Well-written

In between my running schedule, my less than favorable sleeping patterns, and the hecticness of the end of my school year, I have found the need to unwind and am addicted to just curling up in my bed and reading good books. I am in this online book club and I came across this book while doing some research on finding a new york times best seller to read, and found these really interesting quotes as I read my book tonight. It is interesting to me when you can hear emotion and feel emotion off of a page in a book...maybe you relate to the subject, maybe you cannot, but you can just sense that it is very, very well written, at least in my opinion. I have always said if I weren't a teacher, I would be a writer. I still secretly want to write a book one day, I guess I am just enjoy when I come across good writing, so I thought I'd share. So what makes good writing...the ability to relate to the message, the feeling that you understand just what is being written, that emotion comes across the page, you can feel what is being written, whether you have experienced a common situation or not, you can still feel sympathy, empathy, towards the character...or maybe even say I´ve been there. Now, it is not the most uplifting of books, but excellent writing none-the-less:

"...occasionally I wished I could walk through a picture window and have the sharp, broken shards slash me to ribbons so I would finally look like I felt."

"I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible..."

"I intend to scream, shout, race the engine, call when I feel like it, throw tantrums in Bloomingdale's if I feel like it and confess intimate details about my life to complete strangers. I intend to do what I want to do and be whom I want to be and answer only to myself: that is, quite simply, the bitch philosophy..."

"And then there are my friends, and they have their own lives. While they like to talk everything through, to analyze and hypothesize, what I really need, what I'm really looking for, is not something I can articulate. It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.

And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it."

"And I know, knew for sure, with an absolute certainty, that this is rock bottom, this what the worst possible thing feels like. It is not some grand, wretched emotional breakdown. It is, in fact, so very mundane:…Rock Bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable…Rock bottom is feeling that the only thing that matters in all of life is the one bad moment…Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It’s a failure of vision, a failure to see the world how it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not—and not some other way."

"Some friends don't understand this. They don't understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you're wonderful just the way you are. They don't understand that I can't remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. It is all about If you loved me, if you supported me, cared about me, valued me, were loyal to me...... you would."

“I start to feel like I can’t maintain the facade any longer, that I may just start to show through. And I wish I knew what was wrong. Maybe something about how stupid my whole life is. I don’t know. Why does the rest of the world put up with the hypocrisy, the need to put a happy face on sorrow, the need to keep on keeping on?... I don’t know the answer, I know only that I can’t. I don't want any more vicissitudes, I don't want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted.”



And 3 things I am thankful for today:
1. That some friends of mine began to make me feel ok to talk about things again, made me feel a lot less alone. There is a lot to process, It's not going to happen overnight, I know that, but I have a place to go now.
2. My mom. It is her birthday today, and while I am in a battle ground with her a lot, I really do love her and was glad she had a good birthday.
3. 18 more wake-up days left of my first year of teaching, ahh, summer;)

.....and of course for how far I have come, and deep down, know how much stronger I will be.