Looking for continuity. Keep getting false starts and abrupt stops.

I have, like 12 drafts saved to this blog. I keep starting and stopping entries. Trying to write things down before they slip away. But in some ways, I feel like trying to recapture the details of an idea 12 days, 7 lattes, and 96 billed hours later, sort of dampens the spontaneity and the authentic nature of whatever idea I had been trying to convey.

I am left there - standing, helpless and alone - with an idea, an unorganized, messy and jumbled pile of adjectives, and a quesy feeling that all there is to be had in quagmire is artifice. And, of course, we cannot have artifice. As I am, of course, an artist. Or rather, an artiste. Oh please.

I am just a girl (not standing here with a boy telling him I love him), but rather just a girl standing and struggling and hoping to make it through.

I have a slough of issues (and I expect that to be a revelation after 8 months of the rants here) and I muddle through. Looking for the ability to genuinely strut through my life, but would definitely settle for carefree ambling. Either is an appealing option.

For now, I have sort of hit a wall. Not literally, though that has happened to me. Well, I have hit a sidewalk and ended up with five stitches on my chin, and scratches on my iPod. I have hit a wall in terms of my progress. Sort of.

My grandmother's funeral last weekend was full of revelations. It almost ridiculous in its self-help, OMG- I am self actualizing before my own eyes kind of qualities. The weekend should have been about her. About 82 years of life come to an end, but in the end it was really so much more about everyone else. For as many issues as I had with my grandmother (and there were many), she was accomplished. Well, about as accomplished as I think a human being can be. Her stat line impressive: 5 kids, 17 grandkids, 14 great-grandchildren. A houseful of people. Literally. We were all tripping over one another at the wake (though I hesitate to call it that, too austere a term to describe any Mexican family get together gathering). Distilled to its most basic elements, it was a life well lived. A guaranteed immortality, of sorts. My grandmother was neither this philosophical nor prescient though. She never was willing to see what she had accomplished. She spent a lot of time tearing down and manipulating the proverbial fruit of her loins. She was afraid of death to the very end, her heart must have been infinitely heavy with regret. That, I believe, to be more tragic than her death itself. Her passing was such that she had time to assess. It did not happen in an instant. It took four months. And yet, she never did. Bitter to the very end. Sad. I harbored a lot of anger towards her for the way she treated my mother - shut her out for years, turned her sisters against her, and manipulated her to feel guilty and responsible for it all, always. I always hated her for that. And yet, I didn't. Every time, I saw her, I felt sad for her. Her health was in dire straits. It was heartbreaking, but not so much for the health issues, but because she did so little about it, because, as became increasingly clear, she reveled in the attention and the ammunition that the ill health gave her. She could twist pity and sympathy into instrument of blunt power. She was 4'11' and could make you feel tiny. All because of choices she made for herself, for which you were not responsible, and yet, you felt you had been left holding the bag.

As she had passed, I had no further opposrtunity to even consider saying this to my grandmother, so I said it to my mom. I wanted to level with her. I wanted her to know why I wasn't as broken up about the whole thing as I thought I should be. That I felt guilty about it. Of course I did. In some ways, I think my grandmother would have been pleased about that. She would prefer that to my being genuinely devastated. At least it would provide her greater satisfaction.

In any event, I told my mom. And, surprisingly enough, just in telling my mom. I felt better. My mom said I should have told my grandmother. I countered that there was no point, she wouldn't change. My mom quietly noted, that it wasn't about my grandmother changing, it was about me doing so. That just to say it would loosen and lift the feelings away, and let me experience all of the gamut of emotions I had. Anger wouldn't predominate and psuh everything else out. I could have allowed myself to feel all of the bittersweet - in its many falvors and textures - through and through.

She was right. But just in having told my mom, I got some of that. I found that my mother had made her peace, had accepted her mother would never change. Had said what she needed to say and felt better for it, regardless of whether an apology was forthcoming (it wasn't).

And there is the lesson I need to learn about people: I should say things and do things just because I think I need to say or do them. Because that is what I think is right - for me and for others. Whether it is or not, ultimately does not matter. I just need to try and then to do. And, most imporantly, not expect a response or some kind of action in return.

Sometimes there will be a responsive action or some kind of reply, but I cannot count on that. I also can't count on it being what I wanted to hear or see. I cannot control people. I need to my own actions to be enough. Evertyhing else is just icing. I have to bake the proverbial cake.

Problem identified. Implementation: Easier said than done.

[Discuss brothers, large through small]

All of this being said, and all of these realizations made, and yet I am not feeling markedly better.

In fact, right now, my body image tortures me on a daily basis. Hour by hour, minute by minute, I sit here loathing myself. I want to hide under the covers, not get out of bed, because then no one (neither I nor anyone else) needs to see the hideousness of my body.

I feel wretched.

Is it right? No. Is it wrong? Probably. Can I stop? No. Do I want to? Not the way I should.

I went off the medication. It fucked up my metabolism.

Of course, having done so, I am now I am stuck with fucked up metabolism, and, fucked up world view.

Fantastic.

But I had to do something. I had to stem the tide. For whatever the medicine was doing for making me feel "evened out" it was not doing anything to control how obsessively and progressively awful I was continuing to feel about my appearance.

Yes, I am vain. I am totally vain. If I were truly a good person, I would not care at all what I looked about. I would care only about being a worthy, warm, genuine human being. I wouldn't give a second thought to how my jeans fit.

Newsflash: I am not a good person. I am not a bad person either. I am well-meaning (I think, though then again, you know what they say about the pavement to the road to hell...) Anyway, I am totally shallow and caught up in what I look like. I have gotten dependent on my proxy to self confidence. My body, in the last couple of years, at least became a life raft to being comfortable with walking into a room.

I am so afraid that is going to change.

Utterly paralyzed with fear about it.

And it makes me think: Everyone says, and I have believed, for so long, that one of the central issues in my life was this unrealistic expectation I have about being perfect. That in truth, no one is perfect and no one expects me to to be perfect but me. But is that really true? What people in my life, in varying forms over the years, have told me is that they want me to accept myself to love myself. Damnit, that may, in fact, be harder than being perfect. Not only do you have to like what you see in the mirror and the voice you hear in your head, but you have to like whatever they are, no matter how they compare with the outside expectation of society.

I am a size 22 and I am totally irritating with a super nasal voice and an unending whine, but I love me. And I don't care that the rest of society finds all of those things utterly repulsive.

Yeah, I don't think so.

Seems to me that is just as lofty a goal as "perfect" - quantitatively different perhaps, but qualitively book-ends of the same idea.

Damnit, I think too much. Make my life too complicated.

Seriously, how can my life be so complicated when I have absolutely nothing going on? Seriously.

Work is work. I have no love life at all. No currents, no prospects. Hell, I don't even have anyone actively shunning me right now. Well, there might be some latent shunning on several fronts, but nothing really worth noting. No exciting events coming up. No desire to plan anything because I don't want to be seen. I am ashamed of my own visage. Ick.

Need to re-focus and re-calibrate.

Deep breath.

Okay.

Wait.

Another deep breath.

Just need to be satisfied in being alive. Today is a new day, and I am not afflicted with disease, poverty or neglect. No one I care about in life suffers from any of these things either. It is not raining. The sun is out. The sky is blue.

Life is.

Deep breath. In and out. In and out. In and out. In and out.