Hey Mom!

Hey Mom! So in the wee hours of the morning this morning I found myself hopelessly and utterly lost in my own head.  As you may know, this past year has been rough and as a result of that I've chosen to walk away from athletics and transfer schools (for the third flipping time).  And honestly, even though my situation changed, how I felt didn't.  I still need time to process and heal and decide what exactly it is I'm going to do with my life.  The problem is these past two weeks I've been allowing myself to do something that is counteractive to both those things.  I let myself get really bitter and the thing about being bitter is it only makes you feel worse, which makes you more bitter, which only makes you feel worse, which makes you more bitter, which only makes you feel worse, which makes you more bitter,  which only makes you feel worse, which makes you more bitter. <--- Do you see the circle? Do you see it's viciousness. So this morning at 4:44...

Hey Mom! Why do we blame ourselves for the things that are not our fault? What is it that makes us choose to hold on to shame that we don't own? Our hearts latch on and feed from the guilt as if it's keeping us alive.  Maybe it is.  Maybe taking the blame for something outside of our control gives us control.   Maybe feeling guilt is better than feeling helpless.  Perhaps the knowledge that terrible things happen and there is nothing we can do to alter the course is so frightening that we would rather live hating ourselves.  Hindsight is not always 20x20, hindsight is selective, it is guided by what we want to see.  And we want to see guilt, we want to see that we had a hand in what happened.  All the "if only"s and "I should have"s amount to us reaching for anything to slow our free fall. And perhaps this will keep us alive, for a time.  But guilt is a paramedic, it can patch us up for a little while but in the end what we need is a surge...

Hey Mom! So I've been trying to write about something else all week but this topic is not content to simply tumble around in my brain and has expressed this discontent in the form of writer's block.  So after facebooking and tweeting about it,  I have officially given in and will write a full length blog post.  In a previous post  I talked about the callousness of my generation and how we have the tendency to glaze over really horrific events in the world without feeling anything.  The more I think about it, the more I realize that is not isolated to historical events or things happening on the other side of the globe.  This aloofness is entrenched in everything we do.  Passionate people are obsessive.  Friendly people are overbearing.  Sad people are emotionally unstable.  We distance ourselves from any full expression of emotion outside the context of the Olympics.  We have traded authenticity and compassion for facades and sarc...

Hey Mom! I am upset and not the usual indignant, sarcastic upset.  My heart aches and I feel ashamed for my generation. I would also like to preface this post by letting you know that I have done none of my own research regarding this topic and this is just a combination of what I learned in high school social studies and today in chemistry. Ok so in chemistry class today we were learning about different types of substitutions on benzene rings (not relevant to the story just thought you might like to know what I am paying to learn). Towards the end of the class my prof pulls up this picture of an airplane dumping Agent Orange over Vietnam.  Agent Orange is made up of two herbicides (2,4-D and 2,4,5-T) that under normal circumstances do not cause the birth defects, cancers and other mutations associated with Agent Orange.  However, when you heat 2,4,5-T up it undergoes a substitution which creates the killer chemical (TCDD).  My prof's point was that if you ar...