Tequila and Chocolate

Tequila and chocolate is running through my veins and I am once again pondering my future. I realised last weekend that I lead a good life indeed yet I still crave more. My downfall as always.

I’ve always overachieved, asked for more than was due, stretched beyond my limitation and always felt I ended with nothing at all.

A true friend is harder to find than most realise or care to admit. I have at least 3 amazing women in my life that see beyond the piles of bullshit I mound up and see me for what I am and cannot be and love me regardless.

Not many people find this, have this, know this.

One lives with me – a constant strength that not many are privileged to. One is so far away my very soul aches and one is as close as a late night text message, a boozy lunch, a call for help. I am indeed blessed.

In this world of love I still search for the excuse of loneliness. My downfall as always.

All this, all this stuff floating in a very private belly of tequila and chocolate is the very essence of me and all I never can seem to be.

In these moments I think of those that I wish I had a greater connection to. People that drive me forward from afar. People that inspire and terrify me all at once. People that make moments like these feel so alive.

I may follow their updates and blogs in awe, marvel at their strength from afar, rave about their beauty to empty rooms all the while staying safe within their shadows.

People can be terrible and beautiful all at once. They can move you and destroy you, complete you. Yet a life without them can be so snug, so warm, so secure.

I feel shaking and lost treading this path alone.

Yet in its purest state we are all alone, all shaking, all scared, all resisting everything that makes us fail, makes us human.

The tequila makes me fearless, fearless enough to publish this blog, the chocolate make me womanly and weak, weak enough to hold the universe in my hands like every woman must.

I have no idea what I want to say in this piece, maybe the pointlessness is the point of it all.

I’m tired of feeling like the model of malfunction yet the ache is so familiar that I steer my wheel to it everyday.

The hardest part of depression is allowing the brain to recognise the good in your life and not allowing your heart to experience it. The world is harder to take when the logic has been removed.

I’m so tired of hearing my own words, of writing darkness; you must be so tired of reading it.

With all that has been given to me, with all that I have fought to keep I would still give it all away for a just one moment of peace.

My downfall as always.

Grant me the Serenity

I’m 32 and I’m seriously starting to notice the little signs of ageing. Now I’ve been going grey since I was 16, and as long as there is hair dye, I’m cool with that but lines that stay beyond the pillow creases are starting to freak me out.

I’m a huge fan of character lines just not my own face. I love a storyteller and a face that begins conversations just leave my face out of the plot. It’s not that I want to stay young, I want to shrivel up with wisdom but only on the inside.

I spend hours every week pounding the treadmill running away from my age but all I seem to do is encourage my bouncing girls to travel even further south. (must invest in a good sports bra!)

I lather my face in the anti 7 signs of ageing cream everyday cursing that fact that there are as many as 7 signs to this sickness. I stay out of the sun to the point that I now look like Dracula’s bride, eat stupid healthy and limit alcohol to a sad ration every week all in the name of staying young.

I spend so much of my youth on ways of staying young that I have no idea how to be young.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”

Oh I bloody know it but it won’t stop me pouring my 2 cents into the $162 billion anti-ageing industry. I know it is going to happen but I still feel cheated somehow.

I spend my entire life hating my body – I remember even hating it in pre-school – don’t remember much else about pre-school but I sure remember the inadequacy I sentenced myself too.

Thighs too big, arms too wobbly, chin – too many, stomach too bloated, too many rolls and bumps for my liking. A few years ago I lost over 30kgs yet I still see that in the mirror everyday – well the days I can actually look in the mirror.

I’m convinced that when I’m 60 and looking at old photos I will realise that things weren’t as bad as I believed and I may even regret the thousands of hours I spend dismissing my beauty.

Thousands of hours! Maybe this why woman are yet to rule the world – who has the time!

I love control – actually I hate it but it drives me so I need it and seek it wherever I can. Ageing rules me out – defeats me – I must submit to it. Things are going to change whether I like it or not and it isn’t going to be pretty. Yet I think this is one of the reasons that I’m drawn to ink. I’m leaving a mark of my own choosing, I’m creating lines under my terms. I’m in some way choosing how a particular body part will look like to the end of my time.

I’m designing my next tattoo and it’s consuming me. I’m marking my skin once more.

Some people ask if I ever regret my tattoos – what’s to regret. I can point to many things on my body that I regret are there, what’s a couple more! At least it will be art and meaningful and not just sagging tits and an orange peel arse to boot.

Step 8

An innocent invite from the past has thrown me in a spin.

I feel like there needs to be a 12 step program for Depression as surely there needs to be a time when I confront the ones I have hurt, confused, used during my breakdown.

It is very much like recovering from an addiction – an addiction to a life of bad choices and meaner consequences, destructive patterns and fruitless dreams.

In retrospect the fall was dragged over many years and there are many people that came along for the ride. Not always people of great significance but people, breathing, feeling people nonetheless.

I’m ashamed of the fall and the people I used to break it.

Yet I can’t step back – I can’t cross that line again not even for a sorry for what I did, said, thought, not even for a handshake of forgiveness… if that is indeed coming my way.

People can be the habit, the trigger to beliefs, feelings, and actions. If after all that I have lost and all that I have fought to regain how could I possibly walk back into a life I left behind? It’s not possible – it is as if my past needs to be erased in order to survive my future. I need to kill the addiction, wipe the patterns, re-learn to act, live, think, breathe.

I’ve been caught in these circles for too long, round and round and round the same shit, same mistakes, and same reactions. I can’t be the same person and if you knew her then that’s not such a bad thing.

I could make apologies in this public forum but neither of us needs that in order to move on and that is what we all need in the end anyway, isn’t it?

To move on

Step 8 is to make amends for those that you have hurt during the time of your addiction.

I don’t see any of you anymore – I can’t remember the names of you all but I’m still haunted by every one. I won’t seek you out but I will make amends.

I will recover

That is my amends.

Amnesia

I find the older I get the more I forget.

Not where my keys are and if I put on deodorant that morning but memories, events from the past have simply slipped away.

In fact I have a freakish memory for the present day as thousands of little things are meticulously filed away in my head. Ask me about last month and I can bore you right down to the shade of lipstick a client was wearing, ask me about my childhood and I draw a blank.

I find the more the months march on the less memories I have from my childhood. It is like I only have so much room in my head that old memories must be shipped out in order for new ones to be formed.

Facebook is so confronting in this way as I struggle to remember old school friends by face or name and when people bring out the “old stories” I have no idea what they are talking about – even when there is photographic evidence! Even embarrassing memories have left via my right ear. It’s very frustrating when I don’t even remember the names of boyfriends I had 5 years ago so I can look them up on stalkbook. It’s not like I have replaced them with a shiny, slightly exaggerated version I just don’t have anything there.

Obviously they are there somewhere, stored somewhere within my brain I just don’t have the recall skills to find them.

I guess I don’t need to.

I know the people that have shaped my past in positive and negative ways so I guess it doesn’t matter that everyone else has sort of molded into a grey, hazy fog.

Maybe some things aren’t meant to be remembered.

The boredom, the pain, the fear, the heartache.

Increasingly there is a division between my life before the breakdown and after. I can almost see the line in the sand, the point where I died and learned to slowly live again.

It takes all my energy to live everyday that my mind cannot afford to trip down memory lane.

Maybe when I am stronger every memory will come flooding back but until then no embarrassing photos on Facebook please!

The Tight Rope

You see it but it’s not yours to see.

Fly wire eyes, without missing a beat or taking a breath, asked me if I was once a cutter.
I, without missing a beat or taking a breath, laughed and said yes.

That’s all I said and for her that is all I needed to say.

No explanations were needed or called for. No time lines were offered and none were asked. Just a laugh and a nod seemed enough for fly wire eyes. It was enough that it was once a part of me, a pain that had simply leaked rivers across my arms. She didn’t dwell on it, question it further, she simply continued doing what she was before.

The strangest thing is I doubt she will ever look upon it again as she seems to simply move within one non judgmental second to another.

I had spent over a year dreading the moment that someone would ask about my scars that when the moment finally arrived, and then went unnoticed, I must admit that it left me a little hollower than before.

Don’t misunderstand, I don’t want questions, I don’t want to find answers, I don’t want to feel that I need to offer reasons about something seemingly unreasonable. I don’t want my sanity questioned as I’m all too aware that I still and may always walk that unsteady tight robe that draws the line between well and unwell. I don’t want you to ask.

Why? How? When? Did it hurt?

Who cares? Do you really want to know?

How about asking if I miss it? If I still crave it? Fantasise about it? Ache for it? Imagine it just to calm down, to freeze a moment in time so I can catch up, cope, handle it and move onto the next moment that’s waiting for me.

People only ask what they do not understand.
People only answer what others will understand.

Even if you had the balls to ask these questions, these answers would not be for you.

Yes I have scars, thick, shiny, raised scars. You see it but it is not yours to see. With or without prejudice.

Fly Wire Eyes

When I was very young my teacher asked my parents if I was deaf and dumb as it was August and I was still yet to utter a single word. This made my Mum scream with laughter as she used to lock herself in the bathroom as a form of respite from my constant chatter. I was a painfully shy girl who at the age of 4 was already excruciating aware of my downfalls.

I said nothing in order to hide the fact that I believed I knew nothing.

My parents told me that unless I made an effort and spoke to my teacher I couldn’t go to the Ekka. The thought of missing THE BEST GOD DAMN DAY OF THE YEAR forced me to rock up the next day and say "hello". Nothing fancy, not even delivered with a smile but a good start nonetheless.

I spend most of my childhood looking through eyes covered in fly wire. Those eyes never quite saw everything or at least anything in focus. It was as if I had actual fly wire fixed over my eyes. Shyness, low self esteem, awkwardness, dyslexia (at least in my case) can cause the strange condition of fly wire eyes. I was too embarrassed to peer passed the screen door, I was too devastated by my own shortcomings to look anyone in the eye and really take in my surroundings. My memories are confused, chopped up, and just plain missing from my childhood due to this condition.

Yesterday I was taking to someone I often do but for the first I realised that they too suffer from fly wire eyes. My heart leaped out of my chest as I was watched this funny, friendly, lofty blonde mumble an apology for being herself.

I wished I was anywhere but there as I wanted to take her away, preferably somewhere with loads of alcohol, and tell her in a thousands different ways that I understood her apology.

She began to paint a picture of her childhood and the pain that followed it around and it become increasingly clear that despite the fact that she had grown, had beautiful children of her own, found success, stability and love that she was still looking at the world through fly wire. Her gaze was still a haze of tightly woven metal obstructing her eyes from reality.

So much of her makes sense now, not good sense, not the kind the makes you smile but a good start nonetheless.

Whatever happens to ones that are left behind? The haunted? The ones with fly wire eyes?

I didn’t offer her solace, answers, or even a weak pity compliment. I said nothing in order to hide the fact that I believe I know too much.