Muchness and Light

Baby, you cry too much. I'm tired of the sound. You're such a baby.

After a couple of days—weeks, months, I don’t know—of intense “discussion” (as my grandparents would say), Rango has finally said what so many before him have: I’m too much.

I suppose I should clarify that. Initially, it was that it’s not me, per se, who is too much, just my emotions. My overt expression of exactly what I’m feeling at any given time, especially when it’s not in line with how he would feel or express something, or how he thinks best suits me to feel or express it.

And when my expression manifests in ways he doesn’t like or understand, it makes him uncomfortable.

There is absolutely no expectation on his part that I behave in a set, specific way. He just doesn’t understand why I am often so stressed, why I hang on to issues and analyze them into unrecognizable minutiae, and why I am so prone to outbursts of tears when I’m overwhelmed by emotion.

For more than two years, I have done my best to find some full-time/part-time balance of student and employee, plus being a full-time mom. In all but one of the two-dozen classes I’ve taken in that time, I’ve worked for and gotten an A. (Algebra is still the bane of my existence.) My first real job in 15 years is for a prestigious state agency, and it challenges me and engages me constantly. My ex-husband has been out of state for most of that two years, barely in contact with our children and leaving me to care for them while cleaning up his emotional mess—all while berating me bitterly and randomly, usually about money.

I try to explain that I am still trying to learn to stand on my own two feet, and Rango counters that I don’t have to do it all on my own, that I have him.

Without question, he has been a huge support since we started dating. He has been the constant male figure in the boys’ lives, and he has been incredibly supportive of my schooling and work and time with GOAL. He understands fully when I need to take a little time to myself or with the Castration Committee, like I did last weekend.

He doesn’t understand why I berate myself about having gained some of this weight back, about not having time to work out even if I were cleared for weights after a lingering wrist injury from October. Another apparent blown disc is reminding me every day of how far down that slope I have slipped. Seeing pictures from four and five years ago compared to pictures from now is devastating to my ego. My head knows I was living in misery when the skinny girl pictures were taken, and that’s utterly dichotomous to the pictures of me with the Governor or addressing the Georgia Senate.

I should be easy on myself for holding all of this together as well as I have, and I should be nothing but proud of the accomplishments I’ve made. But somewhere in my fucked up head, I am often embarrassed to be me, to see how far I fell down a hole I never wanted to think of again, and to feel the snap! of one tenuous thread and to know how that can bring the whole damn thing crashing down around me.

Even now, while I’m writing, I’m crying. There is just so much that needs to come out.

I’m writing while he and the boys are asleep. I’ll wake them soon to go about our busy day of haircuts and errands and homework and cleaning and cooking and hopefully going out tonight to see a friend’s husband’s band because I was too damn drained last night to do it. I also know I am choosing this time to write because I don’t want him to see me cry. I don’t want him to tell me again that it’s too much.

I also know I choose this forum, because he doesn’t read what I write. Like so many before, he’s not a reader. If I send him something specific, he will read it, but he doesn’t seek out that side of me. Truthfully, that’s part of the reason I haven’t written much in the last year or more. If I couldn’t get the approval of the only person whose approval mattered to me, then why devote the energy there? There was already enough to deflect my attention away; it wasn’t efficient or productive to waste the time and effort.

Except it never was a waste, was it? DH hated that I wrote, and that I wrote away from and about him. Like Absolem and Bounder after, he would tell me I was a good writer, that I should do it, but that I shouldn’t write about things and in ways that made him uncomfortable. I should steer clear of truths that made him feel bad.

It was too much.

Fuck. That.

I feel what I feel. I pull it out and examine it and play with it. I may spin it all around like a Rubik’s cube and put it back in, or I may hang it on a shingle for the world to examine for itself.

But it is mine, and I have my reasons, and absolutely no one ever gets to tell me otherwise. Not if they want to stay.

I struggle, and maybe I’m struggling more and differently than when Rango and I met, over drinks on a holiday weekend when my kids were having rare visitation with their father. But there is a lot more at stake now—logistically and legally and emotionally—and I will never again be content to let anyone else be my sole support. It’s not that I’m unwilling to let anyone else be supportive; I simply will not put myself in any precarious position where I am unable to support myself.

I appreciate that he sees me as beautiful no matter what, that the size of my ass doesn’t tip the scales out of my favor. But if it is the weight of my tears that are too much, I can’t help that. All I can hope is that, in the end, both weigh less than Osiris’ feather.

 

 

 

Underneath my lucid skin, the cold is lost, forgotten.

During an ongoing conversation with a friend about happiness, I asked him what it is in his life that keeps him from being happy.

“What does this elusive happiness look like? What do you believe will bring that happiness? How will it manifest—will you find it, will it find you, or will you make it? What are you struggling against, that you feel is keeping happy away for more than short bursts? What are you willing to change or eliminate in order to make room for this happiness?”

Of course, this banter comes on the heels of my own burst of unhappy this weekend. I have been frustrated that life isn’t necessarily how I want it to be. Since DH moved out of state two years ago, he has had very little interaction with the boys. Phone calls and email have been sparse, and visitation totaled 28 days in that two-year span. (Though I am happy that he has been making a much more concerted effort to rectify that, as of late. <fingers crossed>)

That has left me with very little time in which to connect with myself on my terms. His absence coincided with my starting college and work, so I have lived in the constant pace of mom and student and employee. Constrained by obligation and time and money, I have had to forego a lot of the time to be “free” I’d previously had when the boys were with their father.

Because the boys were getting older and more self-sufficient, I’d been able to take some time away from them, a few hours for class or work or the occasional (bad) date. Then I met Rango.

“Wow,” he said during our first date, “with so much going on, how do you find time to date?”

“If it’s important to me, I will make time for it,” I replied.

Eventually—especially once GOAL was added to my plate—I started to butt up against real limitations. There are only so many hours in a day in which to accomplish what needs to happen in our life. I had to make serious adjustments.

Of course one of the first things to go was working out. If the exhaustion isn’t enough to drop me in bed by 9:00, household chores or schoolwork keep me busy. Now that I’m at Mercer in a program for working adults, my day starts at 6:00 a.m. and often doesn’t end until class lets out sometime after 10:00 p.m.—plus the drive home and the unwinding before I can even sleep before I get up and do it again. Having the boys for nearly 100% of the year also added substantial additional cost; it turns out teenage boys eat a lot, and their school/social activities are time-consuming and expensive.

This week, again, Facebook popped up with my “memories”—pictures from that day in years past. This time it was from a specific night three years ago with Pandy. I looked at the picture and thought, “I miss my purple hair. And I miss my collarbones.”

Toward the end of my marriage, I rebelled against the domesticity I’d created. I felt trapped and struggled to find meaning or purpose that didn’t stem directly from my role as wife and mother. Never happy in the medium, I swung the pendulum so far in the other direction that it, at times, wreaked havoc on my life.

So while I desperately miss the freedoms that come with fully embracing the Sassafras O’Malley persona, I am also careful to remember the confusion and static and sheer craziness that often came with that liberty. Sassafras has a tendency to be where she probably shouldn’t be.

Right now I’m living the life I need to be living: working full time, taking care of and providing for my children, going to school more than half time in order to finish as quickly as possible, succeeding by everyone’s metrics, including mine. And I have the support of a life partner who helps with as much as he can.

But sometimes, I still feel unhappy.

While doing homework over the weekend, I read a quote by Simone de Beauvoir: “Those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest.”

Because I’m not able to do what I want, when I want, I often feel stagnant. I feel trapped by circumstance that’s changing far slower than I would like, given my incredibly impatient nature. Sometimes I feel resentful when that circumstance is to blame for the lack of freedom and the feeling of stagnation. And it doesn’t matter that my head knows better; my gut is screaming that it feels wrong, that it feels too much like my life before, and my heart gets angry.

When I feel those emotions, I have choices in how to react. I can scream and go off my fucking rails, which very people have ever seen. For everything I have experienced with Rango, he has never been witness to a full-fledge Stephie Meltdown. I can choose to hold it all in and just pretend it’s not there, cycling slowly through more resentful. Or I can feel it and acknowledge it and let it go.

Knowing myself the way I do, I usually choose the latter, but Rango called me out on my methodologies. He complained that I become cold and distant, obviously struggling with some emotion that I refuse to let escape the icy surface. He’s right. I eventually found that the quickest way out of my own head was to jump in, dropping into it as quickly as possible, and then use that downward momentum to push off the inevitable bottom, letting the pressure release as I rise back to the top in a stream of my own bubbles.

But as long as I feel like there are things missing or that I am bound by circumstance, I will still have moments of discontent. I will still have impetus to feel unhappy at times.

Maybe happy isn’t the goal. My former therapist told me once that happiness is a fleeting emotion and that content is likely the healthier alternative I am most likely to feel content when I am living my life on my own terms, in my own way and at my own pace. But because I have relationships with other people, especially those three men who live in my house, I am morally obligated to take their contentment into consideration as well. What I want is sometimes in conflict with what they need.

So for now, I’m trying to make the best of it. I’m trying to make those small changes I talk about in my GOAL speeches, to pick up the pieces I keep dropping and put them together in the ever-expanding mosaic that makes up my disco ball. For once in my life, I’m thankful to have these big hands that let me hold more than seems possible.

 

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Simone de Beauvoir

Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you.

 

Maybe I think too much but something's wrong.

Hi.

It's been a while.

This has happened before, where I've been quiet for a while—for far longer than I'd like or intended. This time, though, I haven't been quiet so much as I've just been biting my tongue.

It's been almost six months since I sat down to write for me. Oh, I've been writing, just not for myself. I've written for school—I'm now a senior pursuing a B.A. in Liberal Studies with a minor in Women and Gender Studies. I've written for work—I'm now a full-fledged, employed paralegal for a prestigious state agency. I've written various speeches for speaking engagements around the state—I have three more months to go as GOAL winner.

All of those have kept me very, very busy and feeling very rewarded. I work myself into a tizzy sometimes from the stress. I am striving to be the best possible student and employee and ambassador and mother and partner. It's naturally a lot of pressure, and absolutely no one is harder on me than I am on myself.

I tend to work at a frenetic pace that is exhausting. I am exacting and demanding of myself, sometimes pushing myself to a breaking point. One tiny slip-up, one slight mistake, and it feels like everything comes crashing down around me. For the last few months, Rango has found me more than once in a sobbing, fetal pile in the middle of the bed.

I've often thought out loud that I needed to take the time to come and write. Almost every day, I draft some blog post in my head but never quite get around to getting it onto the screen. There's always something to get in the way—school, work, errands, chores, kids, life.

In reality, it is me that has been getting in my own way.

With so much happening, with so very many demands on my time and energy, I've let some things slide. I finally had to recognize that the house won't be as clean as I would like. Sometimes popcorn and apples make a perfectly acceptable dinner.

There has also been less time to work out. There's been less energy to devote to working out. In taking care of the boys and the house and our world, there's been less effort to take care of me.

With that has come weight.

By no means have I regained all of the lost weight, but it has been slowly creeping up. Queen Frostine has told me for months that I needed to cut myself some slack.

"Look at everything you have going on," she admonished. "Don't be so hard on yourself."

"You're beautiful," Rango tells me every day. "You're not fat."

Before the divorce, before I went back to college and work, I had time to devote to it. I could walk for an hour or two every day before I hit the gym. I could carefully plan and prep meals for a week at a time. And I knew damn well that the weight wouldn't stay gone just because I wished it; I knew I would have to work at it for the rest of my life.

But I didn't, did I?

Tonight, I was trying on ill-fitting clothes, lamenting my spreading thighs. Rango found me crying in the bedroom, again. He told me, again, that I'm beautiful and not fat. He reminded me that I am so much more than my physicality.

In my head, I know he's right. In my head, I know that my worth—whether to other people or to myself—should not come from the size of my ass. But it is hard to make my heart believe that when I'm struggling with clothes that are ill-fitting because I haven't been doing what I should.

And there is shame. There is self-loathing and self-recrimination. Not so much because I'm not a size 8 but because I let this happen, again. Because I built so much of my story and my identity around the self-transformation that came about because of and during the weight loss, and now it feels hypocritical to let that have ever been a part of my story.

Looking for hangers in the closet, I saw a dress hanging and thought, "That's from when I was pretty."

And it doesn't seem fair that I have to choose between being pretty and being smart. It doesn't seem right that anyone, including myself, would put such pressure on me to be a great student and be a great paralegal and be a great ambassador and be a great mom and be a (sometimes) great partner and be as physically perfect as I can muster, given my inherent limitations.

I get it. No one but me is putting that pressure on me.

But that is how I validate my own existence. I strive to exceed expectations, even when it means exceeding every possible and anticipated expectation before I have any clue what they are. Because if I am not perfect, then I am a failure.

Yes, of course, I know how utterly ridiculous this self-imposed craziness is. In so many ways, I am my own albatross.

And so, I have avoided writing for months, sidestepping my fears and evading myself.

But there is catharsis in writing for me. This is the space in which I am most likely to be truly, sometimes brutally, honest with myself. This is how I have worked my head out when my life has felt like it was unraveling. This is where I have found the stones to lay my own path.

So I'm writing again. I'm crying again. But I'm writing.

This is not a passive-aggressive request for encouragement. This is not my wanting someone else to tell me how special I am.

This is Stephanie edging her way back to where she needs to be. This is me finding my voice again, because it is mine and it is valuable.

So I will try to do better, to be more consistent and to be more open, to make the time to take care of myself in the ways that are healthiest and most vital for me.

I've never been fearless. I've been headstrong and dogged but absolutely never fearless in my determination. But they are my fears, and I am determined to face them again.

It's time to reclaim my muchness.

 

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Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you.

Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

Don't believe that the world is empty, just too noisy to hear the sound.

Looking for something else, I realized this week that I haven't written a blog post in almost two months.

Two months? Really? How can that be??

Well, the last two months have been incomparably busy. I finished my internship and my last fifteen hours of classes to complete my Associate's degree. I started classes this week in my Bachelor's program. There have been several speaking engagements as a result of my GOAL award. Somewhere in there were four cats, two boys, and Rango.

And I'm still on the perpetual search for a job.

An employment recruiter asked me a few weeks ago, "What do you want to do?"

I immediately answered, "I don't know."

It's not that I don't have any idea of the direction I would like my career to go. I went to school to become a paralegal, and I have completed an excellent program of substantive training for the legal field.

But the list of what I don't want to do is much better defined. I don't want to do family law or bankruptcy law or real estate law. Those are necessary areas of the legal profession, and I have friends and family who are successful in each of those areas. They just don't seem to be the right fit for me.

This uncertainty is not the I-don't-know of my 20s, when I blew my chance at college the first time, when all I wanted was something easy and comfortable to drop into my lap and push me in a direction—while hopefully letting me veg out on the couch all day.

It's not the I-don't-know of my new-mom 30s, when "I don't know" really meant "no", when I was too polite to say what I wanted and to truly be myself, afraid of what I might lose by defying other people's expectations.

And it's not the I-don't-know of two years ago, when the daily mantra was a tear-streaked "I don't know! I don't know! I don't know!", when I was trying to find a way, any way, to survive.

Now, "I don't know" comes from exploration, from having so many options, from proof that I am good at something and worth far more than I was led to believe. Far more than I led myself to believe.

"I don't know" means I want to try everything and don't know where to start.

The other question that invariably comes during job interviews is, "Where do you want to be in five years?"

If the last five years have taught me nothing else, I know that whatever plans I make will almost assuredly be broken. Something is likely to come along and divert my path, alter my journey, and that I have to be willing and open to the possibility that can come when I expect nothing more than uncertainty.

Last night, in my first class with my new academic advisor, I was asked what my plan was for my major and for any graduate work I might want to do. Because I chose a Liberal Studies degree, I have some flexibility in the concentrations I'll pursue, based upon both what coursework I transferred in and what my plans may be going forward.

"Combined concentrations in Criminal Justice and Communications," I replied very pragmatically.

But then my advisor suggested that maybe there's something else, something that will better suit my intentions for myself as I continue to explore just what those intentions may be.

He asked me to be open to the possibility of me.

I still want and need direction right now. I feel rudderless, honestly, without definitive projects and contributions to make to a world outside my home.

Lately I've felt like I am drifting along my path right now, rather than actively traversing. I'm having to learn to stop my own panicked thrashing and just float, feeling the warm sun on my face and the water splashing across my cheeks as the river carries me where it needs me to be.

I don't know what's coming.

What I do know is that it will not be something I've done before. There is newness and opportunity close enough that I can feel it within reach as I approach it.

Now all I have to do is grab it and hold on. I'm almost where I'm supposed to be.

 

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Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

Huffington Post Article #3

Ain't these tears in my eyes telling you.

I posted a picture to Facebook a couple of days ago, of a cyan-tinted, forlorn, Bitstrips version of Stephanie that said, "Stephanie is feeling a blue."

Several friends immediately commented to inquire about what was wrong. Thankfully no one told me to cheer up. The girls reminded me to moving forward. A couple of people who've had their own sadness in recent months offered sympathetic well wishes.

One friend commented, "Just looking from the outside your future looks very bright."

He's right, of course, but that's exactly what has me in such a damn funk: the future.

I am finishing my last six weeks of my last semester at Georgia Piedmont Technical College. I am finishing my last two weeks as an (unpaid) intern with the ACLU of Georgia. I won this huge award and am trying to schedule the visit to pick up my new car, and I'm appearing fairly regularly as an ambassador for GPTC and for the Technical College System of Georgia.

Under all of that, there is a boatload of fear. I've explored the topic of fear—specifically why it's just stupid to let it hold you down—and I know this is one of those times when fear is not healthy. It's not a warning sign that something is about to eat me or that some berry will poison me. There's no imminent danger that demands I fight or flight.

But there is more uncertainty, more unknown. There is the choice to be made in the next few days of which bachelor's program I'll transition into (the private program that's close to home but only requires 42 hours to complete, or the public college that's an hour away and requires 67 hours to complete but at a third of the cost of the private school). There are the looming issues surrounding the still-jointly-held mortgage that has to be refinanced and the post-divorce credit score that's lower than the number we spend on groceries in a month. Credit takes time to rebuild, even without constant additional damage. There is the question of what will happen to my meager health insurance at the end of the year, tied up with political and financial issues that have embroiled Medicaid and the Obamacare that I still wouldn't be able to afford if I had to pay for it.

And all of that is directly impacted by my now two-month-long job search.

I was told by a hiring-type person (though it was an informational meeting, not an interview) that my qualifications are impressive.

"Until there's a job, my qualifications are worth the spare change in my sons' laundry," I retorted.

On paper, it does look impressive. Even I know that. I'm graduating with a 3.95 GPA from one of the only ABA-approved Paralegal Studies programs in Georgia. I'm a member of three honor societies, and I was named the 2015 Georgia Occupational Award of Leadership recipient by the Technical College System of Georgia, making me the top technical education student of 144,000 in the state. I interned with the ACLU of Georgia, having worked on substantive research issues for litigation and having extensively lobbied the Georgia General Assembly. I've had articles published on DivorcedMoms.com, MariaShriver.com, and The Huffington Post.

But there is no job.

Yes, I have applied for them. Yes, I have reached out to my extensive network of contacts to politely ask them to keep me in mind if they hear of possible positions. Yes, I have reached outside my own box, my own comfort zone, and looked beyond what I think I want to do, willing to consider positions that may be only mildly related if they may ultimately open the door to where I want to be.

But consistently, because I don't have my Bachelor's degree and because I don't have 3-5 years' experience as a paralegal, I am shut out of positions. My skills and talents don't matter, my hard work doesn't matter—it's that one piece of paper that holds me back. And because hiring processes are very often automated now, my application is very often automatically kicked out of employment systems for not quite meeting criteria that I know really doesn't impact what I know or how I perform.

So this starts the cycle of self-recrimination:

This is what you get for fucking it up and blowing your scholarship at 18.

But I wasn't ready. I didn't know how to be ready.

If I'd finished then I wouldn't have gotten married and have these boys now.

You promised these boys you'd be home with them in the afternoons.

I was at home with them for twelve years.

They misbehave, because you're not here like you should be to help them.

I'm doing the best I can. I'm showing them how to be adults and step up to their responsibilities, how not to run to the bottom of a bottle just to escape what is hard.

You're fucking up. You fucked up.

This wouldn't have happened if you hadn't fucked up your marriage.

You're a fuck up.

The constant anxiety has reached a frenzied peak, the likes of which I only saw during the worst of my divorce.

And isn't your divorce at the heart of this?

You fucked it all up.

On and on this cycle goes. My head is relentless sometimes. I get agitated and cranky. I do my best to power through and keep working—homework, household chores, job search, more homework—just to have a reprieve from the constantly animosity.

Lately I've not been very pleasant to be around. It's most likely the boys, or especially Rango, who takes the brunt of that.

I'm sorry.

You're just a fuck up.

You don't deserve him.

This is why DH left, because you're such a fuck up.

I'm sorry. I don't know what I did wrong this time, but I'm sorry.

Right now, it feels like every single nerve ending in me is exposed, peeking beneath the flay that still shimmers with fresh glitter.

 I do know that this will pass, in part because I'm writing about it and dealing with it in the most cathartic way I know how. I know that decisions will be made in a matter of days, which will bring some of the uncertainty to an end. I know that this specific cycle will end. After the last five years, I'm pretty sure there will be another one in the not-too-distant future. If there ever comes a time when everything is easy and I'm skating on rainbows, I have to assume it means I'm dead.

What I also know is that I am not alone in my propensity to tear myself down from the inside. I'm not the only maladaptive girl who sometimes clings tightly to the familiar shards of broken glass, simply because that's a pain you know, which feels far more manageable than the overwhelming uncertainty.

I questioned whether I should even post this publicly. I am representing my college and the system for the next ten months, and this is their shiny champion swearing loudly about her problems. But I'm hardly the only single welfare mom who's gone back to college in her 40s to take care of her family. I'm not the only non-traditional student who has to choke down her fear and step into the classroom and just get it done. I'm not the only one who has to keep fighting while backed into a corner.

If you're there, your shoulders pressing against the jagged walls, use it. For just a moment, let the walls support you and take a breath. Breathe past the tears and the fears. One breath. And then another. And then use those walls for leverage and come out kicking if you have to.

It is your fight. No one else can do this for you.

And no one else can do it for me.

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Huffington Post Article #3

I'm not here for your entertainment.

You were the promise at dawn, and I was the morning after.

My head is a little haunted sometimes.

Because I horde the memories, because I keep an extraordinary amount of minutiae in there, and because I'm an intensely emotional girl, there is a constant swirl of emotion in me. In a given moment, I will drive along a certain street or hear a specific song, and it will dredge up a memory—Oh, I talked to Absolem from that parking lot or That song was playing when Bounder and I <did whatever>--and then I will re-evaluate the entire relationship. It may take hours or it may happen in an instant, but every emotion I ever felt about that person will come in waves of good and bad, roiling over each other and crashing against the shores of my heart in quick succession.

Hurricane Sassafras can be an utter bitch sometimes.

But none of those emotions are happening now. I'm not living the event that led to the original emotion. It's just an echo, a ghost.

"Ghosts can't hurt you," Rango has reminded me a hundred times. "They're powerless."

Theoretically, they have the power I allow them to have, though I don't really know how to make them feel less important. Some have just taken time to fade. There are dozens of faceless, nameless shifting shapes that are little more than a murmur in my periphery.

But then there are the others.

My therapist said to me once that our bodies have a memory of their own, that our memories play out on a deep, cellular level because our bodies were physically present for the events that occurred. As she explained it, this is why anniversaries of powerful and vividly-remembered events can bring on the same emotions that were felt originally.

Right now, at this time of year, I am in a cycle of dozens of anniversaries. For whatever reason, the period from mid-April to the beginning of August is peppered with anniversaries like a minefield of memories. They run the gamut from wonderful to confusing to downright heartbreaking—and sometimes all three at once.

My therapist also had me work on sitting with my emotions, on allowing them to fall in and around me and just be, without reacting or overreacting to them, naming them and being aware of what they were and where they came from. But with emotions constantly on this rollercoaster down Memory Lane, it's too easy for me to become stuck in place, sitting, paralyzed in my useless fear.

And I do know that the fear is pointless and counterproductive. In my head, I am fully aware that what I'm feeling is wrapping its cold hand around my heart because I let it. I know that the ghosts are vaporous re-imaginings of what I remember, vacillating around my perspective at the moment that I am reminded of them.

But what is it about the others that I can't quite seem to escape them fully?

Absolem was both witness and accomplice to the inner transformations that were the cause of so much outer revolution. There are days I think of something that I should tell him and then remember that we no longer have that relationship, that I can't just message him and tell him to call me when he gets a chance. While I miss that friendship, I do not miss the emotional craziness that sometimes ensued because of it. I don't miss those tears, but I do sometimes change the route I drive just to avoid passing my own ghost.

Bounder was... Bounder. He was the one who broke my heart and wouldn't give me the closure I asked for. There was an ending—and one that took far longer to play out than we were actually a couple—but it didn't come how I felt like it should've, and it never will. Because he lives close by, I sometimes pass him on the street. It's not a ghost with him so much as a poltergeist, make me nauseated and ill from a sucker punch to the gut.

There are still some songs I just. can't. bear. to hear.

And with DH, it seems like there should be more than with the others, but there's not. In fact, it happens far less often than it used to. Yes, I've had almost three years to put that damage behind me. Yes, I still have to deal with his shit in my basement.

But I can also see the very best of him every single day in our boys. I chose to have two children with him for a reason, and Max and Tricky remind me all the time of how that decision was the best one I ever made. Somehow I've been able to unpack and repack all of that emotional baggage and keep only what mattered, and it's very rare that those memories have the power to upend me.

So I've been a bit on edge for the last few days. I told the Castration Committee that I felt like I was about to crawl out of my own damn skin again. Last night, the first good spring storm came, thunder like the laughter of those specters. I sat on my porch swing, feeling the cold spray of torrential rain on the breeze like phantasmal fingers stroking along my neck. I let the emotions come and swing with me until I thought I would choke on my own breath.

What was I feeling? Why was I feeling it?

I couldn't name it. I couldn't exorcise it.

One of Rango's superpowers is to be able to replace those memories with his own, our own. He is a Ghostslayer Extraordinaire.

"What do you need me to do?" he asked.

"Nothing. Just hold me."

Is it that you miss them? One of them?

No.

Is there something you're not getting that you need?

Not at all.

It wasn't that I was missing anyone else. I hate to compare old loves—each relationship was special for its own reason—but Rango is undeniably so much more than any of the others. There is nothing any of them was or has that he doesn't offer to me willingly and completely.

"Sometimes I just... hurt," I whispered to Rango.

It just hurts.

And there it was. Just hurt. Not grief or anger or longing or sorrow or love. Just hurt that hasn't fully healed. It doesn't feel like it did when the wounds were fresh, but it still aches sometimes when I twist just right or move too quickly in an unexpected direction. Sometimes I just bump the old wound.

And somehow, giving that to Rango makes the hurt fade.

He kisses me and makes me better.

Today, the ghosts are mostly quiet. They're just kind of hanging out and busying themselves with other things, playing quietly off in the distance. I can feel their presence, see them out of the corner of my eye, but I'm doing my best to stay out of their line of sight.

Somewhere between them and me is him, Rango, who will stand guard for as long as I need.

I'm not so scared anymore.

 

Wonder if I'll ever bury the hatchet inside.

About the time Rango moved into the house with us, I started to realize that I was having a hard time with his past.

Due to the constraints of time and distance and the necessary logistics for the boys, he and I never spent a night in his apartment. He insists that the apartment was never more than a landing pad and that it never felt like home. While I do believe home for him became wherever I was within days of our meeting, part of me still feels like I never got the opportunity to... I don't know... mark that territory...?

It sounds stupid, I know. I feels stupid. Every time some ex comes up, I cringe.

I know part of my insecurity comes from my maladaptive attachment style, which was established in my childhood and then reinforced over and over and over (and over and over and over) in my adult dating life, especially in the two-and-a-half years after DH and I split. I'm a fragile cat, without a doubt, but so is Rango. Generally we are very careful and patient with one another's emotions, lovingly treading across the scarred battlefield of the other's heart.

But really, I have no idea why the hell I am so freaked out when some former relationship of his is mentioned. Because I took the brutally-open-and-honest approach while I was dating, Rango learned probably far more about me in those first days than maybe he wanted, especially my history with the fragile cats.

When you're divorced, or maybe it just happens at this age when you have a good deal of life experience, first date conversation inevitably turns to prior relationships. Were you married? Do you have kids? Why did you break up? First dates are basically an interview, after all—a chance to see if their fuckeduppedness will play well with your fuckeduppedness.

So he knew very quickly that I was living in the same house I'd lived in with my ex-husband. He knew my most painful ex lived just a few miles away and semi-regularly sees me in passing. He knew I'd had a very active dating and social life on the weekends before DH moved out of state and dropped regular contact with the boys.

Hell, I wrote a book about some of it.

In the semi-autobiographical Persona Non Grata, Tierney talks about how she has a hard time hearing about her husband, Sam's, relationship with his long-ago ex-girlfriend:

"I worried for years that you had loved her more than you loved me," I admitted one night.  I couldn't look at him when I said it.  I kept my gaze trained on the darkness in the woods behind our house.

"Why?  Why would you even think that?  Didn't I tell you every day that I loved you?  Couldn't you just believe that?"

"I believed you.  I still do.  But, Sam, you were so broken when you guys split.  I kept waiting for you to come home and tell me that she'd called, that she wanted you back.  I used to dream about it all the time."

I really didn't know that DH loved me more than he'd loved her until the day Max was born, more than seven years into our marriage.

And I know that love should never feel like a competition, but my head is sometimes a mess, and I sometimes feel like I am constantly at battle with the ghosts of the past. I am forever struggling to overcome my screwed up perceptions of how I think other people see me. Often this drives me to be bigger and better and faster and more. I feel like there is so much inherently wrong with me and about me, and that if I can perfect as many small things as possible then the huge amount of bad is still outweighed by lots of little good.

No one is harder on me than I am on myself.

I few weeks ago, I told Rango, "I won't feel secure until I've been with you longer than you've been with [your ex-wife]."

"But you already have."

I looked at him, puzzled. "You do remember that you were married for five years, don't you?"

"Yeah, but our relationship was over long before we even got married," he replied. "Emotionally, we were together for a week-and-a-half."

A few days later, we took our first trip together. Without the boys, we went to Texas for his sister's wedding, which also gave me the opportunity to meet and spend time with his family. We had a lovely couple of days in San Antonio, walking around Riverwalk and later dancing at the wedding, followed by a day in Houston.

 

Wedding Selfie #Sassafras #Rango #JenAndAli

A photo posted by Stephanie Quinn Jackson (@stephqj) on May 2, 2015 at 5:22pm PDT

DH and I had flown into San Antonio once, gone immediately to buy a car, and then drove straight home to Alabama. We passed through a section of Houston on the way. My 2012 trip to Austin by myself was my only real trip to Texas.

Rango spent his teen years in Texas, especially in and around Houston. He lived in various places before moving to Atlanta (to be with [his ex-wife]), but he still thinks of Texas as home. (Well, maybe until he met me.)

Although I'd never been to San Antonio, I set part of Persona Non Grata there. Tierney's life blows up (the climax without a climax) at the Marriott Riverwalk. I spent some time researching and wrote about what I'd never actually seen:

    I walked out from the hotel and turned onto the wide walkways along the river.  I knew there was a coffee shop nearby.  I ordered a frittata and took my coffee to a small table.  I ate slowly, trying to abate the nagging headache.

    I was tired but didn't want to hole up in my hotel room.  I spent a couple of hours exploring San Antonio.  I walked over little bridges and through lushly landscaped mini-parks.  I was impressed by the mix of modern and traditional, of historical and new. 

    I found a shady spot outside a coffee shop, sitting under a bright yellow umbrella.  It was still early, but the River Walk was bustling already with people ready for the new day.  I sketched the profile of a young woman sitting on a park bench, reading a book.  The face of the sleeping baby, parked in his stroller at his parents' table next to mine. 

 

Tierney is hanging out at the Riverwalk in San Antonio. #personanongrata #junkture

A photo posted by Stephanie Quinn Jackson (@stephqj) on May 2, 2015 at 11:21am PDT

Rango and I stayed at another Marriott a few blocks away. On Saturday morning, he happily walked with me to find the spot I'd written. We had lunch at a Mexican restaurant that was included in an earlier draft of PNG. (It was eventually cut and re-written because the scene was lifeless.) And while he knew this was a fictionalized account, that I'd never been to these places, he also knew we were living a moment from the fictionalized account of the events that triggered the metamorphosis that led, in part, to my divorce.

Never did he complain. Never did he express a jealous thought. Not once did he have to choke back an angry lump and leave the room to catch his breath and regain control.

But driving to Houston the next day, picked up by his best friend, some comment was made about an ex they shared. (Who am I to judge someone for dating their best friend's ex?) Sitting in the back seat of the car, I bristled at the mention, knowing full well that she was long, long before me, that the relationship was short-lived and didn't work for a reason, that he loves me more.

Days later, as we were talking about traveling again soon—something DH and I never did together—I told him I would never go to Sweden with him, because he went there to see a now-ex.

"But it's a beautiful country," he argued. "You would love to see it."

I'm sure I would, but I was never willing to go to New Orleans with DH (in theory, because we didn't travel together or take vacations) because India had lived there in her childhood and later gone on vacation there with DH.

I've talked before about how I am a hoarder of memories. Because I remember virtually everything, I hold onto a lot of shit on my big, broken brain. Combine that with my intense sentimentality, and my head is an emotional minefield that I can barely traverse—how the hell is anyone else supposed to get through?

What I realized is that I am more than willing to give Rango the chance to replace some of those memories. Sometimes, he does it and doesn't even know it. Maybe we're having an incredibly wonderful moment and a song comes on that would have previously tied me up in knots, a reminder of a past moment. While there are still songs I just can't bear to hear anymore, there are a few that are now associated with Rango. Maybe it's a trip to a place I've been before or only dreamt about with someone else.

His heart replaced theirs in that memory space.

His cautions that there are formative memories that cannot be replaced. Of course. No matter what he or I do, there's no possible way to replace everything, and I wouldn't want either of us to do that. What happened before is what has led us to here, to the place where our paths converged. It's all about the journey and not the destination.

Yes, I know that I am letting my own insecurities and fears get in my way. I loathe that I think and feel this way. I am repulsed by the dark, tangled emotions that swirl around inside me, ensnaring my thoughts and hijacking what should be a calm, normal moment.

The only way I know to fight the dark is with light. When I don't feel like my own, internal light is strong enough to illuminate the path, I turn into the disco ball, spinning and reflecting a broken, scattered mosaic of brilliance that can be as annoyingly blinding as it is charming in its kinetic chaos.

Through it all, Rango says he is more than happy to be in my shadow, to let me spin in the spotlight while he supports me. I want him to be where he is happy and comfortable. I don't want to ever lose him to the darkness that I refuse to face and enter.

But I really have no idea how to counter the jealousy. I don't know how to not feel like it's a competition, even though it's one I know I'd have won months ago. I don't have a clue how not to snarl back at any of his memories that I'm afraid are snarling at me.

 

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Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

You never know until you try.

For months now, I've been quiet. It hasn't been intentional, I assure you. I've lamented to Rango and the Castration Committee that I just haven't had time or energy to write. 

That's not entirely true.

I have been extremely busy with school. Between three classes and a very busy internship with the ACLU of Georgia, my time has been mostly filled with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, various petitions for probate, and ongoing discussions with my professors and multiple legislators about the privacy concerns surrounding police use of body cameras.

 

Monday Morning Reflections on the Train #itsmarta #marta #train #Atlanta #manicmonday

A photo posted by Stephanie Quinn Jackson (@stephqj) on Mar 31, 2015 at 5:34am PDT

 

My regional GOAL interview seemed to go very well, though I won't know how well until next week. The state competition begins on April 22nd here in Atlanta. Finalists will be announced the first night, and they have to be prepared to compete again the next morning. While I had excellent feedback from my judging panel and others at Regionals, it could be that I'm not the right fit for the Technical College System of Georgia. Maybe I'm too opinionated or too loud or too brash. Then again, maybe I am the right fit.

Either way, I won't know for another week.

I've also been making the transition from single mom of two to attached mom of two. While Rango and I would've happily gotten married the weekend we met, we agreed that probably wasn't in the boys' best interest. After nine months of dating and entangling our lives, we sat down with the boys and asked them how they would feel if he moved in with us, making our home into OUR home.

They were agreeable. They were excited. They were ready.

There have been a few bumps here and there, but all in all it's going better than I was willing to allow myself to hope.

With most things, I tend to subscribe to the "Lowered Expectations" philosophy—expect nothing, and you'll never be disappointed. With regard to the GOAL competition, I'm living that mantra every single day. While I may be very well qualified to be the advocate for technical education in Georgia, there's only a 1 in 24 chance that I'm The One. So I don't get my hopes up. I don't plan about what color car I would pick out or which of our cars we would sell to pay the taxes on the new one.

 

But with Rango, I already have expectation. He has gently guided me to a place where it is okay to believe in someone else, to trust in someone else. And I do. I trust him to do what he tells me he's going to do. I believe that he will love me, actively, and be available for me, forever and always and no matter what.

And that's led me to have expectation for myself. Historically—at least over the last five years—I have hedged my bets. I always had a backup plan or the phone numbers of exes I stayed in contact with, just in case, even when those relationships were toxic for me. Even when those fragile cats would scratch and bite me, running away into the night, and then yowl loudly at my door a few nights later while I was still bleeding from their affront.

Now, there is no bet hedging. I blocked the numbers of my backup plans and made it difficult for them to reach me and vice versa. I took the remnants of old relationships—my wedding dress, the box of Bounder, the last bits of Absolem—and I burned them. I wanted to do something privately ceremonial, like burying the ashes in the backyard, but once the embers faded, I found there was no more energy to give to them. I was tired, and they didn't deserve my reserves.

That's all for Rango now.

He told me over the weekend that, for the first time in his life, he has no backup plan, either. We both always have friends and family we can turn to, but neither of us is propping open the door to possibility of failure. We're not stupid; we've each been divorced and know damn well what could happen.

But we also know now, after years of struggle and growth, what should happen.

We are open and honest, sometimes stupidly so. We are true to ourselves and to each other. We have forged a logistical and emotional partnership that is equal and based on mutual respect and care and love.

We argue sometimes. Sometimes when I'm especially bitchy, he'll just pointedly ask me if I'm going to be okay. He stays calm and lets my storm pass over him until it blows itself out.

At Regionals, the judging panel asked me where I thought I'd be in five years and how I intended to get there.

"I know you want a perfect answer," I replied, "but the honest truth is I don't know and I don't care. What I thought I'd be doing when I started my paralegal studies program is not at all what I'm actually doing a year later. Where I thought I'd be five years ago is nowhere close to where I actually am. So, yes, the answer is still that I don't know, but it's also that I'm excited to find out. I'm excited to explore opportunities and discover new talents and new challenges. I'll let you know where I am in five years."

Even if I don't move on to the next round or win another damn thing ever in my life, I am confident that I will continue to forge my path and make the best of whatever intersects with my journey. I have talent and skill and resourcefulness. I have two amazing sons and a spectacularly supportive life partner. I have loyal, wonderful friends and four warm, snuggly cats.

I don't need another thing.

 

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Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

I'm not here for your entertainment.

I got a twenty-dollar gold piece says there ain't nothing I can't do.

Last fall, I was nominated by one of my professors for the Georgia Occupational Award of Leadership.  According to the Technical College System of Georgia:

First launched in 1971, GOAL focuses on student excellence in technical education by focusing on academic excellence and personal achievement. A panel of judges selects one student, the state GOAL Winner, to serve as an ambassador of technical education in Georgia.

GOAL winners represent the “new image” of Georgia’s technical colleges. Students must recognize technical education’s critical impact on Georgia’s overall economic health, have a strong work ethic, a dedicated sense of loyalty, and a healthy enthusiasm for promoting technical education in Georgia.

GOAL winners are the best possible advertisement for technical education. They prove every day that the best technical education consists of more than manipulative skills. Technical education prepares us for the world of work. GOAL students are an indication of what technical education at its best can achieve and of the caliber of individuals who are choosing Georgia’s technical colleges.

The winning GOAL student serves as an ambassador for technical education in Georgia and makes many public appearances throughout the year including addresses to the Georgia General Assembly, Governor and TCSG’s Student Fall Leadership Conference to name a few.

34 of the 4,000 students at Georgia Piedmont Technical College were nominated for the 2015 GOAL award, which can most easily be described as Student of the Year.  I was honored, but I was also nominated with at least two of my classmates who I felt had a much better chance of winning this award. 

The process started with an early-morning interview before a panel of five faculty and staff members of GPTC.  I had three minutes to tell them—with no note cards or visual displays that weren't permanently attached to my body—who I was, why I had chosen technical education, and how it was impacting my life and my life goals.

Three minutes.

If you've ever spoken with me in person, you know that I talk a lot, I talk very quickly, and I tend to gesticulate wildly while speaking.  More than one boyfriend has been nailed in the jaw when they ventured too close to the Exotic Wild Glamazon while she was hyper-excited about the influence of Greek mythology on the DC comic book universe... or shoes.  So it took a practice session with my professors and others to help hone my speech for both content and style. 

Something stuck, though, because I made it to the second round of interviews, which meant I'd placed in the Top 10, along with my two classmates and seven other very talented, deserving students. 

The second interview was just after Thanksgiving, by which time I was sick with an upper respiratory thing that we later realized was likely Whooping Cough.  I appeared before the selection committee, a panel comprised of local business leaders and last year's GOAL winner for GPTC.  To make sure I didn't start coughing on anyone, I loaded up on cough medicine and my inhaler. 

Three more minutes.

During this three minutes, being so loaded on cold medicine, I think I told them who I was, why I had chosen technical education, how it was impacting my life and my life goals, a brief history of my children, what I'd had for breakfast, and as much as I could about the influence of Greek mythology on the DC comic universe. 

I might have discussed my shoes.

But, again, something stuck.  I was named to the Top 4 finalists.  I was the only student from Paralegal Studies to make it that far, and I was thrilled to be able to represent my department.  Now I had to wait over a month to find out who actually won GOAL for 2015, but I was offered a table for 8 at the awards luncheon on January 22nd.

I know I'm smart.  I know Queen Frostine was right in pointing me toward being a paralegal.  It is an excellent fit for my skillset, and I am thus far very good at what I do.  That's really very difficult for me to say, as I discussed prior to the GOAL competition.  It feels strange to me to openly discuss my accomplishments, as if I should be far more modest about what I've done. 

But even with everything I've worked so hard to do over the last year and more, I honestly didn't believe I had any real chance to win this competition.  The school GOAL winner goes on to compete at regionals in March, and the top placers at regionals compete at a state level in April.  The state winner spends a year traveling Georgia and speaking as an advocate for technical education, which includes appearances at the 25 technical colleges in the system and addresses to the Georgia General Assembly, the Governor, and the Technical College System of Georgia Leadership Conference.  (To help facilitate this, the state winner also gets a new car.)  So the winner effectively acts as an advocate for technical education.

They have to be able to tell people their story and exactly how and why technical education is working for them, how and why it can and should work for others. 

I have very well-developed thoughts about technical education, with a ton of data to back it up, but I will save that for a future post.  I don't want to give away Glamazon trade secrets, and I need to protect my work product as I move forward into the next round of competition, because I won.

No one was more surprised than I was.  According to my mom and stepdad and dad who'd all driven over from Alabama for the luncheon, plus Rango and the boys who were there, and my classmates and my professors, no one but me was surprised I won. 

Mom hates that she didn't have her camera trained on my face when they announced my name.  My mouth and eyes flew open.  I had even whispered to Rango just seconds before that I thought the winner was a finalist from the Criminal Justice department. 

I was wrong.  Wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong  <insert wild, accidental whacking of my son>

The GOAL coordinator had told the finalists to prepare a short speech of acceptance.  I'd made a mental note of who to thank if it happened, but I didn't expect to win.  I had to wing it, but apparently I did okay.  People were nodding and clapping.  I didn't throw up or fall down. 

Lots of hand-shaking, lots of nodding and thanking people whose names I hope I don't forget, and lots of smiling until my face hurt.  But I won.  I worked my ass off for this, and I continue to do so every day, with a 15-hour class load this semester including my internship at the ACLU of Georgia, which puts me at the state Capitol at least one day a week to speak with legislators directly about proposed legislation and how it would directly impact me and other Georgians.

Me.  I get to do that.  I get to make a difference in my world and someone else's.

Selfie with Button Gwinnett at the Georgia State Capitol

 

I've worked so hard.  So very, very hard.  I have faltered at times, and I have wanted to quit, so sure that I just couldn't scale the daunting mountain of work that was before me.  It can be exhausting, and it often keeps me from the boys and Rango when I want nothing more than to curl up on the couch with them and binge watch Netflix. 

Now I'm six months away from finishing my associate's degree, and I should graduate with honors.  I won a $26,500 scholarship to finish my bachelor's degree.   

So, for once, I'm going to say something I rarely do: I did good. 

I'm taking a moment to congratulate myself and recognize that I am doing a good job, no matter how hard it is sometimes.  It may or may not ever get any easier, but there is more reward than just knowing I worked hard.  There is knowing that I worked right, that I worked well, that I am worth this reward. 

 

 

Let's have a disco ball, and let's be happy.

For weeks I've been thinking that I need to write a blog post.  I knew it had been far too long, but I was shocked this morning when I realized it had been six weeks since I'd last posted here. 

For the most part, I have been silent because I've been busy.  The boys are constantly on the go, and it seems half my waking hours are spent transporting them from school to an appointment to a team practice to an event... assuming I'm not in class or doing homework or working.  Emotionally I've been pretty even-keeled, which is in-part attributable to Rango, who brings far more romance and comedy to my life than drama.  Sometimes I freak out about the stress of it all, but he and the Castration Committee are always available sounding boards when I need to vent. 

Last week I sat in on a series of paralegal continuing education sessions.  While I don't need the CLE credits yet, I knew there would be useful information and excellent networking at the all-day event. 

The day was filled with talk of entity management and legal investigation of security breaches and e-filing processes.  The last speaker of the day, though, made me come home and cry.  (Yay, networking.)

Mr. Worthington is a senior human resources manager at a law firm.  He manages paralegals and sometimes teaches through a local paralegal education program.  He spoke about appraising your value in your job.  Value, he said, is derived from the benefit you provide to your client, whether they may be internal or external.  I'll go further to add that the value is benefit net of cost.  He asked each of us to examine the services we provide with a series of threshold questions:

• What do I do?
• How do I do it?
• Why do I do it?

There is the basic description of your job, then the mechanics of how the job is performed, and finally the beneficial applicability of the services provided by the job you do. 

"If you're doing something and you find yourself thinking, 'No one cares that I'm doing this,' then stop doing it."

I spent years doing shit no one but me cared about.  I am a perfectionist who is prone to overachievement.  No one but me gave a damn that I perfected my bathroom cleaning skills and kept my CDs alphabetized and sub-categorized by genre.  It didn't matter to my family how I folded the towels; they just cared that there were clean towels when they got out of the shower.  All that homemade chicken stock in the freezer will make delicious soups, but were the hours spent making the stock instead of playing video games with the boys of more benefit than the cost? 

How I took care of my family and managed my household was the entirety of my value for a very long time.  Three years ago, I wrote about how I was a financial liability to my family, given the fact that I didn't work outside the home.  According to the LIFE Foundation's Human Value Calculator, I am now worth about $232,490, though that's subject to change now that I'm working one unpaid internship instead of three part-time paying jobs.

Much of the last four years has been about assessing my personal value, both to myself and to other people.  Now that I'm transitioning from stay-at-home mom to full-time student to gainfully- and professionally-employed, I have moved from the red into the black.  Hopefully I will continue to appreciate over time. 

Even three years ago I knew I was worth more than the laundry and the cooking and the dishes.

Given the self-exploration I've written about, Mr. Worthington's words were fodder for thought.  What is my job?  How do I do it?  Why do I do what I do?

The job for my external clients—my family, my professors, my employers—is easy to address.  I take care of their needs with the skillset specific to each job, in a way that it fulfilling to me.  I get personal satisfaction from taking care of my sons and Rango, from apply my critical thinking and writing skills to an excellent case brief or legal document.   

But for me, the internal client, these are harder questions to answer.  My job is to hone myself into the best possible version of me that I can be.  I do that by applying my natural skills and talents—analysis, resourcefulness, creativity—to everything that I do, whether it be caring for my family or writing an essay that only I will ever read.  I do this, because I am not content to be stagnant, because I am driven to explore and experiment and test myself.  I am determined to shine my own light into every darkened nook and cranny of my soul, to shatter every warped looking glass, and to shape those pieces into the unique mosaic that can only be Stephanie. 

And that is my job, to create something beautiful from something ugly, to use it to reflect light back into the darkness for those who need it, not to be the spotlight but to use the spotlight to be brilliant and kinetic, even if it is me who needs the light to dance by. 

I am a disco ball unto myself.

The past couple of weeks have also included prepping for an interview for a Student of the Year award.  I had to appear this week before the judging committee, to tell them my story in three minutes.  While practicing with my advisors prior to the interview, I teared up again.

"It seems almost... dirty," I croaked.  "It feels unnatural and uncomfortable to toot my own horn, to tell people all the ways in which I am good.  I'm supposed to be quiet and modest, not boastful."

"That is a woman thing," one of my female professors replied.  "That's also a Southern thing.  You're taught to smile and nod and be quiet in the corner."

"We know how to put the lipstick on the pig," I said. 

Screw that.  The pig is a pig; it's going to wallow in the mud, no matter what I do.  The pig is not my client.  No one cares if I make the pig look pretty. 

But me?  Stephanie? 

I nailed my interview.  Even if I don't move forward in the judging process, I've won a lot over the last few weeks.  I've decided it's time for a raise. 

So now I have to touch up my lipstick.  It's time to go dancing.    

 

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I'm not here for your entertainment.

You'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.