February3

When you lose things to an unwanted wind of change that you have absolutely no control over, the grief can turn you into someone you never thought would spawn into existence. Losing my home, my friends, family, my life in the move to Minnesota was already profound in and of itself. But losing a romantic lover seems to have had the most pathetic consequences of all. I’m not sure it does for everyone, but it sure as hell did for me.

After my adventure in Florida (where I moved to at age twenty one), I hit the road to go live with my brother in Pittsburgh. I loved Pittsburgh. Not romantically of course (har har), but I definitely fell in love with it, embraced it as a substitute for home. I don’t doubt that this falling had a lot to do with the fact that I was living with family, living with someone who is already a part of me, a connection to everything I know about my truest identity. My brother has always been my living, personal hero, and having new adventures in a new city with him was undeniably a memorable year in my life. However, I was struggling, even still, even after all the time that had passed, with who and what I left back in Minnesota. I wanted to shake that “who” from my life, from my heart, but there was no doing it.

I went through a dark depression after half way through my one year of Pittsburgh, packing on twenty pounds, accidentally cutting my horrifically already short hair into an embarrassing, badly chopped up bob, and feeling more ugly and undesirable than I think I may have ever felt in my entire history of hating my outward appearance. Pathetic. Hating myself profusely, I could barely conceive the idea of drawing any attention sexually. And let’s face it, an initial sexual attraction is often the only way to draw in the potential of falling in love. ‘Hence the trickiness of it all.

On the other hand (now that I’ve given it a second thought), an initial sexual attraction is not necessarily the only gateway into love. Some people grow connected over time. Some people have to dig past those outer layers before they recognize that someone is, indeed, sexy to them. Some people despise each other before they fall in love. Some people have the oddest forms of foreplay that can go on for years before either of them even realizes that it’s been foreplay all along. It is indeed a grand mystery. However, no matter how sexy you may have been in an earlier decade, or how sexy you predict yourself to be in the future (if only your hair would grow back out and you’d lose twenty pounds!), if you’re not feeling sexy in the present the chances of someone noticing your potential is pretty much zilch.

So. Pittsburgh was a time of feeling despairingly disgusting and in that stretch of bad self-esteem I lost a large part of myself. I was stuck in what is known to most as “writer’s block”, which isn’t necessarily what a lot of people believe it is. Writer’s block is often described as having the inability to write, the inability to continue one's story, stuck on a chapter, the loss of imagination and foresight. This wasn't the problem. I could write. Oh, could I ever write… But I couldn’t write well. Not in the least. The perception of myself was nothing more than a pathetic, insecure, little teenager, and so I was writing like one. Without a computer I went through notebook after notebook, re-writing chapters to the fantasy novel I was working on at the time, all by hand. It became an obsession. Not a passion, Folks. An obsession. I couldn’t stop writing and fixing and re-writing and fixing, desperately trying to put my esteem back to where it should be. But it was hopeless. I could see my flaws and my immaturity and my inadequacy and my ignorance and my puny, disgusting, vile pile of self-esteem in every single sentence I wrote on every single page of notebook paper and hated myself with some of the worst self-hatred I’ve ever experienced. Nice image, isn’t it? I have a point to all of this, I promise…

My sexiness, what I deem as beautiful and desirable about myself, is wholly dependent on my creative talents. I’m a so-so looking woman with a few features I depend on for my esteem, but when it comes to being able to cope with who I am as a person, who I am as a desirable being on a whole, I depend greatly on my art and my writing. It is the one way I can confidently connect with people. It is what I use to love people. It is what I use to get noticed by men I’m attracted to. It is what I use to communicate the deepest parts of myself that I’m too scared to reveal face to face. Verbally, I’m a nightmare. I’m inarticulate and ridiculous when I’m under pressure to be witty and sociable. I also tend to be recklessly abrupt, awkward, abrasive, and sometimes brash when I speak in conversation and I tend to piss people off. I hate this about myself. So, I greatly depend on my art, my writing, my creative way of communicating to let people know what’s really going on in this psych ward of a melon on my shoulders. When I lost that in Pittsburgh? It was over. I was grieving over him, I had lost my esteem, and therefore lost my writing. I felt empty through and through. I needed to fill the holes, the voids, and when people have enough voids in their life they end up doing desperate things to fill them. Grief can turn you into someone you never thought would spawn into existence. No, wait. Correction: a sour self-esteem can turn you into someone you never thought would spawn into existence. I’d like to blame it on grief, but the truth of it is I was the one that left him. I was the one that chose the road. It was a mistake that I was torturing myself over. He had already met the girl, and was already moving on. Problem was, I was not. So, correction to my latter correction: it was more like a messy concoction of boiling grief, sour self-esteem, bitter regret and tasteless self –pity that drove me into being a person I never thought I’d see in myself.

I know that if you’ve read this far you deserve to read something juicy, so I’m cautiously (more cautiously than you know, actually) going to attempt to share some of these things I did to fill my voids. This stretch of embarrassment went in and out of stints over several years, so what I feed you will be bits and pieces of me living in Pittsburgh, Norristown, and my first return to Minnesota.