Still sick, Sofia the 1st, some things I need to vent about.

Fun stuff first. I saw Sofia the First at my friend's house while baby sitting her son. That was awhile ago, but I recently found it on Netflix and decided that Amanda and I needed to watch it while we wait for the next season of My Little Pony. LOL, Amanda and I really love it and tonight we watched the wassiling episode- or rather their equivalent of Christmas. By the end, and it was a really good ending, we were both doing that ugly cry thing. It was great. But also while watching this show, I've been thinking about some things, things which I will get it in a few moments. 

Okay, more serious stuff. I'm still sick. We're going on about 2 and half weeks now. I started to feel better but for some reason couldn't quite shake it and it came back in full force. So I've been pretty miserable. Miserable in the sense that sometimes I don't realize that I have a fever and take some medicine fall asleep, and wake up drenched in sweat kind of miserable. But I have some antibiotics, am still drinking tea, and have some cough medicine to help. 

Being sick has made trying to do homework problematic. I am for the most part caught up (except for the last papers I need to write for this term) but I gave up on having A's in the classes. Fuck it. I just want to pass the classes and get on to the next term. I am so close to graduating and with everything that has happened over the last several months, I'm just burnt out and tired. Amanda is right, I do need to take time off instead of trying to go right into grad school. I need a break. But I don't want to be doing IEPG stuff, trying to plan a wedding (oh yeah, Amanda and I finally set a date), and doing grad school all at the same time. I'm sure I can do it. Or at least I think I can do it all, but while my brain says "Of course you can" my body and energy level says "Now just a moment sugar, you're gettin ahead of yourself here." Because I imagine all my inner voices to have some form of attitude and possible accents. 

One of my blogger friends was talking about fear and being too afraid to do things. She also talked about anxiety and worrying about everything. I get that. I lived in a sort of paranoid, completely pointless fear for over a year. I was scared to leave my house, scared to be seen enjoying my life even the least little bit. Shit I was scared to be seen walking and carrying in a sack of groceries, all because I had applied for disability and my stupid crazy aunt told me the gov. watches people who apply. I was scared that they would see me on a good day and I would get denied for have a few good days. Thankfully, I decided I didn't want to live like that anymore. 

But while, I got passed those fears, I am scared for all new reasons. Some of them are family related and completely normal, like a kid worrying for their parents. Some things I am scared of are completely irrational, like calling people I don't know. Granted that is left over from call center work and some hiring manager at Borders ripping me a new one right before I had a nervous breakdown. to this day, I don't like talking on the phone unless it is with someone I know and even then I tend to keep it short. Most of the time phone conversations with my Mom are about 20 minutes. The only people I talk to longer than that with are my Grandparents. 

Bringing back the things that I have been thinking about because of Sofia the First, I've been thinking about my current friendships. Most people who know me pretty well have either figured out or have been told that I am very much an introvert. I need time to recoup and recharge after a lot of things. No, it didn't used to be this bad but some health issues, soon to be dealt with, don't make it easy. I'm not expecting that to be a cure all either. But since getting involved with the IEPG a couple of years ago, I've come out of my shell little by little and made some friends on my own. I actually have more friends now than I ever did while in school. That brings forth a whole new slew of problems and social complexities that I don't think I was entirely prepared for.

My parents are pretty much hermits and in a lot of ways I am like them, especially when I get totally engrossed in writing- another scare factor I will get into in a bit. So when I call up my Mom and fuss about this situation or that situation or how I can't seem to understand why there is a seemingly unintentional lack of respect in some areas of friendship, my Mom says that I need to get a new set of friends, I kind of stop an wonder what for. Then I watch things like My little Pony and Sofia the First and realize that either I've got some really selfish and fragile friends or I just need to stop trying to stand up for myself and quit trying to put up boundaries. 

I understand that everyone has had trouble and trails in their lives and that people have had truly horrible things happen to them. I understand that some people will never get over these things and I would never expect or ask them to. It;s not right and its not fair. However, is it really fair to freak out on someone for trying to address something that upset them and they set up a boundary? I'm not even talking big issues, just something small? I've had a couple of friends do that to me and not just once but time and time again. It;s to the point that anytime I have an issue, I am afraid to address with them because I am worried they are going to freak out on me and either make me feel like shit for having an issue or feel like shit that they got so upset. So, instead, I've said nothing and things keep cycling over and over in my head and one of these days I will explode and it won't be pretty. And in the meantime I just get more and more bitter as time goes by. its not really in me to hate anyone, but it is in me to be furious that I can't even talk to someone about something small, talk to them like an adult, resolve it and move on. 

And more to the point, I can't even talk to these friends about how they have treated Amanda in some situations. Another friend of mine once made mention that I don't have much a back bone. In some cases, yes, that is true, I have a hard time standing up for myself, being assertive, and a lot of people take advantage of that. But when people start talking shit, belittle, and try to police Amanda and in her own home no less, that tiny back bone of mine gets really big and its all I can do to bite my tongue and keep from causing a scene. 

   

I would just treat this all as some learning experience from which I can grow from, and in a lot of ways it is. Except I don't like the person I am when I am constantly angry. I don't like how snappish I get, how down right bitchy, and given more toward gossip and venting to Amanda about it. She's got enough on her plate, she doesn't need to hear all of my issues. She should be focusing on finish her novel because her mentor from Grad school want to send it to her personal editor to try and get it published!!!

Now I will discuss why I am scared to write, or at least why I think I am afraid to. There are a lot of reasons. First it was that I could never get quite. Well, we have our own place and will be setting up the "Bowie room"/ office/ Library in its entirety over the next couple of days. So I will have a quiet space to work and room in which to spread out and set up story boards and whatnot. Sometimes I am scared to write because when I feel the urge, I am frustrated and feel guilty because I should be doing school work. I tried setting up a schedule but Amanda thinks with my health and how tired I am all the time, that I need to remove some of what I want to get done in a day from that and just take it a little bit at a time. Okay. I can do that, so these are things that I can easily work out and have to some degree. But the bulk of it is that I am actually scared to it down and write. I'm worried about my characters and if they are all the same, if I've given them enough flaws and if they can have room for growth. I am scared that I peaked when writing fanfiction. I am scared that I will only be a mediocre writer and that no one will take me seriously. Hell, most of my friends don't and that makes me less and less willing to share anything I've written, especially when some of them hate some of the things I write about. And I am most especially scared of writing because if I can't get my friends and even my own family to read my writing without begging, how the hell am I going to get an editor or an agent to look at it and then  publish it? 

I don't know how many times I have sat and cried over even the last bit of that. I've wondered if I should just give up on school. If I should forget about going to Grad school for writing. If I should just erase all my stories and burn all the printed hard copies, the disks, the flash drives, and wipe and rewrite the hard drives of my laptops where everything is saved. Amanda says no. Amanda and my parents think I have talent. Amanda thinks I hit a big milestone when writing fantiction and that I am going to hit more. That there is room for more development and growth. Do, I want to give up writing? I don't really know who I am without it. But at the same time, being scared to sit down and write, leaves me feeling a bit lost. And while feeling that way, and having all these new challenges with people I want to stay friends with and know I can build stronger relationships with, on top of finishing school, and everything else, is kind of exhausting. I always try too look at things from the perspective of "anything I learn, can be useful for personal growth but also in terms of writing". And also, the get up and keep moving. But sometimes, sometimes, a girl gets tired and needs to sit down, rest, recharge, and regroup. 

On a slightly more upbeat and kind of funny note. I won a cruise today. I have dyslexia and it took me 5-6 times to call my health insurance case manager back today. I called some out of service number that google was still doing quality assurance for and also Royal Caribbean cruise lines and won a cruise for two with nominal fees of course. I finally got the number right and got to talk to the health insurance guy. 

The next post will be happier, I swear, because I said fuck it last Friday and got some crafting done.