i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

i brought a lot of books home from book expo a couple of weeks ago; many have been excellent (the upcoming david levithan, the newest christopher moore) and some have been terrible (geek mafia, i am looking at you). most of them have been somewhere in between. this week, i pulled this i believe out of the pile - it's a compilation of "this i believe" pieces from the original series done by edward r. murrow in the 50s, and npr's current series.

it's good. it's really good. it's made me get a little weepy a couple of times, and it's made me think more than that. i like the idea behind the npr series to begin with, and, okay, so i'm sentimental at heart, but i like the idea of having a personal philosophy. it makes me feel better about surviving the world.

and so, for you guys.

this i believe: that the most important thing in my life, the most important thing i can do every single day, is to get out of bed and like who i am. (some days it's just to get out of bed. we're working on that being less hard, though. and by we i mean "me and my coffee maker".)

i have spent my entire life struggling with depression and with severe social anxiety. i have been medicated, i have been in therapy, i have spent weeks puking because the paxil my second shrink prescribed for me made me sick. i have been very crazy and less crazy, severely depressed and basically functional, sometimes all at once. i spent too many years trying too hard to make people like me - changing who i was, what i thought, what i did, what i read and said and listened to, so that people would like me. i have been dumped, in the cruel way that only girls of a certain age can manage, by more than one entire circle of friends, for real or for imagined slights. abandoned by friends because i dressed funny, i read too much, i was too opinionated, i stole other girls' boyfriends (a habit i have since grown out of, thank god).

i was sincerely unhappy for many, many years of my life, and frequently very lonely. sometimes the depression was worse; sometimes it was hard to get out of bed. one winter i managed, entirely through my own inertia, to develop a severe drinking problem coupled with two bad breakups and insomnia; the fact that i survived that winter is, literally, a miracle.

when i turned 25, i got a third tattoo. the day after my birthday, i took the #22 bus, the clark street bus, down to the starbucks at clark & belmont in chicago and waited for sashybaby. she held my hand while i had the sumerian symbol for constellation tattooed between my shoulder blades, the art done by a talented artist named dave at chicago tattoo & piercing company. i got that tattoo to say hello, world, i am still alive, because i genuinely believed, at ages 20 and 21 and 22, that i would not be alive when i reached 25.

i was so unhappy that suicide often seemed like the only end i would ever get. i never considered it seriously. but i couldn't see my own future, past a couple of months, either, and people who think they're going to live to a ripe old age usually don't feel like that.

i turned 25 and marked it on my body with indelible ink - with a constellation, with a pattern, with a way to find my way back home. and i started changing things.

i made a lot of resolutions at the new year, this year. to write 500 words a day, every day, no matter what. to see more movies, to read more books, to worry less. i resolved to cut the crazy out of my life; i am too tired to deal with other people's crazy anymore. my own is enough, and more than enough, and i had no place for emotionally unstable, emotionally draining "friends" who never gave anything back to me. i haven't succeeded entirely, but i'm getting there - i have less crazy than i used to, and i think that's good.

i'm pretty happy today. the weather's nice, and i'm going to augusta, georgia, to see my cousin j. get married this weekend. i wrote this morning, and my coffee was good. the cat's sitting beside me on the couch and purring. my dad's somewhere between richmond and here, on his way to pick me up. i've got friends and family and friends who are family, and i've got you guys.

what you see in this journal is pretty much what you get; this is the me that i've grown into over the last 26 years. i'm a lot bitchier and a little more thoughtful in real life, but i don't have a filter between my brain and my mouth in real life, either, and none of what you read here is faked. you get me, digitized and minus some more personal details, in this journal.

and you can like me and you can love me and you can find me interesting, if you want, or you can hate me or be bored by me. it's your prerogative. but today, this morning, i like myself, and to steal a sentiment from hank william iii: sometimes i'm wired and sometimes i'm tired, but i'm doin' the best that i can. and that's the bottom line.

i had cheesecake for breakfast. that's also the bottom line.