I wake up every morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounds and as impossible as it actually is, happy. But during the course of each day my heart will descend from my chest into my stomach. By early afternoon, I am overcome by the feeling that nothing is right, or nothing is right for me, and by the desire to be alone. By evening I am fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of my grief, alone in my aimless confusion, alone even in my loneliness. I am not sad, I repeat to myself over and over, I am not sad. As if I might one day convince myself. Or fool myself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because my life has unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. I fall asleep with my heart at the foot of my bed, like some domesticated animal that is no part of me at all. And each morning I wake with it again, in the cupboard of my rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon I am again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.

He Puts Himself On A Pedestal and They Go Down On It

No one does this. No one objectifies a list of 35 girls, ranking them on a points system based on attractiveness, performance, and availability (the virgins or one's with boyfriends score higher). Some of them he hasn't even been with yet, and when he gets into their pants he crosses their name off. No one walks over countless amounts of people with no ramifications. Most importantly, no one does this to me. I PICKED YOU UP FROM THE FUCKING ROSEBOWL WHEN YOU STAYED AT UCLA ONLY TO FIND OUT YOU HAD A THREESOME THERE THE NIGHT BEFORE?!?!?! And not only did you cheat on me, you cheated on the OTHER GIRLFRIEND YOU'VE BEEN WITH FOR 4 MONTHS?!? Sorry. Excuse my burst of sudden anger. But the hardest part for me to understand is how so many other people simply allowed things like that to happen. Most people have a problem embracing their worth, with knowing how they deserve to be treated.

As far as it goes for me, in the beginning all I wanted was the feeling of being cared about. You might not know, but for someone as depressed as me, that warmth, that assurance that you are in fact important to someone, is like a drug to a heroin addict. And I was stupid. You go into a relationship looking for safety and security, and it's easy to forget that while this irenic quietude may shelter you from the teeming masses, it also puts you at the mercy of one person. And in the end you will most likely feel varying degrees of pain from a million betrayals, ones big or small. He spoon fed me bullshit about how he was in love with me, and I, too willingly, believed it.

I have never met someone who turns women into play things. He had two girlfriends- *excuse me apparently 3 now?- one of whom took him back after doing this to before. Cheats on everyone he's been together with. Compulsively lies not just to us, but to his friends about where he's going, or even about what he ate for breakfast. Everyday he works out, putting forth all of the effort towards getting girls. All he talks about, all his ego is built upon, is sex- which is something he isn't even that great at. Mister D1 athlete- whose scholarship he lost- puts himself up on a pedestal and girls go down on it- again, and again, and again. I felt like I had to do something to finally teach him a lesson.

Yelling at him would do nothing. The words would just make me feel like I was severely fingering myself. They're just words is all. Powerless. Vocabulary. I wanted every girl to know the kind of guy he is, so I posted that status on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=175613269123102&id=675367542). Getting high fives in the hallway all day pumped me up even further, and by break I was so livid I couldn't even see straight. I resorted to mutually assured destruction, and after fun things went down in the ceramics room with his back pack, things finally escalated when I poured a water bottle on him during passing period. It felt so good.

So fuck you for luring me into a life of nihilism, but listen here you beautiful son of a bitch. I am not like the rest of the girls from your past. I am not a lifeless Stepford Wife who cooks, cleans, and fucks with a blissful, idiotic smile. Nor am I some simple, easy girl who can be reduced to the stereotype of a slut. I know my worth and you do not deserve me, and I hope through all of this you have learned you cannot fuck with me. But more importantly I hope that you no longer treat women as toys.

the night I found out

It is Sunday night, we're about at that point when it's Monday morning, and I am curled up into the fetal position on my bed. I sit here with my face in my hands as if to catch my head, to keep it from rolling across a field like a soccer ball that someone might kick by accident.

And the thing that's really bugging me, as I lie curled up, is the scene that I'm enacting reminds me of my entire life.

These are the same tears I cry when I hear the gospel song that goes This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine, and I think of the way ordinary people are able to triumph, in ways small or large, over adversity. And I remember crying like this after seeing Robert Redford in The Natural, crying over the way determination and conviction can make a simple baseball player do supernatural things. And everyone thought I was stupid, but I wanted to tell them that I was crying because whatever my gifts- the pieces of good buried inside and under so much that I feel is bad, is wrong, is twisted- are less clear than the ability to hit a ball with a bat. My gifts are for life itself, for an unfortunately astute understanding of all the cruelty and pain in the world. My gifts are unspecific. I am an artist manque, someone full of crazy ideas and grandiloquent needs and even a little bit of happiness, but with no particular way to express it.

Now I'll go smoke a cigarette, return to my room, watch the 11 o'clock news, and fall asleep with the blue light of the TV still on, feeling completely pathetic.

Senior Year

The weirdest part about me being a senior is that I have felt no change and have felt a tremendous change at the same time. Being a freshman, you could spot out the older girls... the well-dressed ones who seemed to radiate coolness through their confident, more-mature mannerisms. I don't feel older, I don't feel a heightened sense of fashion, and aside from losing the doe-eyed look in the halls, not much has changed. I still identify myself as me from 8th grade me; I can remember memories from then up until now as though they were yesterday, and not only that but all my previous emotions are still so tangible to me.

At the same time, however, nothing is the same. My outlook on things are completely different, the way I act is completely different. I never EVER could have imagined myself at where I am right now. Two years ago, if you were to tell me I would smoke weed daily, get a tattoo, go on vacation with Lacey, or even become best friends with Katy Conti, I would have laughed in your face.

I can't explain how I got here. I know that I have felt anguish, and it was often blank, undifferentiated. Rarely would it carry a clearly written label that also contains its motivation, and any label it did have was mendacious. I've learned at this point that someone can believe or declare their self to be anguished for one reason and be so due to something different. You can think that you are suffering facing the future and instead be rapt with the passed. You can think that your suffering for others, out of pity or compassion, but deep down you know that it's for your own reasons- more or less profound, more or less avowed- and sometimes they are so deep that only specialists, analysts of the souls, can exhume them.

Regardless, I feel immense excitement gearing towards this year. Reasons include: taking Kirsten and Katy to school every morning, Katy being in my 5th period philosophy class and leaving everyday with her, my new-found friendship with Lacey, no longer being the ostracism and receiving general acceptance from my peers (this eliminates my fear of nutrition break), having two jobs, and having an easy schedule.

The Snowball Effect

Can someone please explain it to me? How is this possible: First I'm in a good mood, but my eyes get watery because Ali, the glamorous Bachelorette from season 6, clearlyyyyy made the wrong decision in the end. But as the tears start pooling together, it's like all my problems flash before me. The reality T.V. series gets me worked up over the heartbreak, then some stupid person said some stupid thing that got me upset over a similar heartbreak of my own, and then, before I know it, I'm a wreck. So first its Ali then its Nick then its loss then its Katy then its nostalgia then its Jordan then its back to loss then it's the cause of all the hurt I am, and soon enough the tear drops that were once plump and perfectly round are falling down the side of my face at such an uncontrollable rate that you can no longer see the perfect streaks left behind, but instead just a blotchy, red, wet complexion. It's like the filter of recall is itself altered, so that it blocks out anything but the darkest colors of the spectrum. Being unhappy precludes all else. The feeling is narcissistic, nothing that does not resonate with my unhappiness can interest me. That's when time becomes palpable and vicious. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, gets wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tighten and ache. At that point I fade into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis creates a painful blank where my mind used to be. I feel the numbness come over me. It's so familiar, yet each time it feels worse than anything, I'm sure. Numbness is an understatement. It's more of a deep freeze, in which the ice threatens to crack at any minute, except underneath there won't be water, there won't be any fluid at all, just more and more layers of ice... ice cubes and icebergs and ice floes and ice statues, where a girl used to be.

What if...

What if I want to be large in a world that has me small, diminished. I don't want to diet, I don't want to say "no, thank you", and pretend somehow that what is there is enough when always, always I want more. That will always be my defining characteristic- I have appetites, and only if I'm truly shameless will I even begin to be sated because nothing is ever really enough. Not because I am greedy, or unsatisfiable, but because I just can't help it, I can't go along with the fiction that the world would have me believe and adhere to, that you ought to settle and be careful and accept the crumbs that are supposed to pass for a life, this minimized self you are supposed to put up with. Everything tells us to stop, to not have another piece of pizza, to not talk to the guy first, to not take an extra shot.

I'm 16, and in my opinion, I have the rest of my life to "stop"- to stand still. But I'm 16 and I intend on going, on living however I please, while I still can, while we still have zero responsibilities. Of course the sadness is still there inside me, like a stone, and it often leaves room for no other thoughts. I'm not trying to make an appeal to your sympathies, I'm just shifting this big weight inside of me from one place to the other. You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell a person the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you. I guess that's why I feel so far from everyone in the end; I can't think of any way to explain myself without sounding stupid or making them feel miserable.

Also, I'm tired of people trying to analyze my life when I myself have no clue as to what is going on, what it all means. I guess the reason for why I'm writing this blog is to use it as a staple, to remember how I felt two days prior to my birthday- lugubrious and irrevocably depressed. Who knows what was the cause, what came first, the sadness or the substance, but it doesn't really matter. Wow. I just had a really scary thought that made me pause my typing after I finished the last sentance. I can literally apply "it doesn't really matter" to every attribute of my life. Jesus, Kaelee, that's really really shitty. I mean how do you even solve that? Pick up a hobby? No. Get some friends? I have them. It's just like I don't feel like I know myself very well right now, so how could I ever be sure about anything? I'm always feeling awkward, like I'm walking on egg shells inside of myself. It's like I don't belong in my own skin and sometimes it makes me so frustrated at everything, I could scream or cry and there'd be no reason for it, aside from me just being so unhappy with myself.

It's okay though. My life is always this, at some point or another. I don't know if I'm getting better or getting used to it, but I know I'm so beyond need at this point. How amazing would it be if we could all decide not to be nice, never to be sorry? To have no regrets: what is before me belongs to me, my life is a result of the experiences I've been through. To say catch me if you can bitches I'm so free this is my life the rest of you can fuck off and die!

Someone asked me

to post a blog about my opinions on homosexuality. I grew up going to Sunday School, learning about how Jesus says to love God and love your neighbor as yourself and that the entity of the "Law" is summed up in that and yadda yadda yadda. That being said, I find it really hard to understand how homosexuality could be considered non-loving or harmful.

I used to be particularly narrow minded. I don't know, I guess as I got older or more mature that changed or something. Seeing flamboyantly gay people used to make me very uncomfortable and uneasy. But after experiencing love and life and the lack of control one can have over their emotions, I don't think it's wrong for a guy to love a guy or a girl to love a girl. It's love, it's all the same. Plus, I've recently made friends with a lot of gay people and they are probably some of the best people I've ever met. So I don't have anything against homosexuality.

If you, my anonymous formspring friend, are asking my opinion from a political standpoint, know that despite how liberal I may seem I do fall under the fiscally conservative republican category. I feel that allowing gay marriage would enable too many surreptitiously-straight people to get married in order to receive benefits. So I don't really know if that answers your question or what... but ya.