Why I love dumb YouTubers

When I was 9 and blogging was popular, my dad had a blog. I saw it and wanted one for the sake of having one, but I didn't know what to write. My dad told me that it was basically a diary that you post online that people can read. A diary is a ventilation system via which you write your deep, persistent thoughts that won't get out of your head despite your best efforts.

It's 5:07am and I have thoughts.

We'll start with a story.

When I was in middle school, I was horrifically depressed. Mentally, I was at rock bottom (at which, let's be clear, I have been since then). I hated everything. I judged everyone. The problem with my perceived elitism was the fact that I was surrounding myself with similar elitists who shared my perceptions of what elite really was, and it was incredibly specific and exclusive. Another problem was the fact that my true self was not up to the standards of the perceived elite. I judged other people for being depressed when I was equally depressed, if not more so. I scoffed at people who were "crazy" when I myself became very close to actually stalking someone. I wore the same thing every day for fear of judging myself with a negative outcome for being too flashy or, conversely, too conservative with my choice of fashion. I never wore makeup because I would never stoop to the level of the girls who want attention, when I myself desperately craved it and wanted nothing more than to feel wanted.

I hated everyone, and I hated myself. I was very anti-feminism, perceiving myself as inferior as a female. I avoided makeup, "girl" colors, "girl" music, "girl" trends. I inundated myself with things I didn't understand and things I didn't give two shits about because boys liked them and I wanted to be one because they had power. Boys liked other boys and I wanted boys to like me.

In 2010, Ark Music released the music video for Rebecca Black's Friday. It quickly became a meme. The hate flowed through me with purity. I perused YouTube videos, poking scathing fun at this teenage girl who was following her dreams. I came across Brock Baker's dub.

Through Brock Baker, I found Jacksfilms, through whom I found Tobuscus (I'm not including a link to him because -- whoops! -- he's a drug addict, alcoholic, and a rapist), through whom I found Markiplier, through whom I found Jacksepticeye and the Game Grumps.

Obviously this transpiration took time. To give you an idea, I didn't subscribe to the Grumps until late 2015. But with the change in subscription came the change of heart.

On his gaming channel, Tobuscus (aka Toby Turner) began ending every video with, "I love you." As a young teenager who had craved unrequited attention for several years at this point, I took it personally. Wow! I thought, Me! He loves me! It's really possible!

It was a slow, subconscious train of thought that went as follows:

So it's possible to love me. I am lovable. My parents aren't lying when they tell me they love me. You know who I've never heard say "I love you"? Any of the people I crave attention from. Those people don't love me. They don't even acknowledge my existence. But you know what? These YouTubers make videos thanking their subscribers personally, and acknowledging their existence as individuals rather than a mass audience or a number on a screen. They're acknowledging that I'm an individual rather than somebody who is unimportant enough to ignore completely. These people have never even met me, but they value my presence on this earth and in virtual space, which, although virtual, is still space. I take up space and it's worth something. I am worth something. I'm worth the space I occupy, I'm worth the air I breathe, I'm worth the money I cost, and I'm worth the fucks people give about me. I'm worth any fucks to be given in the first place. I'm worth enough to love. I can be loved. I can love. I am capable of love. Now I'm on medication and my mental health is improving. I'm receiving love which can be passed on. I've received enough love to value myself as worthy of not only taking it but also giving it. And if those people don't love me back, they're not worth my love, and I don't need to give them any more.

As Dan says, a person only has so many fucks to give. You have to be selective about how you distribute them. What I've found is helpful is the fact that you don't waste fucks on people when they give a fuck back. If you give a fuck about them and they give a fuck about you, it's a net loss of zero fucks. It was not wasted. Your time and your energy were not wasted. Your love was not wasted. You were not wasted.

It's why I want to be a YouTuber. I want to spread that same love to a wider audience than I can reach without it. I want people to know that they're loved. I want to give in the same way that I received. When I say YouTubers saved my life, it's not because they distracted me from suicidal thoughts. I never really had suicidal thoughts. They saved my life because they introduced me to one that believed it was worth something, and that it was worth the love that it could get.

I've heard many people say that "I love you" is a phrase that's overused. But if you take it apart, especially regarding the way it can make a person feel, even on the smallest atomic level, it's a healing statement. If you hear it enough times over the course of a period of time, it can change you. A single phrase can change your perspective.

It's not your fault. You are loved. You are valid. You are worth your space, you're worth giving a fuck.

And if nobody else says it in a way you believe, I want you to know that it's the truth.

I love you.

Adventures In Retail: I'm not as much of an idiot as you think I am

I know I'm relatively new; I've been working here for almost two months. I know I'm relatively young; I'm turning 20 in almost five months. I know I've been gone for three weeks because I had surgery. But this isn't my first job in retail. I know enough about customer service to know what I'm doing to a certain extent. Another thing I know is the fact that our manager just left, and now we're manager-less, and we're severely understaffed. I KNOW ALL THIS.

These things are not an excuse to change everything about protocol. They're not an excuse to take the frustration that we don't have our shit together in the least out on the new kid. The other new kid, who was literally hired the day before me, but just so happens to be ten years older and maybe has some more experience than I do but regardless has a different position than I do, is not picked on.

"I'm not picking on you, these are just things that need to get done." Uh huh. That's why I'm the only one, who gets one thought away from crying because of other asshat customers who got mad at me and went crying to the acting manager when their $10-off coupon didn't work on their purchase of $9.98 which becomes $10.89 after tax and they already paid $11 and I gave them their change and now suddenly they're mad that I scammed them out of their money, I'M the one who gets scolded. I'm the only one who's doing it wrong when the protocol changed two minutes ago. I'm the only one who's doing it wrong when I'm taking my lunch at the scheduled time because I "need to check the daily planner" -- which I did -- before taking my lunch when other people are taking theirs when they weren't scheduled to (which, I come to find out via fly-on-the-wall eavesdropping, three out of the five people working are taking at the same time to discuss plans for changing the inner workings of the establishment completely unbeknownst to me, but possibly not others).

At my last job, the cashiers were in charge of go-backs (putting returned items back on their designated respective shelves) and were not to leave the register out of sight without somebody else watching. At my current job, the cashiers are also in charge of go-backs and are not to leave the register out of sight without somebody else watching. I was twenty feet away, the register in plain sight, no customers around, returning one item whose location I knew immediately off the top of my head. I'm constantly told to work on go-backs when I'm at the register and there's no customers. I'm constantly told to work on go-backs when I'm at the register and there are customers. I'm constantly told that my method of one item at a time which helps with focus is a waste of time. And yet, I'm bombarded by, "WHO'S WATCHING THE REGISTER?! YOU COULD GET FIRED!!!!!111!!!1! and, "Uuuummmmm, no. Never EVER leave the register."

Where I work, we sell farm supplies, which includes bales of various types of hay, and large 50-pound bags of feed and sundry. There are people in a back lot who use forklifts and are qualified to load those objects into customers' trucks/trailers/etc., which said customers pay for at the register, which is entirely out of sight of the back lot. So how in the Good Lord Jesus' name does everybody know except me when we're out of something?

When I was trained, every time somebody paid for a large item, I was taught to call the order over the loudspeaker. Suddenly, that's absolutely not okay because it invades the customers' privacy. I'm told to start calling the orders via phone. I do. For a while. And then nobody's at the back lot to answer the phone. I tell somebody that I'm not getting an answer. They tell me to call over the loudspeaker because nobody's designated to work the back lot. Okay. Sure. Here I go doing it. Nope. Not okay. Call this other phone instead. Nope. The person on the other end can't work the back lot right now and tells me to call it over the loudspeaker so that somebody else can do it. But then I'm supposed to call on the phone because they can't hear the loudspeaker because everybody else is somewhere else. And if nobody hears me at any point, whether nobody answered their phones which I was told to call or nobody can hear the loudspeaker which I'm told to use but am also not supposed to use, I screwed up because I "didn't call the order", and there was a customer waiting.

Somehow it always happens that I'm in the wrong. It was always me, the new kid, that screwed up, because I'm the new kid, I'm young, I'm inexperienced, I'm a ditzy girl from the city who's not accustomed to farm life, why-is-she-working-here, obviously-because-we're-so-desperately-understaffed-we'll-hire-any-idiot-who-doesn't-know-what-they're-doing. Last night at closing I didn't do this right. Last night at closing I didn't have enough time to sweep the floors, take out the garbage, fix the shelves, clean the register area, AND ALSO put back all the returned items to locations I have to scout out because I have no idea what they're for because they're tractor parts and I've never even seen a tractor up close in real life, before my shift ended, and I'm not going to be able to get overtime because that needs to be pre-determined in the schedule, and everybody's waiting for me at the door when I haven't even clocked out yet, and because of all that, I'm in trouble because I left a thing and didn't put it back. I didn't get rid of a sticky note. I didn't put away an unused ink tag. Somehow, in some way, I screwed up. I should be fired. I'm the idiot who didn't go to college because I couldn't afford it. I'm the dumbass who took the test and got my G.E.D. with honors a year before I was due to graduate and who applied and was accepted into the National Society of High School Scholars. I'm the all-around disappointment whose work was used as a reference to grade other students' papers while I was in school. I'm the failure who passed the test to become a transcriptionist which 10% of people pass, and whose friends with office experience all failed.

To all the asshats at my work, I'm not the idiot. You're the exclusionary idiot who doesn't understand why I can't follow your ever-changing rules. I know I don't belong. I hate country music, and I don't know shit about lawnmowers. I would quit in a heartbeat if I could afford it.

Oh, and to top it all off, that customer with the coupon from before? You know what she told me?

"No no, it's okay, I'll find somebody who knows what they're doing. Just make sure that in the future, you remember that it's called customer service for a reason."

Fuck.

You.

Trans-positivity is going a liiiiiittle too far...

Trust me, I am all for freedom to do whatever the hell you want with your body, and if you feel like you don't belong under the identity of a male or a female or whatever else, I don't give a single flying fedora. People are people and that's okay. Gender roles suck. It's true.

But don't push this shit on babies please.

Before y'all get up-in-arms about that statement, please let me explain.

I seriously despise when people label things unnecessarily as "boy" things and "girl" things. Pink is not a "girl" color. Neither is purple. In fact, for a very long time pink was the "boy" color, until Hitler, as big on color-coding as he was, decided to label all the gays pink, and then pink was feminine. So yeah, it's Hitler's idea that pink is a feminine color. Superheroes are for girls just as much as they are for boys, and Barbie dolls and princesses are for girls as much as they are for boys. I highly encourage this ideology. I think it's great. Raising your child not to conform to gender stereotypes is a fantastic thing.

However, I think the line between gender and biological sex is getting skewed.

Because I saw this:

And I thought...

Yes. Yes there is reason to do that.

Because it would be really freaking confusing growing up and figuring out the changes that are happening to your body when your parent(s) won't tell you which side of it all you should pay attention to. It's really confusing when you have to choose between the ladies room and the boys room when you don't have a basic concept of which one you are.

I mean think about your identity. My name is Kayleigh, I am 17 years old, and I am a girl. There's honestly a reason why the initialism A/S/L is so popular. Age? 17. Sex? Female. Location? United States. Basic shit.

Basic biology says vagina = female, penis = male. If a child decides when they grow up that they're not comfortable with the label that they have been given as such, they should absolutely have the right to change it. But babies are babies. Chill out.

Also, as a parent, what the hell are you even supposed to do without the gendered pronouns? Refer to your child as "they" or "them"? I personally tend to refer to small children as "it" because to me they're just really expensive, impressionable potatoes with arms and the ability to make noise and drip hazardous fluids onto everything they touch, but I mean come on. "Is it a boy or a girl?" "Actually it's neither, I'm letting it decide for itself, check your privilege." That's just ridiculous to me. Give your child both "boy" and "girl" toys and clothes and such in order for them to decide which one they prefer, but at the same time, teach your baby girl how to pee and wipe differently from boys because girls specifically have to wipe when they pee and boys don't so that's kinda important for a girl to know growing up. Also periods. And attraction. Without knowing your sex, you don't know what box to check when you go to the doctor. This is why gender dysphoria and depression are so rampant. There's a happy medium somewhere in between hating your child for not conforming to gender stereotypes and hating your child for conforming to gender stereotypes. Y'all gotta loosen up a bit. That's all I'm saying.

As kind of an epilogue, I would like to say that I might have contracted salmonella from my chickens and so this probably doesn't make sense but I got frustrated and that is what this is for; posts that are too long for Facebook/Twitter but are too personal for Tumblr.

It Really Does Get Better

I just read Leelah Alcorn's suicide note (Page 1, Page 2) and I have some things to say as kind of a response.

I know I'm only 17 years old and I don't have enough life experience to advise anyone on how to live (or end, for that matter) their life. But I do have clinical depression and anxiety, and there was a time when I was absolutely convinced that it would never get better. I couldn't see myself in ten years. Hell, I couldn't even see myself in five years. It seemed like too long before things were supposed to go my way. It didn't help that whenever I expressed any excitement about the future and about being an adult that everybody said, "it's not all it's cracked up to be" and "things are going to be a lot harder" and "enjoy your youth while you can because this is the best time of your life". The scary part to me was the fact that I felt awful and self-conscious 24 hours a day every day every week every month every year, and if that was going to be the best time of my life, I didn't want to see what it looked like when it got worse.

I never seriously considered or attempted suicide, though, because I had friends and family who loved me, and since I've been on the other side of a loved one dying, I didn't want to do that to anyone else. I often thought, they're only going to realize how important I was to them when I'm gone, but I knew somewhere in my heart that that wasn't true, and I knew my dad loved me. I had to stay for him to keep him sane and to be the good child to maybe convince him that he wasn't a bad father (which he wasn't, to be clear).

In the present day, I'm really glad I did find the strength to keep living, even though I now realize that I was doing it to make other people happy rather than myself, because I've had enough time to think logically about how life can happen.

The average person lives about 80-90 years, right? As a teenager, you have lived less than 20% of the life you could potentially have. Now think about the reasons why you're so unhappy you want to end your life. Is it because you don't feel like anyone cares about you? Is it because of familial abuse? Is it because of a mental illness? Is it because you're not accepted by your community for being who you are? Well, mental illnesses can't be cured, but they can be treated, and if you learn to live alongside it rather than to let it take control of you, you can realize that your disorder can only take control if you let it. Your family probably does love you and care about you, whether or not they show it in a conventional or appropriate way. As for the aspects of community and abuse, those are only your surroundings, and those can change. Surrounding yourself with people who make you happy can do so much for your self-esteem, and so can cutting off the people who make you miserable.

My point is, everything can get better with time. I am a firm believer in Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. I truly and strongly believe that everything looks better to you when you see the good side. Even if you have to "lie" to yourself to try and convince yourself that your bad day or your bad situation or your bad life can get better. It just takes time. I know it's hard to see that because nobody can actually see the future. The reason why is there is a huge tree of choices that you can make, and you can make them to better yourself or as a detriment to yourself. You have a choice though. You always have a choice in every situation. If you're in a place or around people who make you feel bad about yourself, you can leave them. You can drop them and leave them behind you so that you can focus more of your energy on finding what and/or who makes you happy.

Take off all your clothes and look at yourself in the mirror. Identify the things you hate about your physical appearance, and then question the importance of those things. Learn to say "I don't care". Every human is different, and more likely than not, you're completely normal being different. Embrace the things that make you happy whether or not they're embarrassing. It took me a long time to accept the fact that I like a lot more music than just alternative rock and 80s music. It didn't make me cool, it made me sad. Sad isn't cool, no matter how much you think it is. It's okay to sing along with Britney Spears or Beyonce or Meghan Trainor when you hear them on the radio or at a party. Do whatever makes you happy, and the people who like the same things you do and who can identify with you on a personal level will come to you eventually, but it just takes time.

Thus I will leave you with the words of August Wilson:

Confront the dark parts of yourself,

and work to banish them

with your illumination and forgiveness.

Your willingness to wrestle with your demons

will cause your angels to sing.

Adventures in Cali

 Sooo I decided that for a long-awaited update, it would be appropriate to tell you the tale of my summer vacation to California.

[Note: the text below is slightly smaller because I pre-wrote it in Word and copying does something weird so I'm sorry on behalf of Word.]

We (Raechelle, my dad, and I) boarded a plane via Virgin Airlines at 5 am (FML) and, being Virgin virgins, it was extremely different from any other airline we had flown with before, in a good way. We were in first class, naturally (it was ~$50 to upgrade from “main cabin” aka coach at the gate as opposed to ~$300 online. Always upgrade at the gate. They also do free bag checks.), which was absolutely lovely, though the purple “mood lighting” made me feel like I was in a strip club. Not that I know what that’s like. Anyway, the only downside to Virgin 1^st class is the fact that with the enormous amount of leg room, you can’t stow your personal item under the seat in front of you. So they had to be put up in the cabinet for both takeoff and landing, which was totally lame. The stewardesses were extremely nice, and tried really hard to convince me to take part in their hospitality, however I was not hungry in the least and I had already gotten a water bottle previously so I was totally satisfied. I loved their sarcasm in the little safety instructions (“for the 0.0001% of you who have never used a seatbelt before…”) and it was a very comfortable ride.

We landed in San Francisco, picked up a rental car (white Ford Taurus: keyless ignition, actually a spaceship not a car) and drove to San Jose where we checked in at the Fairmont hotel. Raechelle, out of supposed “curiosity” wanted to find out how much it would cost to upgrade our room from two double beds to a suite, and the guy at the counter said there weren’t any available for that night (there were four goddamn weddings one of which was an extravagant and colorful Indian wedding) but he said he could upgrade us for the next day. For $50. So instead of paying $300 for a suite, we ended up, in total, paying about $150. Talk about a freakin’ deal. We spent that day doing almost literally nothing.

The next two days were pretty average. We hung out with some of my dad’s friends from high school. The suite had a king bed and a really comfortable couch. There were about a million little tiny details which made it not up to expected suite-perfection, such as the clogged shower drain and the broken hairdryer, but, being the humble peasants we are, decided not to say anything because, hey, we got a suite. At the Fairmont. For $50.

On Tuesday we checked out of the hotel and headed to Walnut Creek where my aunt and uncle live and spent the night there. My aunt has a sister who has two kids who practically live at my aunt & uncle’s house, and one is kind of a pain in the ass. He has autism, which explains most of it, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that he’s a pain in the ass. In the middle of movies, he likes to turn to everybody and repeat the plot of the story. As someone who likes to watch movies, that can be really obnoxious when I’m trying to internalize everything else. The plot is not supposed to be glaringly obvious, but you are supposed to know what’s going on, and when you do, it kind of ruins most of it by making you aware of the fact that that is the plot. I slept on an air mattress in the corner of one of the two living rooms. At about 6 am that kid walked in and sat on the couch next to me. I didn’t say anything because that was one of the weirdest things I have probably ever experienced while half-asleep. He didn’t do or say anything, he just sat there. I couldn’t see him, so I assume he wasn’t looking at me, so that made it a little bit better, but it still made me really uncomfortable. After a while, my aunt came in and made him leave because it was weird as hell that he was just sitting there while I was sleeping, so I slept for a couple more hours.

I woke up on Wednesday abnormally angry. I ate a banana to get food in my stomach to take my medication (which I don’t believe I have explained on this blog quite yet but don’t you worry all will be well) and stormed off to my parents’ temporary room to sleep longer. Hours later, they woke me up and told me we were leaving, coming as a surprise to me because I felt like I had only been sleeping for like 20 minutes. Apparently it had been four hours and it was noon and they were not happy that I didn’t socialize that entire day. We left for my godparents’ house.

My godmother is Spanish, and very motherly and also very talkative. My godfather is the most American-looking-and-sounding guy I know, and is a hell of a lot like my dad, which is not surprising seeing as he was pretty much my dad’s mentor and big brother growing up. They live in a huge villa in Rocklin, and I it was a nice change of pace to actually have a room to myself. On the 4^th, my godmother had her three daughters and two grandchildren over all freakin’ day on a day when I coincidentally felt like I needed some time to myself. I periodically switched between reading in my room to going downstairs and being “social”, but that really wasn’t enough, even though my parents got mad at me and said, “I don’t want you to do the same thing you did last time,” but I really was trying my best. There were just too many people, or maybe there were a few people who happened to be loud and overwhelming (however friendly). Either way, I was uncomfortable the whole day.

We stayed in that house for (what was supposed to be) the rest of our trip, which was until Saturday. Again, nothing eventful really happened. There was shopping and stuff that isn’t really fun for a story. However, while we were on the road to the San Francisco airport, Raechelle got a text from my uncle that informed us that a plane crashed on the runway at SFO and was on fire. The entire airport was closed. We could not get home.

We attempted to contact Virgin to check and see if there were possibly any planes that could be rerouted to San Jose or Oakland, but the line was busy for hours, probably because of all the other panicked ticketholders who were trying to get their money back and yell at all the staff because they were late for whatever they were late to because they couldn’t get their flight on time. So instead we called Expedia. The person on Expedia told us that they didn’t reroute the flights and that there weren’t any available flights that day. Because of this, I cried for a really long time. I was panicking. I wanted to get home and see my cats and use my real computer instead of a crappy laptop but I couldn’t and I had to wait another day. They tried to make us wait until Monday but that was a load of crap because Raechelle has a job and we only have so much money to spend on food and a hotel room, and the little toiletries and new underwear that we would inevitably have to buy because even if you pack an extra pair, you would need another one anyway to last you the rest of the time.

We stayed in San Jose in the Fairmont again, this time in a nicer suite that presumably cost the same amount – I didn’t ask – and I rewarded myself for my relative patience and good behavior by getting a hoodie. (Hi, I’m Kayleigh, and I’m addicted to hoodies.) I was still pretty freaking upset, but watching all the YouTube videos I had missed on my dad’s computer made it hurt a little bit less even though it took about five hours. Of course it didn’t feel like five hours, probably because of the hypnotizing glow of the screen. We got cookies and watched the new Evil Dead – fantastic movie by the way – and then I collapsed on a rollaway bed and slept.

And now I am in the San Jose airport with an hour to kill before boarding. I decided I would write an update to this thing.

~*~

I told you I would tell you about the medication, so I will.

I started seeing a therapist a little while ago and after a while she ended up telling me that I was more depressed than even I noticed I was. I didn’t know that people didn’t usually get more depressed than me, but apparently it’s rare to find someone like me who has had undetected severe depression and anxiety for eight years and has not been medicated. Depression is actually easier to hide than most people think, no matter how bad it is. Especially if someone has a mixture of depression and anxiety, because the anxiety will tell them that nobody wants to hear about your problems and you’ll just be a burden on them and you’ll make them sad and you don’t want more sadness around do you, so you hide it to spare the feelings of others. Which is really unfortunate, but it’s true of most depressed people.

So anyway, my therapist recommended me to a doctor who works a lot with mental disorders and who could prescribe me medication. So I did.

The thing about this doctor is she’s very holistic and tries everything before giving you meds. The first time I saw her and explained to her my history and my situation, she immediately told me that there are a lot of ways to relieve regular depression such as acupuncture, yoga, and exercise, but my depression was past that – I had already tried pretty much everything over eight goddamn years – she was absolutely ready to medicate me.

I started on a pretty low dose of Celexa: 10 mg as opposed to 30 mg which is the average dose for a person my size. That, however, caused me to sleepwalk more than I usually do (I don’t know if I’ve ever said it before, but I walk and talk in my sleep sometimes) and it made me tired during the day. After discovering that it made me tired during the day, I tried taking it at night one night as instructed. I fell asleep perfectly fine but woke up with more anxiety than I’ve ever had before, to the point of my abdomen hurting because of all the clenching that was happening. I felt really hypersensitive and paranoid and scared. So I stopped taking it at night.

Obviously that one wasn’t working for me, so the next one was Welbutrin. Apparently I am really sensitive to medication, so she prescribed a really really really low dose of this one, 75 mg as opposed to 300 mg. That one seemed to work, so we upped the dosage to 150 mg and switched to an extended release version of the one that I was taking. I am currently on that one, and so far it has worked somewhat, but I end up getting really self-conscious and depressed at around 4:30 pm and that’s really early. So at this point I think I’m going to have to take the fast-acting one twice a day to keep my mood up all day.

~*~

I should also tell you that I have completely cut my brother out of my life, and this is a pretty long story too so bear with me.

On May 5^th, the day before my dad’s birthday but the day on which we were celebrating his birthday, my dad took me, Raechelle, Tyler, and his friend Miles to see Iron Man 3. That went okay, but when we got home, Tyler asked me if I could use my Xbox controller.

That irked me a little bit, firstly because I’m really overprotective of my stuff, which is probably a byproduct of the PTSD because I want to have all my stuff and be in control of my stuff to make up for the stuff – in this case also people – that I lost. Secondly because I had bought him a controller for Christmas specifically so that he wouldn’t have to use mine anymore (it was a common occurrence that he would take mine). Thirdly because my dad was taking Raechelle and I to lunch and I wasn’t going to be home, which means that he would have to go into my room to get it, which is a huge invasion of my personal privacy, and also relates to reason #2. Anyway, he made up some kind of excuse and I just told him no. I didn’t want him to go into my room when I wasn’t there and I didn’t want him to take my stuff. He made a teenager-y sigh, rolled his eyes, said “fine”, and went inside. I turned to my dad and said, “if he goes into my room and takes it anyway, I am going to get violent.” He condoned this.

We got back from lunch and I didn’t particularly notice anything different when I went into my room. About half an hour later, Tyler poked his head into my room, smiled and said “hi”, threw the controller on the bed, paused just long enough to see the fiery rage in my eyes, said “bye” and then closed the door and ran away as fast as possible.

I screamed in anger and stormed upstairs to see him sort of hiding in the pantry. I stopped behind him, he turned around, and I slapped him in the face before telling – more like screaming – him off. My dad came in to intervene and I went back downstairs as soon as possible to get away from Tyler. About ten minutes later after I had cooled off a little, I came back upstairs mostly to see if he was gone but also to throw away something, and my dad told him to apologize. I dignifiedly said that an apology would do no good and the word “sorry” meant nothing to me as long as it was from him anymore.

I went back downstairs for a few hours, blissfully unaware of the passive-aggressive chaos that was happening above me, until Raechelle came in and informed me that Tyler had supposedly attempted suicide by overdose. I was so angry I started sobbing uncontrollably. Raechelle left and after a few minutes of screaming and crying into my pillow I went upstairs.

The flashing lights of the ambulance didn’t bother me; it was the firetruck that was a trigger. I saw them and was immediately reminded of when my house burned down, which brought back all the memories that I have fought so hard for all these years to repress. I collapsed on the floor in the fetal position and started crying again. Through an open window, I could hear my dad sobbing some words and some other voices that were unfamiliar to me. After everything had died down and after the emergency vehicles left, my dad and Raechelle came inside and we sat in the living room in silence, not really needing to say anything.

After what seemed like hours, I said, “You know what? I hate him.”

My dad told me not to say that. He wrote it off as sibling rivalry and said that he was still my brother. I told him he wasn’t anymore. I was not about to have any contact with him ever again after not only that day but literally a lifetime of torment from him which built up into a pure hatred. I hated him. I didn’t care what happened to him from that moment forward.

And I still hate him. I hate him and everything he’s done to me and my family. He has no place in my heart or in my mind or in my life. As of that day, I have not said one word to him. He has asked about me and said that he was sorry and wants a relationship with me again, but I told my dad to tell him that he has broken something he cannot repair. There is no fixing what he has done to me, and it’s completely fair that I never ever have anything to do with him ever again. He is manipulative and has admitted that he often lies to get what he wants. That’s why I said he “supposedly” attempted suicide. There really is no way of knowing when you know that he does awful things to gain sympathy.

That’s all! Ending on a happy note, right?

I Don't Care (Enough)

I'm back in therapy after a long time of not being in therapy. It's kinda refreshing, too, because my new therapist actually has a PhD as opposed to all the counselors that I had been seeing before whose job it was to sit and listen to me complain rather than actually determining that I had deeper problems than that and trying to find a way to fix them.

So according to my therapist, it's "quite obvious that [I'm] severely depressed, and have been for a long time." At first, I was kinda like, "No. You're kidding," but then I was relieved that somebody actually acknowledged it instead of telling me that I was just some kid who had gone through some tough shit in her life. That was a hell of a lot more obvious than the fact that I was (am) depressed.

What I particularly wanted to talk about was the primary factor of my depression, which is the fact that I just don't care at all about anything. This can be a good thing because I don't care about what people think of me, but that kinda leads into not caring about what I think of myself or of other things, and that leads to poor hygiene and laziness, which leads to bad grades and that, eventually, will completely dash all my hopes of getting into a good university, but because of all this, I won't care that I didn't get in, because who needs school anyway?

This may come as a surprise to you, but I am an introvert; I gain energy from being alone with my thoughts. My depression and not caring makes me psychologically drained all the time, which makes a couple things happen. First of all, I crave and eat a lot of carbs because carbs are energy and so my body feels like it needs a lot of them to gain the energy that I'm somehow not getting. Second, I'm by myself all the time because my brain has a different method of gaining energy, which is by making me stay in bed all day and stuff my face with grain and dairy products. This turns into a vicious circle of feeling bad about myself because I eat too much and never move or talk to people which makes me want to eat a lot and never move or talk to people. I live a very unhealthy lifestyle of internet - food - internet - sleep which is a bad habit that doesn't include three regular meals or social interaction by means of anything other than on a computer screen.

Some days, however, my not-caring takes over so much that I reason with myself that there's no point in eating, so I don't. I might eat a couple of crackers or a banana for breakfast, but then I usually just won't eat until about 8 pm. The way I see it, there are two kinds of sadness: binge-eating sadness and starve-yourself sadness. I take part in both, irregularly, which has all kinds of problems attached to it, medically and psychologically.

Not caring about anything has made me almost feel good about myself, mostly because my internal reasoning is pretty much made up of, "yeah, you're ugly, but who cares? There's someone for everyone, even if that everyone happens to be a crazy, unfit bitch like you," which would make me sad if I cared about anything. Which I don't. It's a kind of self abuse that would make me really, really anxious and self-conscious if my depression wasn't so bad that I just didn't care.

I think the not-caring stemmed from my previous anxiety in a way. After I couldn't get into Sealth, I just decided that I didn't care anymore, which made me feel instinctively good, because in reality it all was just a dumb little thing that was making me worry too much for no real reason. Letting go of it felt good, so it became my coping mechanism. If something bad happened, I would just think to myself, "is this really so important that it's worth your time caring about it?" and my response would always be "no", just to feel that tiny, insignificant burden lifted which my brain told me was happiness. So it turned into the emotional equivalent of a drug, my brain using it whenever it felt like it needed to just to feel the high of not being anxious anymore, and it turned into an addiction. I would think to myself that I needed to eat breakfast, and it would say back to me, "are you really hungry enough to eat something today? Why should you care about it? You'll be fine," and I wouldn't eat breakfast. Then it would be things like, "I really should do my homework; I'm failing this class" and it would reply, "but it's sooooo booorrring. Play SWTOR instead! You need to level up your Sith Warrior!" which spiraled into things like "I should try getting dressed today..." and my brain replying, "but sweatshirts and yoga pants are so much more comfortable. Why should you care about how you look anyway?"

Not caring is also like a drug in the sense that I built up an immunity to it as it started to run my life. Not caring didn't make me happy anymore, it just made me lazy. There was this heavy feeling of negative apathy that was always around me and the carelessness started getting abusive, but it would counteract itself by not caring that it was abusing itself. It was a downward spiral. I had a serious lack of social interaction, which is self-explanatory, and I also had a poor diet because I didn't even care enough to boil a pot of pasta, which is about the simplest thing you can cook. The saddest part about all of this is the fact that it's still happening, and I only used past-tenses because it sounds cooler.

That's pretty much it for today. Sorry about the abruptness. I didn't care enough to write out an ending.

Fangirling

Guys, I have a problem. Now, this isn't your average crack-cocaine addiction we're dealing with here. I am addicted to the Internet.

You're probably thinking, "What the hell is she saying that for? This isn't news!" Well, it kind-of is, actually, because I don't even have time to blog. I've been taking up all my blogging time with...

Dun-dun-DUNNN

YouTube.

So much so, even, that I have considered making my own videos. I have actually tried on several occasions, which is not to say that my own self-doubt kept me from being successful. This calls for an embarrassing back-story.

Long, long ago, like four years ago, I decided I wanted to be internet-famous. I was already watching YouTube videos then, and it got me inspired, so I called upon my partner in crime, Darian, to help me. We thought of the BEST IDEA EVER and called it "The Christmas Show", because Overlord Christmas was my name, and is now hidden away deep inside me as my bitchy alter-ego. Anyway, we made stupid videos with Darian's Flip camera, put them on the internet and actually thought we were hilarious. We didn't understand why we weren't getting any views. Then we got our first comment on a video of me: "are u a boy or a girl".

People always say that you can get 1,000 positive comments saying how good you are, but you always get that one negative comment that can lower your self-esteem by 110% and make you never ever want to show your face to the world again. That is extremely true. In fact, that comment is still planted in my brain and makes me wish I had never gotten my hands on that stupid freaking camera in the first place. Needless to say, I deleted the entire account. None of those videos exist anymore.

Years later, like three years later, Darian and I were reminiscing about how horrible those videos were, and we decided to start making videos again. So we got together and had this whole plan and we made a video. It was actually pretty good this time, but a lot of things went wrong. I only had a crappy little laptop that could not handle the super HD-ness of my video camera, so I couldn't edit, and we could never see each other every week to put out videos. I edited it on my dad's computer anyway and uploaded it. It sat there for a few months, only getting 6 views in total and no subscribers, so I deleted that whole account again and tried to make a different one.

We got together about six months later and tried to do a different video. We couldn't get a good angle and decided it wasn't meant to be. We also couldn't think of a good name that wasn't taken, so we gave up.

As you can see, it's extremely difficult to create. You always are either not good enough or think you're not good enough, and both of those can have the same amount of weight. If anybody has any advice on this subject, it would be greatly appreciated.

That's about it. I probably could rant about Advanced Placement, but... meh.

A Long-Awaited Update

Upon reading a post that I made a long time ago (not the last one, but the one before that), I am going to make a few... updates.

Update #1: The Manuscript

So that's done. Pretty fascinating. I got a .pdf, but I'm not allowed to share. It'll probably go on sale at some point electronically. Once I know about that, I'll post about it.

Update #2: School

Turns out, I was just bitter because I hated freshman year in general. Being a sophomore is nowhere near as bad as being a freshman (school itself is a lot more frustrating, but socially it's easier), which is not to say that I magically like my school. Because I don't. Stop judging me.

Seriously though. I would much rather go to Sealth. I'm waiting for the waiting list to open again so that I can sign up one more time just to see if I can get in, so that I can officially say that I'm a Seahawk as opposed to a Wildcat. But if I don't, tough shit because I've decided that even if I do get into Sealth, I'm not even going to do IB, so what's the point, right?

About that. International Baccalaureate is super good for getting into international schools. You may be thinking, "But you want to go to Oxford! That's in England! What's wrong with you?!" Well, the simple fact is, it's too much work for something that gives you a lesser result than if you were to do, say, Running Start. If you do Running Start, you can get all your credits while simultaneously be working yourself up to an Associate's degree. The bottom line is that you can graduate high school with an AA. How freaking awesome is that? And IB doesn't give you that. At least I don't think it does.

Anyway, school is fine, and I don't care about it, just as long as I complete it and get out as fast as possible so that I can go to college and finish that so that I can get a lot of money -- I mean a great job. I'll probably move to England anyway just to get the hell out of the country. Can I go to jail for saying that? Probably not; it's a free country. It's not like I'm going to blow up the Capitol. Because I'm not, you know, going to blow up the Capitol. Stop judging me.

~*~

What's that? I have a Tumblr? Go look, if you care enough. Probably not. But whatevs. Do what you want.

"Heavy"?

So, through the grapevine of the webs of inter, I found this semi-article called Stars Who Look Better Heavier. Of course, it's on Yahoo, so you can't expect it to be intelligent.

What I expected was pictures of people like Adele or Oprah, but instead you get mostly Jennifer Garner, Nicki Minaj, and Lindsay Lohan.

Bitch, please.

Lindsay and Jennifer are TOTALLY not overweight, especially not Lindsay, what with her drug escapades. It surprised me that there were so many pictures of Jennifer Garner, because she's one of the actors who I list in my head as "skinny as hell". And as a side note, Nicki Minaj shouldn't even be counted as "curvy" or "heavy" because she is mostly made out of plastic (she denies it, but a butt that big just isn't natural), so it's cheating.

Khloe Kardashian is also on there, and that just made me angry because she's just irrelevant in more ways than just this.

I'm kind of afraid to see what they think is "Average". Probably something like this:

OHEMGEE she'z so fattttt

So this is obviously a problem for me.

I consider myself skinny, being a size 4, but if I didn't have the inherent curves that I do, I would probably be smaller than that. I can literally feel my hip bones through my skin when I touch it, and I'm actually afraid of losing any weight because the skin might tear off. That's probably not an issue, but it feels that way to me, and it hurts an extra ton when I bump into a table or countertop because there's barely any protective cushioning there. So I'm definitely not afraid of gaining weight because I feel like I could use some meat on my bones.

I could go on and on about how I hate society and its ways of making everyone feel inadequate by using the massive power of Photoshop for evil instead of good, but I've come up with a theory. I believe that everyone, including men and androgynes and everyone in between, is built with a sense that they are physically inadequate, whether it's sensitivity about hair loss or feeling as though they're out-of-shape or going gray or getting wrinkles or they're too pale or they're too dark or too fat or their nose is too big or too small or too curved or too straight. Everyone thinks that they're unattractive in some way, no matter what size or shape or color they or any of their features are. That's just the way humans think.

Obviously there is no proof of early humans thinking these thoughts, but I've noticed that as far back as records take us, most everyone believes in their own defectiveness.

And this whole thing just makes me frustrated, because most of them have the strong urge to fix it. Sure, I see the flaws in my appearance, and there are times when I want so badly to get a nose job, but I stop and think about who I inherited it from, and how it probably has been in my family for countless generations, and that makes me remember that everything that makes me look the way I do was part of someone else hundreds of years ago. Not to mention the hundreds of other ancestors that contributed to my genetic makeup. But to think that I am made up of little parts that copied from someone else makes me think that I am completely made up of hundreds of people, and that makes me feel special. It also makes me feel special that I have a different shape and a different weight and a different colored skin and a different face than everyone else. Then I just remember that there are people who would think that my nose and the fact that I am the biggest dork in the world is cute, and this supports my other theory; that everyone in the world is born with a 100% perfect match somewhere else in the world. They might be the same gender, but that's okay because they'll end up loving each other anyway because of their cute nose or their dorkiness.

So every time that I see some woman in a magazine ad, I just remember that she's not different, and I end up not admiring her for being on some piece of paper connected to other pieces of paper, especially when her perfect hair and skinny waist was probably sent through some computer somewhere with image-modifying software. And I look at her hair and compare it to everyone else's hair and I realize that the modified image looks more alien than everybody else, because humans can't naturally look like that.

So that's my Poetry Slam moment. I just had to get some of that off my chest after seeing that article, and not all of my thoughts can fit into a Facebook status.

It's been freakin' forever since I posted last, but it's okay because I'm not being lazy. Stuff is actually happening.

I know, right?

I could just bullet-point everything out but this is a blog. Who do you think I am? So here we go:

Ancestry & Manuscripts

My great grandmother (Omi) handed my dad a two-hundred-ninety-something-page manuscript of my great great aunts' manuscript a little while ago. So my dad, being my dad, decided to try to scan it and transcribe it via fancy computer software, but the paper is so old and thin that it couldn't read the typeface, which was weird (according to the computer) anyway. And so I have been ordered to type it up via manual labor. It's not a bad thing, because it's fascinating to hear them say things like, "the colored porter took our things", and, "jazz is the devil's music".

Oh, and for those of you who don't know, the great great aunts in question are Edith and Grace MacDowell, a.k.a. The MacDowell Sisters, a.k.a. The Sweethearts of the Air, a.k.a. a lot of other things.

This is them:

Grace = Left; Edith = Right

I have one of Grace's ukuleles (not pictured) from 1927. I'm afraid if I play it it'll smash to pieces, so I'm going to take it to Dusty Strings at some point and get it restrung by a professional who won't smash it to pieces.

I'm almost finished with the manuscript. 49 pages to go! Yay!

The other half of this story is that because of all this family history fascination, my dad decided to go on Ancestry.com and thus began to trace our family lines for 72 straight hours and it turns out that I'm not prominently Scottish like I thought; I'm prominently Welsh, English, and Dutch, with the minorities of Scottish and Irish mixed in. There was also this one person who was born in Zimbabwe in the 1600s, so I like to say that I'm Dutch-African as well. So although I am a European Mutt, at least I know what breeds make up the mutt.

So there's that.

I Learned to Knit

Yeah, what's that about, right? Well, Raechelle's friend's friend moved out of town and left her plentiful amounts of yarn and knitting needles behind. Before she took it to Goodwill, Raechelle took the yarn from her friend because she knew that I crocheted ("or something? You still use needles, right?") and that good yarn is expensive, so she took it home, and I said, what the hell, why not learn how to knit now that I have the supplies.

And so I finished my crocheting project, and I so far have knitted a too-short scarf because I ran out of yarn, and have started on another one. Because you can never have too many scarves.

Waiting List Crap

They pushed me back three goddamn spaces. So then I was #12. WTF. Probably all the people whose appeals got accepted. Lucky bastards.

Now I'm #11. Things are looking up, but not by a whole lot. So I have a backup plan.

If I don't get to be a leading psychologist at a world-class university, I want to do something artsy. In other words, if I don't get to go to Sealth, I want to go to the Center School. It's not top-class (for public school, anyway) but it's better than WSHS. It's a small, largely LGBT community, so there's not a whole lot of teasing or beating-up, and it's easy to fit in where everyone's different, and if anything, I definitely fit under that category. "Misc." That's me.

~*~

And lo, I have run out of things to say. So I will leave you all with this update and return to... I dunno... Life?

I don't even think anyone reads this anymore...