Let's just take a moment ...

"That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end."

And you know what? When you don't see the end, it all becomes insignificant, meaningless, and the point of everything - life in general - is questioned. I know, this is exactly how I felt. When there isn't an end in sight, that's the hardest thing in this world because you cannot rationalize the fact that it will get better: it won't. It simply will not get better - or so your mind, perhaps the most powerful thing in your body, tells you. And if it doesn't get better, how can you be expected to live?

The above quote describes why I went through what I did, and I think that it is a valuable thing to mention. Thankfully now I do see an end: things have already started to get better, and they will continue to do so. It's still worth mentioning though.

This is a short blog post, I know, but the thing is I'm not in the country right now: I'm on my summer vacation and I've spent all day walking/doing touristy things - I'm exhausted. Damn, that sounds really secretive doesn't it? I haven't said where I am; I would tell you, but the thing is it's kind of top secret, something I'm definitely not willing to broadcast all over this blog: if I did, I'm pretty sure my dad would *murder* me. (cue creepy/secretive spy music) - nah, it's nothing like that ... it's just hard to explain. I'll blog more later when my feet don't feel like they have been walking on hot coals, fused with nails, for the entire day.

"Blind"

I was just going through old files on my flash drive, seeing if I need to salvage anything from my EVIL laptop when I came across a flash fiction that I wrote last year for Writer's Craft. No, I wasn't high at the time, despite what you may think when you read it, however it was inspired by a freaky dream I had (I have A LOT of those). Lately, I've been having these dreams that have a recurring element in them: Tipper Gore. Or some dude that calls himself Tipper Gore: he's not actually Tipper, in fact he's an actor: James Holt in the Devil Wears Prada and .. erhm, Franco in Rescue Me - I think. And that's probably the most sane elements of some of the wacko dreams I've been having lately - that is, about a week ago, I haven't slept a lot this week - darn exams, anyway, it's below if you want to take a gander at it (enjoy).

“This way!” the perky blonde chirped. She looked back, about 10 or so people were following her. “The mission is to get the sugar jar. We’re going in, and then we’re going out, and all we’re getting is the sugar jar.” The sun beat down on the group. She squinted, raising her hand to shield her eyes and then glared, “That’s all we’re getting.” her voice growled, dropping an octave or two. “I don’t have time for any sticky fingers. If you feel the need to have sticky fingers, I will hurt you. That’s a promise. Let me remind you, I am the leader, if you hesitate to obey my orders, I will kill you. That’s another promise.”
The group looked meekly back at the blonde.
I have power over these people. And they know it.
A timid redhead at the back of the group of the squeaked, “What if we get caught?”
The blonde stared: who dared to question her authority? “We won’t.” After a few seconds of people staring at her uncomfortably, “The guy is friggin blind. We won’t get caught. Don’t worry.”
The group trekked silently through the dense woods that sat next to the small farm house. Each time a stick cracked because it was carelessly stepped on, the blonde turned around and glared.
They need to be quiet. This guy can hear stuff miles away.
They were there. They were at the house. It was a one story, red brick house. It sat directly on top of a hill.
The window was open, the grey lace curtains were blowing in the breeze.
They climbed in. One by one. The blonde was first.
The curtains aren’t grey. That’s just the dust. Disgusting.
The house was chilly. Furniture was scattered sparsely throughout. The kitchen was the barest of all the rooms. One obsolete fridge stood alone in the corner, dust speckling the porcelain white door with dark blotches. The cupboards were also covered with dust.
Don’t sneeze.
The cupboards were closed.
Everyone finally managed to get in the house. The redhead looked around, and noticed a door, right next to the window, open as well. She frowned.
The blonde was oblivious.
“Lets get looking. And remember, no sticky fingers.”
They all began opening and closing the cupboards. The slamming of doors in defeat was deafening. The sugar jar was not there.
Speed was urgent; time was of essence. The sugar jar needed to be found.
“STOP! Shh. Do you hear that?” the blonde asked, her ears prickled up. “Shit. Shit. Shit. Be really quiet and don’t make a single sound.”
The front door swung open with such force, the cupboards rattled, dust began to fall. The man was home.
He stomped across the room, not acknowledging the intruders.
He’s blind. He can’t see us.
The blonde put her finger up to her mouth, indicating the group to be quiet. She then motioned to the window.
The redhead hesitated, for she saw that the door was right there.
The blonde saw this hesitation. The redhead was dead within the instant. Furiously the blonde pointed to the window. They began climbing out. She went first.
The dust was collecting furiously in her nose.
Don’t sneeze.
Behind her, a muffled noise was heard. Someone sneezed.
The man suddenly went to the porch.
As the blonde was climbing out of the window, it began to get harder and harder for her to wiggle all the way through. She gasped. The window was shrinking.
Impossible. I can’t get out.
Somehow though, she got out.
It was at that moment the man entered the kitchen again.
The blonde turned. From what she could see through the window, he looked different.
A smirk was on his face. A shot gun was held in his hands. He raised it. Bullets spat out, piercing the people that she came with deep red holes.
She turned and began to run, heading towards the forest.
Please God, let me live.
All of a sudden she stopped. Her face connected to the ground. Her vision began to cloud with red.
This is why you don’t steal the sugar jar.

"Grief is like the ocean: it's deep and dark and bigger than all of us. And pain is like a thief in the night: quiet. Persistent. Unfair. Diminished by faith and time and love."

A Tribute to my Best Friend :)

Whenever I look at this picture I think of watermelons and strawberries for some reason.

We're cool, ya know? I'm thinking you wished you were this cool.

This is my pouty face - it took years of practice, be jealous, be very jealous :)

Hannah Banana, we had so many great times this year!

"I like the fire!" - Me being really stupid

"This will either be the best thing ever, or the worse thing ever. Meh well, either way." - referring to lime popcorn

"If I win the lottery, I'll let you be my slave" - Me to Hannah

"Q"

*Frantic eye-twitching*

"Survival tip #12: when you go hiking in the woods make sure you take pots and pans." - Hannah's tip on how to survive a bear attack

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're just supposed to play dead."
"No, the bear will just maul you, you've got to try fight back you know. Maybe stand on someone shoulders or something. Or bear spray - that could be the best investment you make."
"Or we could just stay away from bears."
"Whatever you do don't climb up a tree."
"Hannah, how do you have all this wisdom about bear attacks?"
"I don't know." - Additional profound bear attack survival tips from Hannah

"Sharks smell fear. So if you're ever in an ocean and you see a shark try to remain calm."
"Because calm is your first reaction when you see a shark."
"Naturally." - Hannah's tip on how to survive a shark attack

"We're poets and we didn't even know it." - referring to our masterpiece poems

"No, don't worry! I'm good at math" - Hannah, while making about 13298219 mistakes and not letting me correct her

"I am bored.
You. Are bored.
We.
Are.
Bored." - one, out of several, example of our poetic genius

"So, I looked it up and it's going to take about a year to get to Australia on foot."
"How did you look that up?"
"Google maps, duh. Although we need to kayak across the ocean, this could present a problem."
"You think?"
"Yeah, I don't have a kayak." - hmmm ... that's the problem with this scenario self?!

Something to Think About

I think about this all the time ... especially when I'm up really late writing and I'm kind of a spaz.

Profound Thoughts for a Saturday Morning

Sometimes I look around a room that's full of people and I try to figure out what they're thinking. I look at the way their eyebrows are arched, the look that they have in their eyes, the way they are sitting. And I try to read their mind. It's weird though, the fact that people are talking in their minds and we can't hear them, and how they could be thinking about the exact same thing, "I wonder what everyone else is thinking?"

Or I think about how I'll never know how others see me, what they truly think about me; if I'm the most beautiful person in their eyes, or the ugliest. You only see the world through your eyes, but remember, there are at least 6 billion other pairs of eyes out there: these eyes may be exactly like yours, or nothing like yours. The point is we'll never really know, will we? You'll never know what someone else is truly thinking, or how they view the world.

Existing Is Not Living

New Beginnings

So, I've finally opened up the blog again; it's been awhile, I know. I don't really even know where to begin to explain: so much has been happening to me lately - and so much had happened to me; I'd spent so long running from things, from life, that I got tired, and those things - life - finally caught up.

Lets just say, things got really messy in my life for awhile and I didn't see the point in keeping this blog going because it took too much energy, and I felt like such a fraud because I was trying so hard to be funny, or witty, when on the inside, I was dying.

I'm not going to sugarcoat anything, the last couple of months - and even longer - have been a really dark time for me, a time in which I feel like I truly lost myself: I became this person who literally hated everything, including herself and the world - who hated everyone around her.

This blog has always been about the good times - the happy times, but not really about anything real, or sometimes how I truly feel: it's simply masking what's inside. The truth is, my life hasn't always been happy: I've had sometimes that have happened to me that I wouldn't wish to happen to worst enemy. Things that made me question the goodness of people. Things that have made me wish that I wasn't alive. You might not have gotten this before, but I feel like that too: we all do at some point in our lives, do we not?

My whole life I feel like I've been told that I need to be "strong", that I shouldn't show emotion, that people shouldn't be trusted and that I should be happy - or at least, convince others that I am happy. I've made mistakes, I've made a lot of mistakes this year; constantly being told those sorts of things led me down a dangerous path, a path where I stopped trusting others and talking to others. A path where I literally just pushed everything that happened deep inside and ignored it. A path where I wasn't living, merely pretending: one that took everything that I had just to act like I was ok, when clearly I wasn't.

I did this for years. I tried so hard to push others away, and to constantly keep my guard up for years. And believe me, that gets tiring so quickly; I look back and I have no idea how I managed to hang on for so long.

What happened was simply that I became so tired: tired of trying, tired of pretending and I gave up. I just quit. All I wanted to do was sleep and not have to try, and after awhile all I wanted was not to have to live, which is why I shut this blog down: it just became too much of a burden, and it was just another painful memory of how I had fooled so many people - I probably fooled you guys too.

My hatred of myself eventually materialized into self-destructive behaviour: I refused to eat, I physically hurt myself, I purposely picked fights with friends and family - in this attempt to push them away, I stopped caring - or doing anything for that matter - and I literally became a shell of a person. At first all I did was cry: cry about my situation, about how hard my life has been, about how some people went out of their way to tear me down, about the past. But after awhile, I just became numb, and empty. I didn't care about anything, and my reaction to everything was indifference: 'so what?' Let me tell you, not feeling anything is way worse than feeling like crap because when you don't feel anything you become disconnected in a sense; the elements that tethered you to the Earth aren't necessarily there anymore, and that is dangerous - very dangerous. The loneliness of everything magnifies and you'll do anything to make it stop, even if it's something that you never fathomed you would think about, let alone do - I know, this is what happened to me.

About 3 1/2 weeks ago I hit rock bottom. I was so empty, and so tired, and so far from being 'ok' that the only way it was going to get better was just to not live anymore - to die. I remember the moment when I decided to kill myself so clearly, and I find this odd because everything else about that time has been a huge blur: I was sitting in an office with a teacher and the principal, looking out the window while they tried to help. My mind was empty, I looked at both of them with dead eyes and realized that they couldn't help, nothing could help, the only way that it would get better was to just die: it was perfect, I wouldn't have to pretend anymore and I wouldn't have to feel. I became so calm, so startlingly calm, in that moment because I realized that it was finally over, the nightmare that was my life had an end in sight. I walked out of that office, refusing help.

I didn't have a plan at that moment, nor did I know when it would actually happen, all I knew was that it would happen - and that was enough at the time. This had happened on a Friday, I actually didn't get around to wanting to execute the plan until the following Tuesday: I had stayed at a friend's house the entire weekend and I didn't want to do it there, I didn't want to put that unnecessary stress on her.

That Tuesday was May 25th, this is a significant date. I got to school and realized that I didn't want to be there - and by there, I meant anywhere on the planet. I walked around town for the longest time, not really paying attention to where I was, or where I was going, my head with no thoughts inside it except the ones formulating and finalizing my plan. I was still calm, frighteningly calm - quite possibly calmer than I had ever been in my short but seemingly long, hard life. After walking for awhile I came across a pond, it was a muddy, deep pond that was relatively deserted, and it would have been such a perfect place to die. I stopped walking and stared at it for the longest time, and the more I stared at it, the more I just wanted to throw myself into it and let the water seep into my lungs, and steal my last breaths away from me. It was tempting, it was so tempting that I took a step closer, and then another, and then another. Soon, I was at the edge: I was at the end.

I don't know what I thought my last thought would be, in fact, I didn't even think that I thought I was really going to have one: up until that point I had been so calm, but so empty at the same time. As I was preparing myself for what I thought my last moments on Earth would be, I was overcome by the urge to know the date, to know exactly when my last day on Earth was happening; I pulled out my iPod and looked, it read "May 25th, 2010". It didn't click right away, I didn't feel like it was any special day, merely just another one, the only difference being that it was my last. However, I don't know what it was, or where it came from, but within a moment a thought had struck me: May 25th is my sister's birthday, Stephanie was now 17.

This jolted me, it did. I know that you probably think that suicide is the most selfish thing a person can do, I did for the longest time. The truth is, it's not selfishness, it's really not - I know this from experience, and I believe that you can't understand this unless you've been there, unless you've been moments away from taking your own life. I'll reiterate this though, it's not being selfish; I wasn't myself, my brain had morphed me into a completely different person: a person who didn't care, a person who truly believed that no one cared about her, and person who believed with all her heart that she didn't deserve to live, that she'd be doing the world a favour. However, with the realization of the date a spark of who I was came back: I knew that I couldn't do that to my sister, I couldn't make her birthday a reminder that her sister was dead, that her sister killed herself and that she didn't realize, or know her sister - at all.

This feeling didn't last forever though: I walked back to the school and along that spark that had prevented me from jumping in the water had extinguished. I knew that I wasn't going to kill myself that day, but I also knew that I still wanted to die. When I got to the school, I was the empty person that I had been for so long once again: I didn't have a chance, and I was wishing that I hadn't walked away from the pond. I did one thing different though, when I got to the school I told someone - someone who had been there, unexpectedly, for me the whole time - someone to whom I owe my life, and I mean that in the most literal sense. I hadn't planned on telling anyone, let alone her, yet there was a series of events that resulted in me spilling it out. She listened, watched me leave and then forced help upon me.

That's right, I got help, help that I desperately needed - even though at the time I didn't necessarily want it. I've been working through everything that has been bugging me, and I'm finally letting people in, truly letting them in for the first time in my life. And it's scary, because I feel so vulnerable now, my heart could get stomped on - again. And I'm scared that I'll regress, and that something will happen and I'll feel like how I did before; whenever I think about that, my stomach literally twists and turns, I don't ever want to feel like I did on May 25th again. I don't know if I could survive feeling like how I did on that day again.

I'm terrified, and that's the one thing that I cannot bring myself to tell anyone aloud, so I guess telling you, through these written words, will have to do.

But, things are getting better, so much better and honestly I feel happy. At this moment, I'm happy. It's not happiness all the time, sometimes I still have a hard time getting out of bed, but the fact that I can feel happiness means so much because before I could not. I feel like life is worth living again, and I'm so excited for the future, and what it will hold for me. You may not be able to appreciate this the way that I do, but honestly, this is monumental for me, truly it is.

Anyway, why tell you guys this? I guess it's just to update you on what's happening in my life, and to let you know that the premise of this blog might change. Sure I'll tell the funny stories that you're used to, but I'm also going to be negative and vent at times: I'm going to write what I feel, not what I think you guys want to read, and sometimes what I feel could be the most dark and depressing thing ever - I don't care though, I'm tired of hiding, I just want to live - and living means being happy one day, and horribly depressed the next, does it not?

And, summer is almost here: I'm taking it easy for this summer which means that I'll probably be posting everyday (so you have that to look forward to) and next fall the plan is that I'm still going to go to Mount Allison University, and I'll definitely blog about my experiences there - I'll have time when procrastinating, yes? I hope that you guys, whoever you are, will continue to read, and enjoy, what I'm writing. And I hope that you guys never feel the way that I have for so long, and if you do, I hope that you can change that, because you shouldn't have to feel that way: I shouldn't have had to feel that way. It's easier said than done, I know: someone told me the same thing, yet I didn't believe her, my brain wouldn't let me believe her, I believed that somehow, I did something so awful that I did deserve to feel the way I did - she was right though, I really shouldn't have had to feel like that.

For the longest time I didn't believe that things could - or would - get better, I had convinced myself that there was no possible way anything could improve, but they did: no matter what, please believe that things can always get better.




"For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again." - Benjamin Button