2:30pm

Good morning, blog! 

An update on the blog's look and chapter two (00,000,000) of restarting my life and taking back control and trying to get things done in the remaining hour that I have to myself. 
Because, while this morning I did fail miserably, I also count each new day as a chance to start again. God's grace and forgiveness wipes the slate clean and all my tally marks fall to the ground. In his mercy which is new every morning, I find a new start, without shame or judgement; simply a new chance to move forward. Which is what I'm going to do.
My brain says that if I don't have punishment, I am going to fall back into the same sins, as if punishment is enough to purge myself of the sin into which I find myself so much tempted that in those moments, nothing else matters. But what is actually the truth is that without accountability, I will find myself without a life jacket and continuing to get sucked back underneath the waves. At 4:00 I am supposed to call my best friend, but at 9 this morning I was supposed to head out to a church I have never been to before, and where I chickened out on that, I hope she is still able to call me. 
I am almost finished (sort of??) catching up on my devotional schedule (I just do it because I KNOW that I want to finish the whole Bible cover to cover this year and God is working with that to change me through extensive reading (something I've always longed to do anyway, it is just difficult when pressured by the presence of others, something I really wonder if I will ever be free of 😅) and He is definitely pointing out things in these Old Testament passages that I would not have been able to see before. Or, things I would not have been able to parallel with my own life, and therefore may have, in a way, missed out on the true meaning. I need to experience things to grasp them sometimes, although it's very easy for me to understand things, I can't get the full meaning (no one can) unless I am actually experiencing it.
What is it like to say no to sin? I wish I knew that more strongly than I do. I am always giving into certain areas and it makes me feel defeated. I know that is exactly how Satan wants me to feel, but contrary to the camp leaders' belief, church will Not solve everything. Can I be honest for a moment? I don't like going to church. I love God and I love his people, but it seems that the people in the church are not the same ones I would like to be a part of. I know this is wrong, but I just don't like those people very much and it gives me a headache. Why can't we have church in the evening instead of early in the morning? I don't know, I don't want to be that person, but sometimes I am. I don't like the people around here and I don't like church people around here, and I just don't want to be here, and I don't want to go to church. I would honestly almost rather be back at home, because I still feel like I want to run away. I am living right now, but when will that life begin? The one where I am truly on my own? I want to know . . .

Anyway, I have wasted so much time, I am always WASTING TIME (and it's because of my phone and I want to curse and swear) but one day I will have all that money (and you best believe I'm starting now), and I will have all my photos physical and I will have all my music physical and I will have all my films physical, and I will have all my Pinterest boards physical and I will change to a landline and a flip phone and a record player, CD player, tape player, mp3, box tv, DVD player, hookup cords, camera, you name it. I am DONE with instagram, Pinterest, snapchat, all these f*&(*ing time wasters. Sucking my life out and I feel SOOO sucked in and sooooo incapable of being a real human and so disappointed and devastated when I think about it too long. So anyway, signing off to get. things. done. ! Will be back later . . . probably 6 days later . . .

2:20pm

Good morning blog! 
I do not feel awful anymore, and since telling the world how I felt, it has since faded. I am revisiting some of my albums that I own on vinyl, and Vanishing Point is definitely one of New Order's best songs. 

Anyway, this post is for my friend Rian. 

Dear Rian
I heard Matilda today and thought of you. I can't wait for you to tell me how you are doing. Over the time that we have been a little absent from each other's lives I have seen the other side and back again. I miss you. Camp was not the same without you and I felt that icky feeling that I feel when something is missing, or gone. Like something was dead, and that always seems to happen. However, I do not mourn my lost friendships, I mourn the memories that I could not add to because you were not there. 
Life always settles back into this rhythm that seems lost in the current but always comes back like settling sand: life is empty of people except for these few I have been blessed to keep so far.
Amidst wild oceans of loneliness, and cold winds of contentment, it is lost among the surfing waves. This reality that when life is normal, and the flags are white and the sea is calm, texts back from anyone are few and far between, and I fall into sin.
I want life to be different for everyone else. I want things to change in this world for everyone else. I want things to be better, but I can't do anything for that cause besides support those I already have. I do this without the expectation that it will return to me, and it does not return to me very much. Still, it is a harvest I have been trying to sow since I was 9 (and considering most of my friends have consistently decided to fade themselves into the transparent background of my life, I seem to have been unsuccessful). 
But I have done all I could do, and I wouldn't do things differently. My advice to you is to always do what you know is right and don't listen to the lies of being conventional or whatever. Just do what you know you should no matter what. Please tell me everything soon - I miss you.

~ XoXo, Belle

I am too tired to continue this post any further.

 9:31am

Good morning blog ☀

Lets just be honest! I feel miserable. I feel really really awful. I do not feel like life is good and great and wonderful, but rather that I do not want to be living it at all. 
Now, this isn't any more fun for me to live than it is for you to read. It feels pretty much like an endless & vicious cycle, right? But I haven't lost hope yet. I just feel one desire - ONE - to go back home. I just want to go back home more than anything else and it's distracting me to the point that I haven't been able to live my own life. I hate going to bed and I hate waking up and I hate doing anything and I just feel scared all the time. I just want to go home. I just want to go home. Even for a month. I just want to go home. 

You see, last summer was beautiful - I quickly learned that I wasn't one much for dwelling on nostalgia. By 14 it felt like it would kill me - so I avoided it at all costs. I rarely entertain it and it scares me, sometimes. I don't like to live in the past. But last summer was the best summer - I really loved it and it caused me to think that summer was my favorite season. But this year, this year it is heat and sun ever present on my eyebrows, going to bed way too early, going to a job feeling sleepy, dealing with more burnout, and being so lonely I don't have words. I just want to go home. That is all I can think about. If someone were to ask me what's wrong, I would say that I want to go home. That is what I want more than anything in the world at this moment. 

It has occurred to me that certain friends have been written about on this site and that they have access to it as well. I guess that they probably don't read it, because it doesn't seem they are aware that I am aware of certain information. Who knows, I frankly don't care anymore. And that's another thing - I don't care about anything anymore to the point that it is almost dangerous. I am concerned, but don't really care that old friends ignore me or give me weird looks or respond unaffected when I say hi or look at them at camp. I don't care that I am wearing my kidsaint jacket and people are thinking things about me and looking at me with those looks. I don't care about how I am perceived, I don't care what songs we sing, I don't care about anything anymore. Life just lives and I just am a piece on the board - but I don't move. I don't even care about how much money I spend - how counterproductive is that?! And we came to my apartment first so I didn't get to grab anything I left at home and I want my CDs and the shirt I left behind and that means that when my sister wakes up she'll take my younger sister and they'll leave because they want to get home and I'll be left alone until about 3. 
So when I say that I don't like my job, because it is wrecking my life, it's because I feel too tired to do anything before work, or after work, or at work, and I am being pushed, and normally that would be fine, but I am not a robot, and that's how I feel I am supposed to be at this job. But also not - I don't know and I don't like it. Everyone has jobs they love and this is not the job I love. I don't have to think it's the best job ever, but it is affecting me greatly. And I won't go running back home, so no one can judge me for what I decide to do here. 

I am moving on from emotions for now to mention that I purchased artwork from my friend Elsa Wahlstrom - she has a substack called Elsa draws for you, and the picture I bought is called "I forgot how to ride a bike". I adore it so much. Here is the post with the picture that I bought.
I will breathe. And maybe I shouldn't dissociate but I don't know what else to do with myself in situations I don't want to be a part of. I feel like Adrian - everything I do is my own thing and nothing I do will ever correlate with another human being and I will never fit in and I will never even slide into a spot where I pleasantly stick out; I will just go to the grave difficult and strange and ugly. And as Job says somewhere in his own words "even death will not have me". 
I may feel like Adrian, but I can't even die like he did. I just couldn't do that but sometimes I am excited for  that day because I am just so tired. 

I'm a lost cause, and a bad guy, and real damn soon you'll realize, i'm a loser, and a problem, that you don't quite care to solve not anymore . . .

Original lyrics to Alina's newly released song "14U". Gorgeous song, btw. I plan to cover it with one of the choruses being the original lyrics instead.
My insides feel weak. 

But seriously, why do I stay alive and live through this horrible feeling period of my life??????????
Because in the future I might relive last year. I might. I might even meet J's family as unlikely as it feels sometimes. The stories take faith and faith takes strength, but if I can keep up that strength, I will always try to do my best. Instead of "doing it for Johnny" as Dallas Winston would say, I do it for Adrian. It's crazy to me, and heartbreaking, that Adrian was a  real guy. He really sang those songs and he really wrote those words and he really lived. 
I always tell myself that maybe I just need to eat or sleep or get alone for a moment. And then I do those things and feel the same way; or I feel even worse. Sometimes it doesn't feel like I can win. but we just have to keep trying, I guess. 

4:50pm

Good morning blog   : ) : )

So I got my Kidsaint jacket!! And I pasted a new cover onto my Bible!! And I posted another message for J on the unsent project. 
But I think he is in Korea now. And for the summer. I am not afraid of anything because I know that I live through all my fear. I was so crippled with fear of life in general the past weeks but I know that so far into the future are things we just have to believe will happen. We just have to believe. And life doesn't always make itself up to you, but it sometimes weakly tries. And maybe everything I want will come true. But why am I always the romantic one??

I was so happy and thrilled about this jacket, and she posted my reviews on Instagram and her husband commented "🔥🔥🔥" and I felt so cool in the coolest jacket <3

And here are pictures of my recovered Bible <3

My fourth post to J on the unsent project, because they have 4 different shades of green and I wanted to finally do all 4 shades for him. He will never know, so I single them out before they have a chance to bury themselves too deep.

Lyrics from The Sound

And realistically, I am fully aware of how stupid I am; of how much I rely on both faith and fantasy; and I am more than fully aware of how completely pathetic, empty, and pointless it feels sometimes. But when I wake up in the middle of the night, or have a random vivid dream all of a sudden, or I go to sleep with a remembered vision . . . I remember . . . 

I remember, and life won't let me forget. I can believe and I don't believe that it is stupid, as stupid as it feels. 

So I get to be covered in "I am safe inside uncertainty" and forge ahead. I believe. I believe. I believe.

-SS

 

2:21pm

Good morning everyone - : )

I am trying to stay positive lately - I know it is the only way to keep afloat. There is this problem with me: I am too lazy, often, to want to put up a fight. I am, frankly, tired of keeping myself upright. Every time I fall, or find myself knocked down, I use it as a sort of a test: will anyone help me up? Please, someone help me up! just to come back to the same realization every time:

 

"no one is coming to save you

get up."

This post saved me once, and now it has remained a nagging voice in my head. Other notable factors in my earthly salvation have been the thought of doing it for Adrian, the goal to actually make friends, or at least to find out whatever the heck is wrong with me, and Black's song of irony & sarcasm "Wonderful Life".
I know there are reasons to live and I know that you feel better when you get up and do the life, but I hate it sometimes. I hate having to get up. I only get up sometimes because I can't take the guilt of laying down. I hate having responsibilities and I hate being such a problem for myself sometimes. I don't hate myself - but I think the person inside of me is someone a little different from the person holding it all in. I don't know. I guess I am just sad and homesick and a little bit annoyed that things didn't turn out the way that I wanted. 

5:45pm

Had a break in what I was doing - I guess that I have resentment towards my job and a nagging feeling that there is danger, or that I need to be on alert. That I need to keep myself in good health on all fronts and that I am not protected. A feeling that I want to turn back around and knowing that I can't and that I must push through with a job I don't like and this horrible feeling, just this horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach and all over everything- it isn't an easy thing to swallow. I just feel like I wake up and am completely alone - that there is nobody to talk to. At the end of the day you can cry yourself into an existential sleep and wake up feeling like you need to slog through the day. But on a morning where you have nothing to do and you just feel guilty and like the last remains of yourself - your dreggs and sediment - are all that's been gathered up of yourself to complete the difficult task of living everyday; and you have to muster that up every day. It feels like I am just tired, and I'm sure it isn't helping that I have somewhat lost my sense of smell, taste, and half my hearing for now, due to a sickness I just went through with about 10 days ago, so I don't have a good sense of anything that is going on around me. I am outside and it is sunny and breezy, but with a low temperature. I can't smell the grass. I don't feel present in this world around me. Maybe that's why I have a heightened interest in films and such these past days. Whenever I don't feel comfortable in where I am or who I am, I turn to others' lives. To someone else's story . . . I just can't feel anything right now and I don't feel present. I am sort of coming back to a sense of feeling, but when I do it's just because something reminds me of what I had, and what I want and that I am not where I want to be, even on my journey to a different place to land. And I feel anxiety, resentment, homesickness, and dread. I feel sadness and disappointment and frustration and extreme loneliness where I simply cannot find a single person to turn to. Things will smooth out, but I am numb. And regaining emotional capacity and feeling will not be pretty. 

But I bought a jacket from Kidsaint. For $384. Its title is "I am safe inside uncertainty". It is coming with a custom quote of Exodus 33:15: "If your presence will not go with me, do not carry us up from here." And I am feeling hopeful because of that. Everything will be okay. Someday, perhaps, someone will hold me like I am held in my maladaptive stories. Whether that is stories of Dale Cooperesque knights in shining armor, or the shows I watch to cope. As Kidsaint says, "we are all just trying to cope with being alive". 
Maybe if I could rid myself of all fear. Fear is the root of all evils. Fear is my enemy, and fear is what kills. We are afraid. We are all afraid. We are afraid of showing ourselves, of being responsible, of answering calls, and of failing. We are afraid of showing up, of being punished, of reliving experiences, of experiences that haven't happened, or of never experiencing something. We are afraid. I live inside myself because my own world inside my head and heart is the only coating for all the fear that I would be running through in the raw, otherwise. 

I miss my family, and I am only an hour away from them. But I carry a heavy weight in my heart and a lump of charcoal in my throat. 

I have also made a playlist, finally, that I have long had plans to make. I have had an idea for a playlist of devastation like this since who knows how long. What I believe to be one of the most, if not The Most, saddest songs in existence has just begun playing right now: Happy Birthday Jane, by The Enemy. It is a song checkpointing what was probably my deepest plunge into depression to date. My sister's name is Jane. And I just don't know that I have ever recovered from that time. I still think about it, and I am still trying to regain something that cannot be regained. I lost a part of myself then, and I guess that that is what I am still dealing with and looking in the face when I wake up - atop the ceiling lies the point blank and hardest truth. "You have no one to turn to". Because I wasn't chosen. Because I was left rejected on the sidewalk to deal with life myself. A choice to respect, but a choice I cry about to this day. So you see, in the midst of a job I don't like at all, a move I hadn't planned at all, and a general fear that I know is unnecessary, old wounds are easier put on hold. It's just that they don't cooperate at all when you wake up on a day off and stare at the ceiling talking to your dread like it's a den of lions that have their mouths taped shut, but are no less terrifying somehow.

Anyway, the show will go on, whether the dancers dance or not, whether the chorus girls remember their lines or stand empty, and whether the puppets are fresh and lively or limping across the stage. All I can do is put on a brave face - a brave face shows faith in something that has not happened yet. But it will come. It will come . . . 😔

Here's to rejection sensitivity disorder and all the other wonderful things in life. <3 <3

-SS

7:10am

Good Morning, Club!!

I'm so tired, it's insane. I haven't done anything besides move boxes, pack boxes, unpack boxes, clean things, buy things, watch a show, and yap. Which is actually kind of a lot of things.
I have to leave in about 30 minutes for my first training at my new job - not the fancy cafe or cozy space at my beloved Brewhalla, but a Caribou in the town where I now live, about an hour away from my hometown ( close in comparison ). Things are adjusting well, I am not greatly moved by all of this ( I suppose God puts me through things at the times He sees fit ), and I think the job will be pretty easy. Plus I will have more time for the things I love, and {hopefully} a better schedule. Not a better one, but a better kept one. 
But I haven't touched a page in weeks. I haven't read a book, I haven't written in my diary, I haven't jotted down a single poem besides shopping lists and some thoughts I finally had scraped up the other night. Don't even speak to me about my devotions. My adherence to the things necessary to my life in the long-term (and short term, too) has been non-existent. And I am the greatest slacker to my own routine. And Spotify is removing my favorite artists one by one. Okay just Cinerama among my favorites, so far, but what will become of everyone else on there when one by one, people are being removed? All of that is out of my control and therefore very distressing. My routine is within my control to a point and is also therefore very distressing. And I always write about all of these things because they are the cover soil, layered over roots of guilt and disappointment in myself for other things I cannot seem to remove from my life. For things I am in the process of removing. For things about myself that make no sense. What if I am just trying to categorize myself? What if I don't understand things at all? What if my faith makes no sense? What if I just misunderstand everything? What if I will be condemned because I blur things in my own mental vision for peace of mind . . . ? Because I can't be angry . . . because I can't heal . . .  because I can't get away or say no or convince anyone or shake the blame that I feel born with for something I can't name? Because I hate groups and I hate people because I always feel that they see something inherently bad in me - (except J and his family) - because I can't get back what I want and I lost something I just thought I had and I feel disgusted by a feeling from my past that isn't nostalgic but isn't traumatic . . . rather, somewhere in between.  A sense of loss I developed at 6 years old, a sense that I was grasping onto something I couldn't keep - would never be old enough to realize fully - and was proven right. A sense that I wasn't worthy. Condemned because I can't figure everything out and condemned because I would try to and condemned because I think I know a thing or two and because sometimes, in other places, I do feel angry. I am wrong for having a desire, for trying to satisfy it, for believing it can be satisfied, and I am wrong for doubting and being complacent. As David Copperfield describes the age old feeling: 

"What meals I had in silence and embarrassment, always feeling that there were a knife and fork too many, and those mine; an appetite too many, and that mine; a plate and chair too many, and those mine; a somebody too many, and that I!"
(...) "what answers I never got, to little observations that I rarely made; what a blank space I seemed, which everybody overlooked, and yet I was in everybody's way;"
David Copperfield, Chapter 8

I need to get up now, and get ready, but I am lucky to have had these moments to write. I will write next time, when hopefully, my room is clean and my life is somewhat in order. <3

-SS

11:31am

Good morning!!

The queen of oversharing is back, testing her limits on this fine morning of May 19th, 2026, Tuesday.
I watched a movie, on Sunday night, called Kramer vs. Kramer. I had thought about watching it when I was younger, perhaps 14, and decided not to because I didn't want to watch something without a happy ending. As I am getting older, though, I am realizing that some endings can be happy because the story was happy, and the ending doesn't necessarily destroy what happened before; hence, it is indirectly, a happy ending.
I am clawing free of a phone addiction (I had somewhat decreased this addiction over lent, but alas, when I rely on myself, all bad things come crawling back, because life always starts to drown me. Oh Peter, Peter . . .)

I snapped a guitar string last night. The same one I always do. The reason I have a little bag of just that string sitting for replacement. 
Two things that represent trauma symbolically: 
1. Burns. Have you ever noticed that when you burn yourself, and the scar feels heat (usually the newer it is), it makes you flinch? It hurts because you remember the evil pain. I think that when we say we are "scarred", it is usually more of sarcastic trauma, or one you suffered as a child and aren't as afraid of anymore (like something you saw on the internet), but I think "scarred", and as a sidenote, I think scar tissue should become more of a term that we use for emotional and mental wounds, such as Anthony Kedis was perhaps trying to do with the song 'Scar Tissue', but I think we should be using scarred as a term for true trauma. Not "true", that was a bad choice of words. All trauma is true if it is indeed trauma, and  no trauma should be discredited, but what I am trying to say without getting in the way of myself is that we should be using "scarred" as a choice for current trauma, instead of past trauma. I don't know if this is making any sense, and everything, especially language sometimes, is very layered. Anyway . . .
The second one is 
2. Snapped guitar strings. I was just talking about this, and I bring it up again because it happened just last night and my thoughts after it happened are, obviously, fresh in my memory. When you snap a guitar string it's not that the string is scary, or that the noise is particularly shrill (unless you snap the smallest one? I don't remember if I have done that or not). It's just so Loud. It's not bone shattering, it just resounds through your body like an unanticipated gong. It's not "oh no I woke everyone up with that noise", because most likely, it being a rather dull noise, no one heard it but you. It is more of an "I just woke up every piece inside my own body with that noise". And after it happens, you're more or less shook. I think the first times it happens you are more afraid and trembling, but the next couple of times you are shook but calm. It is always a small earthquake when you snap a guitar string and the remembrance of such a feeling and such a noise is very similar to mental or emotional trauma. But even that is not simply my point. I will reach my point in a moment. After snapping said string . . . ACTUALLY I don't remember my point. Maybe that simply was my point. I don't know anymore. I should pick up the guitar to see if I can remember. 

Well, my rambling about trauma is more or less finished for now, (I don't think I will ever stop talking about it though), and I am sitting on my bed. I have not changed out of my pajamas because I am cleaning my room, and while that technically has nothing to do with cleaning my room, it's just because they're easier to move around in. 
I saw a video of a man on Instagram rating the 8 books he's read this year (jealousy ensued because I am foolish), and they were 
1. The count of monte cristo
2. The brothers Karamazov 
3. war and peace
4. lonesome dove
5. rebecca
6. stoner
7. the hobbit
8. fellowship of the ring

And the way he felt about the count of monte cristo is how I feel about David Copperfield. It is "my whole heart". 

I am rambling on about nothing because I need to empty myself like a garbage can. I love talking, I love writing, I love rambling, but the thing about writing and why is infinitely better than talking is because it doesn't drain me like talking does. Talking has an emotional weight that it carries with it that deters me from talking. In fact it is very hard for me to talk. As a child my whole family knows that I would talk just to talk. But now I am a mute. Not really, but people say hi, they say good morning, they make a witty comment, and all I can do is make them uncomfortable or disinterested by smiling, nodding, laughing - I cannot open my mouth. Nothing comes out. I talk to people and I almost always say too much. And maybe they're not thinking as unkindly as I feel like they are - when people are talking to me, I am not thinking unkind things, but I am not voicing my opinions either and for that I feel just as much in the wrong as if I was thinking or saying bad things. It is so hard for me to talk, so I have almost 1,000 poems, and I have many diaries, and I have prose piling up in my binders. It is so hard to talk, and it is so hard to sing, but my head can sing, my head can dance, and say everything I want to. But it is so hard to open the mouth, to move the body, to actually become real in front of people. I am not real. I am not real like everyone else is real. We are all real, but I feel locked outside of an invisible bubble - it is shocking for me to try to fit in and not even fit in but to act like a human in front of others who were born 'normal'. I don't want to be normal or surface level, I just want to exist and not feel utterly humiliated. There is no winning: the price we pay for difference and uniqueness and to be interesting, is to feel different. to know the difference inside and out and have it rushing over your body and bones and muscles and thoughts and words and smiles and reactions and the songs in your head like painful water, calm and slow, constant and steady, rushing and shoving ligaments of the heart where they ought not to be - but they have no other place. It often comes out in tears.

But today I get to clean my room, and go to work, and enjoy life, and it doesn't really matter if I am destroyed inside 50% of the time, or whatever - I am mostly disappointed in myself for letting my phone addiction take hold and exist. Oh how I  long for a landline. At least  a flip phone? I wish I didn't have to have apps to be connected, it makes me feel so angry. I would rather be disconnected at this point. What would it change? 

Anyways, my sister signed a lease, so I will go ahead and cosign - 5 more days til I move myself outta here!!! :D