex emotions.

Somehow little 10 year old girls can handle the real anatomy of the human body and boys can’t? Why because boys are inherently immature? They are not. We only teach them they are as a way to perpetuate the status quo. I know some very emotional guys. They are often forced to feel like "less than" men because of it. Sometimes they find alcohol and drug addictions to quell their desire to connect on what is considered a feminine level but is really connection on a human level. 

I think part of why we mistake all hugging, handholding, kissing behavior as sexual is because in this culture there is no other place for it. We have put affection behind closed doors with sex. Because of this our children suffer loneliness. I may not be able to hug adults for no reason but I hug every kid that I see. I hug my son in the morning, at night before bed, when he gets on the bus, when he goes to his grandma’s. I kiss him goodnight every single day. And it’s not just me, my husband does as well. Affection isn’t gender specific.

As a married women I find the friendships I made where sex was never involved are easier to keep. Where we didn't confuse affection and friendship with romance and passion. The lovers I had who loved me back I still keep tabs on. The lovers I had who I feel didn't love me have gone away entirely. I don’t feel like I missed out on sex any of the times I just held boys hands and listened to their most hidden thoughts and feelings. Those moments are more special sometimes when you don’t have to wonder afterwards if they were just after your body and not your mind. Without those moments sex can become as lonely as any other part of life.

As a teenager this culture promotes the idea that you have to get to sex as soon as possible. Sex will make you feel good and your life will be fulfilled. We fail to teach adolescents that they can orgasm on their own and not wind up in intimate emotional relationships they are not ready for involving sex. 

When you are married you can have as much sex as you want and you find there are many things in life that are as important as sex, affection being one of them. I am a lucky enough girl that I’ve had very few sexual experiences that weren’t also affectionate love affairs. I realize that is probably not common in general and certainly not common if you’re a man. 

People have trouble communicating; people have trouble speaking the truth. I don’t have trouble with these two things. I had problems with asking too much of just one person when I have an obsessive intense personality that will keep me coming back for more. Sharing I am good at, holding back, not so much.

I didn’t realize when I was young that I have absolutely no power to actually fix other people’s home and life problems and that when those things are hard just being alone can be necessary. In this world of instant gratification we aren’t used to space. We aren’t used to turning off the phone, or the text messages, blowing off responsibility, and being only present where we are. The arts and music aren’t held up as important anymore and people suffer who can’t express their emotions with words. Everyone has a different language of emotion and you have to find your way to vent your story to others.

I’ve felt a million times like I lost someone, a friend or a lover only for them to come back to me in an unexpected way. It is important not to be mad when we separate from those we are connected to. We should embrace them when they return and let them communicate to us all they have seen and experienced while we were apart. Moving onto something new and starting new connections is essential to life. We cannot subsist on only one connection because we will suck that energy dry quickly. 

The web of connection is where the powerful energy of human interaction is contained. It is a give and take. Life is a balance. Don’t worry about those who don’t return your love, sometimes they come back to you. Don’t worry about the ones who loved you and you lost, make sure to remember what you learned from them. Move on to loving someone else and you will continue to be fulfilled. Love is not finite. It doesn’t lessen your love of anyone from your present or past to add a new person to the web. When you add to the web it grows and the positive energy that is created can be enough to heal the wounds of negative energy we all carry inside ourselves.

Be My Friend

Don't Panic

I haven’t thought about this in a long time. 

Someday I will have to explain my mental illness to my son. 

I don’t even consider myself mentally ill. I haven’t been to a doctor for it in years. I haven’t questioned whether or not I should cut myself in years. I only relapsed once at 19 after the official end to my cutting habit at age 18. I never really think about it anymore.

I used to after my son was born. I would worry about the day my son would ask about it after seeing the scars on my arms. He did finally ask one day around 3 years old. I don’t even think he remembers now. I know someday he will ask me for more details. When he was first born I thought somehow I would just never tell him about the depths of my depression in my teenage years. 

That is a silly thing to think looking back on it. 10 years later at 28 years old I still have many prominent scars. I realized today what made me stop finally, what was different about that last person who found out. They asked me to stop. That person spoke to me openly and without judgment and said, it makes me sad when you hurt yourself, will you promise me to stop and I kept it from that day forward with one relapse the summer I was 19. 

It’s still hard for me to quantify what it was all about. Maybe proof that I wasn’t crazy. To me it was proof that no one really was paying attention to me. 

I feel like an uninhibited person. There was, and is, definitely a part of me that puts it all out there. I’d focus on the pain instead of focusing on fear and anxiety and do really brazen things. Eventually I just became that overtly confident person without the cutting behavior. I didn’t want to explain myself anymore so I conformed. My cutting behavior went away. I would never even consider doing that and explaining it now to my son or his friends’ parents or anyone I know. To me it doesn’t make sense and I was there in my own head. 

But the old scars remain. It seems as though they might never fully go away. You don’t realize as you’re experiencing your childhood that every little thing is going to affect you for the rest of your life. You think you will forget and that will save you from whatever happened to you but mostly that just makes it worse and elongates the process to dealing with your history. 

I treat myself like a person without an anxiety disorder because that is how I see myself and also no one has ever acknowledged I have an anxiety disorder. I eat away at my fingers and bite my lips. I cried every day on the way to kindergarten. Before I left my job I cried every day on the way to work. And yet I would keep it all together and act like a normal person when I was around other people and no one was any the wiser. I have to be aware of my history to realize that these things have causes and I am not entirely at fault as I feel I am after having a panic attack as a supposedly in control adult running a household.

I wouldn’t say I am afraid of other people but I am. I don’t understand why they are so mean. I don’t understand why they don’t pay attention. I can’t stop paying attention. I can tune out everything in a room if I am reading or watching something. A defense mechanism I developed somewhere along the way. But if you have my attention I am listening and will remember what you said. People said as a kid I was overly embarrassed. Now I think I was sensitive from verbal and emotional abuse that manifested in an anxiety disorder. 

I went through a phase as a teenager where I handled my anxiety by being the biggest personality in a room. If I commanded attention I was in control. I constructed a persona that also kept people from feeling they have the right to put their hands on my body. Worked out well for me, I am still in the 2/3 of women who haven’t been raped. 

The me I was as a teen met the me I am as a mother this winter as I read my journals. Teenage me wasn’t as dark as I thought she would be. She was as hopelessly optimistic as she remains. The primary theme was loneliness. Broken family all around in so many ways and friends so broken they couldn’t form trusting relationships. 

I knew in high school that my group of friends had little in common. We all were smart, but also we all came from broken homes. Not all in the traditional sense of divorce although that was some of it. Other families were torn apart by other things like staying together without being in love, addiction, or mothers competing with their beautiful teenage daughters for attention. Alcoholism touched almost every one of us. 

I’ll admit I didn’t come up with cutting on my own. I was 15 when I started and I had the internet and there were plenty of pop culture references to death by suicide by then. Teenagers are obsessed with death because they haven’t had much real experience with the grief it causes. Unless you have, sometimes that is enough to not want to be suicidal. Sometimes it isn’t. Death is different when you are young because you are farther away from it. 

Better to be alive and struggling than dead, can’t fix anything when you’re dead. It seems like an easy escape but it only is for you. The people you leave behind have it that much worse because of the extra painful early severing of ties. I may not entertain the thought these days but I can remember how it comes up. I can hear the thought but I know for me it would never even be a considerable option. I want to see as much of the global story as I can before I go. I know even when I do, all the mysteries that make me curious won’t be solved. In reality the human life span is rather short. 

I was having a writer’s block for some time. I could write in my journal but not to the world. It is hard to open yourself up to judgment. I am trying to share more of my story for the people that care and have asked. No one is eager to open themselves up these days because there will always be someone full of hate there to share with you their disapproval. 

The holidays are coming. I hate them. I hate the pressure to buy terrible processed food, this year I will be because we are on the “whatever is on sale” diet. I hate the pressure to spend money on things we don’t need for people we care about instead of just showing them or telling them that we care about them. 

I always used to give out stuff for holidays in school. I never thought it was weird at the time. Sometimes I wondered why kids were so excited. I didn’t know other people’s parents didn’t celebrate every holiday with their kids just for any reason to celebrate. I’d give out M&Ms for Valentine’s Day, key chains at Christmas, flowers for Veterans, ribbons for breast cancer, or carnations for no reason sometimes. I remember people trying to convince me not to be that way. They were wrong, as an adult atheist I think we should use any excuse to celebrate life. We just don’t necessarily have to spend money on plastic shit made in a factory in China or Indonesia to do that. 

Now I don’t like to spend a lot of money on people and I don’t like them to spend a lot on me, but small tokens of friendship, from a faraway place, a handmade bracelet, or a found crystal ball are deeply meaningful. Those things were a way to keep our friendships and connections alive with people we met along our life's travel before there were photographs, phones, or Facebook to feel those connections were still real. We should reevaluate our beliefs on what is of value and get rid of the rest of the clutter taking up our minds. 

Without the feelings of isolation and lack of real connection I felt as a child and teenager life never seems like it is worth giving up on. My family makes me laugh every single day. My household is full of hugs and kisses and signs of affection. The world forces us to build walls to protect ourselves. Sometimes we build them so tall and so strong that the connections we need to survive as social beings are severed. Even if you can’t change the past or perfect the future as long as you have those connections it is worth it to be here experiencing life. 

Be My Friend 

Community of Loss

Things are bad. 

I am tired of pretending. 

There is no doubt in my mind.

It is hard when about 5 people you know are having a swell life and everyone fucking else is not. Life is always hard. People have to die, that is a part of life, people will always lose people they care about. But in this life you can lose people you care about before death and that is the saddest of all. 

We spend our short amount of time here judging and sometimes avoiding people we care about. Sometimes we avoid them because they hurt us or lie to us. We need to learn to see their vulnerability. We need to understand that when people lash out and hurt us it is because someone or something is hurting them. 

People don’t feel good from hurting other people. You have to be loving to other people to get the oxytocin chemical flowing so people should be good at that. But when someone never learned how to do that and can’t make the oxytocin sometimes they learn to rely on other brain chemicals that have a similar effect. Or other ways to get chemicals in our brain that feel like love. Drugs that effect our dopamine and serotonin are common in legal and illegal forms. 

People fall in love with anger because anger gives you an adrenaline rush. I know it well. Now that feeling gives me intense anxiety. I know the momentary feeling of power for tearing down another human beings emotional core. A damaging blow to their energy. In the long run you will wind up wasting all your own energy. 

You can only focus on love or hate at any given moment. Most people can’t have angry emotions and loving at the same time, you are in a constant balancing act between one and the other. But we also have a choice in some of this. Most of it is learned behavior. You can learn to be angry and judgmental towards others and give yourself that adrenaline rush. But you can also learn to love. 

It takes two to tango though and so many people live in worlds of anger that they don’t even know they are filling in the void with something other than the love drug. So many people taking pain killers. Or antidipresants, benzos, stimulants, food, exercise, any obsession you can name because they are lacking in love. That is what people want, connectedness, community. 

Where does my skin stop exactly and the air begin? 

We are mostly water, but we are mostly nothing as well. 

It’s all how you look at things. 

How we look at things isn’t something we are born with, we learn it all from other people. None of us are alone no matter how alone we feel sometimes. Those of us that thrive do so because we have community, whether we choose to see its existence or not. Many a privileged person doesn’t see how the people they know from where and whom they were born to directly effects their lucky lifestyle. For some it was the time they were born in, certain generations had more free government programs available to them in the start of adulthood than others. 

We are all in debt. 

Everyone is working as hard as possible. 

Humans need recreation and connection and cooperation. We can not thrive and accomplish to our maximum potential when we push ourselves too hard. We will burn out, there is no perfect. This culture just replaces the burnt out worker with another to waste away. 

It is so much nicer to want to understand or help everyone you meet. I notice I need my space from people a lot. I take on their feelings. Their insecurities becomes mine. I am not an insecure person. I tend to feel very intensely the emotions of the person I am with, which is why I only like to go out sometimes. 

I have always been prone to completely zoning out to the point I no longer hear or see what is going on in a room, I’d say this happens the most when I am reading and writing, phone and Alphasmart3000 included. I grew up with quite and extensive family as an only child. I had many cousins on two sides of a family with many different aunts and uncles as parents.  I know what it means to belong to a community of people, someone accepted me as one of them at some point, even as weird as I am. 

As I’ve gotten older I’ve had to lengthen distances between people I care about and myself, because I can’t directly help them. Being myself even bothers them when all I want to do is to connect with people. I want to know everyone’s story. The internet is perfect for me, all the information about someone’s life journey without all the feeling their emotions involved. So I can get to know far more people that closely. It has been an invaluable tool. 

I’ve always made these very personal one-on-one connections with people. I am not big on hanging out in crowds. I always wind up off to the side talking to one other person. Do we all do that? 

It feels weird when I talk to a group of people. So many emotions going on. I find I turn into a clown and make jokes and fill any uncomfortable silences. I hate uncomfortable silences. It took me a long time to learn to talk just enough that people feel comfortable and have a lot to say back so that they will tell you their story. 

I never realized how much growing up in and working in a hair salon shaped who I was until I wasn’t there for a long time. How many things seemed normal, shaping how people appear, never talking about subjects that offend, always being ready to entertain people. 

Things were so intense I am completely burnt out. There are a lot of things hair stylists are privy to that not everyone is. How society is doing, what kind of personal image insecurities everyone has, what they watch on T.V. even though everyone pretends they don’t watch much T.V. 

A friend and I noticed that the other day, how frequently people say they do not watch much T.V. And yet you know millions of people are watching T.V. We have statistics about it. It is on. They may watch movies or sports but there are commercials and it is media and there are advertising dollars in the show and it is in everyone’s living room. If you don’t have a T.V. you probably have the internet, you can get a second hand T.V. for cheap and free DVDs from the library and dirt cheap VHS from any second hand store. Everyone uses and experiences entertainment and recreation. 

Stop judging other peoples choices of how they spend their free time from work and their money, those are not your choices to make for them. The only thing you owe other people is love and sometimes forgiveness but always support. Even if you can’t be around someone because their suffering will only drag you both down they have to know you are rooting for them. 

Everyone has to make it on our own. We have to pick ourselves up and do it. No one can do it for us. But the only people who can do it are those of us with love and support from other people. We have to know that someone believes in us. Anyone really, once you find one your community will always expand. 

It makes me sad when someone hates me, even if I don’t need them in my life at all. It hurts me when people I don’t even see anymore judge me. I don’t know why and I know it shouldn’t. So I personally believe it is hurting all of us. 

Who doesn’t have someone in their life telling them that they are not good enough? Boss, spouse, mom, dad, brother, sister, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, lovers? Everyone is being judged by someone they care about. 

It is the silent suffering under this weight of financial burden and debt that rests on every one of us. If you are lucky enough to have not have a misstep of loans or credit or illness yet be prepared because almost no one gets out of this sick sad world the way it is without some sort of loss worse than the natural course of death humans were so accustomed to for so long. Many people leave without passing on their wisdom and what they have learned to others. 

We should be sharing as we go. Lessons are experienced time and time again until they are learned. This goes for individuals and as a culture.

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
- George Orwell

Society of Ideology

Things feel bleak in America. People are actually scared about the “government shutdown”. The media stunt political ploy. They are squeezing poor women and people who really need help while mildly annoying the Tea Partiers so they have something to rail against Obama about. 

We are all tired of it, we feel like we have no control over it. But we do. We all need to look around and see what we can do. We need to figure out our contribution to the worlds problems and try and minimize our impact on the negative and learn how we can expand our reach into the positive. Violence will always create more violence. We need to start using our words.

I’ve been void of things to write about. Well that is a huge fucking lie. The world is full of things to write about. My own federal government has been “shut down”. Sort of, they closed all the things we liked and kept up all those necessary defense contracts. 

I’ve got all these ideas swirling in my head. I don’t know what to tell people anymore. 

The first step is to be well educated in history and sociology. It helps to know all the basics of science as well. However none of that will help you make any sense of the world as it is because it isn’t designed to make sense. It is designed to be as confusing and frightening as possible so no one knows what the fuck is going on. Really, that is the goal. If they can keep us all in fear they can keep their lavish lifestyles. While the lower classes pour their blood, sweat, and tears into their work and their lives and barely get by at the end of the day. 

Almost everyone I know is suffering extreme stress, often from lack of money after being done paying all the bills but also from social pressure to conform and just "let it go". We pay more for utilities than we should, we pay more for food than we should, we pay more for transportation than we should, we pay more for shelter than we should. The primary problem is that the owners of those for profit ventures don’t give a damn about their customers or what they have to say because they don’t have to anymore. 

Television and streamlined media has us all fed exactly what we want to see and hear. Just docile enough to control, but still active enough to have productivity up 22%. What do we produce anyway in America? Weapons? Food for other people who are too busy working to feed themselves. 

The world is full of too much stuff and yet we keep creating more. Buying more, thinking of ways we can sell more so we can be in on the profits. That is a part of the game, give everyone a small tastes of the rewards, make us all feel we are slightly privileged, just one step away from that magic moment or that magic idea that puts us on the fast track to fortune. It doesn’t actually work that way. 

There are such wide chasms between each of the classes that it is easy to keep us hating one another. God forbid you are sick mentally and physically because then you are the one bringing society down. Don’t be too rich or we will hate you our of jealousy. Don’t be too poor, why don’t you just work harder and get an education? People have lost the ability to relate to situations that are not our own. Perhaps because we don’t read as much fiction. Sitting around “doing nothing” is a waste of time. God forbid anyone should see the world through someone else’s eyes thanks to an artist. 

Television just sells primarily one vision of the world. The white upper class one. Not the world of the wealthiest, the world below them. The world we are supposed to strive for, the life they sold us with too many Super Sweet 16 and Cribs episodes. What they don’t have at the end of cribs is the statistics of how many new money celebrities wind up broke and bankrupt because they can’t maintain the lifestyle of the wealthy once they aren’t in the spotlight. 

Dynasty families don’t let athletes and musicians in on decisions that sway the world. They have to have some stories of people coming from the slums to become super stars, Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z, Britney and Christina, if you are talented enough we will hand you a pass into the world of the rich and famous. But that is all it is, a pass. It doesn’t come with actual power to effect changes you want to see in the neighborhood you came from. You can save yourself but you can’t save everyone else. 

I don’t know anyone personally who doesn’t worry about paying their bills. Even people with steady incomes couldn’t survive if they suddenly lost their job or even just a few weeks of pay. There is no job security. All the workers rights people remember having are gone. All the rights we have to personal freedom are gone. Google and Facebook can tell you exactly what we like, they have compiled extensive marketing data on all of us, so they can get whatever is left of our paycheck at the end of paying the bills. If you are lucky enough to have anything left. 

No one speaks up in their daily lives. Everyone talks about the weather or major sporting events, or even fantasy sports. Who the fuck decided fantasy sports should be the way ANYONE wastes their life away? I support people’s right to spend their moments of life anyway they choose. I completely support recreation and games that are also fun athletic activities. I will never understand how we got to the point where not only do we worship sports stars as gods and talk about that relentlessly, but now we make up realities for these teams and players and pretend that it matters and effects us. We waste a lot of time and energy on things we were raised with and never question.

Now people talk minimally about politics, “can you believe the government shutdown?” But whatever they say was put in their mind for them. Whatever they already believed Google sent them results that match what they will like and agree with. When it comes to TV we watch what we agree with and then we parrot those talking points when in casual conversation. We don’t live in a society of ideas. We live in a society of ideologies. Set rules we want our realities to abide by. We need to get back to believing in change and possibilities. We do the same things with politics, sciences, and religions that we do with sports. We all have our own teams.