Instead, I forget. I forget I know you, I forget there has been work done by others, I forget there are others like me, that what I deal with is understood, and that I’m not some kind of inhuman freakshow because I struggle with the realities of this.
I forget I was ever diagnosed in the first 3 years of intense, wrenching, horrifyingly naked psychotherapy that transformed my life. I forget the answers I put everything I had into finding.
Largely, I choose, rather, my idealism, and resistance to psychological diagnosis which is often abused in the interest of drug companies and politics. I choose the sense that, surely, I am more complex than a wikipedia article on human behavior, which took me years to think to look at again. That, surely, I deserve to feel awful about myself an increasingly disturbing amount of my life. Again. That, surely something MUST be incredibly, strickenly -wrong- with me.
Where is my courage? Why don’t I recognize when this is happening, or more accurately, that it is THIS IS WHAT IS happening? Why can’t I recognize when I’m watching myself dismantle my life, like there’s another soul inside me that shuts me off and moves and speaks for me. Why don’t I SEE IT FASTER?
I’m think-smart. I’m smarter than my own fucking good. Why can’t I be honest with myself about this? Why am I so horrified, so embarrassed, so fucking ASHAMED?
How many more nights will I spend paralyzed by incessant, merciless thoughts of how terrible I am? How many more times will I break down sobbing like a shivering, petrified animal? Why does something so common and ordinary feel so fucking WRONG? Why does the label feel like such a copout?
Why am I not over this? Why am I not fixed? I think about it sometimes, but I don’t want to die. I want this to go away.
I am exhausted and tiny and coiled and awkward and I’m taking my fucking blankie with me on the bus and fuck anyone who’s got a fucking problem with that.
You know, there are a lot of things I can be unhappy with — a lot of stuff I put out there that just doesn’t quite hit the mark, or I pushed out too soon, that I can really gnaw on if I’m looking for things to dislike about myself.
There are improvements I want to make to it, and every time I’ve performed it I’ve refined it and made it better, but no one will ever be able to convince me that this isn’t a damn fine act — http://neevita.net/aerial
Sometimes I dislike living in America. I really wonder what the youtube stats would have been, and what life might be like if there were a snowballs chance in a fat mans asscrack that I could be hired to perform this consistently in Seattle.
I remember some time a few years ago, I heard part of an interview with Coldplay in which one of the band members was asked if bad reviews and the vicious comments that are made about them hurt. He said yes, and I was both impressed with his vulnerable honesty and saddened in how much I related to where the guy was coming from.
I’m not sure who this kid is, but I was very touched by this video.
I’ve tried to google hate on myself during low points in my life. I think I might have even done it using AltaVista once. Honestly, if ever there was a time that the rare unsolicited comment was made about me online, it’s certainly long over. Which is just as well, being that I too am a person who has always wished to be the type who doesn’t care what people think of them, and who probably just isn’t.
I never did find what I was looking for when I’d search for “courtnee papastathis sucks” and various other versions of the same sentiment — and honestly, I’m glad. During depressions, I am bulldog enough about insisting I’m a total waste of mucous without the confirmation of random people who don’t actually know the first thing about me or the real reasons I might suck. Though I can scrap on EFnet with the best of them, the irrational wave of hatred that inevitably ends up directed at the people who ‘make it’ as a performer is, I’m certain, one of the founding reasons I struggle with the prospect of any reasonably inarguable amount of success.
I think about places to contact about showing my art and then never call them. I think about press package designs and never print them. I think about going to open mic’s and I don’t go. I rarely practice, and when I do it helps to have a drink or three in me. I don’t take classes. I walk away from disciplines for months, sometimes years, before picking them up again. I have to re-learn my own songs every time I perform.
I don’t want to even imagine how hard it could become to maneuver my emotional landscape — my stage fright, my writers blocks, my mediocrity — if more people with less investment were paying attention. I cringe at the thought of engaging in conversations with every person who leaves a comment on my Model Mayhem and Deviant Art accounts, let alone being under the scrutiny of a typical celebrity fan base.
I’ve improved greatly at recognizing when I’m in my own way, and pushing through when I feel down about my work: And still, I think I might die before I figure out how to truly stop hiding from it.
I don’t want to be famous. I just want to be loved.
I’ve noticed recently that I tend to put an invisible wall up when I see strangers carrying musical instruments on the street or public transit. I think it’s out of a kind of shame for being such a shitty musician; I don’t want to get trapped in a conversation about the instruments I “play”.
I try to insert myself into situations that don’t interest me out of the fear of being rejected, and then blame the person I want to be closer to for how uncomfortable it is when it doesn’t work.
This video has been circulating a lot lately, a few times from me as well, and every time I see it I get another boost of the rage I feel when I see this excessive shit being pumped into our friends, our lovers, our roommates, our sons, our daughters, ourselves.
This is why I’ve not sought out a modeling agent, why I take a lot of my own pictures and am incredibly picky about who I allow to photograph me, and control (as well as it’s possible to) where images of me and my work go as well as what they’re used for. It’s also one of the reasons I fucking HATE television, especially commercials, and despise mainstream porn.
Tell people about this video. Everyone should see this.
There’s this time in every significant relationship where things are simply dripping in awesome. Life is flowing through everything you do with one another, you stand stronger on your own, the layers you skillfully peel away together reveal excitement, reverence and possibility. The processes are as enjoyable as the outcomes and it’s impossible to not at least occasionally catch yourself wishing and hoping that you may have found a fountain of perpetual fairy tale bliss that may just never have to end.
And then someone fucks up. And shit gets real.
In the most recent case, that someone was me. I found this detail highly inconvenient. It’s usually not me, at least not the first significant trial, but regardless of when it happens, the first time I royally screw up signifies a very particular point in the everlasting, yet constantly progressing cycle that is my relationship with relationships. It signifies a very important and basic test, a subconscious impulse that demands verification: Is this thing real.
One side of a coin is not a real coin. Until you suffer challenge together, you don’t know the strength you may have in a bond. But until you’ve suffered the inevitable fallibility in the other person, until you know what that looks like, and how they handle themselves, and you, when it happens, you don’t know if that bond even truly exists. At least, I don’t. Or at least, some small hologram that periodically takes the wheel inside me doesn’t.
So, that happened. I fucked up and it broke us both open and we were awesome and authentic about it and continue to progress as individuals and as a couple because of it. I’m not proud of it but I’ve worked through the vast majority of my guilt regarding my actions and I continue to learn a little bit more every few days.
I demand integrity and truthfulness and breadth in my significant interpersonal experiences. But real, as much as I covet and search for and insist upon it, is god damn fucking scary. She wants you to fail that test. She wants to stay right, to have (job) security, to stay alive, to keep doing what she knows and does so well it’s almost sickening: Protecting the rest of me. And she’s incessant, she’s crafty and wise and skeptical, she’s righteous and wants to be right because her being right inevitably means less hurt.
And that’s who bursting the bubble makes real, inside, for me. That’s when the shadows step in. That’s when insecurity starts nipping away at my confidence, when I start periodically shutting down emotionally and not knowing why, when I become ambivalent and oscillate between intense attachment and wanting the fuck out. Cause once it’s real, I have something to lose. Something else to invest in, give myself to, protect and foster and fight for, and fucking lose. And that just fucks up everything. She’s on. She’s fucking AWAKE. And it permeates everything in my life. I periodically want to leave my job, stop teaching aerial, give up music, get rid of all my shit, and disappear. Travel light. Travel light, and survive.
I used to think it was all guilt. Once I stepped out of my integrity with someone, and treated them poorly in some way, the guilt ate my resolve away. I thought I felt muted and inconsistent because I deserved to for whatever it was I did, whatever thing I inflicted in my fucked up gauntlet I make the people close to me run. And I could imagine all kinds of things, even things that I hadn’t even done yet and may never do, that made me a bad person and a bad partner who was better off, and made others better off, alone.
As well as I’m able to see this stuff in a relatively short timeframe, I’m still blindsided the test. It wouldn’t be a subconscious thing if I wasn’t, but god damn it if I don’t feel like I should see it coming. I’ve figured out that I feel muted and inconsistent afterwards because I’m threatened somehow, but knowing that doesn’t make it feel any less natural when it happens. I’m just being me, and everything feels fine. Monosaturated, but fine.
I finally saw her today. She’s about 12, with long, stringy, dirty blond hair. She’s wet, and cold, and dirty, standing inside a stone cave, Indiana Jones style. She’s holding something, like a torch or a specter, stationed outside a huge, heavy door. She’s collected, logical, matter of fact and appears unphasable, but there’s a look in her face that tells you she’ll tear your jaw off with her teeth if you step sideways at her too quickly. She radiates old soul, intimidation, and is undeniably smarter than you.
She’s the part of me that mama bears. She’s the one who stands up for the people around her because no one stood up for her. She’s the child that was so impressively mature. She’s constantly tense, constantly on guard. She’s intense and serious. She doesn’t sleep. She’s defined by her duty and by what lies behind that door. She’s the one who understands that there’s always a motive for someone to attack and try to steal what she’s charged to protect. She’s wrung out and full of endurance at the same time. She’s emotionally muted because she has to concentrate, obsessed with finding a breaking point and getting rid of you. And she has no fucking idea what it is she’s guarding.
All the time I’ve known about this test, from the first “I’ll try to run eventually” warning I gave to this last “Aww, man, not again — What the fuck did I do that for?!”, I thought it was about the staying. It’s always been about the staying.
Can they? Will they? Now? What about now? Oop, apparently it was time to test again, agh, I’m such a jerk. What, you’re still here? Really? Why? Sheesh, you’re fucking stupid. Again! Again again! .. This is boring. You know what, just.. nevermind.
The test is never satisfied because it’s not about the staying. I want it to be that easy, and for a long time I’ve stayed in some version of this corrosive loop where the all-telling test us supposed to solve everything and prove I’m capable of becoming comfortable being close with someone, if I just run it one. More. Time.
But it’s not. It’s about all the other shit that comes after the staying. All that scary shit I actually want.
And it’s all behind that door.
Another ingenious, beautiful, incredibly effective, creative, awe inspiring, bulldog stubborn, self inflicted fucking masterpiece of a booby trap.
Though it’s often looked like it to me, feeling insecure doesn’t lead to the matter of somehow behaving unlike myself. It leads to the matter of utter confusion as to which part of me I want to wear.
As I delve into my 30′s, I’ve noticed a new insecurity developing: That I’ll become invested in a relationship, then be left because I don’t want kids.
I’ve been struggling emotionally the last few days. I’ve been longing and sad, and it’s been frustrating that after 7 months of being separated I’ll still backslide and get emotional about not having my ex in my life in some of the ways he used to be.
Depending on how things are going, instead of art, my creative power cycle is sometimes used to think a lot. While the experience brought a great many positive things, in some ways, having sex with someone new was an emotional gamble that I lost. I understand in more acute detail than usual lately why it is that people tend to wait until they absolutely can’t fucking stand one another to break up.
I realized, while taking this picture of a crow at the Montlake bus stop, that it had been a while since I’d flown off somewhere with myself, just me and me. I remembered that this was the feeling I had had enough of when I spontaneously booked tickets to Europe. So I cleared my Saturday afternoon and Sunday calendar and decided to take a ferry and my bike someplace I hadn’t been before, someplace remote and quieter. I decided on Vashon Island.
The plan was to go out there in the early evening Saturday after I wrapped up my massages and meetings, sleep on the beach and spend Sunday exploring. The weather has been great for that and I figure around here, it’s best to get it while the gettings good. So I left my phone at home, hopped the bus to the ferry terminal straight from the office, with packed food, some extra layers and my travel journal.
Even from the beginning, the trip felt like travel. In the sense that I didn’t really mind that the ferry was almost an hour late, I wasn’t rushed or focused on any particular goal, and I already felt better just at arriving to the water at Fauntleroy.
I passed the time waiting for the boat chatting with a man playing with his dog, a Belgian Malinois named Kai, who favored a stick longer than he was which was so girthy he could barely manage to fit it in his jaw. Kai is about 8 months old and still being trained to handle his emotions, of which there were many it seemed about this particular stick. He would frequently get so riled up and excited over it being tossed into the water again so he could chase it down that it seemed his little heart may burst. Before I left, I had been invited to beers and evening Barbecue. Only in West Seattle, I said to myself.
The ferry ride was shorter than I expected, as I’ve only been to Brainbridge and Victoria before and those are both a bit of a trek. I felt lucky in finding an electrical outlet to charge my camera battery, which seems to go from perfectly fine to dead and nothing in between, while I ate some food and prepared to bike the length of an island and back over the course of a day and a half. I’d forgotten how nice ferry rides can be when the weather is good.
I felt some kind of privilege being the first to embark and disembark on the ferry, since I was a walk-on and most people bring their cars. I’m not sure why, but there was just something nice about it, and something inherently cool about being passed by a fleet of motorcycles and scooters directly after getting off.
The first thing I found out about Vashon is that only completely fucking batshit insane people bring their bikes there. Immediately upon getting off the boat, I was greeted with a hill twice the size of the 23rd/24th monstrosity in Seattle and enjoyed the ignorance of not knowing, or being able to see so, based on the windiness of the road. At the top, a half hour and two stops later, I was in a heap in a woodsy area occasionally uttering some kind of ‘what the FUCK?’ type notion, staring at the flawless sky, waiting for my heart to stop trying to punch me in the face. After that, I figured out how to bungee my backpack to my bookrack so I didn’t have to wear it.
I spent the rest of the daylight biking my ass off, which is why I don’t have a lot of pictures, though I did stop when I found things particularly interesting. This GMC truck was apparently being well guarded by horseflies, whose aggressiveness I had conveniently forgotten about since living in the country when I was a kid. I biked in silence, often listening to the wind rushing past my ears. I biked hard. Real hard. And occasionally, I slowed down to look around, like when I rode through the tiny town, which was mostly closed up for the day.
This little house was next to some kind of nursery shop, though I couldn’t find it unless I was actually looking at it and didn’t know it. The top floor is for rent. I spent a good 10 minutes standing on the side of the road, looking at this house and fantasizing about what it would be like to dump my life and move there. This place reminded me of the victorian house my wusband, who predates my current ex by quite a few years and is one of my most trusted friends, and I rented in the central district, a house which I miss to this day. I’ve felt the constant, subtle magnetic pull of country and nature as far as residency since returning from Europe. It wouldn’t surprise me if I move out of the city in the next couple of years.
Right around dinner time, I finally passed by a place I was drawn to enter – Quartermasters Inn and restaurant. The sounds of Billy Holiday and polite eating lofted from the outside deck. If the place had smelled, it would have been of basil. I had plenty of food, but I also brought a little money, and really the only way to experience a new place for me is to eat there. So, I locked up to a sign, mostly so the bike wouldn’t fall over, and went in.
I ordered my first glass of Rose since France. It seemed fitting and it was awesome tasting – not to mention effective. I got some muscles and clams which arrived shortly after the guitarist had begun playing. The volume was low and reasonable, like background music should be, and it was thought provoking for me to watch a person perform while intentionally being in the background. I’m not like that, and don’t particularly want to do gigs that are like that, but being how I’ve been contemplating bands and open mics, it was good reconnaissance and prep work for me.
I had a lot of exercise in my immediate future, and the next day off, so I tossed my food intolerance out the window and just ate what I wanted. While eating the two desserts (chocolate cake and bread pudding) I ordered, and a glass of port, one of the people from the table across from me asked what I was celebrating. It was somewhat interesting, when I thought of the answer to his question. I was just as easily celebrating myself as I was wallowing in an entire quart of rocky road. The only difference was my perspective and approach to doing so. I went with celebrating me.
I didn’t talk too much with people, but somehow still managed to get three different offers of company and/or lodging in the time I spent at Quartermaster. The person who’d asked about my desserts offered his address as camping grounds. The owner of the restaurant offered his sailboat, and the apparent boyfriend of the musician that was playing told me where the hostel was and who to ask for to get properly taken care of. I found the islanders to be hospitable and friendly, but I’d decided about halfway through dinner that I wanted to head home. If I got sidetracked or found a perfect place to rest, so be it, but I missed my guitar and felt satisfied with my travel dose overall. It was also only 8pm and already I’d put on my sweatshirt.
Before heading back, I shot this video of the water just south of Quartermasters. I rode back breathing hard and pumping fast, listening to my most recent playlist, and then to songs of leaving. I’ve rarely listened to my own music while doing something active like biking. It was surprisingly inspiring.
I reached the ferry just in time to hop on as it left, hopped the 54 downtown, and biked another 5 miles home in the dark. Milage total is ~22 miles, same as my last long biking day, but the terrain was much more demanding. I am quite sore and lethargic today, and woke up VERY glad I did not sleep on the ground last night. My back is totally wrecked – I think it’s time to pay the $100 for a pro fitting.
I had a lot of metime to think about stuff in a different way then I tend to laying alone in a cold bed or trying to fill my day up with things that help me avoid the computer. I have notes on song ideas, a new perfume I want, and realized I want to take guitar lessons. I’m contemplating a new tattoo.
I was able to articulate and accept that I don’t feel right in the world without knowing exactly who I’d move heaven and earth to demise with were it ending. Sometimes, that means I’d run toward someone long after it’s reasonable or dignified to feel that way. This happens to be one of them.
So, yay. Life goes on, and for the time being, life is pretty uncomfortable. Thankfully, the one thing you can count on is change. I’m waiting.
