I'm afraid of new things.

I'm pretty much on vacation right now, focusing on my store, resting, considering the possibility of reading a book instead of watching old Law & Order episodes on repeat, and just generally attempting to re-center, ground myself for the pending new year.

I have this new thing in my life, this new person, and as I move through the unknown of this relationship, I am faced daily by all of the things I try to avoid most of the time. I'm recognizing how much I avoid risk, perhaps not risk in the standard sense (I'm not risking my life or anything), but risk in terms of my own heart and soul. See my thrifty heart is a frugal heart. I calculate and recalculate. I weigh pros and cons. I anticipate potential problems so when they come, I'm not surprised. I know when to throw in the towel and call it quits. Thrifting is the way I control my life. Thrifting is the way I make sense of my own soul.

But nothing new and wonderful can come out of something known and understood, at least not intentionally. I've made a lot of choices in my life for the wrong reasons, and they ended up being for my benefit in the end, but I couldn't have orchestrated that; I couldn't have known the future.

So yes, I dig for treasures, but I don't know what I'll find. I don't go looking for particular things; I find wonderful things because I open myself up for them. I spend time preparing, and at the right time, I know what I'm looking at.

People are like that, in some ways. We become people who know what they're looking for, so when we see it, we'll know. I guess I'm wondering if I know what I'm looking for, after all this time, if my years upon years of singleness have taught me anything, or if I'm still just my naive sixteen-year-old self in a grown up woman's body.

Only time will tell, because only time can do the hard work of growing up. Being a grown-up is hard.

Be your own advocate.

John Singer Sargent: Mrs. Edward L. Davis & son Livingston (1890)

I'm a big fan of personal growth and development. I think it's important to create a welcoming environment inside yourself to self-awareness, and to work on continually becoming the person you want to be. I'm always amazed at how wonderful personal therapy can be.

Sometimes I talk to people who have seen a therapist for various reasons and found it so incredibly helpful, and then sometimes I talk to people who say that it wasn't so great. I have the same philosophy of therapy that I do about medical doctors: it is what you make it. There are lots of terrible doctors in the world, people who don't really care. But there are loads of wonderful doctors too, people who really want to help, who have expertise, and will do whatever they are able to help. My physical health changed almost overnight when I started speaking up for myself, when I started saying, "Hey this is who I am, and I need help."

Be your own advocate. Dig down into the depths of yourself, be brave, and say what you need. If that doesn't work, let me know, and we can commiserate :)

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Senior thrift.

Dante Beatrix New York Shark Starfish Backpack

I traveled to the coast today with my two favorite girls (they're hairy and somewhat stupid....Oh! and canine), and I discovered a senior center/thrift store. Whoa. What an idea. I left the dogs in the car. They were pretty tired from all the bird chasing at that point (to date, they have been chasing birds and ducks for years, and have never caught a single one), and lay like floppy babies in the back seat.

This was a "Thrift and Gift", so some things were pricier than others, but the back room was filled with bridge tables (or some other foursome card game) and the customers just walked around them to check out the merch. None of them moved or payed attention to us shoppers. They just kept playin' and chattin'.

What an idea! A thrift store and community center is a great way to combine things that go really well together. The seniors were laid back and unbothered by people in their space, and most thrift store shoppers are okay with chaos. It uses the space well, as a thrift store might not get a ton of traffic. It gives the group a project to work on. All in all, a great combo.

Kudos to you, Cayucos Seniors Gift 'N Thrift.

Making friends :)

I can't wait to sell these boots! They're really cool :)

So now, around town, I feel like a wise old thrifter. I have seen so much. I have patience. I have an appropriately furrowed brow (oh dear, this expression will age me quickly). I am the best thrifting resource you will find, if you only have the time to look around and see if anyone is paying attention to you. I am present. I am smiling. And yes, that color would look great on you.

I used to hang my head and mumble, say "thank you" and never attempt conversation. But something in me has changed over the past year. I think my life has smoothed out to a more steady pace, and I'm able to take moments, full minutes in fact, to speak to people, look them in the eye and talk to them. It's been a trip, really, because it has made my thrifting hobby into something I do, not just because it gives me mindless time (which I need on a daily basis), but it also gives me social time to talk about nothing of any importance. I don't have to give a lot. I can just be me, and enjoy the experience, and smile and let go of the heavy burdens I often put on my own shoulders.

So maybe I'm endearing, and that makes it easy for people to talk to me. Or maybe I'm weird and eccentric, and I don't stand out much (let's all remember fake baby lady from a few weeks ago). I don't know what people think, because sometimes I'm wearing my normal clothes, and sometimes I'm wearing my professional clothes. Maybe they call me something like "weird tall lady" :)

Anyhow, I'm having especially enjoyable times thrifting lately :)

Forever with me.

Vintage Silhouette - Made in Austria

I've written a lot of poetry in my life, lots of terrible wonderful poems about love and loss and longing and anger with God. I'm sick today, and feeling lonely in my sickness, because being sick is always a lonely occupation, isn't it? And I'm trying to figure some stuff out, so I start looking through the last two years of poems to try to get some clarity on my feelings and how they've remained constant in some ways over the years, how my trajectory has, in spite of all obstacles, stayed straight and sure.

Vintage Liz Claiborne - Totally make me think of the early 1990s

I've figured out something really important. My love for other people, my deep unfailing commitment to what some would (and have) declared delusional, has carried me through my life like a bright shimmering string of hope, woven through the mess of my life, inextricably linked to who I was, who I am, and who I will become. These people did not earn that love, nor did they provide it to me. It was something inside of me that kept it going, kept that fire stoked through many stormy times.

Those people can never give me that love that I've created for myself with their names on it. They can never live up to the hype I've given them, because they're human, and I made that hope inside myself so I could keep living when I didn't want to. I deeply want to show these people what they have, with their mere existence, given to me, but it seems to be an impossible task. How do you really love another person? How do you give a person, in a few moments, a decade of hope that you have forever inside you because of them?

So I love them, not because of anything they did, but because at one time, they loved me. And it was everything to me.

Good Sunday to you :)

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Eleanor Roosevelt

A great thing happened today: I went rock climbing (at a climbing gym) for the first time ever, and I went all the way to the ceiling! It was awesome, and I thought you should know. It seems like the scariest thing ever, since you're hanging onto a wall with your fingertips and the side of your foot, but then you just take one step at a time, and eventually you're there! My friends who took me go all the time (they're fiends), so they were super positive and encouraging, and I felt really supported. I figured out that I don't like being told what to do when I'm in the middle of doing it. I need to be able to focus as much as possible on the task at hand, and voices calling out to me where to put the foot I can't see (on the 2" rock I also cannot see) are simply not helpful to me.

So that was good to know about myself. I hadn't quite put those two things together before. See how much I love personal development? I think everyone should do things that scare them just for the heck of it, and we'd all be better people. Unfortunately, I think that a lot of people do drugs and join gangs in an effort to confront their own fears, and this isn't usually a good idea. So maybe the ethos isn't perfect, but it's worth thinking about.

Peace out.

omg — what have I done?

 

All of my insecurities are flying at my face right now, and I'm in pain. I don't know how it happened, and now I'm in this hole where I'm ugly and fat and I can't do anything right. Just typing that was difficult, and now I'm crying.

I was raised to be attuned to everyone's emotions but my own, everyone else's needs to the exclusion of my own. I was raised to believe that I had to be perfect or my parents would get rid of me. Oh my goodness. How horrible is that?

And now, in the midst of this silly business I try to pay the bills with, I keep getting hit with the reminder that no thing and no one is perfect. And to top it all off, I'm the one throwing the punches. I'm the one who loves thrift and recycling, the imperfect things of the world, the things that have been thrown away. I'm the one who decided that somehow this love would define me and my worldview. I'm the one who is somehow made whole through it.

And somehow, I'm the one I keep throwing away.

I am not an alien.

 

When I was seven or eight (or nine?), at Sunday School, we were asked to draw what our life would look like when we were 26. I wrote that I would be a professional ballerina. That was what I wanted to be; I worked like a maniac to be that person, and it didn't work out. My body didn't have what I needed to go as far with dancing as I wanted to go. Then the same thing happened with swimming. My body didn't have what it took.

So now my life is different that I thought it would be. The faces are different from the old faces. The people who were in my life at ages seven, eight, and nine, are no longer in my everyday life. Not a one. And that is strange. I don't have all the markers people commonly have that remind them who they were, and how they became who they are. That disconnect is jarring sometimes. It's normal for a person in my situation, but it's still jarring.

I talk about this stuff a lot, because it's central to my everyday functioning. Sometimes I have to remind myself daily that I'm still real, that I'm a person. I am not an alien. I am not invisible.