Grasping at Air

“I am not an angry girl, but it seems I’ve got everyone fooled. Every time I say something they find hard to hear, they chalk it up to my anger and never to their own fear. Imagine you’re a girl just trying to come clean, knowing full well they’d prefer you were dirty and smiling.” Ani DiFranco – Not a Pretty Girl

Ani DiFranco is one of my heroes. If there was any woman that I could be like, it would be her. Her history is amazing, and she acts out the things that she believes. She is feisty, poetic, and won’t take shit from anyone. These are attributes that I’d like to have myself. Yet I find myself not having these attributes because I lack the self-confidence.
I feel as though I’m grasping at air when I try to change. Maybe the huge change that I made so violently and abruptly away from Christianity blistered my experience of change. It made me hesitant of the consequences of change. I think I did that change a little to harshly. I threw up my middle finger at all of Christianity and fled in the other direction with an extremely stubborn look on my face. I’m only recently relaxing that stubborn face and realizing that maybe I was a little over-dramatic about it. I did what I felt I had to and I did it in the only way I thought I could. But I see now that it was really very painful for a lot of people around me and alienated me from many of those whom I had been close to. It put a gap between me and Josh, it put a gap between me and Christina, it put a gap between me and my parents (although I’m still alright with that one). Probably the only person it didn’t bring a gap between was me and my brother Keith, in fact it brought us together because I finally pulled the stick out of my ass so that I could relate to him without thinking I was better.
I see now that I have much to come to terms with and accept about myself so that I can mend the riffs between myself and those that I love. For one thing, I need to relax on the defense. I have a tendency to assume people are attacking me and not supporting me. I need to have the strength to see and accept that there have been people who both supported me and encouraged me on this wild journey I’ve been on. These are the people that I must stop being so defensive with. These are the people to whom I owe an apology. This is important if I’m ever going to heal the damage from my traumatic change, settle into my own skin, and find the confidence that I feel I’m lacking. I also need to come to terms with and accept where I have come from, what my history has contributed to who I am, and let the past just be the past. I need to not assume that people are holding me up to the standard of who I used to be. And I need to learn to be confident enough in who I am now, that it wouldn’t matter if they did. I just need to put the past to rest, and with it my fears, insecurities, and trauma that arise from it. As Ani says, “If you like it, let it be, and if you don't please do the same.” I need to just fucking let it go.
Becoming the person that I dream about is hardly going to be easy. But in Josh’s words, “If you want something do it.” So I’m gonna do it.

One with the Blizzard

President's Day weekend...a weekend filled with drinking, games, hot-tubbing, a river, two cute dogs, friends old and new, snowshoes and a blizzard. Josh and I went up to a cabin in Gold Bar, WA at the invite of the Button's. We enjoyed a raucous time of relaxation, good conversation, and games. There were ten of us up there along with two very handsome dogs. Although I must say, the highlight of the trip was the snowshoeing adventure. Now, I've always envisioned snowshoeing as an activity that is done on gently sloped trails that meander near lakes and beautiful, snow-laden trees. Well, we got the beautiful trees, more snow than I can describe and a blizzard to boot. Now what we didn't get was the gently sloping trail. Our trail was more like a switchback up the side of a steep, wind-swept mountain. As we broke past the tree-line (that should give you a clue as to our steep trek), I was rather entranced by the view from the upper half of this mountain, even though this view was glimpsed through eyes that had to squint to keep the torrents of snow from freezing my eyeballs. It was a physical challenge that I'm glad to say I did. It was also fun to get out of my city bubble and experience the rawness that is a snowy, windy, blizzardy (there I go inventing words again) mountain side. The majority of my body hasn't experienced any soreness yet. The exception being my shoulders and head. For some reason they decided this would be the time to throw an all out rebellion like I haven't felt in a quite a while. But it was worth it. I'll take a headache for some good old fashioned exercise out in nature any day.

My Beige Foot

This video is great! Visit her website here

Missing Frames

I sit here with my muse music rolling and my inspiration sitting before me wondering what musings I can pull out of this overcrowded brain of mine. Overcrowded may be an understatement. As a continual repressor, I keep everything inside my head. This has a tendency to lead toward mental congestion that can rival the freeways of Seattle. My brain runs slower and only the things that are most pressing get dealt with. Kind of like a computer whose memory is full yet there is more that needs to be processed. I feel like my brain stutters a lot. I’ll be focused on one thing when all the sudden the focus zooms to something else leaving me reeling and disoriented. It resembles a blip you see when a movie projector misses a frame on the reel. Like a portion of what I was thinking about got cut out and now I’m in a whole different part of the movie. I didn’t watch the preceding scenes for this part of the movie so the plot is lost on me and I’m left to fill in the blanks with wild assumptions which probably miss the whole point of the movie. I feel like I’m missing the whole point of life. Like I keep getting glimpses of it, but the projector keeps cutting out scenes and dumping me somewhere else. I feel like life is just a whole lot of my assumptions all bundled together and played as a feature film. But I don’t think my assumptions are right. There are holes in my logic and I have no feeling in this movie of life I have created. When did the feeling leave? Is it tucked away underneath the festering anger and frustration? Is it hidden in the deep depths of happiness and joy that are trapped in my ever repressive mind? And what is this feeling I’m looking for anyway? Is it contained in those frames that have been cut out of my life movie? Or did I just miss it somewhere along the journey?

This is my brain...

...before I began studying for my atmospheric sciences mid-term. My brain looks like a perfectly delicious and ripe watermelon.

This is my brain after studying for my midterm...

I'm assuming you can see the dramatic change in my brain functioning. I think it got ran over by a train. The luscious watermelon crushed to bits by a flurry of train wheels (aka ATM science). And I do this to myself...why? This video sums it up nicely. Enjoy.