I’ve got a birthday coming up here in a week and it’s sent me into a tailspin of reflection. The where I have been, where I’m going, and where I want to be I am pretty clear on. I’m rarely satisfied, so being uncomfortable with all of these things is really not out of the ordinary. Fuck, if you’ve read me once you know I’m a little more skeptical than the average girl.

I’ve been trying to convince myself for years that things will get better, that it’s just a matter of time and opportunity. I’ve tried several things-leaving jobs that were essentially soul-less and futureless, I’ve tried changing my scenery and location by 2,000 miles. I’ve tried getting an education and have realized I can’t do it and work full time. I’ve left relationships that weren’t giving me anything but instead were draining me with no reward. I’ve learned how to stand up for myself through all of this, yet still, I’m way behind all of you. And When I say behind, I mean I am not even on the same ship but instead I’m literally rowing myself with one working arm. Even still, despite my literal resume of failures, I continue to keep trying new angles and haven’t been afraid to try anything. Except maybe fully realizing any one of my half a dozen ideas-that unfortunately continue to grow more limbs and multiply-with incomplete execution-the common denominator of so many projects.

I suppose you’re all waiting for me to spew some grand realization about my one-ness with the universe, the realizations I’ve had about life going through all of this stuff. See, things are not easy when you have a literal death sentence to contend with when everyone else you know is going to school, getting excited about their futures and marriages and children and future mortgages. While all of my friends were doing this I was just trying my best not to die, rarely convinced that I was going to be okay as long as I have managed at this point in my existence. The last surgeries, as I’ve said, were more of a oh, well, shit, now I have to start planning this idea of future since I was literally just waiting all of the time for the bomb to go off and put me out of my misery. I had 14 years of that madness, the time period most of my school friends needed for college and to pay off their loans. In two years I’ve got my 20 year reunion and I’m still a decade behind from feeling proud.

There’s been a lot of you can’t with this little ailment of mine-you can’t have children, you can’t have an education without working full time, you can’t have a house because you have shitty credit, and you can’t have good credit when you’re making $10 a hour and have $40k in loans. Your lack of degree renders you to positions of general customer service where you are usually helping people who were just a bit luckier than you. Somewhere along the line these people got a helping hand, either through encouragement or any other form of support. There are probably a lot of us had a harder time just basically surviving, and though I’ve done it, I wouldn’t use well to describe anything I’ve done. And you certainly can’t have a very good time worrying about the most meediocre details of survival as I have. The debt and the heavy weights of irresponsibility on my shoulders are a direct result of a lot of shit I have no control over, but of course I’m the only one who can fix any of it. I am tired of knowing this, though my actios haven’t done shit but exacerbate the difficulty of what’s going on around me.

And I’ve come to these conclusions about life, clearly just my own, fashioned from buttons of my own experience. I wish I could pray my problems away with any confidence that praying harder would make a difference. I mean this in the religious and non-religious sense. It’s the same stuff the universe is constructed of if you ask any new age afficianado. I’ve been trying to learn how to manipulate it in my favor for my entire life and haven’t learned much-except that peace is interdispersed in between periods of strife, and certainly not always fairly and evenly. I do get pretty exasperated with this idea that I just don’t know the language of the universe, which has always just been “Fuck you” in its easy simplicity. Fuck you, Deanna, just Fuck you.