The Nature Of Progression

It’s weird coming out of this writer’s block. I feel that I have so much to say and yet somehow have forgotten how to say it.

Before the brain fog hit terribly, and I was still blogging on here, I talked about a class I was taking, a Native American literature class and how the material really spoke to me. I also talked about how there was a girl in my class who I was sure was so jealous of me that she was turning the professor and my classmates against me, and conspiring to get this blog taken down–like I said, it was right before the brain fog settled in.

I’m sitting here tonight thinking about where my journey had brought me so far. I think it’s brought me to a much better understanding of myself, of how I fit in this world, of where I can go. I manage to plow through a speech yesterday, something I promised myself I’d never do again, and felt okay about it–better than I usually feel about something like that. It was the first time I could speak in front of a decent group of people and NOT forget everything I was supposed to say because of anxiety.

And tonight I opened up a book I got from that Native American professor and the first passage entitled “The Nature of Progression” touched me suddenly and deeply.

“There’s a gyroscope inside the body, whose electro-magnetic fingers reach out to touch the facets we call spirit, mind, and emotion. It builds a progression that’s always seeking to occur, always moving, always bringing us to balance, despite our confusion, our camouflage, our sabotage.”

That’s described my experience over the last 3 years perfectly. I felt I was always losing control, always bouncing off the rails, and yet there was another force within me fighting for balance. I knew where I needed to return, I just didn’t know how.

And I think that’s a struggle for a lot of us dealing with our mental health. We have a vision of where we want to be, how we want to be, but we’re not quite sure how to get there. I’ve learned a little secret about this.

I’ve learned to let life take me where it will take me. I’ve learned that I don’t need to be perfect in everything as I was pushing myself to be. I’ve learned that where life takes me is where I will end up, and I’m okay with that. Sometimes if you let go of a little control, you gain more than you’d ever imagine you’d have.

The thing about life is that you can’t control it. The universe is so chaotic that it’s ordered, so no matter how much you try and control something, the universe already knows what needs to be in order for balance to come to fruition. And it will guide you in that direction, it’s guided me.

This is my second post of the day because I just have so much to get out of me, so much to catch everyone up on, and a blog to run, of course. I’ve been absent for too long. It’s been calling me back ever since.

As this song I’m listening to says: there’s no point in living if you can’t feel the life.  And as much pain as I’ve been through, I wouldn’t trade it in for a life of perfection. I think that says a lot.

The Sound Of Silence

After the events of the last couple days, and of the last few weeks in general, I went on a search for a place to find solace.Class is not one of them, so I did not attend classes today.

There are several national parks where I live, open to the public and free.Why I never explore them is beyond me.

But today I needed to be in nature. I needed to hear the trees talk to me and the moths tell me everything was going to be okay. The more I think about it, my manager from work is 100% right: moths are totally fairies.

I’m terrified of things that flutter. They are loud and erratic and stress me out. But if I think of them as fairies my fear dissipates. It reminds me of my childhood when a neighbor girl and I were obsessed with them. We went fairy hunting and bought each other fairy accessories (like magnets) with stories about the different types of fairies and the different types of good wills they bring with them. They watch over us, almost like little angels of nature. Ever since my stress has reached monumental peaks and I’ve been cracking at the seams, tons of fairy-moths have been huddling on my room door, outside of my apartment, and laying themselves flat all over my car.

There was one this morning that I talked to for a little while and he rode with me until the wind got too intense and he fluttered off to take care of someone else. They’re busy little creatures.

Anyway, I dragged my boyfriend and his sparkling white shoes and clean clothes into the dust and ruckus of the forest seen above. He hates when I do that.

The picture above was the main road because there are some people who live up on the tip of the mountain.But when you veer off onto the dirt paths through the trees there’s nothing but silence, fairies, rushing water, and the realization that life is more simple and beautiful than we let it be.

I go into the trees when I want to kill myself–not to kill myself, but to not kill myself. See how that works?

Nature and I have a special pact with each other. We understand each other on a metaphysical level. It speaks to me and I speak to it and we both realize we’re in this journey together for the long haul. I feel both good and bad for the redwood that stands for hundreds or thousands of years. That’s a lot of change, a lot of pain, and a lot of time.

As much as I would like to take a bullet to the temple, when I sit next to a stream and listen to the water and all the thousands of years worth of knowledge it has, and when I sit next to a broken stump of a tree twice the length of my 5’7 body, and listen to the pain it’s endured from tree rot or loggers or whatever, it all tells me not to take the bullet.

None of these feelings are gone. But I know the universe is there advocating for me if no one else is.

We came across a large tree stump that my boyfriend thought looked like a large bone of an animal. I said that was because trees are the bones of the earth.

They also–hold onto your hats–receive messages from the universe. That’s how I see it, at least.That’s why they talk to me in the silent way that they do, and they hug me in the non-tangible way that they do.

That’s why the leaves were as bright as they were today. That was a message in itself. That’s why there was as much silence as there was today in those woods. The universe knows where I am this moment, it always sees it coming before I do, and it’s sending its condolences through soft breezes and fairies across my car.

I have not recovered yet from my shutdown or my meltdown. Everything aches. My mental health and my physical health. I can barely lug this body around from my room to the bathroom and the nausea is killing me; it’s always the same. I do not feel well. My classes are suffering once more and I’m sick of falling into the same old cycle without any insight into why.

I might consult the trees again tomorrow morning, if I can wake up early enough.

Some people were walking their horses through the trails and I almost fell into tears because I could not give the horses a hug or a pat. Their eyes are always so telling and I know they had a message for me too, but I couldn’t get close enough to them. They were beautiful though.

I jumped on the tree branches, I climbed some, I sat in the dirt and I got us lost. We went further down into the depths of the mountainside, away from the residential main road where the real silence was.

An aerial view of the park, courtesy of Google Images. I’m probably someone in one of the grooves, swinging from a tree branch.

If we paused we could hear a creek trickling downstream and the distant hooves of the horses.

I feel bad I did not spend this time getting caught up on all the homework I haven’t done, as well as all the studying for my test tomorrow. I feel like I am an expert at wasting time in these frilly states of mind. But I also feel like they are necessary. They’re how I understand the world. They’re the only way I know of, besides hospitalization, that would keep me from blowing away my skull. They are the only reason I’ve never been hospitalized.

If I didn’t think the universe held me on a pedestal, I’d have killed myself long ago.

So the nausea is still rampant, both my hands are sore and a little swollen from all the hitting and punching and throwing things, my skin is irritated from all the self harm, and my mind/body is exhausted. My homework is left undone, my participation points in class have probably plummeted, and I’ll probably fail that test tomorrow.

But I’m alive.

I’m trying to figure out of any of this is worth the effort I’m putting in.

I’ve always wanted this blog to be informative. I’ve also always wanted it to be real. And this is as real as it gets. Fairies, voices of the universe, and a bullet in my head.

The Racist And The Cynic

I think I have a weird obsession with photographing leaves and paths:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I seriously have a problem. It’s an obsession.

I took those about a week and a half ago and haven’t been out on a photography bender since.

It’s hard to get out sometimes. It’s like everyday is one of those weekend mornings that you lay on your back in bed knowing that you have to do laundry, go to the grocery store, run the kids to soccer practice, pick the kids up from soccer practice, clean the kitchen, scrub the bathroom, tidy up the living room, water the lawn, wash the windows, wash the car, sweep the porch, and pay the bills and you just don’t have the motivation to do any of it.

I don’t even have to do any of those things. If I did I probably wouldn’t; I’d sleep the days away, I know I would.

Because I’ve been at my college for two and a half years now, they give me priority status for choosing my classes. Tomorrow I’ve got to pick what I’m going to take for next semester and I’m worried the same thing is going to happen all over again. I’m going to get depressed and overwhelmed and stressed and drop a whole load of them and get stuck at this stupid college for another year.

Everything is going so fast.

That’s probably why I love photographing things that are still and peaceful. Some people are into that motion photography and giving a glimpse at busy city life and it makes them happy and that’s cool. But it’s not for me. I like to capture one single, still moment I can appreciate that is the exact opposite of how my brain works. Maybe it helps me slow down, I don’t know.

I’m probably analyzing something I don’t need to.

There’s one class, a psychological research class, I need to take in order to get my degree. I signed up for it this semester but dropped the second day because wholly fuck I was not prepared. I was not prepared at all. It was a small class, and I could have handled the group work. He said it wouldn’t happen every class period, but frequently. He said it would happen all the time in the lab. I’ve been in labs in other science classes and I get along fairly well with labs, especially in biology or chemistry.

I never told you all about the girl in my biology lab who thought she was hot shit and joined our group and started directing us all over the place and couldn’t do simple math, so I took over and basically told her to fuck off in the most polite way I could and then when it came to do the presentation I fell silent not because of my anxiety for once (although partly) but because she kept acting arrogant and didn’t want to participate so I made her do the presentation. It was funny. She struggled explaining her ideas mostly because they were dumb. At the very end I basically disregarded everything she said in front of the class and said the correct things. The next lab Friday she sat in the back of the class away from us.

I had won the battle and became queen of two Latina chicks who spoke alright English but sometimes struggled with the wording the textbook. My kingdom was small but mighty.

Anyway, we dissected hearts of sheep (two people nearly fainted for some reason) among other things and we teamed up with the anatomy lab to see four carcasses. A lot of people couldn’t handle it. So only a few of us went in the back and they taught us the anatomy of the heart by shoving a human heart in our face (thing is huge), and they showed us cirrhosis of the liver by shoving a diseased liver in our face, and they showed us all the intestines and all that yummy stuff by letting us lean over their work space and stare into the cavern of the four bodies. And I thought to myself: this, this room here full of these people with all their gloves stuffed inside the dead bodies and white lab coats that nearly touched the floor on short people, this is where serial killers are born.

I love labs. Something exciting always happens.  But the lab for that psychology class was a bitch. First of all it happened right after class ended, so you sat in that room with those people for four and a half hours every Tuesday and Thursday. You had to schedule in time to conduct six experiments of your own at some point during the semester with psych 1 students and he didn’t even give more information on it. The one thing about bad social anxiety is that by the time you build up the courage to ask a question to clarify things for you, you’re already lying in bed at home like shit, I should have asked.

But then you remember how stupid you might sound and then you curl up in your blankets and say fuck it, I’ll just drop the class.

One of my goals is to get my social anxiety under enough control that I can finish that class. I have no other option, honestly.

So that class is number one million on the list of classes my anxiety has interfered with. I need to take another Ethics class, which I’d love to do since I love Philosophy, but I remember peering in on their class to do my own personal socially anxious research ritual and saw that they did huge group presentations and projects. I can’t even think of a simple sentence to say in front of people; thinking analytically in front of them is near impossible.

Let me write my words out on the board and just have the class read it. Then i’ll do it.

I want to take the Eastern philosophy though. I’m sick of learning western ideas. It’s boring.

There’s no way I’m ready to take that psych class again. So the only class I know for sure that I’m taking is math. That’s stress enough right there.

I couldn’t handle taking a language class. A whole class devoted to oral repetition? Ha! Kill me first. Everyone, friends and classmates and such, always said I should take Spanish. Obviously I want to learn, I’m not so much of an idiot that I don’t see that I’m going to need to be Bilingual with the next most popular language in my area. But when I say “No” they take it as “No, I don’t want to learn because I’m racist and don’t like the language. I’m black and therefore sick of being around non-black people who I can’t relate to because I’m racist. I’M RACIST.”

No motherfucker, I’m not taking it because I can barely say a coherent sentence in English in front of people when my brain stops the words in my throat and sends them below and I end up standing there like an idiot. How do you think I’ll act in a class where the majority of the people already speak fucking Spanish and are just taking it because it’ll be easy as shit for them? I’ll sound even more stupid. I don’t feel like being laughed at.

I want to feel at least a tiny bit more comfortable speaking in my own Language before I try and learn a new one.

Problem is, I also can’t get into the University I want to without language. The school system is directed towards Extroverts. The whole world is.

But does anyone get that? Of course not. I’m just a racist and a cynic. You know, I’m African American and Native American in a family that’s always, always worked hard and still lives in poverty and is torn apart by addiction but I’m the racist and the cynic. Because that makes sense.

I just don’t know about anything anymore.

Ha, just kidding. I know I’m not taking physics again. These professors suck (it’s not just me who says that, ask anyone who takes physics as my college) and the Physics Learning Center makes me shudder. Too small, too many people, and they’re all arrogant.

I’m arrogant too, but at least I’m not so flamboyant about it.

 

 

Give A Spider A Break, Man!

Here’s a little fun-fact about me: I’m terrified of spiders.

A lot of people are, I think. One incident I sat on the edge of my bed watching television. A brown, long-legged and probably harmless arachnid leisurely descended from the ceiling a few centimeters from my face with it’s little stick legs extended and probing outward toward my nose. I screamed and smacked it in hopes it would fly across the room but instead it swung at me with all it’s legs stretched in claw formation ready to clasp its prey and landed somewhere on my body. I screamed again, leapt from my bed, smacked myself to bruises, burst through my door screaming for my parents and slammed into the wall.

Needless to say I did not sleep in my room that night. He had won the battle but not the war.

He was probably like “what’s your problem, bro? I just want to suck your blood, fuck. Can’t a spider get a ‘lil love in this joint?”

I also stay up late and so do they.

One night at 2am I lay in my bed watching South Park and laughing my ass off as usual until something black tickles the corner of my eye. I stared behind the area of my television and there’s this thick black dot the size of a United States Fifty Cent piece crawling from underneath my world map. He was planning his world domination tactics; Hitler Reincarnated.

DEVIL SPAWN!!!!!!!

I was frozen. I’ve never seen a spider that large other than ones hanging in webs or just chillin’ on the ground outside. This dude somehow squeezed in my room and decided to harass me.

We stared at each other. I knew he felt my presence because I felt him feeling my presence. He remained stationary. The whistler band from the old Clint Eastwood movies peered around the corner of my door and whistled the signature tune as I crawled towards this beastly bastard, heart thumping, neck sweating, mind racing. His leg twitched. I grew rigid. He turned. My bones ached. He breathed, I breathed, he stared, I stared, and for a few minutes we raced through time together at the same speed, in the same direction, until my balls dropped and I gained the confidence to raise myself eye to eye with him. My teeth chattered so I clenched them; he could smell cowardice.

I fell backwards as he flew towards the corner of the room. There he scrunched, confident in his defense but insecure in my offense, and I stood confident in neither my defense or offense. At such an hour I couldn’t wake my parents so I sat on the edge of my bed with one eye on Comedy Central and the other on the mass cowering in the corner. Our standoff lasted until sunrise. My father squished him dead.

I always feel a mix of sorrow and relief. If we would have had means to pick him up and put him outside, we would have, but him being so scrunched in the corner and so large, neither of us were going to make an attempt.

I took every item out of my room that day, including my bed, until the floor was spotless, the closet was uncluttered, and every nook or cranny had been vacuumed out.

There isn’t a moment in my life where I don’t remember being disturbed by spiders. It’s the legs man, it really is. They’re so . . . reachy, you know? They just probe around like they own the place. That’s what makes the alien things in the movie Alien so terrifying when they launch their bodies around people’s faces: it’s the legs!!!

In nature, I think they’re fascinating creatures. I could spend countless hours watching them spin their webs and catch their prey and suck the life from them; it’s such a pleasing experience. It was the one thing I set out on a mission to find yesterday when I went for my walk with my camera. That’s something I would love to have in a single, still frame; just a spider in it’s natural habitat, the thing I fear the most at it’s most comfortable and perhaps most vulnerable. It takes away some of my fear. They’re just trying to live as much as I am.

But, you know, I don’t go crawling up people’s walls and flopping around in their face.

It’s alright. They don’t know any better, they just want some food. Next time maybe I’ll feed one a snack.

I guess if I wanted food enough, I’d scare the shit out of people by descending from the ceiling on their faces and flopping around speaking in tongues. They’ll be out of the house so fast I could just raid their kitchen cabinets. Kind of like:

I walked through all those trees, all those paths, and didn’t find one damn spider in one damn web doing one damn thing. All there was were squirrels trying to ambush me with tree branches. I was disappointed. Until I stared through all eighty of my photos piece by piece and found something amazing. I cropped it out of the larger photo and this is what I found:

Do you see the little guy? Click on the photo; he’s at the top!

YES, I GOT ONE BY COMPLETE ACCIDENT.

He’s tiny, but he’s cute, and I was so ecstatic when I found him my parents didn’t understand what was wrong with me. I exaggerate everything, remember?

So I say suck it spiders, I caught one of you even though I know you were all hiding from me on purpose. Got you.

I shall name him Vex.

Why? Because fuck it, that’s why.

My next theme will be cityscape, I think. Something to do with cities. Buildings. Signs. Something like that. I’ve never had the opportunity to do something like that before, so I’m going to try it.

I’m going to look like a lost tourist taking pictures of random shit, but screw it.

One guy tried taking a picture of a swim center sign yesterday with his iphone. He couldn’t get it right I guess, because he took about three or four. It’s just a giant concrete slab in some dirt that says “Simpkins Family Swim Center”. It’s dirty as hell and unimaginative. But he wanted a picture. If I hadn’t been dressed so horribly with my hair all over the place, I would have walked up all professional like and charged him ten dollars to take a picture of the stupid fucking sign for him. Probably a tourist who spent so much money to come over here he didn’t have enough for a camera.

At any rate, as you can tell I’m having a lot of fun with my new hobby. My psychologist had suggested that perhaps some of my depression is related to the fact that I don’t do anything. I laughed because of the sense it made. So I’m trying to do more things, things outside, and that’s why I bought this camera so haphazardly. It’s getting me out of the house ever so slowly. In fact, I think I’ll head over to another field right now just to get some more shots before I switch away from nature for a while.

Every day is a new day. Don’t give up on the future; you haven’t even experienced it yet!

Decisions, Decisions . . . Cookies. I’ll Just Eat Some Cookies.

Remember, Remember, the fifth of November

Anywhoooo .  .  . I went for a walk this morning for two reasons: 1) To test out my new camera and 2) To think. I’ve recently had something major happen and I’m pretty freaked out about it. I don’t want to say what it is because I have’t made any decisions yet and I know some of my options might be offensive to people. Not that I give a shit about your feelings.

Of course I give a shit about your feelings.

So you’ll all have to suffer while I huddle in secrecy and horror and an odd excitement and keep this to myself. The walk just made me more confused however, and I guess the only thing good out of it was that I see the limitations of my camera and the lens. Mostly the lens. I’m going to need a new one to do what I want. It was definitely worth the money, I’m not regretting my purchase, and it works flawlessly to the average person . . . but I see flaws in the flawless, so I’m going to need a new one. Like a 70-300mm.

But um, Best Buy, I’m not paying 499.99 dollars for it. Ebay, here I come.

Sure hope I get called for that job soon.

I went for a stroll on the beach first and saw some awesome cranes, but I couldn’t get close enough without freaking them out and my lens couldn’t zoom enough for the shot I wanted, so I said fuckk ’em and headed out to the water. Besides, a lady walked past with her stupid loud mouth dog and scared them all to hell.

The water was nice.

I can see that with any art you have to define yourself. Nature is easy to take pictures of, it’s naturally beautiful and people always swoon over it. I’m still getting used to this camera and thinking visually instead of . . . in words . . . so bare with me on this journey. Today was more like me pressing buttons and hoping I don’t break it. Some people read manuals; I don’t have the attention span or the memory space for all that.

It took me a couple weeks to figure out what kind of mental health blogger I wanted to be; you know, sarcastic, hilarious, amazingly informative, and in your face. It’s going to take me much longer to figure out what kind of photographer I am, what I really suck at (mostly everything) and what I’m alright at, and what I want to put my energy into.

Learning! Yay!

It’s really cold. My hands are numb on this keyboard. All you people who live around snow are probably laughing and calling this Californian chick a wimp, but shut up, November is cold and my circulation sucks. I need to exercise, alright?

Anyway, I went into this forest area.

Someone Dropped Their Coke

I tried to get a photo of a squirrel but it raced up the tree, then I saw this dude on his bike in the shadows staring at me. Scared the fuck out of me, not to mention it was slightly embarrassing because I’d been talking to myself. Anyway, he was staring. It was weird. So as relaxed as I wanted to be among the silent musings of the trees, and as confident as I am in my fighting skills (try me, bitch), I spent the majority of my walk paranoid as fuck.

I swear I heard his bike tires in the trees. I heard him get on it behind me too and he rode in the opposite direction I walked: there are two paths and they meet at the same place. I figured he went down the other way just so he could meet me in the brush and potentially murder me.

If you don’t have woods in your area, and you’ve never walked through a forest where you can hear the patter of Chickadee steps across the dirt, than you wouldn’t understand how the environment only added to my hyper-awareness. Every crack of a branch or tweet of a bird or rustle of a leaf in the wind I readied my fist to punch that dude in the teeth. Whenever I turned my back to the path to take a picture, I envisioned that fucker leaping out of the bushes at me and hitting me in the back of the head before I even had a chance to hit him in the nuts. If you’re going to come after me, at least let me have a chance to hit you in the nuts.

A lot of druggies hang out around this path because there’s a drain where they can take shelter for the night. I was the only other person walking the paths. I have a camera worth a good 400 dollars in my hand (although, I didn’t pay that). It’s not as if my paranoia was unjustified.

However, spinning on my heels every five seconds because a bird slammed into a leaf somewhere is a little exhausting.

If I wouldn’t have seen that guy, would I have been thinking those thoughts? Most likely. He just made it worse. I’ve recently learned I have safety issues; I don’t feel safe anywhere, it contributes to why I hate going outside. There’s a lot of thick bushes back there, anyone could be hiding–even a mountain lion–and there aren’t any houses around so no one would hear me screaming. After all the examples I’ve seen of The Bystander Effect, even if someone did hear me scream, they probably wouldn’t waste their breath picking up the phone and dialing emergency services.

Towards the end of my walk I kind of jogged because the noises in the bushes were getting louder. I’d walk really fast, see a picture, snap it as quick as possible, spin around and check the bushes, then walk/jog until I came to another picture. So I’m pretty sure I looked like I was on crack. I’m kind of glad no one else was around.

Crack is Wack, Yo.

She Knows What I’m Talkin’ About

As I reached the end, a branch snapped off and fell in the path behind me and I almost screamed. A stupid squirrel scrambled along another branch after having saved itself from plummeting to the ground with the one it broke. Damn squirrels man, always messing with me. If they’re not staring at me like weirdos, they’re causing a bunch of ruckus. Just like a toddler.

I’m ready to go back to sleep. Too bad I have class later tonight. Ugh.

Just to let you know, I fought for two hours with my phone and my internet to get these pictures up. Two hours consisting of a lot of cursing and a lot of slapping and a lot of promising to rip someones eyeballs out and feed them to the cranes on the beach.

I tend to make general threats to nobody in particular when I get angry at technology.

If only I videoed myself.

Fuck, could you imagine how long it would take a video to load?

The thought makes my skin crawl.