Is This Blog Even Existent Anymore? Who Knows

I never decided to stop writing. I liked writing. But, like my time horseback riding in middle school, it’s just sort of stopped. I never made a decision, I never stopped liking it, I don’t even know what happened, but one day I just forgot to come back. And once you’ve stopped something it’s illegal to start again, right? I guess partly it’s that I’m tired. I’m so so tired my brain can’t figure out how to function like a normal person and just spits random things and disconnects from my arms and legs and lives in a giant fog bank. Except then I sleep and it’s still the same for some reason, which is really really frustrating, but also not frustrating, because frustration requires energy, which I don’t have except from random spurts of adrenaline. Anyway, coming up with stuff to write on a blog requires enough energy to think deep and important thoughts, because why write if it’s not something worthy of it? But not writing makes me mad at myself, because I loved this, this was me, and now it’s just gone like it was never there.

OK sorry for that weird depressed ramble. I’m just sort of writing things. It’s the week after April break, and I am so done. I realized at the beginning of this week that AP tests start next week and suddenly I am NOT READY. Hopefully I show up and know what I’m doing fir the skill based stuff, but for history I need facts and I need to read the textbook to find those facts, and I need time to do that, which I don’t have. Yay. I was counting on April break to reenergize me, but I left it possibly more tired than I started. I’m not really sure why, considering I didn’t do that much, but there it is. So now my head hurts and my back hurts and I feel a little like I’m falling apart, but I’m still struggling through every day and trying to do all the stuff I’m supposed to (which includes running, which is really hard when you just want to sleep but also the only time in my entire day when I feel alive). I only have to hold on for two more weeks, though. After that I get to drop two class loads of work and sleep. I’m genuinely excited. This is why I’m taking AP classes.

Speaking of April break, I saw a bunch of colleges over that break. Six, I think. And I finally found one I liked! Not just one I didn’t hate, one I liked! I was so happy because so far I’ve been super pessimistic about everything. I started to think I knew what I wanted; I was going to be a city kid, I wanted larger universities, now I could go find some more options… and then I went to another college the next day, which was a small liberal arts college in Maine, and I liked that too. So now I’m back to I-don’t-know-what-I-like, except I did finally figure out that science-y environmental majors sound exciting and don’t have to be scary. So at least I’ve got that.

Sorry for the ramble I can’t really organize my thoughts right now. But at least I wrote something!

Driving

I’ve been driving myself to school and back since Thanksgiving, now, and although I’m used to it and rely on it, it still feels slightly strange. It’s not that I’m going somewhere on my own – although i=on other trips that still hits me, at this point I’ve made the drive between my house and the high school enough times that the journey isn’t remarkable. It’s not the feeling of responsibility and danger in driving along the winding roads. I can deal with that. It’s the silence.

Don’t get me wrong – I love silence. There’s been plenty of times when I’ve wrapped it around myself and gloried in the beauteous serenity it brings. I’ve worshiped it. That silence is like a delicate web, connecting the space in your chest to all the rest of the world. It is right, there’s no other way to really describe it, and it holds you suspended, part of something huge and elemental and comforting and peaceful. It appears mysteriously and is shattered by the suddenness of people, but it’s memory remains, enough to comfort and center and hold me together. But that’s outside silence – silence that lives, that has energy and wholeness. This silence, though, is different. It’s the same silence of being home alone, the kind you can’t shake, the kind that lurks just over your shoulder and presses down on you, ominously waiting. It can’t be gotten rid of, because it’s not about noise. I know that sounds impossible, but even with music playing or a TV show running or machine parts moving it’s still terribly, ominously silent. It has the opposite effect from the other silence – it doesn’t free but traps, doesn’t calm but tenses. That silence is why I sit firmly ensconced in my kitchen to do my homework; I tried to do it in my bedroom once, but that’s right in the silence’s heart, most of the time.

The silence in my car isn’t that bad. It’s not like being home alone at night in winter. In and of itself, there’s nothing really wrong with it, I guess. It’s sort of like boredom. But it makes me think. So I drive home and I spend 15 minutes thinking and thinking and thinking. Most of time it’s silly stuff, stories and ideas flitting in and out of my head, but sometimes it gets all serious and weird. Those are great descriptors, but you get the idea. The more I think, the more I overthink. I mull things over and convince myself that senseless things are important, and some part of me taunts and torments some other part, and I have sudden inspirations that seem terribly important but amount to nothing. For the longest time I didn’t notice it, but it’s really annoying when driving of all things. If there’s ever a time when you should be focused and present, it’s when you’re driving a car. And yet I just can’t seem to focus on a task like that for the time it would take, and the silence spins off inspirations and musings and distractions out of nothing.

Me as I Want to Be

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about who I am. Over the last few weeks (or if I’m being honest months) I’ve felt like a different person, and not one I like. I’ve been moody and irrational and angry and generally awful to be around; I keep lashing out at my family and I feel like I have no control. I just kept telling myself that it was just temporary, that it was because of stress or sleep deprivation or hormones. But it hasn’t gone away, and recently I realized that if I don’t fix it it’s not going to. That will be who I am – uncontrolled and compulsive and emotional over nothing. Those are things I hate. Those are things I told myself I’d never be. I was proud of that, proud of who I was and my ability to stay that way. I’ve lost myself, and I want it back. I want to go back to the person who was happy and solid and good to the people around her, because I liked her. She was someone I’d want to be friends with. The person I am now? Not so much. She’s kind of a jerk. I don’t want to be that. So I’m not going to be.

Change can be good. I know that – staying the exact same forever would be horrible.  But sometimes it can be bad. When I was little I didn’t really think about who I was, I just was. Now I’m all grown up and teenager-y, and I think about everything. This blog is evidence enough of that – I wrote post after post about every aspect of who I am, because that’s the kind of thing I analyze. When I stopped writing I told myself it was because of time constraints, but really I ran out of things to say. There’s only so much I can discover in a week, and I’d started to feel like I had to write every week or I’d be disappointing everyone who read this. It stopped being about me. It stopped helping, and it stopped being as honest as I wanted it to be. Anyway, all this thinking and wondering sometimes makes it hard to truly understand myself in the way I used to, because the more I dig down into my soul the deeper and weirder the hole gets. I start finding things that weren’t even there before I started looking, but I miss the easy-to-see things near the surface. When I was a kid, I had songs I sang with my dad. They were our songs, that somehow were about us even though they were written by someone else about someone else. I listened to one of those yesterday, a song called Brown Eyes by the Bacon Brothers. We got to one of the lines in the verse about the daughter, “she’s got an old woman’s soul”, and he looked at me and said “You really did used to have that.” I looked at him and I said, “But I don’t now.” I was shocked a little, because when I thought about it, when I looked inside and saw, it was true. I wasn’t the wise kid I used to be. I got silly in the ways I had told myself I never would, doing things I knew I shouldn’t. It had been slow; I hadn’t even realized it. Every time I slipped a little down a path I didn’t want to walk, I told myself it was unimportant, that I’d just not do it the next time. But then I’d slip a little more and a little more. I know it probably sounds like an inconsequential change – there’s people who have so much deeper problems than me, and at least I still think, still try. But for me, for who I am and who I want to be, it’s huge. So I’m not going to do that anymore. I’ve said that so many times, and nothing has happened, but I am. I’m going to be careful, think before I act, stop letting my emotions rule me. I don’t want to be that kind of person. I’m centering, finding what in all of me is really me, and I’m holding tight to that, because that is who I want to be.

Priorities

It’s the end of November and I haven’t posted anything all month! Jeez!

I have spent the majority of this month in sort of a dream state, drifting along and hoping that everything would just go away. I’ve been sleep deprived and miserable and dead.

But sometimes I’m not! Sometimes I’m alive again and it’s beautiful! If there’s anything this year has done for me, it’s made me realize the things I need to get by. Even though they sometimes seem kind of silly, these are some things I actually need on a regular basis or I become a blob of non-Kira that kind of hates itself.

1. Outside time Over the last few weeks I’ve realized that if I don’t get out of the building every once in a while I become a really tired caged tiger that has mental breakdowns. It’s pretty awful. My emotions get totally out of wack and I maniacally laugh-cry over spilled water (not even milk – just water). It’s a mess. I wouldn’t want to be around myself when I’m like that. I also alternately collapse in complete exhaustion by 2:00 in the afternoon and get really bad headaches or am completely unable to sit still. But when I’m outside, everything gets better! The whole world suddenly seems so much better; I’m awake and in a good mood and energized without exploding. It’s a pretty incredible transformation, like suddenly remembering who I am. Wind in my face and crisp air in lungs and sunlight are essential to me in a way I can’t even begin to explain. The problem, however, is that when I am in miserable slug-Kira mode I have zero desire to go outside. It doesn’t even occur to me. I’m too busy being trapped to come up with solutions, so I just be miserable. Then I actually go outside and suddenly I’m so much happier and I think “why didn’t I do this earlier”. Every. Single. Time. It’s really frustrating! Why can’t I ever recognize the problem?
2. Hugs and best friends I’m really bad at calming myself down and such, so lately I’ve come to better understand how incredibly amazing a good hug is. When I’m sad or have a headache or just don’t know how to deal, having someone who I can count on to care and help me get through it is awesome. My mom is really great at this, so shout out to her for being the greatest mother in the history of existence (and also my best friend). These are also the people who say things like “hey Kira, go outside!” or “hey Kira, you should really focus and get things done!” when I need it. My friends and family are amazing and I love them all so much.
3. Hanging out with my brother Bryce is an amazing human being, but sometimes when I’m busy I don’t see him for days on end. Thus, time spent with my brother is precious. Even if we just sit on a couch together and watch TV, it’s awesome and makes me so happy.
4. Books I went without a book for 2 weeks because I had no time and was apathetic and couldn’t figure out what to read. I honestly lost track of who I was. That sounds melodramatic but I’m serious. It was awful. A good book (or not-so-good book) is essential to the Kira existence.
5. Water and food This probably seems really obvious, but sometimes I forget to eat or drink when I’m stressed out and this becomes an issue. I get really unbalanced and confused until I remember that I haven’t eaten anything in several hours.
6. Sleep Another obvious thing that’s sometimes less than obvious. When I’m stressed out with all the stuff I need to do sleep tends to get pushed to the wayside, but if I don’t get sleep I eventually can’t function. So sleep needs to be higher priority.
7. Things I like to do/usually do This is a pretty broad category, but it’s important. When I’m stressed things like brushing my teeth, writing in my journal, showering, and this blog fall to the wayside, just like sleep does. It makes me feel miserable and useless when I’m not even able to pull together the time or energy to do basic stuff. So actually doing the stuff I push off really helps my self-esteem. That makes me a million times happier.
8. Dressing nicely I always feel better about myself when I dress in a way that I think looks good. It just kind of raises my self-confidence. I feel good. I haven’t gotten to wear planned outfits like that in a while because I never have time in the mornings, and it’s really frustrating.

All these things are pretty essential to being me, and it’s really bad that some of them have been left behind in the last few weeks. I’m doing my best to pull it together, though, and finally identifying what I’ve been missing is an important part of that.

I JUST GOT PUBLISHED!!!!!

Many of you who read this blog have heard about the twist ending story that I wrote during creative writing. It was a story about time travel called The Time Space Conundrum and it was the piece of mine that got workshopped, and it got a ton of awesome feedback from all my classmates and from my teacher, who even said if I polished it up a bit it could get published. It was one of the proudest and happiest moments that I can remember, and it really increased my confidence as a writer.

A month or two later I saw an opportunity to submit work to a magazine called The Marble Collection, which publishes work from high schoolers. I did my best to polish up The Time Space Conundrum, and I sent it in. Then I waited for months. They never sent me anything and the website said it hadn’t been processed yet, so I assumed that they’d forgotten about it or I’d submitted it wrong somehow. I stopped thinking about it.

Then yesterday I got an email from them! They like it and they’re going to publish it! I’m going to be a published author! I’m so happy! I’m going to have some meetings with a college student to work on it and get it ready, and then it’s going to be PUBLISHED. I still can’t totally comprehend that. Yay! Yay! Yay!

On another note, I should really write more… I haven’t really written anything on my own since creative writing ended. It’s so hard to self-motivate, I never feel like I have the time, and I can’t seem to come up with an idea that I want to focus on. Ugh. I need to work on that.

Junior Year is Slowly Killing Me

So remember how I said I was going to post twice a week? That didn’t really work out. I forgot about the important fact that I’m in my junior year and taking literally all honors, AP, or pre-AP classes. I’ve been buried under a mountain of work, stress, sleep deprivation, and apathy. So that’s been fun! The more homework I have, the less I want to sit down and focus on it, and the less I focus the longer it takes, and the longer it takes the less sleep I get, and the less sleep I get the less my will power is to resist procrastinating. It’s a deadly cycle and I can’t seem to snap out of it. I just can’t summon enough energy to care, really. By the time I pull myself together enough to start working it’s 5 or 6:00, and it takes me until around 11:00 to finish. No matter how hard I try I can’t focus in A block, and I find my eyes glazing over as I start to fall asleep. Then I spend all of B block dying of dehydration because my history teacher thinks all water bottles are filled with vodka. C and D blocks are normally OK, but by the time I get home all I want to do is stop having to think and have some free time, so I read my book, and I watch TV while exercising, and I run errands with my mom to practice driving, and then it’s 5:00 again and I have to do homework. Ugh… I know this is my fault – if I’d just buckle down and work it wouldn’t take ten billion hours. But if I start working as soon as I leave school I never get any free time, and how is that helpful? Everyone always says that I need to take time to myself to be happy, but doing that has just caused problems. What’s the answer, mysterious Advisory TED Talk Gods? Or are you just making this stuff up, because that’s how it feels right now. The classes themselves aren’t the problem – they’re fun and I understand most of them and am getting good grades. What’s hard is TIME MANAGEMENT, the bane of my existence. I find it really really hard to focus on something like a homework assignment for a long period of time, and I get distracted really easily, which results in my doing one math problem, then reading my book, then doing one more, then reading (etc). It’s not so efficient. I know I need to focus. I know I need to get it done. In the moment, though, that all goes away and I just get terribly horribly bored. It’s super demoralizing.

As this progresses my organization deteriorates. I’ve already missed a few homework assignments that I just didn’t know about, and I’m afraid it’ll get worse. That is honestly the part the scares me the most. I’m used to being the goody-two-shoes perfect student who always is on top of everything, but when I’ve got headaches every day and I can’t make myself emotionally invested in just about anything, that’s hard to maintain. I don’t want to lose that part of me, the part of me that I’ve always counted on to do things right.

I’ve been kind of waiting for a magical solution to all my problems, but I know that’s not going to happen. As everyone’s so fond of telling me, I’m grown up now and have to take responsibility. So I will – just as soon as I figure out what it is I should be doing.

 

Journals

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it in here before, but I write a journal. Every day before going to bed I write a journal entry about everything that happened that day. Sometimes my entries are long and detailed, sometimes they’re less than half a page, and sometimes I don’t write at all if I’m really tired that day, but most of the time I write something. I’m kind of proud of that. I’ve wanted to write a journal ever since elementary school, when I used to read Dear America books (they’re fictional diaries from different periods of history). That’s where I got the word journal from – one of them was written by a boy and was called a “journal” instead of a “diary”, and I decided I liked the word much better. It made me imagine what I would write if I had a journal, and I liked to think of some historian years in the future finding my writing and using it to figure out about what current society was like. That idea popped back into my head every once in a while, and I tried to start journals many times. I’d usually write a page or two, then lose track of it. I wasn’t committed enough to put away my book at the end of the day and write something instead, so it never happened. I still have most of those early journals. There’s a fluffy one with Disney Princesses that I lost the key to, a Percy Jackson one that I only wrote a page in, and travel journals that I brought to Yellowstone and the Galapagos Islands (I stopped partway through the trip for each), just to name a few. Even though those journals don’t have a lot in them, I can’t seem to get rid of them (except maybe the Disney one… I think I trashed that when I lost the key…).

In eighth grade one of my friends got me a journal for my birthday. It was a leather one from Barnes and Noble, with a fleur de lis on the cover, and at first I didn’t think much of it. I’d given up any real hope of journal writing, so it seemed like something I’d never do anything with. It stayed in the back of my mind, though, and I kept wondering if maybe I could make it work this time. Eighth grade was a pretty bad time for me, even if I’d never have admitted it. I was really down on myself, especially that February as the stresses of school and DI season collided. I became incredibly angry with myself, frustrated by my own lack of motivation and afraid of the future. I didn’t feel like I could talk to anyone. I was locking everything up inside because I didn’t want other people to know, to judge, to think me vulnerable. One day I just decided enough was enough. I started writing. The things I was unable to find words for when talking to other people all found their way out onto the first page of my journal. I remember how relieving that was. I hadn’t vented any of the pressure inside me in years. It had just built and built and built because I was too scared to tell anyone about it, until it was overwhelming me. All of a sudden I’d found a place to let it out, a place where it was safe to rant as much as I wanted. That first journal entry wasn’t happy. I remember scaring my brother by describing it to him. I basically said that I was such a disappointing failure of an unmotivated lump that I would have killed myself if I wasn’t such a coward. I really hope I was being overly dramatic when writing it because rereading that entry kind of scares me, too. I don’t remember feeling that strange, even, on the day I wrote it. I was basically free-writing, and that’s what I ended up at. After writing it, though, I felt better. So I kept doing it. I wrote three rules on the inside cover that day: 1. Write every day. 2. Nothing is wrong. Write whatever you’re feeling. 3. No lying. Then I stuck to them. A few days in, my outlook was tangibly better. Over the course of the first entries I went from depressed and down on myself to happy and determined. The bad parts melted away.

By the second entry I was writing in cursive (I have no reason for this, it just felt right) and soon I’d decided on a new goal – I was going to keep the journal up long enough to write during the Eighth Grade DC Trip. With a definite target to aim for, I was able to motivate to write. I made sure to have my journal clearly visible at home, and I’d write about things as soon as they happened. If my journal wasn’t with me when something important happened (like at school), I’d plan my journal entry out in my head – a strategy that got me through some hard days near the end of the school year. Having a tangible expression of my thoughts, or even just thinking about how to create one, calmed me down when I was upset and helped me release things enough to get on with my day. By the time I got to the DC Trip journaling was a habit. I wrote every time we sat on the bus, doing four pages for each day, and when the trip was over I just kept going. I wrote through my next trip (California), and near the beginning of ninth grade I had to go out and get a new journal. I’ve continued from there, and am now on my fifth journal. By this point it’s less an emotional dumping ground and more a record, and my writing has turned into an end-of-day ritual to recall and review everything that happened that day. It’s calming and peaceful, and it’s still something I love to do.

Hi, I’m Back! And I’m Not As Sad As You All Think

I’ve been really bad about blogging this summer, but now that school’s started back up hopefully I’ll get back on track. More blogging about the mysterious dark recesses of Kira! Speaking of dark recesses… there’s something I need to clear up.

I want to make clear something I probably should have a while ago. I write a lot of posts that are kind of harsh, and , especially on the last post, a lot of people have responded like I need reassurance and help and such. Don’t get me wrong – I’m glad you care! It’s just… I’m not actually being down on myself. I was actually really proud of that last post, and now I feel kind of bad, because I think I worried all you guys. I’m not trying to, I promise! I know I have a high ratio of really intense posts to “happy” posts, but it’s not because I’m feeling particularly bad about who I am. I’m just thinking, and challenging myself. It’s easy to think about the things I’m good at or proud of. Everybody wants to think about stuff like that, to ignore the fact that they’re not perfect. Especially me. I like to be perfect. But I’m not perfect, and I don’t want to blind myself to that. If I did that I would be lying to myself. I don’t want to be a person who does that. I want to be a person who is able to look at themselves and understand what they’re seeing, a person who can acknowledge their faults as well as their strengths. In order to do that, I have to challenge myself to think, to look at things from a different perspective. I’m not very good at that yet. I get mad about silly things, forget to consider someone else’s point of view, or become disgruntled when faced with being less then the best at something. It’s hard to be open and thinking when my emotions are running high. But here’s the point: I’d rather know. I’d rather be a jerk and be able to acknowledge that and try to change it than be a jerk and be blind to it. And this blog is about me, about letting all of you inside so you can see the things I think about and understand what I’m really like. If that’s too darkly introspective for you guys to be comfortable with it, I’m sorry, but it’s true. I like being able to write about the hard things, to challenge myself to express all the weird things that pile up in my head. I’m proud of it when I’m able to do it. I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m doing something that I’m genuinely proud of and happy to be able to express, and the goal is to help all of you understand too. If I write about something happy and silly, it’s probably because I can’t come up with anything else. Writing posts like that is boring. I’d much rather give you guys something to think about. If I’m going to write, it’s going to be meaningful, and exploring the things that are sometimes hard to talk about is more meaningful to me than anything else I could think to do with this blog. So, in conclusion: I’m not sad. I’m not being down on myself. I’m trying to understand who I am better and bring you guys along for the ride. I know sometimes I wander off track and get a bit polarized when I’m writing, but the essence is normally something I want you guys to know and consider. So consider away! This blog is for thinking!

The Outsider

I’ve always had a tendency to feel on the outside of things. I feel like that all the time, like I’m different and special and nobody understands, like I’m the only one in the entire history of the universe who’s ever felt the way I feel or done the things I do. Most of the time that’s not true – often there’s someone else there just as nervous and uncomfortable as I am, or just as interested in whatever’s going on, or thinking just as deeply about the world. Logically, I know I’m not alone. There’s nothing incredibly unique about a teenager who likes books and analyzes herself constantly, but somehow, emotionally I can’t seem to accept that. I have to be special, alone in the world, the only one who’s ever danced in the rain or traveled to Ecuador or worried about their future. That bothers me. I don’t want to be the needy kid who yells out that “nobody understands me” whenever something goes wrong. I want to be realistic and understanding and smart – a person I can respect. Somehow that just never seems to work out…

At some point in elementary school, “normal” became an insult. I guess that’s the result of too much “be you unique self” propaganda – I ended up with this idea that words like “popular” were bad, that “weird” was what I should want to be. A part of me still wanted “normal”, wanted to be like the imagined “everyone else”, but I didn’t want to change or to put in the effort to conform. I wanted to wake up one day and magically be different, be how I was supposed to be. That of course never happened. Instead, I embraced strangeness, originality, weirdness. It sounds like a good thing, right? The little girl sets off to be herself. The trouble was, I had no idea what “myself” was. So, in my eternal quest for originality, it became different form everyone else, better than everyone else. As soon as someone else liked something I felt like I couldn’t anymore. I used to brag  about the stupidest things – my go-to in elementary school was the number of times I’d been to the hospital. Just like my lack of effort for “normal”, my “weirdness” was never very dedicated. I never did anything drastic, never showed it overtly, just let it sit in the back of my mind influencing my thoughts. I guess it came from that desire to be better. I always wanted to be better than everyone at everything. If I’m being honest I still feel that way, like I have to be the best at everything I do or it’s not worth doing. It’s an annoying mentality, a mentality that makes it hard to relax and just enjoy something. I have to make a conscious effort to forget about competition, because otherwise everything becomes a contest. The best way I can think to describe it is annoying – my own competitiveness annoys me. It makes me frustrated by myself. I’ve gotten better about it over the years, but whenever that petty need to win pops back up it makes me angry, because I don’t want to be that kind of person. Yes, competitiveness can be a good thing sometimes, a motivator and inspiration to succeed, but most of the time it just makes me angry over small things, or makes me unable to be a good sport – not just in sports but in life. When someone else wins something, I want to be genuinely happy for them. I don’t want to have to force it. Most of the time I have to do that, and it bothers me. It makes me feel like a bad person, and in the end that’s more of a failure than whatever silly contest I didn’t win.

The idea that “different” equals “better” still kind of holds, and I’m still figuring out the balance of individualism and compromise that allows the world to work. Sometimes a different perspective is a good thing, but absolutes are dangerous. I have a tendency to think that way, that x always equals z, when in reality life is more complicated. So I’ll keep working. I’m nowhere near perfect, but if I keep working at it, maybe someday I’ll be closer.

Dancing in the Rain

Hey, sorry I haven’t written in a while! I really haven’t figured out this whole summer blogging thing.

I don’t really know what to write about. I keep having these ideas and then nothing really comes out when I try to write things, so I haven’t done anything. Ugh. I blame the weather.

I’ve always been really easily influenced by the weather (and well anything else) in my emotional state. I’m what you might call mercurial – I’ll be happy and bubbly one second and viciously angry the next (many apologies to my brother for having to deal with that particular effect so many times). This is partially because I hold things in a lot. I’m not really good at expressing my emotions, so a lot of the time I think people understand how I’m feeling when they actually have no idea. It’s also because I have this annoying tendency to be an emotional whirlwind and jump back and forth with a minimum of control. Yay!

Anyway, back to weather. Weather has a serious effect on my emotional state. I’ve always kind of known that, but I’ve been more aware of it lately. For example, cloudy and misty weather, when it’s grey but not really raining makes me all depressed and tired. I know I’m not alone in that – I’m pretty sure most people agree with me on the “rainy days are really hard to get up in the morning on” front. It’s really annoying, though, to have a day when all I can seem to think are broody thoughts, and to have no way to snap out of it. I get really down on myself on days like that, and it’s awful. In case you’re wondering, yeah, today is that kind of rainy-but-not-rainy day. So was yesterday.

Not all rain is like that, though. That’s the soft, listless rain, the kind that takes the energy out of you. Other rain does the opposite, pouring energy into your soul and giving rise to this free crazy euphoria. I love rain like that. When I was little my brother and dad and I would stand on our deck looking for rain on days when there was supposed to be a thunderstorm. We’d have that energy-laden wind blowing in our faces, moving the trees all around us, and we’d stand with our faces to the sky, watching the clouds roll towards us, feeling the pressure and the tension build until finally the first drops fell. Over the course of a few minutes we’d be soaked as the rain went from a few slow thuds to a rolling pounding on the drum of the wooden deck. It never felt cold, while you were in it. That came later, when Mom would call us in at the sound of thunder. While In that rain, there was just this glorious feeling of energy and one-ness, as if you were truly a part of the storm. It was an amazing feeling. I’m always disappointed when it downpours while I’m at school or otherwise trapped inside. I know that they aren’t, really, but pouring rain feels like a rare thing, like I’m always missing it recently. It happens when I’m asleep, or in school, and I never get to run outside and throw myself into it for my return to the beauty of being a child in a rainstorm. When I do get the timing right, it’s all the more precious.

Let’s tell a story. Once upon a time Kira went to a play. It was a very good play and the ending caused her emotions to go all over the place (sadness at the ending, anger at the author of the book it was based on, etc.). Then she walked out of the theater. It was pouring rain, as it had been threatening to do all day, and as she looked around she could see everyone with their heads down rushing to their cars. She turned her face up, ever so slightly, and started to walk, slowly,calmly, letting the rain soak into her and feeling this intense peace and calm and wholeness as the water surrounded her. Soon her family caught up and passed her, and she walked faster and faster until if she hadn’t been in a parking lot she would have run. She spread her arms wide and her face to the sky and laughter came flying out of her of its own accord as the power of the storm came surging through her. The calmness of before was gone, replaced with this crazy euphoria, and she leaned against a traffic cone as her mother fumbled with the keys,wishing she could stay in that moment forever. Of course, she couldn’t. Eventually her parents got the car open and she had to get in, closing the door between herself and the rain, and by the time she arrived home the rain was gone. But that beautiful moment standing in the rain – that is the kind of moment that makes life worth living, when suddenly you are connected and together and can just stand and be, and have that be a glorious wonderful thing.

That’s why I like rain storms. Run out in one sometime. I highly recommend it.