how it feels to chew 5 gum [sic]

bc donalds or monald king? hot veggie dog! I’m throwing up and breaking down!

and here’s the thing about it. I haven’t been at peace in months. true, deep peace. peace is not a constant state of mind and each day comes with its ebbs and flows. sufficient for each day is its own trouble. but I haven’t felt normal, settled, acclimated, or ready in months.

a fried egg, you’ve heard of one? my brain.

I don’t know how to get the egg to sit still and it rabbit trails so much that I question my own sanity. then I get angry with myself. I can handle this. I should be able to handle this.

I got told my art sucked just in time to graduate with honors and three degrees. moved 15 minutes away. new roommate. moved 20 minutes away. new roommate. paid rent for the first time, second, time, third time. bought a hatchback. why does insurance cost so much? started a 9-5. began the heart-wrenching that I'd wrench until I wrecked a few months later but I’m an aunt in minnesota! filled the fridge with condiments and mold. started eating consistently again. leaky tires. transmission failure. how was your summer?

if you can’t tell, I’m catatonic. I haven’t been able to stop thinking. at times it feels like I’m in a glass elevator and I’m just a kick away from clarity. I don’t know what to believe, am I doing better than I know, as michael w. smith would say, or am I just grass is greener-ing? let’s wear 80s sweater vests and throw rocks at the moon!

the more I try to unravel and understand, which is how I have always worked, the more of a mess I make. I’m playing scrabble but the tiles are covered in cheese. I hate scrabble but I love words so as you’ll understand, I have no choice.

let me set the scene. It’s my turn and everyone is screaming. the whole room smells like scorched colby jack. I think and think and rearrange the not-so-easy, not-so-breezy, very cheesy mess. I make no coherent wordature. the more I rearrange, the more I hurt myself in my confusion, like a wounded pokemon. I take my aim and swan dive off of a skyscraper. it’s over now.

I'm skim milk with chili powder in it. I’m thinner than thin, weaker than weak. but spicy and angry and red and shaky all the same. why would anyone put chili powder in milk? two things can be true at once. but everything that is true right now is also difficult right now.

I understand I need to show myself some grace, but at the same time, I just want my stability back. that is, the relative stability I’d built and layered on top of the transition that was college. It was asinine of me to believe that college is what life is supposed to feel like. but there I go beating myself up again for something I did rather well.

hello, pride! I was so successful, my hair looks great today, I’m doing so well dealing with the pain! brain pain fried pride mind egg.

whiplash, can’t win.

we end up in an iowa graveyard and I wonder why my childhood was so weird. don’t most kids get their driver’s ed and cell phones paid for? aren’t summers made for waterparks and sleepovers and not washing a rockpit until your fingernails feel like they’ve been scraped off?

but it’s 2022 and I can’t enjoy the music I’d like to, because the lyrics keep scratching at me. if you don't believe me, either go to a record shop or rip your skin open until the wind hits your bare boned lungs at 45 miles an hour. I’m an artist, so everything means something. everything means something. everything means something.

I make and I never stop making. I mine and I never stop mining. I don’t know how to stop.

even my time with Jesus is fraught with wandering. it’s a weird breed of both wondering and wanting. not the worst I’ve been but far from the best. I do know it will turn into something other than this rickety roller coaster caster tatter of a journal entry but I can't imagine what.

so I sit in my glass elevator, one spiky stiletto heel away from shattering the glass.

I thought I’d be fine. a month later and I’ve cried every morning this week. if you’re reading this you know that I write my way out of everything. bark at me if you’re mad about it. it’s my narrative.

and so I bleed, bleed, bleed, all over the cherry-stained word processor. blogging is catharsis but I couldn’t care less about sharing it, I just want it out of my veins. point, click, shoot.

where is peace? grace? on the other side of the grass is greener glass is gleaner elevator wall? am I going crazy? doesn’t genius necessitate insanity? isn’t pride man’s greatest sin?

let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it go let it