Saturday, June 27, 2009

Where Everybody Knows I'm Cool

"I'm sick of summer and this waiting around.
Man, it's September and I'm skipping this town.
Hey, it's no mystery;
there's nothing her for me now!"

It's that kind of day.

I've been pondering that little, secret knowledge that we all have, that secret fear that the people around us who claim to like us couldn't possibly if they actually knew all of us, the good parts and those ugly, dark shadows that lurk deep in the locked boudoir of our souls.

Deep down, everyone just knows that the dark parts are our True Selves, that if anyone glimpsed those bits they'd run screaming. We can never fully open our insides because we are all certain that our insides are ugly, twisted monsters, whereas everyone else is lined with lovely pink satin. We can't get too close to anyone because we're afraid that they'll See us on accident.

I remember making a comment to a boy I was seeing, and realizing in the split second afterward that I had revealed too much of my hand too soon. I scrambled to close up again, but even if it worked for him I couldn't escape what I was sure had happened myself and this fear that he had seen too much of me too close and too fast grew until the only way to recover myself was to cut my losses.

But why should I have recovered myself at all? What was to recover? The great illusion of this True Selves thing is that idea that we are the only people who are ugly on the inside and, even more so, that we are hiding it at all. We feel like the one monster walking disguised among humans and we believe that if we can keep it up long enough someday it will be true and we really will deserve everything we want. We don't try as hard as we should; we don't go for what we really want; we stay with the people who hurt us because deep, deep down inside of us we know that we don't deserve any better, that we're not as good as everyone else, that the reason we are unhappy is because we don't deserve to be happy.

But the truth is that the parts we think we're hiding, the parts that want more than they should and hate anyone else to have nice things if we can't, the parts that get jealous of our friends' successes and cheer at their failures, the parts that are spiteful and cruel, the parts that come out late at night when you've had too much red wine and feel like calling your ex-boyfriend, again; these things are in everyone, and none of us are hiding them very well. The people who really, truly love you can see it all, and they love you just the same, and the parts of you that aren't ugly, the goodness in you and the imagination and love, those things are just as you as the ugly bits. It's just hard to see them sometimes when you're focusing too hard on the shadows.

And that's the word.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Just a typical day in my life...

Mom: (Running around to get her stuff together for school) I left a cookie lying around here somewhere but now I don't know where it is... so if you see a cookie...
Me: Okay.
Mom: (Spots something) AHA! I found it, nevermind.
Dad: MY COOKIE!
Mom: (With cookie in her mouth) COOKIE!
Me: ...Ohmygod.
Mom: (Her mouth still full of cookie as she leaves) The future is BLEAK!

It is 11:40 and I have been awake for 7 hours.