God, there are so many hours in a day...

It's been almost a month since I last updated this thing. To be honest, I've been trying to bottle a lot of things up but of course that never works, you just allow pressure to build until it explodes willy-nilly all over the place and threatens to ruin everything.

A lot of things have changed.

I got to do an incredible photo shoot in LA with one of my best friends Thomas as well as several amazing people. Natalie Alyn Lind, Tricia Pain, Steven Asbury, Mani Yarosh and Tyler Shields all modeled for me in addition to Thomas. Tyler is someone I've admired the shit out of since I was in college, he's an unbelievable photographer and one of the most talented, unorthodox, rock star artists in the contemporary art world in my opinion. I absolutely love him, and I was totally starstruck when he showed up on set. But he was really fun and kind to me, and gave me some great advice, and I got some incredible photos. The set was styled by Thomas and we had Sarah Ault doing hair and Kelly O'Leary doing makeup, and it was just this amazing space in downtown LA called Korova which looked like a big dungeon set. The pictures are being published in several outlets, including Dark Beauty Magazine issue #35, Living Dead Magazine Issue #4, and Solis Magazine. I had to spread them out over different publications because I got so many shots I was insanely proud of. 

Unfortunately, this delirious night of creativity and collaboration was also kind of my goodbye kiss to Los Angeles. I still love the city and I hate not being there. I miss the palm trees and the cool night air and the neon of Hollywood. I miss my little apartment and the sushi place around the corner and the stars on the sidewalk. I miss everything about LA with my whole heart.

How can you be homesick for a place that wasn't home?

But it felt like home, a home of my own making, a home where anything could happen. I have a lot of friends there, friends who made me think the impossible was not only possible but probable. 

Things with work unfortunately got crazy, and my boss couldn't really afford to keep me on anymore. I was hemorrhaging money because I was paying rent on my studio apartment as well as paying the mortgage on my house in Waco that was sitting untouched, plus all of my bills, plus my student loan, plus my credit card… etc etc. I was burning through money and with none coming in, everything was getting scary. I had other job offers and the kindness of friends but I knew that I needed to come back to Waco and deal with my house, either move into it to save money or get it sold quickly to pay off debts and stop pouring money into it. So I hired a moving truck, bought out of my lease, and asked Matt to come out to LA to help me move home.

Packing my things was more than a little emotional. It felt like I had just unpacked them, and every time I sealed a box it felt like putting more of my dreams back on the shelf to gather dust. I love Texas and Texas is home, but Texas has never inspired me or given me the confidence that Los Angeles did. I have friends and some family here, but LA had adopted me in the near-year I was there.

Of course, the night before we left LA--- after the moving truck had pulled off with the majority of my things--- someone broke into my car and stole things out of the back seat. The next day we were slated to leave, and so I had put some of my stuff down in the car already--- among them, my camera equipment. I had a large Pelican case full of lenses, a travel camera bag that contained my backup body, and a duffel bag with my lighting kit. All of these things were gone, my window smashed out. Matt called me from downstairs to tell me and it felt like someone punched me in the chest. I had thousands of dollars in equipment in there, equipment that I couldn't afford to replace. But more than that, equipment that represented a lot more than material things to me. My camera was my life. I started out a writer when I was a kid and thought I'd be a novelist, but I've had more fun and luck with my photography. I have embraced it since my mom gave me my first camera when I was a kid. My camera opened so many doors for me, gave me so much hope and ambition for a better life, better things for me. My camera went to movie sets with me and traveled around the country in my suitcase. And some jackass took it right before I left town, a farewell present from the city I loved so much.

I assumed that the items would be covered by insurance but of course there's a loophole, isn't there always, and the assholes at my insurance company certainly worked those loopholes with a vengeance. As a result, even though they appraised my stolen items at almost $7000, they only gave me a check for $750 and told me that was all I would get from them. That doesn't even replace one of the lenses that was stolen. My friends were kind enough to encourage me to set up a Kickstarter-type fundraiser to ask for help, and I did--- it raised over a thousand dollars, which is incredibly nice and generous of everyone, but it still won't come close to rebuilding what was stolen. It had taken me years of working and saving my money and scouring the Internet and swap meets and camera shows to build my kit and fill it with lenses I really loved and knew. I knew the limitations and the capabilities of every one of those lenses. I was anal about lens caps and dusting and UV filters and everything else to keep them as pristine as I could because I knew I couldn't afford to replace them.

And so, in tears, I left my apartment in LA. I left the keys in a drawer in the kitchen and walked out of Apartment 207 on Tamarind Avenue for the last time. The landlady, who used to be one of my closest friends but now doesn't speak to me, ignored me as I walked past her on the sidewalk. It wasn't the best terms to say goodbye to the city I adored with my whole heart; it was a bad breakup. 

I made it back to Dallas driving cross-country with Matt. He is currently living in the spare bedroom of the house owned by two of our best friends and while it could certainly be worse, there isn't enough space for two people in that bedroom. I'm living out of a suitcase, cycling through the same few outfits while I frantically search for work and alternate driving down to Waco to try and prepare my house to sell.

I have sent my resume to probably 40 places this week alone. I've responded to job ads on Monster and Craigslist and browsed LinkedIn for hours to no avail. I've tried cold-calling, doing applications through official websites, and sending inquiry letters to most of the business contacts I have here in Dallas. And either I don't get a call back, the job is something scammy/inconsistent, or I go to the interview just to be turned down. I've been told that I'm overqualified, under qualified, and 'not a right fit' for things I've spent years of my life doing. I've been turned down for several positions I'm perfectly suited for because I have visible tattoos. 

This is the first time in my life I've been unemployed; I got my first job when I was fourteen years old working at the amusement park my grandmother managed, and I worked there until I got the job at the comic book store which I held down for 11 years. I worked my way through high school and both stints of college. The only time I took any time 'off' was when my mom died and I took a year to recover and grieve and focus, both on getting her affairs in order and on finishing my degree with high marks. 

Now I have an associate's in marketing, with a 4.0 GPA and I won several awards from my college. I'm a published writer and photographer with over ten years' experience. I've worked retail for eleven years. I worked in a call center for six months and consistently rated highest in my department. 

And yet I can't even get a call back.

I am beyond discouraged, and disgusted, and upset with myself. I feel like an utter failure. I know there are other people, people who've been unemployed for several months on end or even longer. But I can't go on like this. I spend all day sitting in an empty house doing applications and resumes and job-hunting and writing and revising my cover letter, only to have no responses from anyone. I might as well be putting the messages in a bottle and throwing them into the ocean for all the interaction I get from them. My checking account is perilously low, lower than it's ever been in my adult life, and with no money going into it but the automatic deductions of credit card payment, house payment, utilities, cell phone bill and student loan, plus the expenses like groceries and gas for my car, I am scared. 

I am on the verge of having to sell my childhood home, the last thing my mother left me when she died. I grew up in that house; we've lived there since I was four years old. That house is where I learned to ride a bike, painted my bedroom Pepto-Bismol-pink against my mother's better judgment, and convinced her to put a basketball goal in the driveway. I tear up thinking about giving it up. I have already sold off most of my possessions and my mother's possessions; the only things I've kept are clothes, my books and movies, and a few sentimental things. Everything else is pretty much gone because I needed the space and the money and I needed the freedom. But the house is something else entirely. And I know that even if I sell it for anywhere near it's appraisal, I can't buy another house in today's market for that kind of money. If I pay off my student loan and my credit card debt, I'll be left with less than $30K from the sale of the house, and that's IF I get the asking price for it (unlikely). That isn't enough money to do much of anything except maybe put a big down payment on a 'new' house and start the cycle of never-ending house payments and mortgage and interest rates all over again.

I am terrified that I've made wrong decisions, that I have ham-strung my future ambitions, that I have really made a lot of bad, detrimental moves in the last few years that are now coming back to bite me. My anxiety and depression are sky-high and the last couple nights I've cried myself to sleep. I've been stress-eating so I'm not even going to step on the scale because I know what it will say and my self-esteem really can't handle that right now.

Everyone keeps telling me 'chin up, things will get better' but that isn't how depression works. It isn't logical. If I could just switch it off, I would. No one wants to feel this way. I feel like I'm being smothered by a hot, wet blanket and it makes it impossible to even suck in a good breath. Everything I do feels like a failure. Every time someone raises their voice or speaks sharply to me I take it personally. I do my best to keep my head down and just please the people around me so that I don't inspire more negativity in my environment. I lay low because it's easier than putting myself out there right now. I feel too fragile, a girl made of soap bubbles, and the wrong word sets me off on a crying jag. The edge of the cliff is rightfuckingthere and all I can do is wish that my mom was here because she would know what to say or what to do.

I don't know how to make any of this stop. I don't know how to be 'good' for the people around me because I can't even be good for myself. I don't remember the last time I was genuinely happy, just laughing and carefree and not just these brief shining moments of joy in the sea of shit. I seize those little moments like a raccoon finding a shiny object on the ground, clutching them for dear life and thinking they'll keep me afloat for another day.

Sometimes they do. And sometimes I just lay in bed watching my email inbox wishing more than anything that someone would answer me back. 

Valleyheart.

This city knows no pity; it is as alive and vibrant as a young girl, eager to enchant you with doe eyes and wonder. It fills you with hope and delight at every turn. It is a ragged and bitter whore, cursing at you under its breath as you hurriedly duck your head and walk past and pray you avoid its wrath. It is everything to some people and nothing to others. It is a living, breathing organism.

I walked it tonight. I love my apartment building; it is an enchanted castle, built in the 1920s and covered in a thick coat of ivy that insulates it from the warm summer sun and throws golden-green shadows over most everything in my little studio space. The front buzzer opens a big wrought-iron gate and the floor in the foyer is Spanish tile. Someone on the first floor is always cooking something ethnic, something spicy that vaguely reminds me of intricate hand-woven carpets and incense and veils. Someone on my hallway plays reggae too loud and always has people over, laughing. My room is right above the courtyard and sometimes a strong whiff of cigarette or pot smoke wafts up through my open French windows and makes me wrinkle my nose. 

My building is on a little cul-de-sac next to a massive church with spires that kiss the sky, and if you walk to one corner you can see the top of the Capitol Records building jutting up proudly from behind a line of palm trees. If you walk the other way and wait for the light to tell you it's okay to cross, there's a little strip of shops that are heaven. A posh breakfast place, a dusty bookstore with used tomes on everything from the origins of punk rock to photography books of naked men in Nazi armbands, a record store that always has Joan Jett or Tom Waits imports shoved in mismatched, cluttered bins. There is a sushi place with four-dollar hand rolls and a too-hip-for-school waitstaff, a world-famous comedy theater that hosts cheap and free improv shows several times every day and night, a newsstand that sells anything from fifty-dollar designer candles to glossy French fashion magazines to hardcore transsexual pornography to Chapstick, a restaurant that specializes in every possible way you can cook chicken. A liquor store with hundreds of varieties of wine, a designer pet boutique, a pizza place, a doughnut shop, a high-end organic grocery store, and towering over it all, the impossible mansion structure that is the Celebrity Centre for Scientology.

I live here, in Hollywood. I walk out of my apartment and make a few turns, avoiding traffic, inhaling the millions of scents that conflict in my nose. The rancid burn of piss from doorways where the homeless huddle and whisper to themselves, murmuring in the cacophony of the mentally ill or spiritually broken. The sweet tang of bacon-wrapped sausages frying on portable hot plates, served loaded with grilled onions and peppers by sour-faced women who speak no English. The sour burn of exhaust and smog and garbage mixing with the perfume of night-blooming flowers and food trucks.

I walk across the street and suddenly the cement turns to glossy slate-gray tile with baby-pink stars embedded within, names emblazoned in gold capitals. The people who've entertained us for decades, immortalized on the ground. Tourists exclaim over favorites like Johnny Cash and Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe; people lay on the ground cradling the stars for photos, frame them with their feet. When a celebrity dies, their star becomes cluttered with handwritten notes, bouquets of flowers, stuffed animals, candles, trinkets. If I walk a few blocks, the Pantages Theater looms above me with larger-than-life banners advertising upcoming stage productions. Past that is a strip club, tired women with sagging silicone breasts and fake smiles cheerfully greeting men as they walk past, muscular young guns for hire handing out business cards promising free drink tickets, validated parking, all nude, no cover charge. Girls in Spandex and sequins and too-high heels totter along the pavement clinging to handsome, over-pomaded boyfriends, tittering, snapping their gum. Cabs whiz down the streets, taking little notice of pedestrians. Tourists shout in foreign languages, exclaiming over handprints sunk deep into concrete at the Chinese Theater. Teenage boys in impossibly tight clothes lean against shop fronts on Santa Monica, checking their phones for messages from their coke dealers, sweating, laughing, air-kissing, preening. Drag queens strut confidently in obscenely high heels, glittery lips and spangled eyes and wigs teased to Heaven, cackling and crowing their defiant genderfucking mantras into the streets of the gayborhood. Ethnic boys with loud cars and ghettoblasters, slicked-back hair, sharkskin suits, perfectly-coordinated shoes, gold chains, capped teeth, laughing, their girlfriends looking like extras from rap videos, smoking cigarillos. The trust fund kids in their couture, trying to look bored when their eyes drink it in like the rest of us. The tourists with their cameras, terrified of missing a thing if they stop walking for even one minute.

The city is magic and it is poison. I've never lived somewhere that makes you feel so alive and so dead, so loved and so ignored, all at once, as this one. 

Tonight I had no plans and none of my friends were returning texts, so I decided to go out alone and entertain myself. I found myself at IOWest, a divey little comedy club that's given birth to such talents as Amy Poehler. Two friends were competing in an improvisation cage match, which is exactly what it sounds like. I found an empty seat, drank a diet Coke to give my hands something to do, wondered why I felt so fucking awkward. I laughed my ass off through the entire show and my guys won, their twentieth victory in a row actually. 

____

I wrote the above on Thursday the 12th. 

Friday the 13th was something else. I wanted so desperately to celebrate it like a real holiday the way the other horror fans do. It's the last one of the year and it took place during a full moon; seemed like kismet. My favorite party promoters in LA, The Boulet Brothers, were throwing a ridiculous slasher-themed soiree and I made plans to go with a few friends.

As always, things got derailed and I spent the night sober and trying to wrangle with reality. My depression is still a very real, tangible thing and it rears its ugly head every so often, at least once a week. I have 'good' periods where I feel euphoric, charmed, in love with everything. I have 'bad' periods where I stay in bed for an entire day, sleep too much or not at all, cry over commercials or a verse of a song, eat my weight in junk food even though it hurts my body physically to do so after my surgery. 

Matt is a saint because he takes the brunt of this; he never knows when he calls me what kind of mood I'll be in. I always love him, that never changes. But he listens to my neurotic dissection of why my friends haven't called me. I rant about how if I died, it might be weeks before anyone knew because they wouldn't bother to check on me. I tell him about how much I hate my body and the skin I'm in, and how much I wish I was anyone else. I talk about how ugly I am, and how he's out of my league. He listens, sometimes patiently and sometimes just snaps "Quit that. Cut it out." I know he hates to hear me bash myself. I know it bothers him. It makes it seem like his opinion of me means nothing, that it invalidates what it is that I do like about myself. But he doesn't understand how much I hate myself, and how I have hated myself for at least twenty years now. That isn't something I know how to fix. 

I have severe anxiety and when people don't text me when they say they will, when I call them and it goes to voicemail, when we make plans and they don't give me a hard committal, it makes me stress. I begin to think "Maybe they're avoiding you for a reason. Maybe you suck." This snowballs into "They have other friends. You don't. They're all hanging out without you and you're the pathetic one texting them, trying to get invited, and if they wanted you there they would've invited you." These little voices are mean and sound like pinches. They start small and then turn into these crushing boulders on my shoulders that make everything about me ache. I struggle to smile. I keep my phone turned on at all times and carry it with me to the bathroom, to the kitchen, to the front door. I find myself sending these optimistic little texts, trying to stay upbeat-sounding: Hey! I miss you! Hope you're doing okay! When I don't get a reply, I think Jesus you're pathetic. Just STOP. They have your  number. I see pictures of people hanging out and I wonder why I wasn't invited. It's worse if it's someone who's been telling me we should hang out for ages but then they're too busy or we can't get our schedules coordinated. When we do make plans, say to meet at a bar at nine--- at eight-thirty I am dressed and ready, calling my cab. At eight-fifty I'm in the bar, having found us a booth and ordered a round for myself. At nine I text you I'm here! :) Got a booth in the corner! At nine-twenty I text Are you almost here? At nine-forty you come in, a breezy apology if there is one at all, and inside I breathe a sigh of relief that you're here because my brain has been monologuing for forty-two minutes now about how pathetic I am, how you aren't coming because you got a better offer of plans tonight, how you aren't coming because you forgot we made plans at all and you're out doing something else with someone else. 

My anxiety has manifested itself into a full-scale panic attack more than once. The therapist I saw as a kid diagnosed it as athazagoraphobia and it's a real thing. It's an anxiety that is characterized by the fear of being forgotten or ignored, or the feeling of fear that you might accidentally forget someone else. I know what movies my friends like, their favorite bands, what they collect, what size they wear, when their birthday is. I remember every little detail I can because I want to be that kind of person who can surprise you with something you didn't even know you wanted, but I found it somewhere and thought of you and just nailed it by getting it for you. After twenty-eight years I've come to realize that this isn't something that a lot of people are afflicted with; I'm the only weirdo I know like this, actually.

My friends sometimes say things like Calm down, bitch. You know I love you. or I'm sorry I didn't call back, of course I'm not mad at you! Why would I be mad?! They don't understand that it doesn't need provocation; it's not like we got into a spat and I'm convinced you hate me. It's that I start imagining what I could've possibly done to piss you off, to get myself exiled from the group, to be excluded from plans. I start imagining every scenario and replaying every conversation we've had. I open our text history and re-read it, scanning for something I might've said that could be taken out of context or upset you. I check my email to make sure I didn't miss a message. I look at your social media to find clues of what you're doing, who you're with. 

The weirdest part is that I'm not jealous, or possessive, of people. Not really. Only in the sense that I want to be a part of the circle. I don't need to be the integral part, or the top of the totem pole (to anyone but my boyfriend. That totem pole I'd better be the crowning glory on). I just need to be a part of it. I will gladly step aside for your other friends, your significant other, even strangers who want to make your acquaintance. I will vanish into the shadows or wingman the shit out of you, whatever you need. It's when I'm home alone that the demons in my head start whispering, jabbing those pinchy little fingers into my sides and starting their chants.

You aren't good enough. You aren't special. You aren't pretty. You aren't funny. You're lucky they put up with you at all. Look at you, sitting home by yourself, refreshing your social media and reading Imgur and browsing Netflix and putting off what you should be doing. You should be fine with being alone. You should go to the beach or something, get out of the fucking house. But no, you're going to lie here feeling sorry for yourself like a pathetic loser. No wonder they don't like you. No wonder they just put up with you to your face and can't wait until you go home. No wonder you are always the one making the phone calls, sending the texts, writing the emails, instead of vice versa. They don't want you here--- and who can fucking blame them?

Depression and anxiety are fucking bitches, and they cripple me sometimes. And I'm sorry for everyone else in my life who has to deal with it, who has to reassure me that I don't suck, that I'm not a waste of oxygen, that I am okay. 

________

So I'm leaving LA, and I'm going back to Texas. 

And honestly, even though I've had some surreal experiences here (most of them with Thomas, and often ridiculous and silly, but there was also the time I had my makeup done by FX legend Steve Johnson--- who worked on stuff like Ghostbusters, Species, Blade II--- or the time I met the artist Gary Baseman at one of his art shows, or even just the times I've gone walking down the boulevard by myself and just absorbed the city), I can honestly pinpoint what I'm going to miss the most.

There's this group of comedians called The Resistance, and they're stunt guys and actors who perform at ComedySportzLA, this improv house here in LA. The original reason I went was that Derek Mears, an actor who I've met several times and become friends with over the last few years, performs as part of the troupe and he encouraged me to come check it out. From the first time I went, I was hooked. 

The concept is unique--- it's improv actors who are also stunt performers. They don't use chairs as props, they use fall mats and pads to build sets and create props. They have a live sound guy who creates soundtracks and effects for them to enhance their skit. They choose an audience member and let them shoot a dart gun at a board of movie genres, and then the audience calls out tropes for them to work from. Using those, they create a genre film in a roughly-90-minute improv skit. 

In short, it's incredibly funny, spontaneous, and every time I've been I've had a blast.

Derek might have been my gateway to The Resistance, but he left shortly after I began attending in order to film something (Sleepy Hollow, I think), and I kept going. It was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen, consistently, week after week. I knew the guys on a very superficial level--- Chris, Kurt, Ryan, Justin, Other Kurt, and Derek. They were not only hysterically funny and talented, but they were also nice. They stuck around after the shows to talk to fans, they gave great sweaty hugs to people when they got offstage, they were self-deprecating and real and fun on Facebook. I kind of loved them. Not in a crushy-weird way, obviously, but because they just seemed to be genuinely good guys who were having fun, working as a single unit whose sole purpose was to entertain people and make them laugh. 

I've gone to about nine of their performances now, and I've only actually talked to the guys twice in person. I always turn socially-awkward when they come around me, though I'm not entirely sure why because I've seen them be sweet and wide open and friendly to all of their fans. I usually hang back, leaning against a wall or standing outside checking my phone, too shy to tell them how great I think they did. Later, I go home and post cell phone pictures on Facebook and make sure to comment on their page to tell them my favorite moments or to let them know how funny the skit was that night. 

Every show, they invite people to come out with them to The Cat and Fiddle, this little pub on Sunset. 

Every time, I don't go.

Last week, I did go. I had my Uber drive me to the pub, and I walked in. A little nervous. A jazz band on the stage, people milling around, candles. I didn't see anyone I recognized. Maybe, as usual, I was early. Maybe I had jumped the gun in rushing straight from the show to the pub. Maybe they'd trickle in after twenty minutes or so. I went inside and sat at a vacant table, having no idea where I was 'supposed' to go. Did they have a designated spot? Was there a certain booth? Were they always on the patio and I was sitting inside like a douchebag? I ordered a Diet Coke. I'd get something stronger, maybe, when someone got there. Maybe there would be joking and laughing and actually talking to them. They seemed like cool guys. I'd seen most of their girlfriends, all of them beautiful girls who came to cheer for their boys, who seemed cool because you have to be cool to date a comedian, to go to his shows and support him, right? Maybe I could make friends with some of the other fans, who shared my interest in improv and comedy, who laughed alongside me. Surely someone in that crowd would be someone I could also see movies with, or call when I was bored and ask them to get sushi with me. 

I waited and drank my diet Coke, nervously checking my phone, looking at the door. No one showed up that I recognized, and after about fifteen minutes I paid my tab and called another car. I practically dove into it, embarrassed even though there was no one there to judge me, even though no one in the pub knew that I had fucked this up. I knew my cheeks were hot and I berated myself the ride home. You misunderstood, you went to the wrong pub, you got there too early, you are such a loser was the mantra. I went home, changed for bed, and turned on Netflix. I had failed again in my attempt to be social. I had fucked up. 

What these guys maybe don't realize is that for someone like me, someone who puts up this front of being wild and open and carefree, who goes to clubs in outrageous outfits and crazy makeup--- they don't know how brave I think they are. How much I admire them for getting onstage as a single unit made up of individual parts, and not only thinking on their feet but commanding the attention of an entire room full of people. Of making them laugh. 

The Resistance don't know me. They don't know me from any other audience member--- I'm a name on Facebook, I'm a somewhat-vaguely-familiar face. They've shocked me once or twice recently by knowing things like that I'm moving back to Texas or that I work as a photographer, because even though I've added them on Facebook I didn't really assume that they actually read anything on my page. But they don't know me, and to them I'm just a name and a ticket and a face.

But they have saved my weekend more than once. There've been a lot, more than I care to admit, where I am sitting in my apartment, full of self-loathing, staring at the ceiling with zero missed calls and zero missed texts and zero invites to go anywhere, wondering what the fuck I'm doing with myself, with my life, with my career, with my anything, and then I remember that it's Sunday and that the Resistance is that night. I get up and I get dressed. I wait impatiently until about 8:30 because they almost never start on time. I call my cab and I go to ComedySportzLA and I buy my ticket. Sometimes I splurge on a glass-bottled Diet Coke from the concession stand. I sit by myself in the lobby, and I can't even check my phone because there's no signal in the building there, so I just nervously eye the screen and pretend that I have some fascinating texts or emails I have to read. This keeps me from having to make eye contact with anyone, from having to make small talk. 

And then one of them, sometimes Kurt, sometimes Ryan or Justin, will open the door and yell "Come on! Hurry!" and people begin to rush the doors, scrambling for seats, laughing and yelling back, and the lights go down and the Resistance take the stage and there, in the dark, I am not alone. I am not pathetic and anxious and lonely. I am laughing and I am happy, and for ninety minutes I am a part of the world they build with mats and sound effects and spur-of-the-moment pop culture references. 

It may sound stupid or cheesy, but I am in love with this troupe because of this simple fact, and they are the thing I will miss most in LA. 

A cautionary tale.

I feel like this is a very important point that people don't address. I'm a member of several WLS (weight loss surgery) support groups, and all of them are full of 'newbies' or people considering the surgery who get conflicting information from different sources. So I thought this might be helpful.

Here's an idea of what my life is like now, post-surgery.

First off, my surgery center was great. Barker Bariatric Center in Dallas, Texas. I had Dr. Charlotte Hodges do my surgery and she was absolutely wonderful. However.

I noticed that once I said I would self-pay and didn't need to finance my surgery out, I'd be paying for it all in one go, the clinic's attention suddenly got much more laser-focused on me. I wasn't a 'possible' candidate anymore, I was a sure paycheck. They hurried me into the next available pre-surgery support meeting and booked my surgery date on my first consultation visit. Since I didn't have to wait for insurance to clear, there were no pre-emptive psychiatric consultations, no pre-surgery diet requirements except for a two-week liquid diet to shrink my liver, and only the basic physical exams done (a stress test/EKG to make sure my heart was normal, and a blood panel to check my levels). From my first visit to inquire about the surgery to my actual surgery was less than a month's time.

After my surgery, I attended two post-op follow-ups and support meetings, but they were in Dallas and it was a two-hour commute each way for me. I called to cancel my participation in the third meeting and said I'd reschedule. Cut to 16-months post-surgery and I haven't heard from the clinic since. No follow-up calls, no "Hey, just checking in to see how your surgery's going!", no "can you come in for a blood panel so that we can check your levels?". Absolutely no follow-up. I've been on my own, without support, since that second post-op meeting, which was basically half therapy session and half a drug rep coming in to pitch vitamins and protein shakes and try to sell them with a kickback to the clinic.

Initially, I was on a very restricted diet and I was terrified of fucking it up so I didn't deviate at all. I counted protein grams like my life depended on it, drank a protein shake every day, ordered expensive supplements from various companies to try and find something I liked. I choked down my vitamins even though they upset my stomach. I was a member of a gym and worked out as hard as I could trying to tone up.

Cut to--- 16 months out.

I can literally eat almost anything I want.

I still have portion restrictions, of course, but there are 'cheat codes' for that. Just eat slower and space it out. By 'grazing', I've managed to overeat plenty of times.

Also, some people 'dump' if they eat something too full of sugar or carbs. They get feverish or sweaty or nauseous or something similar. I don't. I also see other people who don't who say "Oh god, I WISH I dumped." No. Because that's like wishing for an eating disorder. If you say "If I threw up every time I ate a piece of bread that'd teach me!" then you aren't addressing the real issue, which is that you still want the bread.

Most of obesity comes from one of two things; genetics (WAY more rare than people claim. I come from a fat family for generations, sure, but we also thought Kraft mac 'n cheese and deep-fried fish sticks was a 'balanced meal'. Everyone says they are 'big boned' or that they have a 'medical condition' that keeps them from losing weight and while this may be true in some cases, in most the person is simply sedentary with a bad diet and no motivation) or lifestyle. Mine was definitely lifestyle, with a healthy dash of psychological thrown in.

I feel good because I've lost weight. I've gone from 349 pounds and a size 24 to about 200 pounds and a size 10/12. It's nice being able to look at 'normal' clothing stores, or know that if I go to a concert or a convention or something, they WILL have a t-shirt in my size (often the fitted girly-cut shirts these days too, not just men's shirts in an XXL). I wear high heels without pain, my ankles don't roll anymore when I walk long distances, I have energy, I can cross my legs when I sit down. I can sit Indian-style in my seat at the movie theater. I can borrow clothes from my best friend if I sleep over or we're going out.  These are all AWESOME things.

But I have also 'cheated' so much that I'm pretty much completely off the bandwagon. All the things they say you 'can't' do, I do.

I can eat carbs. Pasta, doughnuts, bread, etc. you name it. It isn't how it used to be, of course; I can't eat a dozen doughnut holes for breakfast, or a mixing bowl of Captain Crunch, or a box of mac and cheese. But I do order lo mein, make ramen, and share fettucine with my friends if I go out.

I can eat fried food. I eat pizza (thin crust only, but still), fried jalapeño poppers, french fries, cheesesticks, etc. If we go out to a bar and get an app sampler, I can nibble on everything there without a problem.

I can eat fast food. I don't get the big combo meals anymore, of course, but I can eat a Junior Bacon Cheeseburger from Wendy's (I take the top bun off, that's too much bread), or a 4-piece chicken nugget, or a small order of waffle fries. I love to get a single Doritos Locos taco from Taco Bell. I can have about 1/2 a grilled cheese from Five Guys, or 1/4 an order of animal-style fries from N-and-Out.

I can drink booze. Oh man, can I drink booze. The surgery has done some interesting things to my body. Pre-surgery, I could drink a fifth of Crown Royal and be functional-drunk. Now, two shots and I am toast. But I also metabolize everything faster, so about an hour after those two shots I'm ready for a third. I can nurse a cranberry-vodka cocktail with my bestie in a bar. I also don't get hangovers so this is a dangerous thing. I can even drink the 'fizzy' stuff like champagne if I sip it and don't rush myself.

I can drink soda. I actually love the sparkly feel of a soda every few days. I try to drink diet or 'zero' sodas but I know deep-down they're just as bad for me. I'll usually get one and just nurse it for awhile, I don't pound them back like I used to.

I don't take my vitamins religiously. In fact, I take them about once a week. I feel fine. I have energy, I don't have any problems with that kind of thing. I just hate taking them and I forget more than I remember. So far, I haven't had any issues with this except for last May when I was about five months out from surgery and I contracted scurvy. It wasn't just a vitamin deficiency though, I was actually insanely sick and unable to keep anything down, not even water. The scurvy was just a result of a bigger problem with that, which resolved itself shortly after. Since then I've had no issues.

The problem is what I can't eat. I can't eat a lot of fruit. I can eat grapes, bananas and strawberries without a problem, but too much fruit actually makes me feel dizzy from the sugar content. I can't eat many veggies; sometimes I just want a big crunchy salad but after a few bites it's too much, my stomach's full of the roughage. I can't eat more than a few bites of rice, for whatever reason, although I do just fine with California rolls at the sushi place by my house. I can't eat anything overly-greasy, like some Asian takeout or a big piece of street pizza. The last time I tried pad Thai I ended up puking for like 2 hours. When I went to Universal Studios, I had a few bites of a hot dog and thought I might die. But those are the only real 'problems' I've had.

Therefore, people who are considering this surgery just need to realize that the surgery isn't a magical spell that makes you WHOOSH drop a ton of weight and keep it off forever no matter what happens. Your mileage may vary. Some people lose every pound they wanted, some people only lose a few. Some people puke when they look at 'bad' foods afterward, and some, like me, can go right back to all of their bad habits if they aren't careful.

I try to combat my cravings. I eat a lot of celery sticks with low-fat peanut butter, and drink a lot of fruity teas. I try to fill myself up on 'good' things but it doesn't always work. I monitor my drinking and keep it to 1-2 nights a week at the most. I walk anywhere within a couple of miles of my apartment because I live in an awesome neighborhood for pedestrians and I figure if I am walking three or four miles round-trip then I can treat myself to a small order of fries once in awhile.

Everyone just needs to realize that there is no magic wand to make this kind of thing successful, failure is a very real possibility and a real option. It's a mental game. I have to make choices, I have to convince myself that I don't want those delicious foods that I know I can handle. I have to pretend that those foods will make me sick or make me vomit or make me faint even though I know that isn't the case. Mind over matter and sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes I have really bad days, and sometimes I have really great days where I congratulate myself on being such a badass and sticking to my diet.

The point being… weight loss surgery is a complicated fucking thing, and I've heard a few people mumbling about how I "took the easy way out". Listen, bitches. I'm still fat. I still eat when I'm depressed, I still feel guilty over my food choices when I make bad ones, and I still try to 'sneak' food. I'm like a fucking alcoholic sometimes-- friends and I order delivery and I'm going into the kitchen trying to pretend like I'm getting a glass of water when meanwhile I'm sneaking a few extra bites of food from the containers we've already put away in the fridge. I'm still guilty of my own bad habits and I acknowledge that this is a long, complicated, fucked-up road I'm on. I have to love myself before I can take care of myself, and that's a whole issue in itself. But I am trying, and making baby steps in the right direction. And maybe someday soon, I won't have to rely on food as a way to make myself feel better about every little stumbling block I run into.

A beast with frothing jaws.

It's been almost a month since my last blog post, and I never meant to neglect this thing so cruelly. I love this blog; it began as a chronicle of my weight loss surgery but now it's turned into an actual catharsis about my emotions and dealing with the everyday occurrences that make up my life.

Most people likely don't care, or think I'm just narcissistic to think anyone wants to read about my life, but that's fine. This is primarily for me anyway.

My life has been crazy and not always in a good way, it just depends on who you ask. We're still finishing post-production on the film, preparing to go to Texas for this big horror convention. Everything's been chaotic and trying to stay on top of things makes me alternately feel like a rockstar or completely useless depending on the day and the time of the task at hand.

Beyond that, though, other things. I'm dealing with a lot of existentialism right now, trying to decide what I want out of my life, who I want to be. What makes me happy. I really do feel like two completely different people, one of whom is responsible and sensible and nurturing and the other that's wild and crazy and spontaneous and impulsive. The selfish side of me wins sometimes and I do something without thinking about how it will impact someone else. I enjoy going out partying and dancing and drinking and being a little bit reckless and then coming home and buckling down and doing some serious ass-kicking work. I can't be 100% one or the other. I'm too functional to be a hot mess and too crazy to be a stick in the mud. However, I spent years of my life being the 'responsible' one and I never really had the opportunity to go out until recently. I lived in Waco, where there pretty much IS no 'nightlife' to speak of, and my friends all lived in Dallas. And even when I was in Dallas, those friends had no desire to go out partying or out to clubs, they were all older than me and had already gotten it out of their system. So now that I'm here, living in Hollywood and going out is such a regular thing for me, I'm getting this reputation among my older friends that I've 'changed' or I'm not the same person they once knew.

If there is one mantra that I've heard from the time I had the weight loss surgery, it's "You've changed."

My own worst enemy has always been me. I've been at war with myself for as long as I can remember and sadly, thinking back, I don't think there was ever a point in my life where anything was 'enough' for me.

I grew up as an only child because my half-sisters weren't in my household and we intersected only at brief intervals during my upbringing; as such, I constantly had my mom and grandparents gushing over me, bragging about me, telling anyone who would listen how amazing I was. You'd think that this would have instilled self-esteem in me, or some kind of self-worth anyway, but I think it actually served to do the opposite. I always felt like I had to keep that going, that I had to be the best at everything. I had to make myself better so that people didn't feel disappointed in me. It's like the joke about how you should go in expecting nothing so that you're not disappointed; I felt like I was in the other boat. People kept saying how great and talented and amazing I was, so when I met those people I'd better really be great and talented and amazing.

My entire life I've worked very hard to be the best, or among the best. I had nearly perfect grades in school and worked hard at extracurriculars. I held down a job from the time I was fourteen years old while going to school. I was the youngest writer on the syndicated New York Times wire when I was in high school. I befriended my teachers and actually kept in touch with a lot of them after I left their classes. I didn't just want to be good, I wanted to be exemplary.

But I also wanted to be liked. I felt fiercely weird inside, completely misunderstood. I didn't seem to fit in anywhere. I was lucky enough in middle school to find other weirdos, and even if they weren't the same exact brand name of weirdo as I was they were better than nothing. I strove to acclimate; I was like an animal forcing myself to evolve to survive to my new surroundings. I was already well-versed in the practice of eating my feelings, so I was never going to be the 'hot' one in the group. I had to settle for making myself funny or good at group projects or reliable or interesting. I had to make myself an asset to my group of friends.

When I was younger, someone once asked me what my greatest fear was and I really had to think about it. It wasn't loneliness; I spend plenty of time alone and I actually like my own company most of the time. It wasn't heights, or big dogs, or spiders, or the dark, or any 'normal' fear like that. I gave it a lot of thought, running through lists of things, but none of them truly scared me, they just disgusted or upset or bothered me.

And then it hit me.

I was afraid of being forgotten.

I have a very acute phobia of being left out, excluded, forgotten. Of being a non-essential. A 'luxury item'.

In every group of friends there's the one 'core' member, the one planet that everyone else orbits around. This person is always charismatic and whether it's discussed or not, this person has the final say in things like what movie is seen, what restaurant a group goes to, what bar is best for the night's activities, what time we're all getting together. This person's approval is sought on new purchases, on new love interests, on upcoming plans and ambitions. Their word is valued and taken as gospel most of the time.

Other than this particular person, the other roles are more flexible. There are always people there to fill the archetypes and round out the group. If a hole occurs, either a new member is initiated in to fill it or someone already existing in the group simply expands their own range to plug the gap.

My whole social life growing up hinged on me being on the peripheral of a group. In high school I found a girl who, ironically since she was considered alternative and weird, was by all accounts a 'mean girl', and I was determined to make her like me. Consequently, I became her right-hand lackey and an integral part of the group. When I was in her bad graces, however--- like if I disagreed with her on some vital topic, or refused to cover for her when she was sneaking around with her boyfriend and getting me in trouble as her alibi--- I found myself completely cut off. My group went to the movies or concerts or dinner and no one texted or called me. I was in a complete blacklisted state and that terrified me. It wasn't the idea of not having friends; if they'd simply stopped being my friends it would've been bearable, it would've given me closure. It was the idea that I had simply ceased to be thought of at all, that I was so insignificant a part of the ecosystem that no one batted an eyelash when I suddenly ceased to exist.

It probably comes from a very Freudian place involving my dad abandoning me before I was born, and I admitted years ago that I thought that something I did caused him to leave. On an academic level I realize he was just a shithead and a horrible father and it's very unlikely that anything I ever did would've had any bearing at all on his decisions, but on an emotional level I couldn't accept that. I was convinced that it was my fault, that I didn't try hard enough (despite not having been born yet when he bailed).

I have a hard time saying no to people, disappointing people. I live in fear that if I disappoint them, if I let them down, then they will find someone else who will say 'yes' all the time and will always come through for them and I will find myself replaced. I will become disposable, dispensable, someone who isn't necessary to someone's happiness. And that terrifies me. I want to be vital, I want to be memorable, I want to be looped in.

I get jealous and insecure and petty pretty easily. I am always fighting with insecurity. I have this weird thing where I feel like I am lucky to even have friends, and therefore they are the ones who are being generous and awesome just by hanging out with me when they could certainly find cooler people who'd bring more to the table than I do. Therefore, I always try to come through for people in a big way. I pay attention to tiny details that seem insignificant to so many other people. I remember people's coffee orders, what kind of cigarettes they drink, their favorite stores, some weird kitschy thing they collect, what their favorite pizza is, so that if the situation ever calls for it I can surprise them and get it right. I get original artwork or out of print books or concert tickets or rare old collectibles for my friends on holidays. If I go shopping and see a t-shirt that reminds me of someone, I buy it for them 'just because'. It's something I do completely without thinking about it now; it's the same thing with mix CDs, when I hear a song and it reminds me of someone I immediately send it to them or put it on a USB drive for them or make them a playlist because I just need them to hear it. The people in my life, the relationships I treasure most, are like pieces of a big quilt and I am always adding, expanding, stitching, reinforcing, trying to make it the softest, warmest, most comforting and durable thing I possibly can.

I have this permanent, overwhelming desire to love my friends, to protect them from the outside world and from themselves, to provide them with whatever they need. For the people I love and who I believe love me back, I will go to the mats every time and beat anyone who opposes them into bloody smears.

Now that I've lost weight, I still find myself trapped in this bubble. I want to be memorable and vital and essential. I'm certainly not in the market for finding anyone to date, but I love going somewhere and having people flirt with me or hit on me. It makes me feel like a million dollars to have strangers hitting on me for the first time in my entire life.

It's gotten a lot more frequent since I uprooted my life a few months ago and moved to Los Angeles, and I suppose to a degree it's true. But overall, it's something that has wormed its way under my skin, gnawing at me like parasite kisses until I am constantly feeling pressure to censor myself, to shield parts of my 'new life' from people who knew me in the 'before times', as my best friend Brandy calls them.

The fact of the matter is, I have NEVER been a true twenty-something-year-old girl until now. When I was in high school, I stayed out late at punk rock shows with my friends, but I never did anything 'bad'. I never went on dates, I never snuck out after curfew, I smoked a few clove cigarettes to appear cool before deciding that I wasn't cut out for that rebellious image. I was the alibi for my friends who broke the rules; my house was 'where we were all sleeping over', my mom was the designated driver if any of my friends had too much to drink at a house party, and I patiently waited for my turn to shine. I was the voyeur, the documentarian; I carried my camera with me like a talisman, shooting my friends laughing and dancing and kissing and fighting and playing music and painting, and I clung to the shadows in oversized hoodies and shapeless jeans and t-shirts with sarcastic one-liners on them, trying to carve out an identity for myself in a sea of people who were fast on the way to learning who they were.

My wanderlust took hold early and with rows of shark teeth; it sank in the minute I got the acceptance letter from Concord University in West Virginia and I didn't hesitate before accepting. I packed everything I needed into a car and my family drove me to my new home and for the first time I was out on my own. I lived in a dorm and didn't have a car, so my freedom was still limited, not to mention I wasn't financially independent. I was basically confined to the campus, which was small and quaint but surprisingly progressive. We had a gay-student group that put on drag show benefits in the food court. We had geeks and nerds and goths and punks and weirdos. I felt right at home with them. I dated one of the nerd royalty and loved him dearly. For the first time in my life I could sleep over at someone else's place without having to check in,

To those people who say that I've changed, all that I can say is 'yes, you're right'. I used to be almost 350 pounds. I used to be incredibly shy and self-conscious due to my weight and I hid it behind being the jovial, reliable, caretaker friend who would hold your purse for you while you went to dance with the cute guy who bought you a drink. I am not that girl anymore. Now I'm out on the dance floor right alongside you, enjoying a drink and working up a sweat with my friends. I'm not the wallflower anymore.

Sometimes my head still goes to those places though and I realize that deep down I am still the same girl. Thomas has said to me more than once 'You still think like the fat friend' and I know he's right. I still feel grateful that people who are beautiful and talented and popular would want to hang out with me. I don't see a lot of worth in myself. I try hard to compensate, to win people over, to stay in everyone's good graces. I'm terrified of being alone and rejected. I cry when I'm left out of plans. I have major insecurities with my standing in any group of friends. I don't think that I will ever feel truly 'good enough' to exist in any social situation. I am always on the fringe, nervously smiling, trying to be charming if someone talks to me, trying to be invisible if they aren't.

My depression and anxiety are at a level they have never been before during my adult life, which is scary because on the surface my life is amazing. I have terrific friends, a fantastic, exciting job, great opportunities, a cool apartment in the best city I've ever been to. But I am constantly second-guessing myself, unsure if I can pull it off or not. I am insecure and I always feel like I'm just waiting for the guillotine blade to drop and my life go back to the way it was before all of these opportunities presented themselves to me.

And in the interim of this chaos, I've realized the truth--- my weight loss surgery was not a 'cure for what ailed me'. I lost 150 pounds, but I still eat when I'm stressed. I still find myself reaching for things that aren't good for me, aren't beneficial to my weight loss. And I still feel like the fat girl deep down where it really matters.

I don't know how to fix these things. Depression is a real thing. If I knew how to switch it off, I would've done so years ago.

I'm turning into someone else, someone new, but I don't know what that will mean for me in the long run.

"I come alive when I'm falling down…"

The main demon I'm battling these days is the little dragon inside of me that is my depression. It feels like a blanket smothering you and making it damned near impossible to breathe most of the time. I end up coming home from work and just lying down in bed, curling up in a ball and staring at my computer screen or the darkness until I fall asleep. 

It sucks because I'm in one of the most magical cities in the world and there is always stuff going on. I have amazing friends who are always inviting me out to parties or art shows or movies or bars and I do as much of that as I can; I put on pretty clothes and do my makeup and prepare for a nice trip out to socialize because I need that interaction, I need to see the city lit up and beautiful. I hate wallowing in my own sadness, and the only thing worse than fighting off my depression tooth and nail is having someone say "It's fine, cheer up" like I could just flip a switch and turn off my sadness. Shaking it off might be easier for some people than others, but for me it's never come with a particular trigger. I need different things at different times; sometimes I desperately need to cry and have someone pet my hair or rub my back and just be there for me. Other times I just need to lay alone in the darkness and listen to my iPod or watch some stupid movie and ignore my phone for a few hours. I am naturally an extrovert, so I'm not used to hiding it when I'm sad; I will tell the world about my depression, and yet I used to take great care to cover the cuts I was putting on my body. I don't care if people think I'm weak for being this way; it's a big part of who I am, unfortunately, and it's something I fight every day. This last week has been a bad one for me and more than once I've cried myself to sleep. I've eaten too much food, and total junk food, nothing nutritious at all. I haven't been exercising. I haven't been doing much of anything except feeling sorry for myself and wallowing in the sadness inside of me. I'm doing my best now to shake it off and shrug the blanket away, but it's hard. Sunshine comes in little trickles and beams, not big washes of light.

Awhile ago my friend Stephanie and I went hiking in Griffith Park. It's beautiful there, and it was so peaceful and fun. We went up the 'easy' trail and through this beautiful little wooded greenbelt with a brook full of fish and crawdads, and we just talked and watched people and dogs and hung out with her terrier Edie. It was a good day. 

I had a crisis of faith between the last entry and this one; I was facing major uncertainty with a lot of things in my life and it's very hard for me to be so far away from my family and friends while going through this. Of course I have friends out here, but the ones in Texas have obviously known me longer and been with me through more. I don't feel confident enough with most of the people out here to really lean on them when I'm stressing and what's worse, I try not to come across as clingy or desperate or anything but I get so needy and lonely sometimes when I'm depressed and don't have people around me. I spent several days thinking about hurting myself, and it's alarming how much I wanted to go back to bad habits. How easy that slippery slope is to traverse.

But standing on the top of the hill at Griffith Park, looking out over the city, I realized that I was where I'm meant to be. Things aren't easy and things aren't this fairy tale that I always hoped they'd be, but Los Angeles is home for me right now. The city stretches out full of possibilities and beauty, and I have to stop dwelling on the bullshit that clouds my mind from seeing how wonderful things can be if I just let them.

Things at work have certainly been interesting. We're in post-production and editing mode for Fear Clinic, which is pretty fantastic. Shooting the movie was an incredible experience for me and I have stayed close with quite a few of the cast and crew members. It's a big family; even when things were rough or we had bad days on set, we always had each other's backs and had someone to vent to or give a hug to or just have a drink with. 

I got a director's chair back with my name on it. :)

As much as Fear Clinic was amazing, I'm really looking forward to the next few projects we have lined up. I've been writing like a fiend and working really hard on coming up with some original concepts, and it looks like something really big might happen in the near horizon. Something that is surreal to me, and a part of me doesn't even want to say anything for fear of jinxing it. All I can say is that this is the life I always wanted since I was a little kid; the idea of creating something, of making something with my own mind that lots of people might get to see and relate to, is insane and bizarre and intoxicating to me.

And I'd be lying if I said things weren't hard with Matt being 2,000 miles away. I had to fly to North Carolina to see him this past weekend, and it was a five-hour plane ride. On the way out I slept, stretched out in my coach seat as far as I could manage, and listened to the new Bastille album, which I've been totally wearing out on my playlist. Once I got there and rented a car, it was another two hours of driving to get to where he was stationed on set for an indie film he'd been working on. I was exhausted and my back was throwing a fit by the time I pulled up outside the address he'd given me. But then the door opened and this lanky, handsome, scruffy guy with a lip ring walked out and immediately every minute of travel time vanished from my mind. All I wanted to do was throw my arms around his skinny ass and that's exactly what I did; I hugged him as hard and long as I could, just trying to absorb him. No amount of hugging him felt like enough, even though it had only been a few weeks since I last saw him in Dallas.

We spent the night together, a nice dinner and a shady-ass quaint little hotel room, and I can honestly say that laying next to him is the first time I've ever been in a relationship where I felt complete with the person beside me. I sleep better with him breathing next to me; I love how it feels when our bodies brush in the night. As much as I hate everything about my own body, I love everything about his. There's a poem by e.e. cummings which I've always loved… the opening line is "I like my body when it is with your body."

I honestly love everything about Matt. He isn't perfect, but he's perfect for me. He makes me feel that much closer to loving myself, to being comfortable in my own skin. The only thing about our relationship that genuinely sucks is not getting to fall asleep with him every night, not getting to wake up to him every morning. Not getting to drive around holding his hand and rolling my eyes over the death metal music he listens to when he's driving, not having him there to give me shit about my dozens of little quirks that I know drive him crazy even if he says they don't. Long distance sucks. I don't know how people do this and manage. I feel like I'm dying of loneliness sometimes even when we're on FaceTime and it's as close as I can get to actually lying beside him in bed.

This boy is everything to me.

He makes me better just by being with me.

My weight loss seems to have pretty much stabilized, and I don't have a scale here so I don't know how much I weigh. I probably don't want to know, honestly. I've been eating like shit, like I said before, and not really looking out for myself. Not taking care of me the way I should, for sure. But I am about to stop all that shit and get back on the wagon. There will still be vodka, of course, but there will not be Del Taco or fried cheesesticks at 2 AM or a bag of Doritos when I'm bored. I will stop buying things like Bagel Bites even though they make super-convenient noms when I have the late-night munchies. I have to get back to high-protein low-carb goodness, and I have to make a schedule for working out and actually stick to it. Regain is entirely possible, and not only possible but plausible. I refuse to get hugely obese again. I'm still very fat by a lot of standards,  'the fat girl' in any circle of friends, and I don't want that for myself anymore. I am still seriously considering cosmetic surgery to tuck and lift everything that needs tucking and lifting, but I'd like to lose another 20 or so pounds on my own free merit before I go under the knife for that stuff. However, I was so fat for so long that I know some things are inevitable, and I WILL have to get my stomach tucked, my thighs/ass probably too. My upper arms are a nightmare that will have to be dealt with. And without a push-up bra, my tits are a nightmare; two cup sizes smaller than they used to be and gravity is not fucking kind when you lose 150 pounds. 

Matt says I'm too critical of myself, that I'm always putting myself down. I know it bothers him that I don't find myself beautiful. But in truth, I never have. Why would I start now? I don't think I'm beautiful--- on a good day, maybe I'm pretty, but even that's dodgy and uncertain. Just once, I want to take someone's breath away, my own included. I want someone to go "…damn" when they see me, in a good way of course.

In the meantime, there are Victoria's Secrets bras, which are kind of fucking magical.

"If you don't love yourself then you've got nothing to spare…" (Warning: Triggers.)

 My depression is something I've battled with my entire life. It's always been a vicious cycle and one time, when I was about thirteen, my mom walked in on me with a pair of scissors. I was cutting my wrist, and I remember being completely spaced out while I was doing it. I'd gone into a weird trancey state where everything felt totally normal and I was hypnotized by the way the blood looked on my arm. I'd cut myself before, but I always kept it to my thighs or somewhere that people couldn't see. More than cutting, I was into hurting myself in a thousand tinier and less obvious ways. I was hiding food and eating it like it was going to be taken away from me at any moment. I was coming home from school and drowning my heavy heart in ice cream and junk food and frozen pizzas and lying on the couch watching movies that felt like a comfort blanket. I was writing angry, angsty poetry in notebooks--- I found one recently when packing up my house. A black spiral notebook and within the first few pages I had written "I wish I was dead" and then traced it so hard and so many times that my pen had torn through the paper and bled ink onto the pages below. "I wish I was dead" and its ghostly echoes took up the first maybe ten pages of the notebook. It was a mantra, but I was never quite brave enough to actually do it. Instead I just retreated into myself, put on a careful mask of laughter and confidence and a bubbly personality. Inside I was slogging through neck-deep water in concrete shoes, just trying to keep my nose above the tide lines.

It's always come and gone, and I don't know how to explain it to people who don't have depression. (I'm not, you may have guessed, referring to "Oh, my team lost the Superbowl, I'm so depressed" depression here.) Sometimes you see it on the horizon like a summer storm, ominous hints; a song comes on the radio and you feel the familiar sting in your sinuses that means you're about to cry, or you wake up with an unexplainable sense of "Today's going to suck" (self-fulfilling prophecy?). Other times you're sitting at work composing a perfectly innocent email and the next thing you know you've locked yourself in the bathroom and you're crying so hard you can't breathe. I've given myself multiple panic attacks before because my depression couples with anxiety. I get depressed, then I feel guilty about being depressed ("There are people who have it so much worse than you, are you KIDDING me?!"), and it snowballs from there until I am unable to function and I just totally shut down. I wind up crying and hyperventilating and pulling into myself and I can't explain to anyone why it's happening, only that it is. 

I've been like this for as long as I can remember, even as a very young kid, but it just really manifested itself and found its legs when I became an adolescent. My mom knew, but she didn't know how to help. A therapist wasn't covered by her insurance and she didn't know what to do for me. When I was seventeen, I went to my regular doctor, who was kind of a prick. I'd already been having heaps of medical problems--- I was morbidly obese and the doctor was sure that I had polycystic ovarian syndrome because I wasn't menstruating. He sat me down and said matter-of-factly "It's going to be incredibly hard for you to ever have children. Your body just isn't producing eggs. I can put you on birth control to make you have a regular period, but there's no point to that because it obviously won't make you fertile. So you're just going to have to accept that it's going to be a very difficult and unlikely thing if you want to get pregnant." Now at seventeen I had no intention of getting pregnant, but I also had no idea if I was ever going to want babies, if I was going to meet some amazing partner and decide I wanted to be a mommy. So needless to say this was pretty devastating news. I started crying and instead of exhibiting any good bedside manners, the doctor asked me if I considered myself 'overly emotional' as a regular thing. I told him that yes, I did cry at the drop of a hat and something as minor as a commercial could literally ruin my entire day. He asked me the routine questions and I went through the checklist, thinking about it.

Do you find yourself losing enjoyment in things that you once loved doing? I thought about writing, how when I was younger I hadn't ever been without a pen or my electric typewriter. I drove my family insane thrusting pieces of paper at them, "Here, read this!" every ten minutes. I was enamored with words and I made them my bitch. And then I thought about me at seventeen, using my words like weapons, writing trite bullshit about being sad all the time. Where had my stories gone, where had the actual imagination and happiness and beautiful stories gone in my brain?

Do you isolate yourself from others in social situations? I was the king of bringing a book or two to school with me, of reading through lunch, of sitting on the bleachers during gym class when I could get away with it. I loved what friends I did have, but I was perfectly content to run by myself. I didn't like the pressure of always having to be charming and sweet and fun around my friends; I felt like if I showed them that I was sad or fucked-up or depressed they would go away and find someone who was less of a 'downer'.

When we finished our stupid little interview he smirked and asked how long I'd been dealing with these feelings, and then he wrote me a prescription for Prozac. He told me that I should've come forward sooner, that he could've helped me with my depression years ago.

I took it for weeks, and after awhile I realized that I wasn't sad anymore, but everything felt dull and desaturated. Instead of the ultraviolet brilliance of my joy and my pain, there was only blunted, staticky transmissions--- my emotions were a radio station that was a mile out of comfortable tune-in range and I was getting them in starts and fits through a veil of crackling, muffled nonsense when I got them at all. I didn't care about school, though I still made straight As. I didn't cry when I heard a particularly moving song, though I still listened to the same music I always had. There was just nothing there, and I didn't wean myself off the pills or tell the doctor that I was stopping. I just quit taking them and flushed them down the toilet. They weren't an answer, not for me, and those few moments of peace they brought me weren't worth the price I felt I was paying to give up what made me who I was.

I was officially diagnosed with manic depression that day when I was seventeen, and the 'manic' part of it is very true. I don't ever understand what's happening inside my own head. When I'm alone sometimes I'm perfectly happy and content. Other times I feel like the apocalypse has happened and I'm the only person on this earth--- I am crippled by despair and loneliness and a desperation to connect. Sometimes I laugh too loudly at jokes or cling to my friends like a kid to his mother's apron strings; I am overly affectionate, holding hands, hugging, playing with someone's hair in that need to feel connected to someone. I've been known to be self-destructive; I have picked fights with people over insignificant shit just to see if they'll fight with me or if they'll decide I'm not worth the trouble and just walk away. Deep down a part of me is convinced that if I died, only a handful of people would even attend the funeral--- I often lose myself in fantasies about me dying, wondering who would care, what impact it would have on the people around me. I used to think that everyone thought like this, because I couldn't remember a time when I didn't. I have found journal entries I wrote at seven and eight years old saying that I wished I would die or disappear, that I hated myself.

Now I am twenty-seven years old and for about half a year there, I had a good run. When my mom got diagnosed with cancer I tried to remain optimistic--- my mom was a goddamned superhero. Nothing as stupid as cancer was going to take her down; she was going to die of old age someday after I'd gotten married and had a bomb-ass job in a big city. I used to joke with her that if I ever got famous she'd walk the red carpet with me, that she would be my 'date' to awards shows and signings and things like that. I knew that she was going to beat that shit. I put warpaint on her cheeks and took pictures of her in pink boxing gloves, ready to kick cancer's ass. I called up sponsors and companies and asked them for donations for a raffle and auction to raise money for her fight, knowing that once we paid the bills off and she'd finished her chemo we'd laugh about it. She'd sit with me and help me write the thank-you notes to all of those companies who donated shit to the charity event. She would be there when I someday decided that yeah, I did want to get pregnant, and she'd make fun of me for not knowing how to work the velcro tabs on a diaper and she'd teach me how to get the baby to stop crying at 4 AM because I never met a baby who didn't love my mother the instant they met her.

Instead, she died, and I shut down. It was like someone unplugged my heart the day I got the phone call at work. I was in the middle of ringing up a customer at the comic book store where I worked when the hospice worker called, and matter-of-factly said with notes of sympathy in their voice that my mother had died a half-hour ago. I hung up and finished bagging the customer's books; then I looked at my boss. She knew in my eyes what had happened, and her face was a theatre mask of tragedy and grief and pity. I simply said "I need to go" and I took my purse and walked out to my car. People offered to drive me, but I was fine. I was numb. My mother was alive last night but now she wasn't. It didn't sink in. I drove to the nursing home where we'd been forced to put her, and my grandmother and uncle were already there. My grandmother was sobbing. We walked to her patient room and I thought she would be in the morgue or somewhere waiting for the coroner; there wasn't even a sign on the door. Do Not Disturb would've been nice, since we opened the door to pack up her personal things and there she was, lying in the bed without the curtain even drawn around her. She could've been asleep except she wasn't. Even then, I just felt hollowed-out like a jack-o-lantern. I couldn't go in there; my uncle had to remove my mom's rings and things because I couldn't set foot in the room with her body.

For a year after she died, I did nothing. I went to school and I worked at my job, making money and making perfect grades. I drove to Dallas every weekend to see my friends and sought solace in their arms. I didn't write; when I went to open a word processor, I would feel a sense of bland tranquility like when I took the Prozac. Nothing was there, nothing mattered. I had no words for the first time in my life. I started to get anxious about this--- if I couldn't write, who was I? What was I going to do? This quickly escalated into me having panic attacks when I tried to write, and so I stopped. For a year I didn't write. I took pictures because it was easier and it still gave me the artistic outlet I needed, but I wasn't particularly pushing myself to make good art. I just wanted to do something before I stagnated and rotted away.

Moving to LA felt like plugging a live wire directly into my heart. There was adrenaline, there was the sense of urgency that came with being told "You have to go right now, you don't have time to think, this job offer expires in a few weeks". There was the chaos of packing up my life in a little over two weeks, in leaving my lifelong home, in dropping out of school two months before graduation with a perfect GPA. There was the support and the doubt from my friends and family, most of whom thought I was probably making a mistake but who smiled and nodded and waved pom-poms for me anyway. I got here and had about two days to move into my apartment before I was thrown headfirst into work; I came to work in an amazing FX shop full of werewolves and monsters and aliens and Terminators, with a crazy boss who pulled me into his world. We worked in tandem, writing and editing the script and scribbling on Post-Its, chain-drinking Coke Zeros and making five-AM runs for breakfast burritos after endless sleepless nights, passing out in office chairs, listening to movie scores and watching Prince of Darkness and forgetting what sunlight and fresh air felt and looked like. But it was phenomenal for me. I was living my dream, I was working on a major horror film starring people I really admired, the assistant to not only a great director and FX master but a good friend. I was lucky as fuck and I had been rejuvenated, I was remembering how not only to walk but to run. We got on set and we kicked ass through chaos and adversity and lots of weirdness, and we made a movie.

I started to make a life for myself here. I began slowly to build myself a tribe out of the people I was meeting; I was finding other weirdos like myself, other outcasts and rebels and most importantly, artists. People who loved life and art and music and culture and adventure, people who made me laugh and cry, people who inspired me. I started going out more and more because being home in my apartment was such a sad, bleak alternative. This city is electric and full of incredible people living out insane, beautiful stories; I wanted to be one of them, not a voyeur anymore. I jumped off the deep end; I went out dancing until my feet were numb, I drank until I couldn't stop laughing, I was completely entranced by the city and its beauty. Every moment here was a triumph and I could get drunk on the sunshine and the palm trees and the Hollywood sign. I wanted to be a part of it more than anything.

And then the depression clouds began brewing.

The movie was over, things had slowed down a little, the insanity of work had become a memory like a phantom itch. My friends were becoming busier with new projects. I went home for a week and was desperately reminded of how much I loved my friends there, my life there. I walked through my old house and stared at the open walls and empty floors and felt pain echoing through my heart. I kissed my best friend and wondered, as I slept in his tattooed perfect arms and listened to him breathe, how the fuck I was going to walk away from something so comfortable and wonderful.

Since I've been back, my panic attacks have been teetering in the peripheral of my vision. I can see the darkness coming but I don't know what to do except batten down the hatches and buy up a lot of canned goods because I know from experience that once it gets its hooks in me, I'm pretty much toast until I reach the eye again. I am full of this dull ache like the aftershock of a quake; I lay awake at night, unable to sleep, and yet during the day I'm so bogged down with my own despair and insecurities and feelings of inadequacy that I can't fathom the idea of getting out of bed. I just want to lay on my sheets, buried in the pillows, and listen to music that makes me feel something through a safety railing. I want to have Matt here because he knows how to listen and how to touch me and kiss me to make me forget how much I hate being me. Instead I just find myself crying myself to sleep in my apartment, canceling plans, eating junk food when I'm stressed, curling up in a ball and wishing the world would stop being so mean sometimes. And then feeling guilt and remorse and stress over the fact that I am depressed when I'm, for all outward appearances, living this charmed life and experiencing things I dreamt about since I was a kid. The guilt only makes the depression worse, and by the end of things I am just unable to lift my head off the pillow. It feels like a noose around my neck getting tighter and tighter.

But I keep smiling, and pushing it down like a drunk girl swallowing back her puke.  All of this sadness and heaviness and futility in me is growing, feeding on my brain, and to anyone who says "Just shake it off! Your life's not so bad" I say fuck you because that isn't how mental illness works.

My depression has teeth and they're in me pretty firmly right now. And no matter how gently I manage to pry its jaws open, or how many fingers I may lose in the process, sometimes those teeth leave pretty gnarly scars.

I am terrified of making mistakes. I'm terrified of people being disappointed in me. I'm convinced that I am a fuck-up who has fooled people that I am capable and has my shit together. I am a mess and I am frightened when people put a lot of pressure on me and ask me to do things I've never done before, because I've never been without a support system and a spotter. I am so afraid of fucking things up that I will stay in my comfort zone for years because I'm afraid of wasting someone's time, of having them think I'm incompetent, of having them realize that I'm a fraud and a loser and stupid. My boyfriend goes onto a set and learns difficult FX shots on the fly sometimes simply because he has to and if he doesn't, they won't get done. My coworkers blindly throw things into the ether with the hopes of hitting a target because they are fearless and courageous. My mom went at cancer with her teeth and claws bared, positive that she was going to beat it even as it sucked the life out of her in a few short months. She never stopped fighting and even though she was afraid, she almost never let anyone see it.

And me, I am sitting in my bedroom with the covers pulled up over my head, wishing I was brave. Wishing I had half the balls other people seem to think I have. Wishing that I was the person that I always thought I'd be.

Wishing that drowning was harder, because sometimes sinking just seems so fucking easy that it's seductive. I know the saying is if it's easy it isn't worth fighting for but fuck, sometimes I get tired of fighting against the current and trying to convince those little voices in my head that I'm not a complete failure and fuckup.

I just want to know what it feels like to go "I got this" and actually mean it.

I want to stop being scared of everything, most importantly scared of myself.