It's important, but only to me.

Nobody reads this anymore, so here's for posterity. Just for myself.

July 11th

July 20th

August 1st

To one specific, important life.

This is for you, and you know who you are because I just finished talking to you, and I wish you knew how much of an impact it has made on me. And I know you read this blog, or you still did last time we mentioned it in conversation.

I'm sorry.

I wish I had known earlier. I wish you had felt you could trust me with this information sooner, and I'm sorry we drifted apart for a while. I wish I could have suffered for you.

I feel selfish when I fret over my own comparatively miniscule problems. And I feel even more selfish for all of these I-statements I'm making right now.

I wish I could help.

I know that there is nothing I can really do, practically, and because of this I choose to delude myself into thinking that offering my emotional support is enough.

I want to believe that rationality is enough to keep you around, and I know that this is not necessarily true.

I love all of my friends. You are no exception.

And because I am stubborn and do not like airing my emotions in the open, you have never really known how much you helped me, years ago, when I desperately needed a friend.

(You helped a lot.)

I cannot possibly fathom what you feel. If it was anything of smaller magnitude.. But it's not. I only know that I feel powerless.

Times like these, I wish I could pray. I wish I could believe that a higher something could fix a person's problems. I know it can't.

I hope this helps, if only by a fraction of a degree. I hope you take this to heart.

I wish I could do more.

Olivia

There are two hopefully-more-in-depth-and-intellectual posts coming soon; actually, they've both been in the works for at least two months, and for some reason I keep expanding on them and editing and delaying and I'm really not sure why; remember when I used to post daily, uncensored?

But right now there's just something I have to say, because I'm afraid I'll forget what I'm feeling right now. (This sounds stupid already.)

I'm going to keep it vague: I'm confused and I'm really not sure what's happening, and for what seems like the first time I literally do not have anyone I'd feel comfortable talking with about this particular matter. Sure, it's not like I've ever been the most social (although that's changed for the better lately; I love my friends), but there's always been at least one person who could..help, if only by listening. And if it was any other situation, I wouldn't hesitate. But this.. This is just strange. And not even necessarily in a bad way. But it feels too much like a familiar pattern - far too familiar. I don't know how to deal with myself.

In a week I will likely be less attached to this and I will be able to push it away. Right now.. It's just throwing me off a little.

Olivia

On death.

I've been meaning to write in my blog for a while now. I have a backlog of post topics I've been wanting to cover. One about money and entitlement, one about how I'm trying to be a better person and act as my own therapist (and whether or not that can actually work), an update on my apartment search, how I've been making clothes recently and enjoying it, etc. I'm nearing the end of finals season, and my projects are eating me alive, so I could complain about that too. But I'm not going to.

Someone I know died today.

Texts sent between a friend and me:

"Marisol passed away this morning"

"Wait..what? What happened?"

"Marisol passed away this morning. She's gone Olivia."

"How, though?"

"There was something in her brain last fall. And it sent her to the E.R."

I don't know how to act. I don't know how to respond. I don't know what to say. This is the first time someone I know - someone I know personally - has died, excluding pets. Whenever friends have had friends who died, I haven't been much of a comfort. All I could say is I'm sorry. And obviously, that's not good enough.

I didn't know Marisol very well. I liked her well enough; we talked in high school. Jenn, the friend who just told me about her death, was very close to her. They both went to UMass Boston; they were talking about getting an apartment together. Anytime I saw Marisol outside of school, it was because I was hanging out with Jenn. I've been to her house once, and it made me uncomfortable, like how I feel whenever I'm in a stranger's house. Honestly, I barely knew her.

But I can't stop thinking about this. I know young people die sometimes, but it seems even more unfair when it happens to someone you knew, someone whose car you've been in and whose voice you remember and who hated the same people that you hated. Like a true kid of this generation, I turned to Facebook. Her last wall post was on Saturday. (Her last interaction with me was on my birthday in November.) Her boyfriend (oh god, to be the boyfriend of a girl who just died) just says 'She's gone'. Jenn's status says something about not caring that's she's gone to a 'better place', this place was good enough. Her sister changed her profile picture to a photo of Marisol.

Everything I do or think or feel seems trivial right now. This blog post itself sounds like a whiny, insensitive little asshole.

And, selfishly, I wonder what it will be like when I die. I wonder how this would have happened if it had been me. I don't live at home. I mean, my family would be notified if I got hit by a taxi or something, I guess, but what about the rest of my world? My parents would tell the school. They don't know who my friends are, though. Sometimes Akky and Izzy and I joke that if one of us dies, it's up to the other two to inform the internet. But how does that happen if you simply disappear, if you stop returning calls and texts and IMs? What happens to your life after you die? I think about the people who don't have friends or family to speak of; do they just vanish unmourned? An anonymous, unattended funeral, and nobody to remember them? How is that fair?

Jenn asked me if I'll come up for the funeral. I feel like I have to. I'll probably say something insensitive, like how finals nearly killed me. I won't have anything black to wear that isn't a t-shirt or a sweatshirt. I won't know how to act. I barely knew her; I'll probably cry anyways.

I feel lost.

And I have to finish these final projects today and tomorrow, so I don't even have time to process this, save for the time I just spent writing this entry.

Olivia

HNNNNNNNNGH.

MOTHERFUUUUUUUUCK.

I had a post to write but I'm too angry at Blogger right now to do it. There was a merging of Blogspot with Google in 2006 or something? Occasionally it gives me a glitchy login where it wants me to login with my Google account even though I'm already logged in on the browser, and then it directs me to a 'new' Terms and Conditions page from 2006, and when I log in again it asks me to claim a really terrible stupid blog I started in middle school, and sometimes I get frustrated and close out or something I just do it and then whoops, directed back to the Terms and Conditions page, wait haven't I done this already? And then I fumble through the cycle a few times, hoping blindly that maybe it'll work this time, but it NEVER DOES, so I log out of and back into my Gmail on a different tab and then refresh my blog page and hopefully that works but NOPE, so I get upset and open a new browser and this time the latter fix works.

And then I'm too angry at Blogger to write the post I was intending to write in the first place, so you get that instead.

Olivia

PS. AND THEN IT WON'T LET ME CHANGE MY FONT SIZE AWAY FROM THAT INTRUSIVELY LARGE 'NORMAL', AND NOW I'M JUST PISSY THIS IS WHY I DON'T USE SAFARI no not really, I just don't like Safari as much, but at least it's better than IE, sorry Safari you didn't do anything wrong I'm just taking out my anger on you and I shouldn't.

Better.

Most of the time, recently, when I say something about myself that sounds disparaging, it actually isn't. It's a statement of my own truth. When I say I'm fat or lazy or terrible at something, the remark is not meant to put myself down, not anymore. It's just a truth. It's something that I've come to accept as a part of me, or something that I want to change, or just..something. They're all just adjectives. Descriptions.

It actually might be more damaging for someone to say 'Oh, no you aren't' to whatever I believe, because it is a contradiction I really don't need, if I'm going to change my attitude and outlook.

And believe it or not, I actually do feel myself changing. More and more, when I see myself in the mirror, I'm not pissed off by what I see. I recently discovered that I have a good smile. This thing, this being okay with who I am and what I look like, or at least most of the time - this is new. And I guess I like it. I like not hating myself all the time.

This is not a Tavros thing, not an if-I-say-I'm-confident-I'll-be-confident thing. I'm actually feeling a lot better about myself.

This is a good development.

Olivia

PS. And yet, on the other hand, when I read Cyrano I can still completely identify with his attitude. He thinks he repulses women with his appearance, and better to stay away; there are examples from the beginning that seem to prove him wrong, but his stubbornness in belief in his truths sabotages him until his death. Once I fix myself in the broader way, maybe move on to more specific categories.

Wheeeeeeee?

I have realized that my attitude toward myself has been changing lately. I find myself more and more likely to be okay with what I see in the mirror, and I've been mentally beating myself out of most negativities. I'm thinking the struggle I put up against my friend a few weeks ago, when she told me I should see a therapist and I replied that I could fix myself or at least live with my stupid problems, actually did something. I'm thinking I must have conned myself into being nicer to myself, and right now I'm pretty okay with that.

That said, social insecurities are peaking. More and more in the past week I've found myself fretting over what other people think of me - whether or not they actually like me, whether or not I annoy them. These worries are stupid and needy but for some reason I can't shake them, and I find myself saying things that I regret simply because the reactions throw me off.

And it's also been kind of a roller coaster (hnngh cliches why). The last ten days have made up one big moodswing filled with a lot of little moodswings, but I'm finding my ups higher than usual, and my downs, if not also higher, then at least around the same and maybe not quite as severe most of the time.

I'm taking on a few rather ambitious side projects, which will be fun. And it'll mean that in my down time - what time I have, at any rate - I will have something to do, rather than just lying around worrying about homework.

On average, things are pretty okay. Pretty good.

Olivia