Just Stop

Stop.

Stop the onslaught of time and how it rushes through your fingers like the sand you scoop by the sea.

Stop the pressure of the future that you can’t figure out and how it weighs on your mind all the time.

Stop doubting that you can and will do incredible things with your life and your talents and your passion for everything you love.

Stop feeling so small. Stop crying in the middle of the night, gasping for breath on your blue carpet because your life is not what you imagined it would be. Stop letting the fear get the better of you.

Just stop.

 

~~~

Life is the ups and the downs as much as it is the benign. I would never choose not to feel all of this, because all of this is what it’s all about. As always, I thank you for the kind comments you leave. You don’t even know me, and yet you know my lowest moments. Life is a journey and I’ve found myself with you along for the ride, and that is truly a gift.

Love,

Ella

 

Song Quote:

We’ve got younger faces than our hearts are letting on. -Novels, Rusty Clanton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc5X66kFIMg)

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A Cry Guide: For Your Pleasure

So you need a cry party?

A true crier needs no audience. Ladies, remember, cry for yourself and nobody else. If you don’t cry for yourself, who will?

Find the perfect time when you can be alone. Purposely leave your tissues far away to add the lovely element of dragging your limp, heaving body to them.

Pretty tissues are advised

As you feel the tears start, encourage them to keep coming. The more the merrier. When the moment feels right, begin keening sounds. With every breath hike the volume until reaching desired level. The aim is to achieve a point where you’re screaming out your pain and the tears are nothing but a sidekick.

All done? If you left tears behind, tidy them up with a tissue. Discretion is advised. No one can take away the special moments if they don’t know about them.

Did that cry make you feel better? I know I feel better.

Until we cry again,

Ella

Song Quote:

It’s all right to cry, even my dad does sometimes. So don’t wipe your eyes, tears remind you you’re alive. –Even My Dad Does Sometimes, Ed Sheeran

Teardrops on the Stairs

I left a path of teardrops on the stairs today. I think I’m going crazy. I walked in a circle, sat in a circle, turned in a circle.

I cried today. I cried because I needed to scream. In the rare few hours with the house to myself I wandered around and trailed tears behind me. I cried on the floor. I cried on a chair. Tears and tears and tears and tears.

Today I let myself feel the self-pity and fall apart. I let myself cry and cry and cry.

My body is rocking. Rocking back and forth as my brain tries to cope with the pain it’s sending, so distraught over causing its own demise. I blame you, brain.

I cried because I’m angry. I’ve lost so much in my life because of this and I feel my future slipping through my fingers. The decisions, the important and meaningful decisions, are being made not by me but by my illness, whose existence I’ve been bearing upon myself, by myself, for the last four years.

I wish I could end this on some uplifting note of how I carry myself gracefully and nobly through the pain, but I cannot. Today I bowed beneath the pain, I broke. The task is to build myself up again, but I can’t locate the part in me that knows how to do that. Maybe it broke.

Today I left a trail of tears on the stairs, and I can’t find a tissue to clean it up. I fear someone else will slip as I have.

Ella.

Song Quote:

You’ve been crying out for forever, but forever’s come and gone. -When You Break, Bear’s Den

An Ode to the Changing of the Clocks

It’s cold now. Cold means big sweaters and heavy blankets, which mean safety. I bought new slippers, in honor of the changing of the clocks. They mean, I know these look like they belong to an 80-year-old woman, but they’re comfy as heck. Cold means tea, and tea means a burnt tongue, which doesn’t have any enriching value besides reminding me of winters past.

It’s earlier now. Early means I wake before I need to, and fall asleep before I’m supposed to. At least it used to be that way. It isn’t anymore, because sleep and I are on a break. But it does mean that as I lay in bed staring ahead, I see the raindrops (on roses and whiskers on kittens) caught on my window, and the smell of it seeps through the walls. Do the raindrops look like tear drops as they cling to my face?

It’s darker now. Darkness means comfort and calm, and more hours of it should mean less time spent in a frenzy. Because frenzy leads to anxiety and anxiety leads to pain, so really I’m sitting here praying to the darkness: take away my pain.

I latch on to the hope that comes with change. It was fall. Now it’s winter. This was change. May the change bring with it all the good I wish for during my waking hours of staring at raindrops.

Yours truly,

Ella

It’s cozier now, and cozier leads to winter playlists. I put together a playlist for this season (yay!), called ‘Changing Clocks’, that you can find on Spotify (click the link or type ‘Changing Clocks’ into the search bar, it’s the top result, and then you can follow it to see when I add new songs).

Song Quote:

If the rain keeps falling and you can’t see the tears in my eyes, they say the night is daunting but we all need somewhere to hide. –It Could Be Better, Lewis Watson

P.s. Comment below if you caught the Friends reference in here!

Proportional Pain and My Guilty Genes

Scrabble doesn’t come with a question mark, so we’ll have to make do without one

There once was a girl (A) who didn’t pass her cheerleader tryouts, and she was upset. There was also a girl (B) whose boyfriend dumped her, and she was upset. But then there was a girl (C) whose friend was dying of cancer, and she was upset.

Before us we have three (fictional) girls, and each is upset. Who, in your opinion, is most upset?

Please don’t answer that because it’s a trick question. I believe that it’s not fair to compare people’s pain because each is suffering in their own right. So yes, one situation seems way more serious than the others, but does that mean that the other two aren’t upset and don’t have a right to be? No. The fact that one person is worried about cancer and the other is worried about boys doesn’t mean that the one worrying about boys isn’t distraught and in pain, and you can’t discount that.

That said, I am human and sometimes I fail at upholding my own high standards. I look at this girl who is throwing a tantrum because she didn’t get the teacher she wanted for a certain subject and can’t stop thinking about girls in many parts of the world who have to fight to get an education, and often don’t win. I want to scream at her, “just appreciate what you have!”

But then those thoughts lead me to one of the most depressing inner conversations I regularly have. I know I’m suffering, and I know my pain is real, but at the same time look at the world, look at how many people live in terrible pain due to poor hygiene and distance from medical help, and see how many of them continue living completely normally. In comparison, I’m just acting like a baby. But those thoughts don’t make my pain go away and it still gets in the way of me doing everything people my age do.

So when I have these conversations, I force myself to the conclusion that it is important to keep things in proportion and not feel too sorry for myself, because compared to some my troubles are not that bad. I do think you need to keep going and try to pick yourself up, and that’s what I do. But there is also a real reason for sadness, and it’s okay to let yourself feel it.

When someone I know is suffering from a horrible headache, I bite my tongue and never let the “now you know how I feel all the time” escape. But I always think it. It’s not that I think their pain is lesser because it’s a one off thing, it’s just that it gets frustrating when people have no way to understand what I’m going through. I want him or her, for just a minute, to try to imagine what it’s like to feel what he or she is feeling every day and how hard it would be to manage.

Then I feel guilty. For not focusing solely on the person I’m with, but mostly for treating myself like I’m the top-sufferer, like I’m the most unfortunate. I promise you I do not forget how lucky I am to have everything that I have. But then after feeling guilty, I feel even guiltier because it’s almost like I just betrayed myself by my sort of accusation that I’m just exaggerating.

It’s exhausting.

So to girl A I say that there will be more opportunities in life and this way she’ll have more free time to hang out with her friends. To girl B I say that he’s a fool for breaking up with her and if she ever needs a wing-woman I’m her girl. To girl C I tell her how sorry I am and offer her my shoulder.

I allow myself only a minute to contemplate how it seems no one is ever that happy.

 

Yours truly,

Ella

 

Song Quote:

I find it hard to take, when people run in circles it’s a very, very mad world. -Mad World, Tears for Fears

 

Next Week:

My Relationship with Taylor Swift

Get ready to tweet along with me using #TaylorReadThis, because I need your help getting her to see it! So as of next Sunday when I put it up, we’re going to bombard twitter with this hash tag and the link to the post and try to get her attention. You with me?!

Cousins’ Babies

I pretty much looked like this when I found out the news…

 

A few days ago, my mom gave me the good news: my cousin’s wife is pregnant. I smiled, we laughed, and then I started crying.

I’m the youngest in my family, and therefore never got to have little ones in the house that weren’t, well… me. This is the difference between my friends and me: they have baby cousins, and I have cousins’ babies. My oldest cousin, the one who is soon to be a third time father, was 25 when I was born. He’s the oldest of the oldest (my dad’s older sister), and she got married young, and I’m the youngest of the youngest (my dad), who got married late. There you go.

Anyway, back to babies. I love ‘em.

I truly, truly, simply adore them so much. I don’t think I can even describe it. I just feel this connection to them (don’t let your mind make this sentence creepy). My family and friends have decided I have “baby heaven”, which contrary to its literal meaning (=where babies go when they are no longer alive) actually means I look and feel like I’m in heaven when I see babies.

As of now, I have five cousin’s babies (a new one two weeks ago!), but god willing, soon there will be eight. It’s so amazing!!!!! Two of the soon-to-be babies are girls, and the third is as of yet unknown. I can’t wait until they’re born, and we have this whole next generation in our family! Eight babies. That’s a lot. The oldest is… four? So technically she’s not a baby anymore, but still. Also, two of the new ones are meant to be born within a month of each other, so birthdays every year are going to be super cute.

I love babies!!!! I don’t think this is going anywhere. It’s mainly just, I LOVE BABIES.

Oh, I can tell you why I cried, I guess. I was in a bad mood that day, because of how horribly sick I was feeling, and my mom was trying to cheer me up a bit. I had been in school when my cousin, his wife and their two daughters came over, so I wasn’t around when the news was shared. I was alone at home with my mom, and she came and sat down near me on the couch and told me. I got this immediate grin on my face, so wide it hurt my cheeks and jaw terribly, but I couldn’t stop smiling. The two of us were smiling really wide, and then we just started laughing a bit. But instead of laughing a bit more, I started crying. The tears were falling freely. My cat, Squirt, is amazing, and I will tell you why. The second after I start crying, he’s there: it doesn’t matter where in the house I am and he is, if I start crying, he shows up and purrs next to me.

I don’t have a particularly close relationship with him, not like the rest of my family members, but the two of us (me and the cat) have come to terms with this, and we just live amicably side-by-side. He doesn’t sleep on my bed, I don’t sleep on his, but I’ll fill up his food and he won’t scratch me. That kind of thing, you know. But this, the crying dates – they mean a lot to me. Thanks, kitty.

Anywho, I started crying about the new baby, and Squirt came and purred on me. My mom didn’t want me touching my face while I had cat on me, so she brought a tissue and kind of stuck it in the collar of me shirt to collect the tears. I just kept thinking how awesome (in the literal sense awe) it is that my cousin’s wife has a person growing inside her right now, and that in a few months time she and my cousin are going to welcome another beautiful human being into their family. I may only be sixteen, and therefore wholly unready to start a family, but I already know that I have a whole lot of love in my heart, and I’m going to start my own family one day, and love each and every member with the whole of my being.

I can’t wait. I love babies.

The world can be awesome.

Yours truly,

The coolest cousin-ish thing ever,

Ella

 

Song Quote:

I was sixteen with an open heart…. When I was dumb and the world was young.

–Beautiful, Ben Rector

 

 

On a sadder note, the baby that was born two weeks ago was born into hard times. My cousin’s husband’s brother (the baby’s uncle) passed away shortly before she was born. Her middle name is his. I send all of that love that’s in my heart to the family. I can’t even imagine what you all must be going through.