Solitude my healer

I have spent most of the four months of my summer break from school hiding out in my basement apartment, and while at least part of that time I was depressed, for several reasons I won't get into, I know that even if I hadn't been, I would still choose solitude.

People always say to those who choose to be alone, that you can't shut yourself away from the world. To them I ask, why not? I am safe here, I have everything I need, and the people I care about are just a phone call, text message or email away. It isn't often that I choose to be around people, but when I do, I pick my moments and the people I want to share them with carefully.

In reality, people are simply a drain on my energy, because I have to deal with sensory overload as part of my condition. From the outside looking in, to most people, I suppose I seem to be managing just fine, but that is very careful planning and assessing individual situations that makes me appear so. On the inside I am calculating where I will put my next step and what if anything I will say. I appear calm and have even been described as serene. This is self preservation as I prefer not to draw attention to myself. Once home after an outing that has involved being in groups of people, I will take a day or several days to decompress before I am comfortable venturing out again. If I don't or can't take this time, I will become easily overwhelmed and everything I try to do that is new has the potential to reduce me to tears, and my ability to communicate is drastically diminished as well. This doesn't happen because I expect it to and so create this outcome but I have arrived at this realization as an observation. This is just a fact.

So if I choose to be alone it's because I actually do know what's best for me, and do admit I resent others trying to feed me their version of what is best for me. In their world, and possibly the general population as well, what they think is best might actually be so, for them. In my world I am the authority on me. This does not mean that I won't listen to people I trust and whose judgement I respect, because I will and then will make the decision that is still right for me.

I change what I can, adapt when I am able and make no excuses for settling for a life that causes me the least amount of anxiety while still following my dream.

It's not awful, it's just my life. Having always been this way and finally knowing I have an explanation, I do what is within me to make it work and don't beat myself up for not conforming to somebody else's idea of normal. What I offer is only an explanation, not an excuse. All I ask of anyone is this, do not try to change or fix me. Accept that and you accept me as I am. I have.

Flirting with happiness

I want to be happy and flirt with happiness, yet find it takes very little to tip me into despair and wish I knew how to prevent that from happening. My recovery time is getting shorter when this happens though and I know there is a learning lesson in it, but what exactly that lesson is, seems to be elusive.
I push people away who get too close and find the ones I know that I could probably lean on, I won't allow to see me at my most vulnerable for fear of abandonment. Most people do not know what to do with another person's vulnerability. Some want to jump in and fix what they perceive to be broken and others seem to see it as something that they will catch so they run for the hills. It is the rare find that will allow one to cry, vent or to bury themselves in the warmth and caring of their comforting embrace, wordlessly supporting, yet not enabling the despondent to sink into their despair, without judgement and giving advice only when asked.
In spite of my angst I do see myself as a happy person, or perhaps, more accurately as one who is content with settling for close enough. Euphoria is not something that can be sustained for long periods and there is no place to go but down from such heights.
So for now I will choose the halfway point and desire be content with that, while allowing room for the highs and lows to colour my life.

The Spirit, the Heart, the Bridge and the Soul

This past weekend four of my sisters and I went to Stratford to see a play, "The Matchmaker" as a birthday celebration for the oldest in the group, chronologically, but definitely the youngest in spirit. We started this more than five years ago and have only, when life allowed, repeated this for each of our birthdays, three times so far. We want to keep it going.

The sister whose birthday we were celebrating has cancer. She had a double mastectomy 5 years ago and is currently undergoing another round of chemotherapy. I got the news about her current condition while working on a painting in my second year of a fine art program. This shifted my focus for the painting. A certain percentage of the painting had to have personal content in it and I was going to reference an old photo of myself from when I was about 4 years old, but instead decided to use a photo of my sister, seeing as how she was on my mind constantly anyway. Once finished, I offered it to her while making sure that she knew that she was in no way obligated to take it if she didn't like it, and as it is a large canvas, measuring 4'x6' so finding a place for it is tricky. Happily she did really seem to genuinely like it from the photos I sent her of it and wants it. What followed was a short series of emails sharing and elaborating on our connection to each other.

I think I was about 7 or 8 years old when I met her for the first time as she was living with some of the relatives of her Father, my step-Father who had married my Mother. She is the only one of his daughters that came to live with us. He had 3 more daughters, and a son living in a different province with family and only his two oldest sons living with him. Their Mother had cancer and died when the youngest was only a baby of around a year old, and so for whatever reasons, five of his children, all but the two oldest boys, went to stay with his family.

My sister was a bit of a wild child apparently once she hit puberty, so she came to live with us. All I remember back then was her laughter, her singing and her constant horsing around with her older brothers. Other than that I just remember being a bit awestruck, as she laughed more often than anyone I knew and didn't treat me like the crybaby that I was. I am pretty sure she was the one that started singing with and to us girls at night in bed. Those bedtimes are some of my fondest early memories.

When she got a bit older she worked at a lunch counter in, Woolco or Kmart and would sometimes take me with her to work. I would wander around the store after being treated to an ice cream sundae that she would make for me. I'm not sure how many times I tagged along with her but I truly felt like the luckiest little sister to have her want me along. There were also times when she would return home early from a date and take me to her favourite Chinese food restaurant, if our parents were out for the evening and I was on my own. It was from her that I developed a taste for Chinese food and anything beyond the usual meat and potatoes we usually had at home.

When us four sisters did the play and dinner the first time for my birthday more than five years ago, she gave me this wall plaque that reads, "Chance made us sisters, Hearts made us friends". She said in a recent email, that she doesn't think about us having different parents, we are sisters. I can only add that I couldn't love her more if we had the same parents.

The four of us together are a wonderful mix of personalities. The oldest sister I think of as the spirit for her laughter and spark of positivity, another the heart, because she is inevitably always the one who thinks of personal touches, from making bracelets to knitting scarves for us, the youngest as the bridge as she has the same Mother as two and the same Father as the oldest of our foursome and she brings us together in other ways too. I am not sure what I am, I take direction from the others, making bracelets and scarves for instance and go along with whatever they suggest for our birthday celebrations but am still the one who will suddenly dissolve into tears at the thought of not being able to join them for future celebrations because of financial restrictions.
I looked up soul and found these definitions fit for me;
soul a : the moral and emotional nature of human beings 
       b : the quality that arouses emotion and sentiment.
I certainly arouse some emotion and sentiment in our sister group. I don't know if they would agree but I know from now on when I think of us together, we will be the Spirit, the Heart, the Bridge and the Soul, that embodies our sisterhood.

Sooooo wrong

No, I am not hiding behind this cup. Ok, I am.

I know this is probably completely wrong or I just think it should be, but there is something about a friend showing up unshaven, funky hair and then opening his mouth and sounding too smart that makes me want to do him stupid.

The combination of appearing dishevelled but sounding effortlessly intelligent is a definite turn on. I'm not talking about love here and actually not even in the neighbourhood of it.
Him talking at length about anything he knows really well and can explain with even just a small degree of passion, is very sexy, whether he's aware of it or not.

So if he thinks showing up here unshaven and scruffy will deter me from wanting to jump him, he's wrong, dead wrong. I want to tell him, and probably should, to do me a favour next time, shave, comb your hair and talk about the Canadian mint fazing out the penny, or something equally, mind numbingly boring.

If there is a hell, and a special place for those guilty of deliciously, lascivious thoughts about their friends, then they'll be expecting me, but with my luck, he'll be there too, giving a workshop on something like quantum mechanics or binary code manufacturers.

Money, Hope and Happiness