When It Rains It Pours

This post really isn't going to be long.  I just want to vent about feeling stuck and sad and miserable.  And i know most of my blog posts have been about uplifting things and trying to look at the positive and believe me I still do, but every once in a while a girl's allowed to have a crap day/week/year...and it's just been one of those crappy times for me.

Bad things keep happening to me and everyone I care about and I am just tired of it. Tired of crying and worrying and wondering and being upset and feeling so alone.  It's just been super hard on me and my soul and my heart and my ability to pick myself back up again. 

I just want to crawl into a whole and hide out for a few weeks until all things get better and I can stop worrying, wondering, crying and feeling very alone.  I'm ready to be rid of crappy feelings and crappy things and I just want to be happy.  I just want all the crap to go away.  Even for just one day.  No more crap for ONE day...is that so hard?...

My Hips Look Huge. Ugh.

Spring is just around the corner, or, according to the calendar, it has already begun.  In my binge shopping therapy sprees I have seen lots of cute floral prints, tank tops, and other adorable outfits that no longer seem to look cute on me.  I try on everything I think might look okay and it ends up looking horrendous!  I see girls who arms don't flap in the windI see girls who thighs don't touch and who's ass still fits into a size 27 and I wonder if they know how lucky they are to not have their fat thighs chafe as they rub against each other...  and I am envious. 

Just today I returned a skirt because it a. made my hips look gargantuan and b. was in no way flattering to my larger than life ass.  After walking through two stores today and determining that I am too out of shape and not skinny enough for their clothes I went into a slight depression, one in which I loath over my unattractive body and wonder how I let this happen to myself.  I fantasized about having buff and toned arms and thin legs.  Then I wondered if there were a trainer that could whip my fat butt into shape in two months.  Then when I realized there was no way I was going to lose all the weight I wanted in two months and that my hips were probably always going to be too large for a poofy skirt, I got really sad, and all I wanted to do was eat pizza.  or a cookie.  or go drink a big cold soda.  Which is why I can't fit into the skirts or jeans to begin with.  Depression = food.  Food = fat me.  Fat me = Depression.  Depressed me over not being skinny enough to fit into the cute spring clothes I want = FOOD.  It's a terrible cycle to be in.  Fat, depressed and really full.

Today I am wearing all black, probably to symbolize my semi-depressive state, instead of the purples and yellows and pinks that I see everyone else in.  I realize I should probably change my attire and start going to the gym.  But this time change has made me really tired and the gym sounds so boring and hard.

So I am going to try to use these spring images to motivate me to get a move on and try to work out enough that I can look cute in all the spring clothes I keep seeing all over town.

Fragile Little Things

Just a few moments ago I found out that one of my twin nieces who is 4 was rushed to the hospital after falling off a stool.  No one seems to be answering their phones and with my family a million miles away I am only left with my destructive thoughts to try to piece together what may be happening right now.

First off,  I am overcome with sadness that she fell and hurt herself and I can't imagine how scared and how much pain she actually is in right now.  I worry that because my brother-in-law was without my sister that it was tremendously hard for him to somehow get one twin and the other out of the restaurant they were in and somehow sooth poor little Ella.  I just imagine this horrific terrible event happening and I feel sad and upset that I couldn't be there to help out.  Or how, if only she hadn't taken that one faulty step then she wouldn't have fallen. 

It's moments like these when I realize how much I really truly love and miss my family and how I wish I could be there for them for everything they ever have to go through.  I wish we all lived down the street from each other so that I could be there at the hospital right now in the ER.  Or I could have been there when the other twin fell and cracked her head open.  I think about how many good and bad moments I've  missed in the lived of people that mean so much to me because I am far away.  This year especially.  I am so terribly far away that I feel so disconnected from every one and I feel like I chose to make my life something different thinking that what I has wasn't enough.  Thinking that I needed to search to find new and better things, when I realize now that all I ever wanted - I had.  

I had every thing I could have ever asked for.  Friends, great family, a beautiful place to live, a job that made me happy, a lifestyle that was carefree and full of life and joy and laughter.  But for some reason that wasn't enough, and now, in moments where someone needs me most, I am stuck in an apartment ALONE, because I have no one in Chicago, and crying by myself because the only thing I can do is wait by the phone to hear what happens next.

I am not really living.  I am surviving off old memories and waiting for phone calls.  I am revisiting happier times to somehow manage to live another day.  I am reminiscing through old photos or old laugher but I am not creating anything new. 

I took for granted all the fragile little things I had in life.  The things that didn't seem to matter from day to day.  I thought that I somehow would come to this new city and this new place and find some miraculous thing that I had never seen or had before, when I realize now that the real miracle was having a full and abundant life.  

Life is full of fragile little things that make it all worth it.  My advice:  don't ever forget that.

Who is St. Patrick?

Today is a day I have never really understood, nor really cared to understand.  It's just a holiday like Cinco De Mayo, another reason for people to drink a lot and claim they aren't alcoholics even though getting belligerent on a Wednesday used to be a sure fire sign of alcoholism.  Now it's just socially acceptable, when it shouldn't be (in my opinion).  Neither should dressing up like a leprechaun, but that's what's happening in this world.  Drinking on a random nonsensical holiday, and dressing up like red heads makes you cool or fun or something.

Personally, I wish the world were to celebrate actual things more often.  Things that make this world happy and cheerful and honest and real.  Lets get dressed up and dance and have a party for our parents every single day for raising us, or let's laugh and sit together and have dinner outside because it is a beautiful night and down coats are finally unnecessary.  Or let's have a block party and invite every single one of our friends and let's celebrate our friendship, just because it's Wednesday and for no other reason than for our friends to know how important they are.  Let's celebrate, and not by drinking, that we are ALIVE and breathing and loving individuals and have a roof over our heads and food to eat for breakfast lunch and dinner.  How about the celebration of the fact that we can drink or eat or do as we please, whenever we so choose to.

Perhaps St. Patrick did something amazing.  Maybe I'm missing the point since I haven't done my research.  BUT, regardless.   Let today be a reminder to celebrate the little things and the wonderfully meaningless but very significant things in life.  I wish people celebrated these small wonders as much as they celebrate holidays like St. Patrick's Day or Cinco De Mayo.

Just think if the world found wonder and significance in truly meaningful small pieces of life and lived to celebrate it the way they do a holiday most people know nothing about.    Just imagine it now...

 

Quotes Quotes Quotes

I love quotes and here are some of my favorite.  Hopefully you can find meaning in one or more of these:

"Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was."

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"That which causes us trials shall yield us triumph: and that which make our hearts ache shall fill us with gladness. The only true happiness is to learn, to advance, and to improve: which could not happen unless we had commence with error, ignorance, and imperfection. We must pass through the darkness, to reach the light.”

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"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."

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"To be all that is possible we must attempt the impossible.  To be all that we can be, we must dream of being more."

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"There’s a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune, but omitted and the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries. And we must take the current when it serves or lose the ventures before us."

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“You block your dreams when you allow your fear to grow bigger than your faith.”

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"There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do."

Enough

In response to A Week of Worthiness:

Feeling unworthy is easy these days.  Feeling like there is just something missing, something I'm not doing it right, something that just isn't enough is mostly what I hear.  Through people's verbal judgments, through glossy looks.  There are voices on the internet talking about what I should be.  People's awkward stares at the post office that tell me I'm wrong.  So many voices in my own head telling me that I have to be thinner, quieter, more reserved, more easy going, less outspoken, not so tired and have a better job before I can be enough.

A good friend of mine once put it like this, "My whole life I have always been 'too' much of something.  Too loud.  Too emotional.  Too outspoken.  Too harsh.  Too much.  Too needy.  Too sensitive.  Too stubborn.  For once in my life I'd like to be just enough of something."

Her words resonated with me and have been reverberating in my ears ever since she said them.  I have found that how she described her criticisms and how people labeled her have shown up in my day to day life ever since she put into words what I couldn't say myself.  Like my friend, I have never been just "enough" of something; always too much of something.  Which in turn leads to this eternal struggle of listening to my own voice, and hearing other voices being shouted in my ear telling me I'm not worthy enough.  I have to fix this thing about me.  I have to change that thing about me.  I have to do this thing just right.  To be the "right" kind of friend.  To be the "right" kind of sister.  To be the "right" kind of student.  The "right" kind of co-worker.  

If someone out there knows the equation of "just enough" emotion, heart, head, voice, reason and soul to be the best kind of person possible, please share.  Because somehow I seem to be screwing it up.  Whether it's by my own standards, or my peers standards.

Since all these things are telling me that I am not good enough or worthy enough - I will resolve to abolish the things I hear that are telling me to be different and attempt to love and appreciate all that I am and accept all that I am not.

TODAY'S THINGS TELLING ME I'M NOT ENOUGH (& MY RESPONSE):

1.  Me telling myself that I am not attractive, sexy or wanted until I lose 20 lbs.  My Response: 20 lbs.  I have much more to offer someone than a number on a scale.  I have a compassionate heart that longs to do justice in the world, teach the youth of America the importance of self love, and give more than it receives.  I have a soul that longs to write novels that change people lives (or at the very least give them something to read and enjoy in the sunshine on a warm sunny afternoon).  I have a brain filled with knowledge and stories that make people laugh and cry and everything in between.  I have a creative bone that dreams in color and paints pictures in my mind of art and crafts and beautiful things.

2.  Me telling myself that I have wasted the last two years of my life working a job that has nothing to do with what I actually want to do and now, because of the budget crisis, I may never be a teacher.   My Response: Wasted my life.  I have met a lot of really great people at some of my jobs, even my best friend Hillary.  I have only grown more keenly aware of the fact that there is nothing more important that using my God given talents because if I don't they go to waste and the world misses out.  This is my motto right now re this topic: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” -Howard Thurman

3.  A person passive-aggressively twittering that I am "worthless, ignorant, naive, immature, wimpy, a robot, soulless and bossy." My Response: worthless, ignorant, naive, immature, wimpy, a robot, soulless and bossy.  I know my heart.  I know my worth.  I know my maturity.  I know my strength.  I know my soul.  I am aware of my weaknesses and am working towards bettering them.  All of these things are not defined by someone else, and I will not let them be.

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There may be more at a later date, but those are the three things I will focus on today.  

My life is my own, and as long as I am living with good intentions, following my strong and compassionate heart and trying to bring others joy, I believe that's ENOUGH for today. 

I'm Going Home

Well I'm going home,
Back to the place where I belong,
I don't regret this life I chose for me.
But these places and these faces are getting old,
So I'm going home.

Listen to "Home" by Daughtry

Home used to be this place that I longed to get away from.  I thought everyone at home was stuck up and mean.  I thought there was so much world I was missing because I lived in the same place my whole life.  Everything was the same since the day I was born and I felt I had been robbed.  That if I stayed where I had always stayed that I never would grow.  So I moved away for college, and moved away after college (right now).  

But as I get older I realize it was just my age that created these feelings of animosity towards peers and the need to explore.  I see clearly that no matter where you were every 16 year old girl was the same, all her friends sucked, she couldn't wait to leave home, and she wished her life were different somehow.  

Now I long for home in ways that are indescribable.  My yearning for people who have known me for longer than a few months or weeks only gets satisfied in small doses when I get to go home for a weekend visit, or I get to talk to an old friend on the phone.  I long for the smells of my favorite bakery, or the taste of my favorite deli sandwich.  I reminisce about the days when I knew which direction was east because the beautiful rolling hills decorated the eastern horizon.  When I close my eyes I can imagine every detail of the decorated city lights that I see when I am driving from one town to the next.  I can see how green the hills are in the spring time, and what the ground looks like after it's been pouring rain for days.  I remember how good it felt to feel just "kinda" cold in the winter, and I miss the sun streaming into my room no matter what time of year it was.  

There are things I ran so far and so fast from I didn't even get a chance to realize that I would miss them.  There are people I really don't care to ever see again.  Mostly because my life is better now that I don't have to see them, but there are also people that are irreplaceable.  There are people that have forever changed my life and I know will be a part of me until I am old and wrinkly!  There are places I am sad that I have yet to explore and there are places I have seen that I wish every one in the world could see so they could understand true and awe inspiring beauty.  
No matter where I go, who I meet, or what goes on in my life there really is no place like home.  

“Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to."  -John Ed. Pearce