The Requisite Post Regarding Hair

In one sense, a photograph is a betrayal, because it takes a state that exists for one fraction of a second and defines an object—or a person—by that fragmented instant. All that comes before and all that comes after are lost, but for that one frame preserved, and while, in very rare moments it achieves the telling of a facet of the subject's story, most of the time it is merely an incomplete attempt to contain something more than what that one photograph could possibly hold. 

That having been said, there is the subject of hair.

It had to come up on this blog at some point; after all, I am female. And after all, I did promise to share the results of a late-night game with a scissors and a mirror (which happened several regrettable weeks ago and cannot be undone even if it can be grown out of; girls, I do not recommend it).

And even if these two photographs are lacking in artistic portrayal, they convey the information desired, and that is enough for the purpose at hand.

Without further ado...

Travel Snippets: New York City

I was going to write an exciting narrative about my brief travels and edit my sloppy, surreptitiously-taken photographs in an attempt to mask my painful inadequacy as a photographer, but passing time proves the unlikelihood of that particular goal ever being reached. This is what you get, girls: a tidbit of New York through the lens of my camera, wielded as surreptitiously and infrequently as possible.

The apartment: view from the bedroom window and view from the kitchen.

 

  

En route to the Brooklyn Library, a bibliophile's lending emporium.

 

Strolling through Manhattan.

Morning after a night out.

 

A Brooklyn street.

More Manhattan.

relative poverty and life

I don't have the answers.

I'm the girl lying on her stomach on the carpet at two in the morning with the room dark but for the glowing screen of her laptop, the girl making herself sick with chocolate chips she doesn't really want—and definitely shouldn't be consuming—by the handful as if her life depends on it, the girl staying up far too late because her brain won't shut down to allow for sleep, and I don't have the answers. Not for my own rampant insecurities, not for the drama and dilemmas of my dearest friends.

Not for anything.

Anything.

Which makes it ironic, I suppose, that right now I am content as I've not been for years, content even though nights still mean nightmares and panic still grips me on a daily basis. Ironic, too, that it took sitting alone in my cousin's apartment in Brooklyn, holding company with coffee and the distant noise of a less-than-stellar neighbourhood and my own thoughts, to realise the absurdity of running from a place where I truly feel safe merely to satisfy my subconscious desire to prove that I can live life dangling from a shoestring and still be someone, still outdo everyone around me. Competition is engrained deeply in my soul, and it seems as if I am only just learning to relinquish the need to create an image of perfection behind which to hide, because oh, I'm not perfect, not perfect at all, and, for me, to be imperfect is to be despicable, most of all to myself.

Instinctively I count the ways I fail, cataloguing every mistake of the day, every instance in which I am awkward, uncertain, unintelligent, unperceptive, clumsy. I count the veins on my hands, the scars on my body, the pounds on my hips, the flab on my middle, the unidentifiable fungus creeping slowly round my fingernail beds, the times my knees creak (which is just about every time I make use of them), the extra calories that enter my mouth, the uncouth gurgling of my stomach, the inelegant hook of my nose. I count the conversations in which I respond carelessly or inappropriately or even with less wit than the situation earned, count the sneezes that can't be suppressed, the games in which I am obviously incompetent. Guessing games are the bane of my existence, because I hate taking risks that involve people seeing me make stupid choices, and I hate being wrong.

Well, guess what.

I'm wrong, and I don't have the answers.

Any of them.

My life is a cycle of falling flat on my face and picking myself up long enough to wipe the blood from my elbows and knees and nose before going down again, and the bandaids never stay in place so I'm always bleeding. Awkwardness runs in my veins, and there are days when my choices are, occasionally by necessity but mostly because of sheer stupidity, less than wise. More than enough people have told me time and again that I am smart, poised, well-read, intelligent, but I know better: I'm an ignorant girl-turned-woman who vascillates between spewing hyper foolishness and keeping her mouth shut in order to avoid further abject humiliation, who takes one minute less than forever to solve puzzles in the simplest levels of Portal, and who smiles with her gums and either stutters or speaks too quickly. I choke on food or water or air on a daily basis. Speaking of water, I slurp my drinks, and occasionally dribble liquid when I tilt the cup at the wrong angle and overshoot my mouth. I never remember pertinent facts about history or literature or people and can't banter spontaneously to save my life, mostly because I'm too busy taking life seriously to roll with anything so lighthearted as verbal slap battles, and dancing is so far out of my league as to be near impossible, for as much as I love to move to a good beat.

And guess what.

That's okay.

The weight of all I'm not tries to crush me on a near hourly basis, but it's so good to be back, to be here, that bearing that weight is becoming easier, and what formerly seemed unthinkable is slowly become reality: I can live with myself. Even now, alone in the darkened house with my nauseated stomach and headache and disappointment over not having completed yesterday's easy to-do list and a host of other quantifiable failures—even now, with my emotions screaming you detestable piece of crap—I can make the choice to relinquish the vicious self-condemnation that destroys the joy of every happy moment, that tears me apart when the distraction of the people around me is suspended.

I don't have the answers to my own problems, and I don't have the answers to anyone else's, and that's okay. Because right now letting go of the need to have every question resolved and every flaw eliminated is enough.

Because some nights it is enough to be content to be alive.

Impulse and Recovery

Yes, the promised pictures are coming.

Yes, there will be fragments of New York City in them, snapshots of the little of it I saw. The busy-ness. The buildings. The quiet moments spent alone in my cousin's apartment with a cup of black tea and white noise for inarticulate company.

But right now I'm still thinking.

While I was in Brooklyn Sarah and I spoke of jobs and career opportunities, of modeling gigs, of money-making and the fact that femininity is so easily employed as a tool to open any door desired. "Basically, if you're a girl in New York you can get just about anything you want. There aren't any limits." And she's right. Play the field correctly, develop a thick skin and an easy demeanour, and there's not a whole lot that a girl can't obtain.

To be honest, New York tempts me. The anonymity and vastness of the city is seductive, as is the thought of being entirely dependent upon my own ingenuity and work ethic in a place where no one actually cares whether I live or die, and I find myself drawn to the idea of relocation. Even as I remind myself that, no, it would not be a good idea, the thought remains present in the forefront of my mind, and I can't quite shake the notion of packing a bag and running off to the city. Because I do like to run, especially when unsure of myself. In a way it is far easier than dealing with myself in the silence of a life with spaces for growing.

Did I say spaces for growing? At this point I'm not certain that I'm doing anything more than aimlessly drifting and indulging in painfully useless loneliness.

I don't like this kind of growing, the sort that involves relinquishing what sense of self can be extracted from surroundings and replacing it with something that relies upon a state of being instead of a checklist of things done. It is awkward. It is uncomfortable. I don't quite know what to do with it.

I don't know what to do with being alive, really, and that's a strange place to stand. Strange because I've never had to fight so hard to stay on track. To breathe. Because before I was panicking but now I'm so empty that it seems a breath drawn would lodge irretrievably between the sides of my collapsing body and quietly suffocate. Before I was panicking but now I'm finding out the cost of that panic, and the price is higher than I knew.

Last night I sat on the floor of the laundry room at three in the morning with a notebook beside me and no words, knees drawn up to my chin, flinching every time I caught a glimpse of my face in the door of washer, squinting against the glare of the overhead light. I don't have this mess of a life sorted, at all. Not unexpectedly, that makes me want to run. Back to the city, back to the west coast, back to anywhere but here, forward to anywhere but here—and this is the only place to which I've ever wanted so much to return.

Yes, I could move. Go to Brooklyn. Go to Philadelphia. Go to Seattle. Go anywhere at all. Get lost in a city. Make money. Learn to use people, learn to use myself, learn to survive and jostle and make my way through a life with no silence and no spaces and no people who care. With no standard to which to be tacitly held. It would be so easy to lose every shred of self-respect and simplistic appreciation of life in a place where materialistic accomplishment is the pinnacle of achievement and a girl's body is her greatest asset, since self-loathing has already all but paralysed me here anyway. Every day serves to remind me how seamless a transition it would be, and every night drives the point home.

Silent spaces are unavoidable here.

I want to learn to live with them. Learn to live in them. Instead of bolting for the nearest crowd in which to hide, I want to stay.

Accomplishment can wait. The seduction of the city and its promise of anonymity is a temporal solution to panic, the sedation of a mind driven half-mad by itself, but where would the resolution be in that? A career in mindlessness may delay the inevitable, but in the end there is no getting away from the fact that a reckoning point will always arise where it becomes necessary to face the person I am and the form life has taken and accept that and then move on to other things.

Like taking opportunity of the quiet here to get over myself and learn how to live a truly balanced and productive life. 

Like breathing.

New York City has too much smog.

the shape of this week

I've been thinking a lot this past week about family and and the concept of home and life in general.

About goals.

About how travel is stretching long and New York is both so close and so far away, and how right now I really want to go back to that place I love most in the world right now and stay, quietly, but how I also ache to move from place to place, because roaming is in my blood and I'm not sure that I'll ever be able to stop my feet from running.

Because I'm an introvert but I'll never be able to stay away from people.

Because I love books and words but mostly because they tell stories—about people. about human hearts, and even on days that are murder to be alive, to be human, I love what the human heart can feel. What it can be.

This is my statement to the world: I'm glad to be breathing, and I'm thankful for the people who are bringing back that joy. Who are teaching me how to create and accept a life worth living.

I am also very grateful for rain.

Housekeeping

Today has involved a lot of walking and a lot of cleaning (with a sidewinding excursion to sunbathe in a secluded corner of a graveyard), and both of those activities invariably mean a great deal of thinking has been accomplished. Which means I managed, over the course of the afternoon, to mentally outline at least five blog essays to be written in the next month. Whether they will actually reach completion remains to be seen.

 

It's one of those days again, one of those days in which, during some mundane task or contemplative moment, I realise This is it, this is what life has been missing for the past three years. Not happiness, not some upsurge of positive emotion, but just being fine. This is it. Except this time, after with the distinct sense of wonder and satisfaction, came the immediate rebuttal: You know you'll be exhausted and despairing again in hours. You know this doesn't last, so who are you kidding? This is it? You're still as messed up as ever.

In most instances I would agree. That nasty little inner voice that insists upon countering every contented thought with a bitter rejoinder is too reasonable for me to dare deny it. I know all too well my own proclivity to go in less than a minute from stable productivity to abject discouragement that makes what might have been an active day one that ends with no more than a meagre goal or two checked off as accomplished.

But this afternoon, following the sharp internal rebuke came words, someone else's words, a reminder from the midst of a common struggle.

In an archived post, Meg Fee (one of my very favourite bloggers) said something to the effect that slipping from a desired state of equilibrium is not only inevitable but necessary, required in order to allow for learning to re-enter that state.

It's true.

The longer I entertain the idea that my environment must create my equilibrium, the less I will find myself able to control my emotional reactions to what happens around me. The weight that I give to extraneous events in relation to my personal sanity will inevitably directly translate into the weight swinging the pendulum that will eventually send my mentality regarding life careening in the opposite direction. While emotions tend to arise from variables in personal surroundings (along with a host of other factors) and cannot be dictated to or scheduled, general attitude towards life is, arguably, almost entirely within the grasp of the mind, which means that yes, I can pick myself back up again. I can breathe when sucker-punched by despair and tell myself the inability to see beyond a certain situation won't last, and then get up and with that knowledge move forward.

Which basically makes the erratic absence of equilibrium practice runs.

And practice runs aren't failure. Practice runs are hope. A promise for the future. Habit building. All that and more. They count for something.

Every time I go from a steady walk to being flat on my face with my nose crushed against metaphorical asphalt I get the chance to learn how to rise to my feet again. Every instance that feels like failure is one in which I have the opportunity to define success. Losing my marbles is just another lesson in finding them again.

Frankly, I like that idea. I like being able to remind myself that the space in between point A and point B is worth something in life, that making that relentless journey back and forth is not a waste of existence. It is good to know that learning and hopeless mess are not equivalent and never will be, and that the only real failure here would be to subscribe to the futility of those inevitable hopeless moments.

Of Weariness and Lessons Learned

The beginning of this week has been stressful and enormously frustrating in many ways, and yet once again much of the blame rests upon myself. The exasperating conversations and the dust and the sheer physical exhaustion from a combination of over-stimulation and travelling while already feeling unwell are not of my doing, but what of the needless mental anguish indulged when I might have oh-so-easily ignored the triggers, gracefully choosing to let them pass? What of the prolonged headache indubitably induced by cramming sugar into my body as a means of superficial stress relief instead of going out for a walk (the five pounds I must have gained from two days of poor food choices will most likely show up tomorrow on my face)? What of the things that I did control?

I owe people an apology for those, because I botched them. Big time. Which isn't all that much of a surprise after all, given the track record, but still, it oughtn't have happened; I should not have exacerbated the existing problems without reservation, choosing to narrow my scope of attention and keep it fixed upon what could only put me in a nasty temper. Amidst all of the pleasant conversations and hours passed does it have to be the irritating comments and uncomfortable moments that define a visit with my extended family? There are legitimate reasons behind preferring one place in the world over another, but I cannot help wondering now what my insistent clinging to a negative mood despite the needs and affection of people here says about me as a person.