More words, with pictures!

Wow. Tonight I decided to sit down and go through a few boxes that have moved with me from Texas, to Arkansas, back to Texas, and now back to Arkansas, and see what all I'd been keeping that was clearly so important. It was such a fun adventure going through all that, reading notes and cards I've gotten over the years, seeing how my own writing style has changed, and finally, letting go of about 75% of it. I kept a few important things, like birthday cards with nice messages, a couple of notes from people I still talk to, and some pictures and stuff, but I really gave it an overhaul. Before, my Memory Box (which is a pink Barbie carrying case) (yeah, I did just admit that...no shame) wouldn't even close, and now it's only half filled. (I got rid of more than half of it, though, I just filled some of the empty space with my giant medical history folder, since I don't really have anywhere to keep that.)

Some of the treasures I found include:

these awesome pictures that my mom took to document the worst case of chicken pox ever experienced by a child


This note that a friend wrote in...third grade, I believe?


This little piece of something that I wrote a few years ago, then stashed away.


This is what the piled looked like just after I started. By the time I was done I couldn't even carry it all in one trip! My family is big on card giving...for every occasion imaginable.


It's ironic, though, that despite making a lot of space in one box, I actually made a giant mess by pulling all the stuff in front of the box out of the closet, and leaving it stacked in front of the door. Oops! I'll get to it tomorrow, though, now I'm really in the mood to toss stuff out! Or at least put it in a bag to donate, which is what I'm doing to everything that isn't a card, note, or envelope.

I started on a box in my craft room closet, too, and ended up with a bunch of VHS tapes to give away. I don't even know if anyone would buy them, but I have a VCR somewhere too, so maybe if I pack it altogether someone will want it. I don't know. If not, then it's ReStore's problem figuring out if you can just toss all that in the trash. I'm just trying to get rid of as anything and everything that I haven't used in the past year, and don't have a reason to use in the foreseeable future. Makes sense, right?

Anyway, I don't even know where all this cleaning energy came from. Maybe it's because of all that sleep last night/earlier today? I guess I really am a night owl. No matter how hard I try to flip my schedule back to normal, I always end up awake and writing at 5 am. Not the worst thing possible, but I like daylight and I don't get enough of it this way.

My jambalaya turned out awesome, Josh said it was the best thing I've made in a while, so that's a win. I sort of followed a recipe, sort of just threw stuff in and hoped for the best (which is what I usually do when I cook anyway).
 
We ate while we watched the Westminster dog show...this is Orion's reaction to the Affenpinscher winning Best of Show. We were all rooting for the Portuguese water dog, although I really thought the fox terrier had a good chance. :)

Supressed.

This morning when I woke up I felt lighter. Like some of my worries had finally been lifted off my shoulders. I think this whole sharing thing may actually be good for the soul.

During my 13th year (7th grade) three things happened that I've never told anyone about. At the time I figured since I escaped physically unscathed that I was fine...but while we were walking through the park today I realized that the fact that one of my worst anxieties would suggest otherwise. So I'm just going to put it all out there.

The first two are the scariest: I was followed and harassed by two different creeps on two separate occasions.

The first time it happened I was genuinely terrified for my life. I was walking through an empty park behind the junior high as a shortcut to get to the daycare my mom worked at. Suddenly, out of nowhere, this guy appeared. He grabbed my backpack and guided me in a different direction, towards a neighborhood. I just knew I was going to get raped and murdered, but I kept calm and talked to him, and didn't go where he was trying to lead me. Instead I told him that I walked that way every day, and that maybe we could hang out again. For whatever reason, that worked, and he walked off after promising to wait for me the next day. Obviously I never took that shortcut again.

The second time it happened it was in a more public place. After the first incident I changed my route - it was longer, and there was no shade, but I felt safer sticking to main roads. Anyway, I was walking down Closner, which is the main street through the center of town, when this guy came out of a pizza place. He grabbed the back of my neck so hard that I had bruises from his thumb and middle fingers squeezing me. He asked for my name and number, and I gave him a fake name and the number for our church office (I couldn't make one up on the spot, I was terrified!) and walked off as fast as I could. After that, I started getting rides from friends on days that my dad couldn't pick me up.

The third thing may seem kind of funny, and looking back, I can see the humor - it was a far less dangerous situation than getting accosted by a stranger in an empty park, but at the time, it shook me up pretty bad. I had stayed after school one day to try out for basket ball, and somehow managed to be the last one to leave. I finished up and went to leave, when I realized I was locked in the locker room. I freaked out, started screaming, banging on the door from the inside, and then I became convinced that I was going to run out of air and suffocate. (Remember - 13 y'all. Give me a break.) That didn't stop my panic attack though, and eventually (it was probably all of 30 minutes, but it felt like hours) a janitor walked by. I think I scared her pretty bad too, and I'm like 95% sure that I knocked her down I shot out of there so fast, but I can honestly say, I didn't look back to find out. My dad was still there waiting on me, and he said he hadn't been waiting too long (I had told him what time to be there after try-outs) so I know I wasn't trapped all that long, but still.

I don't know why I kept all that to myself for so long. I mean, I guess it didn't matter either way, really, nothing could have been done any differently. I didn't die, nothing terrible happened, other than a crushing anxiety that makes me terrified of strangers in parks and anyone I don't know walking towards me. But hey, at least I'm not scared of getting locked in places!

Eight grade was a lot calmer in that the only thing I kept secret was the fact that I once threw up in the bleachers during a school dance. Totally ok with that being a Thing That Happened to Me.

Well, that's enough of the past for today, don't you think. See, just talking writing it out has helped me immensely. I don't know how or why, I mean, technically as I'm typing this I haven't even hit 'publish' yet, so I'm still the only one who knows...but it just feels good to let go. It's like releasing it to the internet is my way of expelling it from being bottled up inside me...

demons of the past

I just realized that all day I've been opening pages and immediately pausing the videos but my speakers weren't even plugged in.

When we lived in Austin, I went through...7 jobs? I think. We were there for five years, the last three of which I held one steady job, so you do the math. Of those, only one got the requisite letter of resignation. At most, I just walked out one day and never went back. At one, I took an early lunch because I had an anxiety attack and didn't go back until two weeks later when I had to pick up my check. Not exactly noble, but then again this isn't a story about how reliable I am. (Which, ironically, was my best trait according to the people I worked for the last three years we were there.)

Sometimes I wonder if humans have a threshold for experiences...like the people that die in the midst of having some crazy adventure, if they just hit the maximum number of adventures, and that's why they died.

When I was younger I used to write constantly. I carried a notebook with me everywhere, and just wrote. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions of my surroundings, opinions of people, stories I'd make up about strangers, anything and everything that came to mind. Sometimes I'd write notes to people in them, and then I'd give them the notebook and they'd write back. So much of my life is chronicled, captured in my own words, and I often miss doing that.

I lived in my own little world, with my words to keep me company. When I wasn't writing I was reading, and I was perfectly content to spend the majority of my time alone. The stories I could create were very real to me, and they were better than the reality of where I was.

My disdain for the region I grew up in is thick, overwhelming, and destructive. I realize that I wouldn't be the person I am today without having had the exact past that I did. I know that the experiences I had shaped every fiber of my being. I made friends there, I loved there, and yet when I think of it, the only feeling I can muster is a burning hatred that grows the longer I think about it. I dream of the places I lived, the house I grew up in and the church/school I spent 6 days a week at when I was little, and in my dreams the depths of these places is vast, and I'm searching, exploring, yearning to find the thing that will allow me to make peace with my past.

The building I went to elementary school in, where my mom worked six days a week, and where I spent countless hours being terrified that someone was going to sneak in through the alley door and murder us all is gone now, but the secrets it holds will live forever.

I'm more scared of living than dying. Seems weird, considering that all of my anxieties fixate on murderers but the real fear lies in something horrible happening to the people I love, and me being left alone - abandonment. 

I believe that the same way we can have a soulmate, someone who compliments us in the most perfect way, we can also have that connection with a place - somewhere that you feel in perfect harmony with your surroundings.

While my notebook keeping tactics are clear evidence that I've always been an introvert, they also served as a support system for the onset of my depression, as well as a clever way of hiding it for so many years.

When I was 11, my brother moved away. He'd lived with us for six years, ever since he'd come back from living in Spain. He was a constant in my life, always home on weeknights hogging the TV, buying me music, movies, toys, anything I asked for really, the best brother anyone could have asked for. One day, when I walked in the house crying because my dad has refused to stop the car after I saw an abandoned kitten on the side of the road, he asked why I was upset. When I told him, he immediately took me back to the spot where we rescued the kitten and brought her home. I named her Socks, and even though she was taken less than two years later, I'll never forget the no-questions-asked willingness of my brother to just fix whatever he could in my life.

When he left, I was happy for him. He'd escaped the Valley, for a better job in Austin, and he really seemed to like it there.

Then, a year later, less than a week after finding out that her sister had died, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. Because there was no one else to stay with me, and I was not the kind of kid willing to stay home alone, I spent a lot of time at the hospital, and later at the cancer treatment center where my mom took chemo. My dad's way of coping was denial - my mom didn't have cancer, it was just the doctors trying to scam money out of us. Since my mom was the one that was sick, and my brother was gone, I had no real support system. I focused my energy on school, and that helped for a while.

But then, because my mom hadn't been working, my parents couldn't afford to send me back to my private school the next year. My mom asked me to try public school for two weeks, promising that if I hated it, they'd find a way to send me back to Faith. I did hate it, and I had no friends, but I didn't tell anyone. I didn't want to be a financial burden, and I certainly didn't want to stress my mom out.

I think, losing an aunt, even one I never knew, followed by being terrified of losing my mom, and not having anyone to discuss it with probably should have been dealt with, but it wasn't. I didn't bother to tell anyone that something might be wrong, because I didn't really know it was, and my parents were, understandably, focused on getting my mom healthy.

That's when it started, though. Even though no one was really mean to me (except the blind girl who attacked me in the bathroom with her cane), I just didn't fit in. The kids were tougher, calloused, and uncaring. I kept to myself even more than usual, and when I did make a friend, she was just as depressed as I was, and taught me to deal with stress in the most harmful way imaginable. But no one asked questions, and I took that to mean no one cared. If no one cared, then why stop? I started to sink into a hole of depression and self-hatred so deep that I am still working to dig myself out of it.

Sometimes I can't believe I hid it all so well - I was so self-destructive, so angry at the world, and deeply depressed, but in all that time only one person ever confronted me. Ironically it was my mom who convinced him that I was ok, and while part of me was grateful to not have to answer the questions anymore, part of me also wondered why she couldn't see it.

All of that, though, kept bottled for so long, has left me an emotionally damaged, unable to hold down a job, and slightly dysfunctional adult. And I blame the place. I can't blame my parents, they're my parents, they did the best they could given the circumstances, and I love them. I can't blame my brother, he's not responsible for me. I partially blame myself, because if I hadn't had to have surgery in the fifth grade, maybe we would have moved. But then again, maybe it would have been just as bad, or worse.

No matter what the real reason for my current mental state, the truth is that if I don't let go of the hatred I have for that place, I can't move forward. The place itself didn't shape me - the people there did, the experiences I had there did, but physically, the place itself - it's just land. I think it was so easy for so long to just lump all my blame on that, but now I need to start facing the fact that I've been gone for almost ten years and things haven't really gotten a whole lot better. I'm still lost, and I need to take a step back and find the real issue, so that I can free my mind, and be the strong, stable person I know I should be.

"Beyond the East the sunrise, beyond the West the sea
And the East and West, the wander-thirst that will not let me be" - Gerald Gould

Self: realization, appreciation.

I spent so many years of my life trying to repress pieces of myself, depriving myself of things I wanted, or wanted to do, in order to try and seem 'normal' or fit in better. Not always, really, because my family, God bless them, is full of weirdos and crazies, and it's part of what makes them so spectacular, but when we were apart and I was with other people, I wanted to fit in. To seem cool.

And even though I grew out of it years ago, I think, at times, there are still little things I do without even noticing. Like it became almost second nature to me, to adopt these habits and make them my own because it's what the normal people did.

It irks me when I notice them. I get mad at myself, because knowing what I know now, how little all those things really matter in the grand scheme of life, I'd take them back if I could. I'd be my weird, crazy self, every single day of every single year. I'd wear what I wanted, and cut my hair strange, and dance like an idiot in public...more than I already did. I mean, I couldn't hide my true self all the time. I can think of some really awesome moments in time that probably would have embarrassed normal people, that are treasured memories to me. Like the time I dressed as an old lady and sat in a wheelchair in a Fredericks of Hollywood.  Or the fact that I took my 6th grade school picture with bells in my hair.

There were also things I had no control over, that may have bothered others, but did not faze my family one bit. Like when our house flooded? We lived in a hotel for a week, then came home, pulled up the carpet, and lived with concrete floors. We also put everything (literally, y'all; EVERYTHING) into huge plastic bins, and the next time it flooded, we were fine. (Well, minus the fact that turning on a light or fan would lead to being shocked. That was an adventure in itself, though.)

I can't say that I was ever embarrassed, though. I think it was more of a feeling that I should be. I can remember one incident in particular; I was in second grade, and we had just moved from Edinburg to Eagle Lake. I had started school not knowing anyone, and not ever having attended a public school. A cousin of mine was in the same class, but I still didn't really know him, only that we were related. Anyway, one day in the first week of classes, we had music class. Our teacher played some music and we were instructed to dance. Now, I had been taking ballet classes from the time I was 2½, so I danced. Almost immediately I noticed that everyone else was just standing in place and kind of...shaking. After almost kicking the kid next to me in the head, and realizing that even the teacher was staring, it occurred to me that no one was actually expected to dance. I think that was one of the first times there was a full on realization that I was different.

Now that I look back at it, I know that it wasn't just the dancing that made me different; it was how self-aware I was, even at seven. I know I've talked before about how it can be hard for me to differentiate between the knowledge I possessed at the time of particular incidents, and the knowledge I have now, but that memory is quite clear. I remember feeling like I should be embarrassed, but I wasn't. I was sad for everyone else, because I thought to myself, "they've never had ballet lessons!" I didn't dance like that again, not because I cared what anyone thought but because I was worried about crashing into someone else, since they didn't seem to move.

And it is that sentiment that followed me for years; I'd do something, act a certain way, or say something, and then realize that I was getting funny looks. And so, I learned what kind of actions are normal, and acceptable, and what kind will lead to people thinking you're weird. What's strange to me, though, is that it was public schools that were harder to fit into. You would think that private schools are full of snobby kids, but honestly, that's where I thrived. It was second grade, fifth grade, and junior high that really threw me for a loop. By high school, though, I'd found my niche (theater), and the kids who accepted you as you were.

I am really glad, though, that I can appreciate all the random adventures that I had growing up. Like the time the 'Poop Lady' was trying to open our screen door, yelling for matches, and my mom and I had to hide behind the (open) front door until she left. Or the time my aunt almost got bit by a rattlesnake because my dad brought a live one home (in a bag) and she didn't believe him. Getting attacked by a baby cougar...in my own living room; that's one of my favorites, actually, strange though it may seem. The time I had a friend sleeping over, and we ate cereal in the dark, and when I went back to the kitchen I realized that the cereal was full of ants. (They still don't know, to this day.) Falling through a chair while I was chasing a chicken crocodile and pretending to be Steve Irwin. 

So this is me. Strange. Bi-polar. Addicted to expensive sunglasses, but won't pay full price for clothes. I'm bad at geography, but I love Egyptology, paleontology, forensic psychology, and nutrition. I'm messy but I like structure and for things to be even. Apparently, my pronunciation of 'Charlotte' is weird. I can't click my heels but I insist on trying anytime I jump off a curb. I like love classical music. I don't cuss. I'm about 85% sure I have Misophonia, which I believe makes my social anxiety and going out in public that much worse. I have been known to collect random animal bones I find in the woods. (Or you know, anywhere.) I cry for no reason sometimes. I cry for every reason other times. My brother is my hero; always has been, always will be. I'm scared of crickets and vacuum cleaners, but will pick up any spider without a second thought. I have what I call an audiographic memory; in that it is eidetic as far as sounds are concerned. I love animals, but also enjoy wearing real fur. I used to be tall for my age; that stopped around 4th grade. I wore a vintage, non-prom-like dress to prom. I talk to my pets, and treat them like my kids. I don't want kids. Not any, not ever. I don't like settling. Some days I want to buy a house, but it's mostly because I want to paint, and decorate. I really prefer the freedom of being able to move wherever, whenever I want. When I like a song, really like a song, I can listen to it over and over and over and over without getting tired of it.

Here are documentations of some of the aforementioned ventures, along with a couple of other treasures...enjoy!

And proof that it runs in the family...

The End. Have a great Sunday!