Have you realized yet how I'm just a kid running around trying to grab the attention of all the important people in my life that never could give it to me as a kid. Always seeking for the attention, the validation, the longing to be loved with adoring eyes and warm, warm, warm hugs and gentle kisses. I never knew that, I never experienced the warm love that is present in all of our arms. I'm running around right now in my life as the kid I never got to be. I'm just now realizing that maybe I'm something more than just standing around and looking pretty. Something more than running around trying to make everyone laugh but feeling completely awful inside. The awful that chews up your insides, the churn of the bloated belly and shoulder blades deep in ache from the shovel and the rake. Trying to plow the seeds for something ahead, something to be congratulated for, something to be noticed for, admired for, adored for because that feels good. That's the only thing I know, I was always treated like an object. Something to be talked about and tossed around. Never having the chance to say how I felt about any experience. At some point I just stopped feeling all together. It was easier to be happy, but secretly crying into my journal or pouring my heart out into a song. Do you realize I dress the way I do so people tell me I look nice because I don't know it for myself to be true? Did you realize yet that everything I do is for you? For you to realize that I am a person too but I'm so lost inside I don't know how to do anything other than try to impress you. And do you realize how much I love you but only know how to make you love me ? Never experiencing the giving because I never experienced the receiving. And now I'm experiencing the joy of breathing, of discovering, playing, dancing, anything and everything that got shut out from the start. But it was never anyone's fault....for so long I thought. Instead it was the dying need to be embraced and not fought. Never assuming the reality as a child. Because if children are not seen as our same then surely we will all feel that they are a pain and only worth the time when I was falling, crying, failing, succeeding, lying, manipulating, and finally controlling how you will feel and perceive me. Everything except just being me. Calling my name, calling me back home to my roots of sadness and rejection. I was told that I had a pretty face, she's going to get all the boys in school, you should be a model, you've got the legs and the face. You're never going to get a boyfriend like that picking your face. You should learn how to cook yourself a meal, how are you going to cook your husband dinner after he gets home ? I simply replied...he can cook himself dinner....never learning the love that comes with cooking someone a meal and the desire to sit share it with another person just to sit and share it with someone...not the annoyance of "have to's" the annoyance that came along with having to feed a whiny kid and yourself too. Never enjoying our selves and simply being with each other. I don't know that feeling quite yet, but my daughter Winslow is helping me with it tremendously. To her, I owe her my freedom. 

A man's company is one that I enjoy. His strength, his gentle and sweet disposition. A confident man that is confident in his counterparts. The one that sees far beyond his mirror. Does such man exist? Or am I simply, once again, unduly dreaming. Is it so wrong for me to love the strong embrace that a man can give? Is it so wrong for me to want someone who is willing to protect me and stand by me when the seas are troubling and choppy? I will not allow a man per say to define me, but I will allow him to refine me into the greater being that I am. I will allow him to comfort me in his embrace and allow my self-righteousness to fall at my knees. I will allow myself to reach greater heights with my hand in his as we walk together into the sunrise of each day. I am not ashamed of this. To be interdependant with another is the greatest source of inspiration and freedom to achieve. I will meet that man and we will be free, together yet separately.

Dear Breanna,

I am writing this to you because I have seen you in the darkest places and for too long I have left you there. I abandoned you because it hurt too much to be seen, to be heard, to be open. I heard you say you didn't have much to offer, that you were too scattered, too forgetful, too emotional. You even went as far as to say you'd rather not open yourself to anyone in fear of that dreaded rejection, the all too familiar facade of being alone and preferring it. I want you to know that you are beautiful. Your spontaneous and erratic nature is what helps you grow and shed your scales. Who told you that you had to sit still and dig your heals into the dirt and continue along any particular path. It's okay to change your direction, it is okay for you to change your mind and opinion on every possible scenario and event. I like that about you, it opens possibilities and burns boxes. Use that fire to burn your own trail. It's okay that you can't make up your mind and make a decision, or change it at the last minute. It makes your life exciting. Don't worry about getting anywhere, you are already here. You are worthy of friendship and companionship. You are beautiful, have I told you that already ? Your sadness and desperation opens space for joy and humility. Your tears slowly move you into yourself and shapes your best being; just like a river shapes rocks and creates new formations as it flows. I love you. I love you and not just the best parts about you. I love that you are willing to give it all up, knowing that whatever is next is better than it has ever been. I love that you are never complacent and strive for the best this life has to offer. Don't give up, I believe in you. In your darkest hour, I still see the light shining inside of you. You are the best friend, mother, daughter, sister, and employee anyone could ask for. I love you, I really do. I love your voice and the way you speak with carefully chosen words of expression. I love the way that you look deep down into another person's eyes and see that you are forever equal in nature and love. I love the way you walk and the way you look around you and notice every little thing inside and outside of this world. I love the scar on the lower half of your belly because it is a reminder of the day you brought your beautiful daughter into the world. I love your stretch marks because it is proof you grew and carried a whole human in your body. I love the scars on your face from stress related pimples, they show you care and are willing to open space for the hurt you are feeling. I love the way you are always up for a fun time yet always make time to be quiet and alone. I love the way you extend your love with every part of you. I love you as you are; in any and every condition. Today, tomorrow, and forever.

Experience Interpersonal Love

I enjoy being alone. It allows for me to recharge and check myself. Dive into my interests, really hone in on me. That's important. It is important for maintaining healthy relationships. It is easy for me to get lost in another person, totally melt into them. For me, I need to step away for some air; some stillness. I am enjoying the relationships in my life; they are few and full. I am carefully choosing my time with the people in my life. I love the life they all bring into me and what I bring for them. It is a shared presence that I value so highly in this simple everyday life. I am not choosing to be alone to get away from people and their problems, I am choosing to be alone to be there for myself and my own problems.

To one friend, I'll be the one that listens to every single word she says without a peep on my end. The only reason I'm able my undivided attention with her is because I've already spilled my guts to another friend that hardly had a peep on her end. This exchange is the beauty of interpersonal relationships. A give and receive exchange. Receive that person for who they are and give them the attention that they are sharing with you at that moment. We can only share ourselves when we fully know ourselves and this is only possible in times of introspection and stillness.

It is easy to become annoyed with another person when they are taking attention away from you. This happens when I haven't been by myself long enough. Long enough to let the feeling of anger, sadness, despair, confusion, frustration all boil up and dissipate. To listen to myself for once, give myself my own attention.To cease the projection onto others and be present with myself so that I may be present with the people and my surroundings.

If I were always communicating with you then I'd begin to have a hard time formulating my own thoughts. The lines will start to blur and we will begin to enmesh. This is fun for a good while but it drains me. I must be away for some time to fill my cup back up but don't worry because I'll show up again with more love to give.

 Life is best spent with others but I'm reconsidering the whole idea of the married couple. We choose one person to spend practically all of our time with, this is unhealthy. Unless the couple is able to be together yet separate. Separate in the sense that we are our own person and live independently yet in harmony. Share presence rather than compete, scold, compare, resent, and punish the person we are in contact with. This is considered taking it out on the other person. This is irresponsible because we are not dealing with our emotions by ourselves. We are not attending to our bodies. Instead, we are putting it all on someone else's shoulders and making them feel our pain. This is not what we are here for.We are here to share life with each other. We do not owe each other anything. What we owe to ourselves is respect, undivided attention when needed, and honesty.
These are the relationships I am cultivating. A union of shared breath and love with myself and everyone in this life.

Artwork by Norman Duenas

I will not be ashamed of myself any longer. I will not be ashamed of my choices, my decisions, my heartache, my sadness, my forgetfulness, my sorrow, my mindlessness, my laziness. I often wonder how everyone else does it? How do they keep it going long enough to accomplish something, long enough to build something off of. I have no experience with this...well maybe I do but it's out of my sight because I am too busy looking at everything else that I SHOULD be doing. Today, all day all I could think of was that I shouldn't be doing everything that I was doing. Every choice I made was counteracted with myself telling me, no...you really should be doing this instead. How frustrating and defeating that is to be constantly at odds with myself. I have no love for myself, as I am beginning to realize. I thought I did but it was false. It was covered up in clothes and trends, interesting facts and stories. All of it just make believe. I have no basis of who I am and who is me because I have forever buried myself in fear of actually being seen. I am scared of rejection. So, I outwardly reject those around me and the ones I do want to be around, end up rejecting me. It's the same story over and over again. When will it stop ? I feel pinned to the wheel, screaming and desperately wanting off but secretly enjoying it. What else do I know? This is comfortable....and now that I am slowly becoming unpinned, I feel even more scared. Scared of my potential. Scared of losing anything great that comes out of me. This loss runs deep, it is ingrained in my DNA. If for once, I could just forgive myself of everything I didn't do or was supposed to do. Forgive myself for not following through with something...giving up, especially. Forgive myself for being selfish, for being less than, for not eating the right foods for my body. Because it's all this scolding and
"should-be's" that are preventing me from being free. They cloud my mind, eat me up inside...literally  .

KISS- Keep. It. Simple. Silly

What to write about ? I have been denying my fervent desire to get all of these words and ideas out of my god damn brain and head. It literally drives me insane, yet why do I deny this gift of releasing so easily ? It's as if I deny all that is good for me. Maybe, I'm scared of the truth that will come out and then I will really have to listen to said truth and acknowledge it. That's scary. Why? Who knows, I don't. Here I am, 24 years old in my own little home that I made happen for myself and my daughter. And I want to leave already. Am I denying myself this amazing opportunity to live here ? I go too far into thinking about what it all really means.

The WHY. I hate the WHY ! There is no why. It just is, yet so hard to accept. All of us are great and have so much to share with an abundance that is seldom brought forth. I will not judge another person's life and their experience by what it is. That experience they are choosing to have does not make them who they are. Through people is where we learn the most, so logically it doesn't make sense for me to go off and live in the desert alone with my daughter. but it DOES. It does because I haven't fully realized who I am in the world just yet. We haven't discovered ourselves. I've been too busy putting on a goddamn show to all around me trying to prove that I am something of worth and commendation. I've got all the bells and whistles, pretty good at getting the sympathy too. It is sickening, really. It is not me, it is a pre-fabricated existence that I want you to believe about me. How fucking horrible, sad and pathetic. Wow, so no wonder I become bitter because it takes A LOT of energy to be performing at my best all the time for all these people in my life. I put myself on a pedestal and I crave the attention, I crave the acknowledgement, I will do anything for the praise and adoration even if I am doing something that I completely despise. Like cleaning a goddamn microwave and oven, painting crown moulding, vaccuming a kitchen ! I mean, c'mon?!!! What the hell am I doing with my life. Nothing...but performing tasks well. I despise public school for this. Sets us up for the grand performance, in my experience at least. The great stage of the American Dream. I've become a lover for the dramatics. I have become addicted to the theatrics. So far removed from genuinity.

I'm walking off, tipping my hat, saying goodnight and going inside to find who I really am because all of this is just fluff.

On a sidenote, these are just thoughts and ideas....ephemeral and maybe containing substance OR just part of the show as well. Sometimes the lines are blurred please do forgive me of my ambivalence.

Artist Mark Wagner

Life/Death

Admitting to myself that yes, I have suicidal feelings was comforting. Odd, but comforting. Comforting in the sense that I was not alone and that I was still here.
I often imagine myself crashing my car off of a cliff and then I start wondering what it would be like. I imagine how I would feel; if I died. Oh, the irony. How much easier would that be than to hold on to all of this anger and sadness inside of me. But I never believed that I was actually suicidal. It was just a fleeting thought; a fleeting image. And having suicidal thoughts and feeling hopeless isn't what you're supposed to feel. You're supposed to be happy. Right? And you can't express this openly because everyone's got an opinion about how you "should" feel. Well, I never allowed myself to be seen as someone who felt that way.  I never took it seriously because I couldn't although the desperation was vehemently apparent on some days.
I just want to die sometimes and never have I even thought that sentence nor said it aloud. I just imagine dying on some days but then I shake it off and think to myself, no that's bad, don't think that way and don't feel that way which in turns contributes to the block in and on top of me. But the other day, I was sitting in the car and it was raining. The roads were slick and  it was windy driving on Highway 1 along the Big Sur coast line. I had this feeling of doom, as if today was the day that I'd die in a car crash. But I pushed it away, "NO, you do not want to die", I would assure myself. But that day was different, I stopped pushing away the feeling and I honestly admitted to myself that I wanted to die. This feeling of anger, fear, and loneliness crept up and out of me. I remember being a young girl, probably 10 or 11 and writing in my journal how much I hated my life, how much I wanted to die, and how much I hated my Mom. I even scratched into my skin with something sharp, "IHML" which stood for, "I hate my life." You can still see the remnants of the, "I" on my left hand. I put blood in my journal on my paper probably with a few tears. I felt alone and thought it wouldn't really matter if I was here or not. That feeling has stayed with me throughout these years and has been silently leaking into my life because I have never addressed it. I just shrugged it off and thought that's what young girls going through puberty do. They are angry, and yes this is partly true but the difference is that it never left me. I never actually felt the anger. I held it in to feel "strong". To carry on. But it hasn't gone away until now. Until I surrendered to it and found that comfort. The comfort of myself, my breath, my body, friends, family, my daughter and the comfortable, peaceful silence in Nature that resides in all of us. I have finally chosen to live while knowing the key to these emotions is to let them continue in motion and leave my body so that I may be free from the chains of anger, fear, desperation, and isolation. The same chains that have been holding me as hostage for so long.
I am choosing to respond without condition. I am choosing to feel all emotions, Whether they are of living or dying. Whatever they may be. In the laws of Nature, we would not be able to continue living without death first, becoming of us.

When do you know how to follow your intuition? Some days I just want to throw my hands up and stop listening to everybody talking and actually think for myself for a minute. Stop listening to all of their opinions. All of their set views on how things should be. What you need to do is this, what needs to happen is this because of this and that and this because of that and this. NO. I do not want to live my life in constant control. I need the freedom and peace of mind to choose what I would like to do with my time here in existence. You have no clue what that may be, so don't go around throwing your carefully planned safety net over me or your vane validity of reasoning down my throat.  I will not sit comfortably. I mean do you ever experience anything if you are always trying to be something? Always looking for some sort of validation or reasoning or acceptance from somebody else. I say, fuck that. I'm tired of people telling me what I should or shouldn't be doing. They don't know what's good for me or what I need to be doing with my life. Don't give me your opinion when you aren't in my body to make the choice.

Does this make me vane? Thinking that no one knows what is right for myself. I don't t\think so, I think we sacrifice ourselves so often for someone else's dream or play along with their game that we forget on the surface level of what truly makes us happy and what will make our heart jump up and down every single day of our lives. It isn't money, it isn't a trailer, it isn't a home, it isn't a car, it isn't a carefully planned thought out, perfectly remedied idea of a life that will bring us the most joy. It is the simplicity and appreciation for our very own breathe and heartbeat and that of everyone else's on this planet. Every species, every plant, every water of body and so on. Yet, why do we believe that we have to create this fool proof plan that will work out perfectly and create this never ending cycle of never enough. Why is it so hard to want what we have? Why does it always have to be on to the next thing when had just begun.

Can't we just take off our clothes and run through the sprinklers at night?

Are we all lying to ourselves?
Thinking this is it.
What are you waiting for?

Inadequate Lover, nope not I !

So, here I am sitting in my new boyfriends room on his bed while he is passed out full clad, beanie and all diagonally on the bed. I will have to move his lump of a body when I finally decide to shut my eyes and get some rest. He looks so cute when he is sleeping, On his side with both of his hands under his head, innocent and handsome with his beard. Not that his beard makes him innocent but more so the slight sound of his breath coming from his half opened mouth, with his arms and hands tucked under his head like an extra pillow. Okay, I'm going to have to stop typing and take a picture. Now I understand why I always woke up to my Dad with a camera sneakily in his hand, snapping pictures of me while I slept.

We are all so innocent when we are sleeping, off in dreamland. If we could take that innocence and bring it into our daily lives then I do believe the world would be a much kinder place. It is so easy to forget to love and forget the simple joys in everyday life. It is too easy to let your mind race back n' forth, silently talking yourself into believing things that aren't even real. Fears. They'll getcha good. So wrapped up in yourself, so caught up, wound up into a tense ball that all you can do is bounce from wall to wall, entertaining the dreaded nightmare of what may or may not come into play. Then again, it is a choice. A choice of what it is that you want to believe. Be live. To come alive. It is your choice whether you'd like it to be something good for you or like me on tough days choose to have worries that you are not good enough or that you just can't possibly handle someone else's emotions and past life experiences let alone your own.

What about me ? What about my life ? My dreams, my goals, my desires. What about ME ! I scream as I drift into no man's land. Well, I've come to realize that it isn't just about me, it's about everyone. Most importantly the person that is willing to give me all of them. All of their love, all of their past, present and future and here I am stuck on things that are seemingly "not right". Well love isn't right or wrong, it just is. It's something you feel, it is something you know and believe in and hold on to when shit is tough. It isn't easy either. It's hard to give yourself to someone else. You don't have to give up yourself but you do have to give. Everyday. And I'm learning each day to let go and love. For all that there is because why not ? What do you have to lose but everything and when you do lose everything what do you have? You have freedom.
These last couple months since meeting Clayton has been a whirlwind of change. Great change ! Scary stuff, really. and I catch myself on days becoming fearful of not being able to love someone else as much as they love me or do as much as he does for me. Inadequate lover. But I want to be the best ! I really do. I want to love him with all my heart, I want to bring a smile to his face every morning, every day, every night. Why do I feel like I won't be able to do this ? I find myself getting upset when he is having fun and drinking. I grow bitter and resentful. I start pointing the finger and thinking that he shouldn't be doing that and start judging him and I know that these feelings are coming from my past with my Mom. Alcohol and partying are synonymous with my Mom drowning her sorrows in beer and alcohol while growing up. Wasting her life away in worry and stress over regrets and fears.
They were always partying, it seemed as though that's all that mattered. They would spend all their money on alcohol and drugs and lock themselves in their room every weekend. Then stress later on in the week or the end of the month how they would pay for the mortgage, or pay for anything really. It was always, "We don't have any money." ,"We can't do that.", "Go ask your Dad for money." It made me sad to see my Mom unhappy and so drunk that she could barely talk and hold a conversation with her kids. Slurring her words and making jokes about myself and other people around her. I never understood it but now that I can look at it from a different perspective I am able to let go of a lot of those feelings of resentment against her for not being there for me and not supporting me or encouraging me growing up. I started seeing her with loving eyes and respect. I stopped condemning her for her mistakes and choices. Instead I loved her. I remember one night, we were talking in her room and I could tell that something had been bothering her so I asked what was wrong and she just hugged me and said that she was sorry. That she was sorry for being such a bad mom and it broke my heart to know that she felt that way. Because she wasn't a bad mom, she was doing her best to support us and deal with her own emotions and yet here I was condemning her for not thinking of me or caring about me when she was dealing with things far greater than I could ever imagine. Yet it was though her own fear of being an inadequate Mom that actually withdrew her from being a caring Mom to her children. I don't want to be that way and I sometimes see myself taking on that role. Playing into that fear of inadequacy and doubt, withdrawing from the situation. The reality of it all. Becoming resentful and bitter towards life when really I should be grateful and looking forward to all the great things to come.

I will not let my fear of being an inadequate friend, co-worker, person, lover and someday mother withdraw me from all that is beautiful and great in this life! I will embrace each day as it comes and love my family, friends, and boyfriend with compassion and understanding as best as I can. Great things happen when you let go and let your love lead the way.