Lauryn:
i like your kerouac way of writing from real experiences
Julia:
you wrote in your note (let me find it):
So for all of you out there that react on face value. For all of you that are dictated by the very first sights and sounds of the moment (including myself), I urge you to feel between your senses. Cultivate your patience. Because yes, things happen for a reason, but not necessarily the reason in which they first appear.
And
well
I think that is what I am learning
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I am a sensational, living in the moment, unmediated girl. A lot of this is simple biology–I can’t just will away sensory overload, I have to react–and a lot of it is the result of living in a world with soaring heights and suffocating lows. But being reactive, hyperactive, flighty doesn’t help me very much in the long run. If anything, it impedes me.
I’m thinking about high school here. I’m still, always, thinking about high school. It’s a problem that won’t stop eating away at me until I solve it, and I feel like I’m getting closer. I certainly have more pieces laid out in front of me, and I can start to see how they fit together.
Junior and Senior year, all I could see was the surface. All I saw was groups forming, and friends who acted one way with me and another way with all their other friends. I didn’t understand it, and I tried to explain it, using what words I had, but of course, only seeing the surface, only using a limited vocabulary, I couldn’t get it, could only annoy people with my vague and misguided approximations.
But I was trying to think. And eventually, I was able to stop feeling, and start analyzing. And then everything started falling into place. And as CBT teaches, when you change how you think, you change how you feel, and when I saw on Facebook this Wednesday that a bunch of my friends got together Wednesday night, it didn’t hurt. I wasn’t even jealous. I was happy for them. Because I understood what was happening, and I could accept it. I didn’t want to be there. I already had exactly what I wanted.
The reasons may not be exactly what they appear.
But reasons there are, and if I’m patient, if I think, if I ask what others think and manage to communicate with them in some meaningful, intelligible way, I can find them. I can find them if I just step back and let things fall into focus, like those magic-eye puzzles.
I’ve spent the past several years of my life searching for the right words to say what I mean, to explain, to capture, to paint my life and my brain and my place in the web of the world. I’ve spent the last several years of my life embroiled in one misunderstanding after another, and when I close my eyes those conversations are painted on my eyelids. And I can’t help but wonder if the reason for all that waste is that I thought everything was exactly as it seemed.
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I had her backwards, for a while
as chasing black swans and making puzzles
but now
I think
she will figure out the puzzles, and learn how to be a black swan
maybe that’s what being a teenager is
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But I’m not some idiot who’s entire high school career is wrecked with regret. Rather, I am, in at least one aspect, a perfectly typical teenager. This is what teenagers do. We chase black swans, and make puzzles for others to put together, and we look and wait for words we don’t have and, when we lose patience, we make up words that are almost good enough for the moment.
And then we learn that the point isn’t to chase black swans or make puzzles, but to take puzzles apart and put them back together and grow into the confidence necessary for becoming our own black swans.
I’m gonna quote from an essay I wrote for the newspaper last year.
Here’s another cycle. You go into a new situation for the first time, you do the best you can. Time passes, you grow, you mature, and you are embarrassed for who you were and what you did when you first came in. And then you change so much that you have to leave, enter a new situation, and start all over again.
But there’s something I’d like to stress. There is nothing inherently bad, inferior, embarrassing about which part of the cycle you are at. All parts are important, required, purposeful, and there is beauty in each of them. High school was ugly for me, but there were also moments of beauty, from the vermilion of my cheeks when I thought about She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named to the hugs Alex stole from me, from calling my first show to going to my first party, from carving out niches for myself to the year when the niches became too confining.
And I wouldn’t trade any of it. Not my first flame-war, not my first troll, not the words that didn’t come out right or that I never should have said, and certainly not the mistakes and meltdowns that led to my breaks, my mistakes, my labels and my passions.
I’m a teenager. Teenagers nowadays don’t have Vision Quests compressed into one week; ours stretch on for years. And there’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of false starts. Solid ground only comes back when you learn to fly in midair.
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Lauryn
yes
i think so
and i think in that aspect of life, you are on level ground with everyone else
which i hope is a comforting thought
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I don’t think I’m saying exactly what I mean here. I feel almost like I’m sitting in a shrink’s office again, staring at the white walls and pulling apart the spider plant and wishing there was a way to grind into their skulls that No, you don’t know. Not everyone goes through what I go through. They can’t. How could they?
Except now I’m not angry or confused.
Because we’re all more alike than different. And I may have felt like an alien, may have in fact been invisible, but at my core I was, I am, a kid learning to fit into her skin.
And so was everyone else.
And they made just as many mistakes as I did. But it’s okay, because mistakes are just twists on the road or sudden drops off of cliffs, and life isn’t always about moving in straight lines on solid ground. Sometimes it’s about dancing in midair.
Sometimes, the whole point is that you can’t breath and don’t know which way is up.
Order has no purpose and no place without chaos. And if adolescence is a time of putting things in order, than it must of necessity be a time of overwhelming initial chaos, and for most of us there will me moments when all the artificial arbitration we’ve imposed falls apart and we have to start all over again as the ground drops out from under us.
And you have to ask yourself:
is the goal to get everything under perfect control?
or is it to conjure some inherent beauty into plain sight?
And me?
I like the pictures I’m learning to paint.
Maybe I need to re-read Siddhartha–I think I might appreciate it more now. Maybe I need to look less for patterns, and more for hidden reasons. Maybe I need to focus more on the big picture. Maybe I need to tell myself that it’s okay if there is no picture. I definitely need to feel between my senses. Cultivate my patience.
And I’ve been wondering, as I’ve been writing this, how such thinking will help me when my meds don’t work. And the answer is that it won’t. (Without a little lift, the ballerina falls! ~ Next To Normal) But that’s okay. This sort of thinking isn’t, as I’ve always thought, about fixing my everyday ills or gaining control or even perfect understanding. It’s about who do I want to be? It’s about the fact that I love how I feel when I can relax and not fret about social interactions.
It’s about acceptance and rejoicing–not about being happy when all I feel is dead, but about damn it, this is my life and I WILL live it!
I will live.
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Julia
yes
it is very comforting
to know that even the kids I idolize
are doing the same thing
perhaps in a more socially acceptable way
perhaps with different demons to wrestle with
and my pain and my troubles are mine, and I don’t think many share them
but
the underlying mechanism
and motivation
is shared
I like it
you’re finding the words too