Something to Think About

"I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you can appreciate them when they're right, you believe less so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together."

Hmmm.

P.S. I'll be 24 a week from tomorrow.

Why I'm Loving Fablehaven

"The magic inside you is dazzling. By comparison, he is like a faint star next to the noonday sun."
"I don't know how to use it," Kendra said.
"Don't ask me," the fairy said. "You're the gifted luminary our Queen chose to honor. I can't show you how to unlock your magic any more than you can teach me how to use mine."
-- from the second book in the series, Rise of the Evening Star by Brandon Mull

The Scariest Things There Are - Part 1

"You are not consumed by the darkness because you are full of light."
- Robin McKinley








I wake up covered in sweat that burns like ice, and everything is dark.
   Dark? No, that doesn't quite cover it. This is beyond the dark you'd get at midnight on the winter solstice, during a thunderstorm with no lightning, or in the middle of an abandoned cemetery on a starless night. This is more than a simple matter of lights and shadows and rods and corneas. This is a dark you can feel.
   You can even taste it.
   Naturally, my first reaction to something so strange and so foreboding is to get out of bed and go for a run.
   So that's what I do.

There's a certain something about running at night that I can't really describe, but it's nothing short of magical. Sure, it's just as exhausting as it is during the day, but . . . I don't know. The night air is colder, crisper, and I can breathe it in and out easier. I am faster and I am stronger than ever when I can't see where I'm going.
   It makes no sense, but who ever heard of magic making sense?

After running and running and running through the forest for who knows how long (this is surely much farther than any of my usual paths, but the thought of stopping hasn't even begun to occur to me), I trip over nothing and skin both knees.
   My glasses go flying as I fall, because of course my glasses go flying. On a night like this, it's a wonder that they haven't already gone flying (not to put too fine a point on it, but I am sweating an awful lot). For a few moments, I madly scramble about, trying to find them by feel . . .
   . . . until it hits me: What's the point? I can't see a thing anyway, not a blessed thing. Besides, I keep a spare pair at home for precisely this purpose. If I can even find my way home tonight.
   Well, golly.
   Isn't that a pleasant thought?

Seriously, though, where in the world am I?

I crawl over to a sturdy tree and lean into it and just breathe.
   Since I left home (running, in retrospect, was a spectacularly stupid idea -- you'd think, at the very least, I might have had the sense to bring my phone), the palpable dark has increased. Tenfold.
   I begin to worry.
   Breathe.
   In. Out. In, out, in again, out again.
   Shut up and breathe.
   Don't panic.

A minute passes, or maybe it's an hour.

Alright, enough of this.
   Calm down.
   I do have four other senses, after all. Taste is fairly useless at this juncture (all I can taste is the dark -- yes, I know how crazy that sounds), but surely the other three can at least point me in the direction of----
   Hey! Direction! I can just turn around and go home!
   . . . No, I can't. I have no idea where I am and no idea how I got here and no idea where home is. I don't even know how much time has passed since I fell. Plus, I'm tired. I'm so very tired.
   (You know, it's weird. Before I fell, I was perfectly content with having no idea where I was or where I was going. I knew I couldn't see anything even when it was right in front of me, but that didn't seem like such a big deal.)
   Okay, focus. Touch, smell, listen. You can figure this out.

Listen.
   I don't hear anything other than my own anxious heartbeat.
   Or, rather, I don't hear anything other than my own anxious heartbeat until I think, I don't hear anything other than my own anxious heartbeat. The realization inexplicably perks up my ears, and I hear . . .
   . . . a spooky owl,
   . . . wind rushing through the trees,
   . . . something chuckling in the distance, which is surely just my imagination, and
   . . .
     . . .
       . . . somebody somewhere (everywhere? nowhere?) trying to get my attention.
   "IT'S NOT JUST YOUR IMAGINATION."
   Who the hell was that?

An Update (Except Not)

"I'm still alive
That much is true
I've never lied
Well, I guess I've told a few"

- Relient K,
"Softer to Me"

. . . Yeah, I'm not really sure what else to say. I'll try to share more of an actual update on Saturday. I would do it tomorrow, but I'm pretty much gonna be tied up all day. Not in a kinky way.

LOVE.

Addendum

I always feel weird about writing godawful poetry (note: I rarely write poetry that is not godawful) and sharing it with someone. On the one hand, things must be bleak if I'm writing poetry, godawful or otherwise. Then again, things must not be too terribly horribly no good very bad if I'm able to deal with them by taking a second to write poetry, godawful or otherwise.

Last night I did five hundred pushups and one hundred situps. That sounds like a lot, but they were all pretty much necessary. I had another panic attack. Or almost had one. For more than two hours. I don't know exactly what happened, but it sucked out loud. After the twenty-fifth pushup, it stopped sucking or doing anything else because all I could feel was my body.
And then I took a hot bath. Incidentally, exercise and hot baths go together really well, as long as you make sure to do them in that order.

"I think I had a point, but I just got distracted."

I'm going to have some sort of Shopping Emergency in the next two and a half weeks. But don't worry, I'm already planning how to deal with it.

My allergies have been kicking my ass since Sunday night.

The moral of the story is that Depression is a jerk and I'm tired of fighting him. I wish I could just be normal.

This Deserves Its Own Post

"When you're alive, people can hurt you. It's easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out.
"But it's a lie."
- Laurie Halse Anderson, WINTERGIRLS

Spiffy Philosophy

. . . Which reminds me of two quotes from WINTERGIRLS:

"When you're alive, people can hurt you. It's easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out.
"But it's a lie."

"The nasty voices are always on call, eager to pull me back down

::Stupid/ugly/stupid/bitch/stupid/fat/
stupid/baby/stupid/loser/stupid/lost::

but I do not let them."

I Didn't Even Ask Her to Say This

"I'm glad [someone] is noticing a change in you. I think everyone is, really. How couldn't they? You're amazing, and all... chipper when you talk. It's weird, but awesomely amazing, or amazingly awesome. Or some other crazy combination of those words and possibly others."
- Leslie Zimmerman

Just So You Know

I've been kind of quiet for the past few days -- not because I've stopped fighting, but because everything has been so so SO VERY AWESOME that I honestly have no idea where to even start talking about any of it!

I still don't have any idea where to even start, so I'm just gonna go ahead and own the fact that I may never get around to it. Which I'm okay with, because the truth of the matter is that everything is going to be awesome and I'm going to keep fighting to make everything awesome for quite a good long while . . . so, really, there's no need to tell anybody every little awesome thing that happens to me. Particularly not when every single day is so full of so many awesome things, you know?

That being said, there are more than a couple of things I do want to get around to sometime soon, such as:

* Frequently Asked Questions

* The Thing About My Mother

* Happy Tears I Have Cried Lately

* Did therapy truly "change" me that dramatically, or was I always this confident and just really good at hiding it before?

* Exactly What I Want for My Birthday

* "If you want to do something impossible, stop telling yourself that it's impossible." I've done more than one impossible thing in the past six weeks.

* My Instincts Are Almost Always Right -- About EVERYTHING

* IndyFringe and the Fun That Was Had There

* Quotes from Buffy that aptly sum up how (and why) to fight Depression . . .

. . . such as . . .

"There's only one thing on this Earth more powerful than Evil, and that's us."

Alright.

More later.

LOVE.

Lions and Tigers and Metaphors, Oh My

Last night it occurred to me that battling Depression is a bit like The Wizard of Oz (the movie; it's been years and years since I read any of the books): Your entire life gets uprooted by a storm that seems to come out of nowhere, so you have to go on this big long journey -- a journey full of irony and foreshadowing and other such things -- and face your worst fears, and meet all these people who either help you or harm you in some way, just to get home . . . only to discover that, in the end, you had the power to get what you wanted all along.

But you couldn't have taught yourself how to use the power if you hadn't taken the journey.

P.S. Speaking of power, here are two quotes from high school that I've recently gained a new appreciation for.

"You believed you were beautiful and so did the rest of the world." - Sarah Dessen, Keeping the Moon

"There's only one thing on this Earth more powerful than evil . . . and that's us." - Buffy Summers

"Helpful" Quotes

This morning was very special and somewhat stressful (we don't need to get into the details). To help deal with it, I thought I'd spend the last half of my walk to work thinking up quotes that were, well, helpful. This is what I came up with:

"Please let me get what I want." - The Smiths
==> Another quote by them that was suggested by my friend Kiki (who is one-third of the entire reason I have a Twitter): "You know where you came from, you know where you're going and you know where you belong."

"I hate that there's evil in the world. I hate that I was chosen to fight it." - Buffy Summers

"Make your choice. Are you ready to be strong?" - Buffy Summers

"People say I'm pretty, and I guess I'm okay. People say I'm confident, and I know that's true." - Rachel the Animorph

"Maybe you die, but you never surrender." - Marco the Animorph


ANGELUS: Take all that away, and what's left?
BUFFY: Me.

". . . I know you love me, baby." - Lady Gaga

"It's not too late." - Aang

"You already have all the weapons you need. Now fight." - various characters from Sucker Punch

"The truth is important, but so are your friends. And if you can have them both . . . then it's a good life." - Harriet M. Welsch

"The end will justify the pain it took to get us there." - Relient K

"The beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair." - Relient K

"You are now at the hard part of getting better. But keep your head up, kid - you got this." - my friend Emily

(Sooo I clearly need to get my ass to the library sometime soon. Even when I quoted the main character of my favorite book of all time, I lifted a line from the movie.)

I may or may not have more to say about this later, but my whole experience with Depression has made me just slightly jealous of Buffy. Sure, every demon in the world eventually comes after her and her friends, whereas I only have the one to deal with . . . but, when she kills a monster, it (almost always) stays dead.

Depression never goes away forever.

At least, not so far.

But I've only been fighting him for about two and a half months. That's somewhat less than the seventeen years he's been trying to ruin my life.

I guess, when you look at it that way, it's sort of a mixed blessing that he doesn't stay dead.

Because killing him feels good.