party of one

I've been meaning to write a piece on "college". Something motivational, inspirational, a little something to get me excited, to concretely define my path - but then I got here.

It was strange, I walked into my dorm room for the first time and thought, "hmm, this is my dorm room." I realized in that moment, that I'd come into this with absolutely no preconcieved notions. I hadn't pictured my room, or my friends. I hadn't really thought about what campus would look like, or what my classes would be. I hadn't considered who I'd be, or even mused on who I wanted to be given the infinite possibilities for redefinition. I thought "I'm moving to Boston and I'm going to go to school there." In retrospect, this is perfect. There will be no silly nonsense of upset at things being "different then pictured" - there is no picture. I really and truly am working from scratch.

I'll never forget the feeling I had coming out of the my first meeting with Susan (my lovely academic counselor). It was this overwhelming feeling of excitement, motivation, and mostly this isn't Notre Dame anymore. I can't say definitively that I've got it cracked after only four short days of living my environment, but never in my life have I ever felt so motivated. I can't ever remember me personally making the decision to not hang out with people because I wanted my reading done early, or passing up an ice cream run to finish my extra credit, or sacrificing sleep to go exercise.

My initial goal coming into college (the only part I actually did think about) was that for the first time in my life I was going to totally and completely give myself over to it. I was going to throw myself in for the sake of success. This I have thus done successfully.

With the arrival of course selection, I made an adendum. Not only would I throw myself into things, but I was going to throw myself into things I never thought I'd try. Things like Japanese, and underwater basket weaving, and documentary film making. I thought of the lovely Miss Christina Spann, a girl who has not ceased to impress me more and more every time I see her in the last few months. A girl who has always overwhlemingly seemed to go confidently into life, with full assurance of herself, and live contented with past and present actions a result. A girl who is quirky and does things like get octopus tattoos because she thinks it's cool. I thought of that girl and I realized it was some of those traits that through things like Japanese, and cartilage piercings, and experimenting with color scale photography, I wanted to emulate.

I am completely free of all attatchment right now, and I'm realizing more and more how incredibly important that fact is. I am free and ready to pour myself into my life and into me. And as selfish as that may sound, I'm doing it, regardless of what anyone else thinks because it's what I want to do with my life.

The part of all this "map of college" I couldn't've told you until the events of this evening is a part I'd never considered - defining my morals. Not strictly just my morals, but it's the closest word I can come up with for explaination. It's like, I grew up with this image of what my mom wanted me to be, and what she valued as appropriate and innapropriate and I live my life with that as the inner compass standard. From there, after years of not recieving her approval, I fell into the arms of Nathan. Finally someone approved. And that's what I didn't realize until this evening; in the course of that relationship, I began to shift from my mom's standards, yes, but rather than define my own, I found myself beginning to live by his. And you know what? I spend way to much goddamn time worry about what other people think of me.

So right now, I'm here, and I'm not living for my mother, or for Nathan, or for anyone else. I'm taking a step away from the life that was and into the mystery of what is to be. I'm going to take a little step away from what is "planned" and "proper. Try new things, test the waters. And yeah, not everyone will approve of some of my decisions. I'm going to try new things, live my life, and make some mistakes. But I'm going to go at life, full on. Be it academically, or in defining my existence. I've been presented with a glorious and crucially human opportunity to find myself. And I could not be more excited to do just that.

Better in the morning

Late at night, the world can be a strange and scary place.

It can overwhelm,

make things seem far worse then they are,

drive you to hysterics.

Late at night, those things you know to be rationally true are suddenly irrational.

The ones you admitt to yourself,

the ones you don't,

sometimes, late at night, you feel all of it at once.

Funny how true it is what they say.

That everything looks brighter with the dawn of a new day,

what wonders can unfold within the new awakening brought by a good nights rest.

Amazing how you wake up wondering what you were ever even worried about at all;

How you can fall into someone's arms and feel so right that, at that moment,

doubt seems impossible.

The way you wake up smiling, even after a hard night, and dance around your room in your pajamas.

In that moment, as with the dawn of a new day, the problems of darkness that once weighed so heavily now float away with the clarifying light of rational.

And you realize,

your fears were unfounded

and your only reality is happiness.

Say It Ain't So

I have never been the kind of girl who needed a boyfriend. Granted, there have been times in my life where I felt lonely, or wanted to know what this or that experience is like, or wanted to have someone to love or be loved by, but being "single" has never been something that bothered me. I'm just not that girl.

Now countrary to that, being single is never something I particularly wanted. I was single. That was the fact, the way it was, simple as that. Then I was in a relationship, and that became the way it was, simple yet again.

Lately I feel like I want to pull away. Maybe it's the moving backing home. I find myself slowly surrendering to my mother's will. Trying someway to fix things, I start conforming to her ideal of me hoping it will gaining me the affection and approval I so desire. Nathan is not part of her ideal of me.

Or maybe it's the depression. Pills and therapy and bullshit, so so much bullshit; I feel like I don't have time for anyone but me right now. And even if I do I feel like I don't want to spend time on anyone but me right now. I do this thing where I just give and give and give of myself until I snap - I can't take it anymore, so I cut everyone off completely and pour everything I've got into myself for a little while until I'm feeling good and then I just start right back, giving it all away again. It's like I don't know how to take care of myself. Or at least I don't know how to care for myself ahead of others. I certainly don't know how to tell anyone "no."

Or maybe it's this going away to college. After everything I've been through these last few months I just want to cut ties with everyone and everything here. Move away. Start fresh. Be in a new place with new people. Focus on myself. No attatchments from the past. Just looking out for me, starting my new life.

Or maybe I just pictured myself going off to college, being single, having boys finally give me the time of day, like I feel they just might now. Now that I've a sense of that whole scene. Now that I've got a sense of myself.

Or maybe it's just a bad couple of days. I haven't heard from Nathan hardly at all. I'm barely going to see him for our two weeks together and then it's four months apart. Maybe I'm just feeling the additional distance and it's weighing me down.

I wonder sometimes, if everyone thinks about things as much as I do. Every decision, be it what college to go to, or how to respond to a comment, or what to drink with breakfast in the morning, I think about it over and over, scrutinizing, struggling to think from every angle, trying to ascertain what my biases might be, so that I might make the best, most true and unbiased possible decision. I fear mistakes more than anything. I can't stand the thought of failure. It inhibits me from action altogether sometimes.

I think mostly it's just knowing that Nathan and I aren't forever. And him and I have discussed this, when it ends, it's going to be me. Now it's just a matter of when. How do I know when? Is it now? Four months from now? Next year? How do I know what the experation date is here? Will I just wake up one morning and just know? Because I certainly can't imagine him messing up so bad that a break-up is only logical. I also know it won't just happen gradually (well, unless that's what's already occured here). And I would never forgive myself if the time was right, and on some level I knew, but I tried to ignore it until I made some drunken mistake and messed up so bad I couldn't ignore it anymore.

I don't want this to be over. I don't want to loose someone I love so much. Someone who has become such a good friend, and, through fault of my own, my only true friend. And I know right now I need him. The way I want to run away, it's really when I need him more then ever. But I just can't shake that feeling to run.

Rori Gilmore felt guilty about feeling distant when she was the one who'd been broken up with; so how the hell do I get through this from the other side? How do I know when it's over? And how do I make sure I'm not about to make a huge mistake?

Tired

I hate the word "lover". I don't know why. It just bothers me.

This relates to nothing I had to say here, but then I wonder, did I have anything to say at all?

I feel like I don't know how to do this blog thing anymore. Gone are the days that it just came to me. In many ways I feel with them has gone days when I was in connect with myself. Lately it's all just a jumble. Living life day to day. Getting by. Uncertain of the future. It's really not the worst. Mediocrity is not what I thought it was. I don't think I'd mind a life of minimum wage and fast food meals and back yard barbeques and bridge club. Ambition was once my identity, and now I'm not even sure it's something I want as a part of me anymore. So much for my already dwindling sense of motiviation.

I moved home today. It's what I'd wanted for a few weeks, but now I don't know. What was I fighting for in the first place? And now, here, have I undone all that good? Did I make a point at all? Or is it simply a time we'll look back on one day. "The lost months."

College starts soon. I guess I'm excited. I'm nervous. I'm scared I can't do it. I'm worried about how much I'm going to miss here, and Nathan. We both know we CAN do it, but what if I get there and I don't want to. What if things change? I've lived through change. I thought I was good at it. Doesn't mean it's ever something I've loved.

I wrote because all day I felt like writing. All week I've felt like writing. Hell, I've been dreaming of writing for a while now. Again, well, like I use to. But these last few months I just feel so worn. By the world, by my family, by the depression I've been battling. On the bad days, days like today, I wonder if I'll ever feel anything other than apathy ever again. I mean, logically I know it's a passing phase; but that doesn't make it any easier to get out of bed.

This blog is one of the few things I'm proud of. I feel I owe it to myself, and to the reader, to make every post a full effort, passionate and precise. Worthy of your time, worthy of my pride. I miss the days when writing came easy for me. When it was as I intended it to be, a cathartic method to explore not only the outer world, but the inner depths of my soul. But now I'm a little lost. Out here on my own I'm just trying to find myself again. Writing was once where I did that. Maybe I'm just tired. Maybe tomorrow I'll wake up and be me.

Broken

World, when life is wrong I turn to you. I bleed out my sorrows by way of ballpoint pen, and be it restorative, or simply theraputic, it provides me catharcys. And so again, today, I turn to you.

World, I don't know what is going on in my life right now, and I'm terrified. I don't know how I'm going to afford food tomorrow, nor where I will be sleeping come night fall. I don't know how I'm going to clean my stained uniform in time for work, or even if I'll manage to scrownge enough gas money to get there. They are small, almost trivial concerns compared to the larger questions of how to pay for medical care, and whether or not I will, indeed, actually be attending college in January, but there quantity, and there constantness, it's an overwhelming feeling that suffocates.

I write this to you world, not as a sorrowful outcry, not as a request for pity or for assistance. I write it to you because I know not what else to do with the words.

You see I am strong, or so I thought. But even the strongest of us can be broken. Though I have faced adversity in my life, at this moment I take perspective and realize that it was not until this moment that I knew what it was to truly hit bottom. Not a flicker of light do I see in the distance. My future is black. An abyss, a void, a ravenous demon of smoke. You might say it is an adventure, a possibilty, but without any sense of promise or certainty, I see only darkness. And as is ever-true with myself and my battle with the darkness, in it I feel nothing, not love, not hope; only sorrow and hatred remind me that I am of flesh. Even the strongest of us, I am learning, have our weaknesses. Even the evilest of tormenters can find love amongst their followers. Some times, even 18-year-old's just want to cry into our mother's arms and be told that it's okay.

Lately I am nomadic. Without rules, without affiliation, without responsibility to any but myself. It is, in many ways, all I ever wanted, and yet it is not what I realized. It is cold, and lonely, and empty. Moments of security are few and far between. Days are lost, nights are cold. I want more than anything to be in my own bed, in a space that was mine. I don't miss the screaming, or the cynacism, but I miss the comfort that can only be found in my beige carpet and my off white walls. I miss my family. I want it back.

Converging Paths

Lately I've keep having this dream. The cutest little blond girl in a bright sundress twirls and twirls in a field of green. She is half me, that is quite clear, but there are foreign features in her face- the half of a man I don't yet recognize. The combination of her takes the best pieces of the two, and makes them better somehow. She is infinite in spirit, and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. She calls out for me to join her. And I wake with the unshakeable feeling that she's waiting somewhere...

And so I wonder...

I remember growing up and dreaming of Italy. I bought travel books with tales of places near and far. I wrote lists upon lists of places I would see. I decided Copenhagen would be first. I envisioned countless adventures - on a Vespa at midnight in Paris, tanning on the beaches of the Mediterranean, climbing the Great Wall. Knowing everything and yet nothing about the world, I would find life, love, food, fun, beauty, art, architecture, spiritual root with the world, and pieces of myself I never even knew existed. I had been so sure for so long that this was what I wanted - to be out and alive. I've wanted it so bad it is a thirst that has never left my mouth, like that for water on a hot humid summer day.

My world was big. Vast, expansive, and to be explored. All my life, it has been the only form of the world I have known. So now that I find my world shrinking in around me, my desires that were once boundless, now find infinite comfort in the idea of an acres spaces with green grass, a white house, and a picket fence, I wonder: how do we know if we're settling, or if what we thought we wanted, just isn't really what we wanted? How do know when to stop looking for happiness? What if on the way to our life's journey, we stumble in to something wonderful - are we to abandon it and keep going? Is the line between following seredipity down a promising path and one of resentment really a line at all? Or are our choices really OUR choices, to be deteremined and later passed or failed with whatever judgement we wish to pass upon them?

And how do I become this new person I want to be without giving up the person I thought I was?

Flight

I found myself wavering, questioning my choices in the past few days. When I was kicked out of the house two weeks ago, told to never come back, was I wrong for following through with just that? Have I been rash? Rebellious? Where my actions based in sane self-preservation and logic? Or shrouded with adolescent desire?

The facts are these: I have lived, all my life, in an abusive home. Be it manifested more on the physical or verbal spectrum at any given time, it was always the bottom line of my familial existence. I have spent 18 years miserable in this environment. No my mother is not a North Korean dictator. Not every single moment of my life has been miserable. We have had our happy memories. In the past few years, it is almost even safe to say that things were alright most of the time. But despite things being "okay," the residue of the tortured relationship of my mother and father is still palpable between her and me. A phantom in our connection, it is a ghost that won't let go. She looks at the person she thinks I am with eyes of disgust and blame - to her, I am wicked and at fault for all of her problems. It is also the case that no matter how long she is in my life, and even after I eventually (hopefully) escape her, my being at fault will remain the truth in her eyes. I will be blamed for everything from her poor health, to her sham of a marriage, to her self-induced misery.

After hearing her voice for the first time today, any doubt about my actions was evaporated completely. I do not deserve to blamed for someone's life. I should not have to live in fear - of her, of verbal or physical violence. I, as an incredibly mature and responsible being of my age (which I shall be so bold as to state with momentary certainty that I am), have every right to a free and happy life. A life away from game playing, and power trips, and guilting, and incessant sensory hate. A life away from a miserable past, and from dwelling on it, and talking about it over and over again. A life away from two absolutely volatile and miserable "adults," who's only intention is to weave themselves silly in spiderwebs of deceit, playing power games and attempting to inflict as much hurt and darkness upon others as they feel inside.

I am not being childish or petty about this. Though the freedom of going where I want, or staying out til whenever is certainly a perk I have enjoyed -one that has me to question the validity of my logic in this whole affair - I re-realised today that it is certainly not my bottom line. I support myself, medically, financially, etc. School and two jobs - I am doing my absolute best to make it so that I require nothing of her. I am certainly not trying to act out, or be dramatic, or even cast blame. I do not want to run off and do drugs, or bitch about how mean my mommy is. This woman may have given me life, a fact to which I attest and know I should be grateful. But she has done nothing short of making me regret that as she does every single day of my existence. Honor thy father and mother, most religions ask of us, but from my perspective, I have paid my penance. I owe these people nothing more than I have already given. And be the very damnation of my soul the cost, I refuse to allow my life to be sucked in to someone else's black hole of misery.

I, Katherine Elizabeth Stevens, am ready to begin my new life. I am ready to wake up, and be happy, and not have to fight so goddamned hard for that every single day. I am ready to be done with drama and with second guessing. I don't care what happened in the past. Mom, Dad, you both are who you are and that's fine by me. I'm not angry about anything you have done to me, I understand you both as people and your individual logics too well for that. This is not about blame, or judgement, or me wanting to cause any more drama than we have all already been through here. Play your games all you want to, I don't mind. But I refuse to be apart of them any more.

No love. No hate. No anger. No affect. Just done.

mind aflutter

Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever be capable of true monogamy.

My gut instinct tells me no, of course not. It's not something I ever

believed in. Some idealized fantasy of simpler times. Completely impractical in the modern world.

Not only am I the kind of person who can never make a solid decision - always bouncing around, sometimes just pausing to revel in possibility - but I'm also the kind of person who doesn't let things go.

The few people I have truly liked have been incredibly difficult for me to get over. So difficult in fact, that it has scared me out of pursuing people of genuine interest (but that's another blog for another time).

I love Nathan, it's nothing like that, but yet...

sometimes I wonder if I'll ever be able to look into the familiar baby blues of my best friend without my heart melting, or talk on the phone to an almost without wondering about what might have been.

Someday it'd be nice to find out what it would be like to follow the butterflies.

Rainy Days Again

So, it's back. That god-awful claustrophobic feeling. The one that's like a million tiny electric insects crawling under your skin - you can't sit still. I warded it off for a while. Quite a while. Almost had forgotten it entirely. I occupied myself with other tasks, delighted in summer, captured the feeling of life.

But now, now I can't hide from it it seems. My life has become scheduled/rudimentary/structured/boring/normal again. I can't handle it. I was not designed to live the same day twice. I am not a person who does well with too much structure. I thought it was just everyone leaving me that was cause for the growing hole of darkness in my chest, but it seems this sinking feeling is back. The first sign of a new wave of depression.I find it almost every fall. I'm really trying to fight it off with all my might, but I don't know. I don't feel capable of handling all that is on my plate, and the weight of the responsibility is starting to make me feel trapped.

I really LOVE my life right now. I love my boyfriend. I love my job. I love my school. For once I can't wait to learn again, and I really don't want to lose this. I can't bear the thought off falling into the darkness, as I so often doing, and losing the feeling of things as they are. But at the same time, I'm not sure how to beat this slump. How do you fight the inevitable?

Am I? I often wonder. Am I one of the many victims of this "depression" they so often talk about. I've always told myself that the waves I go through were normal. My sense of personal responsibility nags me to fight my own battles and never surrender to any feat. But I mean, is it so wrong to want to always be happy? Is it that bad to go to a doctor and, when qualifiable of course, ask them to make you feel better? Something about it, be it the subconscious stigma placed on it by my mother or my ridiculous amount of egotistical pride tells me that medicating is for the weak, and yet, how nice would it be to not have to feel this hopeless way I find myself every so often? To never again face a suicidal thought inducing bout of depression?

I don't want to be one of those "Americans." The lazy, chicken shit stereotypes who don't face their own damn problems. The "quick-fix seekers," mere tools of a idealistic marketing strategy in a consumeristic society. Nor do I wish to be some medicated drone, dependent on a prescription to get her through the day, never truly feeling, because her feelings have been "stabilized." I want to be a responsible individual. I want to truly feel alive. But this possibility of a life where I don't constantly have to feel like I'm running from a dark cloud, always watching my back, looking for my next quick fix of sunshine just to keep my skies blue, it's tempting sometimes. Maybe I deserve to try something else - to stop and catch my breath.

Imma Be Me

Fuck them. Fuck them all. The stereotypes, the standards, the status quo. The ones who make me doubt. The negative voices that invade my peaceful reality. The ones who constantly tell me how relationships are a waist, that the material is my worth, and try to define the ideal. Those who induce questioning thoughts - hesitations that prevent me from my happiness. Screw everything that says I have to look like this, I have to behave like that. Forget everything always telling me how me, my life, my relationships should be. To hell with the cynics, the media, the nameless, faceless mean girls. Fuck them all.

I'm living. I'm happy. I will doubt no more.