Now I will be different.

Now I will stand on this hill alone. beyond reach, beyond reproach.
I will stay here and reach down to the hands below me, but I will never come down.
I expect to remain until truly passionate, painful, dangerous, ruining, consuming, overwhelming, destroying love reaches up and pulls me down.
Then I will fall down the hill, feet first, then head, then feet again.
 I will be broken and torn and wrecked and bloody and barely able to stand again, these million pieces of me all left to belong to someone else.
Until then I remain, whole and alone, on my hill. To be touched but not yet broken.

Things I've learned today - February 7, 2013

- Sarcasm is a crutch, but its a great one.
- The best way to get out of answering the question "what are you doing?" is to answer it in the most immediate sense. When people really want to know about my current employment, relatiionship status, or otherwise, I prefer this conversation:
"what are you doing?"
"eating this handful of almonds."
I thank New Girl for this.
- Happiness, for me, is a job at Disney. not forever, but just to see what it would be like.
- I've always thought that the question of what one does for a living is as rude as asking how much a person makes. I don't ask it if I can avoid it. I thought I was strange for thinking this, but it turns out I'm not alone.

Some days I learn more things than others. Some days I am more willing to appreciate what I've learned. I need to try to be more conscious of this, remember it, and write it down, so that I can use those little things to create bigger ones.

When you don't think things could get any worse...

...they inevitably do.

I need to stop and be thankful for a moment that I have a roof over my head, food in my fridge, and the people I love are healthy.

But depression. Seriously. I described it recently as feeling as though you are living your life for someone else. You don't feel alive, you live because you have to, you live to get by. Its something nearly impossible to describe to people who haven't felt it before. David Letterman said to Oprah that depression feels like "you get on an elevator and the bottom drops out. You can't stand looking at the sunlight, you can't wait to get back into bed at night..." It sounds so simple yet its exactly true. Every time the sun shines it feels worse, like it is a reminder of how everyone else is so happy and excited to be out in the sun, and all you want to do is crawl back into the dark. Depression eats you from the inside.

I suffer from depression as a result of a generalized anxiety disorder with Obsessive Compulsive tendencies. The anxiety eats all your energy until you have nothing left but to remain in a depressive state. depression is almost a way of controlling the anxiety and OCD tendencies.

When I was first being diagnosed, I remember my doctor going through her litany of questions about how I feel and how I function. At one point early on she asked me "has anything happened that might have triggered these feelings?" I thought to myself "what hasn't happened?" There is always something - this break-up, that family tragedy, this loneliness, that homesickness, this fall out with a friend, that bad grade at school, this work problem....I had an endless stream of things that were causing me to feel this way. Everyone does, that is just how life works. It is full of ups and downs, and its all about riding those and getting stronger from them. My problem was not that these things were happening, it was my inability to cope. One small setback sent me into a tailspin, and if there wasn't something wrong I felt panicked and was sure that I was just waiting for the next thing to go wrong.

Right now it feels like I can't catch a break. I have moved back in with my parents, I have no job and no money, I have been dropped from the program I was hoping to take at school, and the guy I thought had great potential was less than kind about leading me on and then calling things off when his ex came back in the picture. None of it really sounds that bad. None of it really is that bad. But it feels like my world is ending, like I'm living for everyone else and not for myself.

I want to be able to write about how I have overcome this illness and now I live a happy life, but I can't yet. This is a really hard fight, harder than I ever thought it would be. I thought by acknowledging there was a problem and trying to get better everything would just get easier but it doesn't. It takes a fight, and I haven't won yet. I really hope I do someday, and I have to have faith in that, especially today when it feels like I'll never just be happy.

Someday I will write about my fight and what it took for me to be happy, but for now all I can say is that this is how I feel, and its awful, and I would give anything not to feel this way anymore.

The only difference between murder and surgery is the outcome.

...okay, that might be a hasty generalization. And a bit ridiculous. But its interesting to think about how two things seem so much the same, until the point where they just aren't anymore.

I'm not going to talk about dating or relationships or love now (although I realize how that was the perfect lead in for that type of conversation). I feel like obsessing about how relationships are is an unhealthy habit (although one of which I have admittedly been guilty).

I've been living at home for two weeks now. I left a different city, a different job, house, lifestyle, almost everything, for a not-so-fresh start. Or so I thought.

I left my home town five years ago under similar (and yet so, so different) circumstances to my most recent decision to move. I needed to get away from my old high school friends, ex-boyfriends that just wouldn't fade to black, some pretty awful jobs, and a weak start at university, but I also felt like I really needed to prove to myself that I could cope on my own.

I moved ten hours (by car) from everything I had known for the past 18 years, for what was truly a fresh start. The next five years were filled with stress, anxiety, and more roommates than I can count. I succumbed to a number health issues, ranging from stress-induced acne, to the development of what seemed like every possible allergy, to mental illness (also stress-induced).

It was heart-breaking for the first while that the change I had hoped would make me happier was making me miserable. But I was determined that I was going to prove to myself (and maybe others?) that I could cope and be happy without my old life.

Every time I tell someone how unhappy I had been, they seemed confused that I hadn't given up. Sometimes I am still confused that I carried on in this state of distress for so long. But every time I was about ready to throw in the towel, a beacon would appear, convincing me to stay. There was a great friend, a great guy, a great job, and a great prof that all stopped me from leaving at one point or other (though I am almost sure none of them know they factored into my decision-making).

Finally, about 8 months ago, a window opened. I was single for more than a month for the first time in years, I had become disillusioned by what was once a great job opportunity, I loved my friends but didn't feel like they were enough to support me, and felt that the small city (in comparison to where I had grown up) had given me all it could.

I jumped through that window so fast that I didn't even look down. Turns out it was probably a 4 story fall - survivable, but you're not going to come out of a fall like that without at least a few scars.

I quit my reasonably high paying corporate job with a major company, packed my bags, and drove that 10 hours back home to my parents door step. Okay, it wasn't that simple - from the day I officially put my plan in motion until it was fully executed, 2 and a half months passed;5 months of agonizing consideration about the decision led up to it. Needless to say, I moved home. It was heartbreaking to leave some of the great things behind, but I knew long term this was better for me.

So I went back to my old life. But its really not my old life at all, and you know what? That is great. It is better than I could have imagined. I am back with my family, all my favourite old spots are still here, my dogs still sleep in my bed every night, but you know what has changed? All those bad things I had been trying to escape were gone, and all that was left were the things I loved, and some great new additions (like our sweetest ever rescue dog).

All in all, my new life that is supposed to be the same as my old life looks completely different because of the outcome - this time it makes me happy. And that is just great.

Anais Nin...

...once said:

I am only responsible for my own heart.

 You offered yours up for the smashing, my darling. 

Only a fool would give out such a vital organ.

I feel like trust is the very fine line between protecting your heart and allowing yourself to fall for someone else.

My favourite blogs to read are ones where people are honest about their lives. I like to learn who people are and what is going on in their real lives. It can be easy to pretend to be someone else on the internet, and hard to show who you really are. In that interest, I am going to try my best to be honest about what is going on in my life.

I've walked this line very precariously for the past year or so, using it more as a rope than anything else. I met someone who I at first was very unsure of. He seemed very sincere, but I wasn't sure that I was attracted to him emotionally. After a while I realized I was, and began slipping over that line. I'm not always the most careful when it comes to my heart, and was maybe a little too quick to trust, because the minute things started going really well and became more serious, he panicked, and the rug was thusly pulled out from beneath me. I was shocked and hurt, having trusted someone else with such a delicate item (my heart) and had it hit straight over left field and out of the park. 

I moved on, but only a couple of months passed before he was darkening my door again.

Since that point, the pair of us have experimented with many different levels of relationship, and I have experimented with many different positions in relation to that line. Recently, I made a decision to take me away from the relationship geographically, and we both made the decision that we were not going to be able to make this work at this point in time. For me, I realized that I was so concerned with having to protect myself the second time around that I couldn't truly feel anything. 

I know right now I am scared to be hurt again, and so the idea of ever crossing the line is tough for me. But I do want to trust someone enough to do it. 

So where is the line? And what do you do with it? Do you find someone you can trust and cross it? How do you know when its safe?

Or maybe you don't cross it at all. Maybe you should walk it. So when do you know if you're standing right on it?

Tumblr

Every once in a while I get in a mood, and the result is this tumblr:

http://theprettylovelybeautiful.tumblr.com/

pictures and quotes and things I have found to be interesting from all around the internet.

Nothing is still Something.

Photo via artlimited.net

Lately I've been making a lot of tough decisions in my life. None that I have been forced to make, but making choices to make myself happier.

I've found (especially since I've been out of University) that it becomes increasingly easy to let your life happen to you and be complacent with that. I will be the first to admit that my theme for life is quite often "death by a thousand cuts". I've been good at ignoring my own happiness because things have been "just okay", and the pain of confronting what seems to be the problem seems far worse than tolerating the day to day pain.

In an effort to nip this admittedly bad habit in the bud, I have been keeping one thing in my mind. If I were someone else and saw myself, what would I think? Would I think "she seems happy"? Or would it be more like "she would be so much happier if...."?

I feel like this is a version of caring what other people think of you - and in a way it is - but I'm not sure it is always unhealthy to be concerned with how you appear to others. I don't think I would make it a practice to be so concerned with other's thoughts of me that it became detrimental to my own well-being, but don't we all generally strive to be a better person?

I can't even count the times I have watched a friend go through what seemed like hell for some guy who wasn't treating her well. From the outside it was so easy to say "she needs to get out." Once I went through that myself, though, it was so different. I understood how hard it was, and it didn't just happen overnight. Things were good, then they got worse, but there would be moments of light that provided hope that things would get good again. The one day I thought "if I were my friend, how would this look to me?" Thats when I realized that the quiet daily suffering I went through was so much worse than if I had just moved on.

I think sometimes it is hard to remember that doing nothing is still doing something. Choosing not to act, or to make a decision "later", is still a choice. Sometimes it is worth the wait, but if you're going to have to choose eventually, you might as well do it now. It feels good to make conscious, active decisions about your life, even if it is tough at first. In the end, it is better than feeling just okay.