this is a little bit of a pity-party, to warn you in advance – i’m sorry, i’m just really sad and i’m crying my eyes out and it won’t stop and this is the only thing that i think will make me feel better.
i suck. i just got home and found an email from my professor in my inbox. he’s cancelled the workshop tomorrow because he hadn’t heard from me. i’m so disappointed in myself. what happened to me this year? i’m not doing what i thought i was going to do. i am the only one accountable to myself, and i’m doing nothing. the old bee, the one i remember and liked, is gone. last year i never missed a deadline, or a class. this year that’s all i seem to do. i’m broke and i’m scared and i’m lonely…everyone i know is too busy with their own lives. it’s as it should be, in that regard.

tonight at the concert, i went to the bathroom at one point and caught a glimpse of my teeth in the mirror. growing up, my mother always used to tell me that my teeth were too yellow; my dad used to pay for the bleaching treatments. mom used to ask me why i laughed differently all the time – she thought that all my different laughter was faked somehow. during the first years that i was a teenager she criticized every photo i smiled in – she thought it looked weird.
when i brought home a 96% on a test, she (half-jokingly) asked where the other 4% had gone.
i slouched too much, i walked with my head down.
i talked back too much – why can’t you be more like your sister? why must you be so hateful?
she never taught me to cook her special recipes because i was too messy in the kitchen. she hated that i got flour everywhere.  

i say this not to smear the memory of someone who is almost 10 years dead, but because field was driving me home from the concert tonight while i was having an internal FREAK OUT about the story, and he said, ‘has it ever occurred to you that you’re not allowing yourself to succeed because you automatically think you’re a failure?” (my paraphrasing).

of course i’ve thought about that. that’s all i think about and that’s a large part of what i beat myself up over, ironically: why can’t you be more easy on yourself? i’ve heard of the secret, i know about the power of creative visualization, but i can’t figure out how to beat the cycle that was entrenched into me since birth. the cycle where i’m always not good enough (at school, at my job, at my friendships, at my lovelife – i’m failing at that, i’m failing at that, i’m failing at that, and i failed at that), not pretty enough (my short hair unfeminizes me – i disappear more, which is both a good thing and a bad thing, my stomach’s gaining weight, i have more pimples now than i did when i was going through puberty), not smart enough (i always stammer or get too passionate about something or don’t have enough research to back up my point), not organized enough….not enough.

i’ve had three separate women come up to me crying in the past year, to tell me how sorry they were that my mother was so hard on me.
you two were so similar, they said, she didn’t want you to make the same mistakes she did.

i’ll tell you, it’s difficult having an argument with someone who is dead.

it occurred to me tonight that i was born to perfectionist parents and socialized to be one, and then cut loose traumatically when one died. after that, any attempts at family i had were laughable – my stepfather called the police on me once, because he was sure i had enabled some hippies to break into the house; my stepbrother didn’t remember the date i was born, so he scheduled his wedding for the same day; my dad told us if he had his life to live over again he wouldn’t have had kids, and moved to costa rica.
from there i drifted from partnership to couch to partnership to couch to alcohol abuse – i never addressed these issues, i only ran, and tried to hide in someone, in something. i was doing some work, seeing a therapist intermittently and going on meds for a while and trying constantly to get healthy in the hopes that drastic diet changes would help stabilize me…but i have no idea, still, how to retrain my thoughts.

i0 spent a lot of time in my early twenties’ helping other people to achieve their dreams – so much so that when i finally turned 25 and started to get a sense of restlessness that i finally identified as, oh yeah, you forgot about YOU, i had no idea how to focus on myself – so i wanted to be a writer. how does one do that? school seemed like the answer – i had always given myself a hard time for never finishing (and i was HELL on my ex about his never finishing), so i moved here, and my demons, they snuck into the packing boxes.

i believe i have lost control of my academic year. i need help. if i screw up, there is no masters’ for me. and that’s what i want.

actually, i’m lying. i’m lonely, too. still/again/constantly. i miss being touched. i miss being held. i miss the peace of having someone i love crawling into bed beside me when they’re done with their day.

i keep getting offers of cuddles, but they haven’t worked out as of yet. that’s i think what i really need, a loooooong one.