"Bad Words"

Growing up my parents followed protocol in tell my siblings and myself that certain words were bad and that we should never use them. “Never use them”. Why never? I didn’t question it though, I left it alone. That is until I was made fun of for being too afraid to tell someone to “shut up” because I was told that it was wrong to say that. As soon as I realized that all my peers were using these words and that I was the only one too afraid to, my need to fit in made me seek out what all of these taboo words were, learn them and then use them as much as possible. For many years I got in trouble numerous times for my foul or inappropriate language. It wasn’t until freshman year of high school that I met an adult who didn’t see cursing as a bad thing. Mr. Cohen my English teacher. He was a vividly imaginative man who allowed me to find my own love for English. He taught me that although seen as one of the worst words of our language, “fuck” was also the most versatile word, and the only word in our language that not only how to make an entire sentence using only it, but that it is the only word in our language that can used in every part of speech, and can mean everything from pleasure to pain, and everything in between. He opened my eyes to words and how every word is absolutely amazing and should never be disregarded as something to avoid.

When I discovered standup I of course listened to a man named George Carlin who went on a rant about why people are afraid of words and how they shouldn’t be, and from that moment on I decided that I would never allow my children to be afraid of a word. There are no bad words, there are no words that should scare you. Yes, if used in certain ways words can hurt, but they can also heal. So should we disregard the word “fuck” just because it has the potential to be used negatively, when in reality it has just as much potential to used positively? I personally don’t think so.

My daughter is now 7 and has and a few run-ins with “foul language”. Here was my approach. First off if she wants to use a word she should know what it means. So step 1 was introducing her to a dictionary and learning how to use it. I feel as though communication is hindered enough that if we could all just learn what words mean before we use them then maybe there would be a little less miscommunication in our day to day lives. So we started a word list. Any word that she read, or heard that she didn’t understand she would write down, or copy and together we would go over the list and look up each word so that she could learn what they meant and how to use them. The words that she would write weren’t just bad words, honestly there was only one bad word that she wanted to know the meaning of, the rest were all things that she heard from our family reading, or her independent reading.

Step 2 was learning when and how to appropriately use words, and honestly this is the hardest part. This involves teaching a child how to read social cues in a room which most adults have trouble doing. But because there are so many people today who fear words, and fear a child using certain words that it became difficult for me to express to her that even if she is using the words in a nice way and to do well that there are still people who will be angry with her out of pure ignorance of the word and of who she is. I mean seriously though, how do you explain that something that is in fact true, but isn’t politically correct is wrong to a child. So we settled on an agreement that while writing in her journal she can use whatever language she wants, and when speaking to me she can use whatever language she wants, but as far as anyone else she had to run it past me first for each person until she turned 18. So far that seems to be working. -- We did have one occasion where it didn’t and that was when one of her friends was exploring “bad” language during a playdate under my care and I had to handle that situation. For me it was a simple question of just opening up a dialog about the word: Understanding that words are extremely powerful and have the ability to hurt someone more deeply than a knife, but can also to help heal someone better than any medication. Before using a word know what it means, make sure we are using it for good. See if we can come up with other words that people aren’t afraid of that we can use to say the same thing.

This all led us to step 3, which was to learn alternative language. So I introduced her to a thesaurus and how to use it to find other words that would mean the exact same thing that she would be trying to say in a way that won’t offend anyone. However then we ran into other issues; like the fact that some people will even be offended if she uses the expression “darn it” to express something going wrong. - I mean she could have said “Fuck”, or “Shit”, or “Damn” “Damnit”, or she could have done that ridiculously stupid thing that parents do when we say “fudge”, or “frick” because we think somehow that saying a different word with the exact same intention somehow makes it better. That is what gets me; please tell me how saying “the B word” or “the F word” is just as bad as actually saying the word because as the speaker, saying things like “the N word” or “the IT word”, puts the words you mean to say into the listeners head anyway. So technically you’re not, not saying the word; you are! – Fact of the matter is that my daughter weighed the possibilities and picked the least “evil” word she could think of to express her dissatisfaction. However she was still asked to “please not use that word”. Well what word should she have used? Should she really be forced to dumb down her language and use infant-like language because someone else wasn’t ready to hear her use it? Or how about the time she wanted to talk about Hell and was told that she was using bad language. Is it better for her spell out “H-E-double hockey sticks”? That is literally doing the exact same thing as saying it. She is just putting the exact same word into the listeners head by saying it without saying it.

My point for all this is that if you know what a word means and how to use it and your using it appropriately and in a kind way, then why shouldn’t you use a word? Because if I slice my hand open while making dinner one night, I’m sorry but “oh fudgecicles”, or “whippersnappers” doesn’t cover the situation or my emotions quite like “FUCK!” will.

What to expect when your expecting

Yea no, this is not going to be one of those blogs with a list of the top 10 things to expect and how to properly handle them... this is real life.

I remember when I first found out I was going to be a mom. The news firstly brought me great joy in the fact that I would be a mom. Then came panic. I started reading as many books as I could about what was going to happen to me and then what would happen after I gave birth and how I could react. But this just lead to more panic. The more books I read the more contradicting opinions I heard. Each book had a different take on what my baby would do and how I should act. I wasn’t sure what to believe anymore, so I went straight to the source, and began asking other moms. This was an even bigger mistake. Every mom that I spoke to had her own way of doing things and each one was certain that their way was the right way. Being that I was young and single meant that as I got closer to my due date peoples opinions got pushed on me more and more forcefully. I had completely lost all joy of becoming a parent and was now dreading the being a mom. My daughter came early and of course every “mistake” I had made thus far was said to have been what caused this to happen. With my daughter in the NICU and family members and friends judging my every move sent me into a terrible bout of depression, intermixed most likely with normal post partum depression. I was totally lost, and I wasn’t even sure where to look to get myself found.

A  month later when my daughter was aloud to come home, I had decided I had enough of being told how I was a terrible mother. I still wasn’t sure what to do, or how to go about doing it, but I knew that I loved my daughter and that she loved me back. Day by day my confidence as a mother grew, and so did my daughter. I slowly began allowing people back into our life. Each time I did though I was criticized. From the food I fed her to the way I dressed her, the naps she took, and the activities she did, not a single thing went un-criticized. It took a long time for me to get used to being told I was doing everything wrong and being able to ignore it. I had never had a job before where there was no job description, no manual, or rule book. I also never had a job before where my boss would scream and cry if I did things wrong, or you know could possibly choke to death on her own spit, and I certainly never had a job where any random stranger could come up to me and threaten to fire me or tell me I wasn’t a good fit. It was totally strange, and really hard, but like I said, I slowly got used to it.

As time went on and my daughter go older, people slowly started to back off. She hadn’t fallen off any tables and broken her skull, or burnt her hand off on a hot stove. So I guess people stopped having things to complain about, or critique much anymore. In fact, they totally switched up on me and started telling me what a wonderful child I had. How well behaved she was, and how smart, and how talented, and beautiful. It was like a total 180. I couldn’t believe it. Really, these people thought I had done something right? Now I cant take all the credit, my daughter is an amazing kid, but I’ld like to think that my parenting had something to do with how she’s growing up.

I have lots of mom friends, and I work with a lot of new moms, and I am seeing more and more that critiquing a mothers ability to be a parent is completely normal. Why? Honestly do we seriously not have anything better to do than tell others that they are wrong. We see it in politics when Republicans and Democrats fight because their way is the right way. I see it in sports when my team is the best team. I see it in medicine when this treatment is the best treatment. And while in each of these situations one individuals opinion is never the only one, there is always research, articles, lectures, and many other things to help people make their own decisions. As a parent though, there really isn’t. Like I said in the beginning, every book contradicts the last, and each person you talk to contradicts the last. There is nothing to help a new mom stand firm other than just pure confidence, and we are normally lacking this right after childbirth.

Point is when you’re expecting, you can only expect to not expect anything. Don’t expect there to be a book that will solve all your problems or answer all your questions. Don’t expect there to be just one way to do anything. Don’t expect people to respect or disrespect your decisions. Don’t expect your baby to grow the same way that any other child does. Every child, every parent, and every situation is going to be different. The most important thing I can advise you to do is to get yourself a friend who is willing to support every and any decision you make. Weather that is your significant other, or just your best friend. Find them and stick with them. There will be so many people telling you that you are doing things wrong, that you need someone to encourage even your most stupid sounding ideas. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t make mistakes as a parent. In fact just today I sent my kid to school today, when there was no school, and didn’t realize that there was no school until I called to pick her up instead of taking the bus. There are so many things that I do wrong but its ok. I may have never had a job without a manual, but I’ve also never had a boss that kissed me on the forehead when I was sick, or poured go-gurt in my armpit to wake me up to play, or sang “I love you” on repeat to me for 2 days straight.

Don’t worry. You got this. And trust me, your doing just fine.

Memories are really our best form of time travel

Do you ever just catch yourself and thinking about what life would be like if you were still with your first boyfriend/girlfriend, or first crush, first time, or maybe the one that got away? I do. All the time, but the thing with me is that I was so wrapped up in my own world when I was young that I had a lot of “ones that got away” because I couldn’t see how much of a bitch I was to anyone who came close to me. I had great boyfriends that would “like just dump me for no reason” but clearly it wasn’t for no reason, it was because of how terrible I was to them. I remember my first real boy friend in high school. (I wont say his, or any other name because I am not sure how many of my high school friends read this and no one needs a blast) This guy was a sweet heart. Really sweet guy, but for whatever reason I didn’t like him. As a matter of fact I would openly make fun of him for liking me. After he asked me out for the third time, my friends begged me to take pitty on him and at least give him a chance; after all, he really was a great guy. I on the other hand, liked his best friend (of course man it was high school, there’s got to be a love triangle) who coincidentally was going out with one of my friends. So being as clever as I thought I gave in to dating the sweet best friend so I could participate in fun high school double dates stuff. Really it meant hanging out after school, playing guitar, and listening to music. I was still being a total douche though to the sweet friend. I know I pretended I didn’t kiss boys though so I wouldn’t have to kiss him. Secretly though I had started to like him. Too little, to late though, he got wise to me and broke it off. I deserved it for how I treated him, but I had started to like him, too little too late. When he broke up with me he immediately started dating another girl who was never too fond of me, but that he liked very much and who was sweet to him. I lost any chance of ever getting him back. Today is his birthday which is what sparked this blog of mine.

Every once in a while, I get really pensive about my life and I just think back to everything that has happened. When the sweet friends picture popped up on social media for it being his birthday, I started looking through his Facebook to see what he was up to these days. We’ve all done it, looked through high school friends profiles that we haven’t seen in a while.

The first guy I ever really had a crush on was in middle school. I met him at first when his best friend was dating mine in 7^th grade. It was brief and I didn’t like his best friend who was dating mine. I thought my best friend should break up with him. I met him again on my bus in 8^th grade. He was a flirt for sure, and nothing like his best friend who was still dating my best friend. We rode the bus every day we became pretty ok friends, but the kind of friends who had to bicker in public to defend our best friends who were a terrible couple. Now my best friend and her boyfriend (lets call him B1) catch on to the friendship between myself and the other best friend (B2) and they don’t like it. So B1, tells B2 lots of mean things about me while my best friend tells me lots of mean things about B2, so that we don’t like each other anymore. In high school B2 left us and went to a different school, but I never forgot him. A few years after high school we met up again as friends. I immediately had a crush again. We talked about how we had met in middle school. I found out about how B1 had told him to stay away from me and how our friendship had been sabotaged. We suggested the possibility of dating now. Unfortunately I had to move, almost immediately after we met again and so nothing ever happened to the evolution of our friendship.  We are both now engaged and he’s getting a stepchild.

That story wasn’t one where I was really mean to anyone, but I was heavily influenced by my apparently wicked (totally kidding, there are no hard feelings) best friend who did want me dating her boyfriends best friend. There are really only 2 other people worth mentioning. The next person to get a story is the first person I fell in love with. And the terrible awful no good thing I did to him. I was a very stupid little girl who fell in love with someone who was in a relationship. Now lucky for me, I made this mistake while I was young and in high school, and the not older, destroying a marriage or learning my lesson would have been much harder. This guy I fell in love with was in a relationship of 4-5 years, so you know it was marriage level serious to us high-schoolers (honestly its impressive to me as an adult too, have you seen how people date today…)  and I started talking to a guy, who was awesome. Seriously everything I had ever wanted in a person. He was kind and compassionate, at one point he helped me find a place to work and live, just and overall great guy who would do anything for his family and friends. Down side was that he was with another girl. She wasn’t in our grade nor did she  live near us, so most of the time people became used to seeing my crush (call him C) and me together like a couple. One night he and a couple of his buddies, invited me and my friend to come hang out with them, and this other girl tagged along with us. Well this other girl was drunk and all over C. So I was heated. All of a sudden the two of them left the room while no one noticed and I was pissed (little did I know that he was being a gentleman and taking her to the bathroom to puke, found that one out years later) so I went to his best friend and hooked up with him, in front of everyone, even though I was at the party with C. Needless to say my friend and I left the party and the next day C plead his case to me, but I didn’t believe him. I pinned the kiss entirely on him and made him feel like it was his fault. Told him to break up with his girlfriend or I would never speak to him again. After that I moved to another school in another state and so even though I made an ass of him at the party and he broke up with his girlfriend for me, I left him. I called him a few years later when I came back to our home state and he was still mad at me. I used to imagine my with him a lot. As kids we had talked about how our lives could be when we were older, but being older and looking back in a-whole-nother thing.

The last person to get a story was a short relationship. Its not the he’s super special to me, but he was the first decent boy I had dated since the sweet best friend in high school. He was actually the first person I had dated in a very long time, since I was recently a single mom. He was the first guy who met my child and who I felt I could trust around her. Unfortunately for me I was in the throws of my addiction during this time. It was during a point when I thought I had things under control, because I had a great job and was looking to move and buy a house, but honestly I was a mess. One day He just stopped texting me, stopped answering my phone calls. I wanted to say I didn’t know why, and that I had done nothing wrong, but really I did. When we would go out with friends I would always get trashed and expect him to just take care of me.  I even left drugs at his house and let him take the blame for me. He was almost kicked out of where he lived. I would have stopped talking to me to.  I thought about him a lot when I first got clean. I wondered if things would have been different if I had stopped a year or two sooner.

All of these men have made an impact on my life, along with a few other of people I fantasized about having kept in my life, some of them were long and drawn out of the period of almost a decade. I new I was finally over all of these guys when I would try to imagine a different life than the one I had and I wouldn’t want to. This was my sign that I was over any crush, or ones that got away and that I was ready to commit fully to my current fiancé. Who I should think I have been good to. I know that from taking the time to reflect on my mistakes of the past I know things not to do, and we've got no complaints yet (fingers crossed).  This was really just a reflection of my life and the people who have moved through it.    Memories are really our best form of time travel.

My Third Eye Experience

So the other day I had an absolutely awesome experience that brought me closer not only to understanding my third eye chakra, but all the chakras. See to me the chakras were something I had briefly read about and new that they were an energy system in the body, but something I had never really felt. The only chakra I was really connected to was Muladhara, or the root or earth chakra, but had always figured that this was something I felt as an energy from the ground, not one within me. I never really thought I was at a point where the chakras were real for me; more conceptual or theoretical than anything else. This however changed everything. I learned how my mind works by itself and how it works with energy, and the experience over all was just so amazing that I wanted to share it with you all.

It started at a 2 hour class on the third eye chakra. Now in the past I have had such a clouded idea of what the third eye chakra really is because this is the chakra that was described to me as what drove palm readers or tarot readers to be able to see the past present and future, as well as what aloud people to see auras, and that it was literally an invisible eye that saw all things that were invisible to our physical eyes. From the workshop I attended I was able to get such a better understanding for the chakra and how not only is it so much more than what was described to me but how much I truly use and have a large third eye chakra. My intellect and imagination are some proof of this. The third eye is also known as Ajna, which means to perceive or command.

Element: All elements combined, light

Color: Indigo

Shape: Five pointed star

Petals of the lotus: Two

Seed sound: Aum (Om)

Endocrine gland: Pituitary gland

Physical association: Eyes, base of skull, brow

Psychological function: Intuition, imagination

Identity: Archetypal identity

Developmental stage: Adolescence

Challenge: Illusion

Sense organ: Mind

Predominant sense: Neutral

During the workshop we did a meditation where we started off with the cue to only think in images. We started with colors, and immediately I started saying the colors I saw, and telling the colors what to do. I just couldn’t get away from words, I started noticing even that when I looked more closely I wasn’t even seeing the colors, but the word written out in the color ie: I would read “RED” in the color red in my head.  This cue was repeated to us in seeing our breath in color, seeing our body in color, and a few others which I couldn’t pay attention to because I couldn’t see color, I could only see words in colors, so I shut everything out and decided to regroup and re-center and try again. After regrouping I noticed that there was really pretty music in the background which I hadn’t noticed before. From the music I began seeing myself play the instruments, from the piano to the violin and the cello, and everything was in first person. My hands were moving across keyboards and strings gracefully as if I was playing the music myself. Music was a huge part of my upbringing from listening to playing and so this felt very natural to me, but then everything started changing. From these images appeared a dancer, who was dancing beautifully to the music. I was watching her this time instead of being her, and she was dancing in a lyrical and ballet style to the music. It was wonderful to watch since dancing is something I have always watched, admired, and wanted to be able to do well. Every once in a while, I would find myself talking in my head again and images of  my playing the instruments would bring me back to watching this dancer. The neat part is that I was feeling less and less me, and the dancer was starting to look more and more like me. The next thing I noticed was that now when my mind would wander I wouldn’t even see/feel myself playing the instruments anymore, but rather I would see abstract musical notes dancing through my mind. The words my mind wanted to say would turn into quarter notes or triplets, before I knew what the thoughts were. I stayed with this for a while simply enjoying the peace that the music and the dancer brought me. The instructor then turned off the music and began beating a drum giving again the cue to think only in images. The drum wasn’t a loud one, but I could feel vibrations coming from it and filling my body with its sound waves. A huge orange yellow glow filled my mind and took the shape of a fire. The fire was huge and bright and full of life as my view panned out I was able to see a dancer around the fire, but this time the dancer was more abstract. I couldn’t tell whether it was male or female, only that it was most likely human and it was dancing around the fire. The entire thing was very tribal and reminded me almost of portrayals I’ve seen of Native American fire dances and rituals. The drum beating began to slow and change and eventually fade away as we were given the cue to feel our connection to the ground. (Now here’s where I really got a kick out of the experience) Typically when I meditate on the root chakra, or want to feel grounded, I literally start feeling the energy in my feet (mostly) or whatever is in contact with the ground and I can feel the energy coming and going. For whatever reason this time that was not the case. I stayed as a third person, observing my body and seeing my body turn into a twisted and gnarly root system buried deep. The next cue told us to feel the energy from the ground flow up through our body and out the crown of our head. Again I watched as light energy moved up through the root system growing in brightness and size as it moved up from the smaller roots into the bigger ones getting closer and closer to the trunk, and as soon as this energy reached the trunk, or my body, I was pulled out of the third person and back into first as I felt an energy shoot through my spine starting in my buttocks and coming out the top of my head. Even though my eyes were closed I felt as though my eyes were open and I was watching myself in first person fill with light, and very strong white light. I could feel energy moving through me. I sat here in the indescribable feeling of power, energy, love, and light that was me, and yet not for a moment before the bells were chimed and the meditation was over. As I came out of meditation I realized I had to use the bathroom and while I was washing my hands afterwards I noticed my face looked almost ghostly white, but my skin looked really good, like the summer time glow where you have no breakouts and everything is exfoliated and fresh, but it was pale. I figured the paleness was probably because I needed a drink of water, but was super happy about the natural glow. A few minutes later, a student from the class came up to me and told me they needed to tell me something. They apologized for watching me during meditation but that close to the end of  the meditation that there was something bothering them, and it had distracted them so much that they had been forced to come out of meditation and open their eyes, and that’s when they saw me. They told me I was glowing white like an angel of sorts. I was really taken back at first until I remembered that white glow I noticed when I was in the bathroom, and then remembered the white light of energy I was feeling during the meditation. Coincidence? Maybe, but for me the entire experience was amazing and I really waned to share it with you all and get it down on paper before I forget all about it and think that I cant get in touch with the chakras.

The High School Jeans Story

Ok so I need to just get this off my chest I think. Well I think its pretty clear that I need to get it off my chest since, its 3 am and I woke up crying and then couldn’t fall back asleep no for almost an hour while my mind raced around an event that happened to me back in high school; an event that although was not nearly the most traumatic, scariest, or craziest event in my life it was probably the most publicly humiliating event in my life, and the first time I felt truly alone; an event about pants.

When I was in high school I had learned that you don’t need millions of friends as long as you had 1 or 2 really good ones, and that’s what I had, in fact through my entire K-12 career I can count on 1 hand how many friends I had. I was, and still am completely fine with this, however my school was very cliquey, to the point where even if I was friends with one person, it was like we were never truly aloud to be friends, because I wasn’t friends with the 20 other people in their clique, which again was fine other than high school lunch. In elementary and middle school, you sat with your class, in high school you sat where you wanted. Oh the freedom! Well not if the 3 friends you have happen to be in different lunches. I avoided high school lunch my freshman and sophomore year by over filling my class schedule, but as a junior I dropped my music classes in order to get a break during the day. Lunch was anything but. I had to sit in a cafeteria full of people I didn’t know, I wasn’t aloud to leave once I was finished eating to go to the library or gym. Some kids had notes from their parents that aloud them to leave campus entirely and go eat lunch elsewhere, but no such luck on my end. So I was stuck. I found quickly that the girls in my school were much more cliquey than the guys, and if I found a table of all boys, they would be more welcoming to allowing me to sit with them if they had room. This lead to me bouncing around from one table to the next, depending on which table had someone who was out sick, or skipping that day, and meeting some pretty interesting characters. Although I got along with the people I sat with, I cant remember any of their names which goes to show either how terrible my memory is, or just how much we actually interacted.

Another important back story fact is that I was known as the girl who never wore jeans. Every day I would wear yoga pants, or sweatpants, but never anything else. I was a swimmer, and trying to squeeze into a pair of jeans in 5 minutes when your still somewhat wet, just isn’t going to happen. Plus yoga pants and sweat pants were just so comfortable, I never saw the point in wearing anything else. Until this one time…

Everything happened in one day at lunch. There was an upper level to our cafeteria where you could get snacks and where all the upperclassmen sat, and then there was the lower level with the lunch line and the lowerclassmen. I normally only had enough money to buy a soft pretzel for lunch which was on the upper level, so here I was in line for a soft pretzel when a girl from the soccer team came up to me to comment on my pants. Told me they were cute or something. Honestly, she and I had been practicing soccer together now for 2 years, but had ever exchanged a single word, so her comment on my pants caught me off guard, but I thanked her and went about getting my pretzel. A second later, she was gone, and another girl from her table was behind me playing 20 questions with me about these pants. Asking me when I got them and what store, and where was the store, but her entire body language wasn’t “hey, cute pants! Where did you get them so I can get some?” it was almost scary in the way she was asking, like she was angry that I was answering. After about 2 minutes the girl from my soccer team waved her back over to the table and I got my pretzel and went to find a table. I kept feeling watched, and I was right because once I found a table I snuck a peak up at the table with the girls and saw a few of them looking over at me; and not the “don’t let them see me looking at them” look, this was full on, evil stares that they didn’t care if I or anyone else saw. I wasn’t sure what was coming next, but I had been on the tail end of enough high school humiliation to know that something bad was going to happen before the end of the lunch hour. I snuck my chance when the lunch line was long using it as cover to move to another table. I hid right along the wall to the upper level at a table with people I didn’t know. Apparently one of them knew me and came over to ask what I was doing? Not in a mean way just a hey, you’ve never sat here before what’s up kind of way. I told him the wall was the most comfy place to sit because it gives you a chair with back support and he sat with his back to the wall with me making idle chatter, and everything was fine. Everything was fine until there were about 20 minutes left to lunch.

A girl from the previously mentioned table came up to me and started yelling at me that I stole the pants I was wearing. They were not mine and I should give them back. I was a bit dumbfounded and shocked at first because this is not exactly the type of thing I was expecting. My dumbfounded look must have angered her because it made her yell louder. The fact that she was accusing me of stealing her pants had now sunk in, and so I stood up and try to tell her that I had not stolen them. Bad move. Girls from all over the cafeteria started coming up to me, and telling me I had stolen their pants too. There was no point in arguing with these people so I sat back down and ignored them. Eventually some got tired of yelling and others were told to go sit down by the cafeteria aids. But don’t be fooled, my sitting down was yet another bad move. One of the guys from the original girls table came down. Funny thing is that I knew this guy, I knew most of the guys in the school, especially the jocks, because my dad helped train most of them, so I would workout with most of them and I would help some plan their nutrition (only wrestlers needed the nutrition really).  Being that I knew him I thought maybe he was coming to see what the yelling was about, see that it was me and that would be that, but apparently not. These girls either honestly thought I stole their pants, or they were playing one of the worst jokes in the history of high school pranks in the world. My friend leans in and asks did you steal her pants? I told him no. He asks if I am sure because his friends (the girls) are pretty convinced? Again I assure him that no I had not. Then he flips. He starts shouting to tell me they showed him evidence that it was me who had stolen the pants. As soon as he starts yelling 2 more guys come down, along with all of the original girls and a few new ones. Every single one of them looks pissed, and I know that if they wanted to they could kick my ass. (haha especially with the odds now being something like 10-1). Needless to say, I’m pretty scared especially since the group seems to be closing in one me. So I start looking for an exit strategy. I scrambled under the table I had been sitting at and crawled out the other end, my shirt covered in cafeteria food, only to have the head disciplinarian waiting for me at the other end looking pissed. At some point I must have started crying because I remember being paraded through the cafeteria by him with people laughing both at my food covered outfit, and the fact that I cried. He took me back to his office where he started berating me with questions about the pants. Finally I told him that honestly if this was all about a pair of jeans, that I would gladly get rid of them if I could go get some sweatpants from my locker. Honestly they were the only jeans that I owned, and I had gotten them with a gift certificate to a store that priced jeans so high they cost more than what I spend in groceries a week now.  I didn’t really want to get rid of them because I had found a pair of jeans I liked, they were super soft like leggings, and they were from a really cool store, and they fit me really well, so I felt good wearing them. But nothing could make me want to live getting screamed at by what felt like ½ the cafeteria while the other half watched. Nothing made me want to see people that I thought were at least friendly acquaintances scream and yell at me humiliating me in front of everyone.

I felt alone because everyone had a group; a tight knit group that would back them up no matter what. And when I was trapped by all these groups, there was no one left to have my back. I was amazed at the level of commitment that these people had to their friends; that they would gang up on one person based on a half truth, and I wanted nothing more than to have friends like that; someone to have my back when I needed it, or go to war for me on a whim. I thought that was amazing, because I had never had that.

This is what woke me up tonight. This is what stopped me from falling back asleep. An event from years ago, that was not the most painful, devastating, or hurtful, but probably one of the most humiliating and the first time I felt truly alone. I write this because 1 I couldn’t sleep and I wanted to get this off  my chest, but 2 because I am sure that I am not the only person who has gone through this, or is going through this, or will ever go through this, and I just want you all to know that it does get better. This is the first time since the week of the incident that I have even thought about it. It will pass. Things will work out. I promise.

Itchy dry skin Life Hack

Hey my beautiful people! Who suffers from itchy dry skin? I know I do, but here’s a little life hack that I learned recently from a good friend of mine who is an esthetician to help save your skin.

So we all know at this point that heat is damaging to our skin right? We know to cover up in the sun, and to avoid dry heat, and to lotion up when we are exposed to that hot air, but how many of us thought about our showers? I love my hot showers, and honestly when she told me that hot showers were destroying my skin I screamed. There’s no way I am not taking hot showers, and I am sure many of you are the same way. Who wants to give up that hot shower or hot bath? Not me! But the heat from the shower is aging your skin terribly, and is drying your skin our terribly. Apparently the correct temperature is cool, to lukewarm, but unless I end up in the military or in jail, you will not see me taking a cool or lukewarm shower, ever, so here’s how to help protect your skin.

We all know that applying lotion after your shower can help add moister back to your skin, and some of us use soaps that have lotion in them to help keep our skin nourished, but these methods are for treating a problem that already occurred. Like getting a cold and then taking medication for it. I am more in favor of preventative medicine,  and making sure I don’t get that cold in the first place. So how do you prevent your skin from drying out and withering away in that hot shower?

Coconut oil!!!  Most of you have heard me rant and rave about coconut oil in my social media posts, so I wont go over all the amazing, wonderful, great, superb, splendid etc… benefits of coconut oil, but I will share this with you. Apply coconut oil to your body before you get in the shower. Lather yourself up from head to toe before you hop into the nice hot shower. Pretty simple right?  While your in the shower you will wash most of it off when you scrub your body but, you will at least protect your skin from the majority of the heat damage. Then once you hop out, apply more coconut oil, or your lotion of choice, to make up for the oil that rubbed off while scrubbing.

Think of this as preventative medicine for your skin. It will help your skin from wrinkling as quickly as you age,  drying out as much in the winter months where we are surrounded by dry heat, and it will help your skin feel great overall!