Hello Again World

Hey Internet,

So I started this blog almost two years ago now and it's crazy how much has changed. I look back at my old posts and I just laugh at myself because in my mind at that point in time, boys and friends were the most important thing in my life. When I started this blog I was in ninth grade so I didn't really care too much about the future. Where I was going, what I was going to do, or even worldly issues. In my mind, everything centered around who was friends with who. I started writing this blog at the suggestion of someone I used to be friends with who was also blogging. Back in eighth grade I  kept a journal at the suggestion of my English teacher and surprisingly I really enjoyed it, but having three younger sisters it became hard to keep it private. So I started writing this blog, whilst trying to sound more mature and melancholy than I actually was. So I'm back and this is what has changed...

So what changed?

Well, when I first started writing this blog I had just gone through one of the most drastic changes that has ever possibly happened to me. My best friend had moved away and it was only really when she moved away that I realised how malicious she really was and how fake out friendship had been. I had also just broken up with a boy who I thought I was in love with, but now I think it was just the idea of him that I was in love with.
So it got to the point after the first term of school where I had been hanging out with my longest friend and the greatest person in the entire world, but I didn't really fit in with her crowd so I decided to go and make some new friends and find a new place to belong.

This is the story of how I ended up with the 'hipsters'.

So little lost ninth grade me went in search of some friends, and I ended up hanging out with a close friend who was also hanging out with them and eventually I assimilated into the gang. Everything was great. I had finally found my place again, which is something really difficult to do in high school. We were a small tight knit group and in my mind I thought it was 'cool' that we didn't do things the same as everyone else and that we stuck to ourselves. It didn't really become apparent to me the walls we were building around us though until a friend of ours stuck his metaphorical toe outside of the walls and was banished forever. They started teasing him and saying horrible things but I put on my rose coloured glasses and pushed it to the back of my mind.

The it happened to another person.

And another.

And another.

To the point where it seemed like every couple of months we were gaining a few new people and then losing some. Those who did not wish to conform to the group mentality or who stood up for their own beliefs were banished.

In March of this year I finally took a stand and after writing out a personal apology to everyone whose group mentality I may have offended, I decided that I don't need to apologise for standing up for myself or for others. So me and another girl who agreed with me left in search for another group of friends. Luckily unlike most of the other group, my walls weren't built that high and they were easily knocked down when it came to this. I have since started hanging out with some good friends of mine that I have stayed close with over the years despite briefly becoming one of the 'hipsters'.

So that is a brief outline of what has been up with me since I last posted, which was over a year ago (yikes).

So what have I learned from this experience?

1. Never conform to what others want / expect from you ESPECIALLY if it conflicts with your morals and beliefs.

2. Don't be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and make new friends / re-establish friendships with old ones.

and

3. Nothing is forever. Whether that be high school or university. Your career or even marriage. Everything that happens to you is just an experience to learn from, so don't get caught up in it, and rather live it.

So goodbye for now, I hope to talk to you all again very soon. I hope to start writing regular posts again as I enter the most stressful year of my life  - The HSC!
(for those of you who are not Australian, the HSC stands for the Higher School Certificate, which is pretty much a diploma that you get at the end of twelfth grade. The ATAR score you get on it is your rank within your grade throughout the state based on assessment and exam marks)

Anyways, Thank you for listening to my life,

Bye x

I'm empty.

I want to be whole. I don't know of I was ever whole to begin with but I want to be something other than empty. I'm sick of screaming and yelling over things that shouldn't be screamed and yelled over. I'm sick of always wanting to hit something and the anger swelling inside. I'm sick of it all and sometime there isn't any medicine that can fix it. Sometimes you just get left empty and bleeding. I want to find happiness in this bleak world where nothing ever happens unless your brave enough to risk it all. 

I wish I was brave. 

Puzzle Pieces

To those of you who read my blog, I know I compare life to objects a lot and this is going to be aother post similar to those. In this particular post I am going to refer to life as a puzzle. Everything and everyone in our lives, every misfortune and opportunity that comes our way is just a puzzle piece. They may not be a piece of our puzzle but a piece none the less.

Life is like a container filled with billions of puzzles pieces. Our purpose is to find all the pieces of the particular puzzle within that container that is ours and make the picture, make the life. Not every piece fits in this puzzle though even if it looks like it does.

High school is like trying to put together the sky in a puzzle. All the pieces look exactly the same but its hard to get them to fit just right. A lot of the time we put pieces in the wrong place or try to force pieces that dont belong and make them fit because it looks right, but it's not and sometimes you need to stop forcing a piece. I think we need to accept that not every piece is going to fit into our puzzle. We need to let it go and be a perfect fit in someone else's puzzle.

"Sometimes things fall apart so that better things can come together" - Marilyn Monroe

We Can Be Heroes

I do not know why but in the past year, I have experienced what I would regard as emotional highs and lows. I often try to stick to being bland and boring and quiet because it means that my emotions remain quite average but sometimes I get happy and have a really good day and so about an hour after that I hit what I would regard as an emotional low. One tiny little thing usually happens that normally wouldn’t even bug me makes me break down crying.

I just experienced one of those.

Today I, along with my school environment group, held a workshop at an expo for local primary schools that focused on the environment. I had a good day, was talkative, and was happy around my friends and then I got home and I got some major test results back and went amazingly, which added to my good mood. The thing that made me break down was my persuasive writing results. Along with reading, spelling, language conventions, and numeracy, I got well above the nations average in these tests, persuasive writing, which is normally my best subject, I got the lowest mark on. What set me off was my dad just saying that he thought I was good at persuasive writing, which I am.

The subject of the essay was that we had to choose someone who we regarded as a hero and write why they should receive an award. I spent about 30 minutes of the time we had sitting and thinking about this question. I went badly because I don’t have a hero and even though I chose a friend of mine who I thought was admirable, I didn’t think of her as a hero because I don’t have a hero. I do not think that anyone should be your hero but yourself.

Some people may think this opinion is stupid, that we should all aspire to be like someone, whether that be someone like our parents, an Olympic athlete, an actor, a member of parliament, I don’t. I used to have a hero and they let me down.

When I was 4 years old, my hero was Dr Harry. Dr Harry is a vet who now is most commonly known for his section on animal care and tips on the television show Better Homes and Gardens. I had colouring in books, picture books, sticker books, and posters of Dr Harry. When I grew up I wanted to be just like him, I wanted to be a vet and take care of animals but at a meet and greet at a local gardening centre where he was being an ambassador for his television show, when my parents tried to tell him about how much I, a four year old girl, thought of him as a hero, he hardly acknowledged their existence. Then I found a new hero, Steve Irwin, who was a very famous wildlife handler and zookeeper. When I was eight years old, he died.

From a young age I have learnt that, it is pointless to have heroes because they will disappoint you, or will die. You should be your own hero and try to make yourself the sort of person that you would admire. The best reason for being your own hero though is that there is no one there to let you down and be a disappointment, it is all on you. You decide what you want to do and if you want to let yourself down.

That is the core reason why I broke down today, because of the concept of heroes and letting yourself down. I did not stick to what I believe in. In that essay I should have just wrote why I believe we should not have a hero instead of just writing about how much I admire my friend. I let myself down.

Pinch pots and life

Over the past few weeks in art we have been making various things, including a Dragon, Bird and carved trinket box from clay. 

Today whilst working on my trinket box I was getting frustrated as my pinch pots kept collapsing and when I put them together it was never the right shape either and so my anger and frustration at the situation, which by taking care in what I was doing instead of rushing could have been resolved, was instead ruined numerous times by myself accidentally putting a finger through or causing the shape to collapse. 

After talking to my teacher about how I just couldn't do it he said to me "the clay is alive beneath your fingers, it is a part of the earth and so is alive and because it is alive it can feel when you don't love it and are not taking care with it. So if you are angry or upset, no matter how hard you try, the clay will never work for you. But if you are kind to the clay and if you love it, it will love you too". 

I think this not only refers to art but life in general. We are all pinch pots. We all start out as a perfectly round and smooth ball of clay. Then we are prodded and pinched and are slowly moulded into shape throughout our lives and smoother until we are a "perfect" pinch pot. Even when we are the right shape though we still may have uneven amounts of clay and thin sections of clay and our insides may not be smooth but  it's as perfect as we need the pinch pot to be. 

In life though, whilst forming ourselves, the pinch pots, if we are angry or frustrated we ruin what we have created and so the moral of this I guess it that you must find patience and calm  within yourself, an inner harmony of sorts before you can begin to mould yourself other wise it (life, or any situation) will turn into a shamozel. Love the clay and the clay will love you. Love life and life will live you. Love yourself and life will change from being a lump of clay into something beautiful. 

Reclusive behavior

I've become a bit of a recluse lately. I've been wanting to be alone all the time. All I have been doing lately is sitting in my room and watching movies. Today is Monday week 5 and I've already had 7 days off school. I don't like being there and having all these expectations that I'm supposed to fill. I'm constantly being judged and stereotyped and I just want it all to end.

I used to love going to school because it was an escape from home, but now I'm running from both home and school and the only time I between is the 10 minute walk home from the bus stop. 5 if which I am with a friend, the other 5 is my alone time where I have no responsibility and can just think and be with myself. Those 10 minutes is the best part of everyday.

In my fight to get away I left a friend behind and I wish I didn't. She is one of the most important people in my life and on of the very few people I actually care about. The self pity and frustration and anger and stupidity I feel towards myself kind of tuck themselves away at the back of my mind most of the time but when we talk and I'm with her, her humility and sense of moral make me envy the sort of person she is, the sort of person I wish I was. It makes me realize the sort of person I really am and I've been avoiding her because I want to avoid knowing who I really am and I'm so sorry for that. I've basically pushed her from my life because of selfish reasons and she doesn't deserve to be treated like that and to be friends with someone like me.

I think that Emilia is the person I regret pushing away the most. I've pushed everyone away lately though, not just her. I guess I just don't want to be happy and people caring for me scares me, and so I question their motives to the point where it's too much of a hassle to continue being my friend.

I think it would be best if I could just go away for a while sometimes, to run and escape and be able to sit somewhere and look out across the ocean and know how truly insignificant I am and how I don't matter, I'm a speck. Most people won't remember me in years to come and I will go from being the best friend to someone their parents mention every now and then when talking about their childhood, to being that girl thats just there in the photograph that your grandparents are showing you and they can't exactly recall who you are. Eventually though you will just become another tombstone in another graveyard and one day in a few hundred years time when historians discover your remains they'll wonder who you are and what you were like, but no one will know. You will be forgotten just as easily as everyone else that briefly occupies this planet, and that's alright, because in that moment, staring out across the ocean, I will not only feel insignificant, but standing there, looking out as far as the eye can see, I will feel as if I'm on top of the world and that nothing can hurt me.

 In that moment I will be infinite.

Paradise

To me, paradise is somewhere away from the prying eyes of society where I don't have to pretend to be someone I'm not. I feel as if I spend every single day pretending to be someone else, and acting differently around every single person and it has gotten to the point where I don't know when I'm pretending anymore. It's all just one blurred lie.

I'm lost, I really am. I don't know where I'm going or who I am. I don't know what I'm doing with my life and I don't know what I am doing with myself at the moment. I thought I had these friends that I  didn't need to pretend around but I do. I've been lying to everyone around me and pushing everyone away and becoming a secluse. I've changed and I thought it was for the good but in not so sure. I've just changed and my insides are turning darker and all I feel is anger.

I was recently told this story of how within ourselves there are two wolves which are at war with eachother. One of these wolves is good, the other evil. The good wolf is fueled by love and humility. The other wolf is fueled by hatred and anger. The decisions we make decide how strong each of the wolves is and therefore deciding which wolf is victorious over the other. The decisions we make determine the outcome of this battle and right now, the wolf inside of me that is winning is angry and strong.

I wish I had the strength to run and never look back. To use the strength and power of that wolf to my own benefit. I wish I could just take hold and pull myself onto his back with my arms tightly wrapped around his neck and then close my eyes and know that everything was going to be alright now. But it isn't alright and I'm not strong and I can't run and that scares me.