*my so weird life. 2001-06-01 9:01 p.m.*

i was thinking today, or this evening, after i got my "life sucks" mood out of my system, how utterly bizarre my life has been. that whole truth is stranger than fiction thing.

so yeah, did you know that when i was 8-10, i lived with a bunch of hippies, with 3 houses on the property, plus a guy who lived in a tent out back. the landlady's son was schizophrenic and he used to really scare me. there was this time when a bunch of us (but my parents were out grocery shopping) were all over at the main house having spinach lasagne and he got up from the table and started screaming at everyone and i ran outside and into our house, hid under the table and locked the door. i found out later after my parents came home that he had punched a window, breaking it and his hand. anyway, so the landlady bought some property in costa rica, called it tierra de milagros and was planning on turning it into this miracleworking place where her son could be healed. shortly before we moved out, he got arrested for stealing a car, and 6 days after we moved out, he broke out, came back to the house and burned it down. the whole main house was gone, but the 12 cats lived. our house was gone except for the kitchen. we still had some of our things there-- the records, the national geographics from 1920-something on, most of my dad's stuff (this was the first major separation... my dad was in wisconsin at the time, though, helping us move). the only thing that survived was a metal box with dad's birth certificate, a photo of me, and a certificate i'd given him about being the best dad ever. it was in a plastic frame, and the plastic was all melted, but when we moved back in with him, the certificate, melted frame and all was on the wall.

so that's not the weird part. the weird part was moving back to sarasota in 6th grade. there was a speech-writing contest that we all had to enter. i did mine about the taste of sarasota (a thing at the fairgrounds where they have restaurants from all over sarasota, selling food... and karaoke!). a girl who'd lived 3 houses down from me did hers on my house burning down and the traumatic affects it had on her life. that was the weird part.

what got me thinking about this whole "my so weird life" thing was how desparately i want to please my mom. i want it so badly that i see disapproval even when it's not there. and this reminds me of my own jesus complex. the one i had when i was 7.

when i was 7, all my parents' hippy friends loved me. i was a wise nature child, i felt the power of crystals, i said deep things. my peers hated me.

so i decided that i was the second coming. i was the new jesus christ. i knew nothing of the traditional apocalyptic doctrine, nothing about the anti-christ. i believed in reincarnation (christian children books inadvertantly gave me this image. little luv angel and the littlest angel told stories about angels in heaven and how they came to earth as little babies. and since you became an angel when you died, and you became a human after you were an angel...) though i didn't know the word, and i believed that i was the reincarnation of jesus. after awhile i toned this down to believing i was mary, and that i would be the mother of the second coming. i kept that belief on and off until i was about 12.

the point is, it was very disappointing to me when i realized i was not perfect. because i thought that my parents thought i was perfect and wouldn't they be disappointed when they realized that their daughter wasn't the perfect child they'd thought. this sounds like it was pure vanity on my part, but one of the things that i got told so many times as a child was "if we made a list of all the things we wanted in a child before we had you, you'd have them all, plus more." which i interpreted as "you're the perfect child, but you're fat." but eventually i found more imperfections, but the fat thing always seemed the worst one.

the thing was, i never really felt fat. i felt like i was heavier than a lot of my peers, but i only had to sit in one chair, i ran a little slower than the rest, but i didn't run that slow, and most importantly i didn't have a fat voice. i don't know how to describe a fat voice, but i knew i didn't have it. i was fine with the way i looked, except that nobody else seemed to be. my 2nd grade teacher called me in during recess to have a talk about how i'd have a heart attack by 25 if i didn't get into shape. my mom constantly pestered me to go outside, get my nose out of a book, do jane fonda workout videos with her, not eat so much cheese. which was very well-meant and good advice, but which only made me go in my room and cry. i'm good at that whole going in my room and crying thing. i'm doing that a lot already this summer.

but yeah, so i never felt fat, but i felt like everyone else thought i was fat, and that i couldn't be the perfect person that they wanted me to be because of that. that and the realizing i liked girls in the middle of wisconsin at the age of 15 while being filled with fundamentalist doctrines from my peers, not from my parents, was what started the self-abuse that really started about then. by my senior year of high school, i spent a good portion of my time trying to figure out the most dramatic, martyr-like way to kill myself. and i thought of one.

i decided that i would be the martyr for the fat. i would "develop bulimia" and throw-up my food until i was beautifully thin and had no esophagus left. then i would die, and that would make people think twice about making other people feel fat. the only problem i could think of was that i have always had perfect teeth, which has been great because we're poor, and we've never had to pay a whole lot for my teeth, but i knew that bulimia did a number on your teeth and i didn't want my mom to have to pay for my martyrdom.

i don't know how long it lasted, or why i stopped, but i did lose quite a bit of weight pretty quickly, mainly because i hated throwing up so much that i ate very little so i wouldn't have to throw up too much. people complimented me on it, i wanted to kick them. i think what made me stop throwing up was meeting the boy that made me stop wanting to die. it still cracks me up that my first love was an online boyfriend. i wonder where he is now. last i did a websearch on his name, he was doing customer service for some web company. but yeah, a boy made me stop wanting to die, and really i haven't really wanted to die since then. the thought "i want to die" has gone through my brain, but more as just random words not as a real wish.

okay, so there's another weird story, very embarassing, that i want to share...

for halloween when i was 7 or 8, the band my dad was in, the one, i think that twinkle sang for, but she didn't have anything to do with this, dressed up in blackface with big afros.

i hid under the bed until they left.

i write these things, because i wonder if people will find a truth in them (they are true, but will other people find something akin to their own truths in them). but then i wonder how anyone could actually like a person who spent so much time of her life being so weird.

but hey. i like me. i even love me. i know where i've been, i know what i've been through, i know where i was coming from and where i am coming from. and some of it puzzles me immensely. but i do love me.

so yeah. love me.

love,

me.

*listening to: *
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