The Scrolls

Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

I’m Okay. You’re Okay. Etc.

Father’s Day has been over for a few hours. I suppose I could feel relieved but I don’t, not really. Lately, not having a father has weighed on me more heavily than it has in the past. Certainly, as Father’s Day looms in the horizon and the commercials are all about loving fatherly relationships and the gifts that show your thanks, I have time to wonder what it would be like if I had ever had the opportunity to celebrate Father’s Day and if I ever will. Will there be a day when I have children of my own and I craft presents from infants to a man that I love? As they grow will we create home-made gifts together?

I can’t blame the people I love for taking their dads for granted because it should be something that you can take for granted. No one should be missing something so critical to development, to happiness, to life. Yet, here I am, lacking a father and more-or-less okay without one. It perhaps took some extra hard work on my part and I fight my tendencies to be sexist (after all, I could easily say that almost every male I have ever trusted has hurt me somehow) on a daily basis but I make the effort and I come out on top in spite of it.

Perhaps that’s all there is to it. To survive this, I control myself because I certainly can’t tell people to stop having fathers or companies to stop posting Father’s Day commercials. Some things just are what they are and, in the meantime, I’m okay.

Mirror Images

Once upon a time, I would avoid the mirror. I’d run past, especially if I were naked. I’d force my gaze to stray from the areas I didn’t like. There wasn’t much that I did like. And it wasn’t just the morning routine that was disturbed by my self loathing. It was detrimental to my relationships. My self-consciousness infiltrated every area of my life in a way that others probably didn’t understand and maybe you can’t also understand unless you’ve been there, too.

Lately, as I’ve watched the pounds slowly melt off, as I’ve put on pants that I couldn’t wear for years, as I’ve shopped for clothes that actually fit, as I’ve found styles that accent my curves, I’ve been less reluctant to face what the mirror has to show me. I started with small steps. I allowed forced myself to view a little at a time, then a little more. Now I can stand in front of the mirror in full. I suppose I have desensitized myself to the images that I had convinced myself were so vile before.

Now I see me in the mirror, every day, as I apply lotion. I see my skin, my hair. I see my shape, I see my scars, my marks, my blemishes. I don’t love it all but I don’t hate it, either, and that’s the accomplishment. I don’t flinch or run away. I am more or less at peace and, yes, sometimes even happy with what I see, with parts that I used to hate.

The difference plays out in my life. I walk taller, shoulders back with my chin up. I spend more time beautifying myself. I laugh more. I am less self conscious in public, which makes me less uptight in general. I am more open because I am not trying to hide myself for fear that someone may realize that I am not an attractive person or, rather, that I don’t find myself attractive.

All this confidence only pushes me to do more because I can see it, in those mirror images, that I am almost where I want to be.

Sorry

Well, not to you, dear reader. “Sorry” to the folks who might want to purchase advertising on this here site. You see, I won’t do it. It’s that simple. I have in the past put up one or two paid blog posts and I felt awful about it, even when paid blogging was my only source of income. Now that I have other income, I have absolutely no need to sell any sort of advertising on this site. I do some of that on Reviews by Cole. Really, advertising and paid blogging were a heavy focus of the blog. It has since shifted, ever so slightly, toward sponsored reviews and giveaways but the focus of this site, of this blog, has always been personal.

I come here to tell you how I feel, what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, where I’m at with life. Perhaps I have no one else to talk to, perhaps I just need to get something out. I put that here. It’s not always happy, it’s not always deep and it may not interest everyone but it’s always me. And you come here, hopefully, to connect with me not necessarily because of the content of the site but because of who is bringing you that content. As the official content bring (TM) of Her Realm, I just don’t feel like selling advertising will ever connect me with my readers, even if it gives me extra spending money, even if the advertising would be subtle and will be customized to fit my blog.

If you’re looking at this site and wondering if you might place a link, you can head to my other blog or someone else’s entirely. There are many bloggers who are selling advertising next to their life stories and more power to them. It’s just not my thing. Sorry (but not really).

P.S. If I tell you “No” and you persist, you’re a fucking douchebag.

Lazy Day

I intended for today to be a lazy, do-nothin’ type of day. Yet, somehow, I feel accomplished. The plan was to stay in my pajamas for the few hours I’d be awake, do a little writing, catch a snack and go back to bed. While I still plan to hit the hay sooner than later (let me fill you in on a secret: it was already dark when I woke up today!), I feel as though I’ve already finished so much.

As I type this, I am winding down and watching a movie: The Nightmare Before Christmas (I’ve finally opened my collector’s edition–it’s only been over a year!). I wrote, rooted my phone, edited some final settings after my second Windows reinstall, put away laundry, showered and shaved and even cleaned the toilet. Combined with the cleaning I did this morning, I am some sort of awesome get-er-done robot. With boobs.

Perhaps I feel accomplished because I set out to do nothing and did anything at all. Regardless, it feels good and anxiety is low.

I Want a Kite

I’ve never gone kite flying so I decided that this would be the year. I will buy a fancy kite or a kite that strikes my fancy and head to park on a windy day and try–or fail–to fly a kite. It doesn’t matter. Meaning is in the journey and all that. So here I am browsing the Internet for kites, figuring I’d find some pretty diamond one but, no, they all blow my damned mind!

I don’t hate it.

I used to hate a lot of things. Or, at least, dislike many things. I used to look for the negative and find it quite easily. Let’s face it, finding the negative is almost always easier. It’s easy to look at the world with harsh eyes. But lately I’ve found myself using the phrase “I don’t hate it.” For instance, I bought this perfume and it was only $4 and even though it’s kind of weird and doesn’t last long, I don’t hate it. Success. In fact, I may have uttered a variation of that to Robyn when we were shopping.

I don’t hate it and nothing is permanent and that is good enough. Good enough? Who ever would have thought that the girl who likes things the way she likes them would ever settle for “good enough?” It’s not all of the time, I still have progress to make, but I have made progress and I have made it so well that I haven’t even realized it. I’m not straining everyday to be positive. Sometimes, I don’t need to even think about being positive; I just do it. Sometimes I accept that “I don’t hate it” is okay, that I don’t need to say “I love it” about everything.

Nevertheless, being relaxed is still a struggle most days. My anxiety and tendency to thinkthinkthink is ever-present. I sometimes slip back into my old habits and focus on how much more I need to improve instead of congratulating myself for the improvements I have made. It’s these sudden realizations of what I am doing or haven’t been doing that seem to boost my confidence and, as a result, ease my anxiety the most.

One thing that I have recently come to accept is that, no matter how much progress I do make, no matter how much I change the way I think, my anxiety is something that I will never be able to fully eliminate. It is something that I can manage but it is something that will always be there if I continue to go the non-medicinal route (and, to be honest, may still exist even if I do choose to go that route). I will never get a full reprieve from my anxiety but accepting that fact means I have far less anxiety about my anxiety (meta-anxiety?).

Less anxiety, in turn, means less insomnia. Or so I hope. It’s been ridiculously difficult lately. Luckily, I’ve stumbled across a few different apps for the Android and iPod that offer some sleep solutions. In fact, I used one last night that was terrific!

Passion

When asked what I was passionate about, I found it hard to answer and what I did come up with didn’t seem significant enough. The truth is, however, I am passionate about people and things that affect them: freedom and opportunity, tragedies–both natural and man-made, the every day things and the once in a lifetime chances. I think it would be appropriate to be compassionate and I could not tell you that I try because, the truth is, I try not to be sometimes. It’s all to easy for me to get swept up in despair because I cannot possibly help everyone or even know where to start.

To help alleviate this despair, I decided that I would stick to what I’m good at. Every day, I would make my loved ones smile and laugh and feel good about themselves and, in my head, these ripples of goodness slowly spread outward and perhaps, just maybe, touch every corner of the world. Nevermind that it’s a sphere.

And maybe along the way I will discover some way that I can contribute in more “significant” ways because I know that saying “I make people laugh” doesn’t exactly sound like ground breaking life’s worth. But don’t let me undercut what I do because I am damned good at it and if I died today, the people I loved would be sad because there life was better for having me in it, for having me to make them laugh.

And that is awesome.

Yet, sometimes, the reality for those who I can’t make laugh hits me like a ton of bricks. And I get angry. Or sad. Or a hysterical combination of both. Because I care. Because I am passionate about people in general, despite my sarcastic and biting sense of humor that may indicate otherwise. That is how I felt when I stumbled across the following:

There is a country where the leading cause of death of pregnant women is murder by a partner. In this same country, more than a million women were raped in 2008 and women are much more likely to live in poverty than men. Local laws don’t protect their right to bodily freedom and integrity; some rape laws even state that once a woman initially consents to sex, she doesn’t have the right to change her mind.

You may have caught on by now — yes, I’m talking about the United States.

- Jessica Valenti

average life span of a transgendered person is twenty-three years. The statistic is shocking, until it begins to make sense. Gender non-conformists face routine exclusion and violence. Transgendered people are disproportionately poor, homeless, and incarcerated. Many of the systems and facilities intended to help low-income people are sex-segregated and thereby alienate those who don’t comply with state-imposed categories. A trans woman may not be able to secure a bed in a homeless shelter, for example. Spade writes that just as the feminist movement tended to “focus on gender-universalized white women’s experience as ‘women’s experience,’” the lesbian- and gay-rights movement has focused primarily on a white, middle-class politic, centered on marriage and mainstream social mores.

— Meaghan Winter for Guernica

The good news is, there is good news.

Google has stepped up and created a Person Finder page for those who may be missing in Japan. I personally clicked over and stumbled across an entry for someone looking for information about someone in Misawa. I left a little blurb to inform the poster than Misawa AB has reported no deaths or serious injuries. It’s really hard for me to read about what is going on over there right now. It just hits.. a little too close to home but I hope that I have helped.

And despite the political turn that has occurred, people like you and me are stepping up to help others. Like this Tumblr user who want to give rides to women in Virginia who require an abortion but must now travel out of state for the service. Or this user who says (and I paraphrase) “You know what? Abortion isn’t for me but I respect the life of the living as well as the yet-to-live.”

Pro-choice is not pro-abortion. Pro-choice is often far more pro-life than “pro-life” is. I can’t say I’ve ever met anyone who thinks abortion is just fantastic or the new perfect birth control, that’s not how it goes. If you really want a lower abortion rate, put your time and effort into education and health care (you know, programs like Planned Parenthood). No one has any right to tell a woman what to do with her body or anything that’s growing inside of it. No one has any right to put women in danger for a group of cells, especially a group of cells they will later ignore and expect to fend for itself.

– SkyWritingg on Tumblr

Also, this guy is awesome: