Biases

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Through the ashes of heartbreak… I rise with triumph.

Not long after I turned 18, I came home from class one day to find that my mom was home early from work.

I walked in the door to find that she had several bags packed in the kitchen. I asked her what was going on and I got this response:

“Honey, I got fired today. I knew there was a risk of this for a while now, but I didn’t want to worry you. I’m just going to stay at Sean’s house for a week to clear my head. I’ll be back in a week with a plan okay?”

Sean was her boyfriend that lived on the water somewhere near the Eastern Shore. He had cheated on her and broken her heart before, so I wasn’t a fan of him at all, but after watching several boyfriends leave or break her heart, and after watching her struggle constantly with online dating, who was I to stop her from being with him?

Growing up, my mom was constantly dating, and she was very open about it. My whole life had been taking care of her, because it was never in her head that she was supposed to live alone. Sure, she was incredibly strong, but she was also incredibly confused and depressed. She grew up wanting a husband and kids, and while she got the kids, she never got her perfect husband, and my sister and I had to constantly live with her disappointment. My mom went to stay with Sean, and never came back. I got a text message from her that she got married, and she made a life for herself. Since I was 18 I was technically an adult, so technically she did nothing wrong, but you don’t realize just how young you still are when you’re 18 years old.

I didn’t no how to cope with such an enormous empty feeling, so I replaced it with what I learned to do: have a lot of sex.

I went from sleeping with one person, my first love, to several people, in a span of months. It was awful. I had some really great guy friends, and when they showed interest in me, I automatically assumed I needed to sleep with them in order to receive love from them. I’d wake up in the morning feeling filthy, wrong, and quite frankly very unfamiliar with myself. Who was this person that suddenly slept with every man that moved? This wasn’t me! I put these guys before everything, including school and work, and it all came back to haunt me soon enough.

One I ruined my GPA, had no job, and lost nearly all of my guyfriends fro obtaining quite a reputation and getting heartbroken from nearly all of them, I hit rock bottom, and felt the emptiness all over again. None of this was solving any of my problems, but actually just severely avoiding them. I had to find out who I was and what I wanted to do with my life.

I’ve spent this past few years really finding myself, and who I want to be. Sex is faaaarrr in the back of my mind (unless I’m watching a scene of Lord of the Rings with Aragorn), and I’ve dedicated my time to a fresh start. I transferred to UMBC, turned to therapy and acupuncture, started playing the banjo, and have been working as a barista for nearly two years.

I didn’t tell you my story to get sympathy, or to show off who I am today. I just wanted to share the difficult lesson I learned. Sex does not promote your self-esteem, and it doesn’t solve problems. Also, it’s really, really, really okay to hit rock bottom sometimes. As Kurt Vonnegut said: “I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center”

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Healing the Body-Self

Last week on Wednesday, there was talk that the English department puts on to showcase a professor from that department. The department choose Professor Rudacille, my English 383 (Science Writing), to present her different projects she is taking on and how they all relate to one another. So far she is writing a play that is loosely based off of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, she is writing a piece on the mountaintop removal issue in West Virginia, and she is finishing up doing interviews of individuals of the Catholic Faith in regards more radical ideas outside of the church. It was interesting to see how all these vastly different things relate to the idea of healing.

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Not Feelin’ too Gouda

Cheese is definitely my favorite food. I am a strong advocate of cheese, have eaten it daily almost religiously, and believe that it can be incorporated into every meal of the day. Breakfast? Cheesy eggs. Lunch? Grilled cheese. Dinner? Fettuccine Alfredo. Dessert? Cheesecake. You name it, I will find a way to put cheese on it. Except not anymore, because I’m finding that cheese and my body no longer agree, and the way that I think about food and my body has been completely shifted.

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The Eb and Flow of Personal Space

As a frequent patron of the MTA I have been on my fair share of crowded buses.Yes, if you are a user of public transport your palms will now start sweating as I make you relive every time you’ve been on an extremely crowded bus.You will be familiar with the feeling of a stranger, varying in degrees of unsettling (if you think this is harsh you have not rode the Baltimore City Public Bus before), coughing hot moist mouth air down your neck from behind you, or mumbling into your ear, or having your crotch right at someones eye level for an unbroken 15 minutes, or, oh, God, accidentally touching the hand of some other person holding onto a metal bar for support. How awful.It becomes a consuming game trying to avoid any sort of contact with the people surrounding you as you’re all sloshed around a narrow moving vehicle. The whole sweaty crowd sways together and its absolutely nasty. I will spend my entire ride on the packed bus resenting the people crowding me and being offended that the person behind me is standing so close. I mean, nothing personal here, its just that you’re all bursting my personal space bubble and it is killing me. It is making my skin crawl. Im not even claustrophobic, strangers just aren’t supposed to touch strangers.

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When Are Curves Too Much?

“Excuse me, but what you are wearing is inappropriate.” That is what I was told during my many years of attending Catholic school till the 12th grade. Now what my attire consisted of most of these times where yoga pants or leggings and a simple tee. I did not always wear those kinds of pants seeing that we had uniform skirts to wear that must be only 3 inches above the knee. There were only few chances to come out of uniform. But, that is besides my point. While I thought it was okay to wear comfortable clothes that did indeed cover pretty much all of skin, my school authorities thought otherwise. I understand the rules that contribute to having productive learning environment, but I can never fully agree with the dress code. With the dress code, it wanted to avoid tight clothing or attire that revealed too much, whatever that exactly means. We were basically being told what to wear because as teenagers, school authorities could not trust us to pick out our own clothing accordingly. Now Perhaps I told you these dress codes that were essentially assigned to “everyone” in the  school were not exactly directed to “everyone.” They must have only applied to those with curves. It was one of those invisible rules that were not said but obviously thought.

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