I’m changed, I learned how to live again

(Used to do it too–Lecrae)

This is just some random reflections…because driving to work as often as I’ve been doing it gives me a lot of time to think about random things to avoid thinking about things that hurt…

I used to believe what people told me that I was too quiet…and that I was too loud and obnoxious…which doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense since those two things sound like opposites…but I guess for it to make sense you need to know that I was struggling socially, but in the classroom was where I felt most comfortable and didn’t necessarily wait to talk until someone else wasn’t talking…and at home with my family I also talked a lot more…

…That was my definition of myself at the time–too quiet and annoying…I didn’t tend to see a lot of value in that…but it felt like everyone else saw me that way so I adopted the notion and made it my own…

…I don’t think anyone would characterize me as too quiet anymore…let’s just say that I think my mute button has stopped functioning and I really don’t care because after many frustratingly silent years, I’d rather say too much than have the words trapped inside. Being unable to communicate is SOOOOOO hard.

…but I don’t think my identity rests on being loud and obnoxious either…yes, I definitely can be impulsive and overly energetic at times, leading to talking out of turn, but I am really trying to control my tongue to stay within social norms and be respectful, and I have also learned most of the time to control my volume…and as for obnoxious…well, I don’t deny that I can be obnoxious at times, but obnoxiousness is not at the core of my personality…it is mostly just a monster that comes out of the closet when I am over-tired…like last night when I woke up when the garage door opened and decided to get up to see the picture my parents were bringing home…like my school pictures, most of my “professional” pictures from LifeTouch/Target were more of a comedy than a professional picture, because taking pictures of people with glasses is hard…while a few pics are fine and a few more look fine when they are small, the vast majority are definitely not okay when they are not small…and to the photo people’s credit, they agreed to edit the image we had printed bigger than wallet size, and it looked fine after that…but anyway, I got up to see the picture…and when I went back up the stairs I was screaming at the top of my lungs “Bob the Builder can he fix it?? Bob the Builder no he can’t!!” and other various deviations from that theme…I was having fun…but to my credit, even I agree at times like that with people who think I should shut up, because eventually I am annoying myself as well since singing and sleeping tend to be mutually exclusive activities…

Also…for a long time I hated being in the car…as I was driving closer to home I’d have everything packed up ready to get out of the car ASAP upon arrival, because the car was almost my prison…it wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the car. The problem was that most of the rest of the world was scary. From social situations to contamination, there was no way I was waiting anywhere but the car…but staying was not enjoyable and I wanted out…eventually the fear ended and I could and did run free. No more waiting in the car ever…but the car also was where I ran when I needed an alone place to calm down when the waves of life felt like they were about to knock me over…it was quite the contradiction that my car was simultaneously a prison I was happy to escape from and a refuge to which I ran…and over time, like all things do, life evened out (at least in that aspect)…now I CAN wait inside and I CAN wait in my car. It is a choice. I usually go inside when I am waiting to clock in for work, but I LOVE that occasionally I can also stay in my car if I would like…never underestimate the power of choice…I used to complain (inside my head) about how unfair it was that I couldn’t just clock in whenever I wanted and just tell the device what time I was really clocking in for assuming that time was in the future…now while I would still appreciate that ability, it doesn’t bother me nearly so much, because I am not confined to my car during the waiting time…

 

Life isn’t perfect, but taking joy from the little good things makes the big bad things more manageable sometimes…

I wish Britt Nicole lived with me…

’cause that’s how the lost gets found

Yeah, and add to the list of things that are missing the wallet that has my intern licenses and pharmacy insurance card in it…it has a variety of other things as well, but those are the only things I can think of right now, because those are the things I really need right now…I have one week to find it before my rotation…I kind of doubt that the preceptor would ask me for anything more than my current state intern license which I am 94% sure I have a copy of scanned into my computer, so I can probably get a pass on the other stuff for a little longer, and I’ll get a new insurance card in August or September, but I’ll still need a school state intern license eventually…

…so frustrating…at the beginning of the summer I looked all over to find those three cards that I was supposed to have and finally found them…and now I can’t find the wallet they are in…

…it is not like there are a lot of people in my room or that they would be likely to be left anywhere…I probably don’t even need all my fingers to count the number of people outside of my immediate family that have seen or been in my room since we moved into this house when I was in second grade…and at school that wallet lives in my backpack but at home it has very little reason to ever leave the pile where I dumped everything out of my backpack at the end of the school year…

…and I really doubt someone would have broken in and stolen it…too much would be on the line to do that and it would have had to have been a thief who was in it only to violate me and not really for any other gain seeing as how my credit/debit cards, checks, money, passport, and social security cards are not lost…and people tend to describe me as sweet or loving so it’s not like I have a lot of enemies…

…If the lost could get found I’d also like to request that my laptop barcode and my camera battery charger be found…I am starting to become convinced that there is a black hole in my room…

…I really didn’t used to be a loser…

So long status quo

(Brave-Nichole Nordeman)

I learn and get smarter every day

I’m learning…and I am not the same as I used to be…besides just no longer being a coward trying to protect everyone else while neglecting myself, I am learning things that make life more live-able every day…and I have not lost my joy for life.

Like last week I learned that graham crackers and sandwiches shouldn’t go in the same plastic bag…the graham crackers get kinda mushy…and the bread gets kinda hardened…also I read somewhere that graham crackers were originally created to suppress sexual desire…that seems really weird, and I am not sure if I believe that is true…but graham crackers with frosting are SO good so I could totally see someone turn down sex if they could have graham crackers and frosting instead…although I am sorta biased since I have never had a husband yet so I haven’t yet had a chance to even decide if I wanted to have sex…

…and I also recently learned that fruity pebbles and sandwiches also don’t go in the same bag…the sandwich ends up covered in fruity pebbles which is sorta messy, and the fruity pebbles get clumpy…and not just the ones covered in peanut butter…

…and some of the things I learn just make me feel downright stupid…like how my face was numb and I didn’t like it…and I read on the internet that heat would take it away…but even when my fingers were nearly burning my face couldn’t feel anything…and I didn’t know I unknowingly burned my face until I looked into the mirror an hour or so later…which is how I got a pretty heart shaped burn on my face…which turned into a pretty wound since my fingers couldn’t stop picking at it…

(no illicit substances were implicated in the learning of this lesson despite how dumb it was…it was from the dentist…of note, I would much prefer a little extra pain now and not have the numbness later…but no asks my opinion and sometimes it is easier to just revert back to my compliant patient spineless doormat-like former self who would never dare to stand up to anyone or fight for myself…get brainwashed long enough that you aren’t worth it and sometimes you start to believe it…and following directions is sometimes a good thing and it earns you compliments at the dentist which makes you feel good about yourself…which perpetuates the cycle…but I loved the empowerment of being given the choice to stop and take a break if I wanted one even if I did think the idea of a break was dumb)

On a more serious note, I am learning not to generalize and put people in categories. A year ago I was feeling very conflicted. I wanted to characterize anyone working anywhere close to mental health as an awful person…but I had close friends that were still in that area that were still my closest friends and I needed to hang on to my inner circle while other things spun away from me…from there I learned to extend the “okay” to people who earned and maintained my trust…my easily lost trust…I have always been, and still am, quick to extend trust before I know someone, but you better believe that trust became quickly removed…I give people the benefit of the doubt. I wanna believe that every person ultimately wants to be a good person…and that burned me enough that I was ready to acknowledge that sometimes trust needs to be retracted and slowed. The song of trust put en retard while the facts are processed and interpreted…and then a few days ago everyone was abuzz about how Social Work is the worst people ever. They are the yes people. They are as bad if not worse than the security at the place I work…and things started mentally crashing around me as that began to trigger the things in me that doesn’t want more victims…it became more proof that people in mental health related areas are not good…

Let me back up a little bit. Theft is a huge problem at the pharmacy where I work. There isn’t really much we can do. In a lot of people’s profiles we have notes to get them out as fast as possible and keep an eye out and call security because they are especially bad shoplifting offenders, but ultimately we still can’t control the theft. It is too rampant and for anyone we catch there are certainly hundreds of others. Someone supervising some kind of family services at my workplace was finally caught…because one of my coworkers used facebook to figure it out…and last I heard we reported her to security and HR and all she got was a talking to despite being a repeat offender caught on camera…and more recently, just a couple days ago someone stole and we caught her and security actually showed up eventually (that is another story…we could flip the panic buttons with an armed criminal and half an hour later when security finally showed up we’d all be dead and the murderer would have whatever drugs he wanted and be long gone…)…but here’s the thing. Security watched the whole thing. We knew the thief still had a child in surgery. Instead of requesting she give back the stolen items, surgery called social work and the social work people said she could keep it and we needed to figure out what she stole and she would come in to pay for it when she picked up her prescriptions…yeah, because she had such a great track record already with actually paying for things before taking them…as it turns out, she transfers her prescriptions to another pharmacy who we warn about the theft issue…and she wants a paper prescription from us to transfer…and when she picks it up we FINALLY are allowed to not let her in, but security doesn’t do anything to allow us to obtain payment from her. We give her the hard copy of the prescription and that is the end of the transaction…great, so all you have to do to get what you want for free when you’re caught is get social work involved…great…and these are the same people that tell people that we will give them their prescriptions for free and make us into the bad guys when they actually do have to pay their copays…pay is a dirty word at our pharmacy…almost everyone has $0 copays and whenever I see a non-$0 copay, I brace myself because I know there is about an 89% chance I am going to be yelled at. There are some customers who really are considerate and understand that life isn’t free, but most people are more on the side of “I should be able to buy piles of candy while my kids steal more stuff and I should get all the Tylenol I want for free.”

So yeah, I got a little off track on that one…but the point is that someone I originally had placed on the side of the line labelled as a primarily good person had crossed over the line simply by having the S and W in the abbreviation after her name…and as I thought about it I realized that wasn’t fair. I can’t put people in categories like that. One bad person in an area does not mean that everyone is bad. There are certainly pharmacists who are not good people and/or not good at their job, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t amazing pharmacists as well…one bad apple doesn’t spoil the bunch…in fact, I recently had an apple from the bunch that was bad, but another apple from the same bag was perfectly fine…

SOME social workers may not be good people, but others can still be good people. What one person did negatively doesn’t change my positive experience with someone else. Trust is dangerous, but generalizing and characterizing people as unworthy of trust isn’t going to hurt anyone but me…and even formerly “bad” people can change. I believe in healing and restoration and believe that people CAN change…obviously some people will never change, but other people might, and I can’t write someone off forever because of being a bad person for a time in their life…

On a completely unrelated note, one of my coworkers told me that I was like a butterfly. I was living in a cocoon that broke open this summer and now I talk. I couldn’t describe it better myself. Inside my head, I responded, yeah, so it is kind of like someone un-pressed my mute button?…which I thought about and I guess admitting that is pretty much admitting that I really did at one point have a possible problem with selective mutism…which I still think should be called elective mutism, because in my opinion, selective makes it sound like a choice, which it definitely was not, whereas elective sounds like something forced that I didn’t want to do…so yeah…I would place the cocoon opening at last summer, but I didn’t work much then so no one would have known that I talk now…It feels really awesome when people recognize how much progress I’ve made.

I am also learning that a good way to help myself make progress in cleaning my room is to realize that not only will I need to move out at the end of the summer back to school (which I am NOT going to talk about right now, because going back to school is scary) but in another year I will need to move completely out of my parents house, because big girls and boys do not live at home…don’t want to pack Bandaid wrappers from seven years ago? Into the trash the “souvenir” Bandaid wrappers go…don’t wanna someday pack a pencil that is currently unsharpened and only like an inch long? Into the trash it goes….Tired of getting the plastic bag unstuck from the lunchbox zipper? Trash…my room still looks like a tornado went through, but I did take out two full bags of trash…someday my room won’t look like five incredibly messy people are sharing the space while somehow needing only one bed…

Also, I am learning that there are some times that even people I don’t like can be helpful…someone was throwing up yesterday. It was just out of my line of sight, but I could definitely hear it over and over for what felt like an hour but was probably less than 10 minutes. It was hard for me, and that made me scared that I was falling back into OCD…and then I remembered when someone I do not like said that she would be scared too if someone was throwing up near her (at a time when I was terrified and would have bleached the world and quarantined the sick people if it were possible)…and I am fairly certain that she doesn’t have OCD…so I know it is okay to be scared as long as the fear doesn’t prevent me from functioning and prevent me from eating or drinking and force me to repeatedly sanitize myself and my environment…also, looking back at that time, I am SO thankful that I am not dealing with that anymore…there was definitely a time where someone throwing up would have made me scared just to be at work, much more to touch anything or eat at work, whereas, now I am a little on edge for a minute or two and then life goes on as normal…It is a much better way to live…and healthier not just mentally, but physically, because I am not refusing the food and drink that my body is craving…and while the cookies and muffins I am eating at work now are not that nutritious, it is still better than when my contamination prevention rules prevented anything liquid from being consumed at work or before going to work, because dehydration is real and not fun…Living that way for a time taught me to treasure and celebrate things in life that may seem trivial and mundane…waking up in the middle of the night because of a storm rather than because of dehydration I something to be thankful for, not something to be annoyed over…

Another thing I learned is that small items that are important should probably not be carried around with me everywhere (unless it is something I need like a drivers license…)…’cause there used to be 25 cents and my laptop barcode in my ID case…now there is 5 cents and no barcode…I spent ten of the cents, but the rest, I don’t know what happened to…probably lost somewhere…I knew my old barcode number by heart, but this one was so unsticky that it was only on my computer for under a week, so I didn’t have time to learn the number before I stuck it in my ID case…oops…I wonder how much trouble I am going to be in over that when IT finds out I lost it…it is kinda frustrating because it is kinda their fault since I did ask for a new sticker which I know they can do and was willing to pay for if needed but their solution instead was a piece of scotch tape that lasted less than a day…but that is something I can’t change, because chances are that the barcode is lost in the parking garage at work or something like that where it will never be seen again…

I also learned how to use the blender a few weeks ago…that was fun…until I realized that blenders have a lot of pieces that need to be cleaned when done…and I decided that the blender wasn’t so exciting anymore…

You can only move as fast as who’s in front of you

(Breathe Today–Flyleaf)

I guess I mostly just wanted to apologize. I have been having a hard time recently, but that doesn’t give me an excuse to be disrespectful or to stop being cautious with my words…I know people that I’d prefer not read my blog are reading it…and I know some people are easily offended…and I do try really hard to not inadvertently hurt even people I strongly dislike…but sometimes I mess up and don’t really realize how my words could be interpreted or I occasionally am upset enough to not care if I do realize it (or just to not be capable of thinking through it completely…)…I try…and people who know me know that I am fiercely protective even of people I really don’t like. I want to learn to balance that out…respect is definitely important, but outright protection is more than is called for and probably more than is good for me…but in spite of that I make mistakes, and I think perhaps my words have had the potential to cause hurt feelings…so I am sorry…I will never be perfect enough to never accidentally hurt people…so yeah…please accept my apologies if I have hurt your feelings…

Love,

Wiggle Worm

Fighting to walk towards the light…one last candle to keep out the night

(Courage–Superchick…Beauty From Pain–Superchick)

(this post was written last night so today=yesterday, but I wanted to wait to post it until I could at least glance through for glaring typos before posting…)

Because I knew today would be hard (and it was) I tried to occupy my mind with the good things…like the analogy that wouldn’t leave my head…Rubber bands are like rules. If you do not stretch them they will serve no purpose, but if you try to stretch them too hard or long or if you intentionally break them they will hurt you and become useless…I don’t know why that came into my head, but when I think about it, that makes me smile…See, a rule that only people with blood may attend school is a useless rule, because no one will ever come close to touching it’s edges…all people have blood, so the idea of mandating blood is a moot point…similarly a rule not to jump off the top of the parking garage onto the sidewalk to attempt flying, while potentially a good rule, will hurt you by probably killing you if you stretch it by walking off instead of jumping off, and will not protect the people around you who will probably feel scared or sad because of what happened to you…haha yeah…it’s great being inside my head sometimes…oh the places you’ll go…

Also, I found out today that I am a semi-finallist again for the Tyllenol futture carre schollarship. (intentional misspelling added to decrease google hits from the scholarship) Since semi means half and two halves makes a whole, I would argue that being semi-finalist twice makes me now a finalist…that’s just basic math. Something tells me they do not think that way…but speaking of scholarships, a word of advice to anyone headed towards college: it would be a wise idea to find out how much your scholarship is and what the rules with it are before accepting it…I am not saying that I would have not picked the school I am at had I known the details and I am not saying that I am not thankful for what I have, but I don’t usually look at my school bills that closely—just find the number to be paid and pay it, but I actually read it today, and discovered that my scholarship didn’t cover nearly as much as I expected…kind of like second year when the amount dropped, I didn’t really pay that much attention to the details so it was pretty much just oh, okay, life goes on…and it still is significantly more than I was going to get at the school I wanted to go to…although either way, AS was probably right almost two years ago when she said I should find out how high my gpa has to stay to keep my scholarships…I never actually did get around to asking, partly because I just don’t want to think about that…but I probably also don’t want the nasty surprise one day of discovering that umm…oops…lost the scholarship so where is the rest of this semester’s tuition coming from…

In spite of looking for positives, today was rough. Being at work was really good for me to give me something to do to occupy at least a piece of my mind, but when I wasn’t at work it was really evident that things weren’t going so hot…I was getting excessively frustrated over things that in reality shouldn’t have been a big deal…like my clothes not all fitting in the drawer I wanted to put them in…not worth getting upset over…and while some things legitimately deserve to be frustrating, it is never legitimate to end the day with pretending I didn’t hear the question and not answering because I am mad (communication refusal…) followed by screaming…I am definitely old enough to express frustration maturely which should mean I have LONG outgrown both communication refusal AND screaming…growing up sure means a lot of things…like actually recognizing that food that tastes bad still fills my stomach…not that recognizing that stops me from complaining that I only like corn that comes in a bag and not corn that came from a cob…my mom says they are the same thing, but I think they taste completely different…I suppose complaining isn’t that appropriate either though so there are SOME things that shouldn’t be communicated when you grow up…There are some adults I know that could use some work on not using communication refusal to express themselves though…not sayin’ just sayin’…

So Keep Breathing; Go on Breathing; Just Breathe…Stand through the pain you won’t drown

(Breathe–Superchic[k]…Stand in the Rain–Superchic[k])

There are a lot of directions I could go with this but I have like ten minutes before I need to start looking for my keys and throw food in my lunchbox on the way out the door and pray I am not running too late…’cause late and behind are the only kinds of running I do…even though I tend to be an excessively early person…who needs gas in their car anyway?

Like how sometimes I am in so much pain that I am pretty unresponsive to my environment and my coworkers thought yesterday I was having an absence seizure or a heart attack or something…embarrassing…I try my hardest to be functional, but sometimes all I can do is breathe…on a related note, someone needs to invent a pain med that turns your wrist like blue or something so that I can visually see it is working and not kill my stomach lining by taking 4 ibuprofen over the course of less than an hour to try to get it to work more…just a thought…it would be great from an abuse perspective too, ’cause you’d know if someone had taken someone else’s meds…now that I say that, it sounds like an even better idea than it sounded when I first thought of it although it probably isn’t possible…

…Today last year was a crying day (umm…one of many…)…I was finally back to the land of the people who do not stay awake all night and pretend to sleep during the day while getting up in the middle of the day for lunch (night shift is not my thing)…when someone was incredibly rude to me…and then acted extremely unethically and lost my benefit of the doubt that there was anything good about that person besides having kids…and then I don’t know if I was forgotten about or if I was lied to, but someone else was supposed to call me after lunch and around two I gave up on waiting ’cause I figured even people at school usually don’t take a 3 hour lunch break on a regular basis (no, their whole day is a break, oh wait, did I say that, oops) and started calling over…and over…and over…and the guy never answered the phone (yes, I recognize now that it wasn’t exactly appropriate on my part to call 25 times over the course of the day, but I was new to using the phone, and I hadn’t figured out that aspect of etiquette…I was only months past being really proud to have answered the phone for a potential telemarketer and then feeling crushed because I accidentally hung up on the telemarketer and that is rude)…that call was never actually returned ever…I am still waiting for an apology, but I am not that mad because I have plenty of other things that are more important to worry about than a non-returned phone call from a year ago…

…anniversaries of hard times are hard…if the thoughts seemed intrusive throughout the year, you better believe that they are intrusive without any triggers on/near anniversaries…last year today I went to Bible study and thankfully it was just me and the other two older girls because I was determined to act like I was okay and instead I got there and cried again…yesterday just talking about the prospect of going back to school had me almost in tears…but I am not giving up. I will not drown. I will keep breathing, keep enduring, and graduate…and then RUN RUN AS FAST AS I CAN YOU CAN’T CATCH ME I’M THE AWESOMESAUCE GIRL!!

I bend but don’t break and somehow I get through…these are the mysteries I don’t understand

(Crawl—Superchick…Planes Trains and Microwaves—GoFish)

I’m not going to write the post I really want to write, because I am smart enough to know that expressing myself transparently is a punishable offense because LG is a princess and therefore unpunishable and I’m “only” a student so I don’t matter and can be abused and that’s okay, proper compensation is strict punishment…because I didn’t use to fight back and they trust they’ve pushed me down enough that I won’t change that now…I am SO tired of passively enduring the abuse, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a way out besides waiting until I can RUN away from it and never ever come back…sure, I still pretend my school is a good place because I am diminishing my opportunities for a job if people know how awful my school is, because who cares what your grades are if your grades came from a bad school…I just want to scream from the mountaintops a warning to others to not follow my path…but I can’t…and besides, how am I going to get to the top of a mountain? That sounds expensive. It is unfortunate becoming old enough to know better and not be able to get away with saying everything I think as it comes into my head like this one by someone (not me) in church one day (a long time ago)…”How much longer is that guy going to keep talking”…haha yeah…anyway…

Social media is how I have connected to and learned about my world for a long time…for a girl learning to communicate by observation and imitation thrown into a completely new social environment as an almost 16 year old, social media became not just an activity or even a crutch, but a life line to learn names and who was connected to whom in what ways. Being facebook friends with me meant two things: you were most likely a vital part of my inner circle, and I would see everything that you did on facebook…this was the time before facebook did away with the activity feed and if your friend wrote on someone else’s wall or commented on something or whatever else it showed up in a neat little list on the page…Being not my facebook friend meant that if I still knew you and considered you a friend in real life I probably still was looking at your pictures…I might not have had the social skills to hang out with you in real life, but I needed the social connection that facbook filled for me…these pictures of people meant the world to me, and eventually pictures of people on blogs also kinda sorta became my “friends” too…so you can imagine that four years later when I was blocked for the first time (to my knowledge) on facebook it was hurtful…just gonna say though, that the first time actually wasn’t SO bad, and it prepared me for the second time…which was much more hurtful, because the second time was done quite manipulatively…the second time was done AFTER finding out how much social media means to me…and then went on to be a pattern of blocking and unblocking over and over for maximal hurtful effect…and ended with a bang with getting all her friends to block me too…ouch…and to block me from her blog…and that makes no sense whatsoever…

See, she cites how I might use the information as the reasoning behind the blocking and unblocking…haha…funny…so, let me get this straight…you are freaking out that I will know that you went to a restaurant called “The Block” for lunch with your friends (formerly my friends) or that I will have easy access to two pictures of your kiddo who isn’t even cute anymore (sorry…actually, not sorry…I am tired of protecting you…protecting you is what allowed me to continue to be abused and I don’t have to stand for that anymore (or sit or lay down or anything else)…yeah, that doesn’t mean I should be rude, but not all kids are cute, and yours have outgrown the cute…it doesn’t mean they aren’t adorable or sweet or possibly even beautiful kids or that they might not be cute again some day, but I am not close enough to know them to make that judgement and I am not going to lie and say they are still cute…’cause at least according to those two pictures, they aren’t cute anymore…not sayin’ just sayin’…)…So anyway, as I was saying, you are all up in arms that I might know that, yet you left your tax documents (which I may note you shouldn’t have been using work time for, that’s called stealing from the company…which I know you probably don’t care about, but again not sayin’ just sayin’) sitting on the table you knew I always sat at for a week until I got them out of the way in the box for people’s forgotten prints where they sat for yet another month or so until someone else went through the box to decide what to keep and what to throw away…so what you are telling me is that it isn’t okay for me to easily view kidpics, but it is totally fine for me to have access to a document that likely has your SSN, or bank account info or driver license number or all sorts of other information? (I have no idea what is actually there, because I had no curiosity to look—and wouldn’t have looked even if I had been curious since I knew that page wasn’t one I printed…and I am blessed to have parents who still do my taxes for me and just leave me a note to let me know where to sign and where to send the forms after they are signed…) That makes a lot of sense…so you are worried about how I might use a kid pic but not about how I might use your SSN…I totally get that…oh wait, no I don’t…see, this is the craziness I live with Every.Single.Day at school…

There are a lot of other stories I could tell…like the following year being followed to the parking garage a couple days and then being threatened as if I wanted to be followed…well GUESS WHAT?! I didn’t want to be followed, and I was uncomfortable and crying when I noticed…and *might* have broken a traffic courtesy rule in order to escape one time…but no one *really* wanted to be able to use that driveway I parked in front of for a few seconds…right? (sorry to whomever it was I blocked that day in October…I am not more important than you, and I don’t mean to make excuses, but I was running on adrenaline and I was too busy thinking about my tiny opportunity for escape than I was thinking about how my action might inconvenience you…I truly do feel bad thinking about it…and I worked on driving considerately even when adrenilated…and no I don’t think that is probably a real word, but maybe it can be the word of the year or something)

Also, completely unrelated, but it you have your id clipped through your shirt to your bra you should probably unclip it before trying to change clothes instead of yanking harder when you can’t get the stupid shirt off…I also would suggest not wadding up your t-shirt next to your soggy towel if you don’t want to put on a slightly damp t-shirt later… #learningeveryday

Many hearts will mend here

(Build a Barn–Stephanie Pauline 🙂 )

One thing I have learned in life is that it is important to learn how to build a bridge…not a physical bridge, although I can certainly see the utility in building a physical bridge in certain situations…but the kind of bridge you need to build to get over it…Yeah, people die and other assorted bad things happen in life, but staying sad and/or frustrated and/or angry does no one good. It won’t bring anyone back from the dead (barring miracles). It won’t reverse the past. It won’t really change anything but souring future experiences (actually, that doesn’t sound so bad…I LOVE sour patch kids), and painting your world with an ugly paintbrush. Staying upset isn’t necessary to prove that what someone did to you was hurtful, and it only will keep you on the side of hurt looking through the fence at everyone else having fun when you want to scream how can you act like everything is normal, be having fun, when my world is crashing…but the world is crashing for someone somewhere every single day and the rest of the world goes on as if nothing has changed. As long as my heart continues to pump oxygenated blood, life will go on, I will be okay, and I will figure out how to build a bridge and get over it. Being sad/hurt/angry is normal and totally expected, but you can’t stay there…you gotta build a bridge back to happy-land. Maybe some days you cross back over to the sadness or sit on the bridge numb, or lay across it totally confused and at odds at the exhilaration and desperation you feel all at the same time, but without the bridge you stay stuck, spiraling down down down, the grooves getting deeper and deeper as the marble rolls through the sand over and over and over…until you can’t even see out anymore and it seems like that sad, desolate world is the only one that exists, that ever existed, that will ever exist…until something comes along and shakes your world and either the marble of your life is buried on the bottom, or re-emerges on the top again with a fresh start…Building a bridge and getting over it isn’t denial, it is the cautious actions leading up to acceptance, giving the opportunity to decide each day whether to cross the bridge…some people think “build a bridge and get over it” is harsh, but in my opinion, a lot of people, myself included need more than JUST empathy…empathy without a push or at least extra eyes and hands to solve the immediate problem is kind of empty…if I just failed and you totally get it, because you have failed before and your story ends with and then everything was awful forever and ever and the world ended, that might feel good, for a while, but it eventually falls flat and lets both of us feel sorry for ourselves together…but that same story ending with and now it is still hard some days but other days it is okay because it gave the perspective needed to (fill in the blank) or it led to a new opportunity to (fill in the blank) or whatever else, now you are not only connecting but providing a light at the end of the tunnel that for the first time might not be a train…

Also, I made minion cupcakes last week…my mom did the yellow frosting, so I don’t take the blame for the mess ups there, and I recognize it would look awesomer with blue frosting, but my mom doesn’t allow food coloring because it is too messy, and I could only pick out one color frosting and one color for decorations, so neon yellow was my pick…