Tag: confession

the act of unraveling

So much of my time is spent photographing others, writing on behalf of others, and using a different voice to portray a certain message. I have found it hard to really know myself because I focus so much on everyone else.

It is easy for me to pick someone apart by listening carefully and paying attention to their responses and the things they say and do not say. I am an expert understander.

It is not easy for me to put into words how I feel about things, maybe because I am not often asked. I am the asker.

Lately I’ve been asking myself how I can open up more and trying to mirror the vulnerability of others. I write so much, and sometimes feel so in tune with myself, but I don’t know if I have ever truly shared that with someone else. I don’t think I’ve ever voiced my deepest darkest thoughts and hopes and dreams and fears, and I don’t remember ever wanting in such a precise way before.

I have kept me close to me, worn my emotions and complexities like a tight second skin. I wrap myself around myself around myself around myself like a snake coiling and ready to strike in case someone tries to get too close.

But what am I protecting myself from? Where did I learn this behavior?

How do I put the fangs away and unravel myself, now that I want to let someone really know me?

This is what I’ve been trying to do, I am currently in the pursuit of being known by someone that I want so badly to know me. To like me for me, and isn’t that all that anybody has ever asked for?

sonata no.14 in c-sharp minor by beethoven type of post

A person can be defined by their experiences. Their understandings of those experiences, their reactions to those experiences, the conclusions they draw from them, what they learn from them. Their thought process, the kind of relationships they maintain with others, their character, the way they speak.

I’m the melting sea caps pouring into the ocean.

Probably more closely is that I’m defrosting like a frozen chicken.

I feel really good things are on the way, are here already. I am living with high stakes and high payouts.

multitasking

Being a girl is sitting in the salon chair every two weeks crisscrossing your arms for the fill and hoping that the movement from the massage chair doesn’t move the drill and burn your nail beds while trying not to kick the nail tech scrubbing the soles of your feet with a pumice that tickles and hoping you picked the right color.

It’s wanting an iced americano but without sugar so you can be skinny and thinking about when you’ll squeeze in 45 minutes of cardio before your plans tonight and how your concealer is running out so you can only put on makeup after the gym but before plans and you need to wash your hair today and style it and you really just want to stay in and read a book and not go out at all.

But that guy you almost went on a date with but ended up being actually still married even though he’s 25 is going to be there tonight so you want to go out so he sees you even though you won’t date him because ew and either way you don’t want to date anyone but maybe one person but that’s complicated for no real reason except for some very real reasons involving the future and time and space.

Being a girl is exhausting and full of multitasking and caring about everything and never feeling like you’re caring about the right things but not being able to make yourself care any less anyway.

thick as thieves

I want to convince you to design a smile just for me. Yes, I do want to be your friend. I want to be your best friend in the entire world.

Unravel Me

It feels like cold water around my ankles, and I am playing the violin and hoping I do not notice the cold anymore when it envelops me. That I am not shocked.

Not to make a love metaphor out of the whole titanic incident, we are not that big. We are something very small.

I wish I had the type of self control to be a pusher awayer but I am self indulgent when it comes to making myself happy.

I wish I knew it wasn’t going to hurt so much when you leave, sooner or later. Because you will, and it will suck and I will miss you and I wish I could flick a switch that makes me not care about you at all. I care enough that I will happily spend whatever time you will be around, being your friend and enjoying it all, even when it’s boring.

I want to be able to put it into words to explain to you how I feel but I can’t yet, not well. Not perfectly.

All I know is you make me happy in this unique way, and that I am not ready to let go of it. It might develop into something more but it also might never and regardless, it is special.

Is it? Are these pandemic thoughts? Do I see you through pandemic eyes? Am I seeing myself through pandy eyes?

I kind of want to stop talking to you for a week just to see if I make it. If I could do it. I don’t think I could.

the girl with one (1) cold shoulder

I am best friends with the block button and the read receipt. One of my shoulders is always cold.

I feel like it’s a self-preservation thing instead of a confidence thing, because when someone I don’t care about does something I don’t like I almost always immediately fling them to the depths of The Blocked. Ex: the first week I got a Twitter I blocked Chrissy Teigen. It felt good.

When someone I do care about does something (not small) that I don’t like I have to activate my logical checks and balances system and go down my Checklist To Keep People In My Life & Not Be Dramatic. Ex: I have been known to temporarily ground my best friends from my life. One of my friends kept repeatedly saying something I didn’t like and I asked him many times to stop and on the fourth time I didn’t talk to him or interact for four months. It felt fair to me. It was dramatic.

The checklist includes:

  • How do I feel? How should I feel?
  • What do I want to do? What should I do?
  • What can I do? What are my options?
  • What will I do?

Most of the time it’s always better to underreact. I can always ramp up the reaction later but honestly, it usually just makes me feel bad and I’m in the business of making myself feel great and not bad.

Count to ten, drink a glass of water, whatever it takes to not strike the match that ignites my fiery little heart.

‘Experience’ by Ludovico Einaudi type of shit

I can remember so much about the people I care(d) about and yet so little about myself. I think my favorite color is red, but my brain is more worried with trying to retain all of the favorite colors of all of the best friends I’ve ever had.

I am so selfish sometimes and I don’t know why I feel entitled to know everything about someone else while giving up barely anything about me.

At the same time I want someone to know me the way I know them. I want someone to just completely and totally understand me yet I actively push against it. The times I do share I feel like I’m saying too too too much and maybe I am afraid that if the someone I wanted to, really knew me, they wouldn’t find me that great.

I am named after a flower. I think I take too long to bloom and who wants to wait to see that when there are other much brighter and prettier flowers unfurling their petals faster?

But I hope one day I will bloom and there will be someone who is patient enough to catch the slow unraveling of each of my anxious petals and believe the final result was worth the wait.

on being spiteful

The thing about being spiteful is you really only end up hurting yourself. Put down the can of Spite.

I think one of the main reasons why I have achieved what I have achieved is not something to be proud of. I am a person who works better when I am trying to prove something. I am a person that works harder because I don’t ever want to be a victim of anything.

I am a spiteful person.

When somebody does something to you and you get hurt, I think you get to choose whether you use that moment to propel you forward or to set you back.

I, like most people, have been burned a lot. By friends, by boyfriends, by coworkers, and family. But I don’t know whether how I handle it is entirely healthy. I tend to internalize things and out of spite I decide that I need to work hard to prove that I didn’t deserve that treatment.

I have a family member that lives to bring people down. They don’t put any effort into their own wellbeing or personal growth but they love to bash everyone else and judge everyone else for their actions. They lie, cheat, steal, and use other people and never care at all about how it effects the people that love them.

You could get recognized for something cool at work or at school, and they’d say it only happened because you’re a suckup or you got lucky. They know how to push your buttons just right because it’s the only thing they’re good at, the only skill they’ve applied themselves to. And I could write a whole other essay about how shitty saying someone is only successful because they “got lucky” is.

My response to that kind of behavior has been to prove that I can and will be better than that. I worked twice as hard, literally at two jobs, while they did drugs and insulted the family members we lived with. I got accepted to every college I applied for while they got denied, and I felt good.

I know you aren’t supposed to compare yourself to other people, and that’s my biggest flaw. For all of my virtues, for every time that I don’t lie, cheat, or steal, I make myself feel empowered by comparing myself to the people I know that do.

I dated someone that struggled to get a career doing what he loved, and my response after he dumped me was to get my dream job. Instead of working through the pain of a breakup, I worked for an entire year to make sure that I was nowhere in the same league of success as him. I wish I would have taken the time to grieve, to be sad and angry, because those emotions came later. They all flooded back like fresh wounds after I got what I wanted, and I kept cyberstalking him to make sure that he was still a loser and that what I did was worth it.

I thought that if he ever saw me again or looked at my social media profiles, he would see how much better I was doing and it would hurt and annoy him. I want my family member to look at my life and see that their life doesn’t shine as brightly because they are a pitch black pit of negativity. For all the pain they cause my family and me, I want to send it back harder with my success.

I hate flakiness and when my friends don’t follow through with their plans, so I set weird timelines for not looking at their snapchat stories, not replying to their texts, and not making plans with them. I asked you to go with me to an event two weeks ahead of time and you cancelled the day of? See you in six months, and don’t expect a text back from me until after I went to that cool new place you’ve been wanting to go to.

If I wasn’t so spiteful maybe I could stop and slow down and enjoy the life I have built. Maybe I would have more friends and be less successful, and maybe that would be okay. Maybe I’d be happier?

I’ve been trying to work on finding other reasons to push myself. I have been trying to stop comparing myself to other people and make time to stop and appreciate what I already have.

Being a spiteful person is mentally taxing. Because I don’t say spiteful things, or lash out at people to hurt them, in fact I really don’t think anyone would call me a spiteful person at all. But I do it all internally, and at the end of the day the only person who gets harmed is me. It’s very passive aggressive.

This is hard to write, and harder to come to terms with. I hope someone else out there feels like this and has a strategy to battle it. How do you deal with comparing yourself to others, and how do you motivate yourself in a healthy way?