Media Slayer

The creation date for this journal entry is March 28, 2009, but I may have written it earlier than that. What’s pathetic is, four years later, after all my life experiences and college and meeting so many different, new people and having undergone at least two massive paradigm shifts, this hasn’t changed. I’m still struggling to grasp and handle my own uniqueness and creativity. If I’ve got any worth spending my time on.

Part of me enjoys taking care of my child so much because I don’t have to think about myself. I just have to focus on his well-being and making sure he’s happy and thriving. My self-doubts don’t matter or get a chance to creep into my cognition.

“What is my medium?

I can’t seem to find any one that suits me.

I’m not excellent at any one thing.

Only good at some.

Only mediocre at others.

Very bad at so many more.

I hate to see people and read their blogs and look at their art and watch videos and fall in love with them, knowing that I can never get to know them, for all their creativity and beauty. And I hate that I can’t respect those around me that I am close to. And I hate that I am so far out of touch with myself that I don’t know who I am.”

Most people don’t know that I pull my hair. I didn’t know it either until a boyfriend pointed it out to me a few years ago. But now my husband is telling me that I’m getting a few, small bald spots. I have a bit of a “grooming” problem. This is me, telling you what you would be feeling and thinking and doing if you were me while I pull my hair.

Please excuse all the grammar and syntax errors. I tried to write while in the middle of actually doing it.

“It’s such a tedious process. At first, you’re not even thinking about it as you do it. You’ve got to feel through hundreds of different chunks of hair until you finally finger through that one that just doesn’t feel right. Then, you do. It’s so out of place from the rest of them. As your fingertips come slipping past the ends you can feel the culprit strands. The ragged and bent and discoloured strands of hair that have no place being on your head. There’s a tension about it, an anticipation. You’re anxious knowing it’s there but excited that you found it so now, you can get rid of it. But this takes even more careful searching. You need to single out just that one. And you know it makes all the others around it feel off as well, so you need to make sure you track down exactly the right one. The rest of the world doesn’t exist at this point. It doesn’t matter what you were doing because now, you’re so close to getting rid of that strand. Maybe you think you have it but there’s so many between your fingers, you suddenly lose it. So you have to start the process over of finding it again. And of course, you do, because it has become your only goal at that point. It doesn’t matter if you were driving or talking or eating, all that is important is getting that offending hair. You get it down to just three. Your finger tips are working so slowly and carefully at this point. You need two hands now—you need to make sure you separate them all. It just doesn’t feel right if you pull out two. Even if one of those two hairs was the one you were looking for, all it does is disappoint if you’ve pulled out a perfectly good hair with it. Between your two deftly working hands, you grasp just the one between your thumb and index finger. Your other hand moves in once more to do that last quality check, to be certain that you’re just. Holding. The one. And you are, at last, it’s just the one. Already you can feel on the follicle that stinging of it being tugged at for s many minutes. You let go with your other hand, but move in with the middle finger of that hand that’s still holding on, make sure your grasp is firm, and in one, swift motion, you pluck the soliciting hair from it’s post on your scalp. But you’re not done with it—not yet. The task is not yet finished. Before it’s cast aside and forgotten about, you have to inspect it. You find the end and hold it in one hand, then slide your other thumb and index and middle finger back along it. You need to feel it. You need to assure yourself of it’s rigidity and jaggedness and thickness to reassure yourself that it’s the right one. You spin it between your fingers, inspecting the changing translucence and colour in the light. And after several seconds of inspection and making certain that you’ve rid yourself of that slender little criminal on your head, you feel a release. After a process that felt like an eternity, you feel at peace. For a few moments, there is bliss and satisfaction, knowing and feeling that this hair is now gone. At last, you can let it go. The job is done. You feel complete. It can’t bother you anymore.

            Until your hand unconsciously goes back to running through your scalp, in search of another one…” 

I finished a short novel. Now what?

I was never going to win. You expected me to fuck up. You were waiting for it to happen. So either yes, I was going to eventually fuck up, or I was going to spend the rest of our relationship with you hanging over my head waiting for me to fuck up.

I hope you know that. I hope you know that people MAKE MISTAKES. What has been done in the past by other people was heinous but you can’t assume that of everybody else or think that lesser fuck ups by other people are just as bad.

Also, my son has a name. It’s not “so-and-so’s little brother” or “Dan’s second child.” he is my first son, my first child. He has a real name. 

What is this trigger warning bullshit? So we have to give warnings and censor what we say on our personal blogs and twitters and social networking sites because strangers that we don’t know or care about might be “triggered?” Look, as someone who’s suffered post traumatic stress disorder and a variety of mental illnesses throughout her life, I can tell that  being on the internet and out in society I didn’t run around telling everyone they had to be sensitive to my problems and adjust what they were saying accordingly. If you know you have a problem with words or scenarios setting you off then you need to be aware of that and go out into the world at your own discretion, not expect everyone else to cater to you. When I had a meltdown from what someone else said or what I read posted on the internet, I quietly went into the other room, had my freak-out, then when I was calmed-down went back to what I was doing. Do we need to start putting “trigger warnings” on our tv-shows and in our books and in the beginning credits of our movies, too? How do you expect to survive in the real world when you can’t adjust when the smallest thing upsets you? That’s YOUR problem, not everyone else’s.