Dear Law & Order: I am not a Bad Guy

Trigger warning for discussion of mental illness, fictional murders and fictional rape and sexual assault.

So when I was in the hospital I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. This wasn't entirely a surprise, because I was once also told that I showed signs of this disorder but wasn't full-on Borderline. Nor is it my only mental illness diagnosis. However, it is my newest, so I really don't know much about Borderline Disorder at this point other than what the psych/med-student told me in the hospital, and what I read over on the National Institute of Mental Health website.

I also watch a lot of Law & Order.

If you're thinking, Wait, how are these two things related? then you and I are starting out on the same page.


I watch L&O as background noise when I'm trying to sleep or when it's late and I'm talking to my boyfriend (usually via Facebook chat--distance is a bitch) and I can't decide on music. Having watched all of the Special Victims Unit episodes on Netflix and then trudging through at least a season of Criminal Intent, I'm well aware that L&O, like most crime/police drama, is filled with problematic things. SVU especially, seeing as it deals with fictional rape and sexual abuse cases, and those cases tend to fall neatly in line with stereotypes and the occasional shock tactic plotline.

Criminal Intent is only slightly better. It's usually a murder case, and most of the time the culprit falls into "jilted (ex)lover" or "mentally ill serial killer" categories.

Last night I was watching a Criminal Intent episode entitled "Love Sick", which falls firmly into the latter category. If for some reason you're completely set on avoiding four-year-old L&O spoilers, I suppose you can stop reading now, since the rest of this deals with one specific episode.

In this episode, there was a series of murders--women who had gone to the ER and then later been brutally raped, murdered, and scrubbed clean, only to be "dressed as prostitutes" and left on the street. Lots of back-and-forth WhoDunnit stuff happened, but in the end, a woman and her boyfriend were arrested for the murders.

It became obvious as the episode progressed this TV woman that she was the instigator of these crimes. But what got to me was how her character was presented.

Not only did the writers, whoever they were, make her unhealthily dependent on her domineering boyfriend, extremely Other Woman Hating (you know, all other women are whores and trash who aren't good enough), but they heaped on an unhealthy side of Daddy Issues (also the typical TV kind, where there really is no reason for them but somehow all her present actions are tied back to him) and inaccurately portrayed the typical use of bondage gear (as well as perpetuating the idea that all submissive women are mentally ill, and/or that their submission stems from this illness, but damn, that's a rant for another time). At one point, the two detectives have this exchange:

"Some women dedicate their lives to making a man feel superior." 

"Yeah. [The female suspect] has markers of a borderline personality. Borderlines are dominated by an overwhelming fear of abandonment. They're needy, desperate to belong."

Now, it's worth noting that as I was watching this episode, I was literally rolled over, lights off, not looking at the screen, and half asleep.

This exchange not only woke me up, but kept me awake for nearly two hours afterwards--well past 3 AM.

As someone who's always struggled with being identified as "the weirdo" in one sense or another, I've battled against mental illness diagnoses for years. I had--and, in many senses, still do--the idea that if you can't point to me with a label-maker and print out an accurate term, there must not be anything wrong with me, and I can go on living life as usual. In the past year or two, I've narrowed that rebellion against diagnoses down to a few key reasons, the most evident being this: as soon as someone has a label for you, they tend to be less interested in hearing what's actually going on.

Of course, that statement does not apply to everyone. Several of my close friends either struggle with their own mental health and so understand that a label is not a story, or are entirely willing to listen, diagnostics be damned. But what kept me awake last night was the idea that, had I not done a tiny bit of reading of my own about Borderline Disorder, this fictional quip about a fictional serial killer might be my introduction to my understanding (or lack thereof) the diagnosis. In fact, thousands of people have seen that particular L&O episode, and of those thousands, odds are that for many of them, that is their only information about BPD. That, or some other television dramatization used to villify a fictional serial killer or other Insane Bad Guy. (Or in this case, Bad Chick, since most sufferers of BPD are women, and I would wager my next paycheck that all those depicted in fictional crime shows are women.) So if I meet someone, and become close enough to them to even want to maybe explain the chemical imbalances and disorders that sometimes make me difficult to live with, their first association might be of a fictional serial killer who was willing to literally clean up after their boyfriend after he raped and murdered multiple women.

That scares me.

There has been a lot of campaigning recently about not keeping your mental illness silent, in order to de-stigmatize it. While I whole-heartedly agree that this is an extremely important part of dismantling preconception about mental health, I would hasten to add that there is another half of the issue that is being ignored, and that is how serious mental illnesses or mental health issues are thrown around as cheap plot devices, most often in order to demonize villains. After all, how do you know the Bad Guy is the Bad Guy on shows like Law & Order--as opposed to Breaking Bad, for example, which is a wonderfully shining example of real-life moral ambiguity, and how who's Good and who's Bad depends incredibly upon your point of view?

I would argue that shows like L&O do one of two things: they make your empathize with either the victims or the Good Guys (often by throwing in an Underdog Backstory or something similar); or, they make the Bad Guy distinctly Other. And what's the most common way to make someone Other in the TV Crime Show Universe? Slap a mental illness diagnosis on them. The more serious-sounding, the better. No matter what they've done, their actions will now be attributed to their Incurable Mental Disease or Disorder. They're no longer a character that can be changed for the better, or reasoned with, or given hope of redemption. They're also no longer someone the audience is supposed to feel connected with. Joe Blow and his wife, Jane Doe, are supposed to react to the idea of Mental Illness with an emotional and mental drawing-away. Take a metaphorical big step backwards. Cheer when the Bad Guy ends up giving their confession to that episode's crime--be it rape, murder, kidnapping, or some other horrible event--with dull eyes and a sick smile, as if now that their illness has been found out, they can stop pretending to even interact with others in a normal fashion. They're carted off in handcuffs, the TV Cops high-five and leave to go get a drink, and the screen cuts to black. Joe Blow and Jane Doe are supposed to be left with the sense that all is now well in the TV Crime Show Universe--until next week, when the next Bad Guy comes through. Odds are he's got a diagnosis too.

I'm not saying that mental illness has no impact on people's negative actions, nor am I saying that it is not, in some cases, the cause of things like murders. What I am saying is that, if anything, my reaction to receiving a new diagnosis is not setting me on the path to self-help and mental wellness--not as a first reaction. No, because of the constant bombardment of negative portrayals to an increasingly desensitized audience, the idea of a new Mental Illness Label terrifies me. In fact, the description of people with BPD as "needy" and "desperate to belong," obviously used in a negative sense, actually heightened many of the fears that Borderline Personality Disorder hands me to begin with: constant, irrational fear of being abandoned; the sense that I am not as good or capable as my peers; paranoia that I am not myself, not real, or not operating the same was as Everyone Else. Rather than helping me understand myself, the new diagnosis is feeding back into itself, all because of something a TV character said to no one in particular in the middle of the night.

The path to mental health and mental wellness is unique to every individual and their situations and problems. There is no Magic Answer to help any/all mentally ill people at once. But there are things that we as a society and as creative individuals can do to make the road to recovery and wellness easier for ourselves and our loved ones who struggle.

I think that taking a serious look at how casually we use our own and others' illness as a cheap plot trick might be a good place to start.

On Recovery and Serenity

Trigger warning: Self-harm, mentions of addiction

My phone went off at four o'clock today to remind me to do something important. I paused the video I was watching and went to the window sill, where a small army of plastic bottles with childproof caps sit in the winter sunlight: melatonin, for insomnia, which I will leave untouched until somewhere around midnight so that I can maybe get to sleep by two; a plastic jar of Vicks, for when my sinuses decide the best thing in the world is to stop working, usually when I already have a migraine; Excedrin, for aforementioned migraines—it isn't my only bottle, either. There is another in my backpack and probably a third in one of my purses; vitamin D, for the severe and long-lasting lack of sunlight in the middle of Minnesota/Wisconsin winters; a multivitamin to try and make up for the foods I never remember to eat; and a small, orange bottle of antidepressants, newly prescribed to try and cure me of both my unending anxiety and my frequent loss of hope in the world.

I take one of each of the last three, and two Excedrin. The pills leave a tang of aspirin and pill-forming jells in my mouth, and for a moment, I'm filled with distaste. How can it be that I live in a world where I need to pump myself with chemicals just to function? I wonder.

But I'm quickly brought away from that idea by the thought of how much better I've felt for the past week. I've only been on my antidepressants for six days, and already, I can tell they're working. There is a good eight or nine inches of snow on the ground, and the temperatures have been easily under freezing for two days, but I don't feel like curling up into a ball and either crying or sleeping, the way I normally do when winter hits. Finals week has not driven me to frustrated tears or anxious pacing. I've been smoking fewer cigarettes by half.

It has also been four years today since the last time I cut myself.

It's surprising to me how easy that is to think about. There was a time when elevenths—monthly anniversaries, celebrated ecstatically by my best friends—made me uncomfortable and unhappy. They reminded me of how messed up I felt I was, and how little I could do about it, since I'd lost my most effective coping mechanism. There was a time when every eleventh made me feel unstable and on the cusp of a relapse, the thoughts of hurting myself brought to the forefront of my mind by the celebrations of my friends—well-meaning, but the last thing I wanted.

It's also interesting to me that I can no longer remember the reasons I stopped. I remember the decision, and the subsequent relapses afterward, and I definitely still remember the self-injury itself, but my original determination has faded from my mind.

I still struggle with it. There are times when I fight with it almost every day, and when I still need to go to my friends and literally ask them to keep my away from anything sharp enough to hurt myself with. At any given moment, I can inventory nearly everything visible in a room that would be capable of drawing blood. I still keep my nails short—usually bitten out of nerves—so I don't dig them into my hands or my arms when I have moments of roiling anxiety pop up out of nowhere. I'm still triggered by images of injuries that bleed. On the bad days, even Tumblr-artsy bloody nose pictures can make me feel tilted and shaky. (I still don't know why people like to post bloody noses and skinned knees, either, but to each their own.)

There are moments when the only thing keeping me anchored to safety is the ring I wear on the middle finger of my right hand. It was a gift for my two-year anniversary from my best friend, and engraved on the inside are the words Arise and Be. At the worst times, I take it off and watch the light reflect off the engraving. I think of the first time I heard the song, in a mostly-empty bar at the album pre-release party with my best friend, tears rolling down my cheeks and powerful shivers running up my spine. I think of the time I heard the band play it live, at a concert we drove four hours to get to, standing in the front row. Tears rolled down my face then, as well.

On the windowsill where my pill bottles sit, there is another memento, taken from my jewelry box a few nights before, and as I went back to my computer and started playing the song from my ring, I took it with me. Two years ago, a friend I still think of as my older brother went into rehab for drug addiction. The first time I saw him after he got out was my 21-month mark. Out of nowhere, he took something from his pocket and tossed it at me. I dropped it, and when I knelt down to pick it up, I saw it was a coin. About the size of a half-dollar, and bronze in color, it had writing on both sides—Physical, Mental, Spiritual on one side, and the Serenity prayer on the other.

“I got it when I got out of treatment,” he told me, and when I held it out to him, he shook his head. “I want you to have it. I want to give it to someone who knows how important it is.”

I kept it. I never went through treatment for my own addiction, and while I will never say I did it by myself, I can say I went through much of the worst of it alone. The coin has become a symbol not only of him, and the struggle we once went through side by side, but also of my own healing. I consider it now as much a symbol of my own recovery as it was supposed to be of his. I've often thought that someday, I will find someone close to me who deserves it, and I will pass it on. But until then, I keep it with me, occasionally taking it from the recesses of a box or a drawer and spending a few days flipping it between the fingers of my right hand. When I remember, I make myself read the prayer on the back—really read it, as if I had never heard it before. And when I do, I am nearly always struck by its truth.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

Regarding anonymity and respect.

So, a few nights ago, I wrote this post. Like most of my posts on this blog, it is a short snippet of prose about my life. Also like most of my posts, it revolves around sex, romance, and relationships.
This morning, I woke up to an anonymous comment that said this:

"You are cordially invited to shut your dirty whore mouth". You really didn't try to conceal his identity very hard sweetie. Also, don't publish shit like this on facebook where it can hurt people.

Signed,
that "most beautiful" Man's Honey

It took me two hours and a 500-calorie workout to be calm enough to reply. I ended up saying this:

So, I'm not sure if this comment comes from misdirected anger or a misunderstanding of what I intended in this post, but there are several things I'd like to address.

1. The last time I slept with the Fool was something like December 10th of last year. At that time, both of us were single.

2. I have no intention of trying to sleep with him again.

3. Any romantic inclination I may have towards him is minimal. He is a friend, and while I'm drawn to him as a person, I understand that A) he has no interest in me and B) is otherwise involved with other people (or person, as you've just informed me.)

4. The point of this blog post was that I'm trying to sleep with the girl in the rainbow necklace. Not him.

Obviously, you know me somewhat personally, or you wouldn't be able to see my Facebook posts. In this case, I invite you to message me so we can discuss this further if you so desire. But please understand that I mean no offence or imposition on you. In fact, I have no idea who you are; I wasn't aware he is currently in a relationship.

Also, when upset, it is most often unproductive to begin the explanation as to why you are upset with a (stolen) insult.

Cheers.

I also made the decision to remove anonymous commenting on this blog. You may now only leave comments if you have a Google account or an OpenID (livejournal and dreamwidth count), and all comments will be moderated by me before they are either posted or deleted. I respect your right to comment on my work; I hope people will respect my right to choose which of those comments are suitable to be displayed.

Anyway, while I was calming down and while I was writing my response, it got me thinking about why I was so upset by it. And the answer, to my surprise, was not because I felt guilty whatsoever for writing, posting, or linking the piece in the first place. Instead, I realized that I was upset by the fact that this person didn't have the respect to identify themselves while hurling (admittedly bad) insults at me.

My name is attached to my blog. My Tumblr, my photography site, and my Facebook all link there. It's assigned to my main personal email account and has several photos of me. I will never and have never tried to deny the ownership of anything I've written, despite the fact that several posts have bothered people. (I have only once taken a post down due to conflict, and it was because it was a bad decision to post it in the first place).

If someone has a problem with something I've written, I expect them to confront me, just like the Anon above did. But I expect them to own up to their problem or criticism. Discuss with me why you're upset. Throwing your anger at me like rocks through a window accomplishes nothing.
No, I will not apologize for writing or posting it. No, I will not take it down. No, I will not try and tell you I meant someone or something other than exactly what or whom I meant. But I might apologize for hurting you, or showing you disrespect. I might apologize for making you uncomfortable.

But only if you have the balls to tell me who you are, and the respect not to call me a "dirty whore" in the first sentence of your comment.

Functional and beautiful are a Venn Diagram

So, I suppose this post could be seen as a companion to this one, as they deal with similar things, but really, it's just what's been on my mind lately.

Lots of the people that I know are very into body positivity, not necessarily as something they actually feel, but as something they want to feel. And I completely understand that, and why you need to immerse yourself in something in order to help yourself embrace it. I've struggled with both physical body image and non-physical self image for a long time. But while I was in the shower today, I found myself thinking of all the reasons I actually love my body, and realized that few of them are at all related to appearance.

I thought to myself, "My body is so incredibly functional, but only parts of it are beautiful. Still, all of it is valuable."

And here are the reasons I've discovered I love my body.

It heals quickly

My dad's side of the family has always healed quickly, and I tend to take that for granted. But I inherited my klutziness from my mother, and I realized recently that I'm lucky to have the two of them together, because I frequently end up hurting myself. But because my body heals, like all bodies, that doesn't stop me from doing the things I want to do. And because it heals quickly, I'm able to do those things without having to wait around to stop bleeding. Which, in my case, is a very useful trait.

It lets me modify it.

This is something I wasn't really able to do until recently, but once I started, I was hooked. My body is flexible and able to adapt, and incredibly tolerant of the things I decide to do to it. Some of that goes with healing quickly, and some of it is just because I was lucky enough to get a body with minimal allergies and intolerances. But my body is mine, and I'm able to add things to it to make it look a certain way, and I think that's fantastic.

It may not be strong, but it's capable

Photo by Max Pittman

In the past few years, I've come to learn how very privileged I've been to posses a body that does all of the things a human body is "supposed" to do. For someone who was born nearly three months premature at a time where neonatal care was good but not great, this is another one of those things that I take for granted but shouldn't. 

When I was born, I had a heart murmur and lungs that didn't know how to be lungs yet. I grew out of both those things, and even if I hadn't, they were minor complications for someone in my position. The doctors warned my parents I could be blind or deaf, have learning disabilities or developmental delays, or possibly even have physical disabilities. 

I am extremely fortunate to have missed those possible outcomes, and to have come into a body that lets me do things like hike the buttes of Montana, paddle thirty miles down a river in a day, bike to my friends' houses, and stand front row for my favorite bands.

It lets me experience the world.

Photo by Madison Rae/Withered Flower Photography

This is another thing I never stopped to realize until recently. Everything I've done in my life has required me to have a body to do it. All of my art needed my body to bring it from my mind to the rest of the world. My photographs only exist because I have eyes to see them and hands to use my camera. My writing is incredibly dependent on what my body has been through and can imagine going though.

My body is housing to my mind, but it's like a lens on a camera--the mechanism of the mind will work without the lens of the body, but there will be no experiences. No photographs. My body is what has enabled me to be alive. Without it, I wouldn't even exist.





I feel incredibly blessed to come to these realizations two days before I leave to spend my summer at a summer camp as a counselor for kids with special needs. I will meet so many people this summer, and each and every one of them will have something new to teach me, from what they've experienced within the scope of their own mind and body.

No two people will ever look the same, but sometimes, we can lay beside each other and compare the things our bodies have given us--the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful--and all of the lessons we have learned from every scrape we ever got and ever scar we have.

I am so looking forward to this.

"You're not pretty enough" is basically a compliment

Recently, someone very close to me told me I was “not pretty enough.” Now, I can't go into detail about the circumstances or the situation, but I want to make two things clear: One, I hold no grudge against the person who made that statement. They were in an unhealthy, unsafe mental place and what they said had no more meaning that what's said when someone is drop-dead drunk. Two, I agree with them. I'd even go a little further in that statement.

I am not pretty at all.

Before you go to rant at me about anything, please hear me out. Look at that definition.

I am not delicate. I am short and stocky: five-two and fluctuating between 150 and 160 pounds. I wear a US size 13/14 jeans most of the time (though some 12s fit, and some do not). My hips measure 40” and my bust is a 38. I don't even care to know my waist number, to be quite honest.

Even if I weighed less, I would never be thin, not really. My hips are too wide. My legs have too much muscle. My thighs will always touch, regardless of my weight—they curve that way, the same way that my knees knock together and make my clumsy. It's just the way I'm built. I will never look delicate, and if I'm healthy and taking care of myself, I will never be delicate. To be delicate would mean that something was wrong with me—in my case, with my build and my health needs, to be or look delicate would most likely mean I was terminally ill or had an eating disorder, neither of which, I hope, ever comes to pass.

I'm also not traditionally attractive. Like I said, I'm short. I'm overweight—maybe not fat, but heavy, yes. My nose is long and hookish. My face is prone to acne and is always too red. I wear glasses because I don't like the effort of contacts every day. There's a bend—almost a hump, really—at the top of my spine. My shoulders slope. My stomach—already big—has extremely evident red and pink stretch marks, to the point where, when people see them for the first time, they tend to ask if I've hurt myself.

My hair, dyed (imperfectly, I might add) green and blue in places, is curly, frizzy, and unruly to the extreme. My nails are bitten and I very rarely wear makeup. When I do indulge in lipstick and eyeshadow, my philosophy is “the more and brighter the color, the happier I am,” which has led people to snicker about me being a clown behind my back. I tend to lean to the hippie side of things, and while I shave, I don't do it often—not my legs, my underarms, or other places. I don't shower every day or even every other day, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I'm really not.

But wait for a second, please. I have another definition for you.

I've pretty much already been over the first definition; I've long since accepted the fact that I'm not very pleasing to most people's senses. That's fine. That's honestly and truly okay. It's the second definition that I'm interested in.

Look at the definition of pretty again for me. It's a purely aesthetic thing, and it falls short of being beautiful for that very reason. No, I am not pretty, but, contrary to the popular use of the term, pretty is not a lesser-level term that precedes beauty. I can be beautiful without ever even touching pretty.

I'm not saying that I am beautiful. I don't think I can see myself that highly, even in moments like this. What I'm saying is, I can make my goal to be beautiful, to be excellent, without ever once aiming to be attractive of aesthetically pleasing. Yes, I'm short and heavy. Yes, I look even more Jewish than I am. Yes, I eat more than I should and exercise less. But, as much as those things may or may not be good things, I am still more than that. I am a writer. I'm a photographer. I'm a dabbler in most other arts. I am a friend, a sister, a daughter, a confidant. I try and help people. I am a part of this world and this Universe.

If I ever am truly beautiful, it will be those things that make me so. Not my appearance, and certainly not other people's perception of it.

If anyone tells me in the future that I'm “not pretty enough,” my first question will be, “Pretty enough for what? To be found attractive? Good. Start looking past that, and onto the rest of me. Onto the part that matters.”

Which, I can say for certain, is more apt to be found in my head or my heart than on the outside of my very flawed, very un-pretty body.

The world is a web.

I have always been both a firm believer and a staunch critic of the interconnectedness of people. There are times I believe we are all strands on a cosmic web, and times when I feel as if I know for certain one human being can never truly touch another.

On Wednesday, I was the closest I have ever been to killing myself.

To anyone other than myself, those two paragraphs seem completely unrelated. But I promise you, they aren't.

About six thirty Wednesday evening, my best friend texted me, saying she felt weird, and that she was worried about me. I told her I would call her later, and continued to fight with the dark cloud that had settled over me, my mind, my heart, and my senses.

While I did that, a girl in Germany, aged 17, saw the cry for help I had posted online. While I wandered dorm hallways and leaned out of third floor windows, she posted on her blog, asking for help on my behalf. She called and emailed my school from across the world.

Around seven, I logged into my Tumblr, looking for distraction, and saw over one hundred messages asking me to be safe and alive and healthy.

By seven forty-five, I had talked to two different friends on the phone—one 200 miles away, and one approximately 1,000—who told me they felt weird and were beyond glad to hear that I was alright.

At midnight, a friend I had kind of lost touch with said she had heard what had almost happened. She confessed to me that she's had a nervous breakdown at work earlier in the week, and she had tried to kill herself. She was now in counseling and on medication. She said she wanted to make sure I knew I wasn't alone.

Around twelve-thirty Thursday morning, I found out a friend on campus had hit his worst mental state in a long time. “I don't want to talk about it,” he said. “I'm going to sleep.” And I let him, but only because something in me said he'd be there to talk to in the morning. (He was.)

At one in the morning, I got a text from the man I still think of as my soul mate. I didn't read it until I woke up, but when I did, I cried. “It scares me how much we still sync up. I hope you're doing okay.”

I awoke this morning (Thursday) to my school counselor knocking on my door. Since then, I've met with her, set up future appointments, and begun talks of therapy and possible medication. I called my mother and cried on the phone to her, and tonight, everything is alright. For me, at least.

I hope I don't lose sight of this—of the way I am inextricably bound to these other souls, some more closely than others, but all of them bright and beautiful and on fire.

If you're reading this, I love you.

If you're reading this, thank you.

Sorry for the hacking, guys!

Password has been changed, and hacked entries have been deleted! If you see anything else wonky with my accounts, please let me know!

Much love <3
://Sarah

On being trapped.

I think, boiled down, it's the feeling of helplessness that gets to us. And I think this is the truth—people who have been independent for years, or even decades, have forgotten the feeling of being under the control that binds you more firmly than any chain. Because it isn't oppression and anger that wraps us up in folds of confusion and angst and sadness and anger. No, that's not at all what binds us into this feeling of being lost in the middle of an ocean with no way to see.

It's the love that does it.

It's looking at the person who is hurting us and understanding that this is worse than anything, because if someone who hates us hurts us, we can turn away.

When it's someone we love, all we can do is turn towards their razor strikes and pray that we are strong enough to survive the beating.

And we know that we will embrace the blades of their pain, even if we aren't.

We Are The Hopeful

Today is Christmas, albeit closer to the end of it than the beginning. And today I feel like saying I'm sorry, and saying hold on, and saying I love you.

I know that Christmas is hard for a lot of my friends. I know that many days are hard for many of my friends. But as I'm struck by a melancholy feeling I cannot explain in the quiet lull of after-Christmas, I know that today in particular is harder for them. For me. For us.

For those of us who sit and wonder, is this all there is? and have the question not even touch on presents and food. For those of us who miss holidays of years passed—years when loved ones were alive, when parents were together, when we lived in places we loved, when we were able to make a phone call and know that the person on the other end wanted to be with us as much as we wanted to be with them, wherever they were.

The great Jamie Tworkowski said today, “If you feel abandoned and haunted today, please know you're not alone. If you feel overwhelmed by questions and pain, please know you're not alone.”

And this is true.

I want you to know that if you're reading this, I love you. If you're hurting, I want your pain to stop. If you want something more, I do, too, and I know that we can fight for it if we want it.

So do you want it? And will you come with me to find it, even if it doesn't seem like it wants to be found?

There will always be despair. A friend of mine said to me today, “The bad guys always win and there is nothing we can do.”

And I told him, “The bad guys only win when we admit defeat. Remember that.”

This, I believe, is also true.

So will you join me? Will you step up and let our refusal, our denial of that defeat, echo in the bones of those who tell us we are, will always be, have always been nothing? Worthless? Hopeless?

Because we are not hopeless. We are only young, and we are learning. And we are fighting. And we will not let ourselves be trampled by our despair anymore.

We are the Hopeful.

Are you with me?

Nothing great is ever done alone.

This is an post to remind you all, and to remind myself, that I'm alive. And so are you.

This seems like it would be a given, but honestly, it's so easy to forget. To forget that you're living a life that's just as great and important and beautiful as all of the other lives you see around you. It's just harder to see your own life and your own actions in the same way you see the lives of others.

This is a thank you note. This is to say that I love you. This is to tell you to step outside, however cold it is, take a deep breath, and breathe out a dream, or a wish, or a prayer. And this is to encourage you to take that wish and own it, and to make it happen. Wishes and prayers are powerful things, but they're all the more powerful when you put your own strength behind them.

I think sometimes it's easy to look at the world around us and assume there isn't much we can do—this person is stronger than us, that person is better than us, these people have more charm or talent or skill or a better reputation than we do. But here's the thing: there's always going to be someone better in our own eyes. The trick isn't to be better than the people around you, but to do better with the people around you.

Nothing great is ever achieved alone. Unite with the people you love, and you'll be surprised at how much easier life can be. That's the point of having friends and allies, you know? So that they can life you up when you fall, and you can help do the same thing for them. And I think sometimes we, as young people, forget that. To us, friends sometimes become the people to hang with in the hallways and crack jokes with. We stop seeing them as people as full of life and depth and experiences as we are.

Here's a challenge for you, whoever happens to actually read this rambling of mine: take a second look at the people who are close to you and, as the great John Green says, imagine them complexly. Look at the people you love and realize that they have the same capacity for love and pain and happiness and hopes and dreams and fears that you do.

And then just love them.

Remember that wish I told you to make? Keep it. Tie it to your finger with a string. Don't let yourself forget it. Turn it over in your mind until you know it upside down and backwards.

Then turn to those complexly-imagined people that you love, and say to them, “There's this thing I want to do. Can you help me?”

And I bet you I know what they'll say back.

Just try it.

I dare you.

Believe in Dreams | Remember to Live EP | Flyleaf

Before a Fall

There are some prolonged moments in time where I simply sit in awe and hope and fear, wondering where I’m going to be when the moment ends. These “moments” are sometimes very short--less than a minute, less than an hour--and are sometimes long, as long as days or even a week or two.
I’m finding myself in the grip of one of those moments tonight. I feel like I could cry at any moment, but that if I do, something in this moment will be broken, and I’ll never find what I’m inadvertently looking for within it.

I’m almost certain that I’m going to look back on this in the morning and paint it a bunch of over-dramatic philosophical nonsense, but right now it’s more solid than that.

I’m sitting here with a novel behind on its word count, a social life that’s minimal, eyes that don’t want to focus on the computer screen, and hands that want to find my phone in my lap and dial the number I just hung up with, to ask my older brother to stay up just a little longer to keep all the demons away.

I’m thinking of a million other different things as well, the most prevalent being that my friend, who I’ve called my brother now for years, could maybe give me a chance, if I tried hard enough... or if something out there took a liking to me.

This train of thought is dangerous and probably bad, but honestly, I measure the people I meet by him anyway. I’m most likely going to end up single for most of my life, and it will be because no one I meet will measure up to the immeasurable depth of potential and love and hope and humanness that I see in that boy. And I do see that in him, all of it. Every time I talk to him, I hear more of it in his voice, and every time I hang up the phone, which has been happening frequently in the past couple of weeks, I find myself wishing just a little bit harder that I could have him, just for a while. Or someone like him.

But that’s silly, isn’t it? Because everyone knows there isn’t anyone like ani.

And so I sit, torn between things, hung in a balance that I don’t dare disturb, but that I know will topple me eventually, probably into the cloudy waters of self-loathing rather than onto the shores of possibility. And I’ll fall into them unwillingly but drink of them with a thirst that I could wait to slake if I wanted, but that, in the end, is best satisfied when I am unhappy with myself.

I just want somebody to come up to me and tell me to forget about it, and ask me to dance.

O'Children by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Change, Part 2

Change, Part 1

In the aftermath of my break-up and its related fall-out, I've been plagued with all of my self-depreciating thoughts and ideas. These things aren't new-comers to my head by any means, but they'd taken a leave of absence, and I wasn't entirely equipped to deal with them when they returned. The shapes and forms of these thoughts vary, but what they all melt down to in the end is I am worthless and nothing has changed.

For some reason, the second one has been a lot more prevalent, possibly because a year ago I was so certain that everything would change, and so my worst fear at this moment is that everything from the past year is a waste.

My friends have all been trying to convince me that this is untrue, and while I was thinking today, something my friend Sam said stuck out the most.

You look in the mirror every day and see the same person; never noticing the microscopic changes and growth. When I hang with you once every week to a couple weeks, each time I see something new that you've developed and learned that makes you an even better person than you were before. Nothing you say can convince me otherwise.

This has been a long time coming, but she's right.

For the past two days, I've been applying for jobs. This alone marks a change—a willingness to give up free time and do something that requires more effort—but it's the application process itself that, for me, really measures a change. A year ago, I never would have been able to just walk in to a store or a restaurant and ask, “Are you guys accepting applications?” It sounds like an easy thing to do, but a year ago I would have locked up, panicked, and never actually asked.

Sam, and all the other people who have been trying to convince me for the past few weeks, are right. Change isn't something black an white, Before and After. It's gradual, like looking in the mirror one day and realizing my hair is long again (which it is, but that's beside the point.) Change doesn't happen over night, and sometimes that's good—too much change all at once is likely to short out our mental circuits. But that also makes it harder to see, harder to measure.

And maybe that's the point. Maybe it's not supposed to be something that's easy to measure and quantify. Maybe change is gradual because it forces us to take good, hard looks at our life, both in its current and former states. Perhaps the Universe made change move slowly, simply so we would never forget to look for it.

Because the only thing that never changes is that everything does.