The pit in my chest.

Yesterday started what is, without a doubt, the hardest week of the year for me. I could feel the tight pull of anxiety in my chest last night. I spent a restless night dreaming of her and tossing and turning. I went and ran this morning in hopes of pushing through the sadness. It didn't help. I still felt that terrible anxious sadness. A big empty pit in my chest.
March 11th will be three years since my mother died. Everyone says it gets easier, and in some ways it does. You have work and life and immediate concerns. You get distracted and busy. Life takes over. Auto-pilot. There are those moments though... I have an argument with Corey, I feel like I'm wasting time at my job because it isn't me focusing on sewing and being creative, I have a bad day, I try a new wine or a great new bakery that I know she would love and I'm right back in that empty lonely feeling. I become overwhelmed with the feeling that there is nothing good left in the world.
I'm sitting on my couch sobbing right now, the tight feeling in my chest making me feel like I'm suffocating.
I promised myself that when and if this feeling cropped back up this year, I'd try my best to work out more and think of good positive things.
One of them is this:
While some asshat felt the need to throw a brick through the window of Commonwealth Press, they've decided to auction off the brick along with a bunch of other items to the highest bidder to cover repair costs and turn a negative into a positive. Both KDKA and WPXI have been to the shop today and the auction is up to over $400. You can get the details on their Facebook page.

Sometimes all it takes is remembering that not everything is awful, sometimes people are lovely and things do get better. This week I get to see Dania, go dancing with a bunch of my favorite ladies, meet and hug Taryn Hipp of Lady Teeth (the zine and etsy store), for a zine reading at The Big Idea Bookstore here in Bloomfield. Besides its my Sweet 16x2 birthday this month. I want to have fun and smile and not let this anxiety squeeze the life out of me this month.
I'm gladly receiving and giving hugs all month long.

Location:Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

With my whole heart.

After being at work for half an hour on a cold snowy Saturday morning I was reminded of how lucky I am. I thought about the moment I knew that my brilliant boyfriend was in love with me. I won’t go into details to save him the mortification of all of creation being able to read about that private moment that happened in a public place, although the memory of it does bring me to why I felt compelled to write this entry.

I feel lucky, not just because I get to spend every single day with someone I love, who is infinitely frustrating because he is similar to me as he is unapologetically himself and who is so hard on me while constantly pushing me harder and harder not to give up. I feel lucky because this wonderful/handsome/hilarious man fell in love with a very damaged girl. Our relationship started almost exactly a month before a day that has forever changed me and how I function as a human, the day I lost my mother to cancer.

When I think about how he was able to look through the mess and stick by me while I lost every sense of who I was or why I existed, I am awe-struck. I think about how he slept next to me on nights when I know he would have much rather walked away because of what a complete nightmare I was and my heart aches with love for him. He fought with me, yelled at me, and threw everything I was dumping on him right back at me. That tough love showed me what I could stand to lose, and why I had to figure out how to work through the crashing sea of unhealthy feelings I was drowning in. Over the last three years he has reminded me what it means to be so near someone who fills your heart. Knowing you’ve got someone that you want to quell bad habits to stay with and who you’re willing to compromise for.

I can tell by how he looks at me that even though he clearly thinks I’m completely ridiculous and over the top, he loves me for it. I’ve never felt this accepted by another person and it’s completely overwhelming. I truly feel like the luckiest person alive to have found my way back to someone I had known for this long, and to now wake up next to him.

I love you, dummy.

We're all worried, we're all in pain.

This is just a stream of consciousness.
I know that it may be hard to believe, but I don't strive to be a misanthrope. I actually LIKE being happy, when it happens. I want to be full of positive thoughts and not allow the things that happen in the world to weigh me down. Unfortunately wanting it isn't enough for it to be a reality for me and I've never been the type to force or fake happiness if I don't feel it.
I spend a good portion of my week dealing with people who aren't very nice. It may be the people in my office, the people I talk to, or the people I see downtown as I commute. I try to brush it off, but it wears on you. Recently I had an interaction with someone online where they started arguing that the way that someone dresses (i.e. their personal style) is a directly reflection of their intelligence or mental capacity. I am consistently appalled by people who openly admit that they will judge a person and their personality. I feel like one of the first things we were taught as children was not to judge a book by it's cover. How anyone can justify judging someone else based on how they dress or their hair style is well beyond me. Then when I continued arguing my point, this girl (as I refuse to call someone like this a woman) then says and I am loosely quoting here... "I'm glad I'm not the kind of person who judges a book by its cover, but I am the kind of sarcastic person who likes to get people like you all riled up on the Internet." So you're mean? Ok, I've noted it in my memory banks to avoid you at all costs because you LIKE being mean to people and upsetting people for fun.
As much as it pains me to admit it, the truth of the matter is some people are just cruel broken people. Deep down inside of their bodies. In their heart. In their brain and in their bones. They're mean and hurt other people.
Today ruined me. I've had a fairly bad week as far as interpersonal human interactions go and the events of today just pushed me over the edge. I know everyone has some opinion as to why and how or how to stop events like the 27 dead, 20 of which were elementary school kids in Connecticut, but the truth of the matter is that person was a mean broken person. I'm sitting here on my couch, alone in my apartment sobbing. We can all spout off our ideals and views and beliefs but none of that can change what happened. None of our ideas or beliefs or streams of consciousness will fix the broken families that this man with a gun in an elementary school has created in less than half a day. My heart feels broken.
I wish there was anything I could do for those people. The families who have the holidays right in front of them (or the rest of their lives) and their children gone, their husbands, wives, mothers, fathers.... their siblings gone. I wish there was anything I could do besides feeling so terribly bleak about the future of world... or feeling bleak I feel about the past and present of our world. I wish I could protect anyone from something like this or any sort of tragedy.
I envy those who don't feel empathy.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Your dick is so small I want to punch you in the head.

The boyfriend is out of town, when this happens I tend to sleep on the couch. The reasons are sappy and ridiculous so I'll just avoid getting into it. It's creeping up on 4:45am, which is my preferred wake up time, when I hear the "I Don't Understand Job" song by Garfunkel & Oates.



Pretty much one of the weirdest ways up wake up, someone singing about how confusing it is to learn to give a handjob. I relate to this a lot. For the longest time my philosophy was, "A handjobs a man's job." It was lack of a partner who wanted to take the time to teach me and my fear and ultimately my laziness. I find this carries over to a lot of areas of sex. We assume because it is instinctual to HAVE sex that this also means that it is instinctual to know how to pleasure someone too. Not true at all. Then there is the misconception of "Pleasing a man is easy, what do you have to know to do that?" From someone with, ahem, quite a bit of experience... you can get any man to cum but making it pleasurable and memorable is a whole different story.

Which brings me to the very next program that came on Comedy Central as I laid here preparing to get up for the day. An infomercial came on and after 20 minutes I STILL didn't know what the product is called, and could only guess what it was for using by my sharp powers of deduction.

Each scene is a bright fun background and in front stands a girl. I say girl because each of these girls is no older than 28 years of age. Every girl is outfitted in her very best club clothes. Plenty of makeup and shiny jewelry. Products in and of themselves. Next to each girl is her name and her age. At first I couldn't see how the the age was important... and then a light clicks on. Men want young slim girls to want them, so showing a bunch of girls in club clothes (One girl had on a bra with a short black skirt and a little blazer over top, I don't go clubbing but do people really dress like that?!) who are early 20's talking about dicks will CLEARLY help them sell their product.

The girls are talking about how when they are about to hook up w/ a guy and he has a small dick it "makes [them] so mad [they] want to punch the guy in the head" or "I don't care what anyone says, size DOES matter. If a guy is small down there I just want to walk out." These are direct quotes. These girls who get their sex tips from the pages of Cosmo magazine, are experts in sex at 23 years old. Another said "you would think with all that PORNO that guys watch they would know how important it is to have a big member."

I'm disgusted, although completely unsurprised. The whole "the bigger the dick, the better the sex" game. I don't know why this even has to be said, but a big dick doesn't mean he knows how to use it, his fingers, or his mouth. A big dick doesn't mean the person attached to it is a considerate lover who cares about your pleasure. Being someone who has seen and been with men of many different sizes and shapes, the size of his dick has little to do with the quality of the sex we'll be having later.

So finally the name of the drug reveals itself, ExtaMax. This infomercial is shameless and goes so far into the sort of objectification we as women loathe, that it crosses a line to sexual assault while telling women to go for the "grab test." You know, grabbing a guys crotch region to ensure that he's big enough for you.



Yes, grab a man you don't know. Grab his genitals. Because think about how happy you'd be if a man was judging you on how "tight" you were "down there." You know... out at the club and just a playful two finger slip inside to make sure he's not getting into something that would make him want to "punch you in the head" for not being tight enough. Again a lot men and women would both say, "Men would love it if a woman was that forward." Would they, would anyone just LOVE a stranger coming up to them that they didn't know who was groping their body to make sure that they measured up to some imaginary guideline to whether this person would be a compatible lover? I find this incredibly hard to believe.

So, ladies... after you've grabbed a guy by the dick in the club and he either then starts hitting on you and you're not interested, or even better you grab a guy by the dick and then he presses charges... maybe if he doesn't measure up to your fascist dick size standards you can make up some business cards for ExtaMax so as the bouncer is kicking you out of the club he can look up this non-FDA approved drug that will help make his ERECT penis bigger (which has nothing to do with his flaccid penis, and neither of which has anything to do with how he is in bed). If he's lucky the side effects won't be a steroid like rage that incites the sort of seemingly benign violence these women joked about wanting to commit when his dick wasn't big enough to please them.

Location:Pittsburgh,United States

Relationships

As of late I've been dealing with some very specific struggles in my love life and I have been putting off writing about it out of fear. I've been in quite a few long term relationships in my life and I rarely have ever casually dated. This current relationship though has been a particular struggle for a lot of new and very difficult reasons.

No sooner had this relationship started and a month and a half later my mother died. Every single part of me went crazy. I had never been an angry drunk before, a sad drunk sure, but never angry. Suddenly I had a flood of angry emotions stemming from my unprocessed upheaval after her dying. I didn't know what to do. I still sometimes don't know. Corey was the only safe harbor in the emotional storm inside my brain, unfortunately this also meant he took the brunt of the anger that was crashing out of me all the time. After 7 solid months of me being a complete drunken rage-filled sobbing nightmare I finally realized that this budding relationship wasn't going to last if I didn't start figuring out what the hell was going on inside my brain.



I wrote out a long letter to him explaining why I was acting the way I was and apologizing and most importantly promising that I wanted to take time to work out these issues so we could be in a better place. Things did improve. I still have the fear inside me that if I get too drunk I won't be able to control that misplaced anger about my mother's death, so I just don't get that drunk. There are other underlying issues though.



A relationship with issues, who would have thought... These, however, are not new issues. They are issues I've had my entire life. Neuroses that have lived inside my brain as long as I can remember. I can site several sources for the problems, but in the end it's up to me to fix them and finger pointing wont help anything. These behavioral ticks are things I don't feel I've ever really admitted to myself let alone any partner I've ever had.


I don't know if i'm quite ready to put them down in writing here either, to be honest, but I feel like I have to.

Because I love Corey and want to see this relationship continue and grow I knew I needed to recognize these things, admit them to myself, find a way to put words to them, and talk to him about them as well. I'm a huge proponent of communication and being as open and direct as possible, so making sure I'm finding the best words and conveying them correctly is really important to me. In the last few months I've been able to admit to him that I feel completely inadequate as a woman, a girlfriend, and a person in general. I haven't ever felt pretty enough, smart enough, or fun enough to be deserving of love. I "know better" as it were, and I preach against these damaging types of feelings all the time. The reality of it though is that I've never felt like I was good enough.

I am always trying to show the people who matter most to me how to love themselves, but I don't know if I've ever fully accepted myself for who I am. These types of self loathing, self deprecating, and inadequate feelings have brought one very specific set of relationship problems to the forefront for me.
I feel that in not being pretty enough, smart enough, or fun enough for the person I'm with that the relationship is bound to end. I've never really believed that anyone would want to marry me, and that all partners I've had are temporary. This starts a spiral of jealousy, unhappiness, and eventually me pushing the relationship to an end. I know the end of every relationship was not my fault, but I do see my role in the build up to each of them.


A plan of attack that I've implemented and shared with Corey is that if he notices that I'm upset and asks me what's wrong and I don't share, I need him to not push the subject. Me being upset isn't always caused by something he is DOING but by the situation at present. Making him aware of it in the moment isn't always the best course of action as I don't want him to feel bad about anything he's doing. It's something inside of me, an idosynchracy of my own, that needs to be acknowledged and dealt with. Recognizing the event that triggers my feeling of jealousy and inadequacy, then mentally exploring the reason I feel that way isn't necessarily something I need to share in the middle of a crowded public place. Being able to tell the difference between being upset with your partner because of a specific action of theirs that is something you can both work through together as it may be inappropriate or hurtful is very different from being upset because your partner is talking to someone else and you feel that you're not "_______" enough.


These feelings of jealousy if left unattended can eventually be misconstrued as mistrust, which is absolutely not the case. Even worse they can BECOME mistrust and that's an absolute killer of a healthy relationship.


I realize not everyone is the type of person to analyze these things, write them out, and come to their partner with a very specific guideline to what is happening. I know it can be hard for someone to deal with, but after an argument today I've accepted that no matter how direct I am not everyone is receptive to that. I just hope that Corey cares about the relationship enough to be patient while I am working through this and willing to help me when I need it.
Does it ever get easier?

It's amazing to me how much a person can attempt to make themselves feel better about their actions and words by criminalizing you when you don't immediately fall into the roll of their catharsis.

Yeah, exactly... fuck you. My entire goal in life is not to always be doing exactly what you or anyone else thinks I should or to be your dumping ground for feelings. I love making friends and meeting people, but when you don't get what you want from me and your first instinct is to verbally assault me; you've proven my point. I love connecting with other people and being supportive to them, when I ask for space but get called a "bad friend" or "inconsiderate person" you've given me all I need to walk away.

I'm sure it's surprising but sometimes MY OWN life and MY OWN feelings are paramount over yours. My need to walk away and focus on myself, my life, and MY OWN problems might actually be important and fuck me for being such a clearly self obsessed cunt for it. If you don't get that, then I'm sorry... that's your issue not mine. Being treated and talked about like I'm a bad person because I refuse to fall to your whim and expectations when I have CLEARLY voiced my need for my own time and space to focus on myself makes you look like an asshole. Just let it go.

Thanks for proving all my previous ideas of you completely wrong.

Sage Advice.

Webs., a photo by Nix Sidhe on Flickr.

I can't help but wonder if everyone, after being alive for many years, feels as if they have one piece of advice that resonates inside of them. Then while resonating eventually becomes the advice that they feel obligated to share. It sounds out from within them as a beacon from a light house.

I do. I have a select piece of advice that I truly believe in with all of my heart and feel that it is the only thing I can advise on and feel just in doing so. Of course I'm going to share, as if I'd bait you and not let on. So, here it goes...

Relationships are difficult.

It's not the outcry of a cynical girl with a broken heart, and it's not some "Heed this warning all ye who dare socialize." I mean it genuinely with all of my heart. This can mean your relationship with your family, your friends, your significant other, or the people who you work with. A person has countless other people who they interact with intimately on a daily basis, and each of these relationships has been, can be, or will be challenging at some point.

It can be so frustrating you want to cry or scream. You might feel like you're slowly over time just losing your mind. You may want to walk out and not ever deal with it again.

Stop. Think. Clear your mind.
Communicate.
Write things down and make lists.
Listen and don't just talk at the other person.
Listen to your heart.
Don't harbor bad feelings or hold grudges.
Make an effort to be proactive and initiate the changes necessary to maintain a healthy relationship.
Say what you mean and how you feel.
Realize that apologizing over and over for the same thing doesn't fix the problem, change the behavior because otherwise apologies mean nothing.
Accept that sometimes things will be difficult.

You're two separate beings attempting to coexist. It's not always going to be easy but that doesn't mean it's bad. It takes effort, nurturing, and understanding. It requires the ability to shrug off somethings and address others. Concentrate and make smart decisions. Be careful with people and their feelings and most importantly keep self preservation in mind.