1/4/15 Last One

Writing this on the airplane home because, as it turns out, it isn’t as easy to craft a blog post with my nephew asking me to play cards at every waking hour as one might think.

It was a good trip to my Kentucky home.

Lots of forced rest.

Lots of home cooking

My belt is literally tighter.

Throughout the trip and the writing of this blog I have avoided the question:

Who do I want to be?

I’ve got a ton of stuff about who I am and what I’m afraid of and why.

I could write a book about my weaknesses.

But what good is point A if I don’t have a point B that I want to get to?

So I’m asking:

Who do I want to be?

I’ve got an idea. A blurry picture.

Blurry because giving it a real outline is scary AF.

That girl is intimidating.

Like, take a chill pill you’re making everyone else look bad.

She’s kind. And loving. She is so full of joy and passion and she works to make those things count every day. She isn’t afraid of her sadness. Or her anger. (I literally just watched Inside Out and sobbed at the relevance.) She isn’t afraid of her fear. She loves herself so much that when you’re around her you love yourself. She knows what she is worth and she doesn’t downplay her strengths. She USES them. She doesn’t lay awake at night thinking of how she will fail tomorrow or what she missed out on today. She is sunshine and pixie dust and thunder storms and the bottom of the ocean.

Becoming this person means making mistakes. I hate that. Making mistakes. I hate it so much that both my therapist and improv coach have told me that in order to get better I have to make more mistakes.

Funny thing is that I make more mistakes in fear of making mistakes than I would if I didn’t worry about making mistakes.

Follow?

I don’t really make New Years resolutions. They don’t really stick.

However I do participate in the ‘naming of my years’ dealio.

2015 was the Year of Fire. I can explain that some other time.

I’m calling 2016 The Year of Fucking Up.

I thought about calling it The Year of Mistakes but it seems like a mistake to use ‘the f word’ so it’s going to be The Year of Fucking Up.

Get ready to do some shitty improv scenes. Prepare yourselves to read terrible scripts and watch even worse sketches. If you think my comment on instagram was stupid: meant to. And oooooowweeeeee I am ready to embarrass myself in front of some hotties and casting directors.

Ya’ll ready for this?

*cue space jam credits*

12/28/15 Villains

I like to know who the villain is in every story.

Black and white.

Cut and dry.

Right and Wrong.
Good and evil.

I like my Disney movies.

But the world doesn't work that way. It has a thousand other colors. And a thousand different shades of each of those colors. And every person is a different combination of those colors at different times and can you please just fit into the boxes I have created for you all?!?

A couple days ago I realized that one of the largest flaws of those boxes is trying to fit myself into one.
Is my dad the villain for attempting to keep me captive in the dungeon that is northern kentucky?
Or am I the villain for not loving my father enough to sacrifice my happiness for his?
Who gets to be the hero?
 It doesn't feel like me right now. And according to my own standard if I'm not a hero, I'm a villain.

If I loosen my grip on the way I want things to be for just a moment I realize that this doesn't work. There is not always a right and a wrong. But then… how am I supposed to keep everything organized? How am I supposed to keep MYSELF organized? How could I possibly live without being able to label every single one of my thoughts and feelings as good or bad?!
What's that? My intense fear of being labeled and judged partially comes from the fact that I am constantly labeling and judging everything I do?
Hm.

I will leave you with this clip from Age of Ultron because it's a conversation I have been having with myself a lot lately.

"You're unbearably naive."
"Well, I was born yesterday."

12/26/15 I can read your mind

I walked into my extended family's christmas and the first thing my Uncle Tom says is 

"I read your blog."

That phrase has been making my stomach clench. I didn't really think anybody would bother with reading this. Especially family members.
Part of the decision to make this public was to force myself to face my fear of being judged. A fear that I did not know was so prominent in my life until recently. And perhaps a fear that had not become so prominent in my life until recently. I was comfortable with who I was a month ago and now I'm not. And I know that the way I feel normally projects out into the world. If I can see my insecurities so can everyone else.

I made this public so that people like my wonderful uncle(he told me to say something nice about him in this post) could see and judge me however they pleased. But the thing is he didn't. Or maybe he did and wasn't super vocal about it but he certainly only had kind things to say.

One major way I see myself is through what I believe other people think of me.
So basically I pretend I can read your mind and then use what I can not see to create an image of myself.

Or maybe that's just an excuse to be incredibly hard on myself. I mean, if that's what everyone else thinks then it's okay for me to think it too.
I don't know.

Through my dad's eyes I see a helpless little girl that needs to be protected from the world.
Through my sister's eyes I see a selfish child incapable of putting someone else first.
Through your eyes I see someone trying too hard to impress you with how good of a writer I am.

So much of my mental energy goes toward proving the three of you wrong. Just look at how many sentences I end with prepositions! And I never know where to put those commas.

The thought I just had of living without the need to prove people wrong or impress them is pretty damn liberating.
As a kid I had an adult in my life that would tell me daily that I was not good enough. So maybe(most likely) part of me has been proving that person wrong for a very long time. Projecting their words onto the thoughts of everyone around me.

Maybe that's what we're all doing. Taking the negative and often untrue things people have said about us and putting them into the mouths of the people surrounding us regardless of their actual thoughts.
After all, if I know my weaknesses before you do you can't use them to hurt me.

I don't know.

Right now what I know is that I want to pursue that free feeling I just had.
The glimpse of what it would mean for my life if I stopped trying to prove something. ANYTHING. To anyone!

I don't know what that looks like but I think it's time I try to find out.

12/24/15: I'm Happy

My dad sat me down to have the 'when are you moving back' conversation. The answer is and has continued to be 'never' for the past three years. 

His methods of persuasion:

1. It has been three years and nothing has happened acting wise.

2. My neighborhood is not a safe place. (He researched crime in the area.)

3. With all of the mass shootings happening, Los Angeles is far more likely to be targeted than Alexandria, Kentucky.

A fact that I have actually taken into consideration lately. 

I am sure many of my friends have had this same conversation. Makes every family gathering spicy with disappointment. Theirs and ours. 

But I learned something important in that conversation.

I am happy. 

So very happy with the things I am doing in Los Angeles that fear can not remove me. Not the fear of getting shot and not the much greater fear of upsetting my father. There was not a moment that I even considered the idea of moving back to appease him.

Why am I so happy in Los Angeles?

The sucker punch that will always be reminding someone that they are not exactly where they want to be in the entertainment industry didn't hurt as much as it made me wish he understood. 

Has anyone out there found a concise way of explaining that their love for comedy and performing doesn't really have a foreseeable time table? 

So I'm happy.

If I wasn't happy I would probably have gone back to Kentucky by now. 

Unless I am running from something. 

Which is possible. 

But it feels like happiness. 

Maybe I'm happily running. 

I don't know.

Maybe the fear of giving up is the fear that's driving me now.

Are we always driven by what we are most afraid of?

"If you're going to be afraid, fear the thing that will only use that fear to make you better."

12/22/15: Day One

Why does coming home feel like stopping my heart?

Stopping progress. 

What am I currently doing in LA that is so important and fragile that leaving it for two weeks makes me  think I might have to start all over when I return.

I think part of it has to do with the cycle I'm returning to here in Kentucky. A cycle that I don't actually fit into anymore. A cycle that I am, regardless, expected to fit into. I have been trying to allow myself to observe the cycle without getting sucked into it. To set healthy boundaries between my mind and the people I call family. Boundaries don't really exist in my family.
They're insulting. We're your family. We love you. We know you.
And that is such a big thing.
They know me. They know a version of me that I think I want very desperately to have no part of.
Which is a reason for the sudden quest for identity.
There are parts of me that I do not want to exist. So if I were to admit they existed and took the time to break down the barriers I had set up to block them, who would I be?
I talked about being 'sunshine and pixie dust' in the last post. Said it was a burden. And it is, but it was a burden that I took on as a trade for not having to deal with me. All of me.
I wanted so desperately to be the happy go lucky, easy to laugh gal, I thought others wanted me to be that I started cutting away at the pieces that didn't allow for that.
My mom passed away two years ago and it was just the worst. A ton of things came to the surface at the time. Grief sifted through my deepest fears and strained out only the most bitter thoughts it could find.
I refused to deal with it. Pulled a classic 'push it down' move and when it finally exploded I realized that  I just had to let it runs its course.
This might seem like an obvious statement but I swear I am just now realizing this about myself, I super hate grieving. I hate being sad. I hate being angry. I fight it so hard. So hard, in fact, that I am pretty sure I just thought I was good at dealing with things.
And if I tried to avoid dealing with something as large as the death of my mother what other things are hiding in my soul, draining me of energy because I don't want to admit it is happening?

And if I do admit it is happening, that I tried to cut myself off from pieces of me that I deem ugly does that mean I think I'm ugly? And if I think I'm ugly what am I projecting out into the world?

I thought naming this blog 'I Don't Know' was kind of a cop out for not wanting to worry about the name but I'm starting to think it is a pretty good mantra of sorts.

I don't know if I think I'm ugly.
I don't know if I'm going to learn that I am a very sad person with the ability to put on a very large smile.
Another crazy thought I just realized was in my head: I don't like to start searching for the answer if I don't know what it will be.
Cool. So. Here's to going against my instincts and being okay with not knowing and still searching.

A Preamble

I recently discovered that I do not know if I like myself. Mostly because I suddenly found myself in the precarious position of not knowing who I actually am. 

Ugh. This blog is about your identity crisis? Boring!

Then don't read it. Think I give a fuck? 

Anyway.

I've been going to therapy for a couple months now. It's good stuff. Except for sometimes you open a box of nightmares that you had no idea was just sitting in your attic, leaking poison all over your life.

I opened one of those boxes. It sucked. Two days ago I would have given anything to have sealed that box back up and labeled it 'Repressed for a reason. DO NOT OPEN.'

Today I'm starting a blog about it. 

I'm giving this blog two weeks to live. That is how long I will be in Kentucky for the holidays. 

Two, potentially, long weeks. 

Again, just two days ago I was thinking of changing my plane ticket to return to my LA home sooner. The thought of going back to the place I have been trying so hard to forget I was ever attached to is pretty tough. And this is my quest to find out why. 

Ever since moving to Los Angeles I've felt like I should've been here my entire life. But would I feel that way if I had lived here my entire life? Why am I so afraid of where I come from? 

I discovered these fears lurking my mind and decided that I needed to figure out why they exist.

1. I am afraid that somehow while I am in kentucky, people will convince me that I should stay in kentucky. Which is absurd. Have I met me? When was the last time I did something that I did not absolutely want to do?

2. I am afraid that if I am away from LA for too long the space I left behind will cover up and the city will forget that I ever existed within it. 

(If you've gotten this far into the blog, you live in LA, and consider us friends do feel free to send me a message promising not to forget me in the two weeks I'm gone or ever.)

A couple of things I have learned about myself recently:

1. I am big on the people pleasing.
Posting this is pretty difficult because I don't want people in kentucky to read it and take it personally.  And I don't want people in Los Angeles to read it and realize what an over analytical psycho I am.
Then of course there is the fact that I said 'fuck' right up top(did that on purpose) and I'm worried about that because what if certain people read it and think I have become the barbarian that all people who move to LA inevitably become. That I am a product of the Sodom of the west! I must be prayed for and reached out to!
And now I'm nervous that they think I'm making fun of them with that comment.
I promise this blog won't be full of curse words. I just wanted to confess that I say it without feeling shame.(I'm also still deciding if I should be feeling shame for saying fuck.)

2. I see myself as sunshine and pixie dust.
What a freaken burden.
My stupid face does not have a neutral expression. If I'm not smiling people assume I'm having a mental breakdown. If I'm not the loudest person at the party I get asked if I am alright. Which is not a bad thing. It's great that people care enough to ask. But sometimes I want to be not alright in a corner while I watch other people.
If I'm having a bad day I have to give thanks and be happy knowing that Jesus died for me and that I am so very loved and that music is wonderful and isn't the ocean just beautiful?! 

3. I place so much of my identity in acting. In comedy. In the fact that I am not creating everything I want to be creating.
A friend recently pointed out to me that if you are resting who you are on your acting career and you are not booking roles, there is a good chance you are not going to like yourself.

I've been tearing up the foundation of my being these past couple weeks. It has been sad and terrifying and I have tried to stop digging. To leave it alone so that I didn't have to keep looking at all the work that has to be done. But some stupid rational part of me just keeps repeating that if I ignore the work it will still need to get done and I can't leave my heart in this state.

I don't know who I am.
I don't know if I want to know who I am.
I don't know how deep this hurt goes.
I don't know if should be ashamed of saying fuck.
I don't know if I will ever be where I want to be.
I don't know why I am so gosh dang loud.
I don't know why writing helps.

I know that I'll never be finished not knowing things.

Here is my attempt to try nonetheless.