#thedoverbitchblog

[thedoverbitch]

A Quiet Life For Those Who Are Insatiable

Recently my For You Page is filled with slideshows of people sharing their "quiet life". These slideshows includes pictures in nature, warm drinks in cute mugs, books, phone calls with parents. A quiet life is something soft. Something safe and personal. I'm aware that social media is extremely curated. These are the best pictures people could find and they've edited and arranged them to look "aesthetic". But a quiet life doesn't seem that unattainable. It's an existence where life is something you live, not something you fight for.

This trend made me realize that my life is far from quiet. It's breathless and ruthless and I am always starving for something. Since I was a child I have been ridiculously ambitious. Once my mother told me that I would have to miss ballet because we were going to a friend's birthday party and I cried. I told her that if I missed class my teacher wouldn't think I was dedicated and I wouldn't be moved to the upper level. I was eight.

Ballet was where I directed all of my insanity for about sixteen years. I went to three different studios and took private lessons just to get enough training. In the fall I spent every weekend at Nutcracker rehearsal, then every weekend in the spring at auditions until concert rehearsals started up. In the summers I'd spend weeks at prestigious summer intensives where I would sometimes be on pointe for six hours a day. Needless to say, this lifestyle wasn't sustainable. I tore both of my patella tendons and was out of dance for six months. My scoliosis worsened to the point where dance became excruciatingly painful. By the time my teachers wanted me to audition for professional programs, I was burnt out and had done permanent damage to my body. So did I learn my lesson and chill out after ruining my ballet career before it even really started? Of course not, I just redirected all that ambition into my academics.

There's a fire that lights in me when I have a goal. There's a look in my eyes, a feeling in my chest when I really, really want something. When I'll do whatever it takes to get it. My ambition and the standards I hold myself to have gotten me to where I am today, and I'm grateful for that. But now good isn't enough. I've been good before, now it's just my baseline. I can't just be good, I have to be perfect. I have to be once in a lifetime. Even when I'm awarded scholarships for being "outstanding" in my department or get A's in all my classes...it's not enough. Nothing I do is ever enough.

So my life is not quiet. My life is a constant bellowing voice in my ear pushing me to be more even when I am exhausted. Reminding me that I will never be as good as I once was and I'll never be as good as everyone else. But I imagine it. A life where my success doesn't rely on the parts of my life with a score attached to them. A life where I am gentle and soft, where there is no fire or ash. A life where, like Mary Oliver said, I do not have to be good, I only have to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves. A life where one day I won't look down and find my own blood on my hands. Where I won't try and fail to scrub it off calling "out damn spot!" and knowing my ambition has run me to ruin.

I know my cautionary tales, I do, but I'm still insatiable. I worry that I'm incapable of being satisfied. That I am not good enough for anything and nothing is good enough for me. I worry that I ruin everything, no matter how much I love it. That the very loving of the thing, is what makes me destroy it and myself in the process. I want a quiet life. I don't want to keep killing everything I love.

[thedoverbitch]

Because a Blended Family Is Overrated

"Summer is an evil season" my friend once told our group chat. She was referencing the ninety degree heat and the way SSRI's make you burn even under SPF and clouds, but she was correct on many fronts. Today it is an ice cold eighty-five and I'm pacing my messy bedroom. The last few months have felt like constantly being spun in circles then pushed out into the unknown. Everything's turning and I've forgotten how to walk by myself. The world doesn't care; the world keeps on spinning. As I'm writing this I have just received the latest whiplash inducing spin in the form of a phone call with my father.

But first, a bit of backstory. A few months ago my father got married for the fourth time to a woman I have met twice and that he had known for nine months. After their Vegas elopement I realized that this meant -- in the legal sense -- that I now had a step mother and two step siblings. I have never met these step siblings and only learned the girls name a week ago -- which ironically is the same name as the friend I quoted earlier.

The news is that the time has come for me to meet my new step-sister. Dearest reader, place your bets now on how you think this meeting will take place. A family dinner? A holiday celebration? Of course not. We will simply be in the same place at the same time. No introduction, no formality. This is how I imagine it. My teenage step-sister, let's call her A, enters the front door of her now home to find me and my two adult best friends pet sitting. (My dad and his wife live at the beach + A will be in Disney World while they're gone + my friends and I can't afford a real vacation = pet sitting vacay.) So the house is now A and three twenty somethings she has never met, one of whom is technically her step-sister. This shouldn't be awkward at all. As for me and my friends, she's either going to think were the coolest or the most annoying people she's ever met. No other options.

I'm grateful my friends will be there, but at the same time I feel guilty for making them experience my dad and his new family. The whole situation is strange to me. I don't even consider my own father family, now I'm legally related to people I don't even know. It's like I've been dropped into a play with no script or even synopsis of what it's about. I'm expected to smile and know things and be happy about something I have no knowledge or control over. I'm expected to like these people I don't know and also pretend that my father isn't the reason that my Google calendar is full of red slashes reading "therapy". But if I don't perform, somehow I'm in the wrong. Summer is an evil season. Not just for the heat, but for placing me back within the lives of people I've been trying to outrun for years. I must remind myself that even in the suffocating months there is a beach where my friends and I will read. There's a palace we'll explore while pretending to be Jane Austen characters. There's a kitchen we'll cook and laugh in, even if technically belongs to a cruel man. There may be no love, no family in that house, but that's okay. We've always been good at making our own.

[thedoverbitch]

I Keep Having Dreams About My Teeth Falling Out

I am twenty and my mind is a poison wasteland that is always hungry. I feed it fear, I feed it my thoughts spinning day and night and day and night and nothing is enough. The thought that it's currently sinking its phantom teeth into is that my roommate hates me. Yes, my lovely roommate has suddenly decided I am detestable. I am loud and annoying and rude and clingy and did I mention annoying? My therapist taught me to play "fact vs fiction" with these thoughts. Find out what's real and what isn't. I'm beyond this. The world around me is so steeped in delusion that it is acid green and midnight swirling into my worst fears reflected. My tongue traces around my mouth; I open it and out falls a cluster of rock like teeth.

But it's my heart that's the fickle ally. In sunshine and joy I'm grateful for her. I'm grateful for the way I can feel bliss all the way down to my bones. But that's just the issue. I feel everything down to my bones. I am sensitive, and I hate to admit that. I hate that about myself. More than that I hate my ability to manufacture my own reality. In my world, my roommate hates me and everyone thinks I'm irritating and every step I take there is a loud buzzer screeching out signifying that I am wrong. My heart swallows up everything, and I wish to rip her out and stamp her into the dirt.

In truth, my heart isn't the issue. I know that. The issue is this. In my mind, I believe there is no possible way anyone could love me without my having to constantly work for it. There is no possible way anyone could love me if I am not a walking sometimes talking thing with no needs who only desires to help their friends. Everyone else can be human, I have to be a hologram that will do what you want when you want me to and never have a problem. My existence requires an apology, and I can't spit them out fast enough. I can look in the mirror and know that I'm pretty, even if I feel my best with my pajamas and wet hair. But I can't look into my heart and find anything worth wanting. When I wake in the morning sweating, I type my dream into google. My teeth in my hands. Loose, and in clusters. Exposed, the interpreters tell me. I'm terrified that everyone else can see past my act and into my heart, and they know that it's empty.