I like how weird and gauche this blog is. Like who the fuck publicly airs out their real thoughts anymore, anyways? Life is about showing up as an image of perfection and success, the reality of the human spirit dimmed in favor of an illusion. I think my life has been so the opposite in terms of being able to present an illusion.
I had really bad teeth when I was a kid. When my front teeth first fell out I had a habit of pressing my tongue against my gums. “Don’t do that, they’ll come out crooked” my mom would say. Crooked they did come out. I was such a chubby child too. I remember my uncle visited and turned to my cousin and said “Poor girl, she is so unattractive.”
When I was young, being able to present myself as a put together functional human being wasn’t exactly available to me. I had weird teeth, frizzy hair (still do), and went to an all white high school where everyone wore new outfits every day and the parking lot had BMWs and Benzes. I didn’t fit in, and there wasn’t much I could do to make that happen. I always felt sort of out of the loop and confused by my environment. Now that I’m older I realize that if I moved back to Ohio and taught at a high school there, I would still feel out of the loop and confused. Girls that grew up in immigrant communities outside Toronto had no business at all white high schools in Ohio, the cultural catastrophe of the boonies lurking in close proximity.
Sitting in the discomfort vs being stoned. This week has been stressful. I’m learning to use my voice, to find my voice, to find my perspective and assert myself. It’s a complicated process, but I feel like I’ve learned the art of surrounding myself with voices that support and validate me. It’s the podcasts and interviews I listen to that wake me up. Sofia Amoruso talking about her relationship to her body’s agency, Gabor Mate discussing the nature of childhood trauma. It’s a cacophony that mirrors back to me aspects of my own internal reality, connecting me to myself at a deeper level.
Getting stoned is nice and I miss it. This week has been so stressful. All I wanted to do was get high and lay in bed and stare at my ceiling, floating on that small boat of bliss. The book I read to help me stop smoking weed helped a lot. He took away the sweet veneer that I thought weed provided me and presented me with an even grimmer reality: I was in a prison. This sticks with me because with weed you don’t feel as much, the scope of your experience narrows until eventually you’re so high you forget what it was that bothered you in the first place, your brain fumbling around on Thursday evenings, going from task to task while neglecting your purpose in the grand scheme of things.
Pain and stress are welcome emotions. They’re not fun, and they’re not easy, but laying in bed and crying, listening to too much Deborah De Luca, venting to my favorite coworkers about whatever crisis is consuming me, helps me let go of the emotions and move forward. I’m not swallowed by my reality, but rather learning to enjoy the arduous swim back to the shores of sanity.
a soft death 