Being Okay With Uncertainty: Life Update of a Twenty-Something

Being twenty has got to be one of the weirdest things.

No longer able to pull the teenager card, but without the stability I was told came with adulthood. I know I'm still a young adult technically, but this is way more chaotic than I expected. My life at twenty is extraordinarily stressful. In fact, to illustrate, up until roughly forty-eight hours ago, I wasn't even sure I would be a student at Western Carolina this semester.

Mostly this chaos stems from money, or the constantly changing state of having or not having it. Money's play in everyday life has been made more aware to me than it ever has. And a thought struck me yesterday at three am: Money will never go away. Not in my lifetime. Money, and the constant budgeting and math and squeezing from here and there to "make ends meet," is fully exhausting. Is this what adulthood is? Forever?

Up until forty-eight hours ago, I still owed WCU over a thousand dollars because my privately serviced loan was accidentally disbursed in only half, the other being designated from next semester. I didn't have a thousand dollars. I didn't even have thirty at that point. Up until last Wednesday, I wasn't sure of the entire next three months of my life. That is a very not fun place to be dangling at.

Somehow though, I found myself panicking not nearly enough as I had expected from myself, a person extremely not okay with not knowing. Uncertainty fuels many of my nightmares, and also my lingering, but still very real, uneasiness toward the dark. Literally, I'm twenty and need a light to walk to my front door because it's in a corner and the streetlight doesn't reach it. But being uncertain about my status as a student should've been shaking me to my core.

Instead, I had stumbled upon a very odd peace. My future was not up to ME at that moment. It was out of my hands. And my hands weren't fidgeting. I understood my powerlessness. I couldn't change it this time.

So I let myself contemplate life as, not a student, but an employee, a full-time working adult. Starbucks full-time didn't sound so bad. The pay is adequate, and the people pretty great. It could be much worse. I still had my fiancé, our apartment, our cats, my friends. Money would flow in and then out just the same. One less loan for now would be nice. We could save more for our trip out West later this year. We could sell one of our cars, buy a minivan maybe. We could do anything really. Possibilities suddenly opened up that had seemed so unreasonable before. And I was okay with this more flexible scenario. I was comfortable even.

It wasn't apathy, it was acceptance. I was accepting a possible future(s) which should've made me feel like a failure in relation to any goal I had ever been taught to hold myself to. Education was always supposed to come first. Dropping out, even for just a semester, and because of sucky financial communication that was not 100% my fault, was supposed to be rock bottom. Working without the school part was supposed to mean I had given up, that I had failed at what was expected of me as a twenty-something, a college age person of my particular background. I was supposed to bettering myself, making some progress toward a degree that would one day get me a "real job," a nine to five, catapulting me to true adulthood. But Starbucks and saving up for a semester didn't sound so bad. This comfort felt wrong, but I still felt it. So I waited.

Eventually my loan was amended and my school balance zeroed out. I was relieved to be done waiting. But a part of me was almost disappointed. I had embraced uncertainty and open-ended possibility for the first time in my adult life, and it had slipped away.

I'm happy to be a student, don't get me wrong. I love my classes this semester, they all feel more relevant than ever, but nearly tasting a weird sort of freedom that would have accompanied non-student-ness has left a bit of want in its wake. I want to live more open-endedly. I want to be more comfortable with uncertainty. I want to be unbothered by even my near future not being set in stone. Things will settle as they settle, and life will go on.

This doesn't mean I want to be passive in my life, it means I want to live more aggressively aware of how little control I have in the grand scheme of things, of how much it just doesn't matter sometimes, of how much easier it is to just live and not care about tradition or conventionality or past values that have expired.

It means life happens, shit happens, and happiness happens. Everything ebbs and flows, and I am now certifiably hippie dippie, apparently. I know, big surprise.

Why People With a Mental Illness Can't Just "Be Positive"

I have never been paralyzed like this before. I have never been unable to control my body like this before. I know depression and anxiety often accompany each other, but I have never experienced this mixture. I assumed I was immune to anxiety. I know what I feel is not even half as powerful as what others may suffer from, so I know there is always someone who has it worse. I am not claiming to be unique in my experience, or to be having the most extreme case.

Today I was hit by a wall. Or rather, I hit a wall. How impact occurred isn't important. The fact is that the wall and I met in my head. My head told my body there was a wall and I could go no further. My mental state had rendered my physical body paralyzed. To be so helpless, if even only for a few moments, a minute or so at most, was terrifying, almost more so than what I had originally felt in the overarching situation. I was overcome by tears and caught in a trap so tight my feet would not move. I could only stand there in tears. I could barely look at my boyfriend out of shame, or embarrassment, I don't know which. Maybe both. Either way, this person I loved was clearly in pain at the sight of my pain, but nothing could be done to remedy it. I simply gave up on the situation and retreated. My mental condition had told me no and I was powerless. I was in shock at the force with which I had been stopped.

I don't know how to feel. If I say I just didn't try hard enough to fight it, I'm claiming everyone suffering from mental illness isn't trying hard enough, or that mental illness is entirely conquerable through brute mental force or a strong will, which isn't fair to anyone. But when I say that I am powerless, I feel ashamed. I feel that people will read this and think I am making excuses for myself, or think I am willingly surrendering my control to it, as if I don't want to fight back. I am at a place I don't know how to explain, or how to understand myself. I want to say I am strong and can fight it, but I think these things already and I was still paralyzed. I have a will, you could say I am a willful person, but having depressive thoughts while also scaring yourself into a statue are the worst conditions to prove it.

Will is erased in a way that has nothing to do with your own want. Your want is to get better, to function again on the level everyone else seems to be. But another want exists, and it is ugly. It is the want to stay the same. Change is scary in itself and even change from being scared to being less scared is change. This want is not something we readily admit to ourselves and it may not even really make us act any different. But the fact is that a part of us is too afraid to want to change. It keeps me blaming myself, it keeps me telling myself that this is stupid, that I'm stupid, that it's ridiculous to not be able to face a professor whose class you've missed, who you desperately want to explain yourself to.

One's own thoughts are often said to be one's own worst enemy and I don't think that saying is far off for those facing mental illness, even if they are not in the same context as those without. My thoughts become a spiral into I can't and I never and stupid useless hopeless worthless. And even when I actively try to "be better," even if it's just I got out of bed today, I never allow myself a victory. The victory would be too small, I tell myself. How much is a small victory even worth compared to all the things you failed to do today? Or yesterday? Or this week? What about how you failed here or here or there? Quickly the victory is lost in the sea of failures my thoughts remind me of. I allow myself no good moments longer than their arrival. They appear and I swiftly dismiss them. Even having friends doesn't allow me any lingering healing. Maybe when I'm with them, I look okay, I act okay, I tell myself I am okay. But I know as soon as I am alone again, or in company that knows and understands, I am battered with inaudible words, worries of not being worthy of friends, of being silly for thinking they could fix me. It's a hole I tumble into even when I'm with those I love. My face may change, but my heart is still trapped; my body eventually is a slave to my head.

Like today when I was frozen on the steps out of my building, when I was frozen by a fear that did not even seem rational, that I tell myself could easily overcome if I was just "better," if I was just "stronger." Even though I have people who care about me, even though I have a boyfriend willing to walk with me to see my professor, to be there when I was clearly terrified, to be a guide to my slow, unruly feet, I was trapped, I was locked in my fear. I felt I had let him down. I feel that I am letting everyone down. I feel like my professor must think I don't respect him, that I don't value my education, that I am just a lazy, uncaring young person.

I know you will tell me these are invalid, silly thoughts, I tell myself the same thing, but I still have them. I feel both sides of every thought, and it's exhausting and confusing and makes for some very, very bad days when all you can do is cry and sit in a chair and eat when your boyfriend reminds you and take a deep breath when your boyfriend suggests it. Some days were like today. And sometimes that's all you can do.

Why It's Not Shameful To Be A "Basic Bitch"

I don't understand why people always feel the need to assert their dominance over others, to somehow prove they are worth more, or that their lifestyle is more respectable or more "genuine." Everyone's life has value, no matter how they may choose to live it, whether it be drinking Starbucks religiously or monogramming everything they own or neither of those things.

I'm me so I'm gonna look at this through my feminist googles and speak directly about women and girls that fall into this "weird girl" superiority complex. Some girls seem to believe that because they don't get a spray tan they are labelled "weird" by society. Many who think this way also claim they don't care that they "don't fit in." They attempt to express a "f*ck the system" attitude one would expect from an anarchist or other sort of radical. In reality, these girls simply don't participate in a  certain lifestyle. Some of us have been convinced this is most common, that this is "the normal." I have two newsflashes for all who believe this.

There is no "normal." There is only common, or what is accepted as common.

The reason these "Starbucks whores" are so widely thrown under the bus is they are deemed "less genuine" in a society that is supposed to have been built on "family values," including honesty. Genuineness is a reliable indicator of character or morality in situations when what is "genuine" and what is "fake" is based more solely on a stark moral compass and not on what the media or "weird girls" deem to be. Dyed-blonde hair and shirts with greek letters on them does not inherently determine the content of one's character.

It's just another clique. And yours isn't special, or better.

Society often casts a negative spotlight on the lives of the sorority-involved, pumpkin spice latté-drinking, riding boot-wearing, white girl. Those who are labelled "intellectual," "nerdy," or "girl-next-door" find themselves in a position outside of spotlight, and take advantage of it by bashing the "basic bitches" who just lead a life in a different social circle. No one actually makes any girl who doesn't meticulously groom her eyebrows or wear oversized tees with norts an outcast of society or look at them with any sort of disdain.

Society is built of cultures and sub-cultures and cliques and social circles, some of which rarely create Venn Diagrams. This is how it is. This is how people interact, how they make friends, with nonverbally and verbally accepted norms and roles and codes built upon shared life experiences and interests and, y'know, stuff like that.

Just because one might value a good book over a night out does not mean one leads a more genuine or more "real" life than one who values a night out over a good book. (This is also often the basis of being an introvert or an extrovert, both of which are normal things to be, but that's a whole other discussion.)

Also on the note of being a stereotypical white girl, traits that are attributed to us are usually the butt of jokes meant to demean those traits as stupid or somehow "lesser." I find it kind of ridiculous. How does really really liking Starbucks make anyone lesser than someone else? How does wearing riding boots and fitted plaid shirts make someone dumb? How do Uggs or pastel baseball caps or pearl earrings or crop tops or curled hair or zippered vests make anyone not worth your time or worth a jabbing comment? How does anyone's love to get dressed up and go out make them any of the above?

I may not entirely fit the image of a "dumb sorority girl" who is "just like everybody else," but I do get called a white girl for having some of their traits. Yeah, I'm totally obsessed with pumpkin spice flavored things; where's the joke there? Yes, I love the season of fall, so does like 95% percent of everyone else. I'm not ashamed to love Starbucks or Instagram or Pinterest or cute sweaters or eye makeup or contouring or leggings or messy buns or my iPhone or any particular season. I'm not saying anyone who doesn't is dumb or lesser, so why belittle or demean what I do or love?

Having different social needs or fashion senses or hobbies shouldn't affect people's views on originality and genuineness. Can't everyone just understand that everyone's different and no one's life choices or preferences makes them worth more or less?

I may not fit the whole stereotype of a "basic bitch," but even if I did, why should I be coerced into being ashamed for it?


So get over it, you're not a special snowflake.

You Are Beyoncé, Here's Why

I've realized that I hate the word beautiful.

I don't like to hate things, and therefore I don't hate things lightly, so hear me out. I'm not referring to the actual adjective's denotation, but it's connotation in modern American society ( as that's the only culture I can speak of from experience ). It's over usage in the popular media, advertisements, and everyday dialogue makes my skin crawl.

"All bodies are beautiful."

"Everyone is beautiful in their own way."

I hate those sentences with a burning passion I have for basically nothing else in the world.

THE POINT OF SOMEONE'S WHOLE EXISTENCE SHOULDN'T BE TO FIT THE
CONSTRUCT (HOWEVER PROGRESSIVE OR RELATIVE) OF A SINGLE WORD.

I understand some use the word and mean well, mean to lift people up, but it's still a word that limits the worth of a person and their humanity. It still says, "Yes, you are worthy to exist, but only 'cause I personally think you're nice on the eyes." It doesn't make sense to me, and I hate it. It's oversaturation of body positive campaigns and feminist movements is unacceptable. A person should have worth because they are a person; they deserve worth because they are worthy.

Everyone should be able to feel good about themselves, but not just because they are deemed "beautiful," no matter how genuinely accepting that may sound.

A girl shouldn't feel happy or accepted based on the sole fact that she is pretty or beautiful. She should feel accepted and loved and confident because she is caring or kind or kickass or inuitive or hardworking or accepting of others or a good leader or a successful goalie or writer or artist or science major or team member. Her self image shouldn't be based on the ever-changing, relative term "beautiful." She should be appreciated for all the aspects of her character and personality and ethics and achievements.

Beautiful is a fine word; it means possessing qualities that give great pleasure or satisfaction to see, hear, or think about. But you should want to do more.

I want to not just be delightful or pleasant, but to challenge, to fear, to learn, to fight, to intrigue, to cry, to believe, to question, to screw up, to bruise, to love, to win, to lose, to scorn, to earn, to do whatever I damn well please. Not just please people. Or allow anyone to smile condescendingly and brandish their "modern" view on the constructs of beauty. I'm calling bullshit, if you'll pardon my French.

What I'm saying is not 100% unbiased or unarguable, and I'm not here to hurt the feelings of those who want to be attractive, so please don't take it the wrong way when I say:

BEAUTIFUL is a trap. 

It is disguised with good intentions, even by those unaware of it's effect. Please don't fall in, for it takes a good while to climb back out.

YOU AREN'T BEAUTIFUL. (READ: YOU ARE MORE.)

YOU ARE POWERFUL.

YOU REIGN SUPREME.

YOU ARE YOUR OWN BEYONCÉ. 

OKAY?

YOU MAKE YOU,

SO WHAT WILL YOU BE?

Yay For Friendship Or Whatever

As I'm currently typing this it's 10:22 am, which is pretty early for me for a Wednesday, so keep that in mind if you come across any misspellings or mismatched tensed verbs and nouns or general word vomit. I had to get this down while I had it on my mind.

Today I want to talk about friends.

I am up at this nearly ungodly hour because of a friend. His name is JJ, and he functions as my college mother, much like my close friend Sammie. JJ is a good mom. He makes sure I eat and leave my room occasionally, stuff of that nature. I needed this very much last semester before Sam became functioning mom #2.

I met JJ in my anthropology class last semester, a course taught by a scatterbrained, ever entertaining Ashevillan named Jamie Patterson who would, on occasion, speak the words "genital cutting" and then wave her fingers in the air like some super unnecessary jazz hands. This never sparked conversation the way she wanted, but she was giving it her best effort. Culture can be a weird thing, which is why Jamie was kind of perfect for teaching that class. But back to my lovely, gimpy, Kate Spade obsessed, gay mom.

He knew everyone. More like seventy, eighty percent of everyone, but to me, who knows at this moment maybe nine percent of people, his active social life allowed me that familiar feeling of standing awkwardly while the person you know talks to someone(s) you don't know. I've had this feeling my whole life, which you understand completely if you know my actual mother. ( Hi, mom! ) JJ's intense, widespread social life was intimidating at times, but I realize that I would've gotten out a whole lot less my first semester without him. He was pushy and assuming and still does not comprehend the word no when on the receiving end. And rarely on the giving end, as he's involved in so many programs that I don't even try to keep track anymore. I just nod and move on when he mentions a something with someone for something else.

JJ is a character I'm very fortunate to have in my life. He drags me out of bed during finals week on a day that I don't even have a final, bribing me with Starbucks of course, and sits with me in the caf for a good hour while he eats his croissant and jam and waffle and I eat my eggs and bagel and pancake and we video each other at various, unflattering angles to upload to our snapchat stories. Literally this is sixty percent of our friendship. And I will always be grateful for it.

Another friend deserving some attention is the aforementioned Samantha Harris, functioning mom #2. She is a cool mom and a scary mom. I guess I just attract motherly types. They can probably sense my indirection and haplessness in the face of responsibility from miles away. They sniff me out and find me laying in my own filth, surrounded by old ramen cups and dirty mugs and my utter lack of adultness. Apparently I just shout HELP ME on a level incoherent to everyone but those tuned in to the mom station on their internal radios. Anyways, this Sammie person.

She is irreplaceable and a rare and beautiful disputation to my usual rotten luck and voluntary social isolation. We met through a friend of a friend on the day I got my nose pierced. While she did not partake in the cancellation of her general attractiveness to future employers as I did, she did get her cartilage pierced and totally supported myself, her roommate, and the friend of a friend's decision to put a hole in part of our faces. She weaseled her way into my life one invitation to dinner at a time after that, and then BAM! friends for life happened. On a side note though, she did not weasel, we were both very into eating food together. It's basically two thirds of our friendship. Food has gotten me lots of relationships, it seems. But more on that later.

Sam is just the kind of friend I need when I need one. She'll lounge around with me and order pizza and watch Disney movies until 3am on a weekday but is also the one who calls me to wake me up on days I absolutely cannot miss class and also will sit on me and flick me until I start doing my work  and threaten to take away my headphones so she'll know if I'm watching Daredevil or Friends again and not writing my paper that's probably due in less than twelve hours. She's a pal but also a life coach and I love her to death. She's totally chill with me just coming to her room and napping because she's just watching Finding Carter or Parks and Rec anyways. When I learned I wouldn't be returning to Chick-Fil-A this summer and was pretty down the whole rest of the day, she was just there, and knew that her presence was comforting as is. And she did hug me when I figured I needed one later on. We don't spend 24/7 together, but we know the other will always be available if a summoning is requested. She's my cool mom and my scary mom, and I love her.

What I'm trying to say is, be grateful for friends that make you a better person, keep you up and at 'em, and don't take you for granted.

Happy Almost Summer, and stay rad, pals.

A Brief Explanation & Then Some Pretentious Free Verse

Yeah, that first blog site totally crashed, and I don't even feel like dealing with it, so we're going to live and learn and move on.

So here we are again. You waiting for me to say something that makes a visit to this site justifiable and not a waste of time. I'm not making any guarantees, alright? You get what you want to get out of this whole thing. Just keep that in mind.

I suppose I should address the title, those four words up there at the top, hovering ambiguously.

Sometimes Coffee, Sometimes Tea.

Well, I could say I came up with those on my own, but then I'd be a boldfaced liar. Those words in this context were suggested by none other than Andrew Reed, whom some would call my boyfriend. (I prefer the more gender-neutral term, soulmate, because 'boyfriend' feels cheap compared to how much I love him.) I heard it, I liked it, I adopted it instantaneously. But how to explain it? It had to have weight, purpose, a hidden meaning. Truthfully, it's a simple statement relative to life's unpredictability and how one must adapt and choose to accept the moment for what it is, and what it calls for: sometimes coffee, sometimes tea. If you are confounded or intrigued by what I've just said, simply find the little box to the right labeled "Why Sometimes Coffee, Sometimes Tea?" and read away to your heart's content.

On the more pressing matter of what exactly this post is about, I don't really have a satisfying answer. I wanted to write something fresh and inspiring to leave whoever reads this considering more deeply their one chance at existence in the world, but writer's block is too real at the moment.

Due to this unfortunate fact, I've decided to instead delve into my archive of existentialist pieces and pull out this little thing. It's been on my Wattpad account for several months, but I figure it's good enough to serve as a placeholder where a witty, anecdotal introduction would usually be. It may be a bit pretentious, but know that I mean well and am aiming only to encourage the broadening of perspective.

Two Kinds of Height: A Blurb Concerning Bodies and Souls

I wish I was stronger.

I wish I was taller.

I wish wishes weren't just ways for me to excuse my own lack in motivation to set off a chain reaction of change in my life. These words spill like poetry, but they're far from the flighty, diaphanous phrases with which that term has become synonymous.

I will be stronger.

My strength will make me taller.

Not physically, of course, but there's another kind of height to be measured. The height of your soul can expand far beyond your body.

In fact, it should.

The better I feel, the more I radiate confidence, spew kindred lines and keep faithful to my promises, the more worth I give myself in my own eyes, the more that balloon of spirit inside me will inflate, and others will begin to debate whether they are considered tall in the tallness that matters.

While abstaining from confrontation may be my default action in the face of any altercation or inconvenient conflict, may be second nature to those of mellow composition, may seem to just be easier, there are times when my soul must speak, the words that I'm always forming in my head must make their way out and cascade into the ears of all those who need to hear it.

My voice is supposed to be heard; in fact, it's practically mandatory. My soul can't be tamed, though caged in my physical being, it's a living thing, it's me.

I am a soul, I have a body.

I can no longer let the weight of my own lips stop me from saying what I want to say. It may not even be what needs to be said, they may not be words that specifically lay claim to be heard, but any person with any respect for themselves deserves to relay what their soul is telling them.

I must shatter the glass of my insecurities that bars me from living, separates me from them, like I'm trapped on the wrong side of the zoo enclosure, in here with the lions I've created for myself. Every downgrading word I've ever told myself, even in my own head, mingles with outward threats to my comfort and niggling, off-hand comments that struck like arrows and have become the pacing carnivores with which I'm caught in close quarters. I pound on the thick glass, but everyone passes by, wound up in their own issues, perhaps trapped with their own demons in the glass boxes in their own heads.

I must help myself. I am my own hero.

I no longer bend over backwards to avoid sharing my opinion. I make my own decisions before others take the wheel from me and drive it in their own desired direction.

I am my own person. I am a soul. I am strong-minded. I am tall in spirit.

I speak what I mean, and I mean business.

This is my life, I must seize it, not patiently wait for it to play itself out like a movie reeled by how I react instead of how I act.

I am done watching from the sidelines. I put on a jersey and get in the game. I am my own coach, and I play all the positions.

This is my life. If you want to stick around, you'd better get with it.

I won't be docile, or weak-kneed, or mild.

I will be remembered for things much, much different.

Just don't take me wrong, I don't mean to say there's no place for peace or amicability. I love having friends, I love enjoying their company. I don't want to pick fights, or hate the whole of humanity. I'm not encouraging purposeless chaos, I merely want you to know:

the body never considers the boundlessness of the soul.

What I mean to say is you're taller than what you may seem.