There is a special feeling I get when someone spells my name right.

And a weird other feeling when someone spells it wrong.

I've spent a lot of my life trying to be someone I believed others wanted me to be: A good girl who did what she was told and was rewarded for it.

Making other people happy and living for their praise was a safe way of securing my place in the group and belonging somewhere. It got me pats on the head and I love that shit.

But I was so busy pretending to be The Perfect Me that I never got to explore and embrace who I actually am, which has led to me pushing my own needs aside. And now the part of me that longs to be accepted and loved demands that it only matters if it's real.

So I've been trying out a Me That I Want To Explore And Embrace. But, to be completely honest, it is really, really difficult and quite exhausting. :(

She is a bit more of a hard pill to swallow; she is a disappointment compared to The Perfect Me you've grown accustomed to, and somehow that hurts people's feelings (I hate hurting people's feelings).

And that makes her feel like she's a mistake, something broken that should be hidden away and never accepted.

Like maybe it would be way easier to just go back to good old-fashioned smiling, keeping-her-mouth-shut people-pleasing.

Ngggghhh. D:

Happy 2025, kids.

I've only just made it out of the depths of hell (I had a weird virus that knocked me out for five days), and what do you know, it's still January (the longest January in the history of Januaries, probably).

Ughghgh.

Here are some thoughts I put on paper in weird sentences loosely strung together by a sense of helplessness and frustration.

May I Exit the Ride, Please
One day I awoke,
and the world no longer made sense;
the light that used to give me comfort
had gone dark and tense.

--

It is not easy to be human
in a world that only teaches to consume and
take and take until all the space we have for joy
is occupied by things.

By no coincidence, we are forced to feed a system
based solely on greed, devoid of any wisdom,
put there so the few white men in power and their sons
could stay there.

Mother Nature, tired of crying out in pain,
is filled with a fire that burns angry and hot,
switching up the seasons
so swiftly we don't know which one we've got.
Forests up in flames, islands disappearing,
communities washed away, and not one soul left for hearing
the sound a tree makes when it falls.

...

Apocalyptic, yet - forgive me for saying -
it's not the Earth that will end up paying.
She will overcome our failures,
recreate the land and sea.
The thing that's not clear to me is:
How the hell will we?

She closes more and more of Herself off to us
(who can blame Her?),
giving us all that tough love detox medicine juice,
while we continue to maim Her.

Not "we" as in you and I,
but "we" as in Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Money.
"We", the punchline in this sick joke
that's not even a little bit funny.

The ladders upon which the rich stand
need, require, mandate, demand
someone, anything
to be at the bottom.

A people, a world, a universe,
or the last black rhino;
as long as there's something to be exploited,
there will be no one to ask, "Why, though?"

In the end, there are no winners in this game
of lying and betraying
and everything we've done only amounts to weighing
each other down.

We are all losers here;
nobody wins unless we stop playing.