This is a True Story

In catholic school they taught me that I was a piece of play dough. That every time I touched somebody else sexually they’re colors rubbed into mine and mine into theirs. that afterwards I wasn’t all yellow anymore. I wasn’t pure anymore. As if sex taints me, makes me imperfect. As if I’m the toy nobody else will want to play with anymore because I’m now ugly. Ruined. It took me a long time to realize that it’s not true.

You and I are not play dough or puzzle pieces trying to jam ourselves into the places we do not fit. We are human beings. We are not broken or misshapen. We are not ugly or tainted. Human. We are human.

Believing in God has nothing to do with any of this. I am not trying to shed a negative light on Him. But no matter what you believe, if sex is something you do want to save or if it’s something you want to enjoy now, for yourself, you will not be ruined because you do it. You will not be a prude because you don’t.

Don’t let schooling or anybody else shame you or make you feel like you are less whole for having sex. Sex is human. It is natural. It is love.

What I do give those Catholic school teachers props for is that they told me what is not sex. If you were manipulated, raped, scared, or anything of the kind, that wasn’t sex. If you are ashamed, like me, because you were 15 and thought maybe having sex to please your boyfriend was what you were supposed to do so you did it anyways… That isn’t sex. That’s being taken advantage of.

Regardless, manipulated, raped, scared, abstinent, having sex because you want to, having sex with the person you love, you are still not tainted. You are never damaged goods.

You are always you and you are always whole. Nobody can take any part of you away from them.

You know this because every time you’ve had your heart broken, you’ve always come out the otherside. It’s okay to let some people reserve a special part of your heart and soul, but remember, you always own it. You are not damaged goods.

On Hating the Person You Love

I’m just going to come out and say it: I don’t like Tim today. I don’t know why.

Part of me wants to hash out to you guys every little thing he’s done today that’s made me boiling mad or caused me to cry until I don’t really know why I’m crying anymore, but that’s not fair to not only him, but also to our relationship as well. And, if I’m being honest with myself, he hasn’t done anything wrong. I’m just feeling overly emotional and, well, bitchy.

But even I start to rethink everything in these small moments of rage. Yes, I know, “Perfect Mary Ann who always seems to have clear and concise thoughts gets… irrational? Absurd! I don’t believe it.”

Believe it, folks. I’m as irrational as they get. It’s gonna be a fun ride with me. And I hope that is why you’re sticking around.

But anyway, whether it is me feeling like he just hasn’t said the right thing or being pretty clingy, or he actually is at fault, not liking the person you love is okay sometimes. Maybe even healthy.

Like I said, I have irrational thoughts a lot of the time, especially when I’m lowkey mad at Tim. But the point is that I never act on them. I step away. I cool off. And then I remember that no matter how much I don’t like him right now, he’s the first person I want to start my day with and the last person I want to end it with. Besides Maggie, of course.

Not liking the one you love the most is healthy because it shows that sometimes it rains, that no relationship is perfect. That you can never take anything for granted. And that’s what I was doing. I was taking him for granted. All the love he gives to me, all the days he spends with me, all the time he invests in me. I treated it like oxygen and water and sleep. I should’ve treated it like food, the most delicious kind–still necessary to live and thrive, but never infinite, never always there, never obtainable all the time.

Tim tells me time and time again that he would do anything for me, and I know he would. And I’m proud to say that, although I’ve taken the “I love you”s and “good morning baby”s for granted, I haven’t taken that side of him, that hero/caretaker/in-love-with-me-for-god-knows-why side for granted. Because I feel down a lot. I do. I overthink and I get the blues just like anybody else. I miss him extra. And I know that if I texted him, “please, please, please come over. I need you so badly right now,” he would in a heartbeat. It wouldn’t even be a question. But that’s not fair. You only get so many of those in your life, and you shouldn’t use them up unless you really need them.

And, mostly, you need to learn how to take care of yourself. I’m glad that I can. I’m glad that I have books and TV shows and THIS FREAKING BLOG to separate my heart and head or just let my heart spill out. So do that for yourself. And, once that’s done, once you really can take care of yourself, it’s okay to let somebody else help. I didn’t know that until him.

So, Tim, I’m sorry for hating you today, but, mostly, I’m sorry you picked somebody as odd as me to love.

 

*disclaimer* I’m not sure how this post comes across yet, I won’t know that for a few days. But if it seems at all like I’m this crazy, overly attached girlfriend, know that’s because for a few hours today I was. That’s what being overly emotional is. But, all in all, I’d like to say I’m fair, that I treat him right, because, by god, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be with him now. He deserves all there is in this world, and I intend to give it to him, just like he intends to give it to me. AND THEN WE HAVE DOUBLE THE WORLD. Woah. Love is some crazy shit, guys.

Nothing is Permanent

At least, not if you don’t want it to be.

Not even tattoos.

I think we get so caught up in what we might look like to other people, how something will impact our future, what we should hold back on to wait out for something better.

The only permanent things are deaths, drugs, and felonies. Don’t do those. The rest is honestly up to you.

Cut your hair. It will grow back. Get a tattoo. Regret it and then get it removed. Break up with him if he doesn’t make you happy. If it’s meant to be you’ll get back together, if not, you’ll find somebody better for you.

You can always go back to school if you feel like it isn’t for you right now, you can always start school even if you’re scared.

Start writing a book. You can always stop if it isn’t going the way you planned.

Eat one piece of chocolate cake. It won’t kill you.

The only things you shouldn’t do are things that become an addiction, things that ultimately change who YOU are INSIDE. Like, too much alcohol, too many relationships, too many pieces of chocolate cake. Does any of that make sense?

I guess what I’m saying is that you don’t have to be afraid to do anything. It’s okay to let go of things and it’s okay to switch your life when you need to. I know you’re terrified of losing losing people. But the people who love you, the people you can really call home (more on them next time), they’ll be there when you get back from wherever you’re going.

I was a paper doll for way too long. Dont be that way anyway. Let anyone and everyone paint you blue, purple, gray, green, and grey skies.

It is okay.

Tumblr and Scrubs and Love

Gonna start off this post with a little quote I came across today.

do you remember the waiting? the unnecessary tapping of fingers against tables. telling yourself the phone isn’t gonna ring any faster, baby. telling yourself you can live without them. you don’t need anyone is what you think. you don’t need anything. who cares about love when there’s a new show on the television tonight and your favourite meal is cooking and autumn is so soon. do you remember the waiting? you tell yourself it’s normal to love, it’s okay to fall every once in awhile. but you still haven’t figured out how to love them without giving up a part of yourself, too.

For the past few days I’ve been thinking about how to put this feeling into words. Tim asked me what my biggest fear was and the only way I could express it was, “I don’t want to end up like Lorelai.” But, other than that simple statement, how do you tell the person who love the most that you’re terrified of doing so?

-Tim, if you’re reading this for whatever reason, don’t worry. It’s you.-

For those of you who don’t know, Lorelai is a character from Gilmore Girls. She is an amazing woman who lets her strength get the best of her sometimes. I’ve been told I’m just like her on so many occasions, and it’s really a large complement because of her 100 miles a minute speech and her high wit mind. But it also sucks because I don’t want to be scared to love somebody, but more than that, I don’t want to fall apart when I lose that love.

And I’ve been that girl, too. The girl who loses her mind just because her boyfriend broke up with her. The girl who cries every night and forgets what wind feels like because she simply can’t bare to get out of bed and face the world. And every time I’ve been her, I’ve kicked myself over and over again whenever I looked back on it. That girl was mean and blamed the world, she treated her life like a movie. And, in the end, she got so wrapped up in the heartbreak that she forgot what the actual love part was really like. And that’s just not fair.

So, how do you fix this? How do you love somebody without giving them a piece of yourself?

The answer is: you don’t. It is so completely and totally okay to share yourself with somebody. That’s what love is. And, most of us never realize it, but when you give a chunk of your heart to somebody and let them hold it, they’re also giving you a chunk of theirs. A matching piece to fill the puzzle back up again. And, when you’re together, you get double the heart. Double the stuff.

Let me quote Scrubs:

Carla: This is about you not being able to commit, because committing means saying goodbye to whatever unfulfilled fantasy of love you’ve concocted after seeing too many Meg Ryan movies. But men don’t come and make everything all better — they’re only human. And you shouldn’t punish him because you were forced to grow up so fast you never learned how to let someone else take care of you. He’s not your father, okay, he’s not necessarily gonna disappear at the first sign of trouble. And, as scary as it is to consider letting yourself be truly vulnerable with another human being, what’s even scarier is that deep down inside you know you picked this man…and if you run away from him now, you’ll be running away from being the kind of person you always wanted to be.

Every time I watch this episode all I can think is, “REEEE FUCKING TWEEETTTT CARLA! THAT IS ME!” I think what is so wrong with all of us is that we are terrified to invest our lives and hearts into these things because we 1. don’t want to get hurt, 2. don’t want to give up on our “unfulfilled fantasies of love”, and 2. don’t know how to share ourselves.

Maybe because we grew up in a time when talking about your feelings wasn’t a thing. Maybe because most of us are children of divorce and the last thing we want to be is our parents. Maybe because for so long we’ve always been told that we should only ever have to take care of ourselves.

I’m going to tell you right now that it is a thousand and seven percent okay to rest your head on somebody else’s shoulders for a little while. That you are strong and courageous. That you can give your heart to somebody and still keep every piece of yourself in tact, and that if you don’t, it’s okay to be broken every now and then.

The point of this blog is to make sure each and everyone of you know that it is human nature to need people. If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be so many of us. Baby’s wouldn’t die without attention. People wouldn’t go crazy when left in isolation. But the other, underlying factor of this blog is to embrace every feeling you’ve ever had. They are all valid. Especially the love ones.

On Divorce.

I’m not going to act like I know anything about what it’s like to get divorced. Heck, I don’t even really know what it’s like to have a long term relationship, let alone marriage.

But I am a child of divorce. And if you’re in that same boat, because I doubt anybody reading this is married with kids or divorced, unless you’re my mom, then I want you to know before I get into this that I am with you. 100% of the time. And if you’re not in that same boat but, for some reason, want to read further, know that every situation is different. Some people have it way worse, some way better.

Anyway, enough with the disclaimer.

Being a child of divorce is probably the hardest thing a kid has to go through. It is a constantly battle of tug-o-war, where you’re not on the losing or winning team, you’re just the rope. Unlike so many of your friends whose parents chose to stick it out, you see the heartbreak, the tears, the fights, the lawyers and courtrooms, the too much drinking, the police lights. You see everything, more than a kid should see. But the worst thing is that you see your parent, the man or woman caped in red for so long, dwindle down to this thing we call human. That’s the scariest part.

So, through all of that and after that, we learn to understand. We become adults for ourselves. Without them knowing it, we become the maids that sweep up our parents’ broken pieces. We glue them together to form a glass case around our own hearts.

And then we get older, stronger, smarter–we get better. And all of the sudden, we don’t want to understand. So we don’t. We let go of all of the bad and kind of just brush it off, act like maybe it didn’t change us at all, act like we don’t know why the shambled wall in our chest is even there to begin with.

Then life goes on. And it’s great. But we stop believing in a real type of love, in a real type of marriage. Again, I’m not going to sit here and act like I know all there is to know about those two things. I don’t. I’m nineteen and all of my serious relationships were eight months long. The relationship I am in now is wonderful and strong, but still new.

But, recently, not because of any boy or romance I experienced, I realized that this whole divorce thing is a lot harder than we thought. And we all already thought it was a battlefield. ‘

Dan Layus, former front man of Augustana, put out his first solo song called “Driveway.” Listen to it now before I go on.

Basically, the song is about this man and woman in the beginnings of a divorce. I don’t think I knew how hard it was for my parents to just walk away, maybe because I thought the only hard part was the aftermath.

In this song, it seems to me they both knew it was over. That the only thing either one of them couldn’t leave was this life they built together. In every article on marriage I’ve ever read it talks about how love isn’t the only part of marriage, how that life is sometimes the only reason you stay. But, I think, that if it were that simple, these people who once vowed their lives together could figure out a way to stick it out for a few years. These nauce articles act like people actually want to get divorced. Like, it was the easier way out. Now, I’m not so sure that’s true.

I don’t think my parents wanted to leave each other, to split their assets, to fight over me and my siblings. I don’t think it was this simple answer and light at the end of the tunnel. I think, in their minds, maybe, the light at the end of the tunnel was sticking it out. Was fighting. But somehow, and I don’t know how, divorce was the hard, complicated, twisted truth they had to come to.

What I’m saying is this: We were the kids who spent way too long understanding that people are only human. Who endured the hardest of things. Whether or not your parents’ separation was amicable, having divorced parents sucks. But that time we stopped understanding, I think we lost sight of what love was. How much our parents once loved each other. I mean, they created us. That counts for something, right?

Maybe it’s time we start understanding their side of it all. That they did pick up a lot of pieces. That they sacrificed a lot when they chose divorce–number one being their love for each other. Maybe they sacrificed that to keep us in homes that could still be filled with love and laughter, even if they were two different homes.

Again, I really don’t know. Honestly, I’m just kind of ranting here. Let me know what you think.

 

On Being a Girl

I’m nineteen years old and spend hours planning my wedding on Pinterest.

I listen to Ingrid Michaelson when I need to cry and Taylor Swift when I need to laugh in the car.

I like to wear dresses and heels and love when boys pay for stuff and walk up to the door when they pick me up.

And I love One Direction!!!

And that is all okay.

I hate that in today’s society we have to explain our actions by saying, “I’m not like other girls.”

Let me ask you this: What is so wrong with being like other girls? I mean it, really. We are all so strong and beautiful. We should be proud to be like our sisters and moms and daughters and aunts and best friends. It’s okay to be giggly and silly and laugh.

Just because you love pink frosting and makeup does not mean you are not strong, valid, and authentic. Do not let anybody, especially another girl, make you feel bad for being that way. You’re young. It’s okay to let yourself feel light and pretty. Let yourself have the courage to do so.

The Beginning.

A very good place to start.

Here is the matter of fact, no games, no false hopes or dreams truth:

I’m starting this blog for me and only me. I am starting this blog to scream my games, hopes, and dreams out into whatever internet void I’ve been given. You don’t have to read or listen or even click on any other post, but if you do, I hope you’ll find yourself there the way I’m trying to find myself here as well.

I hope your navigation on my page is the same as my journey through this writing process.

I don’t have a set theme. I will often change my viewpoints. One day I will talk about war and corrupt societies, other days I will cry about humanity, and on the days my heart is the most restless, I’ll post an unedited, fancy-free poem to try and share a small piece of who I happen to be on that particular day.

That’s what it’s like to be an early twenty-something who doesn’t really have any friends other than her dog and a few people she’s known since grammar school.

The fact of the matter is, reader, I’m simply trying to bring some sort of light into this world. Some sort of color. Purple, maybe. Some sort of solace to this weird, beautiful, dark life.

disclaimer: some things I post here will be edited, revamped versions of things I posted on longasta.tumblr.com