This is my 510th post. I have not written in almost a year. It is a bizarre feeling to be sitting behind the keyboard again, sending my secrets into cyberspace.
I'm not really sure why I'm writing again. A weird combination of events, I suppose: it snowed today, so I've been sitting in my apartment all day, and decided to surf the web and review some old posts. I'm also listening to Damien Rice, who always makes me want to write, and my poetry muse has been worn out this week. The point though, is that in reviewing the old posts, it's amazing how much I feel like I've grown up in the past year; what's even more amazing is how much I actually have grown. And maybe I feel like I need to write in order to record this growth.
A while back--the summer before I started my freshman year--I wrote this: "I need change. Things in my life can't stay still for too long, because I get bored and then I get reckless." Of everything I read, those two sentences hit home hardest for me, because they're still true, and maybe that is the real reason why I am writing now.
A lot has happened in the past year, including my moving out of my parents house, finally declaring a major (double major in English and Spanish), dropping off the face of the planet and relocating (if you know me, you know I don't hang out with the same group of people for too terribly long), and a way-too-long-term relationship (which I just recently put an end to around Thanksgiving). I've learned a lot about the world and about my place in it, but, regardless, I still crave change. I can't get enough of it, and I'm still as reckless as I used to be. It's not that change is bad, or the need for change is bad. It's that I like to push the universe into changing for me. I like to rush the climax by skipping over important plot points. I am reckless. I am inappropriate. If I had to choose one word to describe me, it would definitely be "inappropriate."
I don't know why I'm so reckless and inappropriate. Lately my behavior has grown to immoral extremes. It blows me away. I'm not going to be modest; sure, I love the attention, like most people, but for some reason I crave negative attention just as much, if not more than, positive attention. I can't get my ass to class five days a week, but I sure as hell can party for 10 days straight. I can't pull that 3.0 GPA, and I don't even want to try, but I can drink with "the boys" anytime. I used to be able to balance my social life with my academic goals. It turns out that I have no academic goals anymore. I no longer take pride in my intelligence. At the same time, I'm not even "that girl." I'm not a party girl at all. I'm not the girl dancing on tables or initiating strip poker (though I admittedly have been in the past). I can still be that way when I want to, but most of the time I don't want to. I just like to drink and chill out with my good friends. Sure, I still get drunk, but I don't get crazy. I become numb.
The real problem is that I have an unmistakable need for attention coupled with the tendency to replace the voids in my life with unhealthy behavior. I sleep with inappropriate boys in order to feel more secure about my own inappropriateness, but really it's just a vicious cycle. A vicious cycle which I consciously acknowledge and at the same time, can't escape.
Don't get me wrong; I'm happy. I'm currently extremely happy--happier than I've been in a long time. I'm not particularly ashamed of my life choices. Others are embarrassed of me more than I am of myself. I find it hilarious when someone can't look me in the eye while I tell them my saga. Mostly I find that they are embarrassed by my honesty and my tendency not to leave out the dirty details; nonetheless, it bothers me when people tell me straight-up that I am making horrible decisions. Recently, it has come to that.
Usually this is the point in my life where I drop all of the friends who believe I am a horrible, dirty, damned human, and find new ones. Currently, however, I really enjoy the people I spend time with. As a friend once said of herself, "I collect broken things;" I am the same as her. I collect broken things and mostly broken people, which is why I am currently in love with my friends. But when the broken people start to tell you that you are beyond broken, what is there to do but admit it?
I am beyond broken.