An Assignment.

HOW I MAKE WOMEN MY GOD

By Ani M.

“I give myself very good advice...” I’m very good at that, yes.  “...but I very seldom follow it.”  Turns out I’m even better at that.  This quote from Alice in Wonderland was the first thing that popped into my head when I began to brainstorm exactly what I was going to write upon the topic of “how I make women my God.”  I’m not quite certain if it’s a direct quote from the original book or just from the Disney movie.  Regardless, it about sums me up in a nutshell.  I am certainly good at giving myself good advice.  Unfortunately though, I’ve realized that reason goes completely out the window when it comes to romance.  Listening to my mother talk to me about relationship advice was rather funny.  It was certainly good advice, but funny because it clearly echoed things I have told other people regarding romantic relationships...  Good advice certainly, I can spew it out but when it comes down to my own romantic drama, I can’t even see the true from the false... The good from the bad.  I love love.  I am a hopeless romantic.  Nothing could be more false.  The truth is, that when it all boils down to the one thing I can’t stand the most, me, I am full of self-loathing and absolute insecurity.  Sure, I can put on a good front...  In fact, in my fuzzy drunkenness of yesternight, I recieved several comments on how attractive my confidence is.  Wow, really?  Well, as long as somebody else is acknowledging me on my attractiveness, I’m okay, at least for now.  This morning I woke up next to a very attractive naked woman, not that I had really slept much, really...  Nose candy will do that to you.  Anyway, she liked me.  That felt kinda good.  Last night, at least.  Yet, this morning, I felt as empty as ever.  That’s the problem, I think.    

I’d love to go into past relationships... The patterns are drone and repetitive, yet new and exciting whenever I find a new love interest.  I won’t though.  Sadly it’s practically the same story every time.  The only difference, as hard as it may be to believe, is that although I keep putting myself in harmful and unhealthy situations over and over, with every time I get my heart broken I put yet another brick on a wall I have slowly built over the years to protect me from getting as hurt as I was the first time, with my first serious relationship.  Sure, pity me.  Just kidding, don’t.  Naturally I don’t tend to gravitate toward healthy or sane people, but truthfully, they aren’t the problem.  The problem is me, and my bottomless emptiness that I mentioned before.  My self destructive tendency is to test people...  To see if they “really love me.”   I don’t necessarily do this consciously, but part of my problem is to see how much people can really take.  Because if they can take it, they must really love me, or even need me.  Then, when they are fed up with my unpredictability and abuse, for lack of a better word, I pity myself for having a broken heart...  Clearly, I did nothing wrong.  I so long to be loved, because I am not a complete person.  

That void.  It gets bigger and bigger with every heartbreak.  I keep trying to fill it with the same thing, over and over.  A girl.  How selfish is it of me to give someone that kind of a burden?  How selfish is it of me to expect a human to complete me and fill my emptiness?  It isn’t fair to them, and I am never satisfied.  It’s never enough.  I “fall in love” so quickly and so easily, putting my love interest on a pedestal and obsessing with nurturing the relationship, when in reality I am doing nothing but sucking the life out of the other person.  It’s quite possible that I don’t even know how to love someone.  Anyone.  I can’t even love myself.  I care about people, and, in my limited tunnel vision, am an extremely giving person.  I give and I give, and they take and they take.  The truth is, I’ve never not had an immense part in the process of getting my heart broken.  That was a double negative.  I don’t love people, I need them.  I need them to make me feel good about myself.  It never works, and that’s where the insanity comes in.  This time, it will be different.  It never is. 

So, here’s where the solution comes into play.  The question is, am I willing to suffer through the pain of being alone in order to come to a place where I can truly love myself and eventually have a healthy companionship to offer another person?  Time.  It all just takes time.  Easier said than done, mind you.  I am a thoroughly impatient person, and I am addicted to that wonderful warm fuzzy feeling that comes with the initial excitement of finding a new love.  It’s nice, to be loved...  The thing is, though, that these girls I get myself involved with are quite possibly as sick and as empty as I am, more or less.  So, most likely, they aren’t really loving me either.  They depend on me to fill them up as much as I depend on them.  Whether or not that works in the meantime, it’s always doomed to fail.  That’s where I’m stuck.  That’s where I’m messed up, because, as I write this, it makes perfect sense to me, but as the pain of each current heartbreak consumes me, and I need someone new to take it away.  Rebounds, they call it.  So the pattern repeats itself.  Repeatedly.  Always hoping that this time, she’s the one.  This time it will be all roses and bliss and puppies and we’ll live happily ever after.  Unfortunately, though, not until I can be complete will I ever be able to offer anyone else anything genuine and substantial.  So, either I can keep doing it my way, or I can try something different.  I think I’ll go with the latter this time. 

What a Lovely Way to Burn

Fever.  What a terrible way to burn.  Actually, I don't think "burning" in any form would be a lot of fun.  Regardless of whether or not death by extreme temperature is any fun, I'm sick.  Sick as a dog. . .  An expression I could never understand.  (My dogs are very healthy creatures.)  At any rate, I've been having fevers like a dog, body aches like a dog, coughs like a dog, and ultimately I sound like a dog.  When I try to sing it comes out like a dog's bark.  I don't like it.

I woke up at three o'clock, also known as the witching hour.  I'm not terribly superstitious or anything, but this time of night really creeps me out.  This isn't the first time I've woken up at 3 am, so I'm starting to think something fishy is going on.  So here I am, unable to go back to sleep, typing away at my little post.  I think the creep-out factor is especially high on the creep-out factor scale, due to the fact that I woke up from a zombie apocalypse type nightmare.  Let me tell you about this nightmare.  Woke up in some kind of concentration camp/military base type place. . . That's the most accurate way my sickly brain is able to describe anything right now.  Anyway, concrete buildings surrounded by chain link fences.  I was with my entire immediate family, my mom, my dad and my sister, and we were the only people there, in that big empty place.  I'm not exactly sure why we survived the "aura" which, in my dream, was what the apocalyptic signs were, but we did.  I remember talking about it with my family and being terribly sad about my extended family and the dogs.  The dream consisted of us trying to find the means to survive, you know, like they do in zombie movies.  I remember going to the grocery store and stocking up on some non-perishables.  You know, important things, like soda.  Anyway, there was a phone and I was able to connect with some army guys and I asked for some ice for my soda.  Dude promised he'd "chip me some" when they came and got us.  Whatever.  Anyway, we made it to this room where we were going to sleep.  My mom opened the door to another room which was connected to the first room and she said, "Hey, look at this."  There was a large tim-burtonesque puppet shaped like an ant with claws. . . Except it was made out of human guts.  You could pull on an intestine attached to it and the claws would go crazy and it would make a horrendous noise.  Like in the exorcist when she's talking and it's a bunch of voices talking backwards.  We opened a closet and more guts spilled out.  One good thing about this closet was that there were blankets on the shelf.  So we got those. . . I wanted to leave this room immediately because it just seemed a little weird that there was a meat puppet made of human organs, but whatever.

Then I woke up.  You know how dreams are.  When you're dreaming them, they're filled with anxiety and they are really scary.  When you wake up from them, you're still thinking about what was going to happen next and you're still kinda freaked out about it.  At least, that's how it works in my mind.  I'm going to go ahead and assume that we got guns to protect ourselves with, and I led the family to safety of course, mainly because I am the bravest and I play the most video games.  I'm pretty good at shooting zombies, if I do say so myself.  Now that it's written down, it sounds absolutely stupid and ridiculous.  Let me tell you, though, if you had been in my dream, you would have probably pooped your pants.

I hate being sick.

One is the Loneliest

Are you there, God?  It's me, Margaret.  Hello.  My name is not Margaret, just to make that clear.  That, my friends, is the title of a book about a young lady (age 12) who begins menstruation, thus igniting a barrage of horrible sinful thoughts and ultimately leading her to die of a heroin overdose.  Or syphilis. Or something.  I never actually read that book, but I'm assuming since the target audience was, indeed, twelve year old girls, it wouldn't be terribly hasty to presume that the book does not have such a twisted ending. . .  Although it would be a lot more interesting if it did.

I was twelve once, ten years ago.  How quickly doth the rose bloom, and even quicker doth it fade.  I just made that up, by the way.  Right off the dome, homes.  Perhaps something similar has been said before.  I'm actually pretty certain that it has.  But for realsies.   Twelve.  What a freaking terrible time that was.  I really hated being twelve. . .  I was an awkward little munchkin.  Seriously, no wonder they wrote that damn book about it! Most girls go through that phase around that time,  all of my friends certainly did,  but I still felt different and, although I was surrounded with people, alone.

One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do.  Two can be as bad as one, It's the loneliest number since the number one.  This is quite true.  Two can be as bad as one, if not worse.  That has been something I have not understood until now.  With a constant emptiness inside of me, my solution was always to get involved with someone.  Even as a small child, I had boyfriends with whom I didn't do anything with, other than maybe sit with them at lunch instead of with the girls.  I had a boyfriend though, so that meant everything was good. . . Because I had someone to like me.  Then I went to high school.  I had a fun freshman year.  I did well in class and had good friends, and I was simply happy being me, for once.  Ugh, but gym.  The class was awful.  I definitely didn't care to participate.  There was no way I was getting any exercise with sixty other kids in the pool.  I might've had a foot to kick my feet a little, but in no way was it worth the effort.  Praise Jesus my best friend Chelsea was in the same class as me.  We could be lazy together.  She was a little more sporty than me, so sometimes she would leave me alone to go participate.  Looking back though, we had a lot of laughs.  A lot of the girls made fun of the girls' gym teacher.  She was an old decrepit lesbian with straw instead of hair and a knack for creeping everyone out because apparently she liked to watch us in the locker room.  Oh those locker rooms.  This was the weirdest part of gym class.  All the girls were completely comfortable getting naked and acting as if it was completely normal, going about their little conversations and playing with each other's hair, the way straight girls do.  Not me.  I would stare at the floor and quickly and discreetly change my attire.  Not that I sweat very much in class anyway since I wasn't participating and all.  Again, I felt alone and different.  That was the last year I remained in the closet.

I kissed a girl and I liked it, although there was no cherry chapstick involved.  F that.  Now I felt really different.  This was the beginning of an incredibly angry time in my life.  Lucky for me, I wasn't the only one.  One of my very good friends at the time was going through the exact same thing.  If it wasn't for him, I don't think I would've been able to do it.  At least not so openly.  Due to the circumstances, and of course, our matching souls, we became very close and our friendship grew quickly.  I am so grateful to have had him in my life, because without him, I might've been lost. . .  Even more so than I already was.  He was definitely more functional than I was.  He's the type that can handle painful situations without falling apart. . .  I think that's called being normal.  Something like that.  As the high school years progressed my grades started to drop dramatically.  This might've had something to do with my wonderful discovery of alcohol and pot.  I remember the first night that I got drunk.  I was so excited and eager to do it.  I had no idea what it felt like or what would happen, but ultimately I ended up blacking out and passing out and waking up next to a pile of vomit, wondering who had vomited right next to my face.  Turns out that it was me.  Who would have thought.  I was so incredibly hung over the next day.  My face was hot and red, I felt terribly nauseated and I had a splitting headache.  But as soon as I felt better, I wanted it to happen again.  I loved the way it made me feel, it made me feel stupid and I didn't have to think about real life.  Now for pot.  The first time you smoke pot, it won't get you high.  That, my friends, is a lie.  I remember how wonderfully strange I felt the second it finally hit me.  I smoked in the car with some friends and after having told them that I had never been high.  Immediately their goal was to get me high.  What good friends I had!  Unbeknownst to me, the effect of pot lasts longer than thirty minutes, and I had to do makeup for the school play.  My friends dropped me back off at school, and I asked with a slightly nervous tone, "How long does this last?!"  They all looked at each other and laughed and have me a "whoopsies" type facial expression.

I graduated.  I graduated with no chords and with a 2.8 gpa.  Nothing like I was supposed to.  My best friend let me wear some of his honors chords so I didn't feel like such a damn buffoon.  I got a half ride to the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, so I went there.  Bad idea.  I definitely wasn't ready to be on my own.  Now I could drink all I wanted.  There was even a time when I drank in the morning, before drawing class.  Didn't make it to class.  My roommates kicked me out, and I resented them.  They did it because they hated me.  NOT!  It was truly because I was completely out of control, and they couldn't handle it.  Rightly so.  I had fun, but I had to drop out before the first semester was up.  Didn't even make it one semester.

Moved in with my girlfriend in Topeka.  I loved her, but it was an incredibly tumultuous relationship.  I quit drinking for a bit to salvage our relationship, but things got even worse.  I was even crazier.  This, children, is called being dry.  There is a gargantuan difference between being dry and being sober, although I didn't know it at the time.  Ultimately the relationship failed, and she left me for another lady.  I was miserable, and I lost it.  I lost it big time.

I called the Menninger hospital while I was coming down off of that white powder stuff, (I felt like I was dying,) and that monday we flew down to Houston to do my intake.  That place saved my life.  I was completely depressed and suicidal.  I couldn't stay there forever, plus I started getting cabin fever, so I went home. . .  To my new home, Kansas City.  I didn't stay long though.  I went out to California for a rehab type treatment, which ended up being horrible.  The location was beautiful, but the place itself was not for me.  I abhor it to this day.  I got out, did some more drugs, did some more drinking and I dyed my hair pink often and was pierced all up in my fizzace.  One day I got my lip pierced twice.  If you are familiar with vertical snakebites, that's what I decided to get.  That night I tripped acid for the first time.  The next day I had sort of an awakening.  I was 21.  I had wasted three entire years of my life doing absolutely nothing.  I took out dem ugly piercings and decided to dye my hair a normal color.  I haven't done hard drugs since, aside from the next day when I did it again. . .  But never again after that!

So I was dry for the next nine months in crazy mode again.  That's when I switched group therapy.  I mentioned in the group that I was attempting to maintain sobriety.  After the group ended, a wonderfully campy girl came up to me and invited me to come to a place where a lot of people are helping each other stay sober.  I'm down, why not?  My life sucks anyway.  So I did it, and I never could have made a better decision.

I've had plenty of ups and downs in sobriety, I've gone back out and come back in, and I've never been rejected.  These people love me and accept me the way I am, as long as I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, which I try my darndest to do what I need to do.  Now, one is not the loneliest number that I'll ever do.  I'm never alone, even when I am.  I've lost a lot due to my terrible life choices, but I've gained a lot due to my good ones, and I wouldn't trade that for anything in this world.  I've been beaten down and I've been hopeless.  I don't feel that way anymore, even when life gets a little hard.  I'll always have hope, because I've seen my life get better before.  Being able to learn who I am is one of the greatest gifts I've ever had.  That is that.

So to whoever is reading this, thank you.  Now that I have my little introductory autobiography out of the way, I'll be able to rant about even more ridiculous things.  So keep coming back.  :)