the angsty meanderings of a twentysomething

Warning: this blog post is quite angst ridden and kind of disgusting, but I'm posting it anyway. You don't have to read it.

I spend a lot of my time feeling disappointed or upset with myself. I'm not necessarily who I would like to be, but at the same time I am very stubborn about being myself and not conforming to every arbitrary social norm out there. It's the same sort of thing that I hate and love about my mother. She won't conform to any social norm, reasonable or not. She is who she is, and this is good in theory, but I don't think she is very happy and she tends to make other people feel awkward and unhappy. Will I do the same? Will I lash out at every thing telling me I should be a certain way and be miserable for not fitting in and for finding myself always alone and frustrated? I mean, if I choose to not conform to people's expectations, I can't possibly expect people to conform to the way I do things.

Part of me thinks that conforming may be a reasonable sacrifice, and another part tells me over and over again that I have to stay true to myself no matter what and if I am always true to myself life will be hard but I will be happy.

I have a feeling life is always going to be hard and that the things I expect and hope for will not happen simply for the fact that I hope for them. I remember learning this lesson when I was a child. Whenever I had an idea that something good was supposed to happen I would stay up all night thinking about every single detail of the coming day and how wonderful it would be. Soon, I realized that nothing ever turned out how I imagined it and that if I wanted something good to happen that would mean for a fact that it would not happen. This continued to prove true over and over and over again as I grew up, and I stopped imagining the wonderful things I hoped would happen to me. Then my imagination turned to disasters. If I stayed up all night thinking about the horrors of my house burning down, it would surely not. Nothing expected actually happens, good or bad, and I could only count on unexpected happiness. The problem is that now I expect the unexpected wonderful thing to happen: does that automatically mean that it won't? I mean, I can't remember the last unexpected turn of fortune that occurred.

Oh, I'm getting old and realizing just how hard life is going to be. I'm going to continue to be rejected, from men and schools and jobs and scholarly journals. I used to believe that I was amazing, that any one who met me would realize how amazing I was and hire me or fall in love with me on the spot. All they had to do was talk to me and see my goodness. I don't really believe that anymore. There are a number of better qualified, smarter and more attractive people out there and now I feel like all I can hope for is to eek out a meager subsistence, just survive because I have a survival instinct built in.

I'm setting myself up for disappointment now. On Friday I will take the GRE and hope against hope that all my studying will actually pay off and that I won't screw it up. Then I'm applying for 6 grad schools, hoping again that one, just one will deign to let me attend their school. If they don't I'm going to beauty school and embracing all that beauty school represents.

My body is a cage...

Like every young woman in the Western world, I have body issues. I tend to be rather uncomfortable in my body at times, and it has kept me from accomplishing a lot of things. I know my body doesn't fit into the acceptable perameters that our society has set for attractiveness, and somtimes it is difficult to live with this fact, especially when I am a human who needs love and attention just like everyone else. It's hard to live with and be around people who go on dates and are generally fairly attractive. It is especially hard when I am ignored while boys go after these pretty girls, and I just have to stand back and watch. It is also very frustrating to look for clothes when most of the places where I want to buy clothes don't carry my 16/18 size. I guess this is good because I do always seem to find something that will work, and I've learned to look at something and know whether or not it will fit. I also don't spend as much money as I probably would, and I've had to develop my own style. But it still is incredibly emotionally painful at times to live with my body in this world where I feel that I don't fit, and where I feel so often that I'm not wanted.

Not only am I uncomfortable emotionally when I feel inadequate and unattractive being around a group of attractive people, I also am often just physically uncomfortable. I think it has something to do with my low threshold for pain. I hate it when my feet are sore, and it doesnt seem to take much to do that, and I have a never ending problem with shoes. I simply cannot find any shoe that fits and is always comfortable. There's always some problem. In general, things always have to be just right or I go crazy. I have to be wearing the right clothes; when I go to bed my environment has to be perfect. I sleep with earplugs and I can only sleep in pitch black darkness. When i was younger I could only sleep in my own bed. I am always irritated by something physically, and one sad problem I have is not liking when people touch me. My skin hurts.

I'm going to Italy next week and one of the things that has been weighing heavily on my mind is how comfortable I will be physically. I know my feet will hurt, so I'm bringing several pairs of shoes that I can switch around since each pair rub differently on my feet. I'm going to bring some good strong painkillers, and I have loads of bandaids for when something rubs wrong for too long. I have also chosen my clothes very carefully so nothing will rub me the wrong way. The worst thing is that there are virtually no public restrooms in Italy, which means I have to plan carefully because I do not want to find myself needing to go to the bathroom and not being able to. Unfortunately I'd rather be dehydrated. I am also not looking forward to the beating my body will take just in traveling. I'll leave at 7 in the morning and get there at noon the following day. Now, Italy is 7 or 8 hours ahead so it will feel like the middle of the night to me, and I'll want to stay awake and have fun. Yeah, not looking forward to that day of travel at all.

Oh this stupid body, always needing to be cared for, always giving me problems, always getting hurt somehow. Fortunately I do have a very strong and healthy body. I am fat, but it's something that I need to really just accept because I know it is in my genes and it's not because I am a horrible person. I know my body's healthy weight, even if it is more than I'd like it to be, but I don't want to be obssessed with it for the rest of my life. I eat good food every single day and I am a relatively active person. When I was burned horribly on my face and arm the EMTs, the doctors and nurses were all astonished at how well my body maintained stasis. All my vitals were as normal as can be. The same thing happened when I was born, apparently. The labor was extremely difficult for my mom and I was stuck in a dangerous position for several hours, and yet when i finally came out I received the highest score possible for overall general health. I really was blessed with a good body, and I know that despite the various physical irritations I anticipate on my trip that I will be fine walking all over Florence and Rome for 10 days. I guess I should just chill the eff out and enjoy myself.

angst

I feel like my life is a bit of a mess lately. I feel that this is most evident when I look in the mirror, like how I take care of myself is reflective of the mess I feel like I am inside. It looks like I stopped caring, and while I don't really believe this is true, the disheveled and generally unkempt hair, the bad complexion, the patches of dry skin that may or may not be eczema, tell a different story. The thing is, I do care but it's not translating well into action. Another point of this is the fact that I really want to eat healthy and keep my body in shape. I would like to stop eating meat and dairy, and I have lofty ideals that make me want to never put a piece of meat or cheese in my mouth again, and yet I sit here and eat bagels covered in cream cheese for lunch, partly because of the habit of always eating free food, no matter how much it goes against my ideals, like the big plate of hamburgery pasta my roommate offered for dinner the other night and the quesadilla I had last night. I cannot say no to free food. Also, I started doing pilates the other day, and I know it will take a while to get any good at it, but I was appalled at how uncoordinated, inflexible and completely out of control of my body I am.

Another area that seems to be a bit of a mess are my relationships with a few of my friends. I always see myself doing things and saying things I probably shouldn't, having ridiculous expectations and generally generating a lot of awkwardness. It's like the more I try the worse it gets. Time to back away, perhaps.

Now the question, what in the world is wrong with me? Perhaps the fact that I've never been one for discipline, that I am ruled by laziness, that I am generally a little crazy, that I am insecure, flighty, have a very short attention span, that I lack tact and other essential social skills and am afraid of being too close to people while paradoxically craving attention, that I am too hard on myself, that I am too easy on myself, that I am too proud, and that I am human, confused, tired and lonely. Add in this list that I feel as if I have few personal accomplishments because I get so bored with things that I move on before I ever learn any kind of skill. I am a mess. Now, i'm not saying that I'm special here, I honestly don't know how we as humans can go on existing. I wonder how we do it. What do you do when you feel like you're unraveling? How do you cinch up the lose ends before it's too late?

The most frustrating thing is the seemingly simple answer to the question: How do I bridge the gap from wanting to (or knowing I should) do something an actually doing it? The answer of course is to just do it. Simple. Nothing worth analyzing. The big question then is this: Why is it so bloody hard?

Gah. I'm being kind of angsty, aren't I?

Let's go for a walk

This is the first Saturday in weeks that I haven't had to go in to work. I worked really hard at the beginning of the week on the holiday while everyone else was out having fun and I successfully made all my hours in two days. So today I relax. I clean my house and go to the store and do my laundry. I read and watch movies and do something artistic.

I'll be walking to the store. I've been thinking about walking a lot lately while still not actually doing much of it. I know that my lazy lifestyle is not healthy for me or the environment, but having a car makes life so much easier. Except my car has only made my life so much more difficult, and I'm anxious to not have to rely on a car ever again. At least not this one. I realized this yesterday as I was walking towards my car after work and my heart started racing and I got a terrible sick feeling. "What if it doesn't start? What if it stalls in the middle of an intersection? What if it blows up?" I'm scared of driving. I'm not scared of getting into an accident; I'm actually scared of my own car. I learned this fall that a car can turn on you, that you could be innocently standing by when the radiator decides to blow up in your face. It wasn't my car that did that, but it still has made me kind of skittish.

I have a bus pass and I will start to use it regularly. It's winter and it's cold, but I don't mind walking in it. People use public transportation. People walk. Why can't I? Because I am lazy, that's why. I figure, however, that laziness will not get my anywhere this summer when I'm backpacking through Europe and that if I don't want to be in pain and miserable during that time I should just get used to walking.