True Love

When I was younger, and even sometimes now, I always thought I needed true love to fix me.  We are constantly bombarded with this image of a helpless woman being saved by true love's kiss.  We're taught that a knight on a white horse is going to come pick up our broken pieces and put us back together.

          So I waited...

          And waited.......

I waited for someone to show up and somehow make me realize that I could be salvaged.  That I no longer had to be the sum of broken parts that I had become.  I waited for that person who I could come home to and spend my life with because I was shown that it was necessary.

I came to a fascinating and wonderful realization today (while dancing in the shower mind you) that you do not.  You do not need some person to come save you.  That person could try, but the only person who can save you, is you.

You do however, need true love.  My true love comes in numerous forms.  This is my love letter to you all and my thank you for somehow putting my pieces back together.

I have found myself in a place I never thought I would be.  I am in a place far from the friends and family I grew up next to.  I paved my own way here.  There was no ounce of recognition for the first few years I lived here and no one asked if I was related to Mel (my darling mother who held so many different jobs in town that I SWEAR she knew EVERYONE).  For a very long time, I felt alone.  And. It. Was. MARVELOUS.  There is something magical about when you finally find yourself alone after feeling like you answer to so many different souls.  There is something absolutely fantastic about leaving work and realizing you don't have to check in with anyone.  You are you're own person.  You are entirely free.

Then it happened.  I realized that I had somehow, over the course of years, surrounded myself with some of the most beautiful, kind-hearted, sarcastic, hilarious, glorious people I have ever met in my existence.  This is not to in any way discount the people who came before.  To those people, you brought me to this place.  You made it possible.  You did it.  However, the people surrounding me now make me feel like I can accomplish anything.  They make me feel like I can be this person with pieced glued back in and still be worthwhile.  True love did play a role in making me whole again, it just wasn't the true love of one person.  It was a symphony of love and caring and wonder from multitudes of people.

The people who sat and listened while I cried during the worst week ever.  The couple who sat with me the night before I had to move out of the apartment my boyfriend and I shared because we had broken up the previous week and I was so distraught over the concept that I drank until I couldn't see straight.  The various people throughout the past few years who have given me love and acceptance.

Most importantly, my family.  I have a wonderful mother, father, and sister who I adore and would give my life for.  But this is not for that family.  This is for the family I have created over the years.  The people I have slowly realized that I cannot live without...

My healing began with a bar full of regulars.  Sure, they were a little rough sometimes, but over the course of years they have become my people.  They are the people I love.  They are the people I cannot do without.  They have watched me soar and they have watched me plummet but no matter what happens, they have found a way to support me and hold my hand through it all.  They are the people you want to end the day with.  They are glorious and they have somehow brought me with them.  They have taught me to never question myself, to honor my own thoughts and opinions, and most importantly, to always be patient.

My healing continued because I became surrounded by the best teachers in the world.  Each year, I see teachers come and go.  We socialize, we get to know each other and we care about one another.  I have surrounded myself with some of the craziest bunch of people I know but they have all found a way to support me.  This year, I decided to stop hiding who I was and stop trying to make sure people were comfortable around me.  This year I decided to stand up and have a voice for all of us out there who were hurt my someone and never said a word because they didn't want to deal with the trouble of it all.  I look back on myself at 22, sobbing on a stoop, telling my dad for the first time.  I look back on the next day and the entire summer afterwards and having to relive it over and over again to try to get my mother to understand that I didn't blame her, it was out of her control, but of course I was pissed that it happened to me.  I don't know that girl anymore.

It feels wonderful.

Do I still feel sad and lonely sometimes?  Of course.  But I'm me again.  More than that, I think I'm the best version of me that I have ever been.  This is because of my family.  My hundreds of dysfunctional people family.  The people who I have told about my life who choose to love me and support me because of it (not despite it).

The point...find the people you love who will love you back unconditionally.  I've learned that none of us have just one true love, we have many.  And that is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Pieces Of Me...

I came to a recent realization.  With the final milestone of acceptance about what happened to me as a child, things started to come into stark contrast to how I used to view them.  Life choices began making more sense with that added piece of the puzzle…

The nights spent so drunk that friends had to find me a ride home, laughing about how it was just the way I was.  The birthday where I spent a majority of it sleeping on a bed made of bar stools.  The countless one night stands and meaningless sex that had been happening for over a decade. 

It all came to me like the lightbulb to Edison (and probably took as many tries to perfect and fully understand its value): I had chosen years ago to not value myself and so I hid myself away behind a façade of someone who was not only willing but happy to oblige…always. 

With this realization, certain encounters began to come into an almost scary focus.  The time when I was basically passed out drunk and woke up in the middle of an encounter with a man and was so startled by what was happening that I ran out of the apartment so fast, I actually left my underwear behind.  The period of time when I would spend every weekend drunk with a friend and when his friends showed up, it was like I became the bottle they could pass around on a nightly basis.  The time that I was so drunk after a few whiskeys that I laid down on the sidewalk and had to get put into a cab to get home, had to basically be carried inside and woke up in a heap of blankets on the floor with no recollection how I got there, only to later realize that someone at the bar had roofied my drink.  Feeling trapped because I knew no-one would believe that I was roofied because I already had the label of “drunk party girl” permanently tattooed on my person.  The conversation with a “friend” after the fact when she told me, “It doesn’t matter how it happened, you ruined so-in-so’s perfect day.” 

All of these are situations where someone had chosen to take advantage of me.  All of these situations are moments in time that I am blamed for.  All of these stem from one simple idea: victim shaming.  In all of these scenarios, I was a victim.  I was not someone who should be judged, but treated with the same respect and dignity that is afforded to all people.  This is, however, not always the case, especially when, “she should know better”.  The worst thing about these situations (and these are only a very few examples of things that happened in the last 10 years), is that I carry these moments with me and feel guilty about the way people see me because of them.  It hurts to the core of my being that there are people in this world who see me as a piece of meat.  That see me as some trashy slutty party girl who will never grow up.  Who see me as a perpetual hurricane that just needs to be ridden out. 

And in these situations, it’s not just the fact that people see me as some sort of constant natural disaster of epic proportions.  It is also the fact that for brief moments in many, not all, of these encounters when I felt like perhaps this person was willing to take on the task of caring about me for who I am.  Of, maybe, just maybe, loving such a damaged and tumultuous being.  Even for a brief moment, the hope was more intoxicating than any alcohol or drug.  The hope that someone would possibly choose me, and love me, just because I exist as I do and not in spite of it.

So I write today to say no more.  I will no longer be the missing piece in whatever puzzle you have created for yourself.  I will not be the one to silently fill your void unless you are someone who is willing to fill mine.  It is not selfish.  It is self-preservation.  I cannot continue to feel guilty because I was not enough. 

I was enough.  I will always be enough.  I will always be a sum of parts that doesn’t always fully add up to 100%.  I will constantly be a basketball player that will be good but will never be legendary, despite their best effort.  I will be the person who seems to live with perpetual nightmares and seems to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders, but I will not bow, I will not bend, I will not break. 

I will no longer go quietly into the night, spending hours or days or weeks or months or maybe even years feeling guilty about how you see me.  I will no longer try to help you fill the voids that your own life and your own damage have given you while you completely choose to ignore the choices I have made with my life and why.  If you choose not to really see, that is your prerogative.  Mine will be to continue to carry that weight and to walk through life like the champion I am, and never, like a victim again.

The Bubble

There is a saying.  Maybe not a saying.  Maybe it's just become a crazy internet meme (which to my generation is just as good as a saying).  True friendship is one that can have no contact for excessive amounts of time but when you do see each other, it's like you never left each other.  I have been lucky enough to have witnessed this in my life.

It was a Sunday afternoon when I picked him up from the train station.  We had made the decision to take an impulsive and impromptu road trip during the summer because we both had time off and a couple of bucks saved up.  So after 2 years of not seeing each other, and only the rare and unexpected phone calls or text messages, we set sail, so to speak.

To preface this story, I have become a loner in the last few years.  I have gotten very comfortable with my life at home, and have been in the same place for years now.  Over the past year, I have settled down with my roommates and I have been very content with how my life has ended up.  There are moments of emptiness and difficulty, there can be no other way in a life like mine, but I have surrounded myself with a group of people who are so absolutely spectacular that I have convinced myself that I am happy here.  If I am not in immediate peril, I am always content.

So, used to my solitude, I agreed to a road trip with one of my best friends.  We have been through a lot together.  I have seen him through his struggles and he has always been kind and supportive through mine so I could only assume that a road trip together would be epic.  I was not wrong.

In true impulsive fashion, we left like thieves in the night at one o'clock in the morning.  He turned to me and said, "Are we doing this?!" and my only thought as to a response was, "Hell yes!"  So we left, filled the tank and were headed south in my small hatchback.  I was in a trance for the first leg of the journey and when we finally realized how long we'd been in the car, we were in New Jersey.  I looked at him from the driver's seat and said, "We could always turn around...this seems like a really stupid idea now..."  He insisted that we needed this.  I believed him and he was in no way wrong...

So we continued.  I took pictures all the way down (one in particular will always be my my favorite of me flipping off a "Virginia is for Lovers" sign) and we ventured like no one else ventured before.  We got caught in rainstorms that I could have only fathomed without witnessing it, we got caught in traffic as a reaction to the worst car crash we have ever seen.  We saw giant lifted southern trucks and the funniest bumper stickers we've ever witnessed.  He had the bladder of a tiny child and constantly had to pee, so our final stop on the way was at a truck stop off of 59 in Mississippi where he told me he had the most scenic and wonderful pee of his life.  While I was in the car, however, there was the a truck creeping up to the driver's side of the car and I immediately swapped seats and shouted for him to get in the damn car.

So regardless of our delightful drive down, we finally got down to New Orleans.  We're driving over bridges bigger than I've ever seen in my entire life.  We're driving by palm trees (PALM TREES!) which for a kid from Massachusetts is something entirely new.  We finally get into New Orleans and each of us washes the road off (and trust me, it was some nasty stuff).  We go out and grab a drink, because New Orleans is supposed to be a constant party.  The whole plan was about going to New Orleans.  It was all about going to the birthplace of some of the best music in the country.  It was all about getting some serious creole food.

The trip became something wholeheartedly different during our time.  There was a moment on this trip.  A moment that I'm not even sure that I am willing to be honest about right at this moment.  There are very few people in this world who I love unconditionally.  There are very few people that I trust completely with my life and my soul and my person.  He is one of them.  It was a complicated realization to come to.  I am not sure how it actually happened.  We went out drinking for a night and I don't remember the last time I felt so completely connected to another person.  I know that it was a whiskey fueled night, but I genuinely can't remember feeling so deeply for another person and genuinely trusting them with me.  I trust very rarely.  This was a feat.

And then we were back on the road.  We made awesome time and I was in full road-trip beast mode.  I hurried back, probably because I was scared and I had every right to be.  I am back in my bubble right now, and I am miserable.  I spent 7 whole days with another person, non-stop, without apology.  I was myself, I was not putting on a front as I so often do.  I spent 7 days being myself and being with this person.  Now, as I sit in my self-prescribed isolation, I find myself so lost.  I find myself listening to music we heard on the trip and bringing myself back to Virginia.  I find myself listening to podcasts that were suggested by him.  I find myself not sure what to do with my days now that we are not visiting shady, creepy gas stations selling ninja stars.  I find myself suddenly not enthused by my sheltered little bubble.  I wish so desperately that I was back on the road.  I wish we were witnessing box-men.  I wish we were dancing in the car, completely damaged.  I would even wish to be a sloth over this uneventful sadness.

I am now sitting in my bubble realizing that somehow I may have acquiesced to mediocrity.  I spent 7 days with another person and loved them more for it.  This is something that I was not sure if I was capable of doing.  This has rocked me to my core because I have spent years just assuming that I am incapable of being around another human being for an extended period of time.  I assumed that apparently because of who I am and what I've gone through, I will die alone.  I have joked about it since I was young (see Recluses, Eccentrics, and Babies) but I started to genuinely believe it as time has gone by.  I don't necessary think I am the kind of person who will ever be, just happy.  I will never be, just happy.

I also have very little patience for other people.  I find myself back in my bubble trying to make lists of things that pissed me off about him, but it doesn't help.  It was the first time that in spite of his flaws, in spite of his problems, I was just happy to be near him.  I was happy to have someone with me who I knew loved me as I am.

This road trip gave me a few things.  It gave me the hope that someday, I can actually be a fully functioning person again.  It also gave me the realization that I am in it for the story and I will always be an exploratory person who is so willing and excited to do as much stupid stuff as is possible before I die.  It also reminded me of the kinds of friends I deserve.  I deserve a person who loves me as much as I know he does.  I deserve friends who will love me because of my flaws and not in spite of them,  Because, what New Orleans and this road trip taught me, I'm pretty fucking awesome.

Aunt Jackie

I sat in my darkened cave (because I love living in a cave..it's a thing) on a nice summer day thinking about life, the universe, and everything.  I sat watching a stupid medical drama on Netlflix and pouring myself into the stories and the characters, as I do every summer vacation.  This particular drama had a man with a supposedly inoperable spinal tumor.  As he lay on the table waiting to be operated on, he says that he survived a war, that he survived the death of his family, the death of his wife and child and if he loses the ability to walk (TO WALK) he will survive the loss of his legs.  Yesterday, I had a visit with my endocrinologist (I like to think of it as a visit and not an appointment at this point, since the man did get me through cancer...).  Yesterday, it was like I never had cancer.  I walked into my doctor's office, was seen almost immediately, I spoke to the nurse about being a teacher.  We talked about the MTELs and what a horrible thing it must be to declare a major and not be able to pass the test to actually do what you want to do in life.  I sat in a room with walls coated in album covers, and said hi to a very nice Jack Russell Terrier, the same one who sat on my lap while I received the news 7 years ago, that I had papillary thyroid cancer.

I still remember the day.  I spent the night before with my best friend, buffalo wings, and pepperoni pizza.  We joked that we would be laughing the next day when it turned out I was fine.  Well, the next day, it turned out, I was not fine.  We met up at a local ice rink after my appointment, and my friend found me just pounding the ice.  I was a figure skater for years, but I swear that day I have never been more thankful for something to beat the hell out of just for sport.  We sat as I cried and tried to process the word.  Cancer.  It was like a flashing sign in my head.  Every 2 minutes it would pop up and remind me, "Oh, hey!  You're body is trying to kill itself slowly!"

I remember the process I went through to handle it.  I remember sitting here and saying, "I'm fine!" to anyone who cared enough to ask if I was okay.  I remember being so scared when I read horror stories of other people who had papillary thyroid cancer.  I was so scared and most of all, I was angry.  The thing I sit here thinking now is how angry I've been for my entire life.  It feels like one person should not have to go through as much as I've had to go through...

When I had cancer, I did not handle it well.  On the surface, I did, but very few people every saw me in the wee morning hours, crying myself to sleep on my parents couch while drinking a whole bottle of wine alone.  One such night, I remember vividly.

My dad came down the stairs of my childhood home, and I was drunk and sobbing on the couch (every dad's worst nightmare, but especially mine).  He asked me what was wrong and I could only unevenly say that it was the fact that I was diseased.  I now understand my words better than I do now.  I have always felt diseased.  I have always felt like a burden on the people I love.  This was just the first physical interpretation of this burden.  My dad continued on to tell me that I should take a page from his Aunt Jackie who died of Multiple Sclerosis (even writing this I almost wrote MS but I feel like it minimized what it is...and Multiple Sclerosis is HUGE).  My dad continued to tell me about Aunt Jackie, who never cried once.

I thought about this for years afterwards.  As I cried on the various couches I have owned, in the various apartments I have lived, crying into whatever friend would still have me.  Crying and thinking that, there is no way in hell that Aunt Jackie didn't cry.  She didn't cry to the public, the same as me.  She kept a brave face, the same as me.  She smiled and kept being a wonderful human, the same as me.  She fought, the same as me.  I did everything Aunt Jackie did.  Aunt Jackie couldn't win her fight, but I could win mine.  So I kept Aunt Jackie in the back of my mind while I continue to fight.  I didn't know her, but I feel like she would be proud of the person I am today, despite my hardships.

When I was younger, I was one of those people who would just superficially ask, "How are you?"  This is what my life has taught me.  When someone asks how you are, 90% of the time they do not give a damn how you're doing.  They have been trained in the art of the artificial American politeness.  We do not care what is going on with you, we DEFINITELY do not care if you are somehow in emotional pain.  We just want an excuse to talk about how we are...here's what's happening with us!  When you have gone through as much as my life has tossed at me, you start to realize that the best part of your day is the moment when you get to be there for another human.  I have sat and held the hand of people who have been struggling.  I have checked in on people in my life and gone out of my way to make sure they know they have someone there at all times.  What I was taught by having cancer and being sexually assaulted is an immense sense of empathy.  I am willing to put myself in the shoes of another and to feel their suffering and hold their heads as they cry, because I was never strong enough to ask someone to do that for me.  I have always been stoic, the consummate survivor.  I have never asked for someone to hold my hand, and part of that is a misplaced sense of pride in being "strong".

The Soccer Ball

I made a soccer ball.  There was a student who was distraught because he let his friend down.  He had promised to spend every recess with this friend and on that day, he chose to spend time with someone else.  I sat there watching this child cry because he felt that he had let his friend down and he felt so guilty.  I understood.  I have spent a lifetime letting people down or feeling like I have.  In that moment, there was an easy fix.  I told him, if he could get himself calmed down that I would help him make a special soccer ball for his best friend. 

Later that week, this child and I sat with a soccer ball and brand new permanent markers.  I asked him,

“How do you want to decorate his birthday soccer ball?”  He replied…

            “How about a rainbow?”

So we sat, this child and I, coloring small patches of every vibrant color we could get our grubby little fingers on.  We sat and made a soccer ball for the birthday of his best friend.  It was one of the best moments I had this year.  It was a pure moment.  There was no major emotions felt, there was no anger inside me at that moment, no frustration, no elation, no glee.  It was a pure moment without major emotion.  A moment of calm before the many storms.

I am the kind of person who feels everything deeply.  I feel extreme pain, extreme sadness, extreme delight, extreme wonder.  I am incapable of feeling anything lightly.  However, this moment, however brief, was a moment of pure ease.  This is not something that I am used to in any way shape or form.  There are very few moments when I am at ease.  Ease is not something that I can do. 

Since a very young age, really as long as I can remember, I have been high strung.  This may come from the fact that I was sexually assaulted as a child.  It is a poison that has been flowing through my veins as long as I can remember.  I have had moments of extreme love, extreme hate…moments of extreme bliss and extreme sorrow.  However, I have rarely known moments of calm.  Calm is not something my life provides.

When I was in high school, I met a boy.  I loved this boy and stayed with him until the summer after our Freshman year in college.  I loved this boy so strongly that I stayed with him.  I stayed with him despite the fact that he left me stranded in a snowy parking lot alone with two tow truck guys at 1 am and drove away after his car was freed, leaving me to fend for myself (a huge thank you to those two young men who dragged my car out of the snow for free and told me that I was better off without a guy like that.)  I stayed with him despite the fact that he brought another girl to his prom and as a result I didn’t go to mine because I knew he wouldn’t like it.  I entered college and I spent the first year waiting around studying in a library for him to get out of classes.  He didn’t like when I drank, so I didn’t drink.  He didn’t like when I made friends with the guy in my Latin American Studies class, so I tried not to be friends with him.  He didn’t like a lot of things, so I tried to form who I was to please him.  I felt that, if someone was willing to love me, that I should find a way to make it worthwhile for them. 

This is just one example in dozens, if not hundreds of moments that I see in my past where I have changed or adjusted myself, or my opinions, or my words to make sure that people love me.  The reason?  Because it hurts too much to think that I live in a world where people don’t.  Some might say that this is me being fake or manipulative.  You may be right.  I really don’t know at this point.  All I know, is that it’s the only way I know how to survive.  It’s the only way I know how to live.  I know the real me.  She is the one who curls up in bed on a Sunday afternoon, cracks open a beer and tries to find a distraction from herself because to look inwards and see all the cracks is just far too much for her to bear.  She’s the one who sits at a bar, surrounded by friends and yet she never stops feeling completely exhausted and isolated.  It takes everything for me to seem normal and functional but I keep doing it because it literally is all I’m good at. 

I once thought teaching was all I was good at.  I was wrong.   Surviving is what I’m really good at, since I’ve been doing it for so long.  I am capable of making it through anything but the worrisome question that has started wandering through my head as of late, “Why?”  Why do I want to survive when I’m just going through the general motions?  Why do I want to fight to be here when I don’t even like where here is.  There are things worth fighting for, mind you.  I understand that.  I have friends, I have family, I have falling asleep to thunderstorms, and watching your kids make it to high school and watching them graduate and watching them reach their goals or raise kids of their own.  And I’m happy, but I’m happy to an extreme that makes me sad.  I am so capable of being happy for the people around me that it serves as a reminder of just how empty my own life feels.  I am not sure that I am even capable of the kind of love and happiness others are. 

Which is why, I made a soccer ball.  For a brief moment, I witnessed a child’s unadulterated sadness, and I was able to turn it into a moment of calm for him.  For a brief moment, I was able to give another child a brief moment of extreme delight at the sight of his rainbow Happy birthday soccer ball.  I was able to bask in the glory of an untainted moment.  A moment not centered on my own tortured past or depressed present or unclear future.   I was able to give those children something that was never given to me.  A moment of pure childlike wonder that they will be able to look back on with a smile not tainted with poison.    

Nightmare Brain

One of the well known facts about me: I love scary movies.  Anyone who has any knowledge of me as a human being knows this preference to be true.  I love that horror can fit into so many different molds.  It can be supernatural (little ghost girls standing on a stairwell), it can be a psychopath hiding in plain site as a functioning member of society (Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, the list goes on and on), it can be an evil doll coming to life (usually fashioned after an odd combination of the two).  Due to my own love of horror, passed down from my father, my sister and I developed what the two of us have coined, “nightmare brain”.  Now, this love of horror has always led me to watch the things that scare me the most. The idea that someone I know and love, is willing to target me or my family in some terrifying vendetta that will end with a death of someone I love (like in Friday the 13th when EVERYONE around Jamie Lee Curtis dies). The horror movie where a seemingly well-meaning ghost turns out to have demonic tendencies and wants to set the world on fire (these ones scare me way less, because there is always that one friendly tortured soul who does his/her best to defend the person who needs to be saved, like in House on Haunted Hill, or Hocus Pocus). Then there are the dolls. My not so secret shame is that dolls scare me so much it's actually pathetic. It all started with Chucky and it just burgeoned from there. I was around 12 years old and I was flipping through the cable channels and I saw the term "Horror" and my immediate response was to see how scary it could be. Clearly, at the ripe, mature age of 12,nothing could scare me anymore. Well, watching a small ginger-haired doll chase after 2 children in a toy manufacturing plant and watching a man get doll eyes (DOLL EYES) stamped into his skull as his last earthly moment damaged me a little more than I thought. From then on, anything from china dolls, to ventriloquist dummies, to marionettes scare me endlessly. I'm not one to run screaming from a shop (I did live in Prague for a 2 month period, and they are known for their marionettes) but basically as long as they are not trying to murder me I'm okay. Still every once in a while, something randomly appears in my daily life to reference some creepy doll and it always shakes me to the core of my being.

Now, there was a vacation that I was lucky enough to house sit for a family in a nice isolated area where I could breath freely and take stock of my life.  It was meant to be a wonderful time away to reflect on my own personal growth.  By Day 2, I was completely and utterly relaxed and the dogs I was sitting were happy and the cat had only thrown up on the rug once (yay!) and the only casualty was a sickly hamster (who was unfortunate to be found propped up against the food bowl; rigor mortis had clearly set it).  Then it happened.  I was watching a crime serial, albeit an odd one, but out of nowhere in it’s coincidental oddity, this episode had a weird little scavenger hunt that led the sweet puzzle-loving nerdy forensic scientist, whose boyfriend had been murdered and clearly set this up as a romantic night for two (and oh, how romantic to be hunting down possible serial killers with a series of blindly dangerous clues!) to a wonderful little speakeasy where a simple key wound up a doll (a DOLL THAT LOOKED LIKE A VENTRILOQUIST DUMMY) with a knife (A FREAKIN’ KNIFE!) who used to do magic tricks (WHAT?  MAGIC?  IS NOTHING SACRED) but now is so old he just stabs a table blindly and wildly until he unwinds.  

For anyone who knows my face, there was a look of blind and bewildered horror on my face at this point.  Especially at the point where it stops stabbing the table with wild fervor (SERIOUSLY.  STABS.  WILDLY!) and she puts her hands on the table (UNDER A KNIFE!  UNDER THE KNIFE OF A MALFUNCTIONING TURN-KEY DOLL THAT STABS WILDLY!) to find the secret clue.  The clue was something like, “The cow jumped over the moon…” (just kidding, it said, “I love you to the moon and back…” Demonic turn-key magician doll or not, my hopeless romanticism cannot be stopped!).  While I sat there in absolute horror, nightmare brain just beginning to coil it’s snake-like existence around the entirety of my soul, the dogs began to bark.  I mean, the dogs literally bark at their own shadows and I also know that they feed off of each other, so one starts barking and they’re like a bunchh of furry, giant, drooling sheep and ALL start following suit.  This was different.  It’s my second day, in a house that I don’t know exceedingly well, with nightmare brain beginning to cripple my own everyday view of the world.  Now, the hills that comforted and relaxed me are a wild landscape. The zombie apocalypse is impending. This house was built on an elephant graveyard which causes a catastrophic ghost-stampede that will kill me! A poltergeist will magically appear and I'll slip coming out of the hot tub, and they'll find my body 2 weeks later half eaten by the dogs I was watching). Someone will come over to borrow a cup of sugar and one thing will lead to another and they'll find my head in the mailbox. (Yes, these are actual thoughts that have crossed through my head tonight after the ventriloquist magician and the dogs going ballistic).

So with nightmare brain in full-alert mode and with a sense of impending doom and murder looming in the near distance, I find myself reflecting on a random quote from one of my favorite horror movie series (yes, I mean Scream of course). In Scream 3, which finds a young McDreamy as a detective in Las Angeles, specifically Hollywood, investigating the systematic annihilation of an entire movie cast. When he finally meets Sydney Prescott, who has clearly become a hermit in the middle of nowhere due to her constant murderous surroundings, she asks him what his favorite scary movie is (classic!). In truly creepy, Scream-style fashion, he leans down dramatically (and suspiciously!) to say, "My life..." Her response was under her breath, "Mine too..." as he slowly exits the room. I find this suddenly relevant because it reminded me of something that was said earlier this weekend. I made a joke about my life experience, despite my few years on this earth, and their response was to remind me that I have, in fact, been through a lot. I agree with them, my life has had a very odd number of moments where I have struggled with difficult obstacles, and instead of being the girl who runs up the stairs instead of running out the front door, I have put on my armor and I have destroyed each and every one of those obstacles. I have more than risen to the occasion. For the first time in my life, I no longer fear my nightmare brain. Maybe it will inspire me to use it for good and try my hand at some non-fiction horror (with all the terrifying things that happen in this head, it would not be a terrible idea..). However, sitting in this quiet house, listening to the dogs snore gently, in a darkened house, in the middle of nowhere, I know that regardless of what happens, there is no way in hell anyone is going to find my head in a mailbox. I know that I will always be the girl in the final credits, who may be limping, and covered in blood and missing her shoes, but I will be victorious...always.