allthoselostthoughts

[allthoselostthoughts]

I was trudging into lab reluctantly, as I do, and you glanced up at me, wide eyed and awake like you never are at 8 AM.

“I need your help with something,” as you laid out your dilemma. I listened carefully as our group joked in the background. The upside of being assigned friends is when you all fall together, personalities mixing like paint. The downside being how often we’d get called on for an answer without any of us knowing the question. Occasional public embarrassment was a small price to pay.

But you and I were focused today, for a moment at least. It was nothing major, a faux pas easily smoothed over with some crafty organization and pretty words. I’d have been even more panicked, so used to the sky crashing down around me, but since it wasn’t me, I had a solution in a heartbeat. One thing bothered me though.

“Why’d you ask me?”

“What do you mean?” You seemed so genuinely confused as I stumbled through my explanation, not even really sure what I meant, why I was so surprised. “Because you’re good at this stuff, coming up with solutions.” And I was so touched, a warmth in my chest and an elusive feeling I couldn’t name.

After that it kept happening. Another friend, “It happens a lot, someone insisting on doing a job instead of you just to screw it up and leave you a problem.” I was taken a back. “It happens often like in the world or to me specifically?” You were confused, asking me what I meant before having to elaborate, “to you of course.” As if it should be obvious.

Why is it so hard for me to realize how other see me? That perhaps I can be good at things, reliable, competent even. That I occasionally cross their minds when I’m not in the room, that they might devote even a few seconds of their precious time to being considerate of me. That I might be their friend. I’m not perfect and I’m very aware of my flaws. Maybe too aware.

They say I’m hard to offend, my knee jerk reactions to lean in to the teasing rather than pull away, delighted I existed enough to warrant it. I know I always expect the worst, no one has ever called me an optimist. And all together it screams childhood trauma. I know. But I’m realizing that there’s more to it now. I grew up in a world of harsh edges, tinged with disappointment and burdens to bear. But my world is bigger now and the lines are softer.

I see it all around me more, those little moments of softness. Because sometimes my friends think of me. And it makes me smile and that feeling burns in my chest. And it surprises me less than it used to.

[allthoselostthoughts]

The words ‘pain is cold water, your brain just gets used to it’ have been playing on repeat recently. The lyrics are as beautiful as they are ugly. That ability to accept and compartmentalize, disassociate, seek out patterns and survive are important when you’re living in a nightmare. But now I’ve woken up only my brain doesn’t believe me.

I forgot how I’m always on that precipice of falling apart or falling into numbness. Pretended to be healthy and okay for so long that I even fooled myself.

I should do something about it, but just convincing myself I’m awake takes it all. So instead, I hyper-fixate. I always have. I could play the same song 100 times in a row and not get sick of it, so I do. When everyone is gliding through the sky, I don’t notice the burn from the sun or the wax dripping off my wings until I’m plunging into the ocean. They don’t get it and maybe I don’t either, but songs like this remind me I’m not the only Icarus. I don’t know if sinking into it all is better or worse but I do know that Icarus always goes into the ocean in the end. And I know that the cold water isn’t a shock to my system. And so I play it again.

[allthoselostthoughts]

I didn’t realize you were the person who did the fanfiction tag drinks.

ahah yeah that's meeee!!

If you guys are interested they are all available as stickers on my RB!!

[allthoselostthoughts]

I’ve recently realized that I had never heard the term ‘bones’ for a break up until I was on Reddit live commenting on THAT 911 episode of season 8 (Buddie fans know what I mean) I’ve been googling it for half an hour and STILL have no idea where it came from and I kind of love the thought that fandom culture is still teaching me and coining new phrases.

Just read a fic that used ‘bones’ to describe Buck moving out of his loft and I adore the normalization of this term. Fandom is so adorable.

[allthoselostthoughts]

To continue my hyper fixation on the themes within The Uglies’ series by Scott Westerfield, I want to talk about the part of the story that has been the most controversial and, in my opinion, the least understood, the portrayal of self harm.

I haven’t read the series in a LONG time so most of this will be based on my memories and the various recaps/ analyses I’ve seen.

Cutting in this series is first introduced as a way to cope with the (secret) brain lesions designed by the government to keep pretties complacent and unquestioning. Shay (the MCs bff) realizes that the adrenaline from their crazy daredevil antics while partying actually overcomes the brain fog of the lesions letting them feel momentarily wide awake and alive again rather than dulled down. She translates this into cutting as a way to release that adrenaline.

In ‘Pretties’ Tally sees this self harm as shocking and harmful, as would be expected. We, the audience, know that the self harm is due to the lesions screwing up Shay’s brain chemistry. This backs up the message that self harm is a result of mental health issues and is not normal, which is a true and reasonable message. People seem to get this. However, people argue that ‘Specials’ glorifies cutting as both Tally and Shay become a part of a group of ‘cutters’ who regularly glorify cutting, describing it as euphoric and something that keeps them ‘icy’.

However, people often ignore the more complex nuances and messages around self harm in this book which I think is a mistake. Tally and Shay, at this point, have become ‘specials’, who are so ruthless they’re basically inhuman. To the point that by the end of the book another city, ‘Diego’ actually considers them weapons with how much they’ve been changed. On top of this, that ‘icy’ feeling is described to be a state of clarify and a lack of emotion. We see Tally cling to cutting as a way to make sense of the world by shoving all her emotions into a box leaving behind only clear ruthlessness. This is so effective that even in a fight when Tally becomes injured she’s able to channel these feelings and adrenaline from her injury into pure viciousness, almost animalistic as she fights with her filed down pointed teeth and claws.

Tally reflects on this lack of humanity throughout ‘Specials’ and her cutting is just a symptom of this. Tally and Shay no longer need to cut to overcome the lesions but instead use it as evidence of their superiority compared to everyone else who they see as weak. They cut to show how far they were willing to go to achieve their goal, how special they are. These feelings of superiority are so strong Tally wonders if it’s due to another unknowing change to their brain chemistry to let them become such ruthless enforcers. This is confirmed to be the case when all the specials are returned to normal in Diego with the exception of Tally.

Zane, Tally’s love interest, even points out how harmful this is, and she sees him as so weak and broken because of it. Something she later regrets deeply and realizes was due to how messed up her brain was by this point. The fact that Tally and Shay as specials see cutting as something amazing is the book pointing towards how cutting is actually just the opposite.

As someone who self harmed, it is addicting and feels like a way to gain control over everything in your life. People do it for lots of different reasons, but everyone who self harms at some point starts to see it as something normal. It’s like any other addiction, it’s unhealthy and trick you into complacency as it creeps in to take over your life and destroy you. This book portrays it as exactly that, a symptom of deeper problems in their brains that are slowly leaking out and destroying both themselves and those they love (Tally seeing Zane as weak and broken despite loving him) just as cutting does irl. Portraying it as something horrible and shocking is not realistic or even fair. It’s obviously damaging to people, but people who cut often see it as something normal to them, and portraying it as that, imo, is important to both show a true experience of self harm and to make it something people don’t feel a need to shy away from talking about.

Not because people should start self harming, I don’t think any book can really influence someone enough to do that, imo self harm is a due to lot of complicated factors more nuanced than this. But there’s nothing more isolating than someone realizing or being told you self harm and reacting as if you’re completely crazy or knowing that you have no one who would be able to understand if you did tell them. You’re not crazy. Things are hard, life is hard, and self-harm is just a symptom of deeper issues just as coping with smoking or eating or caffeine or any other addiction. It should be something that people as a whole can stand to look at directly rather than something to dance around and be shocked by. Only then can people who self harm feel comfortable asking for help. Only then can we really discuss and dig into why people self harm, what factors can make someone vulnerable to it and why it’s so damaging and how to get help.

This series has a realistic view of self harm. It’s not pretty, but it’s not shocking and vulgar as people seem to think it should be. Rather, it’s having so much pain and confusion that self harm becomes something benign, normal or even comforting. And being able to recognize that and knowing you need to get help can make all the difference.

[allthoselostthoughts]

i don't know what else to tell you except to be brave and to be kind. take it day by day. go outside and watch the clouds paint the sky. call a friend.

we are still here, and furious. you are still here, and that matters. you can still do and make and be something important. i promise. stay alive. it matters, and you matter. i know it is easy to succumb to anxiety and exhaustion and defeat.

communities can start with tiny ideas. google "dnd meeting near me" or whatever your interest might be. google "volunteering near me." google "support groups near me." start journalling. start a discord. start a book club.

when you close your eyes and hear hamlet, answer his prayer: it's better still to be.

[allthoselostthoughts]

My school is having a writing competition for poems and essays and the only caveat is a relation to medicine. As my soul is a cacophony of lines and dots and I often have whisps of emotions on my tongue, I want to enter.

However, there’s one more caveat. The winners are published.

I define myself by the things I’ve read, blanketing myself in pretty words wrapped in concentric rings like an onion. I’ve lived lifetimes combing through delicate metaphors and clever allusions, grasping all that resonates with greedy fingers and discarding the remnants. It’s when I read that I can slip into another’s skin and steal away with their treasures, a thief in the night.

However, when I write there’s only me. I am exposed, cut open, peeling back the layers of the onion as tears coat my cheeks. Never knowing what I’ll find or how to handle the fall out as another layer of skin falls away leaving me bare. Sometimes I embrace the vulnerability, basking in the pain as stares prick at my skin. Sometimes I try to hide, desperately gathering up pieces of skin that turn to dust in my hands. On my worst days I even fight it in a whirl of claws and misery leaving bloody gouges that take ages to scab over. I am only ever consistent in my pain.

Perhaps my writing is a lie, a dramatized account of a broken child who refuses to heal. Or maybe it’s the most truthful I’ve ever been, as I split myself open and lean into the claws that draw blood. I don’t know why I am this way, I just know the words that taste of the pain in my chest and I know how to set them free and how to find solace in the reprieve before they claw their way home.

Maybe I’m being silly, maybe I’ll sit down to write and find rainbows and s’mores and bonfires on chilly summer nights. But I fear what will happen if instead I find only the heat of the flames, the shaking boom of thunder, and watching marshmallow char and turn to ash. I feel paralyzed by indecision, and so scared to reveal all my brokenness even if only by accident.

To write is to be vulnerable, and vulnerability can be used against you and sharpened like a knife. But there’s strength in it too, in facing the fear, in risking the pain. I hope to find soft clouds and fluffy petals rather than the sharpness of eyes piercing the back of my neck, of wounds littering my soul in different stages of healing.

Because wounds don’t heal linearly. The scabs itch and pull leaving behind ugly jagged lines of bright red. Healing is pain, but it’s still healing. And perhaps true strength is in allowing the bones to be re-broken. I hope to find out, to find the strength to let myself be broken to eventually become whole again.

[allthoselostthoughts]

hey man I found a piece of your soul stuck in the text messages of old friends you don’t speak to anymore. do you want it back

[allthoselostthoughts]

I remember the late nights, driving too fast on empty roads surrounded by dark forrest. The cold air whipping my hair into tangles and I’d be worried about the inevitable pain of yanking a brush through them later if I didn’t know I’d feel nothing at all. Numbness is minty on the tongue and buzzing in the ears, dissociation a well used power of my despair.

I remember sitting on an old swing-set surrounded by empty dark forrest. Was there something stalking at the edges of the blackness to consume me? Just beyond my eye-line waiting for me to hang up the phone? A predator, an animal, my own mind? We had talked for an hour already, you constantly insisted that you had to go. I knew you did, you found the life you wanted in college. A place to belong, parties and late nights falling asleep in stacks of pizza boxes with friends. You found a life, and I found out that tape and bandaids can’t fix bullet wounds.

Yet you stayed. We don’t know each other anymore. The people we used to be lost in the bustle of different colleges, different lives. And you’ll never know how much those moments meant to me, how much I needed them. Or maybe you did, maybe that’s why you made time. I sat on the swing drifting back and forth in the breeze, the crescent of the moon above me, and ruminated in the sounds of your joy, of life. A sound I’d nearly forgotten.

The voices in the background reaching out to you, the shuffle of what was surely a costume, always so theatrical you were. You could have let me go, but you didn’t. I listened to you walk over, heard the loud music, the clinking of drinks punctuating your stern lecture, your stubborn insistence. I didn’t care about me then, but I cared about you, was determined not to be the abyss gazing back into you, the darkness to your light. So back to my car I went, back to my empty apartment.

Those whole years of my life are a whirlwind of nothingness. I remember things but I don’t feel them, I can’t hold onto the pieces to put it all together. The harder I try to grab on the more the memories slip away. It got better though. I pretended to be okay, going through the motions of good mental health, until somehow I was. Until I had my own sounds of joy and light and effervescence.

Yet here I am again, watching myself fracture, bemused at the audacity. After all that work, all those years, all those friends who took some of the darkness from my gaze, how can I be here yet again? My nails are still broken and bleeding from the last time I crawled out of my grave, how dare I find myself buried again. Is it greed? A cry for attention? Do I not know how to be anything but broken? How does everyone else come out smelling of daisies and sunflowers yet I carry the stench of decay?

I worry. I worry that I’ll never be okay. I worry that all I know is how to break and to break those around me, to stomp on their gardens of fresh flowers planted so near to my grave. I worry that I’m careening off a cliff and I can’t stop it. Knowing I’ll fail, knowing that I’m the architect of my own demise but powerless stop the descent. It’s too late, I’m already falling. I want to just let go, but I remember you. You who always reached out to grab my wrist and pull, determined to win even against forces I thought as inevitable as gravity. Of all the other hands who reach out to grasp and pull, uncaring of their blood dripping down as I dig in my claws.

I can’t muster up the energy for myself, not yet. But for all the drops of blood spilt over the edges of the cliff I can fight. And so I’ll do what I should, take my meds, sleep more, eat better, go to therapy, and pretend I’m okay until I am. Until the day I’m doing it for me. Until I can step into my garden rather than my grave and stop to smell the daisies.

[allthoselostthoughts]

It’s odd being around people with good mental health. Like when you’re doing a puzzle and realize the pieces you thought fit actually have a little space around the edges and you suddenly don’t know where they go. And all your instability is leaking through the seams. So you push it down and your throat feels like when you dry swallow your handful of pills each morning. Or at least how it used to feel when it was difficult, all the mental illnesses literally hard to swallow like a bad metaphor. Now though, it’s easy. You’re used to it. The hard part is what to do with that handful of pills.

I have a one track mind frequently clotheslined by anxiety and ADHD. I never remember to take my pills and usually toss them back once I get to class when it suddenly hits me. The first week of class, I threw back a handful like it was candy and my classmates were shocked by my nonchalance. But it never even crossed my mind.

These moments are when I feel the furthest from normal, the most ‘crazy’. Like I just woke up disoriented and unable to separate the dream from reality. Or looking down to realize you’re bleeding from a wound you never saw, so used to the pain. It’s that feeling of almost, so close, yet never exactly right.

And I cope with humor, always. Joking that I’m broken and unstable and have my therapist on speed dial. ‘You have to laugh or you’ll cry’ has always been my motto. But if you look close enough, you can see the cracks, the flatness in my eyes, blood sluggishly pooling around open wounds. Others make jokes, about me, about mental health in general. But it feels different. It is different.

My words are heavy with knowing but theirs are light with the brightness of ignorance. An ignorance that makes it hard not to flinch when they err on the side of dismissive or even accusatory.

Those of us weighed down huddle together as if strength in numbers will dissuade the predator of our own mind. Yet some have never been hunted, never been prey. And there’s no way to explain that visceral taste of fear on your tongue. How you expect thunderstorms and rain regardless of the sun on your face and lack of clouds in the sky. It’s hard to forgive them for being whole when I’ve only ever been broken.

I still haven’t quite figured out how. They comment on the brightness of the sun, the calmness of the day and I look for predators and wait for rain. Their attempts at reassurance make me bite my tongue until I taste blood. I can’t blame them for daring to be whole. But as blood leaks from the corners of my lips I hope that they can see it. Because I didn’t even realize I was bleeding. Not until the blood dripped sluggishly down my chin.

[allthoselostthoughts]

Lately, I have been obsessed with 'The Uglies' series by Scott Westerfield. It's recently come out with a (not very good apparently) film and I loved it as a kid so my ADHD brain has circled back around to hyperfixation.

TLDR (because this is important); Making the choice to fight for yourself and rewire your brain in the throes of mental illness is hard, but every time you decide you're worth the effort you are shaping your brain for the future. Every choice to bleed in the fight for your wellness and future matters. You matter. And eventually, it's worth it. (As relayed by/ related to 'The Uglies' series)

I've been listening to lots of reviews on "The Uglies' series and I can't help but feel that they miss the point. Or what I thought was the point as a kid and even a teen at least. Something especially relevant if you subscribe to the 'Death of the Author' theory for literary interpretation. I subscribe more to the idea of 'The Author is a ghost guiding my thoughts with whispered fingers, gentle like the kiss of butterfly wings rather than bludgeoning like a Louisville slugger'.

Aka: The author's intentions matter and can help guide our interpretation but cannot fully change our perceptions as our lens is so intrinsically connected to and shaped by our own personal experiences.

In 'The Pretties' Tally (the main character) takes a 'cure' for what we now know are brain lesions, secretly put on the brain of every child at 16 when they undergo plastic surgery to become 'pretty'. The lesions are a kind of lobotomy, keeping everyone pliant, minimally questioning, and breaking their ability to quickly reason and critically think. Thus their society is a bunch of pliant happy pretty people with no real freedoms due to this 'brain damage'. However, we later learn that in actuality Tally did not take the cure and has instead been having to work around these lesions and 'rewire' her brain on her own.

People seem to find this kind of silly, like the theme is the idea that brain damage can be fixed if you're just special enough with all that main character energy. Perhaps it's because we're currently in the 'Neuro' part of medical school but I find this take to be completely missing the point. I've always been of this opinion but now that I understand the brain better, I can actually articulate why I believe this using actual science. The point being that your mental pathways MATTER. Your brain must use previous experiences to predict the correct responses to new ones because otherwise moving your arm to take a drink from someone's hands would take so long they'd have already dropped it before you got there.

In that way, each time your brain is right or wrong it uses that info to recalibrate your predictions for next time. Similarly, the paths that are taken most often in your brain will be the most myelinated aka they'll be the fastest most 'well-traveled' roads. Creating new ways of thinking requires shaping and changing your knee-jerk predictions and choosing new pathways to myelinate rather than taking those that are well-worn. Just like how driving to your new job takes tons of mental energy for the first few weeks but in a few years, it takes so little that you find yourself at work without even remembering how you got there.

THAT is what I get as a takeaway. Tally didn't get a pill to fix her brain, it would have been nice if she had, but she was able to rewire it herself with tons of effort and energy. And it was HARD. We see later, when they eventually create medication to help with this 'rewiring' how much harder Tally had it having to do it alone. It's not saying that you can fix literal brain damage or that medication isn't great, it is, but your thoughts MATTER. Every thought and action is a CHOICE that will shape your brain over time. I'm not saying mental health is easy, it's not, and a lot of us start off making these choices at a disadvantage compared to those who are 'neurotypical' but we still make choices.

Mental health is hard, overcoming mental illness is constant work and energy and effort. It's draining and maybe you don't choose to fight every day or win every battle, but you can win the war. And a not insignificant part of winning that war is choosing to do things to restructure your brain, even if that choice is taking the medications that fuel the neurotransmitters that spark those pathways or making that therapy appointment or deciding to tell yourself that it's okay to be exhausted rather than feeling guilt pricking at your skin when you can't muster up the energy to get out of bed and wipe the tears from your cheeks.

The point is that healing your brain is work. and it's not easy, but it matters. Every time you make the choice to fight for yourself, it matters. Eventually, it gets easier. And eventually, it's worth it.

[allthoselostthoughts]

Trying to explain why fanfic is amazing and why lines in certain fics have the ability to destroy my whole soul.

“She was a non-active member of the order and she did not fight” lives in my nightmares.

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[allthoselostthoughts]

Requested by @mybelovedghost

[allthoselostthoughts]

I’m the fixer in my family. It seems like a bad joke. I can’t even fix myself yet I’m always the one picking up the pieces. It doesn’t make sense but that’s how it’s always been.

I grew up in a tornado, a whirlwind of addiction, infidelity, divorce and screaming matches. I’d sit slumped on the stairs listening to the chaos like the eye of a storm. The lighthouse parting dark stormy skies. Waiting for my parents to just follow that light back to still waters, light breezy sea air and happy memories. Back to me. To loving me more than they needed to fall apart. But they never did.

Everyone says addiction is a disease, but that doesn’t do it justice. Addiction is hunger that devours with sharp teeth. Crunches on bones and drinks marrow. It’s the monster that lived under my bed and the blood that welled up from careful even cuts. It’s the air stolen from my lungs. We’ve never met face to face, yet I’ve been forever hunted. A shadow seen in the corner of eyes, footsteps echoing after my own. We’ve never met, yet addiction has destroyed me.

Ripped me apart at the seams. Ripped me apart where I should have been lovingly sewn together with kind even stitching by supportive hands. Where instead I’ve always had holes, pieces of string begging to be unraveled. And I am. Constantly unraveling, falling apart. I’d hoped someday I’d get the privileged of being stitched back together, lovely and whole.

But I am the only seamstress in my family. The fixer. Life is hard. Addiction is hard. It’s a disease. I can’t explain how thoroughly it has ground me to dust. I go to class with tear streaks dried on my face chanting ‘stop crying’ under my breath and people ask me if I’m okay. I’m not okay. I don’t know if I’ve ever been okay. No one knows what to do with that and I can’t blame them.

Neither do I. I sit through my class learning about depression and mental illness feeling sliced open. I feel like I should explain. Explain how I grew up as the parent. How we lost my mom’s job, our homes and my sanity. How I’ve spent my life bleeding, picking up the shards of her shattered life and poor choices. The exhaustion of wanting it to end as she destroys herself, willfully ignorant of me as collateral damage.

I feel like I have to prove that I’m broken because I earned it. Through alcohol fueled benders, through being unwanted and unloved sleeping on a floor without even a room to call my own. Earned it by threatening to run away and being told I had nowhere to go, no one who wanted me. Yet at the same time I feel embarrassed by it, like my trauma isn’t enough to account for how much of a mess I am.

I’m a car crash in slow motion. Bystanders slowing down to gape at the chaos. I sit in class and stare blankly ahead. It’s completely abnormal for me, who fidgets even in my sleep. Yet it’s all I can do to keep the car crash from bursting into flames. I let my vision get fuzzy at the edges and the voices become thick and muffled in my ears. Dissociating. Another hard earned gift of my childhood.

I let myself sink into quiet waters and don’t know if I’ll ever be able to come up for air. I want to scream, to rage, to hurt something, even myself, to sleep for a hundred years, to fade into non existence, but instead I sink down into darkness with the scream strangled in my burning throat. Because what else is there to do.

[allthoselostthoughts]

My love and I are having a discussion on what type of bird we’d each be. The only rule being that we must approve of the chosen bird before it’s ‘official’ or whatever the phrase is for descending into madness at the behest of a cliche line from a popular romance movie. A madness that ends with assigning each other types of birds in place of pet names.

In my pursuit of romantic cliches, I’m joking that my love could be an ostrich because they run fast and don’t fly and so does he. Or a seagull because he loves the ocean and also French fries. He offers me an owl for wisdom but something about the full swivel of their head and the coughing up bones feels too metal for me, such an easily broken thing.

It comes to me as a sort of joke at first. What’s the most abhorred bird, the least beloved. One that not even a bird watcher would spare a glance for. A pigeon.

What, why a pigeon? He doesn’t understand, seeing immediately the same things I did. Only now that it’s said I see all the ways in which I have been a pigeon.

Brought in for a higher purpose and then summarily discarded. A forgotten remnant of history turned into a daily nuisance. How small I sometimes feel, how obsolete. We all chase purpose, but what happens when that purpose goes away? What happens if by the time I got here I never even had one? A lost pigeon wandering the city decades too late. I can’t explain the feeling nor can I rationalize it. I just know that I feel it sometimes.

Unmoored and adrift. As though I have nothing tying me to this earth and might just float away. A balloon becoming ever tinier on the horizon until I simply cease. The flickering of a candle reaching the end of its wick and dimming before going out entirely, subtle and unnoticed.

I think it’s the scary damaged things that live in me that make me feel this way. The part of me that doesn’t know if I want to quietly choke on the jagged things in my throat or if I want to let them out to wreak havoc just to make sure they’re seen. The part of me that hesitates before getting someone’s attention. That pauses to stare at the phone before answering.

A constant melancholy that grips with sharp claws. I want to be full of sunshine and laughter, easy confidence and optimism. Full of bright mornings, of cool ice cream in the summer, of daisies in spring, of gazing at twinkling stars under a cloudless sky. But as blood streams from buried claws, I cannot remember how to have that sparkling wanderlust of childhood. All I remember is being a pigeon.

But then my love decides that I must be a crow. Clever, observant, easily distracted by shiny things, and a little bit murderous. I know how to hold a grudge he says. And I like that more. Because I know I’m not a blue jay or hummingbird or any of those pretty light hearted things, but I don’t have to be a pigeon. Not anymore. I’ll never be a cardinal, confident blazing red and constantly pulling gazes, but I can be something else that’s hopeful and all my own. In fact I like to think I have all the makings of a good crow.

[allthoselostthoughts]

Today I was waiting in the line for coffee and I realized it was the first week of high school. Realized when I saw the window paint on cars proudly announcing senior year. I wondered what their year would be like. If they’d find themselves or lose themselves or completely reinvent themselves. Because if there’s one thing I remember about being a teen it’s how loud it all is. How messy. To feel everything so vividly.

Because the lights are so bright they burn the backs of your eyelids. The music so loud that it makes your teeth ache. The water so cold that you shiver and gasp for air. And the sparklers so beautiful that you let the flames lick your fingers.

I think that some are better at dousing the flames and some of us live in them. Make a home dancing in the flickering shadows and let it kiss our fingers until it blisters. Because it’s hard when the whisper of words against your skin feels like a knife. When eyes falling on you makes you want to scratch until you bleed.

I remember it like being lost at sea. The crashing of waves, the burning of lungs, not knowing up from down or if you’d live to see another day. If you even wanted to. Feeling so overwhelmed and so tiny in the face of it all. All so much bigger than you, so much mightier, able to bend or break you at a whim.

I always thought being an adult would be the opposite. Would be finally making land and the steadiness of earth under your feet. But I don’t think that anymore. Instead I think that it’s calm waters that reflect the beauty of stars in the sky. It’s thunderstorms that disorient but never blind you and it’s coming up for air with burning lungs.

The waves are still mightier than me, but I can swim now. I know how to let myself feel without getting lost to it. Know when to close my eyes to the brightness of the sun. How to cover my ears before my jaw begins to throb. Some days I still live in the pain, in all the sharp edges of the world, but I don’t lose myself in it. And that makes all the difference.

[allthoselostthoughts]

I always wanted to journal but thoughts run through my brain like the spin cycle and I find it hard to catch them. The ones I do catch tend to taste like rain. Not the first kiss, sweet summer kind but rather like missed opportunities and foggy mornings where you wake up nostalgic for the idyllic childhood you never actually had.

It’s an exercise in soul searching trying to catch them. I think to get better you have to get worse. To feel whole you have to first be broken. To let all the skeletons you buried rise from their graves. But what do I know, the world around me looks pretty whole and unbroken.

Maybe most people don’t have skeletons. Maybe they only have daisies, reaching out for the warmth of the sun on beautiful spring mornings. Seeds sown by reliable hands that rarely missed a day of watering. Hands that comforted them through sadness and steadied them through all the teenage angsts of childhood. Who picked them up from their first parties and lectured them about making good choices.

I’ve never had a lecture. Not really. Because how do you lecture a child when you are the child? To this day I lie awake at night worrying. I can’t sleep knowing the choices you’ll be faced with and knowing that you’ll choose wrong.

I try to explain it. I’m happy for my love, that he’s only known daisies. That he doesn’t taste the salt in the rain that keeps me up at night. He tries to give an excuse and I know it’s really for me. At least she’d never risk me. Never put me in the backseat of a car reeking of vodka. I laugh. Because of course I was there, I’ve always been there. He can’t imagine the recklessness, of letting your child pick up the pieces of you. But I can’t imagine anything else.

He sleeps easy, sunlight and daisies in his dreams. While I lie awake at night with thoughts like chips of hail. Waiting to cut myself on the pieces of putting you back together again.