I.D. Industries

So I googled “racing thoughts” 

Today is better.

It was raining all weekend, throwing hail against my metal roof and pushing wind through my windows to rattle the doors while I was sleeping. My power cut out as I was standing naked and vulnerable in the shower, and it didn’t come on for eternities.

And then I fell asleep.

Sick exhaustion. That feeling of wrapping your wet hair in a towel and lying down on your bed, falling asleep in the steam that forms just up above your scalp. Bare flesh against cotton blankets on one side and cool air grazing your exposed skin on the other. Everything smells like soap and apples.

Today is better. Today I got dressed and climbed to the rooftop to watch the sun rise. The clouds unknit themselves from each other just long enough to present a 6 o’clock sunrise rather than imitation at 2 p.m. Everything was orange and gold and pink and freezing. A false positive. Not exactly an olive branch but a calling in the distance.  

It’s going to rain again. Today. Tomorrow. Maybe all the days. Fill me up like Noah’s standing on top of me, just ready to cast away. I can’t shed it myself. Turn my fingers into drain pipes and my veins into the mouths of rivers.

I don’t feel overdramatic. I feel like I can’t feel for this moment because it’ll be gone too fast. Stop and watch and stop and listen. Naked attention. Naked ambition. Stripped down to muscle on top of bone on top of blood on top of heart. The clouds are chasing each other in whichever part of my body contains my core, my soul, my being, be it head or heart.

Let’s title this “Thinly Veiled Self-Hatred” because I’m tired of masquerading as if everything is perfect and wonderful and amazing all the time.

There are hills in the distance that just taunt me with their glory. If I need nature to remind me why I believe in God, it’s those hills, and I want to climb them; I want to conquer them. I want to set foot on every inch of yellow grass, follow every trail through every forest, know these hills so intimately that I can truly call Southern Oregon my home.

I had the romantic thought to go chasing after sunrise photos this morning, running a mile-and-a-half to the top of the universe and facing east just when the moment was right.

But I don’t have the lung capacity for that. And as a small woman, I cannot make this journey alone. Not cannot; should not. “Should” is a bad word on my tongue. It’d be dangerous for me to entertain my spontaneity. I’m too stupid to know how to fight a bear in the forest or a man with a pocketknife. I’m stupid to humor the idea; I’m better off staying at home.

I lapse into fantasy too often; probably a product of my brain not being competent enough to live anywhere above the land of stupidity. Fake it ‘til you make it and that’s as good as it’s going to get. Sometimes I think about the boy I hope to marry, and I put a real name to a real face for the sake of comforting myself while I slip into delusion. In the real world, I want to go see this boy, but he lives so far away. I’d drive down the ocean for him, but the roads get too windy on the edges of cliffs. I don’t have the money to spend on hotels. Could I sleep in a hotel room by myself, anyway? With rusty air conditioners that could catch on fire and running toilets with leaky pipes? I don’t even know how to pump my own gas.

There’s an idyllic sentiment that people in their twenties “should” up and travel before they lose the opportunity to family and career. But I’m held in place by paralysis. God, do I want to be that person who camps out on a blanket under the Milky Way, listening to the sounds of the waves and understanding that I’m only a tiny piece of the universe.

But I can’t.

And you don’t understand, but I can’t.

Genuinely.

No lies.

I’m alone in my room at 5:33 a.m. thinking about how I’ll never escape my self-imposed prison, but at least it’s a sensible price and I don’t mind the setting too much.

Not like I could change my mind anyhow.

But don’t worry. I’ll never forget. Because people laugh when I get cute and flustered but I snuck away twice to cry yesterday because I know I’m never going anywhere. I’m not freaking out and I don’t have a bad attitude. I need a prescription or someone to talk to.

Righttt I said I was going to writtte again

As if fuckboy didn’t message me in the middle of the night hoping my standards would be low enough to send a “hey” back.

It’s not like I refuse to give my heart to another human but it’s sunk pretty deep into my chest, deep behind my ribs, and there’s some metaphorical key that starts a heater to melt some ice or whatever other shit you’re supposed to know about Capricorn.

Hint: I read times on a clock like promises.

Newsflash: I was asleep and you didn’t have permission to go there. But you’re another fuckboy who I’ve weeded out of my life. Insert something metaphorical about my secret garden.

Maybe I’m making peace with a host of societal constructs. Maybe I’m annoyed that my tequila-hungover-self had to see a little red one by your face at 1:30 this morning, because you’re just another bullet on my list of bullshit I have to deal with in my day.

I think too fast.

I think too fast about the things I don’t want to think about. I can’t slow down enough to think about what I want to think about because there’s either zero or ninety, there is not in between. If there is a period of acceleration or deceleration I can’t think about it, because I’m too distracted by the act that I’m caught in. Rapid disassociation happens at one end, stand-still nonexistence happens at the other, and observation happens somewhere in the middle.

I can’t think about what I want to do.

I tell myself I’m going to schedule time to think about what I want to do because that must be the root of all my problems—I don’t have time. I’m too overwhelmed by all I have to do and all I have going on to actually stop and breathe for a little bit. Self-imposed harm by outside forces, like I hate myself so I bury myself in things I can blame on other people and say “but it’s because I’m so nice” at the end of the day. Is this just the way I’m programmed? Is this a symptom of the anxiety or some parental heritage? Monkey see, monkey do, Daddy has a love/hate relationship with his life and I’m sinking into the same patterns.

I don’t want to edit this. That’s going to require me going slow. Too slow. Like how I skip all the slow songs on my iPod when I’m driving because I don’t have time for that bullshit. There are certain songs that start out slow but grow with a perfect intensity to match how heavy my foot gets on the gas pedal, particularly in that spot when I first turn off of 62 onto 140, going from a stop light to the recommended dosage of 55 miles-an-hour.

I’ve taken that road at 80. Not all the time, but it happens.

So where does this leave all those “what I wanted to be when I grow up” scenarios? I don’t fucking know I don’t fucking know I DON’T FUCKING KNOW                 because that would be answering a question that comes to others’ minds so easily, and I have to slow down and think about it for a bit. What am I good at? I can answer that shit. What does my heart tell me?

My heart tells me it’s easier to crawl into bed and watch reruns on Netflix than try to figure out why I’m unhappy in all the facets of my life. Or my heart tells me it’s all a delusion. One or the other. Rapid disassociation or stand-still nonexistence. Everything is perfect because I’m so successful by the easiest standard of success there is to think about!

Let’s not talk about boys. I don’t want to think about boys. Boys live in that land of disassociation where I think I could be in love with someone someday if I ever figured out how to stop being so goddamn selfish.

What is this? What is this? I’m becoming too self-aware.

At least, that's the saying. 

So today was kind of a shitty day. I won't go into the boring details because honestly, most of what made today shitty was my own anxieties building up over time and not being dealt with in a healthy manner. Also, I spent a significant amount of time trying to impress a boy who may or may not actually be worth impressing. Haven't really determined that yet. 

So at the end of the day, I texted a friend and asked her if I could relay my entire story to her via Facebook message where she could send me pictures of that little Pusheen cat to cheer me up. You know, this dude. 

And essentially after general comforting/sympathizing remarks, she told me to go take a walk or a bath or do something to calm myself down. 

My first thought was to write.

And typically, what I've noticed, is art does indeed imitate life. I've had several moments over the past year and a half or so where I've encountered a situation and the best way I know how to process it and learn from it is to translate it into my writing. My character, Asher, is subject to the worst kinds of torture as a result of this process. I've always been intrigued by things like clinical depression and bipolar disorder, and the science behind it all, so I incorporated those conditions in my writing. Last year when I first learned about the Peace Corps, the first thing I did was research how this could apply to my character before ever thinking of how it could apply to me. 

To be entirely honest, I started writing character journals (day-by-day accounts of Asher's life that don't really follow a typical novel format) when I first started my internship in January 2013 because I needed a way to cope with anxiety. The first thing I wrote about was Asher's dealings with anxiety as his parents went through a divorce. 

So tonight after freaking out, I let my mind wander into what I could use for my writing. I wasn't feeling upset enough to kill a character (although I did that last week, RIP Wilson) and I wasn't feeling edgy enough to really do anything that deviated too far from my mental outline. Honestly, if anything, I should be doing homework. 

I didn't even end up writing. I ended up buying facial products online instead as a form of retail therapy. 

((Granted, I thought of a few cute scenes of Asher wearing facial masks with his kids that'll probably make their way to my computer later. But that's another matter.))

I think I don't know what to write right now because I don't know what to feel. I'm in that in-between place between okay and a little less than that. And I don't know how to translate that into words. 

I guess this entry is supposed to be close enough.