I guess that’s what is so lame about conditions of the mind. You want to control them and sometimes you even try to but in the end they are the ones who are controlling you. I like to think that any day now all this madness in my brain is going to just calm down like a pond 5 minutes after someone has thrown a rock into it. I guess my pond is located below a rocky cliff, the rocks just keep tumbling down.

Maybe I am doing something, like screaming at the top of my lungs, which is causing the rocks to rattle and fall but maybe it is just what the rocks were meant to do. I don’t know why I find it so much easier to explain my life in terms of other things but it just is. Right now I am a pond and my water is moving in waves crashing against the rocky edge that surrounds me.

I think about it though. I feel like I want my water to be calm and peaceful but maybe that is boring. Maybe life is all about having waves but just learning how to deal with them. As soon as I think I want something I realize that I don’t. I do think I want my mind to calm down but part of me doesn’t because in all of this craziness I feel like I am really alive and feeling things.

I think I tried too hard to keep my water calm in the past and some sick part of me wants to get back to that but then I remember that it wasn’t a calm happiness, is was a calm madness. Right now I am probably closer to happiness than I think but I will call my current state rapids of change. Change can’t happen without a little bit of crazy splashing.

You know what, now that I think of it some of the coolest people I have ever met have been a little crazy, I think I can make this work for me if I can just kick this infinite sadness that washes over me every other day. That’s easier said than done though I think.

For the past year and a half I have been depressed and I have done a long list of things but none of them have been good. I have said before how embarrassed I am about so many things that have happened this past year but that doesn’t really stop me from sharing them here and I think that says that I don’t plan on being this way forever and also that I am perfectly comfortable taking responsibility for my own failures.

I was trying to think today about the good things I have done since I normally focus on the bad and with each thing I thought about I got a little happier. It also made me realize that if I can change just a few small things about the way I think that I could probably be a lot happier day to day.

I am 28 years old and these are some of the things I am happy and or proud of myself for:

In grade school I got awards all the time because I loved school and I was a ridiculously attentive student but I think the very first thing I am truly proud of myself for is joining the track team in high school. I wasn’t amazing, I didn’t have any friends going into it, I sucked at nearly every event I tried and my parents never came to see me at a meet (my step mom did show up after one once) but I kept at it and I felt good that I did it even though no one else cared. I thought I was awesome. I still think I was awesome. side note here, one of my most embarrassing moments happened when I was on the track team.

embarrassing story: Okay, so the whole track team was crammed into a classroom watching tapes of our first meet and when the 400 meter event comes up I get a little worried because I finished dead last, and when I say dead I mean it. I thought I was going to die. So we are watching the race and at first I am keeping up with everyone but then I start to trail off and I am soon not even in the shot anymore, everyone crosses the line pretty close together and the camera pans back to pick me up and follow me across the line. The fact that my whole team was watching this was bad enough but one of the coaches goes “ooooooh kaaah-moooon!” and proceeds to fast forward the tape, not realizing that person was someone on our team. I almost died and the girls sitting around me who I had made friends with started laughing cause they knew it was me. I was super embarrassed but hey I lived. wow, see how easily I just lost focus there? Back to me talking about how wonderful I am.

The winter before I turned 17 I got my first job and it was at KFC. Lisa totally hooked me up with this one but I had been going out on my own with no help from my parents because I wanted a job so bad. For anyone who knew me then this was huge because I was TERRIBLY shy but I wasn’t about to be broke AND shy. Laycie got her first job and Lisa gets part of the credit! yay!

My next big thing would be graduating high school. I was the first person in my family and the only one in my immediate family. I gave myself a high five for this one!

I got my Associate’s degree from Chemeketa in 2002 and became the only person in my family to have a college degree of some sort. Once again high five!

Okay, I’m starting to feel like a weirdo now so I am just going to quickly rattle off some of the other things I have done that make me feel happy: I learned how to drive a manual and I got my license (even though I was nearly 20 this was a huge event!), I learned how to sell on eBay and then proceeded to sell and sell for many years. I went to WOU for way too many years and even though I have no degree I am still proud of the hard work and good grades I got. I have ran two marathons and a handful of other random road races. I have become a wonderful pet owner, even earning the title of acceptably acceptable cat hoarder of the year, okay I made that title up but hey I deserve it! And it may not seem like it but I AM proud of myself for being able to do what I needed to do after realizing that I wasn’t happy with Michael anymore even though it meant I would be terribly broke and devastatingly lonely… I’m not happy that I haven’t executed the aftermath of that realization too beautifully but I do plan on tying the whole mess up with a pretty green ribbon and that my dears makes me feel alright for now.