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[red-sky-take-warning]

Me playing Pokemon GO:

Me: ehhh I'm not so sure about Team Valor... I picked it because my Ingress friends picked it, but I think Team Instinct would have suited me better...

(Candela is revealed)

Me: MY QUEEN

[red-sky-take-warning]

Oh my god, something just occurred to me:

Is my life actually...

...going well?

I’ve got a new job that doesn’t make me want to leap from tall buildings, I think someone might actually like me for REAL this time, and my dad somehow picked out the exact turntable I wanted for my birthday without me even telling him? And I actually feel like I might be regaining my ability to exercise, which I’ll prove by doing a 5K run/walk on the 25th??

AND I SLEPT FOR NINE SOLID HOURS LAST NIGHT??!!?

I was about to say “this is great,” but experience tells me that this is the part where I fuck it all up. Maybe my fear of fucking it up will fuck it up? Or maybe I don’t have ENOUGH fear of fucking it up, and THAT’S what will fuck it up!!

[red-sky-take-warning]

Alright, Tumblr Reboot time.

This may take a second.

[red-sky-take-warning]

I thought about making a small memorial shrine in my room, to offer myself a place to sit and mourn my intangible losses...

...but then I remembered that I was never the sort of person to visit grave sites and the like. So, for the meantime, I’ll just say my final farewells here:

Dear Unrealized, Now-Impossible Fantasy Version of My Future,

Farewell, and thank you for all that we had together.

Your time with me was not meaningless, and even though you were never realized, you still got me through some difficult and busy times. We spent college together. You persuaded me to finally get up off my ass and change myself toward the end of 2015. You were a little distant with me when I got my first post-college job, but you were still there. I clung to you way longer than I probably should have.

In April, everything changed. A family friend passed away, but I also got a new job, and my best friend got a new job as well, and my grandparents FINALLY, after a very long family struggle, got approved for their assisted living facility... it was a busy month, and a lot was happening to me and to those around me. Some was bad, but it was mostly good--I started to feel like my life was turning a corner. I saw light at the end of a light-years-long tunnel.

By the time May arrived, I didn’t even know that you, my dear dream, were already dead.

Since I had put you on the back-burner for a while, your death was kinda strange to me. I found out about it after my parents and I got back from Dayle’s memorial. We all left that service in tears, and it seemed almost unfair to me that the world would carry on with business-as-usual when someone who had lived such an incredible, amazing, interesting, and joyful existence was gone. Like, how very DARE this world--does it not realize what it’s lost??

And then, with the kind of timing that I thought only happened at the points in stories where the writer decides to heap a bunch of shit onto their main character to see if they can take it, I got the news that one of the biggest dreams I’d had for my future was now permanently unable to be realized.

At first I would have probably said that I was “crushed,” but looking back on it--even though it was only a day and a half ago--I think that might be overstating it.

I was surprised, certainly, but if we’re talking the 5 Stages of Grief here (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance), my denial of your, uh, permanent implausibility was actually pretty short. I just said “WHAT?!?” a few times and then skipped pretty quickly to anger.

I was angry at myself, at you, at the situation, at the people involved, at how badly my day was going... To be fair, I went into that day expecting to have to mourn ONE loss, and now here I was having to cope with two. That's twice the grief I expected, and I wouldn’t even get to enjoy my Sunday night out with my friends the next day because I had to work!

I hit the “Bargaining” stage the next morning, while I was watching “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” and again, it was short. I really identified with Kimmy in the fifth episode of Season 2, and (without dropping any major spoilers), when Kimmy is talking about how she’ll just wait two years to live her dream, she says “I can do two years standing on my head!” At first, I thought like that too--I was like “yeah, I’ll wait! Maybe if I wait long enough, this dream will become plausible again!”

That thought process was interrupted when I realized “hey, wait a minute, Kimmy is in the wrong in this situation, and the show is implying that those two years will be wasted on waiting for a dream that may or may not come true, when she could be doing something better with that time instead.”

So I went to work in the throes of Depression. Whenever anyone asked me how I was, I said “oh, y’know, my family friend died, my friends are all seeing a movie without me right now,” and then I’d tell them about you, dream, and exactly how you ended, finishing the list off with a sarcastic “but other than that, I’m alright.”

Time crawled past at work, and while my coworkers complained about how slowly time was crawling past, all I could think about was that which I’d lost. You were dead! My dream was Jossed (it’s a trope, look it up), and however long it would take, I just had to accept that.

I had to accept it.

So here we are.

Grief comes in waves--one minute you’re floating on your back in seemingly-calm waters, but then, when you’re not paying attention, a wave breaks right over your head, flipping you upside-down and filling your mouth with brine and stuffing your face in the sand. I know that, and I expect it to happen a few times in the near future. Maybe even a few times in the far future.

But for now, there is nothing I can say that can erase you, my once-beloved fantasy future, from my personal history. There is no action I can take to make you possible again. And now, of course, there is reality--a lot of things are currently going on that I do not have the luxury of ignoring, and most of them are either a) good things, or b) things that I must complete/endure now in order to make good things happen later. My new reality has no place for outdated dreams like you, and I accept that.

My life HAS turned a corner. My future is bright. Dream, I thought you were my future, but as it turns out, you’re part of my past.

Goodbye, fantasy, and maybe you be replaced as swiftly as possible. (Yes, I realize that may sound a bit callous, but it was awfully callous of you to die like that, so I’d say we’re about even. It’s okay, though... I forgive you.)

With Love,

Present-Day Me

[red-sky-take-warning]

I’m thinking of doing a sort of “tumblr reboot”...

I’ll unfollow everyone except people I can immediately identify as IRL friends, favorite webcomic artists, or specific Tumblr accounts that I follow for certain reasons (like do-not-touch-my-food or the color gradients one), and then I can start fresh on this website and... I dunno, just...

*sigh*

Okay, so today was just really, really bad. I went to a funeral for a dear family friend (and of course bawled my eyes out like a baby, because it doesn’t really matter how long a person is sick, you’re still never REALLY prepared for when they finally pass away), and then, when I got home, I found I had suffered another loss, this one of a more intangible variety.

I didn’t exactly lose a person or a creature, but a dream... without going into too much detail, I’d envisioned something going a certain way, convinced myself it was possible, built some aspects of my life around it, and then found out that it probably wasn’t meant to be--and then, tonight, I found out that it was 100%, unequivocally, without-a-doubt, DEFINITELY NOT going to happen, EVER. And it hurt.

It hurt a lot.

Again, neither loss came as a surprise to me, but they are losses nonetheless, and as someone who doesn’t really believe in any sort of higher power besides other people (I’m a secular humanist) as well as someone who doesn’t really have a lot of recent experience with intense personal loss, finding ways to mourn and grieve is always tricky for me.

It usually goes like this: I sit, and watch videos, and cry, and eat food, and then cry some more, and then I go to sleep. I get up, I go to work, I eat food, I cry again, and I go to sleep again. I do this over and over for a while, and time just kinda passes. Occasionally I’ll take a moment to wish I was doing something more productive in memory of whatever it is I’ve lost, or something to make it seem like all the time and mental energy I invested in these intangibles wasn’t all in vain... and then I’ll go back to watching videos.

I will eventually get over this, but I do have a tendency to think (when I’m in the moment) that this negative feeling will last forever. I am getting way better about reminding myself that it’s only temporary, and that really helped me to stick with my new job two weeks ago.

Oh yeah, did I not mention that here? At the end of the month, my new part-time job at the local print shop will become my new FULL-time job... I’m only making a dollar more an hour, but I leave there every day feeling happy. That was mainly what made my life feel like it was turning a corner, and the reason I’m speaking about said corner-turning in the past tense is because this whole blasted weekend seems like the stone that fell into the machine and stopped all the gears from turning. This weekend is the big-ass pothole on the highway that blew out a tire and spilled everyone’s drinks. This weekend is the drunk asshole that crashed the house party and ruined everything by starting a fistfight in my garage! THIS WEEKEND IS A TORNADO THAT PICKED UP MY LIFE, TORE IT APART, AND SPREAD IT ACROSS FOUR NEIGHBORING COUNTIES AND OVER STATE LINES!!

And this weekend didn’t even have enough mercy to END yet.

Now, I must dig. Somewhere down inside me is the same optimism and determination I had two weeks ago. I knew I had to get past the difficult times, because once I did, everything was going to be so awesome for me... and for a brief moment in time, it was. 

When a person has that sort of fortitude, it doesn’t tend to be temporary. It’s still in there somewhere, and when I find it, I will once again be unstoppable.

[red-sky-take-warning]

Remember that guy I wrote about a week or so ago? Well, it turns out he died--heart attack or something--but it also turns out his reputation as “scary” wasn’t entirely undeserved, as he was kinda-sorta-stalking a 16-year-old girl. Sooo, yeah, mixed feelings.

[red-sky-take-warning]

My heart just broke for this customer I had years ago.

There was this older guy who always came into our store... he wore kinda tattered clothing, smelled pretty bad, penciled on his mustache with black eyeliner, and only shopped late at night when the store was relatively empty. Basically he gave off “creeper” vibes in just about every way, and my coworkers noticed--they nicknamed him “Scary Larry” (I don’t know whether or not Larry is his real name) and I heard a rumor that he got kicked out of other stores for doing some sort of public-indecency-type activity in the bathrooms.

My coworker Susan and I both thought that he was probably just some guy--possibly poor or homeless, which would explain the bad hygiene, torn clothes and small transactions--and that all the rumors about him were probably false.

But just now, I realized that he always struck me as someone who was, in a weird sort of way, self-aware. (Not self-aware enough to abstain from penciling on a mustache with a black eyeliner pencil, but whatever.) He might have only shopped at night because he hated when people stared at him with the disgust that they undoubtedly did. You know, the look that I probably gave him the first time I saw him.

I also realized that people have looked at me in the same way before, for one reason or another (usually it’s because of my weight), and I thought of all the horrible thoughts and stereotypes that people must have been assigning to me in their minds. “She’s gross.” “She’s lazy.” “She’s a slob.” I remembered how I internalized those messages, and in my mind it went from being “she’s gross” to “I’M gross,” and I think that to this day. I remembered how much it sucked, how much it continues to suck, and I thought I would never wish that on anybody or anything--or at least not a complete stranger, perhaps a guy who was down on his luck and just trying to pay for his damn oranges in peace.

When he came through my checkout line, he might not have noticed. My smile might have been professional enough to cover it up. It’s possible, though, that he thought that all he wanted to do was buy his oranges and pencils, and he was still unable to escape judgment, even from the pudgy, awkward moron, standing before him in Wal-Mart khakis and a badly-tucked-in green polo.

Yeah, I’m not pretending for a second that I’m better than anyone else who ever saw this guy. Maybe he was actually a creeper; I don’t know... but as I sat here, thinking about it, I burst into tears.

I cried for him, and I cried for me, and I cried for anyone else who has ever been a victim of the same hatred, internalized that hatred, and now has to listen to it all day long. I cried for everyone else who goes out of their way to avoid human contact not because they want to, but because they feel it’s just “easier” that way. I cried for the people who may be the nicest people the world has ever known if anyone would just ignore their face and give them a chance.

And hell, I cried because maybe I’m just imposing my own internal struggle onto some guy who may or may not be called Larry, and I’m just being a whiny little narcissist who’s upset because the only person, literally the only person, that thought they were still pretty after their age hit double digits is now so fucking far away that he might as well be on the Moon.

Either way... 

To all the people who are victims of their own internalized hatred: I sympathize with you. I love you. I hope you learn how to take care of yourself. And you don’t deserve this. You’re probably way better than you think you are, better than you even thought possible, and I hope my voice will be a kind one that you can use to drown out a little of the inner negativity.

[red-sky-take-warning]

It’s tough to grieve the loss of something intangible.

If a dream dies, has anything really died, or do you just need to get your head out of your ass?