Here have an Essay

So, I’ve been kind of quiet on my blog lately, so I thought I would post something. I was going through some stuff I wrote this past year. I don’t feel as melancholy anymore as the tone of this essay would suggest. It’s just a look into my musings. Enjoy.

When I was a little girl, I would sit at the kitchen table playing with my plastic horses wondering what kind of women I would grow up to be. Always, I grew up to be something akin to a Disney princess: impossibly slender, with bright blonde hair, and an easy amiable grace. The girl I grew up to be was empathetic and lovely; everyone wanted to see her happy, and she wanted to see them happy.

My dreams as a little girl were always about the grown up woman. It wasn’t about the man until later. Instead, it shifted between Jacob, Jeremy, and Todd, varying grade-school crushes, who played the role of “man” in Frank Sinatra induced delusions of being moved around a dance floor.

Being barely a women now myself, I find myself sometimes comparing the results. The features I have now are much more like that of the little girl then the imagined wonder woman. I now sit and feel the effects of dozens of lotions, every prick of the tweezers, pull of the hairbrush as I try to get my body functioning up to my unreasonable standards. On days were I remember to cherish my luck, I am satisfied with the feeling of the effort put into it. On days where I feel even luckier, I remember that I got pretty close to what I wanted.

Still, my tongue is a lot sharper then I ever expected it to be. My temper flares more then I ever thought it would. I read an article that reminds me that just having an extra X chromosome isn’t always going to make me feel feminine; it takes work to remember to trade silk for sweats, to wear red lipstick at home alone, and let people do things I can very easily do better for myself.

Sometimes, the thing I feel the most out of touch with for that dream girl was she very often seemed happy. In all my imaginings she smiles easily and freely. I find this a challenge today because I do not share her smile, and I can’t say my smile is one of my favorite expressions. A little too much cheeks and carrying a sort of immaturity and simplicity that I find unremarkable. No, instead I prefer my mouth closed smile that looks like I’m thinking of something naughty.

As I have gotten older, I have felt more of an urge to do something daring and bold. Bold, in fact, is my favorite word because it implies an intensity that is admirable. It’s a fearlessness that seems thought out. Now, I feel both young and old simultaneously. Attempting, to ignore my propensity to trap myself in a forty-five year old’s mind, I want to feel eighteen. I want to do something stupid or ridiculous or, most importantly daring. But I am confounded as to what I should do.

Wondering if the answer lay elsewhere, I engaged in conversations with some of the less chaste girls I knew. Girls who participated in the typical activities expected of someone my age. Despite this, what they do is always considered to be on the fringes because, I don’t know, maybe it’s something their parents don’t actually think they do.

Either way, these people’s lives seemed much too focused on sex and drugs and alcohol. Meaningless sex seems like a coping mechanism; just another way to numb the world. Alcohol and drugs aren’t for me. When I live my life I want as much of me as I can get to the moment to be there to feel it. Every brain cell, every tissue, needs to be there. It’s fine though; nobody has ever offered me anything anyway.

Maybe the whole smile issue is rooted in just simple happiness, and how little of it I feel. It’s amazing that most papers and books about health these days have one chapter on actual exercise and the rest is about the mind. And like most people I think, I often just skip to the exercise part because who cares about my mind. It’s contained. Like a horrible raging beast that I try to keep trapped inside my skull. Yes, I am totally at peace.

When I was that little girl, there were moments were I would find myself, like most children, looking forward to adult hood, where I was accountable for my own bedtime and could eat all the chocolate cake I wanted. Now, I sometimes wish that would just go back to being my parents choice.

But if happiness is like stock, then I think it’s a silly idea to invest all of it on the future. A boy I met told me in passing that he was suffering now, banking on the fact that he would be satisfied in his 50s. My first thought was how awful it was that his body was wasted on the thoughts of an old man. When his body was old it would want to be young again. Then I wondered, what if he got hit by a bus? What then? His life had been about making it to his fifties. It was about something abstract, and he wasn’t even happy searching for it.

Still, when people tell me happiness is a choice I scoff at them. Because who has the time? It feels silly because happiness is one of the few things in my life I can actually say I want right now, but sticking to happiness is like sticking to a diet. You say you will, but then the first attempt to be Johnny Raincloud arrives and you abandon ship.

Sometimes, I think it would be nice to sit down with my little self at the kitchen table. I would explain to her that, in the future, I am stuck in a rut, spinning my wheels, immobilized. She would understand the Harry Potter reference, and we’d set to work on the problem while playing with the plastic horses. I would feel embarrassed the whole time because I’d be fighting to make her future worth something, and trying to make myself a worth while addition in case other future Meghan’s were wishing to consult at the kitchen table.