I will tear right into you
with the hands that I have used
to hold myself upright.
I held myself alone together
for what felt just like forever
but I will fall apart tonight.

When my body stitched the holes in my skin,
you were there to dig right in.
I will fight the dark within me,
I will bleed it into you.
I'll be heavy on your shoulders
Force your strength out, make it true.
The only time that I felt fed
was with your hands over my mouth
To shield me from the poison lead
Once forged in Hell, the deepest south.

Slide a mile six inches at a time

Underneath the skin and jewelry,
hidden in her words and eyes
is a wall that's cold and ugly
and she's scared as hell.
Trembling at the thought of feeling.
Wide awake and keeping distance.
Nothing seems to penetrate her.
cause she's scared as hell.

I am frightened too.
I am scared like you.

- cold and ugly - tool

Offering my heart to God.

I know you better than I know myself.

I will choke until I swallow.

I'm starting to fear that I have no idea what or who I really am. Some guys at work joke around when they see my hair and piercings and ask if I'm a metal head or punk rocker. But I'm neither. I wouldn't fit in with either crowd. I don't really listen to metal and I'm a capitalist at heart. I get asked if I'm a lesbian probably more often than most girls do, and I don't think I am. Somehow, I portray a lot of different characteristics for a lot of different boxes but I hardly fit any single one. 

Then there's just my face and my figure that I can't quite accept. I feel like I'm made of all these big features, my nose, my chin, my neck and shoulders. I've always felt like I'm physically built too big and like I don't fit anywhere in the world, as if I take up too much space. I used to have a real problem dealing with this thought but I've grown to mostly be relaxed about the idea. The old me used to hide behind over-sized shirts and eat like a bird everyday to try to seem smaller. Now, I hardly give a fuck. I wear a bikini to the beach and tight blouses to work. I'm trying to keep less emphasis in my mind on my physique but the nagging is always there. I could always be ten pounds thinner. I believe I have a very distorted view of what I look like and I fear it will always be that way. It's hardwired into me to hate my body, as long as the numbers are too high. 

I wonder if one day I'll see a low enough number on the scale and I can actually be happy. Normally, I feel confident and attractive when I go out. I did my makeup as perfect as I could and I felt really pretty today. But later on, I started to sense the tightness of my clothes and how much my stomach is pushing out my shirt. And I start to believe this is all people see when they see me. How just plain big I am. I want to get a tattoo on my ribs but they're too wide. I want one on my thigh but the stretch marks make me want to cry. 

But I know by the numbers that I'm not fat at all. I try to compare myself to people I see to try to get a real impression of how I must look when others see me. I compare my body to girls who I believe are the same size as me. But it doesn't help. The part of me that thinks I'm big propels forward and makes comparisons with girls who are what I truly believe to be bigger than me. I know I'm not big but my soul doesn't believe it. I stopped starving myself to be small but the insatiable desire is still there and it's permanent. I will never, ever understand what I truly look like to people and it's one of the worst things I've come to know.

You are the voice that's been calling me back home.

Lately I've been reading a lot about investing and making a budget for the next five years of my life. It's really made me feel like an adult for the first time ever and I feel like I really do have some control over the path my life will lead. I'm finding that a lot of other things in life are analogous to the methods of investing.

Like relationships. Having a significant other would be a volatile investment. There's high risk (they could cheat, could leave you at anytime, could steal everything you have, has real potential to be harmful) and more often then not, offers a low rate of return (potential for feeling loved  vs. losing time/money/energy.) This i basically how I've always felt but never had a way of describing it. These are the things I think about when someone asks "Why don't you have a boyfriend?" often accompanied by it's follow-up, "You'll find someone someday." To me, being in a relationship right now would be like putting all of my money in RIM stock.


In other thoughts, I've wondered how I exist as a person who mostly despises the company of other people but somehow ends up in jobs that involve being face-to-face with large groups of new people on a constant basis. I think it's on the way my personality seems to split itself. For a long time, I've believed that I had two sides to me but I'm finding that there's several. I function in multiple personalities and I'm discovering the characteristics of each one as I encounter them. There's the part of me that goes to work, and is bright and chatty. Generally a happy girl. I think this is most of what I am because I can't really describe it as a separate entity, the way I can with the others. There's my alter ego, her name's a secret. That's the part of me that scowls, with fierce eyes looking downwards, hood up and infuriated by crowds. People recoil at the sight of her. All those piercings... why would she do that to her face? The natural beauty ruined. She mostly comes out at night.

I'm also an android. Completely without feelings though understands the reality and concept of human emotions. Perfect sense of time and an unwavering gait. Little regard for outside influences but acknowledges  entirety of surroundings. Mainly concerned with current environment, as opposed to past and future events.

There's a good part of me that I would consider male. The way I interact with my brother seems close to what is mostly regarded as male bonding. My independence and not typically being annoyed by things that most women constantly moan about. The moments when there are no fucks given about my appearance. Drinking with my dad, watching football, cursing beyond what is necessary, protective of female friends.

I'm planning on cutting my hair short enough to see if I really can be passable as a male. To live as both genders, in two-spirits, on alternate days. When I'm in the mood to be a guy that day, that's what I'll be. Clothes, gait, all the typical behaviours reserved for men. I've thought about getting a cosmetic mastectomy, since my chest is so small anyway it might as well not even be there. But my risk assessment has come through and I'm not really into wasting the money, the scars and risking infection when I could probably diet it mostly away.

This probably all sounds really insane, but it's my explanation for how I function on this earth as an adult human, which I'm not even sure that I am. In functioning through several personalities, I let all parts of my true self live in the open without being regarded as hypocritical or characteristically incongruent.

Suicide Tuesday

Eye on what I'm after
I don't need another friend
Nod and watch your lips move
If you need me to pretend

Because clever got me this far
Then tricky got me in
I'll take just what I came for
Then I'm out the door again

Lie to get what I came for
Lie to get what I need now
Lie to get what I'm craving
Lie and smile to get what's mine

Give this to me
Take what's mine


- The Package - A Perfect Circle

Forty six and two is just ahead of me.

So I'm in the home stretch of supporting myself in the most expensive city ever, and I'm elated to be coming back home. I'm much too young to be this worried about money, but that's me. It sounds kind of wrong in my head when I think "I'm coming home" because Calgary just doesn't feel that way to me. Most of my family is not really there anymore so the only thing home-y about it will be living with my mum and brother again. And I think we could live anywhere together, and that place would feel like home to me. It sounds pretty gay, but living on my own and being independent, never really made me feel like an adult. I can support myself just fine, it's not difficult and I think I expected it to be a lot harder. Like being an adult means your smothered on a daily basis with responsibilities and worries but I've never personally felt that. So I still feel like a baby. It's not even a money thing (outside of the fact I need money for school and fuck loans), I just know I'll be happier living with my mum again.

I applied late to ACAD so I probably won't be starting my first year until January. Which is hugely irritating because the program I want to get into for my second year only starts in the Fall. This basically tacks on an entire year onto when I was hoping to finish the degree. I figured I could take credit courses starting this September and try to finish the requirements for my first year by June. I can't register as a non degree student because I won't be in the city when that registration becomes available. So I emailed the Extended Studies department in hopes of learning what courses they might have, and see if there was a possibility that I might not need to take an extra year for my degree. For some reason, the thought just terrified the shit out of me. I didn't want to be 26 and still in school, I want to be working! I've been panicking about this all last week. Fuck, why didn't I just apply sooner, why didn't I just figure out what I wanted to do, why didn't I just go to school here in BC. I made a schedule for what classes I needed and could possibly take in the Fall, Winter and Spring semesters. I would go to school six days a week, just please let me finish in four years.

I'm freaking out over this, and not hearing back from Extended Studies. Then a few nights ago, I'm on Facebook and a whole album of sonogram photos is posted by a friend of mine. A guy who turned 21 two weeks before I did. And I'm clicking around and see another 3 or 4 people I went to this same junior high with, same age and everything and they have kids too.

I suddenly felt more relaxed about everything in my life and didn't care if it was going to take me four, five or six years to finish my degree. As long as I don't have a baby before I'm 26, I think I can be pretty pleased with whatever it is I do with my life. I called ACAD today after not getting a reply to my email and they said the credit courses would no longer be offered in Extended Studies. I had an entire plan for next year that depended on the possibility of taking these courses and it was just smashed to pieces right then. But it didn't even matter. Now I can take the months between September and January to work, save more money for school. For a motorcycle and to get lessons for both driving and riding. To maybe travel some, see India. See more of the States. To do fucking anything I want to because I don't have a kid on the way, or a mortgage or a husband. I think I'll apply to work on a cruise again, now that I'm old enough to do so.

I know it's terrible to compare the transitions of my life to those in others', and to evaluate my success based on what I see other people doing, but it has really opened my eyes to what my life could be if I make good or bad decisions. I'm learning to relax and not to stress about how short or long my life might end up being I learn from my own mistakes plenty, and I will learn through others' as well.

Evolve.

I've been crawling on my belly
Clearing out what could've been.
I've been wallowing in my own chaotic
and insecure delusions.

I wanna feel the change consume me,
Feel the outside turning in.
I wanna feel the metamorphosis and
cleansing I've endured within

My shadow
Change is coming.
Now is my time.
Listen to my muscle memory.
Contemplate what I've been clinging to.
Forty-six and two ahead of me.



I choose to live and to
lie, kill and give and to
die, learn and love and to
do what it takes to step through.



- forty six and two - tool

You're the one I had to meet.

Where I've been
I was bound to leave behind.


I never wanted to go home
There was nothing there for me


I don't know where to go
now I got nowhere to hide.


Wanderlust will carry us on. 
Will there ever be a place for you and me?


- The Wanderlust - Metric