Thursday, January 27, 2011

Who Am I?

Oddly enough, I've never really ever felt my age. At 14 I felt that time was moving too quickly, at 18 I never once felt 18, and now at 23 I am finding it hard to put all of the little parts of me together. My exterior apparently screams underage, my logic seemingly that of a 40 year old woman, and my emotional intelligence is still waiting for the jury to return the verdict on that one. When I put all of these pieces together I feel like such a mismatched freckle on the nose of my life's complexion.
I could just put it down as a unique mark of my own individuality, if I didn't feel that I needed to rotate the various pieces of me to suit the personality of whoever faces me at that particular moment.
Just when I think I can safely pack myself into a box labelled with some form of stereotype, the field to the left of my brain throws something into the game to prove me wrong. The thirty-something feminist in me is looking at real estate and applying for a mortgage, discussing strata fees and square metres whilst hanging out by the lockers at work. The single twenty-something year old will sit in a Kings Cross club with old school friends drinking cocktails poured from a teapot whilst wearing Chanel. The various characters in me can be clearly contradicted at a swift glance through my wardrobe; dresses with full tulle skirts, Spanish leather pumps, stockings and cardigans, blue sequined Converse sneakers and seasonal Sportsgirl jackets - and that's all before you get to the designer labels. Many of these items contradict one another, yet surprisingly they all play an integral part of finishing one of my soul-defining outfits. But even as I decode each one, it somehow manages to confuse me of the make up of my identity even further. I wonder if it will ever somehow make sense to me, and if not perhaps someone else who can rearrange the 'pick the face' enough for me to recognise enough of my own features to finally see it as an acceptable 'me'.

Saturday, January 01, 2011

Happy 2011?

Apart from spending the turn of the millennium on Sydney Harbour, the only NYE worthy of noting was seeing out 2007. I spent the evening with a random assortment of friends from school and embraced 2 midnight count downs by drinking in a club right on the NSW/Qld border and monopolising the time difference. We had all stumbled back to a friends house who lived walking distance but up a massive hill, and I had managed to avoid sleeping on bare tiles by stealing a damp mattress one of the other boys had brought and passed out on it before he could argue me off it.
I had to open the store that I worked at the next morning and due to the magnitude of the previous night, I responsibly left my car and walked. My friend, Yass, walked with me. She claimed it was because she wanted to cure her hangover with a dose of Subway, but I think she was just being a loyal companion.
The road was wet as we walked. Neither of us could remember it raining but I put it down to the magic of the first day of the new year. It was too early for the heat of the day to have picked up, but I could feel a hangover headache niggling away. Despite this, I remember the morning feeling fresh, like the new beginning that it was.
Today is again the first day of yet another new year. I can't say however, that I felt the same magic that I did back in that first day of 2008. Aside from the unbearable heat despite climate control air-conditioning, the absence of work commitments and the over-stimulation of hosting a party the previous night, the first day of 2011 is officially my first depressed day of the year - 100% non-success rate so far. Ha.
Some would say that I'm being melodramatic. I've had my fair share of depressed days and still trying to recover from an emotional crisis, so why should one day be such a concern, simply because it falls on a notable public holiday? Perhaps because after so long, so much hard work and all the emotional energy invested, a day feeling as rock bottom as I am, I have grounds to be concerned.
I felt that I really had come leaps and bounds from where I found myself just a few months ago. The demons that I had then fought against for so long had finally brainwashed me into believing them, and because I was stupid enough to share this, I was forced into some 'asylum time'. So I suppose I'm not unfounded in saying that the return of these thoughts lingering in the shadows of my mind is grounds for concern. I've dealt with them before so I should be able to deal with them again, right? Not when I feel so cornered that the biggest evil of them all seems the most comforting in comparison. So, what to do? Check myself back in to Hotel Northside? Be the real drama queen that my mother has always teased me to be? One day isn't grounds for anything. All I have to do is cling onto the tomorrow in my future and hope that it is a little brighter than today, and hopefully bring enough brightness to burn a hole in my new year statistic.