I always have to ask myself if EPCOT or the Magic Kingdom is my favorite park, and it’s such a fine line that it really depends on the day. But dayum, do I love EPCOT.
This was a first for us – EPCOT was hosting its first International Festival of the Arts, and I absolutely had to get down there to see what they had to offer. Also, I will use anything as an excuse to get to Disney World. Enjoy some photos from around the world and of some truly beautiful art, aka my selfies. JK. Sort of.
Not much to say here – what can you say, really?
20 years ago last December, on Christmas Day, the nation was forever changed by the violent death of this little girl. She was America’s Daughter – we all wanted justice for her, had never seen anything like her! In a time before Toddlers & Tiaras, her eerily overpainted face and overly wise eyes unsettled us all. Who could do this? The American people craved answers.
Was it an intruder? Her parents? Her brother? A fan? We still don’t know, and probably never will. This child’s short lived life is arguably one of the most famous true crime stories in American history.
A body is just that – a body. A shell. Knowing that and feeling that are two different things, however. Death hag and true crime fan that I am, we pitstopped on the way to Atlanta to St. James Episcopal cemetery in Marietta, GA yesterday to pay our respects to the late JonBenét Ramsey. Her name evokes such an image – I think the majority of us have memories attached to her. The only thing I can say is that being there … it felt surreal. I wish I had a better word, but that’s it. It felt bigger than I could understand.
JonBenét rests in a peaceful corner of a quiet cemetery in a town that passes her by without a second glance – it seems almost laughable, considering her un-lived years have been rocked by near-constant controversy and scandal. With her half sister, Beth, and her mother, Patsy, nearby, she is Just Another Little Girl. Gone too soon. You could hardly believe you were standing over the shell of one of the most horrifying moments in the history of our nation, and truly, of time. It seemed almost inappropriately quaint, but maybe that’s the point. I don’t know. None of us do, do we?
It was brought to my attention the other day that I have been somewhat of a hypocrite, as far as relationships go.
Rewind about five months ago. A classmate (and now friend) of mine was asked if she had any plans to start looking for an apprentice funeral director/embalmer position, and she answered no. She was going to finish school and then see what her boyfriend wanted to do, as far as his career and his location plans were. She looked right at me.
“Don’t judge me.” She said.
I scoffed.
“Too late,” I replied back.
Fast forward. With the same classmate/friend in tow at the Midwinter convention that we attended as a class last week, I found myself saying shades of the same. “I don’t have any plans to look for an apprenticeship right now. I want to really focus on school and then see where my boyfriend is at at that point, because one of us may move if a job opportunity comes up.”
Erika called me right out, and rightfully so.
So, I was fired from the funeral home.
Again.
One day shy of the one year anniversary of the first time I was fired.
Ahhhh, life. You never, ever, ever fail to keep me on my toes.
I missed class yesterday morning, which never happens. I set my alarm for the wrong time, I mixed up my days, totally goofed – but this meant that I could go into work early, and I was really excited to go into work. I miss work, I hate that school takes me away from work and that I don’t get to be as present as I want to be, as involved as I long to be. I didn’t text Tom and tell him that I was sneaking in a few hours early because I wanted to surprise him. Yesterday was the first day that felt like fall to me, the leaves are starting to change, the air was nice and cool, the sun was bright. I felt fine, I remember thinking that – I feel fine today. I walked into the funeral home with a vial of shaved citrine in my hand (said to bring success in ones career) and an Elvis magnet, stoked to add them to the rest of the oddities collected on my desk.
I made it as far as the doorway. I didn’t even get to put my bag down.
So, I went on a road trip last week to see Melanie Martinez in Memphis, and that was really exciting and wonderful and I love her dear little Cry Baby heart infinitely – but there is something else a liiiiittle more important to do in Memphis that I’ve been wanting to do since I was a zygote.
Like, DUH! You go to see the King! People – after years and years and years of begging for what seemed like a trillion times to a trillion people, the stars aligned and I finally got to go walking in Memphis and see G-R-A-C-E-L-A-N-D! BUT! More on all that later.
Now that I have gotten better about flying, I was totally willing to fly in and out of Memphis so that we would have a little bit more time to vacation. There was one small fly in the ointment of my travels, however – if I drove, I would get to go to Mississippi and Arkansas. Two previously unchartered terrains on my growing list of states that I’ve visited.
So drive we did.
Ugh.
Driving.
(This is me doing really well at being in the car for what turned out to be a nearly 12 hour stretch)
Oddly enough, I have been surprisingly calm about turning 30 – maybe even a little excited, dare I say? In all honesty, my calmness has been entirely shocking to me. Typically by the time September rolls around, I start to get that metallic, anxious taste at the back of my throat because I start thinking about aging and lost opportunities and all of the societal terrors that are ever so kindly imposed on women. In the week before my birthday, I am at my worst – crying, panicking, and most of all, in an endless cycle of self-loathing and self-criticizing. I have never handled birthdays well, no matter what the age – any mention or reference to aging has always been enough to make me clench my buttcheeks hard enough to suck an entire chair up my ass, legs and all – but somehow, when it comes to this one, I feel cool. Seriously. I feel pretty cool. This tells me that I’m either growing up or about to have an absolute mental breakdown – is there even really a difference between the two?
I have been living with a pain in my neck and shoulders for the past few days that feels like some sort of stress-born entity has planted roots and taken up a permanent residence inside of me, tendrils coiling lovingly around the knobs of my spine. Very matter of factly did it move in, like I had no choice or say in it at all. I never even thought to fight it, never even thought I had the right to. I am and always was bound to be the corporeal home of this being – was always meant to carry this weight.
I lay in my bed and I study the world around me through the tiny screen that is my way out – I compare, I compare, I hate myself, I hate everything about who I am. How did all of these lucky people that I know get to become able, capable, confident? What exactly is it that happened to me to make me so hard on myself? I try to look back on my life and pinpoint it – was it a childhood trauma, some deep, emotional disturbance? I don’t know. But every day feels like I’m tip-toeing closer to the edge of a cliff.
What happens next? What do I do? Who am I? I don’t know.
Agitated, agitated. I’m happiest alone, but I crave motion, company. Stillness makes me nervous. I don’t feel like myself anymore, I haven’t for years – I constantly think back to the “old me” and wish I could find her again, she was fun, she was free, she wasn’t afraid. Instead I feel restless, old, stuck, uneasy, caged – I can NEVER see the forest for the trees. Summer is hard for me – summer is always hard for me. I want to say that I am not okay, I want to scream it as loud as I can until someone hears me, but I can’t find my voice, and even if I somehow could, what would matter? What would change? Those who want to help me annoy me most. I’m too tired to talk, it takes too much energy to try to make anyone understand that I feel like I’m already gone.
I am aware that time is flying and I can feel it, sticky and hot, as it rushes by and sucks the breath out of me, but somehow I still seem to be exactly where I’ve always been, watching everyone else pass me by.
Always watching.
Jealousy and spite are getting the best of me, I am a bent and bowed creature, labored and wanting. I don’t want to work, I don’t want to fight, I don’t want to do anything at all. I feel dumb, sluggish, my once attractive features warped into a constant ugliness that is all that I can ever see or fixate on. If I could pick myself to death, skin clean from the bones, I would, and with a smile.
I have lost sight, I have lost hope, I am unfocused. I search for answers, I have no answers, there are no damn answers. I hurt and I hurt and I hold it because I can’t bear to share it, can’t stand the feeling of my guts hitting the floor as I pour them out.
If there is anything that I can say with absolutely certainly about my early childhood, it is that homosexuality was no big deal. It was a concept that I quickly became familiar with, and I knew all that I needed to know about it: it was just something that some people were.
Though I became familiar with homosexuality at a very young age and knew and understood what it meant to be homosexual, it was just a part of my life that required no further explanation. I cannot stress that enough. I never had to ask my parents awkward questions, I never needed further help on the topic. As I saw it, some boys kissed boys. Some girls kissed girls. It seemed really simple. I just innately knew from a very early age that the gender of who I loved or was sexually active with didn’t matter, and honestly, it just seemed like a really stupid thing to get your panties in a bunch about.
I got to live in this beautiful bubble for awhile – where gay was gay and gay was totally okay – but by the time I reached middle school, the jig was up. I started to understand that being gay wasn’t so black and white – rather, it wasn’t a thing that you just could be with any semblance of ease. I felt like a fish out of water when I started to look around and see the behavior towards homosexuality – it was “disgusting, unnatural, perverse”. Even more confusing was when people were accused of being gay that weren’t – like the term “gay” was a bad thing? Something actually insulting to be called? In middle school, if you didn’t throw a football well enough, you were a “faggot” – even if you WEREN’T. It was sort of like how I learned that “fat” was an insult that could be hurled at anyone, and it was the worst thing – it would bring a twiggy, long legged girl to her knees with self doubt. I had always been fat and knew it was “bad”, so I accepted what was dealt to me – but I never could quite understand how being gay had similar connotations. This was the first time that I began to make gay friends, and I bonded with them in solidarity, and fought for them like a lioness defending her cubs. But the wool had been pulled back from my eyes – the naiveté of early childhood was gone.
Then I got a little older. High school. You can only imagine all I learned about “being gay” in those hallowed halls. Still, I was confused. Why was this a bad thing? Why were my friends hurt and abused because they were gay? The bullying dialed up to 11. The Southern Baptists told my friends matter of factly that there wasn’t a space in heaven for them if they didn’t change. I watched them cry as they turned from their churches out of fear and shame, watched them live in fear of their parents finding out who they truly were and what the cost of the truth would be. “Faggots” were targeted, chairs kicked out from under them, their lives a constant living hell. To this day, I thank God that we were the last generation before social media really became rampant – because I don’t think some of those jackals would have let some of my friends out of high school alive.
As I left high school, I left with one truth: in the eyes of the great majority, it was somehow not okay to be gay. And if you were gay, you either un-gayed yourself and un-gayed yourself quick, according to the Southern Baptists – or you hide your “shame” for the rest of your life.
Well … I sure as hell wasn’t going to stand for that.
As it always does, and as none of us truly believe it will, life goes on after high school, and what we were afraid of then becomes the catalyst to who we will inevitably become – whether we choose to stay afraid, or if we use what we suffered as a launching pad to our personal evolution. At this time in my life, I was pretty clear on hatred towards gays. My gay friends, previously proud and bold and jubilant, ran back into the closet and slammed the door with the force of a thousand suns.
And throughout all this time, I was just there – I was there when they hid their true selves in public, and I was there when, as we grew up and away from high school a little bit, they tiptoed, absolutely terrified, back out of the closet. I was there for them, because they were there for me. After all, I had always been different: fat, mental problems, a little dramatic, weird as hell, way too damn much eyeliner – and the gay community embraced me with open arms. I quickly and happily blended in to the gay clubs where we all sought refuge from the real world with a relieved glee. Many, many happy nights spent drinking and dancing, covered in glitter, light up the memories of my early twenties like so many stars now.
(Funny thing, though – you always wanted to get out of the parking lot and into the club as quickly as you could – you could just never be sure who was watching, and how safe you’d be. This is around the time that I learned about hate crimes.)
There’s a secondary part of this story, too. While I’ve always designated myself to ally – defender and militant supporter of the LGBTQA community – the truth is that I’ve always grown up knowing that I liked both boys and girls. And not just that. I liked trans girls and boys, too. I have never have labeled my sexuality for the same reasons that, as a child, I just couldn’t understand the big deal about all of this – and also because I just didn’t really know where the hell I fit in. And though I tended to crush mostly on boys and slept mostly with boys – but simultaneously liked girls, trans people, and basically anyone who interested me – I just thought that, at most, I was straight with a dash of extracurricular interest. Maybe bisexual – but even then, I didn’t feel like that fit. I couldn’t claim that, because there was more to it, a wider berth.
As I grew older, really, only in the last year or so, and my knowledge of queer culture deepened, and I realized what I am: pansexual. “One who can love sexuality in many forms. Like bisexuality, but even more fluid, a pansexual person can love not only the traditional male and female genders, but also transgendered, androgynous, and gender fluid people.”
FINALLY. Something that makes sense.
So when I think about what happened in Orlando over the weekend, I can’t help but feel sickened. Sickened because I know what it’s like to want to be with your friends in a safe place. Sickened because I’ve watched my gay friends be broken and abused for who they are. Sickened that some assholes right now are coming out to say that these people that were senselessly slaughtered deserved this because they aren’t right with Jesus. Sickened because this has been my community all along and I was too ignorant to realized it.
I thought earnestly about what I could do to help – the answer is not much. There is just no way to plug the gaping hole left in the LGBTQA community, or our nation. But what I can do is claim this as MY community now, and fight LOUDER & HARDER – fight tooth & nail for our rights to safety and freedom. I am a part of the LGBTQA community, formally and proudly. MY community was attacked. I am not okay with that. And while kind, no amount of thoughts & prayers will fix what has been broken. We have got to take a look around, every single one of us, and find the common denominator in these issues.
And then we have to fight like hell to stop it.
So here’s what you can do. If you are a straight ally, start talking about why what happens hurts and disgusts you. Start talking to anyone who will listen. Hell, even a retweet will do – don’t ignore this because you think you aren’t involved, or because this isn’t your community. This is not just about gay people, but your brothers and sisters in humanity. Fight for them.
If you are a girl who likes girls but also likes boys and also likes trans people but don’t know where you fit in – you fit in right here with the rest of us. You are a part of this, and don’t you dare feel any differently. Fight for them.
And finally, to those who oppose homosexuality for religious reasons, I won’t and could never change your minds, and I respect that: but I do beg you to be civil, gracious, and generous. Stop telling people they are going to hell. Stop making Christians look like terrorists themselves. Stop being cruel. Stop turning away from people that are different than you. And most of all, get down on your knees and thank God that it wasn’t your church that was attacked – because it could easily have swung that way (and has been before in the past) – and rise above your egos. FIGHT FOR THEM.
If a kid like me could figure out the truth about homosexuality at the age of six – IT’S NO BIG DEAL – then I think we should all be able to grasp it. Support it or not, whatever, do your thing – but remember this: who other people sleep with is really no damn big deal. And one should not have to DIE or even ever feel one second of fear in order to assauge the insecurities of a sick and twisted man who let his ignorance and fear breed hate.
To those that were lost in Orlando last weekend, eternal love flows as your community weeps for you, and you will never be forgotten.
I’ll be thirty soon. In just a little over 3 months.
It feels hard to believe and also just right, you know? Like, wow. I can’t believe I’m not 11 and listening to Hanson and waiting for Taylor Hanson to eventually deflower me. And also like wow, I can’t believe I’m 29 and listening to Hanson and still wish it had been Taylor Hanson who deflowered me. Somewhere in between all that.
I’ve become quite introspective as my twenties have gradually started to draw to a close, which I feel is probably very normal – sometimes I look back at the last decade and ask myself “what the hell did you waste all that marvelous, youth-laden time for? You should have done so much more!” And other times, I look back and I laugh and cry and thank God Almighty that I have seen and done so many of the things that I have, because life moves so quickly that sometimes I forgot how great it has been – and truly, life has been kind of wild.
Though I’m reaching this milestone birthday that (to me, at least) is supposed to really signify the crossover into full blown adulthood, this place where I should be totally together and everything everyone expects of me – there are times where I feel less sure of who I am than ever before. Truth be told, I never really know what to think of myself. Do any of us? Perhaps this is the last great hang up of my twenties – perhaps it will take much, much longer to figure out. I recognize that I get caught up a lot in living a social media life. I want my life to look pretty and I want you all to think that I’m interesting and fun and worthy of love, and I want to be someone that you want to know. I am very lonely a lot of the time, many times when surrounded by people I love – but I don’t want you all to think of me as lonely. I want to talk to you about my mental health problems, but I worry that I’ll do or say something and you’ll think I’m just “crazy”. And most of all, I worry that you think something must be wrong with me because I am single. That’s the greatest worry of all. Sometimes I want to show up on the internet performing tricks, juggling fire, belting arias, anything just to distract you from the fact that I’m single – because it makes me feel different. And feeling different makes me feel bad.
So I worry. And that’s silly, isn’t it? To worry about what people MIGHT be thinking of you. But boy, I am the queen of it.
There are many days where I struggle with who I am and with my life’s path, because let’s face it – three months won’t make me a together kind of girl. I won’t magic myself into adulthood just because the calendar says so. And I feel like a lot of times, I don’t have many people to turn to for guidance – I just don’t know any other morbidly obese, lipstick fiending, bipolar morticians who burst into tears at even the thought of Elton John… I’m kind of my own species, it feels like. I envy those who are excitedly getting married and having children right now, because that is so very, very adult. No one could ever question those people because they are doing typical adult things, and that makes them official adults, right? It is ridiculous to feel this way, because I’m literally envious of people who are getting things that I don’t want – but what I do want is to feel normal, and there are a lot more save the dates and baby bumps out there than there are morbidly obese, lipstick fiending, bipolar morticians. I’m not kidding when I say that sometimes it is my biggest shame that I am not another wife in a Lilly Pulitzer dress getting excited over flatware – I wish I had that in me, but it’s like a synapse that is misfiring – I can’t will myself to be her. I constantly try to cover up my life like a cat turd, because somehow I’ve convinced myself I should be ashamed of it. I still catch myself willing life to fast forward to the “good part” where I magically become some normal person who isn’t always so very, very, THIS.
But on good days, on days where I haven’t sunk too low into my worries, I try to grab ahold of myself, shake myself by the shoulders and remind myself that what I constantly fail to acknowledge is that this IS the good part. It’s MY good part. And it doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s good part.
Like I said, on a good day, when there are no triggers or setbacks or tensions, I love my life with such ferocity that my heart could burst. I feel gifted, truly, with the one thing that shames me the most: being single. If the perfect man or woman comes along for me, that’s bitchin, and I’ll be stoked – but that relationship could never be more valuable than the one that I’ve been building with myself as I am forcibly dragged into adulthood. There’s a reason I’m single, and I’m not ashamed of it (at least not today – it’s a good day) – I’VE GOT MORE TO LEARN FIRST. I’ve got further to journey before someone else can come along, because I am, for some reason, lucky enough to be given both the gift of self knowledge, and the time required to truly learn who you are. I know that by society’s standards, I’m supposed to be a wife and a mom by now, and growing up, I never really thought either way about what would happen to me when I got older, but I assumed it would look like everyone else’s life – and the moment I realized that it didn’t and that it wouldn’t, well, I have been scrambling to camouflage my oddities ever since.
But really – when you divorce yourself from what you think your life should look like and focus on what actually makes you happy and who you want to be (and not who you want people to think you are), there is this freedom that you would have never ever been able to dream of. My grasp of this concept ebbs and flows, depending on the day. There is sadness, too, when you align yourself with this line of thinking, because with that acceptance also comes a certain type of goodbye to a person you’ll never be – goodbye, Ashley in a Lilly Pulitzer dress, picking out shades of paint for the guest bedroom – but the pain feels worth it, somehow. Like that girl had to die so I could truly live. I mean, that’s sort of harsh, but you feel me. I’ll never know (well, I guess I will, I’ll ask Jesus about it after I die, right after I ask him who really killed Jon Benet Ramsey) why I’m meant to be eternally marching to the beat of my own drum, but who knows – maybe I’ll magically figure it out when I turn 30. For now, I’ll just keep wondering and marching. Well, maybe I’ll march more towards October – it’s getting hot outside here and I’d like to avoid boob sweat.
What I wish I could stop being ashamed of is simply just being who I am and feeling the need to explain away all of the things that I see as flaws – how the hell did I get to be this way?! Why am I the rudest person my self has ever encountered? And what I need to constantly remember is to STOP COMPARING MY LIFE TO OTHER PEOPLE!! We can all be happy and different and it doesn’t make me less to be just one person and not part of a pair. If the greatest relationship I ever have is with myself, then that’s awesome. If I find someone else who is a match for me, that’s awesome, too. But this mentality of thinking that I’m not enough or not on the same level as my peers because I don’t have a baby or a husband/wife – I hope that toxic thinking is the first damn thing to go when I turn 30. Because I’m more than enough. Hell, I’m too much – and not even in a braggy way. Just literally. I’m exhausting.
Above all things, I just want to be grateful for this season of MY life – all seasons, really. Things seem so difficult and meaningless and frustrating all of the time, and I complain the days away and bitch about what is and what isn’t – but if I had to be honest and sum my life up with one word (other than “lipstick”), the first thing that comes to mind is “fortunate”, and that kind of blows me away, you know? I was so surprised, when it appeared, quite taken aback – but then I nodded to myself. Yeah. Fortunate. Sounds about right.
Well, it is unofficially and undeniably already here – my very own case of summertime sadness (thanks, Lana, for giving such a clever name to that listless and unfulfilled feeling that haunts me from late May until early September).
I’ve got a lot going on these days. I’m working full-time as apprentice funeral director/embalmer, I’m going to school full-time (which involves traveling an hour and a half away twice a week to Piedmont Tech for biology classes after work – meaning I don’t get home until nearly 11 PM at night) – this plus the rest of the coursework for other classes and trying to maintain sanity as I learn an entirely new career that isn’t quite so simple (I mean, embalming a human body is a little more complicated than working as a cashier at Target, and I can say that with confidence, as I have done both) – my point being, I don’t feel good. I’m stressed, and stress is hard for me, because I take it to a bad place. I take it to a place of blame and self doubt and it is truly the sickest and cruelest thing I could ever do to myself. I feel sad a lot lately. I feel overwhelmed and stretched thin and all of the things that I love seem to go abandoned – like blogging, reading, crafting, etc. I know – at least I hope and pray – that all of this will be worth it in the end, when I have that degree and my apprenticeship is complete, but it is hard to give away your time when you feel like you have none to give, I guess. Especially now, during my personal hardest time of the year.
I’ve always been prone to summertime sadness – while everyone else is orgasming at the first mention of summer rolling in, I withdraw, isolate myself, go away inside – I’m mean, snappy, frustrated easily, angry – I don’t know why this is. I just know that I have never felt joy in this time. It has always felt like something to be suffered (probably because I have the good common sense to be revolted by 95 degree heat). And mentally, as far as my levels and mania and ups & downs go – this is where I always find myself at my worst and most desperate. So to have an already heaping amount of external stress dumped on top of a place where I’m already trying to hold a hand over an open wound in myself feels like a mountain I’m too tired to climb again this year. Already, my teeth are gritted, shoulders hunched, “can’t can’t can’t can’t” a steady mantra on repeat in my mind.
I thought that taking a mini vacation to Disney World before this semester began would be a really good thing for me, and in some ways it was (pics to come later) – I flew again for the first time in years and got over that major fear (HALLELUJAH), and that felt AMAZING – plus I had a great time with my best friends at one of my favorite places in the universe, so you really can’t complain about that. Sadly, some “triflin’ shit” got in the way of pure & total rest & bliss, and it put quite a bit of a damper on my relaxation, but that was also a learning opportunity, too, which I’m grateful for – I’m quite used to trying to constantly be everything for everyone, and I worry to the moon and back about everyone’s happiness but my own. Fortunately, the aforementioned “triflin’ shit” helped me to put my foot down and realize that sometimes I deserve to be happy, too. And I think that was a big step for me – and having that notion cinched in my mind is something I’m going to carry with me into the summertime sadness – I DESERVE TO BE HAPPY, TOO. There. I said it. It’s on the internet, so it must be true.
I think something important for me, at least during my bouts of summertime sadness, is to be mindful of my triggers, so I can at least step around the landmines as best I can vs losing my damn leg to one. But how to get past the depression? That, I have no clue. This is how I always end up around the beginning of September plotting my suicide and being irrational and out of control to the point that none of us – my family, my friends, myself – know how to handle me- I get so down that I can’t see up, only straight ahead.
I guess I just wanted to chat with myself on my blog and rationalize what I’m feeling. The first step to getting over or past any hurdle is to accept it, and I accept it – I’ve got the damn summertime sadness. It’s a real thing, it’s valid, and I’ve got to somehow gird my loins and try to make it through. And mostly I think I just needed a good whine, and writing always makes me feel better. I get so damn hung up about writing and trying to make it perfect, but none of it will ever be perfect – and I guess I’d rather post lots and lots of sullen or meaningless crap than look back and wish I had taken the time and wonder what I was thinking way back when.
Feel free to leave your favorite summer suggestions in the comments – just remember, I hate the outdoors, all people, places that aren’t air conditioned, and basically everything. Just kidding – I’d love to know your tips and tricks for summer fun – or, even more importantly, what helps you get through your own version of “summertime sadness”.
Till next time xx
Ashley in Wonderland 