Summer Bummer
I don't understand why so many like Summer. While they are described as "hot" by many, I agree that their face reminds me of the sun: blinding to the human eye, boiling our skin with a searing gaze. Their small talk leaves me with petty burns and a sense of sheer exhaustion.
When they speak, it's only mosquitos that pour from their lips, out for my blood. Just being near them makes me sweat in discomfort, and their ideas of "fun" are asking me to just stay indoors and avoid them. They are as salty as their beaches, as dry as scorching deserts. I've tried hanging out with them, but all they do is ruin my ice cream and push me to the ground with it. Once they made me fall ill at an amusement park, and another time angered a hornet to sting me at a skatepark! They may open up exciting events during their prime, but the unbearable heat they bring with it can taint what were supposed to be good memories.
I could go on and on about why I prefer the whimsical and warm Spring, cool and spooky Autumn, or even cold yet festive Winter, but just saying what I've said so far is bringing more unwanted attention to them.
I think they've had enough people call them "sultry" (more for the humidity than anything else).
Falling - Monologue
Please listen to my monologue on Soundcloud, and tell me what you think. It means the world to me! Thank you
https://soundcloud.com/user-236012635/falling
There is nothing like falling in love.
Like the way that it feels when your heart becomes divided. When it ruptures from its own habitat and collides inside another person’s. When your whole world and all of your reality shift, and transform. Life becomes suddenly essential. Your world becomes sweetly delicate. Because love is perilous, love is treacherous, and love is always unpredictable. But perhaps that is why it is so enticing. Something about taking that risk head on, without even an inch of hesitation. Perhaps that is what makes love so captivating. The chance that a forever is even possible. That it could ever be real. That it could ever be yours. And there is absolutely nothing like it. There's nothing like the feeling. This undescribable, and undefinable feeling. It's almost like your invincable. Like as long as you have them, as long as you have that feeling, the only thing that you can see, that you can hear, that you can touch, that you can taste, or feel.. is them. An overload of emotion. Of sensation. Of monumental bliss. It's so real, and it's so profound that you can almost physically feel yourself get lost inside of it. You know you're falling deeper and deeper, and further and further. Into that person. Into their world. Into their heart. And you reach this place. This place where you know without a doubt that no matter what happens, a piece of you will forever remain there. And it's all that you can do to hold on. It's all that you can take not to lose control, because it just feels so good to lose your control. And the depths that you reach are infinate. They are endless. You begin to lose sight of anything and everything besides being with them. Your eyes can only focus on them. On them and that feeling. The feeling of falling deep, deeply into love.
writing tips
I don't know if I'm in any position to be giving out tips for writing but I think one of the most obvious ways to improve is to just keep writing. Sometimes you may look at what you've written and think "it's just trash" but I encourage you to keep it. I enjoy to look back at how far I've come and sometimes it makes for a good laugh to see some cheesy or badly written work.
Write everyday. Everywhere. Anytime. With technology we have today you don't need to be carrying around a pen and paper to be able to write, you can just take out your phone and flip to notes and write away.
If you don't know what to write about, write about your surroundings, how you're feeling, or using all five senses in your writing. Also try to change your sentence structure up. I tend to stick to one type of sentence structure and it's something I've been meaning to fix about my writing.
Read some books with writing styles you like. Copy their style. Not their story.
Do they have short sentences with simple language? Is it long and complex with a lot of sensory details?
Find what you like, find what you like to write about and just write.
Just write.
An Episode of Depression: A Raw Outlook
The night I finished my cause or effect essay, I went to sleep after reading a chapter of Anthropology and I left my computer open on the desk in my office. I thought everything would be fine I had a few days to submit the assignment and I would have time to make a few changes. My husband didn’t realize he hadn’t shut the door completely after he used the office. He comes home late and studies even later into the night while I sleep. Afterward, my nine-month-old cat Teddy broke into the office and slept on the keyboard. Somehow, which is still a mystery to me, she triggered an upgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 10, which didn’t successfully upgrade the driver packs. In the end, my computer had to be completely reformatted to factory settings. I slipped into an extreme fit of depression that lasted almost a month with some lingering effects.
I use my computer to read my textbooks, watch the news on YouTube, and practice freewriting on my Goodreads.com account which was easily retrieved. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I was able to clean my house for a few extra hours and I slept more due to falling into the emotional “Pit of Despair,” (The Princess Bride, 1984). I found that I was too dependent on my computer. This, in turn, led me to look for different avenues to print out my study guides and handouts; reply to discussion questions; or to take quizzes on Canvas. I still feel inadequate for the loss of the time trying to fix my PC and managing only with a smartphone. I dislike reading on a tiny screen with my poor eyesight. I have my office set up just so and if one thing malfunctions my productivity flatlines. My computer had lost all my files, pictures, games, and programs. I’ve had the computer for about five years with very few problems, so I was devastated by the loss of the pictures which were of my children and recently deceased grandmother. I also lost many poems, short stories, essays, and journal entries that weren’t backed up on an online cloud. All my hard work; gone!
My mother likes to compare me to Henny Penny, the sky is always falling, and I never realize that it was only an acorn. As a result, I show my stress by how clean my house is. If the furniture has been rearranged it means that I’ve been having a complete emotional crisis. Memories and thoughts catch up and then they begin to spiral. This led me to fall behind in my required reading because two of my textbooks were inaccessible. My datebook was the only way that I kept myself on track. When I fall behind my mind tells me that I’m inadequate, I’m not good enough, they were right that I couldn’t go back to school. I stress and procrastinate more. I try my Focus: Pomodoro app but I just couldn’t concentrate. I would fold clothes in the living room and get distracted by the dishes while I was putting dish towels away, then the dryer would beep. I would run from task to task doing a lot yet accomplishing very little. This made me realize that my children aren’t ready to be self-sufficient yet because neither wholly finish their assigned chores or caused more work by leaving their cups, school papers, and snack wrappers in the family room. My children walk next door to do household chores, when they don’t have band practice, for my mother. I’m left in the moral quandary is it enabling bad habits by me doing their chores or asking too much for them to do double of the same chore that they help their grandmother with?
It also wasn’t helpful to bottle up grief, for over a year I had prolonged grieving over my grandmother’s death from Alzheimer's. I was her part-time caretaker in the last few months and was numb when she passed. This semester, my father had quadruple bypass surgery and a separate surgery to implant an internal defribulator. Little did we know he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's; the surgeries progressed the symptoms. This time has been full of unease for my entire family but to me, it seems like a reoccurring nightmare. On my husband’s day off, which are few, he was finally able to fix my computer. Then Murphy's Law decided to apply itself to my life directly, resulting in a tooth breaking off at the gum line and a filling in another tooth came out within days of each other. The following week my car broke down. Leading up to turkey day and no school for a week.
The week of Thanksgiving I got away from it all. I went walking twice to pick up aluminum cans, in all I walked four and a half miles. I took my time the first day, but I started back early on my second walk. I didn’t bother getting the litter on the walks; although, I plan to go again once finals are over. I collected over twenty-two pounds in a little less than six hours. It was a good thing I did this; it was a good way to put my thoughts in order and I was able to do something constructive. I listened to The Federalist Papers by John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton; going one way and walking back on the opposite side of the road I listened to a humorous book called Kill the Farm Boy by Kevin Hearn and Delilah S. Dawson. The landscape certainly changed in Ohatchee since the last time I beat the streets. In my Human Development course, it calls this mourning, grief work, and acceptance. Later I remembered Terry Pratchett wrote in I Shall Wear Midnight, “She heard him mutter, ‘Can you take away this grief?’ ‘I’m sorry,’ she replied. ‘Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for.’”
When I returned home after the second walk, I had a good cry; put on my favorite anime One Piece; ate the last piece of pumpkin pie; and proceeded to bed. I watched the harrowing adventure of a pirate chasing his dream of being the pirate king, gathering crew members, and facing the underlying social issues of the places his crew visited. The next morning, I woke up feeling not great but better. I ate the frog and finished one assignment at a time. It was enough to focus on just that day and that’s how I’ve had to take things. The AA motto: “One day at a time.” I would only add; a datebook helps. I took the time and filled in all the important dates the first week of class using the syllabi from my instructors.
Coming back to school has taught me new ways to cope with my anxiety and depression, but this course taught me the most. I learned something new in every lesson that I didn’t know before such as learning how to cite a source. Learning the structures of essays will help me move forward in the next writing comp class. The discussion question due dates in my datebook kept me tethered and kept me from throwing my hands up in the air and giving up. Many thanks.
written in November 2019 for EH101 as a reflective essay
#sixthcollegeessay #reflectiveessay #essay
Parts
I think she took a part of me. Not in a bad way, not in a good way. She just casually carries it around in her purse perhaps, or in her back pocket. Hopefully in her heart, but most likely in the bottom of her shoes. Like one would carry a backpack or a wallet. Casually, without fail, and like it was relunctantly replacable.
simply
i'm a writer.
i'm addicted to plot twists and clashing metaphors and the arc of a character. i'd follow the path to the ends of hell or the start of heaven. prose and poems are my oxygen and i exhale cliches and inter monologues. and it's easy. it's so easy to drown in ficitonal worlds, in the endless possibilities. to create and create and get lost and neevr look back. it's like breathing, falling in love, crying. staying away results in needing more.
but simply, i'm a writer.
Do you still feel numb?
If several years ago I had written myself a letter, then I'm sure it would have sounded something like this:
Dear New Lissie,
Do you still feel like that girl who cried herself to sleep? Do you still have to be someone you don't want to be? Have you learned how to talk to people yet? Do you still feel numb? Are you still like me? I hope you're not. I hope that by the time you've read this, you have become someone else. Living like this feels so lonely. I don't know if I could go on if I continued to live like this. Sometimes I wish it had been me instead. I'm the least-liked sibling, so if the one sick was me, then we'd be better off. That's what I think about a lot. Day-to-day life feels so breathlessly numb, and it's felt that way ever since That Day. I know I won't have to specify what day because whether or not I have changed, that is a moment I could never forget. I hope you're happy. I don't think I remember what it feels like to be happy. I hope you can smile again. When people tell me that I look sad, I smile and say that I was just deep in thought. It's not a real smile though. I want so bad to feel okay. I want to feel something. I don't like having to carry all this. I feel like I'm suffocating. I just have hope at this point. I really hope things get better. I hope you're a different person by the time you read this. I hope you have felt happy. Learn to be happy, but never forget me. I feel so little that I don't feel real anymore, and if you forget me then it'll be like I never existed. I know it hurts because I'm living through it, but when it doesn't hurt anymore, you can't forget the hurt. You can move on, but you can't just throw me away. I hope you're happy now.
Don't forget me,
A Different Lissie
Sunset on the Soul
Wildflowers grace
the edge of the canyon
Radiant golden,
sun-kissed horizon
Warmth of summer rays
caresses bare skin
That’s cooled by the balmy,
westerly winds
No feelings evoked
when gazing upon
The beauty present
from dusk until dawn
Your heart locked away
without any key
Numbed, to avoid
any more damage, thee
Passing through life
with it all turned to “off”
Anesthetic, the wounds,
comes with a cost
Colors grow dimmer
the longer you’re numb
Until you slow-fade;
soul sets like the sun
