momebie

It has been a month. HOW HAS IT BEEN A MONTH? I legit don't know how I got here. I suppose it was just one breath after another, but man, it feels like a lot of those are missing when I think back on them.


I have read a lot of poetry in that time. A LOT. Five books worth, give or take. And I've written some. I am never going to be an amazing poet, just like I'm never going to be an amazing novelist, but the more of it I write the more right it feels to be doing it and the more I feel I need to write. I don't know, there's just something about the act of writing poetry that makes me feel like I belong in a place or to a thing finally. It's helped me try to wrangle feelings I don't think I could do in prose.

For instance, when I was in Orlando I told theemdash that I take a lot of selfies because I'm still trying to get used to my face. Her response was a totally normal 'you've had that face a long time, dude, you should probably be used to it be by now' (paraphrased, obvs). And it's true. I have had this face a long time. I am old on the internet and in real life and you'd really think that in the last thirty-two years my mental image of myself would have lined up with the reflection I see every day. And yet, I am always vaguely shocked and disappointed by the facticity of my physical being. It's not even that I'm a fat kid. I mean, I AM a fat kid and I should really do something about that. I don't feel good about it or anything. But really it's to do with the shape of my face and the way all the bits of it are arranged. I romanticize them in my head and make them way more pleasing than they actually are.

And how do I manage expectation based on a distorted image of myself, or the feedback spiral downward that it causes. Like, I clearly lust above my station all of the time. How do I convince one of those people I'm worth dating if I don't think I am?

Also, some days I just look too much like my father for comfort, but that's a WHOLE OTHER truck of issues.

When I first moved to Boston I was telling one of the then roommates about how I want to be uploaded to a computer and they asked me if I was entirely disassociative. And I mean, no? I don't think I am. In my head the computer thing has nothing to do with my physical form being a hindrance and everything to do with time being a limited resource. I feel pretty good about being a lady and the things my body can do for me. I don't not feel at home in my body. I don't want to leave it behind. I just...want to tweak it a little so that it matches who I think I am. Though, real talk, there are a lot of things I wish I cold tweak about myself to match who I think I really am in moments of extreme hubris or whatever.

Anyway, it's a feeling I scratch at regularly, trying to understand it and I think I finally got a start on getting there.

Souls glare bright in the dim glow of living,
and easily fall prey to the glass
that would cleave them in two,
seeking out affinity in another shining surface
in vanity, letting it separate the stunning interior
from the gloaming shell,
which I think is why I never find myself
sitting in the beady eyes and pouch of a mouth
of my changeling self, as she stares
clinging covetous as mist to every mirror
and window, waiting for the invention
promised us by fiction of some
shimmering beam that might unite us again,
for the practical magic of a pure, smooth surface
to become a rippling pool she can reach through
and drown me in. I love her
more than I love myself,
for her patience and her desire.
How long has she been watching me?
My whole life, surely. Thirty-two years spent
waiting for discovery to catch up with desperation
while elsewhere we fling men into a space
just as vast as the millimeter that separates
the two halves of my whole when we reach
for one another, fingers against slick, cold skin.
How do I make myself worthy of this union?
If I had the opportunity I would swap out
every piece of myself. Rebuild the ship,
make me into something fine
and deserving of interest.
Would that upset the alchemy?
Would she know me anymore?
Would she come looking?
Finally crawl through the hard way, the shards
covered with thin, white web-like fury,
disillusioned dew glistening in the anemic yellow
bathroom light, the only evidence
there was ever any version of me at all.

So yeah, poetry. Cheaper than therapy! (I should really look into that too, though.)


And because we're already talking about poetry, here's a video Richard Siken made for his poem 'Why'. It made me laugh and it made me choke up a bit and it made me say 'yes' under my breath about a hundred times.

'Why', poem and video by Richard Siken w/ music by Marianne Dissard from Marianne Dissard on Vimeo.

HOTPANTS
HOTPANTS
HOTPANTS

Poetry is serious business, you guys.

Am I crazy? Indubitably. There, this is going to be the easiest prompt of the whole competition!

I feel that, without a doubt, I am most certainly a crazy person. This opinion of myself though, is often met with resistance by the people around me. (As are many of my opinions about myself, such as the ones pertaining to my looks or my social skills or which Hogwarts house I'm in, but that's a whole other post.) Crazy is, it seems, not as crazy does. Instead, crazy is as crazy is perceived, and everyone's measure is different. So what is it that makes me crazy and why is it that we can't agree on a set identifier?

The term crazy gets a bad rap in the current online social community, for good reason. It's a dismissive catch-all term that lacks as much in precision as it does in empathy. What we call crazy are the thoughts and behaviors in others which we don't understand. The people on Hoarders, for instance, or the two women who are married to the Berlin wall. They are crazy. There is something identifiably deviant about these people when measured against the accepted social markers. They become too attached to things we don't think a person should be attached to, for starters.

This is where crazy gets slippery, because often those people don't think that they're crazy. It feels right to them to create these attachments. It would almost be crazier to deny the heart what it wants, which I think is a sentiment a lot of us can agree with when it's targeted toward other people or really nice shoes. Their neurological makeup does not understand why a person shouldn't fall in love with the Berlin wall, it merely does.

This line of thinking brings us back around to me and my brain, which feels guilty and awkward and deviant for the things that happen in it all of the time. Sunday I had a panic attack over the smell of a stranger's cologne. It triggered a negative response to a specific memory and my body reacted physically as if it was still in that situation. That made me feel crazy. It was a reaction which I mentally identified as being deviant when related to my current physical state of safety. I mean, other people don't stop breathing as they're leaving movie theaters. The Last Stand wasn't good, but it wasn't so bad it robbed me of life.

When I voiced concern over my reaction in relation to my mental state, several people who know me assured me that I wasn't crazy, that I'm still not, because they could identify with my reaction. It wasn't deviant. I'm not crazy because they understand me, and they're not crazy. This attitude, of course, does not take into account my personal discomfort with my own mind, which is really what makes most of us feel crazy when we do.

What about the people then who don't feel uncomfortable with who they are, but who make us uncomfortable? Much like in Catch-22, if you can identify that you might be insane, then you are sane enough to hide it and perform your duties. You think you're crazy, so you can't possible be crazy. Congratulations! But that is little comfort to the people still fighting the battles they disagree with and who want nothing more than to escape from them.

So, am I crazy? I still think so. I want to believe it's unnatural to feel at odds with the simple facts of who you are on a daily basis, but the truth is it's not. This pervasive cultural discomfort makes finding a corroborating diagnosis of insanity difficult, regardless of your symptoms. Unless you fall in love with the Berlin wall, in which case, keep that nonsense over there, thanks.


This post was written in response to therealljidol Exhibit A, Week One Topic: Am I Crazy? Concrit and comments are welcome.

Guys! In 22 hours I'll be on the Florida Turnpike and headed to Dragon*Con. I'm so excited! If you don't have my number but want my number so we can hook up while we're there, let me know and I'll get it to you. In honor of Con my favorite barista drew me a special cup. I'm hoping I'll see him there as well!


[Other Thing The First] I am so colossally stupid sometimes, guys. I made a moony post to Tumblr last night, as I sometimes do when I can't let go of a thought that's gnawing at the back of my head. I made it about a specific person whom I haven't seen in ages and who I miss still, kind of regularly. I hit post and then I realized that I actually, really loved her. Well, love her. Was probably a bit IN LOVE with her, and didn't know how to say any of that. So I acted like a twat, which is what I do best. Ugh. Seriously. I'm an idiot.


[Other Thing the Second] Cure for Caska! They're a local band I'm sure I've told you about before. Well now they've made a video and you should watch it. karenthology did the filming and editing and person wrangling. barbed_whispers and I did B-Roll and minor person wrangling. The singer acted like a sexy tiger and that made it in. So you know, SOMETHING about that should interest you.



Watch it. Go tweet at them and tell them you like it. Or better yet, go give them money in exchange for sweet tunes. It's win/win, as Mr. Bowers would say.


Right. I need to call someone in another department now and try and figure out what they've done that's causing me this massive work-related nightmare. Here's hoping I can get it cleared up today and I don't need to drag the co-worker into it to babysit while I'm away.

Oh, who am I kidding? I'll be at Con. I won't care!

This is a response to (response to? echo of? fist bump of solidarity for?) the article at xoJane called A Timeline of One Girl's Relationship With Her Body.

I have been debating where I should post this, if I should post it at all. I wanted to post it to a different blog, but it felt too much like an admission, mixing the person I am with the person I want to be. At the same time, I didn’t want to lock it away. It has been my experience that we are taught not to share our defeats, only our victories, and that even those closest to us rarely know what’s happening inside of us. What’s happening inside of us is just as important as what’s happening outside of us, even though we often don’t admit it to ourselves. It’s in deference to this thought that, though it’s here under relative anonymity--in that you guys know I’m me, but other people simply stumbling on it may not--I leave this unlocked. So here, in admiration and support of the original post, is another girl’s timeline of her relationship with her body. I hope that this turns into a cacophony of voices and inner thoughts, because it’s in silence that we lose most of ourselves to the world around us.

( A Timeline of Another Girl’s Relationship With Her Body )

I am so damn intrigued right now. cleolinda has a poll going here where she's trying to correlate instances of INFP-ness to instances of someone being an empath. She has links to a Myers-Briggs test and explanations of what an empath is and it's all very interesting. If you're so inclined, I urge you to be a sample case for her poll. But really, that's not what's got me thinking.

As someone who has a Psychology minor, and who has never known what she wanted to be when she grew up, I've taken a LOT of Myers-Briggs tests in my time. From the time I was a senior in high school to the time I graduated college I was pretty exclusively an INFJ (Introversion Intuition Feeling Judgment). When I took the Myers-Briggs test she linked to just now I came up as an ISFP (Introverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving). I am not going to argue with either of those results, really. They both sum me up quite well. My issue with them is that they would seem to be coming up backwards. Or rather, it seems like I should have been ISFP then and an INFJ now.

I don't think I posted about it, and I don't really bring it up unless I'm ruefully, self-deprecatingly trying to be funny about my weaknesses, but last year some time all of my friends (the boyfriend included) pretty much told me in the span of a week that they don't think I'm particularly empathetic. And I'll tell you right now, that fucking hurt. I have always, to my way of thinking, tried to understand what other people are going through. I may not change my behavior to CORRELATE with those mental processes concerning the feelings and situations of others, but I go through the exercise. So while I might rant about people needing to get over this or go along with that, it's not that I haven't tried to find their side of the story. It's mostly that I think their side of the story is hurting someone else who I don't like to see hurt and because of that I want them to be better. I am not immune to this either. I often wish I could be better for people and sometimes don't really know how, which is probably part of the disconnect in the way my friends see me and the way I see myself.

So yeah, I lack empathy apparently. But then, you maybe all knew that. It comes to mind that a lot of the characters I really, really like lack empathy. Vicious being the most notable in that regard, but it's a common thread. I find the heartless intriguing. I always assumed that it was because I was allowing myself to explore a different facet of (non)emotional being, but perhaps it's always been that I relate to these characters because I too lack this trait and I want to be able to explore those parts of myself without people calling me on being a lousy person. (Which isn't to say that lacking in empathy makes you a bad person. It's just that I feel we're just taught that being sensitive to others is a paramount skill for navigating the world around us, and if we don't have that skill we're somehow letting other people down.)

In taking that Myers-Briggs test THIS TIME I kept thinking about the questions and wondering how my friends would answer them for me. I didn't answer the way I think they would, I answered honestly for myself, but the thought was in the back of my mind. And then when I came up with the new answer I had to wonder how much that whole revelation has changed who I am fundamentally. Do I now behave differently because my friends saw that I was lacking something I thought I wasn't? Am I now trying to make up for my actions in the past and does that make either set of answers disingenuous? For the record, I think that we are works in progress, myself especially, so I am not surprised by the idea that our Myers-Briggs scores could change over time. I'm mostly pondering how other people's reactions shape who we become. (And there's a long rant about Others and existentialism that I'll keep to myself, since I'm sure you've heard it before.)

But anyway, my head is rolling all of that around right now and I don't have a conclusion for my thoughts, I just wanted to get them out. And I also wanted to sort of gauge how other people see me and see how those scores work for or against my own scores. Is it just that I cannot properly communicate who I am, or is it that who I am is not who I think I am. And if I am not who I think I am, then who am I and how do I untangle the two gestalts? So anyway, if you will indulge me by telling me what Type YOU think I am:

[Poll #1728823]

I know that some of you know me very well and some of you don't know me that well at all. That's par for life. Even if you feel you don't know me well enough to answer I'm still interested in seeing what you think. There's no right or wrong answer here, I'm just genuinely curious about the way in which other people see me. It's a question I spend a lot of time ruminating on, but can never really answer in any meaningful way since I can only know myself (or anything really) as myself and not as anyone else.

It's two am and he’s snoring, making it impossible for her to sleep. Usually she would elbow him in the ribs or push at his shoulders until he rolled over onto his side, but tonight it doesn’t feel like the thing to do. It might be the last time she gets a chance to be kept awake by his snoring. So she lays in the half darkness and rehearses the things she wants to say to him. Eventually.

It's not that she doesn't love him—though sometimes she worries that she doesn't love him enough or in the right way—it's that she does and she doesn't know how to handle it. She doesn't know how to balance her affection for the moment with her lust for the future and she doesn't want to end up hurting him when she figures it out. Because she's ready to leave this place, so very ready, and she knows that he might never be ready for that. He's terrified she's going to leave him behind. So is she. For months, without knowing it, she's been counting down the days until she has to let him go.

Up until now, being with him has been easy. Like breathing, as people say. They've been in this relationship more than a third of their lives. They've lived together and apart. They've argued and laughed. They've had a lot of sex and none at all. None of it has taken effort until now.

She rolls onto her stomach and hugs the pillow to her chest. It's not just the warm body she's afraid of losing. She knows that there are something like seven billion people in the world and another warm body won't be that hard to find. No, what she's afraid of losing is the history. She's afraid he'll feel he's wasted all the time he's spent with her. She can't think of anything worse than being someone else's regret.

It's starting to interfere with everything.

When he comes down to see her she can't help but think of the money he'd save by not driving that four hundred miles.

When his niece addresses her as 'Aunt' she can't help but think of how she'll create a hole in many lives, not just his, when she leaves.

When they're sitting quietly across from each other at a restaurant because there's nothing else to say, she can't help but think of the arguments and the tears that pushing the subject will cause.

When he tells her he loves she hears 'stay with me'.

When she tells him she loves him she's saying 'but I can't'.

She can't be everything he needs her to be without first being herself. She can no longer be herself in this place.

There's a refrain in her mind from some song she's only heard once or twice. You love me but you don't know who I am, so let me go.... She doesn't know which one of them it applies to more.

On her side now, she's watching his shoulder move as he breathes deeply in his sleep. He's stopped snoring and is whuffling quietly and irregularly. In the dim light from the sleeping, back lit, black computer screen his hair and skin look like they've been sprayed with silver paint. The ceiling fan's whir fills in the spaces between them and she shivers against the caress, despite being warm. His room is always too warm. He's always too warm, and she loves him for it. She loves him so god damned much that sometimes she feels like she might burst. Even at this moment, when she's really nothing more than a leaking water balloon, slowly deflating as she drifts into sleep.

Their combined silence is deafening. The pressure only intensifies as they hurtle toward the outer reaches of the future. It gives her constant headaches as a reminder that she must make a choice. And love or promise, something has to give. She probably will burst. Eventually.

This entry was written for Topic 4: The Elephant In the Room at therealljidol.