I CAN'T TELL YOU WHAT IT REALLY IS...

I can only tell you what it feels like, and right now there's a steel knife in my windpipe. I can't breathe.

If those words sound familiar it is because I borrowed them. Or stole them. Or copied them. Maybe I plagiarized them. I don't know. Ask Purple Cow. She wrote a blog all about this and seems to have a handle on it. I want to get back to the topic at hand. Oh yeah, I borrowed them from Marshall Mathers. It is the opener from his song I LOVE THE WAY YOU LIE. Which is about abuse. Well that is appropriate for this blog. Moving on...

I wrote this blog on Wednesday. It was about my first day of school at Wilson Junior High School. I also wrote this blog a while back to help you gain some understanding, if you want further understanding, of all the things spiralling out in my life and making me feel like crap back then.


I have spent two days trying to get a handle on why my junior high school experience was worse than other people's experience. I have decided that it was not worse than everyone's experience, obviously. Wilson was just the worst junior high school in my town. There were two other junior high schools that didn't spit out kids who felt like they walked through a war zone. Why? All of those kids were, more or less, living at the same socio-economic level. In other words, they were more the same than they were different. It was only at Wilson that they took kids from the bottom of the food chain and kids from the top and threw them together. It was like expecting community fish and piranhas to live in harmony. Ha.

I think I mentioned that I wrote several blogs about junior high on facebook and got this unexpected backlash of comments and emails. It turns out that it was torturous for everyone that went to Wilson. The kids from Lincoln and Roosevelt were like, "Whatever. It kinda sucked." The Wilson kids aka adults read that, got drunk, and sent me crying emails. So, no, this horrible, miserable, three years were not just mine. The pain was spread around. However, I can't own other people's pain, and I don't know how it affected their futures. I can only speak for me.

So, Robin, what did Wilson do to you?


1) It gave me a certainty that I would never be enough. I would never have enough. I would never be able to keep up. Even if I saved and saved for the right brand of jeans to fit in, as soon as I bought them, they would go out, and I would be wrong again. Or they wouldn't matter because my shirt would be all wrong. Or my shoes. Or my coat. Or my hairstyle. It didn't really matter, because there was nothing I could do to ever be enough. I was all wrong and I couldn't change it, fix it, or accept it.

2) As a non-person at Wilson, that also makes you unpretty. Your wrong clothes with your wrong haircut combined with the glasses you have to wear... that all adds up to unpretty. Even when you get contacts, the unpretty feeling remains. Once unpretty, always unpretty.


3) You are not good at anything athletic. This is because you are small and unpopular. You are unpopular because of #1 and #2. You are small because you are small boned and naturally a small person. The super athletes at this school are not going to give you a chance to see if you can play any actual sports. Instead, they will knock you down to get to the ball. You get knocked down enough times, you are smart enough to step aside and let them play your position and theirs. The gym teacher never once calls them out for this behavior, because he thinks that you can't play sports either. This is confirmed by being picked at the end or near the end for teams. In the beginning, there was this thought that ran in my head, "If they only knew I am a gymnast and I can out play their ass if they would let me." That thought lasted until I picked myself up off the ground the fourth or fifth time. Then it became, "I suck at sports." Don't ask me to play sports, because I really do suck at sports now. I hate effin sports.

4) Fear. I learned all about fear at Wilson. Unfortunately, I didn't learn what to do with it. I worked on my invisibility skills without a lot of success. There was this one girl who I thought was just bullying me. Turns out it was her mission to terrorize as many people as possible. (That was one of the things I found out on facebook.) It was daily. Pokes and jabs. Small things. The irony is that I never saw them coming until they hit their mark. How do some people do that? Her best ones were always when I thought she would overlook me that day. Or when I thought I was in a safe zone like class.



We were in Home Ec. In hindsight, I should have taken Shop. Careerwise, it would have served me better. It was the cooking day. We had made our Whatever. It was all up at the front and there was a line. I already had mine and was sitting at my table. Kellie (yeah that's her real name), my tormentor, was walking back to her table with food and drink and decided to stop right behind me. Not good news. I only knew she was there because she started talking to me. She was holding her cup of red juice over my head. She says, "I could pour this whole cup of juice over your head and nobody would care." She gives that a long pause to let it sink in. The nobody would care part and the fact that she's contemplating such an act. The cup is still dangling over my head. "You're no one in this school." She let that sink in. Cup still dangling. "I could say I slipped. No one would question me." Finally someone came back to my table and she moved on. She and her cup of red juice. And I said nothing. Not to her. Not to anyone at my table. Maybe not to anyone. Well, probably to my neighbor, Robin, who got to hear about each and every horror that I lived through at Wilson. Not sure anyone else. Well, all of you who are reading this.

It probably wasn't long after that I read THE OUTSIDERS and it changed everything for me. And I wrote about that in this blog. Matter of fact, on my trip to the library today I checked out that book again. I haven't read it since I was a teenager and I wanted to see if it would read the same now. Probably not quite.


Wilson. The place I lost my voice. The place that a whole lot of people needed to be told to fuck off (pardon my language, but there really is no nice way to say it). I wish that I had seen PRETTY IN PINK sooner. Of course, that was impossible, because it hadn't been made yet. However, there was my answer to problem #1. If you can't keep with The Jones's you don't try. You think about this problem and decide on YOUR STYLE and then you create it. It might mean you spend some time in Goodwill and places like that, but you get creative.

My point is this: I thought I kicked that negative tape loop when I went to high school, because I loved high school, and I have an awesome Kellie story (later gators). BUT... somewhere in my head that tape loop is still running. Or it was. Or it can. When I feel under pressure or something makes me feel like I am back at Wilson for some reason, that switch gets flipped. I need to burn that tape once and for all.


and before I make any more copyright infringment mistakes....
all images found at www.weheartit.com

I'M NOT AFRAID

A couple of days ago I won a contest! Yes, you heard that correctly. I entered a contest on Yenta's Mary's page (the Food Floozie) and won this dish.

Isn't it precious? It is in the mail as I type. I am very much looking forward to its arrival.

I made the rounds of blog reading and happened upon something disconcerting at Java's blog (Never Growing Old). Apparently she got a comment from a brand new blogger that her page had too much distracting stuff on it, and they were not coming back as a result. Java was, at first, offended, and then wondered if this person had a point. She received many encouraging comments that her blog was fine. However, it caused me to ponder my own. One of the points that Java brought up was the length of a blog. Apparently, if your blog takes longer than five minutes to read it is too long. Woah. No wonder it is taking me so much time to pick up followers....

Then there was this video that Misery posted a little more than a week ago on her page. I hate hip hop music. Actually, hate just isn't strong enough to indicate how I feel about hip hop music. I don't like Eminem AT ALL. However, since I post a lot of youtube footage I tend to watch other people's youtube footage. It seems only fair. I watched this video twice on her page, and three times on youtube since. I am reading your blogs and it keeps striking a chord. I think about the oil in the gulf and I think of this song. I think about lost keys, feel overwhelmed, and I think of this song. I think about the people we love dying and I think of this song. I think about life being a marathon, not a sprint, and I think of this song. Now, you're thinking I should have saved it for tomorrow. You're probably right because my footage for Thursday is lousy. (Write more peeps.)

I know what he's talking about in this song. However, life is messy. And there are a lot of situations that need "cleaning up." If Eminem can MAN UP, then I think it is high time that some other people do it, too. Yeah, that is directed at all of you high powered yo-yos wanting a bailout. At BP for not getting the job done. At Mr. President for not jumping in sooner and putting your foot in some oilman a**. And the list goes on.

Don't misunderstand me... I am not lumping my blogwriting friends in with BP and President Obama. I think of my blog writing friends because they, too, are not afraid. I think of the others because they aren't manning up. They are on opposite sides of the same coin ~ worlds apart.

Don't forget to turn off my music player at the bottom of the page.

By the way, I freaking love this song and video. Now I totally have to rethink Eminem.

THREE IN A ROW

This may seem unremarkable, and very sad, but today will mark the third day in a row that I actually leave the house (by car) if I go to Allstate later and pay my premium per my plan. For those of you who know me are probably experiencing some form of shock. Yes, I have become a recluse.


Day one was my trip to see my doctor. That really wasn't a great day. However, I did leave the house and so it counts. My driving skills are beginning to frighten me. Actually it isn't so much the driving but the remembering. And that has been frightening me for a long time. It was really bad when I lived here and was working. I'd be in my territory and forget how to get to an account I'd been to a million times. Then I'd have an anxiety attack while I was driving because I couldn't remember how to get where I was going and I knew I should. I got lost going to my doctor's office. Not lost, lost. Just wrong turn lost. I got found again. It didn't give me an anxiety attack; it just made me mad.


On day two I remembered the rest of what Debbie Strait said about filing for disabilitity... all of the work involved. I spent most of the day drowning out her voice by playing on facebook and writing a nice blog about my dog. I wanted to think about ANYTHING else. My mom had made plans to have dinner over at my aunt's house. My mom cooked dinner and took it over because my aunt had a biopsy done yesterday and she knew that she wouldn't feel like cooking. All prayers for her are appreciated:-)


I was still writing my Shelby blog and wasn't quite ready to go and drove separately since they only live a mile and a half away. I don't know what it is about the car but someday someone is going to name a band Drivin' and Thinkin' because that is invariably what happens when I get in there. Dontcha know I got lost going to my aunt's house since I was so lost in thought! Not really lost but I had to turn around and figure out where the heck I was. Anyway, I will explain my vision flashes because that's what they were for me: flashes. You get the long version.


Back in December 2005 I was divorced but very sick and my parents had already moved to FL. At Christmas they came to me because there was no chance of it being the other way around. The look on my mother's face when she walked into my house was priceless. My house was a disaster. It was paper everywhere. I hadn't eaten in my dining room since Rob and the kids moved out. I had stacks of mail all over the table, all around the floor surrounding the table, it had creeped into the living room, smaller stacks were in the kitchen, den, office, etc. My mother is super-organized. She couldn't believe what she was seeing. She spent the rest of that trip trying to find my bills. I got 2-3 pieces of work mail daily, junk mail, and bills all mixed together. She had her work cut out for her.

I learned later in Divorce Recovery Group that hiding your mail like that is a subconscious coping method that people use when they know that they aren't making enough money to pay their bills. How true that was. I can't tell you many times my lights, water, etc, were cut off and I had to call my dad saying, "Help, I'm in the dark/without water, etc."


Overlay all of that with Debbie's voice telling me I needed to be super-organized to get SSD because the government is one big red tape machine that only cares about facts. It wants facts. What meds did you take for how long, etc. Holy crap. This all started back in 2001. I'm writing down when I take my pain pills because I can't remember so I don't overdose myself. I can't even remember my neurologist's name from back in 2003! Fear is the great immobilizer. I could feel myself spiraling down and that is how I missed my aunt's house.

Earlier today, I read a blog I've been following (A DELIBERATE LIFE). For right now, you will have to go to my profile and look at blogs I follow until I can figure out how to move what I want onto my main page (eeks!). She is waging her own war on her weight and she has been winning *yeah* until she hit her own roadblock. She used a chicken coop metaphor that I won't ruin for you. The thing is this: we all reach a place where we have to make a decision of which fear is greater. Hers has to do with her weight and her history. Mine has to do with wading through a lot bureaucratic medical bullcrap that will take time, money (I am going to have to go back to each doctor/hospital for a history and some will charge for this stuff by the page), and it will be migraine-causing, BUT I will have the information that I need or I can do nothing and continue to cause my parents to suffer and still have a migraine. It's always a no-brainer in the end. You just have to kick down that wall of fear to see it.


As for me, I have to try and find some visually interesting pictures for you and then I have a car insurance payment to make. I hope I find the Allstate office....