Random Acts of Awesome

There is this amazing book, by Doris Lessing, called Prisons we choose to live inside. I read it when I was in my early twenties, and it changed my life. The book itself focuses on the world at large, but I took the knowledge I'd gained from it and focused it on my own life. Or tried to. Relatively unsuccessfully, as it turns out. I've always known that I have a very strong tendency to create boundaries for myself, to create these rigid structures that provide me with a reassuring sense of being held in, being held back. When I was young, it was provided for me, in the form of a religion that did not let me be myself in any way, shape, or form. When I left that religion, I had a year of pure freedom. And then I created a prison for myself in the form of a relationship that I didn't want to be in. I grew to love J very much, but in the beginning, I was a swirling morass of "HOLY SHIT, WHAT AM I DOING??!". And I stayed in that relationship far, far longer than...

I don't know if you still read my blog at all. You unfriended me pretty quickly, and since I got a shit ton of traffic from facebook in the days right before that, and most of the posts accessed referenced you in some way... I can only assume you came here, read what I wrote about you a couple years ago, and walked away. I read through most of those posts, and I can't say as I blame you. They're both flattering and cruel. I feel bad, on some levels. I always tried so damn hard to be honest with you. I really, genuinely liked you. Like you. But there was always something there that blocked my honesty. I don't blame you for that, of course. It was my own weakness, my own stupid, bullshit issues. Regardless of the reasons, every time I tried to open up to you, to pull you into my real world, I froze up. The result of that is the posts you must have read. Truth, yes. I'm not ashamed of them. There's nothing in here that I didn't mean, nothing I shouldn't...

I don't know what it is about autumn, but it ALWAYS makes me feel discontented. It always makes me feel like I should have more, somehow. More friends, more beauty, more happiness, more stability... more of everything. At the same time, I love autumn more than any other season. I don't know if I like what that says about me... But I do. I love it. I love the slow, golden sunshine, the wind that blows the scent of leaves and brown earth in through my windows. I love the harvest theme, the vegetables, the colors, the slowly shortening days that make time feel like a candy that's been slowly sucked all year till it's finally getting to the brittle, sharp edged end. Everything about fall, I love. But. I spent all day today feeling like I should be doing more. I woke up late, made myself a wonderful breakfast that involved maple syrup (everything has to involve maple syrup in the fall. Even onions and curry.), went and picked up three huge bundles of free firewood fo...

I always said I'd never try hallucinogens, because I didn't trust my grasp on reality to be strong enough to keep my tethered to the earth with something trying to pull me away. Well. I didn't really think of mushrooms as hallucinogens. I did them once, long ago. Had some mushroom tea with a group of people I really should not have been taking any sort of illegal substance with. Bunch of stupid guys. Fortunately for me, the tea didn't affect me in any way, shape or form. I didn't even feel buzzed. So, a couple months ago, I did them again. Just me and Stoph, who's done them plenty of times. And again, it barely affected me. I felt buzzed, and happy. Super giggly. But not high. Same with the next time I did them. It was honestly just a truly pleasant, mellow buzz. The last time I did them, though... yeah. Not so much. I know why they call it tripping now. Because you truly do trip and fall down a rabbit hole. Looking back on the experience now, it's fas...

I have a sister named Theresa. She's about 6 years older than me, so she's 40 now. She has Williams Syndrome . Reading that clinical description is very strange. I don't associate HER with a disability. I know she has some disabilities. She's mildly retarded, she has a hard time keeping the weight off, she's got the emotional development of a teenager. I feel like I just described most of America. So, I don't think of my sister as Handicapped. In some ways, she is. In some ways, she has boundaries and barriers that the rest of us just don't have to deal with. In other ways, she is lightyears ahead of the curve. It's funny. Thinking about my sister, the strongest memories I have are always of conflict. We butted heads CONSTANTLY. She was incredibly stubborn, and absolutely convinced she was always right. I, on the other hand, was the model of reason and humility... WHAT?! Yeah. We were a lot alike. And because of this, we constantly argued. I felt ...

God damn, I am so fucking sick of feeling so stressed all the fucking time. I am perfectly well aware the every single source of stress in my life at the moment is my own damn fault. It is. But I feel so helpless to get rid of them. They're so trite, too. Money, job, landlady, lovers, health... Just your everyday, run of the mill stresses that make life just unhappy enough to suck, but not unhappy enough to be unbearable. I keep dreaming about running away. Literally. I dreamt about robbing a bank and moving to Costa Rica the other night. It was an incredibly detailed dream, and honestly, quite tempting. I just want to run away from everything, to live simply. But that's been my MO for too long. Running away, creating a new life, and then populating that new life with the EXACT SAME things that made me run away in the first place. Fuck that. I know I have to fix that part of me, otherwise I'll be in Costa Rica and stressing about eating too many coconuts and spending ...

This keeps coming up. I keep having these conversations about it, with men and women. I have all these thoughts running around in my head, trying to express themselves, but they're not clear enough yet. Hopefully soon, after I let them percolate for a bit. In the meantime, though, the only true perspective I have on this issue is personal. Talking to people I know, and my own experiences. My mother was raped multiple times, as a young teenage girl living on the streets of Boston. She was a reformed Catholic School Girl, she did a lot of drugs, and she trusted the wrong people. This inspired her to instill in all 3 of her daughters an intense distrust of men and of their own sexuality. I'm 34, and I've spent the last 4 years coming to terms with what this has meant to me. Distrusting men, believing them to be weaker, incapable of controlling their urges, knowing that I HAD to manipulate them to survive in this world they've created... it hasn't exactly helped...