The Last Post: You do not have to be good

I’ve been waiting for a while to write this post. And you should know that it is because of several reasons.

1. I’m not ready to finish writing this blog. There are too many things that I still need to say and tell people. I want to take the time to start writing letters that show people that I think they matter and that they’re irreplaceable. I want them to know that there is a difference between looking and seeing and that I would love to be given the chance to see them.
2.  I’m selfish. I don’t want the stories to stop. I want to keep reading them and opening my ears to know them. I want to reply to them and then maybe not. I want the chance to know when to make the distinction between those options of response, even if it is all by mistake.
3. The lament of the perfectionist will always be: I have a hundred things to say and only two lines to write them down on.
4.  I’m not ready for “this” to be over. I have spoken so much about knowing when to let something go and all of the rational parts inside of me know that it’s time to let go. I set a goal in time and I’ve already passed it, so it’s time to meet this hard deadline and start another project, maybe. But all of the parts of me that are human want to wait. They want to write more and have you read them. It’s probably not much that I’ve given you, but you have given me much in return and that alone is another thing I want to write about.

So what this all boils down to is wanting to say more.

And what this all boils down to is re-reading what I have read and knowing that I have to practice what I preach and let go of this. I appreciate it. I value it. Maybe someday there will be another blog. I will read books and write about what they mean, and if graduate school isn’t in the cards for me, I could end up on your couch, surfing my way across the state, the country, the world. I would write about that, too.

There are so many other people in this world to collect stories from.

There are so many stories to tell. Our brains are infinite.

My brain wants to grow and my heart as well. And my thoughts have. They have. And there is this ring that I get to look at on my finger everyday when I wake up and when I go to sleep and when I shower and when I type on this computer that reminds me of the reason for which I did this.

I wanted to grow and I think I have done that.

I want many things for you. I want you to listen to someone you wouldn’t have listened to normally. I want you to find your thirty seconds of insane courage to do something amazing. Even if it is just an extra thirty seconds for you to breathe–just know that it is amazing.  I want you to hold someone’s hand, and no, that does not always mean romantically. Tell me, ask me, and I will hold your hand. I want you to find a purpose just for today, that you have never filled. Talk to strangers. Ask questions of people. Tell someone they’re beautiful and that you appreciate them. I think we don’t do those things enough.

You may not have a ring. But promise yourself something. Love yourself enough to work for it. Some of us start with slacking or we dive right in. I started with asking for help.

Write something. It does not have to be good. You do not have to be good. But you are always going to be something.

 

 

Day 33: Once more, on love

When I think about what love means, I get confused a lot. I don’t want to say that it’s subjective, but I think we’ve all learned now that it is. We know that it is a mobius strip. We know that it is gray and infinite and spectacular.

When I think about love, I am told to think about things for the good of others and giving things away and becoming a part of another person. And I hate to be the one to be contrary, but I don’t think that’s it because those things are definitive.

I swear I have had this conversation a million times. Andrea Gibson has a poem called “Sleeping” and in that poem, she writes, “I have written this poem before. But always through a window, never through an open door.” She is a beautiful human being.

And before, I wrote about how we show love and how it feels for everyone else and how to tell others the right way to love you. The silly thing is that any one of us could write this poem for hours and never finish and yet no one can tell me anything about it that they know for sure is a fact.

When I think about love, I think about my father.

I’ve written this poem before. If you read it you’ll know that I admire him very much and that he raised me by himself, but you won’t know that he’s the reason I learned compassion and you won’t know that he is the person from whom I learned strength and the small amount of self-sufficiency that I had when I was young–before I learned how to write checks and build my own furniture (well, kind of.)

You probably won’t know that I always thought he looked like a child born of Willie Nelson and Hugo Weaving.

You won’t know that he wrote me letters and kept  a journal that I was allowed to read only when I turned 16 and I read them all the day after he died.

There is a slim chance that you know that today would have been his birthday.

You won’t know that when I read that journal, I had never seen that much love put into words.

Day 32: Healthy teeth, respect, and other things I like

You get to make a lot of decisions.

And it often doesn’t seem like it. I think it’s easy to get stuck in a rut where all of your choices are being made for you and it’s easier to accept them than to combat the problem–it is often easier to let that happen. If you don’t combat the problem, you don’t have to fight.

That’s why we end up doing things that we don’t want to do and spending time with people who we don’t want to see. Well, they’re all important, but there is something to be said for being genuine. If it is a waste of someone’s time to speak to me, I don’t want them around anyway. It’s not just for my pride. It’s because they shouldn’t be wasting their time. They get so little of it, and I respect that not everyone’s going to do everything the way I want them to.

I want them to take the time to look at people and to know that every person that walks this Earth contains more than even the biggest library, but a lot of them won’t. If they want to try, I’ll try to guide them through that as best as I can, but if they don’t, I don’t want them to pretend they do.

This is my art. It is what I love. I do not want it cheapened.

It reminds me of what I said in regard to religion a few posts ago. I don’t want to disrespect Christianity by becoming someone who pretends to believe in such an important thing. And no one has entered my domain and lied to me, as far as I know.

But you only get to live one life, so you might as well live it the way that you enjoy–whether that means rushing to every commitment that you have begrudgingly made or talking to strangers.

I’ve written about choosing before. I’ve also written about biology.

Being myself is a very important thing to me, although I cannot always celebrate that the way I want to–or show it to others the way that I really want to come across. But you should know that if I’ve listened to you or talked to you at some point, it is because I wanted to, not because I felt like I had to.

You should also know that if I have neglected you recently, it is not because I’m trying to be rid of you. There are too many people who I want to know well and too many things in this world that I have also decided to do. I don’t make commitments that I do not want to keep and I try very hard to keep the ones that I make.

I find myself finishing cups of burnt coffee sometimes because I’ve committed to them, even without knowing they were burnt.

I go to the dentist not because I have to. I genuinely want to have healthy teeth, and I know seeing the dentist is a way to move toward this goal.

About seven months ago, my therapist told me that I must be very concerned with being a genuine person instead of just someone who wants to do what they want to do.

I didn’t see it that way at first, but I think I have grown into it…or at least I’m really putting in the effort to do so.

 

Day 31: My complete refusal of an idea

I’ve been having strange dreams recently. And if I believed in dream theory at all, these dreams would mean that I’m harboring some anxiety or deep internal conflict. 

News flash, you know, I wasn’t already. Let’s be real here, I’m pretty sure more people are doing that than those who are not. We could take a survey. It’s not my favorite method of data-gathering, but it’s reliable enough.

 

I see dreams a little differently than a lot of other people–a lot of other psychologists. I do hold the belief that the brain does not become inactive until death. This means that during sleep, that fabulous organ must be doing something. 

 

There’s this idea that our brains are playing movies when you’re sleeping. Well, yeah, they do seem a lot like movies. Our friends Freud and Jung developed this theories about subconscious and archetypes. They’re neat. They’re nice to know about when you want to write a spoken word poem, just like Greek mythology and the names of stars.

If you didn’t know, I actually do that.

 

They believed that elements of these brain-movies acted as symbols that referred to things like death or love or the birth of new ideas. That’s a pretty wild thing to just think up one day. The two of them would make great novelists.

 

But I don’t agree.

 

It rests all on the idea of the collective unconscious, which can be related to instinct. I see it this way: if the brain/ mind is a library, then you’re born with two books in there. We’ll name them Language Acquisition and What Jung Says You’ve Got in There. (We’re not going to include the one called How to Express Your Emotions. It varies culture to culture and also– not everyone knows how to express them.)

 

In the latter book, there’s information about how to suck and swim, how to grip, how to flex your toes when someone strokes the bottom of your foot, and symbolism. So if you have a dream about fire, it’s obviously a symbol for rebirth. That information is found in your book.

 

My problem with that is that children–very small children– have dreams, but often don’t know concepts like new beginnings unless you’re referring to a new episode of a cartoon. I don’t think there’s a lexicon in there for dreamspeak.

 

We can observe the changes in control of muscle movement. Your eyes roll, your body twitches when you’re in stage 1, and I think that emotions work that way, too.

 

I think your brain’s idea, the big one that we call the dream, is just an emotion.

 

To understand what my hypothesis is, you may have to get a bit tuned in on continuation and closure.

 

Continuation: When someone walks halfway behind a brick wall, you know that part of that person does not disappear, even though you cannot see the covered half.

 

Closure:  If you look at the picture below, you’re going to know that there is a circle and also a rectangle shown, even though the lines are not perfect.

This is another amazing thing. We take it for granted– much like learning a language, but it’s a beautiful and interesting mechanism. We find these two principles in a group called the principles of grouping (ha ha).

This is my dream theory:

1. The brain, while it twitches and rolls its eyes, sends emotion signals throughout the noggin.

2. Emotions are activated and move around and warp and change at a random pace.

3. We stop this and wake up, our brains kind of rebooting. The brain is similar to a computer, after all.

4. Rationalization of the highest form takes place. We want closure for these emotions. We want continuation. In the process of waking up, we create stories that explain the feelings that are experienced. Look at that circle in the closure box again. Imagine that the gaps in the line are what we call dreams. The lines that we can see visibly are emotions. I think this happens in the time it takes us to stop sleeping and to start waking up. It’s more of a gradual thing, isn’t it. It might feel sudden; I don’t think it is.

You might want me to explain dreams that don’t make any sense. Bilbo Baggins shows up at your doorstep with a pomeranian and your mother-in-law. It doesn’t matter if the gaps in the rectangle are pretty, so long as they’re there.

Is the theory a little unorthodox? Yeah, probably–but there might be a name for it. I haven’t checked to see if someone else has come up with this idea before.

So what does this say for my dreams about arguing with good friends and family members getting themselves into car crashes? Not much, I think.

Maybe they mean there are parts of me that I’m arguing with. It could end up being true that the car accident is a sign that I need to slow down and quit driving myself too hard.  But it’s going to take a lot more arguing to convince me of that.

Day 30: Made up stuff (or On body image)

This was my mohawk.

I like it when people tell me their stories. I like it when they tell me things they don’t tell other people. On a visceral level, it validates me. You should validate me by saying that everyone needs to be validated every now and then.

I like it when people come into the place where I work and they tell me stories about hitchhiking across the country or the exact moment they knew that they’d fallen in love. It is more than knowing that they have trusted me–it is partly the fact that I get to live a life that is not mine for a few minutes. Do not misread me. I love my life, but I  only get one, and there is an infinite amount of lives in this world that I could potentially lead. I just think that’s the coolest thing.

That’s the same reason I like video games.

Each of the people in this world that you are going to meet can fill up books and books and books should you give them the chance. Their lives, no matter how young they are, are filled with so much information and it is all stored in that small thing inside of their skulls.

They’re decorated with outsides and clothing and hair coloring and a bunch of stuff that really makes for little importance in the relative scheme of things. Finding the brain beautiful and the body beautiful are not mutually exclusive, but there are many more beautiful things that you cannot see than you can when you look at someone, I think.

It reminds me of something I hear a lot about, which is hiring people who have a great amount of body modifications. I know a lot of very intelligent people who are passed over for employment because of tattoos, in favor of hiring someone who is unfriendly in a professional setting or are completely unapproachable. What an employer who discriminates is saying is: You’re ugly, so I’m not going to hire you. Were it that literal, we would not see it as acceptable.

There are limits. For instance, the ladies and gents who have profanity spilled across their foreheads.

But their bodies are temples and I truly believe that they should decorate that temple however they see fit. I want there to be a distinguishable difference between my temple and the temple on the same block as me. I want strangers to know that my brain does not operate the same way as that persons–because no two temples are alike. If they were, what would be the appeal of choosing one over another?

We are not expendable as people. Our infinite brains are filled with so many different things than the brains of those around us. But here’s the catch: the way I look still does not reflect what is inside my head.

An example of this is brought up by a friend every time “Me and Bobby McGee” plays:   “Ah, Janis Joplin, proof that you do not have to be attractive to be famous.” or some variation of that–he changes it just about every time.

And maybe she was a singer. Maybe she wasn’t someone with a doctorate in physics and she didn’t perform brain surgery, but the people how have that and do that should not be discriminated against based on how they look as well.

I’ve been seeing a very lovely man who I was talking to recently about facial piercings. I asked him how he felt about them and he told me: Two things I feel very strongly about that I would tell you if it was some other guy you were interested in: First, how you see yourself and what you like should come before how some guy sees you and what he likes or doesn’t. Second, if he’s the kind of guy to go running because you got willfully added a hole to your face, then it wouldn’t have worked out anyways and you’ve saved yourself a ton of time. So… don’t worry about what I have to say.

And while I thought this was a very kind thing to say, it wasn’t the answer I was asking for, which was exactly what he thought about them. You see, I have become a master of not caring what other people think in regard to the way I look and dress. I enjoy wearing make up and I don’t do it because it makes men like me more. I do it because it is an expression of art that I can wear every day.

Jeff wrote to me here that I would have saved a ton of time if it didn’t work out with someone who would leave a relationship with me because of a facial piercing and I think that’s true to an extent. I don’t want to be with someone who thinks I’m ugly.

I would want to be in a relationship with someone who sees me not as a paragon of perfection nor as the kryptonite for a superficial superman.  I want to be with someone who sees me really, and accepts that.

This is the only body that I’m ever going to have. I like it. I want to continue to like it. How hurtful it would be for me to lose a job because I have gained weight or have not shaven my underarms. I may not want that job, true.

But what my job does is valuable. I can contribute with it. I do not want to be denied the opportunity to help a child through research because I have a tattoo.

The secret is that I would be covered with that kind of art if  I could afford it. My brain is a canvas, and so is my skin. Let me fill it.