Gratitude Post

So, my friend/mom of two of my friends (that is hella awkward wording but I'm never sure how to express being friends with a specific member of a whole family I love) posts a list of five things she is grateful for at the end of each day. I love that idea, but I am horrible at doing anything on a daily or weekly basis (see Exhibit A: this blog). But since I'm in a happy, lovey mood today I'm going to do one big fat list of many, many things I am really enjoying in life right now, in no particular order:

The really genuinely sweet kids I babysit (when I say sweet, keep in mind one of them is a 14 year old boy, so that's saying something)

"Tension Tamer" tea, of which I presently have a mug which is larger than my head

Housemates who have my back when other people are not so nice

Lavender incense

A rapidly increasing understanding of "love" and "friendship" as meaning so much more than anything in our culture ever tells us they should

Living in the part of the country I wanted to live in ever since I was a kid, seeing beautiful houses everywhere I go, feeling the seasons change (especially to spring!)

Looking in the mirror and genuinely liking what I see

Spending lots of time recently with people I really love

Rediscovering my love of creating music and art - I honestly don't feel whole without them

Being *thisclose* to driving again, but also appreciating how nice my ass looks I feel after walking two miles a day

Being called Elisha - finally for the first time in my life, being proud when I say my name, when other people say my name, when I write it, when I see it written...

Living in a nice cozy basement - yes, I actually like living down here!

Earbuds that don't fucking fall out of my ears every few seconds

My beautiful rainbow bracelet that my Buncy made me, even though it currently has an unsolvable knot in the cord

Finally having an appointment to start therapy

Feeling loved, respected and understood

This was going to be longer but Buncy and Roni and Fez got online and totally ruined my blogging mojo. I am grateful for them anyway though :p

I really need to blog but there is a horrible clacking noise outside

This is a visual representation of what my brain is currently capable of being aware of. Think of it like one of those horrible tag clouds, except clicking on it won't force you to post it on your Facebook with a link to my blog (OR WILL IT?!):

I feel kind of bad now because I opened this with a mildly amusing MSPaint image and probably made you think I was going to write something quirky and whimsical that might make you think I was ripping off Allie Brosh or The Oatmeal, but instead I'm going to write about how I paid a bunch of bills today and how I'm mentally unstable and need therapy.

:D!!!!

No, I really did pay a bunch of bills today. That is the good news. I paid the property tax on my house in Florida, which had been hanging over my head like an angry frowning cloud of doom, and also my cell phone bill, and I put insurance on my car which I was supposed to do like four months ago. You would think after getting that many things off my chest my emotional state would be similar to that of Jimmy Buffet on laughing gas, but instead I am sitting here fending off an anxiety attack because:

• My housemates decided to listen to "Struttin' That Ass" while I was trying to decipher an insurance form
• Someone on Tumblr said something irritating
• While I was trying to complain to a friend about the thing on Tumblr that was irritating, Google Talk decided to shit its pants
  
• CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK

White people problems, I have them.

But no, seriously, I am way way oversensitive and have actually been having a really hard time emotionally these days. I am going to call tomorrow and try to make a therapy appointment. I've needed to do that for a long time, for various reasons, but lately I'm just freaking out way too often. The other night my roommate found me weeping on the couch for reasons I can't even remember now, although I'm pretty sure they boiled down to "everyone hates me and I will die alone". All of my emotional crises boil down to that, even when someone is clearly sitting right there demonstrating that they care about me.

The thing is, when I'm emotionally healthy I can be remarkably clearheaded, intuitive, even wise; I'm good at defending my beliefs, and people around me are even convinced I possess some sort of emotional tenacity that exceeds that of most people. When I'm emotionally healthy. When I'm not, which is far more of the time than I would like it to be, I am deeply insecure and ready to believe the worst of people. The more clear it would be to an unbiased observer that a person loves me, the more I become convinced they actually hate me and find me annoying and want me to go away. This of course tends to be really hurtful to those people because they are trying so hard to show they love me and I'm basically like "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" But the thing is, in that mental state, I really can't. No matter how loud or how often they express it. And that's scary.

So I'm going to get into some therapy. I really wish I had enough capacity for self-love* to be doing it for my own sake, but really I just want to stop hurting the people I love. In the meantime, I am trying to get into some more hobbies. I obtained a guitar via the means of someone in my house going "Here you can have this guitar nobody uses it," and I'm learning to play very slowly. I reorganized the craft closet so I can find art supplies when I want them. I'm trying to figure out how to get Minecraft to work on my computer, and I restarted Pokemon Pearl because I'm too cheap to buy the new gen. I've also been thinking my brain and body need more exercise, so I've been looking at math and physics videos on Khan Academy, and I want to find some sort of sport or martial art or dance or thing to learn. Anything to occupy myself with things that make me happy instead of just ruminating over all my fears all the time.


*Shut up, Kyle**

**I really enjoy the fact that adding a footnote telling Kyle to shut up resulted in Kyle following my blog

Weird Kids

Last night out of nowhere I had this sudden memory of my two best friends from second grade.

One was a girl, I'll call her D, who I was in Girl Scouts with. She was extremely tomboyish, and for a couple years in elementary school she asked everyone to call her a very boyish name because she said she was supposed to be born a boy. We used to play at each other's houses all the time and she taught me how to do cool stuff like climb trees and build forts and pee in the woods. She was also kinda mean and would tell me lies just because she knew I was too trusting and would believe them, or would make me do stuff "or I'm not your friend anymore". At the time I was too naive to realize it, but when I look back at things that happened at her house I'm pretty sure her stepfamily was abusing her in some way. She moved away in middle school, and I've never been able to track her down again.

The other was a boy, we'll call him B, who was older than everyone else because he'd repeated a grade. B was very shy and bad at sports, and only seemed to make friends with girls. He was an adorable, sweet boy who D and I both always had a crush on and would fight over sometimes. I caught up with him at my favorite gay bar a few years ago and gave him a hug. He's still sweet, but his life doesn't seem to have gotten much easier since second grade.

I think about childhood and childhood friends a lot, but what struck me was how all us kids who were so queer (or at least got treated like queers) found each other and stuck together. And I started thinking about my other friends in elementary school. There was my best friend S who was so hyperactive most people couldn't stand her (I thought she was fun). Then there was my fourth grade posse: MM, who had an extremely odd sense of humor; her best friend R, who was a boy who took gymnastics and, like B, had only female friends; and J, whose dad was in prison. There was MH, who was as poor as I was and whose mom I later found out was schizophrenic like my mom. (Her mom, at one point, was my mom's only friend.) Also in my life were the class "fat kid" J who once begged me to be his friend because nobody else would; and RM, who once threw a desk at a teacher and eventually got put in classes for the "severely emotionally disturbed". I was never close friends with either of them but I always thought they were nice, sweet boys who didn't deserve to be treated like they were. Later, my best friends were SB and SG; the former was the only Jew in our whole town, the latter had a delicate family situation and was being controlled to within an inch of her life all the way to adulthood. Both were "goth kids" who couldn't fit into the extremely Christian culture in our school.

My whole life my friends have been the people who weren't hanging out with anybody else. I just naturally do that; I go past the big crowd and find the people sitting on the edge with no one to talk to. I don't do it out of pity, and I didn't as a kid. Those are just the people I most want to be around. As a kid I absorbed a lot of cultural messages that said this is just proof that I was only good enough to make friends with people who are desperate for friends. But maybe that's my gift. Maybe going directly to the people who are invisible (or visible for the wrong reasons) to everyone else and finding something good in them is what I'm good for, what I've always been good for. I feel like this is coming across as "oh look what a do-gooder I am, being nice to the weird kids" and that's not what I'm trying to say at all. I'm saying I love the weird kids *for* being weird, not in spite of it. What I'm trying to do is remind myself that I matter. I'm trying to look at the little child that I once was and see what's really special about her the same way I would do with a child in my life now. And I think maybe that's it. That little kid I used to be was always going around loving people who thought nobody would love them. And she never had any idea how important that was.

Hi! (Why I Have Not Been Blogging)

Yeah, so I seem to have totally ditched BOW'11 the last few weeks. I didn't forget, exactly, I've just had other stuff on my mind. The last couple of weeks I've become unhealthily absorbed by one large, looming issue in my life. I spend pretty much all my time thinking about this issue, to the point where I have no other real hobbies or activities going on at the moment. This has resulted in me being a bit depressed and very anxious. It has also resulted in me being overly needy and clingy toward the few people in my life who are like me in this way, while shutting out the ones who aren't. (I'm sorry for being so vague - if I gave any details you'd be able to work out what was going on.) It's even gotten to the point where I am focusing on this issue at work rather than on how well I am doing my job.

I'm trying to accept myself where I am, by realizing that during this phase in my life it's natural to be consumed by this issue and to cling to those friends. I'm also trying to ground myself a bit and remind myself that there are plenty of other aspects to my life and who I am, so that even when this one issue gets rough I have other things that can make me happy. But it's really, really difficult to think about anything else. I don't have much emotional energy.

So that's what's up with me lately, and why I haven't been especially present or interesting to talk to. Once I work through some shit I will be my old self again. Or, hopefully, I will be my new self and be secure and happy that way.