It's Been Cloudy

It's starting again.  It's not as bad as the first time.  But the behaviors are coming back.  It's starting again.

My dad once told me that he noticed I was prone to wild and deranged “highs”. These "highs" consisted of me going up to people I am happy to be around and telling them I love them, or hugging them from behind, and squealing at random intervals to let some adrenaline out, loudly exclaiming how grateful I am to be alive, "life is worth living!", etc.  He said these could be dangerous.  I was so frustrated to hear him say this.  I melodramatically asked why he insisted on being so discouraging and negative.  He said that when you get to a high that high, the only place to come down is to a low low.  The key is to—he placed his hands flat near his chest— “stay balanced, right here.”  I rolled my eyes at this, lecturing him on how life was boring like that.

☾

I write when something’s wrong, I’ve noticed.

I like reading uplifting things, things with a lot of hope, so it’s upsetting to know that I take up a negative space with my words.

☾

On September 24 at 11:05 pm, I fling the covers off of me and stumble out of bed.  I pace around my pitch-black room, holding my right arm out, my left hand thumping on my chest in a desperate attempt to steady my own heart rate. “It’s okay, you’re safe!” I try to vocalize the flurry of thoughts inside my head. “Everything’s okay, you’re fine, this isn’t dangerous.” I thump my chest after every word.

I start swinging my arms at my sides and I have a sudden urge to throw up.

☾

I wake up and sunlight is beaming through the folds of my curtains. I stretch and roll to the other side of my bed. I nap. I wake up and reach towards my desk, fish some dried figs out of a plastic bag. I chew on them and make note of the pile of stems I’ve accumulated. It’s dark outside. I take a nap. I wake up and the sunlight is beaming through the folds of my curtains. I stretch and roll to the other side of my bed. My bare feet slap the wooden floors as I scurry to the kitchen to refill my water bottle. I get in bed and read the same five tweets at the top of my timeline over and over until my eyes don't want to stay open anymore.

I don’t feel compelled to write when everything feels right: I don’t want to break down and analyze my life when things are smooth. No, I write when things are Large and Taking Up Unwanted Space in my Life. We are afraid of that which we don’t understand, and I cope by distracting myself with taking apart every stressor in my life, writing about it and lamenting its presence.

On this 12:42 am mid-October morning, I know two things: there is a sense of urgency and fear coursing through my body, keeping me awake; and the secret to happiness lies within the act of sharing love.

I’m sitting cross-legged in front of a long, full-length mirror. My skin is pink and dewy, my curls are in a bun, I’m wearing an old large white t-shirt, and my bare legs are folded underneath me. I decide I feel lovable. I place my pointer finger at the tip of my aquiline nose and press upwards, trying to straighten my family’s shared trait into a more traditional version of beauty. It’s a bad habit I still do, despite having accepted my nose’s shape a long time ago.

I look at my face, and I look at my shoulders, and I look at my stomach, and I look at my thighs, and my hands. I’m trying to become more familiar with them, hoping that memorizing my features will make it easier to excitedly love my reflection.

☾

I find comfort in habits I developed in my teens.  Instantly-gratifying, non-confrontational habits.

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One of my magic tricks is being reached-out to when I need it the most. Whenever I am in deep mental trouble, or whenever I am fondly thinking of someone, I am always messaged by them, as if they knew I was thinking of them, as if they knew I needed to be spoken to.

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I was born greatly optimistic but highly impressionable.

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Someone a couple of desks over asks their friend, "What's it like to be in love with you?" I take out a piece of paper in such a hurry so that I won't forget to write the question down, that I don't hear their answer. I write it in lead. What's it like to be in love with you? I wiggle the pencil around my fingers for a few seconds. Then I write "Unpredictable, and a little testy." I underline it.

☾

I watch myself cry in the mirror. I laugh a little at how absurd this is.

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NOV 5, 2017, 8:21 AM: I exit my room and I bounce down my home’s staircase. A giddy little laugh escapes me. I don’t know why— just 10 hours prior, I was slowly walking up to my dad, asking him to hug me, trying to explain that I wasn’t sure what was wrong, without crying.

NOV 5, 2017, 9:15 AM: I take out a pencil and on my windowpane I write: I JUST REALIZED I’M A VERY ANGRY PERSON.  I wonder whether it's unhelpful to make this observation without a clear solution in mind, but I'm feeling self-deprecative today and I let it stay.

☾

When I tore my meniscus after a longboarding accident, I limped all the way home.  I limped through my front door, and I limped up my staircase.

My parents heard me, and from the kitchen, they asked what’s up and I said nothing much! and my sister said she got hurt! and my mother said what?! and I said no, haha, I just stubbed my toe with my board! and glared at my sister.  I bit my bottom lip and continued to hobble up the stairs.

I inspected my wounds in the bathroom: the palms of my hand were scraped raw, and the back of my thighs burned. My right knee was pulsing with pain— not a pain I recognized. It felt like the second half of my leg was hanging on by a thread. My knees were fine, since I had been wearing knee pads. I tried to get a closer look at my feet: my white shoe had gotten caught in one of my wheels as I fell off the board, and I saw that my shoelace had been ripped off cleanly.  One to cruelly make light of other people's physical pain, I tried to swallow my own and forced my legs to walk like they had just an hour before.

The next morning, my knee was swollen to twice its size.  I couldn't move the bottom half of my body without pressing my face into my own shoulder and breathing heavily.  I spent the next three days with my right leg propped up, sitting on the living room sofa.

On the second day, at five in the morning, I was rigidly sitting up, looking at infomercials on television, when my dad walked in.  He put a hand to my forehead and asked me whether my fever was any better.  I said yes and he looked at me for a really long time.  I said "What?" and he frowned and looked away and said, "I just feel so sad."  I laughed in surprise and said "Why?" and he said, "'Cause you didn't tell us you were hurt.  And I know that if we hadn't checked on you, you would have never told us."

☾

I’m hunched over the computer in the library, my eyes feel very hot, and I can’t stop lolling my head from one side to the other. Just an hour ago I was seated next to a girl in my Marriage and Family Psychology class, where I asked her, “Are you ever so tired and so anxious that you feel like breaking out into screeching laughter?” She says no and I leave it alone. It's an hour later, and I still feel that bleary deliriousness that’s been hanging around my head all day. I laugh as I imagine how funny it’d be if I walked up the hill towards the parking garage where my car is sitting, and just straight-up fainted on the way up there. I suddenly feel like bursting out into laughter, and I look around and notice other people typing at their computers, as well.  I feel pleasantly unnoticed.  My smile fades, and I continue working.

“You laugh like a little girl, and inside you think like a martyr.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I'm Always Barefoot

With the approach of the dark months here in Southern California, I decided to take some precaution and bring more light into my room. Prone to Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.), I can't take any chances, and since I'm not about to purchase a heat lamp, I figured I could create my own type of light therapy, and switch out my purple drapes for translucent white curtains. As a result, it got a little festive in my room.

Praying in the Street

Apart from the abrupt cold weather, a tell-tale sign of autumn arriving in San Diego is the fact that I can't hear cars at night anymore.  When the summer arrives, I open my windows, and they stay open for four months.  When it gets chilly, my windows are shut, and it becomes quieter.  The sound of autumn is complete silence.

☾

I walk into my creative writing course with sweaty palms and shaky knees, and I sort of slam my body down into an empty chair.  I pull out a post-it, and I'm trying to write down BOTH RIVER PHOENIX AND PATTI SMITH HAD LAZY LEFT EYES, but my vision isn't cooperating.  My body feels very hot.  I'm shivering.

I was almost visited by a panic attack while driving.

☾

On September twelfth, I open my socks drawer for the first time in five months.

☾

Before, I suggested that guarding your true emotions isn't a good idea, and being open about your intentions is the way to go.  But I'm going to rephrase:  guarding my emotions is a bad idea for me and being open about my intentions is something I need to do.

Sometimes you grow up in an environment where neither you nor the person taking care of you knows how to help your brain think normal human being things through.  It's a chain, you know?  The person taking care of your parents didn't take good care of their brain, so your parent's brain doesn't take good care of yours, etc.

I've noticed that my brain didn't expand on a lot of things that it needed to expand on as a child.  For example, I don't know how to ask for forgiveness.  I equate asking for forgiveness with shame.  My brain thinks that asking for forgiveness means that I lost, and not asking for forgiveness leaves a lot of room for interpretation (meaning, maybe at some point, the other person will think it was their fault all along).

Another example is, I assume that every action I make around another person has the potential to annoy them, and is actually annoying them at that very second.  I grew up not knowing how people felt about my actions.  Like, I'd do things that I thought were good!  Good things!  But the people taking care of me had bodies that didn't know how to work through their negative emotions, so they would explode a lot when I was around.  Since they didn't ask for forgiveness, I would assume it was my fault.

You begin to collect all these mixed signals, and you just don't know what people's actions mean.

"Hey, are you mad at me?"
"Jess, why in the world would you think I'm mad at you?"

And it's probably because they stomped up the stairs a little too hard, or slammed their bag on the table on accident, or maybe they're just quieter; whatever it is, I think it's because of me.

I don't want people to be confused about how I feel.  I don't want to be confused about how people feel about me.  I do reiterate that it is all about trial-and-error, though.  I hope that my transparency encourages people to be transparent with me.  I hope that I never make people feel guilty about how I feel, I hope that I'm not a person that is hard to be around: I just want to be honest, and I want people to be honest back.  I don't want to not know.  

"I have always found it odd that people who think passive aggressively ignoring a person is making a point to them. The only point it makes to anyone is your inability to articulate your point of view because deep down you know you can’t win. It’s better to assert yourself and tell the person you are moving on without them and why, rather than leave a lasting impression of cowardness on your part in a person’s mind by avoiding them."

Shannon Alder

I know what is happening when I begin to get a strange sense of tunnel vision while driving.  It has happened before, panicking while driving, but there's always been someone in the passenger seat with me.  This time, I'm alone, stuck in traffic going north, in the lane farthest to the left.

John Mayer's Continuum always calms me down: I know all the lyrics in that album, and singing out loud brings me down from my whirlwind of panic.  I jab my fingers at my stereo.  Every action that I take is making my heart beat faster.

The existentialist thoughts arrive in a chariot of fire.  They park right in front of my car.  I can't see ahead.  My vision is getting alarmingly blurry.  My brain is trying to figure out which tactics to use to avoid freaking out; at the same time, the existentialist thoughts that burrowed into my head are growing larger in size.  I look at my hands, gripping the steering wheel, and I ask myself whether I'm real.  Whether I'm driving a car.  Whether the planet is real, whether the people driving their cars is real.

John Mayer begins to croon from the speaker and I feel like a child, trying to mimic his singing style.  Instead of sounding bluesy, I find that I'm shouting the lyrics.  ME AND ALL MY FRIENDS!  WE'RE ALL MISUNDERSTOOD!  THEY SAY WE STAND FOR NOTHING, AND!  THERE'S NO WAY WE EVER COULD!

Shrinking Before Expanding

✍ CURRENTLY WRITING FROM: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

Usually, I’ve stopped writing for one of a couple of reasons. The most likely is: something very large and detail-specific took place in my life, and recording every aspect of it is going to require of me an hour or two of silence, attention, and a strong memory. As a perfectionist, I’d rather not begin something that will barely meet my personal standards of “good work”, so I don’t write this event down until the time is perfect. However, I can’t bring myself to continue journaling my day-to-day life until that event is taken care of. So I don't write at all.  It’s a very long cycle of evading.

Until one day I’ve had enough! And I can’t bear it any longer and I must, I must write! Except not for any heroic reason: more, like… writing is the only place I built any real identity, other than my self-pity. And I gotta reconnect every once in a while.

That’s something I deeply resent about myself, by the way. Pessimism turned into a defense mechanism when it suddenly became uncool to be enthusiastic and high-pitched. Through the years I began to believe it. The voice in my head? That said, “Well, actually, have you considered…” every time I thought a nice thought. It’s so uncool!... but it’s so easy! How does one stop believing this?

I'm looking forward to the day where what I write doesn't sound so sad.

☼

Dani and I take a hike through the highlands by her home. I haven’t seen her since I pointedly secluded myself in my home months ago. She is very lively, shiny and bronze. Her long, wavy hair is beautifully caught in a tangled ponytail, woven through a baseball cap. She has a lot of things to tell me about herself, which I love: I am very submissive, and prefer any one else other than myself to be in control of a conversation, or any interaction in general. Not to mention that she’s a fantastic verbal communicator, a gift I’m, unfortunately, jealous of.

Romance is one of my favorite topics to meditate over: I love trying to prove it, trying to disprove it, trying to figure out at which moments it exists. Talking about it with Dani is very fun: She tells me that a large part of her enjoys the attention she receives from guys, and that’s enough for her. I tell her I support her doing anything she wants for attention. She laughs and thanks me. “Most people would judge me,” she says, and I know that she’s right. I wonder whether she has found herself feeling worn out by a man’s detachment in the past, a position many women find themselves in regularly. I wonder how anyone could possibly blame her for wanting attention.

I take pictures of Dani as we walk and talk, and she calls me her little photographer, which makes me beam. We reach a fork in the road. “We can hike up the rest of the mountain; it’s very steep, but it’ll take us directly back home. Or! We can go down this slope. I’ve never been down there, but I’ve heard this trail circles around the mountain.” Not one to pass up a chance at a significant event to occur in my life, I say, “I don’t know that I’m feeling up for hiking a steep mountain right now,” and she grins and says, “Thank God, neither do I!”

The further we are from civilization, the more afraid I get. I begin to see images of scary men hidden in the trees, wild coyotes, a stray rattlesnake. Worse, I wonder whether we’ll be lost out here.

☼

I wonder, can it be understood that I am aware and I am grateful for the things that I have, most of them which I don’t deserve, and I am still unhappy?

☼

I’m sitting on my bed, right next to my window. The sun is setting to my left. I re-arranged my room last October for this very reason: to be able to watch the sunset every single night.

I’m writing and Paolo Nutini is crooning from the other corner of the room, the sound escaping from a tiny speaker. He’s singing about his girl making him want to be a better man. Can I just say? That Paolo Nutini makes me feel something on the surface of my skin? I’ve been trying lately to avoid using clichés, whether I’m speaking or writing, so I don’t know how to put across the idea that Paolo Nutini is very important to me without using a tired phrase, and also, my love for Paolo Nutini isn’t important at all, but one of the main characteristics of my personality is record-keeping: I have to remember that Paolo Nutini was very important to me August of 2016.

Speaking of August of 2016, I celebrated my twenty-first birthday on the twenty-fourth of August. For my birthday, I got a piñata (shaped like a colorful donkey) filled with Hershey bars, and a gold necklace with a pendant in the shape of California. It was the happiest birthday I had ever had in my entire life. The reasons for it are somewhere in my journal.

Paolo Nutini just finished crooning about being a Better Man and two helicopters just flew above my home. More than three families on my street are moving out. I feel like something is stirring outside my universe, and every one else knows but me.

☼

After thinking about it for some time, maybe I don’t know how to describe how I love Paolo Nutini because I’m not interested in explaining myself. Which I understand sounds harsh, but as someone who considers herself one of the biggest people-pleasers she has ever met, this is very good news.

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My first day of my senior year of college began this week, after taking a semester off. This is the first year I attend college back home, in Southern California, after having studied in New York City. The school I attend now is in the city also, which gives me a false sense of being back in Manhattan. And that’s enough to keep me going.

I’ve had a rough start, though: my courses begin at 9 am, and I have four classes back-to-back. The night before my first day of classes, I was so nervous that I wouldn’t sleep enough. I was so nervous, in fact, that it kept me awake all night. I didn’t sleep not even ten minutes. It was a trip driving to school; however, I was forced to ask my parents to pick me up from school when I figured I could probably die if I attempted to drive back home. I’ve never been drunk in my life, but I wonder if the feeling was similar.

But My Name is Lame, I Can't Walk and I Ain't the Same

✍ CURRENTLY WRITING FROM: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

Angel left for bootcamp. The evening he left, he sent a message explaining that he only had a short amount of time left before he couldn't communicate over the phone anymore. I sent a long string of hurried messages, explaining that he'd be missed and a reminder to write and to take care of himself. Then, he sent Dani and I one last message: "Girls, I love you. I gotta go now." I'm not sure why I feel it so heavily, but I do.

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I begin to do that shitty thing in which I re-read my old journals, where I was decidedly happier. I compare who I am to who I was. I decide I don't want to be around either version of myself.

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I am sleepy and nonverbal for a couple of days in a row, and I ignore this warning sign, because I routinely punish myself with isolation for pitying myself. I observe my mind feeling sorry for itself for being sad and alone, and I stick my nose up at it, and say Well, you should have though about that before making everything about you. However, the couple of days turn into a week and then this turns into two weeks which turns into a really long stretch of time in which I vacantly stare into space and I realize that I don't remember any specific activity I did during that time, it seems like the days are repeating themselves and I'm stuck in a loop of being apathetic and irritable.

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I try to let Eckhart Tolle convince me that I don't have to feel what I'm feeling by closing my eyes and meditating on this, but after struggling and squeezing my eyes shut for a couple of minutes, I think to myself that I'm not feeling anything, that's the problem, and I don't know where I want to go.

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On a bus ride in Los Angeles, my phone's battery drains, and I become lost trying to reach West Hollywood at 10 PM.  Next to me, a group of teenage boys toss a foam football from across the aisle to each other.  They're talking about so many different, innocent things, which I find so amusing, that I need to record somehow.  Unable to type it into my phone, I pull a pen from my bag and begin to quickly transcribe what I'm overhearing on to my hand, as inconspicuously as I can.

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A month passes.  In the middle of my apathy, Amani visits me all the way from New York City.  She brings with her: love, unconditional love; warmth, despite how much colder it is where she's coming from; good habits.  I spend a week loving and being loved by a group of people that doesn't have to bother loving me.  They don't have to, I'm no where near them any more.  Still, it feels as though no time has passed since I saw them last.  I laugh just as high-pitchedly as I would have if I still lived on the East Coast.  They spend a week in awe of Southern California.  When I drop them off at the bus station on their last day, I cry hot, quiet tears.  I keep crying as I get into my car, I cry as I drive past them and wave solemnly out the window, I cry all the way home, and the tears pool in my lap.

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I'm Not Entirely Here, Half of Me Has Disappeared

✍ CURRENTLY WRITING FROM: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

On a February night, in a darkened parking lot, Dani slaps my thigh with a rubber knife.  We're learning to deflect knife wounds.  This one, in particular, stings.  I squeeze my eyes shut and make note to check what it looks like the next morning.  I wake up with a heart-shaped bruise.

+

Tonight I talked to Amani. She was 2,763 miles away from me, huddled up in a student lounge in Manhattan, while I sat criss cross applesauce in my room, sporting a clay mask and a raggedy I ♡ NY t-shirt. We recounted what had happened to each other since the last time we spoke. I laughed and I laughed and I clutched at my stomach and I realized that Amani radiates the sun no matter what time of day it is.  At one point, she switches to a new topic and begins by saying, "You're an observant person, aren't you?" and my heart swells.  She makes me take a quiz to find out what kind of element bender I am, and one of the questions inquires whether I’m consistent with my emotions and moods, or whether I’m all over the place. I come to the harsh realization that I’m actually very emotionally unstable in the gentlest way possible, and then I laugh about that, as well.

+

Somewhere during my freshman year of college, there was a shift in my spirit. That Manhattan winter of 2014 was one of the saddest Februarys I had ever been alive. I noticed there was something different when I walked from Union Square all the way down to Brooklyn Bridge / City Hall, crying at nothing in particular, while snow flurries frizzed up my hair, made my nose pink.

+

Cait and Lizzie visit me one Saturday night, which makes me giddy inside, because the space I live in is my favorite place in the world. L. tucks her legs under her and she bounces animatedly, telling us stories about her new relationship. We all begin to talk about what we think love is, and we all come to the consensus that not only are there different kinds of love, but it’s difficult for someone to come up with a correct definition of love if they haven’t been in it.

C. says that she thinks the city we live in is small-town mentality. This makes me frown, because I realize that she’s correct, and I begin to wish I hadn’t left New York and that life hadn’t happened to me and that I was a stronger person than I am now. The wheels in my head start turning, and I become resolute on the fact that I will not grow up and die here.

At some point in the night, C. and L. are curled up in different corners of my bed, busy on their own, a speaker plays chillwave music, and I’m dicking around with a camera. Sometimes they’ll look up and ask, “What song is this?” C. says, “This has been such a good Saturday. I love hang-outs like these. I love your room.” And I feel happiness bubble up inside me, at the thought that people that I love made themselves comfortable in my space.

+

My mother points at The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, printed onto a canvas and on sale at Goodwill for twelve dollars. Realizing what I’m looking at, I squeal and begin to jump up and down and I grab on to her arm and I’m bouncing and laughing maniacally. Trying to indulge my recent zodiac mania, she tells me that she read in my horoscope that morning that I’d be receiving a surprise from a family member today. She pays for one half, I the other, and I walk out of the store with a canvas that’s larger than half of my height, unable to control my cackling.

+

Cherry blossoms have started budding in San Diego. I decide that whenever I see one, it’ll be a reminder to stand upright and keep blooming.

+

On a day like this one, where communication falls through with another person, I feel it deeply in my heart and it fills my boots, they're heavy for the rest of the day.

I go to sleep and I turn off the light in this room and I put my hands out and walk, in the dark, to my bed.  As my autopilot pulls me there, I remember how, when I was a child, I used be deeply afraid of the dark and its hidden, paranormal unknowns.  Inevitably, I think about M. again.  Twice in one month.  I find that whenever I feel spooked, I think of him, and I wonder whether he'd take care of me and protect me today.

+

S. calls me as I'm painting my nails brick red.  "Jess!  Look out your window!"  I tiptoe in my bare feet to the other side of my room and peer into the bushes outside.  In my ear, she says: "Can you let me in?"  I swing the door open and she says she was this close to throwing pebbles to get my attention.  I wish she would have.

+

A man much larger than I is on the ground, sparring with me, and at one point, he presses my head down on the mat.  He slides his arm around my neck and tries to choke me, and my starfish earring gets stuck to his sleeve.  As his arm keeps pulling, so does my earring.  I tap; he releases.  I reach my hand up to my ear and I feel sticky blood.  I put my fingers to my face.  They're red. I grin at him with satisfaction.

+

He says I love you and that's enough for now.

+

Traditionally, my brain shuts down emotionally after I've had a good day.  This was no exception.  My boots get heavy while I'm sleeping.  I wake up and my mind is cloudy, my eyes don't want to open.  Where sweet words are lacking, my joy is found in chocolate pastries and the bubbles that form at the bottom of a glass as you're filling it with water from the tap.

+

I sit still for the first time all day and I continue to think about my life.  I realize that I'm daydreaming about sabotaging my future.  I wistfully imagine what it'd be like to fall apart and crumble every single damn day, have it reset at night, and begin again the next.

+

I listen to 'That I Would be Good" on repeat at noon, and I wonder whether I'm going through an Alanis Morissette phase at twenty, in the year 2016.

+

Dani drives through the long back road at night, exiting the ranch-and-equestrian community she lives in.  I told her before I hate driving through here; it reminds me of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  The road merges and we're in a deserted, winding road.  Over the music she yells:  "Is this the place you're scared of?"

I smile sheepishly and nod,  "Yeah, dude!"

Dani turns her face back to the road, and before I realize, she switches off her headlights and she lets out a long, high-pitch scream.  She begins to cackle as I smack her shoulder.  She rolls down her window and turns down the music and she screams again as I alternate between looking bewildered at her, and watching the road.  It seems like the sound of the engine has gotten louder, my knees feel weak, but I still throw my head back and laugh while shaking.  My teeth begin to chatter and I still chuckle here and there.  Dani lets out a Whooo! and she turns the headlights back on.