You have so much to be happy about

This is hard for me to write because writing it down means it actually exists, and that I am admitting to faults. That I am "broken" or "damaged goods" or just plain not really there.

It comes in waves. There are days when everything feels fine. I am happy, I am laughing, I am making the jokes that are making other people laugh. And then there are the days when I am the center of attention, I am laughing, I am smiling, I am making the jokes that make people laugh...and I go home empty.

There are days when, for no reason, I cannot fathom getting out of bed. I lie there in the dark until the last possible minute, drag myself into jeans and a t shirt, brush my teeth, paste on a smile, and head to work.

I throw myself into work, into hobbies, into second jobs, so that I won't feel the nagging feeling. On some days, everything feels empty, and I feel guilty for feeling that way.

Sure, I've got my fair share of baggage. The alcoholic mother. The divorced parents. The abusive three year long relationship. But that's all situational. I also have extreme forces of positivity in my life. I have beautiful friends and amazing family. I have an education. I'm a musician. Though I'm an amateur, I've recently discovered I have the capacity to make people laugh.

There are so many things in my life that I should be happy about. That I am happy about.

Is it possible to be happy at the same time you're depressed? I consider myself an intelligent person, but I can't wrap my head around this idea. I am comfortable with facts, data, science (despite outward appearances and me generally being an emotional hot mess express). Logically I can see and identify all of the things in my life that I should be happy about. But I don't feel it. Emotionally, I am not there. Am I emotionally stunted? Is there something wrong with me? Is it fixable? Is this the reason I can't connect? Can't date? Keep everyone at a distance...substituting physicality for emotional connection?

The first time I had a panic attack, I was in my mother's bed while she was out with her boyfriend. It sounds stupid, but it was triggered by my sudden realization of mortality. I was twelve years old, and I recognized that my heart beat was indicative of my actually being alive. Without that, I would cease to exist. My thoughts, my existence, were tied to that thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. I focused. I felt like my heart was out of control, like my chest was on fire, and suddenly I couldn't breathe. My grandmother talked me down, my heart beat slowed, and I fell asleep.

The first time I thought about suicide, I was twelve years old. The first time I self harmed, I was twelve. I was on medication that, instead of "curing" me, made it so I couldn't feel anything. So I self harmed. My mom found out from the school guidance counselor, and said "do you have any idea how this is going to reflect on me?"

My whole life, I've been taught that I should be ashamed for feeling this way. The very word "depression" is a dirty word. A word that we can easily cast off and make smaller than it actually is.

I don't self harm anymore. I'm not medicated. I drink too much. I change my hair every couple of weeks. When I feel an anxiety attack coming on, I breathe my way through it. I am not broken. I am doing pretty well. I have a good job, I went to college.

I shouldn't feel so empty.

I shouldn't feel ashamed that sometimes, for no reason....a lot of the time, for no reason...I simply can't fathom existing in the world anymore. I don't want to see people. I don't want to talk to people. I just want to drink and sleep and forget that I exist. I want people to forget that I exist.

But I fake it because I was told that is what you do when you're an adult. I don't talk about depression. If you're depressed, you just have to dust yourself off and get up. If you're depressed, shit, take a pill for that. Carry on. Move on. Grow up. Stop being such a baby.

You have so much to be happy about.
But you seem so happy.
Just think positive.
How can you be depressed? You're always out with people.
If you were really depressed, you'd be on medication.

I'm writing this because I feel like I need to...because I'm sick of being the intelligent strong person who doesn't need to talk. Because you can be surrounded by people who love you and still feel alone, worthless, and empty. Because sometimes, often, despite outward appearances, I am not okay. And I need that to be okay.

I need to be able to admit that I'm laughing because I have to. Because pretending that when I go home alone after work or a night of drinking that I am perfectly okay is exhausting. Because being exhausted is exhausting. And I really just want a little bit of understanding.

I am not crazy. I'm just....trying. Struggling. I am happy. But I am not all here.

And that's all I have to say about that.

On being friends with my mother.

I haven't really felt compelled to write anything lately, but I seem to be awake far earlier than normal on a Sunday (you can thank the copious amounts of PBR I drank last night that had me in bed by 9)

I haven't slept so well the rest of the week. On Thursday night, I received a text message from my mother that said something along the lines of "l l olive you", which I assumed was a product of drunkenness or her inability to operate a smart phone. I didn't think anything of it, until I received four phone calls in a row from her number.

I finally pick up.

"Yes?"

"I just wanted to talk and apologize for my phone"

"Mom, it's 12:30 here. I'm getting up in five hours. Can we do this later?"

"I am not going to take this abuse from you"

So naturally I hung up the phone. She's tried to call me several more times this week. And I just can't bring myself to speak to her. It's been bothering me for days.

When something good happens to most women my age, they want to tell their mothers. I tell my father. My success, my failures, my hopes and dreams...I bring those to my dad. My knight in shining armor who let me rescue myself from a bad situation when I was 14 by moving in with him.

It has recently dawned on me that my mother knows nothing about who I am as a person. I haven't seen her since I was twenty. We talk about two or three times a year, but I talk about her more.

I talk about how many times we moved when I was a kid, and about her new husband, and about her alcoholism. I talk about the pressure I felt to be thin and beautiful, when I never heard from her that I was. I talk about the crushing depression and anxiety I experienced living in a home with her. I talk about all of these things with other people, but never with my mother.

She asked me last summer if I thought she was a bad parent and I said no. I said she did what she could with what she was given.

Sitting at my grandmother's kitchen table this summer in the sleepy Northern Michigan town I grew up in, I realized I know just as little about my mother as she does me. I held wedding pictures and pictures from pageants, pictures from family events and school picture day, and felt no connection to this woman who birthed me.

How is it possible to love someone so deeply and not know them?

I know that I love my mother. I love the memories of her doing her hair, singing Whitney Houston, taking us to thrift stores. Sometimes she was really there. She was really Mom to me a handful of times, and that's what makes this sensation so strange.

My mother has liver cirrhosis and it is going to drastically shorten her life, and I don't know how I will react when she dies. I don't know how sad I'll be. I don't know if I would even make it to her funeral, as she lives in California. I don't know how she lives her life. I don't know what she even looks like anymore. I don't know if she still uses Eucerin ointment on her lips because they crack so badly, or if she still insists on curling her hair because it is so naturally straight. I don't know if she is so zoned out on pain medicine and booze that the real Nicole Goodreau even exists anymore.

And so people tell me to reach out to her.

"Why don't you just call her?"

Because every time I call her, I feel terribly about myself afterward. Because every time I call her, I miss having a mother. I feel guilty for being so absent. I feel guilty for not visiting her and her husband. I feel like a terrible daughter. I am a terrible daughter.

But mostly, I have nothing to say.

At this point, forcing a relationship between my mother and myself would be dishonest. I am not at all the scared fourteen year old who left her house. I figured out the hair thing. I figured out the makeup thing. I am active and I try to be strong. I try to be smart. I graduated with two majors in five years while working full time at a ceremony she did not even attend.

I don't know how to talk to her. I don't know how to involve her in my life the way I've involved everyone else. I don't know what to say.

So I ignore her phone calls and let the relationship decay a little more every day, because I don't know what to do.

I don't feel like I am her daughter anymore.

Thankfuly, I have a fantastic father and stepmother who I love to pieces. I have the grandmother who essentially raised me. I have the friend's mothers who have seen me grow up and still think to ask about me. Aunts and uncles who have welcomed me into their homes even when they don't agree with my life choices. And finally, the best sisters a girl could ever ask for. That being said.

I miss my mother. But no amount of conversation or effort will bring back the mother I miss.

Vita brevis, ars longa.

What makes your heart sing?

I have been asking myself this question a lot lately. Morgan, what makes your heart sing? Shouldn't you be doing that?

I am lucky to have a job where I can live comfortably and not worry about where my next meal is coming from. I am lucky to have only had a very brief stint with unemployment in my adult life. But a job is just a job. I find myself wondering, perhaps prematurely, what my legacy will be.

When I go, what's left?

I haven't done anything. I'm not married. I don't have children. I don't have my graduate degree or my PhD. I express these thoughts to friends and family, and they look at me like I'm crazy.

"You have plenty of time" they say. "You're young. It will come"

Logically I know that I have plenty of time. But that also seems like an excuse to be complacent.

Last week, someone I had admired greatly passed away in a terrible wreck. He was an amazing musician, father, and teacher. He left a legacy. His influence will be felt for many, many years. And all I could think was "when I go, what's left?"

I have been so consumed with living my life as a twenty something...drinking, dating, making mistakes...that I've given very little thought to my future. It's something nebulous and ethereal. Five years time? Who knows. But the reality is...in five years time, I may not be here.

So I ask myself again. Morgan. What makes your heart sing?

Words can't explain the sense of community I felt with the other musicians as we mourned the loss of one of our own. Studying music with the same people for years makes you family in a way that simple blood does not. Words also can't explain the sense of fulfillment and the weight on my heart when I listened to the orchestra. When I listened to Schumann on the way home. When I sang Debussy in the shower. Music, music makes my heart sing.

Learning about the past makes my heart sing. Reading sources, analyzing them, writing about them. Stretching the boundaries of thought until I feel like my head will explode.

These are both things that I had in college that I don't have now. I'm reticent to think of the  future, and overly nostalgic for the past. There are so many things I would have done differently to get more out of the experience. I would have read more books. I would have made more friends. I would have been in more ensembles. I would have presented more papers.

My fraternity's motto is "Vita brevis, ars longa." Life is short, but art is long. That phrase has been weighing heavily on my heart since that talented musician passed away. He left a true legacy. His life was tragically short, but he lives on through his students, through his recordings, through the memories of musicians who lived and worked with him.

So what is my point here?

Morgan. What makes your heart sing?

Don't you think you should do it?

If all we have is this life, am I squandering it on a 9-5 job? Am I doing this "adult" thing correctly? Because I look at my life and I look at the things I want to do and am positively overwhelmed with feelings of inadequacy and passion. I just want to learn. I just want to live. I just want to teach. I just want to sing. I want to feel deeply and completely. I want my heart to sing.

The funny thing about funerals is they make you realize your own mortality. And I've decided that I want to live fully as long as I can. I will do something to make my heart sing every day. I will not waste time being sad.

I want to really live.

Vita brevis, ars longa.

Why Do We Hate Ourselves?

   This is a bare bones blog look for now, until I can find the time to make it pretty. But it kind of works because what I'm needing to talk about isn't really that pretty at all.

   Why do we hate ourselves?

   More specifically, why, when I look in the mirror, am I so fixated on negative things that I cannot move forward and move on with my day? Why do I feel trapped in a less than ideal body? Especially when I have friends and family tell me day in and day out that I'm beautiful. Why can't I own that? Where is the confidence? Why is it okay for us as women, or more specifically, myself, to be so wrapped up in what's on the outside that it doesn't matter who I am inside?

   I used to think that eating correctly and exercising was the only way that I could ever feel comfortable with myself, but I'm beginning to realize it goes even deeper than that. I have been eating clean (well, primarily, with a few slip ups here and there) for over a year. I recently went a lot more strict simply for health reasons....but I find myself falling into the same old habits. I stopped intermittent fasting because I felt so good when I was starving I wanted to keep going. I wake up every morning and weigh myself. I weigh myself when I come home from work. These are not healthy habits. I am still obsessed with my weight, even though I lost 40 pounds last year, even though half of my jeans now fall off of me, it is never enough. I still am not beautiful. And I'm beginning to think that even if I lose this last twenty pounds, I will still obsessively return to the scale. I will still think of myself in my 200 pound state. I will still hate myself.

  If this is exhausting for me, I can't imagine how exhausting it is for the people who love and care about me. To constantly have to build me up and remind me that I'm not a horrendous creature from the black lagoon, I am beautiful. To constantly have to affirm me and reassure me of things that I should already know.  And it's the same way with strangers, or people who could love me. In the past year of my singleness, the common denominator in my failed attempts at romance hasn't been that I'm too fat (though my ex boyfriend did use those words once) or that I'm not pretty enough, it's that I have zero sense of self worth. I can see this becoming a pattern in my life and it terrifies me. After all, who wants to spend their life with someone who is so uncomfortable in their own skin? Who wants that type of woman to be an example for their children, especially if they are little girls? If I had a daughter and she grew up with this opinion of herself, I would feel like a failure as a parent. Furthermore, who wants to be with someone who obsesses over every tiny piece of food they put in their mouth and is besieged with guilt for the rest of the day over something as innocent as fruit (because sugar content, of course).

  I think that my mind is beautiful. I know that I am intelligent and creative and a queen at trivia. I know that I have a good voice and am a good writer. I am confident in my quirkiness and feel no shame for my obsession with Lord of the Rings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and X-Men. I know who I am, and I like my insides. But in boiling my worth down to the way I look on the outside, I am effectively saying that the way I look is infinitely more important than who I am as a person, regardless of how awesome that person is. 

  And the scariest part is I don't know how to calm down. I don't know how to look at a candid picture of myself and be happy with what I see. I want to, desperately. I want to see in me what others see in me. But I don't know where to begin. And that terrifies me, because I can see myself losing the people I care about. So now the question becomes, how do I change my perception of myself? How can I look in the mirror and be in love?

  Why do we hate ourselves?