I am a special snowflake!

(Video is tangentially relevant but mostly here because I think you should watch it.)

Almost my entire life has been an internal war between trying to make myself be normal and trying to figure out why I am so weird. I've slowly been peeling off layers of the person I was raised and socialized to be, to reveal the person I actually am. When I was twelve I realized I couldn't be Baptist and when I was sixteen I realized I couldn't be Christian at all. When I was thirteen I realized I wasn't heterosexual (and then again when I was 15 and again when I was 21 - I kept going in and out of my own internal closet). When I was 17, I realized I was probably not neurotypical, something I had suspected even as a little kid. I always knew I hated school, but I didn't quit until I was 16 and I didn't find the unschooling community until I was 22. And, since this is mainly a blog for close friends, I may as well come out and say that in the past year I have discovered I am not cisgender (meaning: my body says I should be a woman, but my sense of self says I am not.)

The process of figuring out who I am has mainly been a matter of hearing the right words. I've felt weird and funny and square-peggish my whole life but I couldn't know who I was without the words. I knew what my spiritual beliefs were but I didn't have the word "Unitarian"; as soon as I learned it I immediately knew what I was. I knew what sorts of people I found attractive but I didn't have the idea of "queer" (as opposed to lesbian or bisexual); once I did, I knew that was me. Sometimes I had half the idea but it wasn't enough. For example, I had the word "trans", and while I was inexplicably drawn to it I didn't see myself there, but the word "genderqueer" struck my soul like a bell. I had the word "autism" and I knew it was like me, but I didn't have concepts like "Asperger's" or "sensory integration disorder" or "highly sensitive person"; once I knew those, I knew where I fit. And I knew I left school to learn on my own, but I didn't have any word for what I was doing ("dropout" only being a word for what I wasn't doing).

Each of these discoveries has freed me initially, but the problem is that claiming them requires a lot of self-confidence that I don't always have. They're not only outside the mainstream, they're outside the words for being outside the mainstream! I'm not straight, neurotypical, schooled, religious, or a cis woman, but nor am I gay, homeschooled, atheist, or a textbook-approved sort of trans or autistic person. It takes a lot of courage to accept yourself as being outside the mainstream, but it takes even more to embrace living in all these in-between spaces. I don't do well with being in-between, and I've spent a lot of time trying to force myself to be completely gay or completely a boy, telling myself I'm either more disabled than I am or not different at all, and so on. One of the hardest things about collecting so many labels is that you tend to get accused of just wanting to be special and unique, of just wanting attention. No one's ever directly accused me of those things, but I've definitely thrown that accusation at myself. The first time I told someone I was questioning my gender identity I spent the rest of the day telling myself I was "such a fucking girl" and that I had some nerve coming out to a "real" trans person. I've spent the last eight years going back and forth on whether I'm "impaired" enough to call myself autistic, which results in long periods of denying and neglecting my needs until I sort of shut down and become impaired. And of course there's all the times I ignore my spiritual needs (admitting you go to any sort of church or believe in anything is just not cool in a lot of the circles I run in) until I have an existential crisis and become deeply depressed.

So I'm trying to start treating myself better and taking my needs more seriously. And maybe where that starts is by standing up and saying, goddammit, I'm weird. I like wearing nail polish while being called "he", I could spend the rest of my life listening to music in a rocking chair in the dark and be happy, I'm agnostic with regard to the fairies at the bottom of the garden, I'm attracted to quite random sorts of people with little regard to what genitalia they have, I think K12 school ruins kids and higher ed perpetuates the kyriarchy. I don't do any of these things to get attention, I do them because they come naturally to me, because they're what I enjoy doing or what I genuinely believe. But if I need to seek attention and make a fuss in order to have the right to do them, then I will fucking well do that. I believe in a world where everyone is free to be exactly as weird as they are, and if I'm going to help build that world, I need to start by living it myself.

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.

I promise my life is more fun to live than to read about

So I am about due for another post that is not about alpacas and I think what I want to do is show you a little bit of how I live. I wish this post had some pictures or something but it does not. Weep.

I get up usually around 10am, sometimes earlier if I need to go to the laundromat or do other errands before work, or if I am woken up at 9am by a text message from someone who has no sense of what are appropriate texting hours, Valerie.

Then I check my email and go take a shower and maybe eat something small, get dressed, feed the cats, etc. I leave the house generally at 11:30 or 12 and walk about a mile to the train. On the way there I stop at either 7-Eleven or Dunkin' Donuts to stuff my face LIKE AN AMERICAN. I get on the train at 12:30-ish, go a couple stops over and then walk a few more blocks to my job.

I babysit and clean house for a living, but I don't have my kids until 3, so for two hours I am alone in the house. I do menial chores like washing dishes, folding laundry, and so forth. While I am cleaning I listen to stuff. I used to listen to Radio Free Burrito until my iPod died a tragic death, so now I've been listening to my Barenaked Ladies station on Pandora on my phone instead, or to country music on the cable music channels. (Yes, country. Deal with it.) If there is an hour's worth of laundry to fold (in a house with three kids you would be surprised how often this happens) I watch Doctor Who while I do it.

At 3:00 I get J10 off the bus and read the notes her teachers have sent home from school. I get out her Dynavox (a computer she uses to communicate) and put it on her wheelchair for her, and then we set up to play Monopoly. This takes an extremely long time because she likes me to read all the instructions to her, and to explain them in detail. Around this time T14 gets home and gives J10 a hug and then goes off to play video games for the rest of the afternoon. Sometimes he brings a bunch of friends over and I get to work in a house full of happy, giggling teenagers. Those are my favorite days.

About halfway through playing Monopoly it will either be time to take J10 to the bathroom, which takes a long time, or she will stop playing and decide she wants me to show her how to spell all of the words on the Monopoly board. The rest of the afternoon is usually taken up with folding even more laundry (her choice), giving her medicine through a G-tube, and putting her in her prone stander to watch Barney. Generally this is the same Barney video every day. I've had dreams about that video. She has dozens of them, but she wants to watch the same one over and over.

Once the parents arrive and I've given them any relevant updates on what the kids have been doing, I go back to the train and either walk or catch a bus home from there. I'm usually home by 7, and unless it's my night to cook dinner, I go straight to my room to decompress a bit and chat with friends. This goes on until either something interesting is happening upstairs (I live with a lot of people, so sometimes people are hanging out) or the people I am talking to go to bed. So around 9 or 10 I either venture upstairs or decide I am feeling hyper and need to listen to music and jump around for awhile. If I am being responsible I will do some housework around this time. And then it's round 2 of chatting with friends, usually either west coast people or my friends in Singapore and Australia (since it's late morning/early afternoon for them). I get to bed normally between midnight and 2am, sometimes later if interesting shit is going on.

Those are work days. Days off are spent doing errands, playing video games, blogging, and hanging with people. My life is kinda predictable and routine, but that doesn't mean I don't have a LOT of fun. I love my job, my house, my friends, and even my walk to work each day if the weather doesn't blow goats. Yay.

Alpaca!

My teacher died and I am sad and will also be doing many things this weekend in between being sad, so this week I am going to simply share with you some fun facts I have just learned about alpacas. See, I am only just learning about alpacas, so we can learn TOGETHER. Unless you are some sort of alpaca expert in which case you will probably find this post unamusing and maddeningly full of errors.

Fact #1: Alpacas are totally adorable and I want to hug them.

Their huggability is actually science.

Fact #2: Despite the apparently obvious sheepliness in the above photo, alpacas are not sheep.

They are however related to llamas and CAMELS.


Fact #3: Immediately before being shorn, alpacas resemble giant puffy sheepdogs.

An actual unshorn alpaca

Fact #4: Immediately after being shorn, alpacas resemble Colin Mochrie.

An actual shorn alpaca

Fact #5: I am just going to directly quote this fact from Wikipedia: "Because of the high price commanded by alpaca on the growing North American alpaca market, illegal alpaca smuggling has become a growing problem."

illegal alpaca smuggling
illegal alpaca smuggling
illegal alpaca smuggling
illegal alpaca smuggling

Fact #6: I am tired of learning fun facts about alpacas and I want to go back to bed.

GOODNIGHT INTERNET SCOUTS