Growing Pains

The way we get through life is by telling ourselves a bunch of things to make us feel better. You need to find the balance between convincing yourself life is one way and letting yourself be surprised by people. No one’s ever right, not you, not anyone else. So keep that in mind. It’s easy to think that everyone else has got their head on straight and yours is lopsided, but everyone’s just as mixed up as you, trying to make it in their own way. So calm down. Take a deep breath. And enjoy the world you fit into now, but don’t ever stop trying to burrow outwards more, expand your view, like a little mole. 

I think I am a high-functioning Aspie.

I see little point in life sometimes

I need a rigid schedule to give me purpose and direction

I can spend hours doing one, often weird, thing..

I take everything very literally

I feel really disconnected from other people all the time

I have trouble focusing on things

I feel really stressed by life, all the time, no matter what I’m doing

I wish I wasn’t such a loony..

How much is too much to expect of other people? Do I expect too much of other people? So what if my expectations for other people are higher than most people have for each other and for themselves? Maybe it’s not even that I expect too much of people, but my standards for friendships and relationships are higher than most people’s my age so in comparison they seem high. No, actually no I don’t think I expect too much. I’m pretty sure it is just that a lot of people have lower standards and let their friends get away with treating them like crap because they probably treat other people like that too. Does that mean I have to settle for being treated crappily just because everybody else seems to do it too? I don’t think so..

How hard is it to call someone back? Maybe if I called you twice a day, every single day, I could understand being pissed at me if I complained that you never answered or replied. Buuut…maybe one call in a couple of months? That’s really not so often.. 

I really think people are like this because they are lazy, not because they don’t care. I think people care a lot, and about a lot of things, but when it comes to actually doing something about what they believe in it is hard for them to be motivated. It’s all about effort..how much effort you want to put into maintaining a relationship. Personally, if for 8 months of the year I see someone every other day, talk to them just about every day, and they consider me a good, close friend, then them dropping off the map for a 4 month period would frustrate me. Not that I want to talk to them every day, or every week, or necessarily even every month. But just once or twice over that 4 month period seems at the very least reasonable,  maybe even a little infrequent. So if I call a few times and they never answer, and we set up times to video chat but they bail every time I’m not going to make the effort anymore, cus I don’t want to a) be annoying and bug them and b) try to make someone be my friend if they don’t seem to want to talk to me. 

So that’s all I’m sayin…just try a little harder people. (And I will too! Cus I don’t hold myself exempt from that statement either! :)

Um wow. So I just cracked open my old diary from high school that ended around my junior year..and..wow! That was a weeeiiirdd walk down memory lane slash peek into the can of worms that was my 15-16-17 year old brain! I was a weird kid. Okay who am I kidding, AM a weird kid! What was really kind of interesting to me was the number of times I wrote about feeling depressed, sad, shy, misunderstood, etc..or equal to that, the number of times I would come back to my diary after a long time and writing about having a “revelation” about myself or realizing something about the way I was. Granted, a lot of times I only wrote in my diary when I was feeling lost or insecure or whatever so in a way it is a bit of an unbalanced look into my life 3 years ago, but I can only imagine the number of times I felt that way and I didn’t write about it…By the way, I would just like to take this opportunity to make a note to myself that next time I need to start a fire I already have a little kindling to get started with!!

I deleted about 20 or 30 “friends” from Facebook today from high school that I never talked to and really only knew by name or face. It was kind of empowering! I mean I have 451 “friends,” only about 20 of which I actually talk to on a regular basis…about 100 of which I’ve probably ever had a significant conversation with recently. If I had started my Facebook during college I would probably not be doing that right now. 

So I would like to note that right now in my life, I feel more comfortable with myself than I’ve ever been before. I’m coming to terms with who I am and I’m seeing the things that make me different as things to embrace, not try to change. I can be shy, I can be quiet, and I can need my time alone, but does that mean I need to try to make myself more outgoing, talk more or spend more time with people? Uhh..nope! It just means that I need to allow myself to be those things and enjoy what I’m doing when I’m feeling particularly quiet rather than try to call and text everyone in my phone book or sit on facebook chat for a couple hours trying to talk to everyone who’s online.. Cus it’s weird how it works this way, but when I’m feeling like that, somehow a lot of people aren’t online and won’t text me back.. It’s when you try to force yourself to be something you think you should be that you’ll always end up being dissatisfied, but if you start to accept yourself and love yourself and stop trying to be the person who you have this image of in your head, you’ll finally start to be happy.

And a lot of people have been right, for a long time. Over a year, in fact. I’ve struggled so hard to tell myself that I can have it both ways, their way and my way, but I can’t. They’re right - he is poison to me. He’s been subtly influencing my life for over 2 years; in the last year without even realizing it. And I realized this weekend I was talking about him and his part in my life NOW like he still is a part of it!!! Like Allison, whaaaaattt?!? You’ve been broken up for more than a year and you’re still in love with him? and you’re still talking about him like you broke up a month ago?? Yeaaah..that needs to stop. (You didn’t even DATE for a year..) It’s been waaaay too long. I’m like a bad dieter — I tell myself I’m not going to talk to him, but if he calls me I’ll answer, or I text him things, or e-mail him things — like if someone else hands me a Big Mac it’s okay, or this one little piece of chocolate won’t hurt (and then I proceed to eat the whole bag over the next 2 days). It’s really not doing me any good to text him. Or email him. Or answer him if he texts me. Or calls me. Does he (or did he, rather) still call me and email me because he liked to make sure I still liked him? because he liked to reaffirm occasionally that he had me on a little leash by the heart? I don’t know. I would like to hope not, because I would like to think of him as better than that, but to be honest it doesn’t really matter all that much. Why?, I can hear the little pesky voice in the back of my head asking. Well, because we’re done with him now, I’m answering. Now we are really and truly letting go of him, once and for all. Because we believe that there are other people out there, other people who will give you everything you had with him AND. MORE. They will be all the wonderful things about him and they will treat you like you are the most wonderful, perfect person for them, too. You want that back, you do. And you’re only kidding yourself if you continue to think that you’ll have a future with him - because he doesn’t. want. to. be. with. you. The end.

On a different note, I’ve realized I need to expect less of people. I really do expect too much of my friends or my sort-of friends and my not-even friends. Like one good friend in particular, I’ve realized that I’ve been having too high of standards for for the past 2 years I’ve known them, and then ended up being disappointed when they continually act the way they do. I want them to be the kind of friend that I have this grand image of for them in my head, but then..they aren’t. They are only themselves. And so I’m always disappointed with them because I’m trying to be friends with the idea of this person I have in my head. It doesn’t work. Very, very few people have come close to that person I imagine, and there are really only two I can think of. One of which was the subject of the above paragraph, so really only one I’m going to continue to communicate with on a regular basis :) But that is all really besides the point, I think, because I just need to realize that save for those two aforementioned people, most of the time I need to start appreciating people for who they actually are and the kind of friend they actually can be. I think I’ll be much happier in the end. And maybe even feel like I have more friends than I did before, because I’ll stop rejecting people for not being “good enough” for my standards. You just gotta lower your standards. Then people will always exceed them* :)

And on that note, I think I’m gonna go paint :)

*This is in reference to everybody else, of course! Cus you gotta have high standards for yourself, obvs!

Tough Mudder. If it starts to seem like I’m becoming obsessed, it’s because I am. I need to be: right now I can’t do one push up, I can’t run a mile straight, I can’t do a pull-up, and most of all I can’t keep feeling so insecure and lacking conviction. So what can I do: I can run 7/10 of a mile without stopping, I can lift 10 and 20 lb weights, and have one hell of a crazy freaking idea that I’m going to be able to run 12 miles, slog through a swamp (several, actually), crawl through a tunnel of tires, monkey bar across a late, run through fire and electrical wires, climb over several 12 ft walls, and other crazy challenges worthy of a military training camp. People train for a year for this kind of shit, and I’m going to try to hack my own way through training for it in 13 weeks, part of that time while completing an entire SEMESTER’s worth of school work..All of this coming from the girl who, a month ago, was trying to use sleeping as an escape from life..who almost got beaten down by life itself..Am I crazy? Yeah, I’m starting to think so. But I’m going to do it. I WILL. That is not even remotely a question. It’s gonna happen. It’s gonna take a while, and a lot of work, a lot of work that I don’t think even I have come to terms with yet, and it’s not gonna be pretty, but it will happen, I promise you that. Actually, I promise ME that. I want to do this for ME, to prove to everybody else as much as myself that I can do something I set my mind to. So I really ought to start going to the gym twice a day, making myself run a mile without stopping and ramping up the internal mental motivation to OVERDRIVE. I’m going to kick my depression in the mother fucking nuts, hit it over the head with a baseball bat, cut its body up into 400 tiny little pieces, throw it in a garbage bag, and feed it to a tiger. And every time my brain says “no, stop” or “I don’t want to do this,” no matter what the situation* I’m going to tell it very nicely to shut the FUCK up. Cus sleeping in til 11 is no longer acceptable. Laying in bed instead of painting a master copy of a Singer Sargent is no longer acceptable. Watching 2 movies in a row on Netflix while eating a pint of ice cream is no longer acceptable. Mediocrity is no longer acceptable. I want to make myself so busy that my brain doesn’t have the time or energy to think about not having any friends or being a bad illustrator or not having the guy of my dreams or any of the other silly things it likes to concoct to make me unhappy. You aren’t gonna win this time, evil brain-bully!

*unless the situation is a man leaning out the window of an old white van telling me he’s got a puppy in back that I should come see

We’re starting small here…cus I can’t do a real push up, or some of the stuff on the tough mudder training list. 

1. Run on the treadmill for at least 35 minutes every day: alternate between jogging 5mph for 2 min and 6mph for 1 min

2. Do AT LEAST 15 girly pushups a day (until I can actually do a real one)

3. Do 100 reps of 3lb weight exercises every day (until I can do 10lbs)