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.

sorry if we ruin your lives

The bitch persona has moments of style and certain moments of substance, but quite often the attitude reveals itself to be about genuine anger, disturbance, or fear. It's the kind of female resentment and rage that produce girls like Sandy from Grease, for example. We all want to be Olivia Newton-John in the last scene, the girl swiveling her foot like a broken record to put out a cigarette with one of her red high heels (which are no longer "Fuck Me" pumps but rather "Fuck You" shoes), the girl with ratted hair, in slinky shiny black pegged pants. Yes, by the end of the movie Sandy has become your 1958 basic slut: the girl who, after suffering months of rejection for being a party pooper prude who didn't smoke or drink, has finally realized that you do have to "pet" to be popular, that you do have to put out to get the guy, that it isn't the blondes who have more fun- it's the sluts. Placing one's pretty power, one's pussy power, one's sexual energy out there for popular consumption no longer makes you a bimbo, it makes you smart.

We as girls already have ages of bad blood, beginning with Eve, ending our stay in Eden with her curiosity and lust for strange fruit, and to me it seems that even if we act like good people, the world is still quite likely to find us bad. So fuck dignity. It seems so much more exciting to be a Siren beckoning with her song or Calypso captivating on her island than to be Penelope, the archetype of female fidelity, weaving and unweaving, sending her suitors away while waiting for the errant Odysseus to return, waiting while he luxuriates in lotusland as he commits adultery with gorgeous, high-class women.

It seems to me, in the pageantry of public life, the one statement a girl can make to declare her strength, her surefootedness, her autonomy- her self as a self- is to somehow be bad, somehow do something that is sure to make her parents weep. We only seem interesting if something seems not quite right. Marilyn Monroe might have been miserable, but her death is immortal.

The Stupid Things You Do

Insight alone is not a transformative force. It doesn't work that way. Everyday you might come to a new conclusion about yourself and about the reasoning behind your behaivor, and you can tell yourself that this knowledge will make all the difference. But in all likelihood, you're going to keep on doing the same old things. You'll still be the same person. You'll still cling to your destructive, debilitating habits because your emotional tie to them is so strong- so much stronger than any cereal box insight you might come up with- that the stupid things you do are really the only things you've got that keep you centered and connected. They're the only things about you that make you you.


If only life were like the movies where characters muddle things through and do what's right in the end. In The Breakfast Club, a geek, a jock, a rich bitch, a girl in black, and a hoodlum become best friends and reconcile their differences in a few hours' worth of detention.... In real life, any momentary intimacy at Saturday school would result only in some forced, awkward exchanges on Monday morning, everyone returning to the same old cliques and clans, the same old lipstick shades and sunglasses.

"The Dead Girl", by Melanie Thernstrom

"It was like sawdust, the unhappiness: it infiltrated everything, everything was a problem, everything made her cry- school, homework, boyfriends, the future, the lack of future, the uncertainty of future, the fear of future, fear in general- but it was hard to say exactly what the problem was in the first place."

I'm starting to feel like I can't maintain my facade any longer, that I just might start to show through, and I wish I knew what was wrong. I have this palpable, absolute sense that I'm breaking down and there's really no good reason as to why, and- even worse- there's nothing I can do about it.

I'm certain that they'll never understand the philosophical underpinnings of the state I'm in. Sometimes I'm just fine, I can cope with the ebb and tide of life, I can handle the setbacks with aplomb, I can be a good sport. But when my head is clean and clear of this clutter of reason and rationality, what I'm mostly thinking is: why? Why take it like a man? Why be mature? Why accept adversity? Why surrender with grace the follies of youth? Why put up with the bullshit?

The thing is that the nature of life- even normal, sane, not depressed life- has worn me down and will continue to wear me down even more. It's just a fact that if I am to grow up, and get married, and eventually have kids, and do all the normal, happy things, along the way I will have so much trial and error to go through, so much living that I can only anticipate with dread.

There will be so many more Nicks, so many more heartbreaks, so many more cycles of elation at the first kiss, and devastation when it's over. I accept this pattern as a perfectly decent way for people to make their way through the "mating game", but I can't handle it. I am so wrecked already, so unstable, a piece of work who was never given the tools it takes to deal with what everyone else considers business as usual. I am not equipped with any emotional resilience, can't go with the flow, can't stand steady when the boat rocks and rolls. I have been robbed of that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.

Measure of Mindfulness

The measure of our mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity and our attention to responsibility. If you're still at the point when you're even just barely going through the motions (i.e. showing up at school, making small talk) you are still okay or okay enough. But you're not, and a desire not to acknowledge depression in ourselves or those close to us- better known these days as denial- is such a strong urge that plenty of people prefer to think that until you're actually flying out of a window, you don't have a problem.

I can't quite shake this feeling that we live in a world gone wrong, that there are all these feelings that you're not supposed to have because there's no reason to have them anymore. But they're still there, stuck somewhere, a flaw that evolution hasn't managed to eliminate yet, like tonsils or an appendix. I wonder if anything will work or if there is no drink, no drug, no pill, no potion, no serum, no shot, nothing under the whole black sun that can possibly penetrate a pain so deep. There must be something, some very strong hand with a very tight grip that can turn off the way I feel.

Jesus Christ

Every guy I fall for becomes Jesus Christ within the first 24 hours of our relationship.

I know that this happens, I see it happening, I even feel myself, sometimes, standing at some temporal crossroad, some distinct moment at which I can walk away and keep this all from happening, but I never do.

I always imagine the end, the despair I will suffer when it comes, and it makes any happiness I have in the present seem not merely ephemeral, but doomed. Because the happier I allow myself to be, the more miserable I will be later.

Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign on my forehead. Sometimes I wish there was a way to let people know that just because we live in a world without rules, and in a life that is lawless, doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt so bad the morning after. Sometimes I think that I was forced to withdraw into depression because it was the only rightful protest I could throw in the face of a world that said it was alright for people to come and go as they please, that there were simply no real obligations left. Certainly deceit and treachery in both romantic and political relationships are nothing new, but at one time, it was bad, callous, and cold to hurt somebody. Now it's just the way things go, part of the growth process.

I grab at everything, I end up with nothing, and then I feel bereft. I mourn over the loss of something I never even had. I am a sick, sick girl.