almost two years ago

the link is dead now, and so is the relationship, but just looking at this...at those few fleeting moments when i thought i knew what it was like to be happy...i can't stop crying. i need an escape, consequences and repercussions be damned. -b

 

a guide

it's all kind of a mess and bit haphazard, but i already spent way too much time on this. sometimes its literal, sometimes its not. sometimes the lines i picked below are all that i mean, sometimes it is much much more. it's about time. for you.

1. It started out as a feeling which then grew into a hope

2. I've been extra careful with the words that I say

3. One more time could be time enough to think about it.

4. Now, I'm wanting this for sure and I'll beg for nothing more.

5. Will I know when it can be us?

6. But my life is such a mess, and we've already been through this.

7. And not a soul sleeps, another heart skips a beat

8. They can't love me, they can't love what I don't show

9. So if you want to be with me with these things, there's not telling we just have to wait and see

10. Got you laying up nights just waiting for the music to start

11. There’s only room for you and me and what we’ve left to try

12. Goes right through you, but knotted up in my mind

13. Oh baby don’t you know I suffer…you set my soul alight

14. Do you believe you're missing out, that everything good is happening somewhere else?

15. I am taking you with me where we can contemplate our chemistry

16. Look at the time, we’re always waiting

17. They'll find a way to pull stars down

18. Every now and again sometimes I get lost on the wind of a dream

19. Im trying to find truth in words, in rhymes, in notes, in all the things i wish id wrote

20. Mixin’ up adjectives, like jealous and sweet

21. If you like to think out loud it might really help me out

22. It looks like the worst is over, blue eyes when the wind was here

23. I want to go where everyone goes, I want to know what everyone knows, I want to go where everyone feels the same

24. I don't get it, I'm not asking for much, but everybody wants to just have something

25. The next time I’m in town...

at 9/24/2009 12:46:00 AM

relax, relapse again

so, i've made a bargain. i get to go to this concert if i get help. here's the rub - if i get help, they are just going to turn me into a zombie again. when i'm medicated for my depression, i can't read greek. sometimes i can fudge my way through latin at a beginner's pace. i can't do crosswords. i can't get out of bed in the morning. i throw up everything i eat, but somehow manage to gain weight in the process. so either, i get help and drop out of school, thus inciting a greater wave of depression, or i don't get help and suffer my way through school wishing i hadn't fucked everything up.

i don't know how i got here again. i hated myself for birmingham, but at least there was intent in that occurrence. i didn't even want it. it just snowballed, and happened and i fell asleep before i could stop my friends from sounding the alarm. with the exception of a quarter of an adderal that i had been given earlier in the night, everything i had taken was prescribed to me, and only the klonopin in excessive doses. and those excessive doses used to be my prescribed doses three times daily. i fell asleep watching my favorite movie - fantastic mr. fox - and only made it through fifteen minutes before i fell asleep. no phone calls in those fifteen minutes. it was afterward that the texts, calls, the worry piled up.

i didn't want to call billy. i called glen a couple of times, hoping that talking to him would defuse the situation. no answer. it was approaching 2 in the morning and i couldn't think of anyone else who would be awake. billy it was. once i heard his voice though, i panicked. i still hold on to this childish idea that nothing has really changed and the moment i hear his voice, i know that is not the case. the alcohol was the catalyst and the rest was out of my hands. maybe it was just a cry for attention, but it was really more of an accident. now i feel more desperate than yesterday. but i'm not going to do anything about that. i want to break this cycle, but the only thing that was keeping my head above was him. he was the voice of reason that could break through my downward spirals, but now i'm just a sad girl. a sad girl who wants to be smart but can never compare to her peers, a girl who wants people to care but who doesn't have anyone in the world. this is my life, and i don't know how to live with it.

swim.

no mercy

i'm sure no one reads this anymore, but that is besides the point. this blog started almost three years ago the day i relapsed. it feels like a lifetime ago and so much has changed since then, at least in the world around me, and i am still profoundly sad. i have a full-ride ahead of me, my choice of a handful of great graduate programs, a boyfriend i adore, and things seem like they are looking up...but maybe they aren't. i'm in the middle of (not) writing a paper - a paper i actually wrote yesterday and lost to a stupid oversight - and writing about something without all the baggage has always been cathartic.


i used to talk about synchronicity all the time, but i've been so caught up in the stupid minutia of day-to-day academia that i haven't really taken the time to stop and look at the world around me. maybe because looking around me just depresses me, or because i'm so absorbed, i'm not really sure. i haven't had a chance to breathe in years...i don't think i will ever let myself have that kind of luxury without feeling guilty...and i have lost sight of a lot of the things that used to mean a lot to me. i don't really have friends anymore, per se, but that used to be okay because i still had internet friends to rely on. well, now my world is slowly becoming smaller and the friends that used to be mine alone, or that was how i saw them, are friends with other friends, but none of them are really mine. i'm still on the outside, looking in, and it makes me uncomfortable.


the people around me are either checked-out, having a good time and not doing a damn thing, or they are working semi-hard and getting way more credit for it. i have my foot in both worlds and i can't get enough of either. there isn't enough time in each day to make both work and things have had to slip through the cracks, but for what? what is this unconscious criteria that i use to decide what my time is spent on? why am i so invested in this stupid paper? i have almost 1,300 facebook friends, even after a few purges (though not recently, because when do i have the time?), but i can only talk to approximately 3.5 people about my paper and i've spent the last three days painstakingly working over it. no one cares about the tables, knows what they mean, or even understands the huge potential of this paper, but the only people that can wrap their hands around it will just rip it to shreds only so i can write it again.


let's not mention that since spring break i have written thirty-eight pages (comps essays), twenty-eight pages (sweden report), eleven pages (albania report), eleven pages (herodotus paper), totaling eighty-eight pages and everyone else has been done for weeks. i'm a SENIOR, doesn't that mean anything? not really. this is just a taste of what will be coming my way every year for the next decade and a fraction of what i will be expected to produce throughout my career. and no one will even notice. i'm just the girl who sits with her computer in the cafeteria while hoards of sorority girls shuffle in and out of the tables around me...skinnier, prettier, happier. everything i wish i was and i'm not. i can't be that carefree. i can't be that naive. i can't be anything except stuck in my own head.


but who cares, right?

puppies and cheer

flashing lights

holiday sites

i don't feel any different

Those who crafted me, be they gods or demons, crafted this mind that shapes my resistance to their schemes. Surely they were wise enough, at the wheel where I was thrown, to anticipate further resistance in the heart they were abuilding

 - Tom Robbins

I don't have any resolutions this year. I hadn't really thought about it, it kind of sneaked up on me. Even when I was celebrating new year's eve with Sarah and some new friends, it didn't seem real at all and the ball drop didn't really phase me. Maybe it was because I wasn't anticipating it, maybe it was because I finished my applications and that felt more final than the first minute, the first day of the new year, maybe it was because I didn't have someone to ring in the new year with. I'm trying to worry less - that is the goal. Now it is just time to wait.

This is the year of waiting. Waiting for application confirmations. Waiting for responses, hopefully for offers. Waiting for my departure (finally) from Millsaps. Waiting for this summer. I don't know where I will be traveling, but I'm just waiting. More importantly, waiting to start the next phase of my life. I will end up somewhere in this country from Denver to Nashville to Ithaca or a number of cities in between and this is what I've been anticipating for years now. A fresh beginning. A chance to do it right and to study and spend my time the way I see fit. My own apartment. My own life. My own place. No more wandering and searching for answers somewhere halfway across the world, and hopefully the only frequent flyer miles I will be acquiring will be in the process of returning home - be it Jackson or Austin. I'm not sure what to expect, but all I can do is wait. Wait and hope.

writing my name in water

 

i just finished rereading michael chabon's wonder boys and i'm feeling a little off. maybe it is the fact that i've been confined to my house and mundane activities or maybe it is the fact that i don't really have much to worry about but things feel off. so far the tally is up to three and a half books since i've been home (plus countless hours of 30 rock, bones, and the x files, a trip to houston, and one grad school application down) and i keep telling myself that i have to just finish this one book and then do something different. a craft, bake, leave the house, finish my grad school applications. now i have a handy holiday excuse of christmas day to let me finish tom stoppard's arcadia to add to c.s. lewis' till we have faces, tom robbins' jitterbug perfume and the aforementioned chabon novel. as i was lying in my bubble bath finishing up the last chapter, i felt myself empathizing with the crazy grady tripp and i realized i over-empathize with literature. i go into every book as an escape and i'm not sure what i'm running from or what i'm expecting but i always expect something. i'm always looking for something and even when i don't find it, whatever it is, my mind tries to find something to latch on to with every bit of information i process. i can't just read a book or listen to a song without over-analyzing everything, underlining passages that apply to some oblique thought or occurrence. finally having someone around who understands how my mind works, someone who is around me almost constantly, i am starting to see how unreasonable my worrying and fixating can be. i'm not able to simply enjoy things unless i look at them from a dozen different angles, unless i take in every possible opinion and interpretation. i spend so much of my free time with my head in a book or listening to music but i have never really been able to do the same thing with movies. why? because i can't invest in movies the same way i can with literature and music. i can't immerse myself in movies the way i can with these other mediums so maybe i should start watching more movies - empathizing with some of these literary characters doesn't seem healthy. i'm not finding what i'm looking for, so should i keep looking? i can't give up books or music, but maybe a different approach is in order. books straddle the realm of transience and permanence - a fleeting escape, one that you can come back to again and again. maybe i can't keep looking for an escape.

clean gone

i haven't really been inspired to write in a while. maybe it is all of the energy i put into academic writing these days, but as i finally have time to read outside of the classroom, i'm slowly feeling more inclined to write outside of academia as well. i picked up a book which had been collecting dust on the shelf, so to speak, for quite some time now - a book that i started in a half-hearted attempt a couple of years ago, put aside, lost a copy, bought a replacement and still never got around to reading. it took a friend coming into my depressing little dorm room (yes, i'm 23 and still live in a dorm. let's not talk about it, okay? i think my age is the depressing element in the equation) and saw it on my shelf - a 1966 edition of C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces.

i can't even begin to talk about how much this book moved me once i sat down and gave it the time it deserved. i'm going to write about this book; professionally, i mean. or as close as professionally as an undergraduate can get. academically maybe, but it is a bit more than that. there is no grade riding on this, no deadline, just my own personal motivation to do it right. clive staples is one of the few writers i know who just gets it, who sees the world the way that i see it. okay, for all of you out there who just associate him with narnia, feel free to check out right now. granted, The Last Battle means a whole hell of a lot to me, the authorial voice really comes out in his philosophical works and in the Perelandra series. until this book, the closest i ever felt to C.S. Lewis was probably in The Problem of Pain (you can read more about that here). there is something about him and i can't articulate it (at least not yet), which oddly enough, brings me to my point.

the complaint was the answer. to have heard myself making it was to be answered. lightly men talk of saying what they mean. often when he was teaching me to write in greek the fox would say, "child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." a glib saying. when the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. till that world can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? how can they meet us face to face till we have faces?