If you had to teach something, what would you teach?
I'm going to school to be an English teacher. It was a toss up between that or applied mathematics.
What keeps you up at night?
A lot of things. The voices. Fear. Nightmares. Inadequacy. Being alone. Pain.
I am not ready for a lot of things. I'm definitely not ready to be a grown-up, and I'm definitely never going to be able to fit into what society has dubbed as normal, and that does make me anxious, and it does scare me and it does make me feel incredibly, absolutely alone. And the things that make me different: the voices that whisper to me, more clearly when I'm on the verge of sleep; the people and objects that I sometimes see that aren't there; the fact that I could do so much and haven't done anything--they keep me up for hours, tossing and turning and trying to find some sort of equilibrium. There are things that I know... and so many others that I don't know... and all of them warring for my attention the second that I stop concentrating on everything else. It's why I keep busy. Why I would volunteer to work all the time or tutor people or study any number of other things. Just anything to keep me from really getting down to the things that bother me. To keep me from being left alone with the parts of me that I can't share.
I just want to move on. I keep thinking that if I can just get to the place I'm supposed to be then things will be okay. I'll sleep normally. I'll at least be able to function in normal society. But I'm not sure where I'm supposed to be. And every time I think I'm close, something goes wrong and I end up even farther away.
What challenges in life have you conquered and emerged from a better person?
Sponsored by Nature Made.
I've survived. Of course, that probably doesn't seem like a lot. I mean, most of the time, it doesn't seem like all that great of an achievement to me. Lots of people survive. Lots of people survive a lot worse things than the things that I've been through.
The way I see it, though, is that no two troubles are the same. Circumstances can be similar, challenges can be set in the same terms, and yet it's never the same.
I was not molested by a trusted family friend, my parents did not chain me up in the closet and feed me table scraps, I was not any more neglected than the next kid from a big family. Which makes my life seem incredibly easy to survive, you know? No severe physical trauma, no birth defects, no learning disabilities, just... me.
So what does it matter if I survived? So far, I've not even faced any challenges. But everyone's life is an overall challenge, we just have different smaller (and not so small) challenges along the way. But surviving long enough to consider these sort of questions is pretty hard for a lot of people, and the fact that I've managed to do it surprises me sometimes.
So, my little challenges that've made it so hard to survive up until now: physically, emotionally, and psychologically abusive siblings. The loss of my twin. Being disowned by a parent. Being gay. A total loss of self. Depression. Anxiety. Nervous breakdowns. Being outcast to the point where I quite literally had nobody that I could even consider a friendly face. Rape. Being mugged. Permanently damaging my ACL (it's a tendon in your knee, damaging it affects your ability to do almost anything physical on it until it's fixed, usually by surgery. I never had the surgery.). Asthma.
And I'm sure there's more, they're just too little to even remember. The thing is, we're challenged. Every day. Every hour. Every minute. Every second. Life pushes us, and we've got to push back or we'll be pushed down, and if you're pushed down enough, there are times when you won't be able to get back up. Life is this series of challenges, but the challenges themselves don't matter. It's how you deal with them and how you emerge after them. I'm not proud of the way that I've handled some of my challenges. I didn't handle them well and I have to live with how I've handled them, and, if possible, try to fix them. But it's not so much about fixing the past. You can't, really. You can just make yourself feel better about them. You can make yourself accept that you've done some things wrong, but you can learn from them and you can move on. I think one Alabaster Willem said it best: "It's the things ye've done that can't be changed. All ye can do is figure out what comes next."
It's something I've learned recently. It's not the challenges that matter. Everyone's got challenges. It's how we react to them and how we endure after them. There's an old saying/song lyric that goes, "Life's a journey, not a destination." Well, the challenges are just the pot holes and speed bumps.
