Why not?

Mental health 101

One time, when I was a kid, a baseball landed on my finger and I heard the bones in my index finger crack. The pain resonated down my arm to my elbow and then back up to my finger, radiating in the worst sense of the word. I jammed my finger trying to catch a fly ball in the back yard. I've also been whacked in the head by fly balls a few times (so that explains the therapy!), whammed in the gut by line drives, and landed on my knee sliding into third base. There was always that moment after the shock of the pain where I'd check to see if things were still working how they should - by moving around the injured parts. Shake it off, as a mantra. And eat aspirin.

I take some fundamental things for granted. The fact that I can move around by my own will, that I have been handed opportunities some people would never dream of being handed. That I have experienced things some people may never experience. That I'm young, and mostly capable, and willing to do some things I'm sure I'll later regret. That I want to learn, that I'm unaware of how much it'll hurt; it'll hurt the unnatural way that two bones rub through cartilage and finally touch, scraping together and sending pain down the affected limb. Rebound is important. Shake it off, as a mantra. And eat aspirin.

I am reading a book on self injury called A Bright Red Scream by Marilee Strong. It's fascinating to me because although I know that my self injury makes me part of a psychological community of other self injurers, part of me still felt like a freak for doing it. I still hide my scars, except around one person who I trust with all of my heart. In this book, there is a quote from a 15 year old girl that gave me a big I'm-not-alone moment:

"I stood in the bathroom, looking in the mirror, and I didn't recognize myself. It was my face looking back at me, but my soul wasn't there. It was just a body to me, and I didn't feel part of it anymore. I felt I had lost control of my thoughts, my emotions, and my actions. And when you have lost control of everything, what do you have left? I saw the razors my parents kept in the medicine cabinet. It just seemed to make sense at the time, though I didn't know exactly why. I was only scared and searching. Later on, the more I cut, the more I understood why."

I had that moment when I was 14 and in 8th grade, when I started to get addicted to cutting after a 2 year period of not really needing it. I can remember standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom and wondering who was looking back at me. This book also goes into the dissociation that sometimes happens during cutting sessions, which I've also experienced; it's a bit like floating out of your body and watching it happen from above. Everything flows into one big, understandable fluid thought and everything that made you want to do it in the first place just flows away with the blood. And then it's gone.

I'd often find myself so calm that I fell asleep, coccooned in my bed with my arm wrapped in a towel. And I'd wake up the next morning, my arm buzzing and wrapped in bloody towels that I'd have to throw away in a public dumpster somewhere to hide the evidence. I wouldn't even clean out the cuts, which were pretty deep and wide towards the end - I'd just watch them get infected and feel like I deserved every bit of it.

I kinda feel like since I've stopped my mantra has been shake it off, and eat aspirin. Just like I got my finger jammed during a baseball game. It's weird, but in a good way. If that makes sense.

I know the chances are about .5%, but if anybody reads this who is having problems with self injury, depression, an eating disorder, or anything else related, please educate yourself because it can't hurt:

Secret Shame
Self Injury Fact Sheet, with anonymous phone lines
Something Fishy, eating disorders information

They're dropping like squirrels!

My Mom and I have been dealing with corpses a lot lately. Not anything creepy or particularly out of the ordinary (I promise), but it is still a weird phenomenon. She had noticed some mice running around in the barn, so she put out poison, turning our property into some weird death trap for rodents.

She neglected to tell me that she'd probably be too afraid to pick up the since-passed mice once they took the bait. So that one was assigned to me.

Upon strolling out into the barn in the middle of the night with a shovel resting on my shoulder, I found two dead mice curled up on the floor near one of the desks. They were a few feet from the poison, like they had collapsed after realizing that couldn't have been cheese. It's sad. I'm not sure how long they've been sitting there, but they're stiff and unflinchingly, well... dead. Think the Monty Python parrot. They have ceased to be.

I delicately picked them up with my shovel, dug a shallow hole in the woods and buried them, side by side, like an old married couple. The second one had died under the stairs, its legs akimbo in the animal's death throes. It's funny how my reaction to this has changed over time. When I was a kid I always saw these events as opportunities to increase my risk for communicable diseases and indulge in a free autopsy, and that interest is still there... but it's more of a sad thing. Like maybe I should have read a eulogy or something.

Corpse event number two occurred earlier tonight. When I got home this afternoon I noticed a black squirrel sprawled out under a tree in the yard, not unlike they do in the mid-July heat to cool off. But it's not mid-July, and it's not hot... and it's eyes were closed, and I could stand next to it without it so much as twitching an ear or blinking. It's dead, I thought, and I'm gonna have to be the gravedigger again.

My Mom works with a taxidermist. Yes, it gets weirder. When I tell her that the "asleep" squirrel in the yard is in a much deeper sleep than she thinks, she immediately calls the taxidermist and leaves a message on his office phone about the prize dead squirrel laying in our yard getting ready to decompose and feed the tree out of which it fell. Then we go out to pick it up.

Fully equipped with a plastic bag, flashlight and that trusty old shovel, we go after the squirrel. I hold the flashlight in my teeth and keep the bag as wide open as possible, hoping to not feel a sharp dead squirrel claw graze one of my fingers. It takes us two tries to get the little guy into our bag, and on the second try his locked-straight tail brushes my hand. But he's in. And now he's sitting next to the bag of frozen peas in the deep freezer.

I kid you not.

Upon looking at him all wrapped up in grocery bags near the gallon of vanilla ice cream in our freezer, I kind of wonder what the allure is in taxidermy. I also wonder if I'll ever be able to eat ice cream again, just like dissecting a fetal pig forever ruined eating pork ribs for me (oh, that's just some intercoastal cartilage... he must-a-been a young 'un!). I also get a sense that our freezer is looking more like a morgue than your average family sized deep freeze. But this is my family, so anything goes, I guess.

Right in time for Halloween. Sometimes my life is hilariously absurd and sometimes it's just absurd. What else could it feel like when there's a dead squirrel in the freezer, on hold for a taxidermist? I have no idea. So I become increasingly talented at suppressing zany thoughts. Maybe that will get me a good job after college.

Cancel the obit

In the spirit of spontaneity:

- I got accepted to Edinboro, Slippery Rock and Eastern Michigan. Yay me.

- I have officially been handed the opportunity to become a full body plastinate post-mortem, thanks to the BodyWorlds exhibition and the Institute for Plastination in Heidelberg, Germany. In other words, I got my brochure and forms in the mail yesterday. I sent in the postcard I picked up at the museum just out of curiosity, and now I have the official paperwork, body donation card and booklet on becoming a plastinate after my death. Hmmm. On an even stranger note, My Mom is seriously considering this option as an alternative to burial or cremation. Last night she exclaimed, "I wonder if they could do me like this!" and stood frozen with her mouth open, mid-disco pose. Ahhhh. I can just feel the minds of medical students being stimulated.

- I saw Oasis again last Friday. I thought this show was better than Detroit, mostly because they were more talkative. During the encore there were at least 25 people on stage, shaking hands and hugging Liam. In Detroit it was like they wanted to just play the set, put on a good show and go to bed. In Cleveland, they seemed more... y'know... into it. Three drunk guys fell on me - two that were climbing over seats landed on me, and one elbowed me in my upper trapezius (that's right, trapezius).

Not a lot else has happened that's worth mentioning. But, I still have a pulse. My brain is another story but the pulse is still going strong.

Two songs to make it all okay

Fix You and Everything's Not Lost by Coldplay.

Actual (well, you know) writing soon.

Zzz

Sleep has been a little elusive for me lately. As much as I would love to go to bed and wake up refreshed 8 hours later, it never seems to happen. I always feel a little bit rundown, which is normal for not being in school. When I'm in school, "a little bit rundown" seems to escalate scarily fast into daytime zombie. One of my favorite quotes ever comes from Lewis Black: "You can't learn anything out of one bloodshot eye."

Amen.

Soon (3 days) I'll be getting up at 5.45am to make the drive into school, which has become almost robotic for me now. I don't have to think about where to turn and when to stop, because it's been carved into my brain. I always make the same foolish vow that when summer comes, I'll spend it lazily sleeping away the days and staying up at night. I always get the second part right but forget about the first. Which is problematic when August comes and I realize my body clock isn't exactly ticking anymore.

Oh, and I apologize for making you look at the upper half of my head. Just be thankful you didn't get the whole thing. :)

Dresses? Pfft

The other day I heard a story on This American Life about manliness called Goldstein on Goldstein (Act 2 from this show). It was an adorable piece, I thought, and after I heard it I started to think about the other side of the coin. What’s it mean to be feminine? What are the standards? What’s my story?

I’ve never been the type of girl to pride herself on the vastness of her makeup collection. I played with Barbies when I was little, but I secretly reveled in the sheer joy of defaming them more than actually playing with them. One of my brother’s favorite pastimes included deforming those perfect plastic bodies with magic markers and giving them army haircuts with child scissors, and I found myself secretly wanting to join him in the carnage. I liked getting dirty more than I liked getting prettied up in front of a mirror, and I showed off my bruises with the best of the boys on the street. I loved baseball, and I loved running, and I loved ruining my clothes and watching my bike crash catastrophe scrapes heal.

A lot of my time when I was younger was spent on my babysitter’s street because my parents are divorced and my mom works full time. Her street was much different than ours – there were a lot of kids living very close together in small houses with fenced in backyards. My first best friend was the boy who lived next door, Billy. There weren’t a lot of girls living on the street, and his sister Lisa pleaded with me almost daily each summer to play dress-up. Billy and I would be getting ready to ride our bikes on a track in the dirt field and she’d meet me at the door and invite me over to make cookies or try on her mom’s makeup. I always declined, happy to spend my summers with Billy playing truth or dare, climbing trees and racing our bikes.

Somewhere in the realm of middle school I realized that I wasn’t normal. I was a full on tomboy. I’ve never been thin and I often felt that showing any skin was just something that girls my size didn’t do. Consequently, I wore baggy t-shirts and I had the same hoodie for about 3 years. I vowed to never wear makeup – for shame, you ignorant heathens! – and while I had crushes on guys I knew I could never get close to any of them because no male in his right mind would want me. My friends were everything I would never be – beautiful, thin, stylish, and, ultimately, very attractive. I secretly loathed them for so effortlessly achieving what I perceived to be absolute perfection.

I’m still not the girly girl most women in my life probably occasionally wished I was, but I’m definitely more feminine than I used to be. I wear eyeliner and mascara sometimes, and I tend to wear girlier clothes (by girlier, I mean t-shirts to t-shirts that actually fit). However, I can proudly say, I no longer particularly care. I’ll never be a slim size 6, I’ll never have men at my feet, and I’m absolutely sure I’ll never see myself as perfect. But I’m me, and that’s good enough for now. Funny how I did more good for me as a crazy person than either of my therapists ever did.

P.S. a good book to read during those long, boring doctor’s office waiting room visits. Heh.