taken from my blog, The Blathering Broad
Yesterday, I had a woman looking to buy some food, interested in the sandwiches we serve. Once she settled on her choice, she looked around her before leaning to tell me,"Okay, this may be weird, but I have OCD." I immediately said,"No, it's all good! I do, too!" Her eyes brightened. "Really?! I could hug you right now. Most people think I'm crazy!" For her comfort, I took care of everything, washing my hands several times between glove changes. She was very very grateful, stuck around for a few more hours, and came back for more food. It made me sad that this poor woman felt that she'd be perceived as "crazy" because she has OCD. Goodness, I hate how stigmatized mental illness is. In the years since writing my post, things i'm afraid to tell you, i've become even more open in discussing my condition in the hopes that it'll allow others to feel less alone.
Personally, I've always felt alone and choose to isolate myself with those feelings of despair and anxiety come around. If I'm around others, I feel like a bummer or a burden if I talk about what is bothering me. When I'm deep in a funk, I'm all alone. It's my own personal hell. To quote Arcade Fire,"My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love, but my mind holds the key." I interpret that as I'm in my own personal mental hell, but the key is within me to fix it. I fix those feelings by reaching out to others so they feel less alone, as well as I will feel less alone. Whenever I discover something like a friend with severe anxiety or someone struggling with self-harm, I always let them tell me their stories, as well as share my own. To know that you're not the only one struggling makes a huge difference. Just remember: everybody's trying.
be more open
fourteen years ago
Fourteen years ago, I was a seventh grader at Samuel Morse Middle School for the Gifted & Talented. My cousin had her first baby, a little boy she named Izaiah. I wore fat pants, chokers, listened to Limp Bizkit, Incubus, and Linkin Park. I was a pop-punk emo kid. The morning of September 11th, 2001, I remember my aunt screaming and crying as she got ready for work in her bedroom nearby. I didn't quite understand what was going on. I recall her mentioning something about airplanes hitting buildings in New York and how we needed to call my grandma. I am now aware where my grandma lives in relation to the towers. At the time, though, I had no clue. Whenever the subject of my paternal grandmother living in New York came up with peers, I always decided which sounded more badass- Bronx or Brooklyn? Well, my grandma lives in Manhattan, in East Harlem. I know that now, but New York was too complicated for my thirteen year old brain, having not visited for five years. There was no time to call that morning (I doubt it would have gone through anyway) so we decided to call when I got home from school. I walked to the bus stop, and thought things would be normal.
I don't recall any other class than my algebra class. Advanced math nerd that I was, me and a few other smarty pants seventh graders were taught with eighth graders the wonders of algebra. There would be no algebra that day, though, much to my not-homework-doing delight. Instead, we sat and listened to our teacher's clock radio as the news was somberly played for forty-five minutes.
"I heard it was the Ay-rabs!"
"I heard it was the Puerto Ricans!"
"Shut up! Puerto Rico is a US Territory, idiot!"
So many stupid things shouted by thirteen and twelve year olds not really sure what was happening. My brother was at the high school I'd be attending in two years. He told me that the teacher who ended up becoming my English teacher senior year ran into his Spanish class screaming,"We're all going to die!" Now that I know her, I can see it clearly in my mind. My best friend's sister was in her Italian class where they turned on the TV to watch the horror unfold, rather than studying vocabulary or whatever was on the agenda for the day. I remember moving through the rest of the day as though I were floating. I don't remember anything else about school that day. I was there, but my mind kept turning to the things I was hearing. What was going on in the world outside this building?
When I got home, 24 hours news monster was already spewing images that haunt me to this day. It took some time for my brain to comprehend that the things falling from the burning buildings were people jumping. I cried and wailed uncontrollably. I stuffed a pillow in my mouth so no one else could hear something was wrong, but everyone else was upstairs with the baby. I was alone to deal with these images. For weeks, it was all I could see in my mind when I closed my eyes. I couldn't understand why. Why did this happen? Why did those people have to die? Why did they jump? Was taking matters into their own hands better than waiting for whatever fate had in store for them?
That day always plays in my head when the anniversary comes around. We were able to get ahold of my grandma the next morning. I talked to her briefly before school, said,"Bendición," and "I love you," as if those words were enough to alleviate this strangeness we all felt. We were able to reconnect with someone we loved, but what about the thousands who never can? And the lives of innocents who didn't ask to be in a war zone? What about those whose voices we'll never hear again? What about them?
on friendships, old and new
Friendships are weird, especially those established during adolescents. It’s a murky time where we change who we are and what we believe in almost as often as we change our underwear. We want to be cool, we don’t want to conform. We want to try everything and have everyone as our friend, but we also want a little tight-knit group. We don’t really know what we want and will only find out by trying every. Little. Thing. That’s okay. That’s how we find who we are, those of us who haven’t had it established from the day they set foot inside their pre-school. That’s most people, I feel. But then, you can be made out to be a poser or a fake just because your tastes “changed,” but you actually do still listen to Band X, you just like the older stuff ~snicker snicker~ Eventually, though, you will fall into your group.
And that group is amazing, or even, multiple groups. That’s right, some friendships never come together, but you can have multiple groups of people whose company you enjoy. It is possible to find, grow, and maintain a relationship such as friendship over a long period of time, even through adolescents. I feel those that can grow with you and see you through the truly difficult moments as we are growing into adults are the strongest friendships. Those have not only stood the test of time, but the test of hardship, and naturally, tests of quarreling. The other groups can form in other ways, whether through familial connections (a cousin of a cousin of a cousin) or work connections, there are other small groups formed. Those can be just as loving as the first group, but it’s always the first group that takes priority over the others simply due to time. Time spent laughing, loving, crying, learning, growing. It’s those friendships that make those awkward adolescent moments bearable, in retrospect.
heaven's to betsy
It's silly, right? To be this broken up about a car? You have to understand some things, though. Most importantly, I grew as a driver in this car. My first and only accident occurred in this car. I have spent many nights chatting and flirting in this car. For a while, I had my own car, a Cavalier that was such a hazard to drive, but I loved it. It was something all mine. Once my mom got herself a car, we'd no longer have to share Betsy. She'd be all mine. But then the axle broke, other things were corroded, or falling apart, and she just wasn't worth saving, I guess. She'd never fully be mine. Just like that, it felt as though I was stripped of my freedom. For a while, I'll have to rely on others for transportation, and it gives me anxiety, waiting around for who knows what to happen.
I feel as though when things are looking up, the universe has to shake things up for me a little bit. Car first, apartment next. It's as though the restart button was pushed on the gaming console before you could get to a save checkpoint, but y'know, real life things. Now back to waiting to find and save for a car again, pushing my move out date to next year. Goodbye, more freedoms. I want a cat companion. I want to be able to spread out my possessions, rather than cramming everything into one little bedroom. I want things to call my own so I can feel like I have accomplished something, anything.
how it began and evolved
I wrote creatively for the first time when I was six year old. I was in the first grade. We kept journals made from brightly colored construction paper and newsprint paper, folded in half, and stapled at the crease. I recall it was something about a rainbow and a unicorn, but the teachers were impressed that a first grader could rhyme, I guess? They published it in the school newsletter, which I thought was weird, and still do. I didn't write much more until the fifth grade when I began to write what I learned years later had a name- fanfiction. I continued to do a lot of that throughout middle school, and even ventured into creating my own characters, rather than others developed by more experienced writers. In middle school, I also began to dabble with poetry. I became obsessed with poetry until I was about fifteen. From then on, I wrote sporadically. Mostly poetry, but of course, once a year, I would attempt National Novel Writing Month. In college, I took an introduction to creative writing class, which stretched my creative mind back to writing habitually again.
I've started to read personal essays within the last four years of my life. I find them fascinating, how people can turn the mundane into something poetic and could be mistaken for fiction. My obsession with the HBO show, GIRLS, amplified my want to dabble in personal essay writing. My photographs and I had also been picked (but since been dropped, at least the photo aspect to keep the things strictly prose) to participate in an online literary zine called The Inner Condition. I've since become a little bit more comfortable sharing my words with few so if you stumble upon this and enjoy the words, cool. If not, cool, too. I'm here to keep track of how I continue to evolve.