Day 18: Too much to say...

photo by J. Grandbois

I started a blog post about how I'd gained 25 pounds since I started back to school and how it made me uncomfortable to the point that I don't particularly like looking at myself in the mirror these days. Except for my shoulders...which is a whole other story. But that seemed depressing and not very body positive so I deleted it. 

Then I started a post about gossip and how in recent months it got round to me that someone was saying not so nice things, and how I was sort of a coward about it all.  Instead of defending myself or trying to counteract it I just hoped people would realize all the old things that people say about gossipers and their low self-esteem and need for validation via other peoples misery...but how I also secretly hoped they get a really bad case of athletes foot or other toe fungus that is annoying, super itchy and makes it totally uncomfortable to wear any sort of shoe...buuuut then I decided that was just mean and made me no better than the gossiper...delete...delete...delete...delete.

So I thought perhaps I'd write about a memory from what I was 16 in which someone I really looked up to told me that a deeply moving experience I had was invalid because I wasn't possibly mature enough to have had such an experience and so I spent the next year trying to understand why my brain tricked me this way.  And I began to trust my own experience just a little bit less...but I was afraid I didn't do enough to mask the identity of the person who said it, and why should I still feel the need to protect them even after nearly 30 years? I decided that there was till far too much to process there...

And then I jumped ahead a few years to a day when I walked in the woods with a friend who told me I was beautiful and for the first time ever I thought it might, maybe, actually be true.  And then I thought, well that's just too sappy...

So I came back to today when my phone buzzed me a thunderstorm warning.  As always my thoughts turned to that woman I picked up hitchhiking late a night in the pouring rain 20 years ago.  And her story of how her boyfriend had died after being struck by lightning.  She carried his obituary in her purse...and that I picked her up again about two years later on the same strip of road. Again late at night, again in the pouring rain.  She told me she'd been engaged but that her fiance was struck by lightning while playing football.  And how could this happen to her twice?  I dropped her off at the same spot and to this day I still wonder if I gave a ride to a ghost. 

And then I decided, well screw it.  I just write about all of it, but in a short surfacy, slightly self deprecating way so you'd take none of it overly seriously. 

Oh, and I'll include picture of a toy pony.