identity crisis

trigger warning: suicide

There are words, dancing and slipping and twirling in my head. And they don't come out. They stay there, time and time again. Whether it is emails to Liv, or the Christmas card for Ben, or the letters to Jay, or the rainbows- the dancing glittering rainbows that don't really require words, but contain them anyway- for Cassie.

And then they are gone, and I try to recreate them, and I cannot.

Sometimes they are stories that will never get told and exist in something that was once my memory, but is now worse than Limbo, for it doesn't exist at all. Some of them are stories of my life, and some of them are just stories. And none of them exist any more.

I can feel the jumble of 26 characters drifting away, the passion, the love ebbing down and away, and it's not like the tide because I cannot feel it coming back at all. There is no nipping in the middle of the night of words that get pressed to paper, or pixels to screen. They stay, circling in my head until they are gone.

I am losing my words and I do not know how to find them.

If you asked me six months ago, I would have killed myself and left no words why. And now, now I don't want to die, but still there are no words. There is nothing like comfort, yet there is so much to say. There is the blank screen, and the empty page, and the pens scattered across the room, and a blinking cursor.

I have written my whole life- it is what I am and who I am. I wrote them when I was broken and they were a comfort. I called out to the empty universe and sometimes it wrote back. And now? Now am I not quite so broken in that same way, but the words have gone with the broken. It's a different sort of broken, and I don't know how to fix it.

I am losing my words and I do not know how to get them back.

Once, I thought if I only stopped taking the pills, maybe I would be terribly miserable and depressed, but I could have my words. It wasn't to be. I stopped cold turkey and had vertigo and headshocks and dug up that old razor blade that I sneaked back out of Liv's room after he took it from me. And it was then, when I had rivers of red and I realised what I was doing to myself, I went back on the pills, and the vertigo stopped, and my head stopped shocking, and I lost the desire to dance lines across my skin in some attempt to feel, to breathe, to love, to create. I always said I would trade anything to get my words back if I lost them. But not this. Turns out there was too high a price to pay- who knew?

And the words stayed dancing and twirling and skipping and slipping in my head. Nothing came to pass.

Maybe this is growing up. Maybe the fact that I've been far better at getting out and DOING things is the point.

I think of Andy and of Garrett and of standing up and using action, and it's wonderful, and a rush, but then I think 'wouldn't it be nice if all the words in my head could join it?' and they never can. And maybe that's growing up, and maybe that's how it's supposed to go. I don't know.

I use/d words as my escape, as my outlet, as my screaming at an unfair world. I took all the unfairness of Timothy's assault and made them beautiful words, dancing a story of two unlikely male lovers across the pages. They, those two fictional men that Jay got me to fall in love with, got me through the worst of it- they kept my sanity. And in high school, when I thought I couldn't bear to live any more, the words skittered across the pages in some sort of cliched, tragic, suburbian poetry that Jason could probably recognise if he saw it. But they kept my sanity.

Now, now something else doesn't keep my sanity- it regulates it so I don't feel as if I am losing it. There is nothing to calm from, there is nothing to keep, for I already have kept it, if that makes any sense at all.

My words have defined me for so long, and now I activist around the place, and I volunteer for politics and believe that my actions make a difference. My words saved me, but my actions are bigger than me. And maybe that's how it's supposed to be, phone calls to people sick of politics, trying to get them to care [oh, how I love the crotchety people- they make this humanity seem real. It's what my words used to do], or protests, or actions, or organising groups of people in a united effort. Maybe it's trying to end a war, or speaking out about why 17-year old girls are NOT like Hitler, not even a little bit. Maybe that's what this is, this life, and that's how this is supposed to go.

So words, whatever you were, and whatever you are, and whatever you will be. Maybe this is goodbye, and maybe this isn't.

Maybe I am just lonely and missing people and missing actions and phone calls and ending wars and tagboard with handwritten signs. Maybe I am missing them instead of words and they are the pieces of my identity now. I don't know.

And you know what?

There's something terrifying, yet brilliant about that.

PostSecret at the U of M

So I attended, on the 23rd of October, the PostSecret event at the U of M. [That link takes you to the Facebook page, where you can see the 375 uploaded secrets from [mostly] my collection of postsecrets over the years.

The event started with Frank sharing some of his favourite secrets, as well as the stories behind them. Interwoven in this was the story of his parents, both not really 'getting' the postsecret thing [and it's true- I've found it's really hard to describe postsecret to someone, even after buying them the book and placing a personal secret on the last page]. Frank showed some secrets that were banned from the PostSecret books, for various reasons. And then he shared that Wal-Mart has refused to carry any of the books, which really surprised me. And made me gleeful a bit at the same time. Makes me like the books a little bit more. And then Frank concluded, and told the story of how his wife flew his father out for one of the PostSecret events, and I thought that was really touching, that his father started to get it. I wish my mother got it. I wish I'd mailed in that secret that I stuck in the back of her book. I wish PostSecret was something she and I could share. But I digress.

Then the mics opened up. And here's where it not only got really personal, but it was the point I'd been waiting for; sitting in a dark room with strangers and sharing secrets or stories, or asking Frank questions. And something odd happened. I got up and shared my secret. With 498 strangers. I talked about the secret that has changed my life, and still changes my life, in different moments everyday. Of how it's not even my postcard, but it is very much my secret. And I realise this is going to sound like I'm being coy or something, but I'm leaving that secret in that room, and in that bunch of secrets I linked to. Other people shared secrets, and stories, and cried, and hurt, and it was sad and beautiful all mixed into one. At the very end, a slideshow/video played.

When I left the event, someone I didn't know was going to be there- a friend- came up and approached me and told me how brave I was. I'm not sure if I'm brave. I'm not sure if I've ever been brave, in all the secrets I've kept or created. I've been human though, and so have the secrets, and I suppose that's all that matters. And I suppose that's it.

It feels like words can't really explain the experience of PostSecret, because as much as it is images and stories, it's also tears and laughter, and pieces of humanity that are allowed to just be. Putting that into some sort of adequate phrasing or elegant words ... I can't do that. So I hope this sufficed.

is it school tiem soon? Why yes, it is.

And I'm really excited about some of my classes this semester. And then after ... I get to go change the world. How exciting! How do these two classes NOT sound like some of the most amazing classes, ever? And uh, I think we can say that I'm in the discipline of medical geography, as that's what my senior thesis will *crosses fingers* be about. Not to mention I'll be interning at Children's Hospital for the semester as well.

Geog 3371W Cities, Citizens, and Communities

This course is about how structures of class, race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality combine to produce varieties of urban experience in the United States. The course will also deal with why the city--why urbanization as a distinctive process--shapes those social structures in particular ways. The course centers especially on the city as a crucial locus for capitalism and on capitalism as irrevocably a socially made and contested process. It is a hallmark of capitalism that it leads not only to the making of different kinds of urban environments and histories. It also relies upon and fosters social differences. Through discussion, lecture, case study readings (including two books and a variety of articles), and group projects we will try to come to a more layered understanding of what makes the American city tick.

GEOG 3411W Geography of Health and Health Care

This course surveys medical geography, a subdiscipline which encompasses a broad range of geographical work on health and health care. What distinguishes medical geography from the discipline of geography as a whole is its thematic focus on health and health care. It shares with the discipline a remarkable breadth of theoretical approaches, methodologies and sub-themes. In other words, medical geography does not differ from the rest of geography in theory or method. It is distinctive only in subject matter. This courses uses medical geographic examples to explore three groups of theoretical approaches in geography: ecological approaches, which systematically analyze relationships between peoples and their environments; spatial approaches, which employ maps and spatial statistics to identity patterns of single and associated variables; and social approaches, including political economy and recent humanist approaches, which address issues related to both space and place. Students in the course are encouraged continually to consider the relationships among research questions, philosophical assumptions, and appropriate methods as well as to question the complementarity and inherent tensions among different theoretical approaches.

Yay! Only 24 more days!

[[There's other classes too- they're just not cool enough to mention]]

This city is love.

Mpls is a lot of happiness all rolled up into one. Tonight I walked in a parade on short notice (side tangent: I never get to watch parades any more!), and then afterwards, the Mayor and I were heading the same way, so I got to talk to him and explain 'Atticus' to him. And then after that I thought it was such a nice night out, I would just walk home. I did, and took a few snapshots of my city along the way. And fell in love with it, just a little bit more.

Mpls is the best city in America, I think. I often tell people that half my heart belongs to Hilo, half to Mpls, and half to the Central African region. But there’s a different kind of giving of my heart to each. The Central African region is where my activist heart belongs, where the barest pieces of my humanity come out. It is my passion, and my heart beeps for it. Hilo was the place where I was lost and found pieces of myself, and learnt to love. It was a place to start over, to find some peace. Mpls, on the other hand, is a place to live when you’ve got some sense of the rest. It has infrastructure, skyscrapers, an awesome bus system, more lakes than you can know what to do with, and the river (not to mention a really kick-ass mayor). At some point more than a year ago, I was walking down Nicollet Mall and I had the sense that this city actually belonged to me, in the way that we can get possessive about cities. I think it was the people along the Mall, and the scent of roasting pecan nuts that pushed me over the edge. Every time I leave the city and return to see the skyline, I’m filled with this sense of home, something I hadn’t really felt since Hilo.

It is mine, and it is love.