♥ ♣ ♦ ♠ Down the rabbit hole ♥ ♣ ♦ ♠

It’s 2am. I’m sitting on my bed, with the vintage floral urban outfitters comforter tossed aside, revealing the second layer of my bed – a leopard print acrylic mink blanket I got as a gift when I was 18. The state of my room: a mess. Papers, clothes, makeup strewn about. I sit, with my freshly cut nails, painted a mellow orange-hued red, a color certain to be featured in a girl magazine but I’m not bothered to check. My curls bouncy and full of volume air drying after the first wash after a long-awaited cut. I sip on a cool can of  ‘La Croix natural cran-raspberry flavored sparkling water’ while looking around and picking out pieces illustrating the woman I aim to be mixed in with things representing the woman I am along side declining evidence of the woman I once was. My thoughts are clear and simple :

I am not the fashionable pixie girl photographed and pinned to pinterest walls. I am not the girl who is constantly buying new things to dress like a woman I once saw and has now been convinced that putting on the same pencil skirt will make me just as sophisticated. I am not the girl who sits up at night wishing on stars that my prince charming will come, take me away and fix all my problems. I am not the single girl who plans her own wedding. I am not the girl who knows the hottest up and coming band. I am not the girl who plans ahead, and pieces together the outcome before the action.

I am the woman who hopes to god I don’t look too fat in pictures. I am the woman who knows my sophistication comes from my experience and I wear the pencil skirt, purely to accentuate my ass.  I am the woman who wishes on stars to win the lottery in order to take off and travel the world, where I’ll meet a man who did the same thing and the only problems he’ll have to fix are his own when we say goodbye. I am the single woman who plans her own birthday party. I am the woman who listens to music from the 60s, because it is better than the up and coming band. I am the woman who wings it and is always surprised by the way things turn out.

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I believe that people are the heroes of their own lives. Whether or not they deserve the title. It makes sense, when you think of their limited frame of reference. As you become an adult you start to question and second guess yourself and your beliefs. You meet someone who seems to be just really cool. Perhaps exciting, adventurous, intelligent, a person who has different views and you emulate that person and want to have such strong views too.  Then one day your views are tested, as a young person you fight for what you believe in because you haven’t had enough time to believe in anything else. Then as an older young person you fight for what you believe in because you just feel like you have to fight for something.

A day arrives where you no longer want to fight for what you believe in and you are given a choice – to either : Fight against what others believe in or accept the differences and stop fighting all together and just live. I came home tonight to a tense apartment. A roommate felt slighted by a response I wrote on the communal white board. While I assured her it was in jest she replied “I don’t like feeling stupid. I feel stupid enough already.” With my back to her and my hand reaching for the ice tray in the freezer all that came out was “that’s not my fault.”

It wasn’t and it isn’t. It was a very clear example of knowing my own worth and knowing that whatever conversation she was hoping to have with me was not going to happen because she already had her cannons loaded.  I wonder if at times, we create, add and burgeon our own problems because we are not comfortable with peace. I feel surrounded by people my age who are self-serving to all the wrong attributes. Sometimes they are happy and they fade into the background. Sometimes they are not and they stay up late at night pinning pictures to their pinterest page in hopes of waking up the next morning with the attribute of that pin installed in their personality hard drive.

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It’s hard to come to terms with the person you were and the person you are. I meditate and talk to my inner child. We are strangers. She doesn’t recognize me at all and I can vaguely remember her. Until she laughs. Then I begin to remember. I remember the laughter and forget all the tears. None of us knew what we were doing back then- It’s not my parents fault that they were human and parents and trying to manage their lives while raising two new ones. It was not this little girl’s fault either. She just wanted to dance and sing and laugh. When she got older she couldn’t do those things any more because it didn’t make any sense to dance when no one else was singing or to sing when no one else was dancing.

That little girl grew up way too quickly. As a teenager, she was an adult. Now as an adult, I am lost. It’s almost as if I’ve finally caught up with myself and therefore the chasing has ceased and now we don’t know what to do with our self. The rabbit has led us to the rabbit hole, and here we are falling down it. In the dark. Not knowing which way is up.

The problems we had before we started the fall are of no value or importance now because we are in survival mode. Not knowing where the fall will take us, and if life on the other side will be better or worse. All we can do is open my arms wide, embrace the fall and hope for a soft landing.