It Doesnt Always Rain Like It Thunders

I know I have been missing posts on Friday and well turns out that with my laptop being out of order its a lot harder and close to impossible to get posts done. I am still awaiting a miracle when it comes to my dear laptop.

If you have netflix I suggest you go watch "The Breadwinner" it is an amazing, really well choreographed story. Which is, by the way, where my title came from. The main character is a young girl whose father is imprisoned without charge and so she pretends to be a boy in order to work and get money to feed her family. Its a story that I believe everyone should see. This is a narrative that is ever rarely if at all given a chance to be seen and showcased on such a platform.  Anyway, it inspired me to come on here and write. SO here I am.

I have had quite a week where my work situatiin isnt getting any better. The coworker that has been making work life unbearable seems to be unable to work in a profesional manner. Just on Friday as I was sitting in the employees lounge eating after my shift she came and began to complain very loudly to me. After letting her kniw that because she was beijg unreceptive that I was not and would not participate in a conversation with her but still she went on, I was so close to cussing her out and any minute more I would have gotten out of my chair and slapped her. But because surprisingly I know how be professional and act like an adult, I didnt. I didnt want to incriminate myself with such a reaction that she could use later on against me in her will to tear me down. With three tacos in my belly I stormed out of there.

As I thought about what happened through the rest of the day I realized I felt like screaming "I quit" because of the lack of consequences that my intolerable coworker recieves. I although for one didnt want to give her the satisfaction, again, because by the way a coworker has already quit before due to a similiar situation and second my family and I cannot afford for me to quit. I can barely afford life now and I get paid!

Also, my car needs more work done and although it takes all my time and money, did I mention money? I have to do it. This car is our entire life. Without it our lives would go from kinda shitty and tough to what else is there besides shitty and shitty again? So I am doing it little by little. Getting car parts one at a time and having to wait until I have a pair or so to begin repairs. Things take time, I know, I just hope that my car can hold it together inbetween times.

I also finally went and got us some gym memberships. We came to the point where we were running on 2 weeks without a shower and I had run out of friends to ask. Friends who were readily willing and available. Its going to become an extra big expense but I feel like we've gotten some of ourselves back with it. The feeling of not being in control of your hygeine is a heavy and tasking weight for a person. The feeling of not being able to enjoy the shower for fear of taking too long or making too much noise takes from a person.

Take. Take. Take.

Seems like all everything knows how to do is take and you have to constantly rearrange the pieces to keep from crumbling over.

I think thats where exhaustion is. In the rearranging of ourselves. As creatures of habit the unavoidable everchanging rhythm of life keep us on our spirtual toes. Right when we think we got it handled and coherent something goes awrye. But I also think thats where our power is made. We become imaginative and resourceful. Resilient.

We get taken from and so we find a new way to recieve. 

Before I start to overthink everything here I want to say that I think everytime I feel like crumbling, I do, but then I re-adjust. re-arrange and without even realizing it I get on my way again.

 I think people are graceful in that way, in all of our clumsy dances to find out we can in all the moments we thought we couldn't.


Song of the week:

Sweet Creature - Harry Styles

Until next time
-Analaura

What Makes Us Feel Okay

Photo taken by L.M.

So with my laptop still being "under the weather" I have resorted to my tablet until further notice. Which in retrospect sounds a bit privileged so I will refrain my complaints about this.

This week I wanted to explore the idea of what makes us feel "okay" in the context of when someone is particularly unhappy. What relieves the ache. What diffuses. What allows us to breathe again. What in the middle of everything can make us feel like we can easily take a breathe again.

I know the answers are different and ever changing for everybody so please know that what diffuses for me may/can/will be different to what diffuses for you.

I find myself always at a constant of searching for more in myself than the numb and sadness. What else is in that huge hoarding pile of feelings. There has to be joy or peace or something like that somewhere in here. I always seem to be blind to it as if my sight is selective. I think from feeling numb for so long I've felt at a loss when it comes to much else. I mean I let out a laugh or two day to day and find amusement in random things. I feel kindness to my friends so I get stumped when I think back to those things and try to convince myself that is one of the many ways joy can look like. I seem to feel this emotion that can't be described in any other way than the lazily shrugging of shoulders. Its like I remain unmoved by the evidence that joy is not the stranger I claim it to be.

Hey, um didnt you hear???? You aren't just a walking talking robot built from fuckery buuut nope all that I get is just the metaphorical shrugging of my souls shoulders

I think I can come to discover that I can feel much more than what my current range of emotion allows me to. I think I have to become more trusting and believe that the times of laughter and kindness and peace are not or will not ever be forgotten by my soul. Perhaps my soul has found the loop hole to misery. MAYBE just maybe this entire time I thought I was failing at feeling okay I had been completely ignoring the fact that I was even able to participate.

This week has been pretty straighforward. Go to work, get out, pick up Celest, go get some wifi then head to our designated lot for the night. Of course days like yesterday when we went from picking up Celest to the storage right up until they closed is a nice change of pace. My work week hasn't been stressful, I actually really enjoy my co-workers company so when I get to work with her 3-4 days out of the six days I'm at work I'm grateful. I made a co-worker laugh once or twice and that always make me feel okay for a couple seconds. It reminds me that I can be funny. My dogs are always happy to see me and taking them to an empty park where they just ran around made me so happy. You should have seen their faces. Watching new episodes of our favorite shows on netflix and hulu with my mom and Celest make me feel okay. Hearing from Lori, my best friend, makes me feel okay. Organizing things putting them where they belong or making a space for something is comforting to me.

We often go to our favorite thrift store and so often I see small dining sets and wooden bookshelves that if I had a home I would refurbish and that does not make me feel okay. In fact it tears me a part inside because I'd like to have a home that I can make homey but instead I stand back and watch everyone else do it for theirs.

My sadness is ever present but hopefully I will never stop looking for the things that make me feel okay. We need those things after all so recognizing what those things actually ARE is really important. Maybe one day I can look back to the things that make me feel okay and not have a shrugging of shoulders reaction. Maybe I can have the reaction that my dogs have after running around at the park. Pure contentment.

One can only hope.

I hope to have a more interesting in depth much more revised post next week but for now this is all I got. Sorry, kinda.

Until next Friday,

-Analaura

Songs of the week:

Stay- Sara Bareilles

My Love Is Like A Star - Demi Lovato

Surviving Wont Be The Hardest Part

I have never been shy about sharing the uncanny, witty interpretation of hope I have. The stumbling, ruffled, unprecedented hope I believe in. In fact, a while back I stood in front of a church full of people with a microphone and declared how I believe, "Hope is a relentless bastard". I also often write how my hope seems to be walking around without its head and continuously bumping into walls. Imagery people, its everything. Yes, hope is blind but do not be mistaken it is very aware of whats it stands in front of. Hope is pretty much a bad ass. 

Hope is important and most of the time anything important and/or significant is at one point or at other times entirely painful. Sad AND happy is the paradoxical normal of the universe. Pain and healing go together. Hope being painful is not always the truth in every situation but in a deprived, suffocated, and overwhelming period of ones journey it can be. 

Hope being painful is for the people who have learned how to make a home inside the storm. Not out of choice but by severe necessity. Hope at first is motivating but eventually hope just gets annoying and annoying I mean too painful to bring around. Hope is the dream of it getting better. Hope is looking forward to the brighter tomorrow. But what happens when tomorrow doesn't get better? After a while its too difficult to keep believing because its much too tiring. Life can make you feel like a fool too. When you are in a upheaval to get your life to a safe place dreaming ahead can be helpful. Hoping to ones highest ability for a change of course can be/is a helpful tool. I do not discredit this but also in a long journey there is a point where it becomes easier to just continue moving instead of enthusiastically hoping. 

That was something I wrote up a month or two ago. I must have had an extra rough week. But I must have fell asleep before i could finish. I did say something though that struck a cord in me after reading this today. 

Enthusiastically hoping.

Is that how hope works? Is hope only enthusiastic? I think that is how its advertised to us. Hope is the shiny and bright during the bleak. So does that mean that hope can't be be dreary, weak, maybe a bit dirty or confused? Am I doing this hope thing all wrong then??  

Hope and Grace are the most powerful forces in the universe. Do you think they would conform to one specific definition? Nah, thats way too boring and exclusive. Hope fights to stay with us. Hope fights to stay alive in us. Hope grows and shrinks in the same way our lives fluctuate but it will not wither and die. No matter how determined you are to believe it has. 

Continuously through the extreme, rough and bumpy through the impossible we think now how the fuck am I going to get through THIS? but we do. No matter what way we went about it. Wearily, quietly, kicking and screaming, crawling, angrily, gracefully, quickly,slowly dammit we got through it and then its just right along into the next adventure. Whatever the hell that may be. 

Hope doesn't sit anything out. Hopes attached itself to us forever. It becomes whatever it needs to be in order to stay within us. So no, enthusiastically isn't the only way hope comes. Hope is the badass in the leather jacket and its also the weary kind friend. 

I think I maxed out the number of times one can use the word hope in an essay but zero fucks given. 

This week was something. At work I was blamed for all the things being wrong by another receptionist which caused anger and frustration and even insecurity. Then out of work I am overwhelmed with bills and exasperated by how even homelessness can't escape the wrath of bills. The lottery would solve this. Hah, wishful thinking. But we also got offered a blanket yesterday morning by a woman in a military uniform while preparing to head to our destinations for the day and the fast food restaurant we frequent gave us 2 free things the past two days. We were able to cook with our camping stove today and eat a "home" cooked meal. Percy got really tummy sick this week and cars broke down. My best friend lost her best friend-her doggy and I wept while leaving work to grieve with her. I got a house sitting opportunity in May and I was ecstatic upon hearing the news but also grief stricken because I'd love to be in a home by then. January is almost gone and I'm terrified. Take care of us 2018.

Until next Friday.

-Analaura

Song of the week: "26" - Paramore

Hey, 2018s Here

Hey there 2018.

Cute puppy-AKA-Penny

Although I am not one for resolutions I did promise myself that this year I would begin to write again. I seemed to be a gray blur in 2017 and maybe that was just my healing process for that moment in time but these past few days my soul has been tugging at me like a 4 year old on a mission to write again. My conscious blowing up at me because it knows that I'd feel better if I just wrote something. Ah! I wanted to come up with a title or an idea that I could center my thoughts around but then I remembered that was the very reason I felt I couldn't write in 2017. 2017 was the year that all the crap and turmoil thats always been hidden under the rug got uncovered and so of course this caused the world to believe the world has turned to shit when in reality all of these things were already there and happening. It was a year of eye opening. It was a year where people discovered how far their compassion for "the issues" would really take them. It was the year people rose up to activism and others turned their backs and stayed silent. It was the year when people finally made those who are silent realize they are on the side of the oppressor. That there is no limbo when it comes to justice for black and brown lives, for women and so on. It was the uncovering that the world needed to begin a better revolutionized healing process.

I have a job now. I work part time in a medical office. I like it although it hasn't came without work place drama I'm actually quite impressed with how I've done and how I have been handling being homeless and working at the same time. Some days it takes everything in me to breathe and not to start crying but others are a breeze and I am able to clock in, do my job, clock out and leave it all behind. Some days my mental health is on the brink of giving out so I'm grateful that I am able to bring one of my dogs to work to hug when I feel like being alive is just way too damn much to handle. Some days I work at the office and then later as a nanny. I'm tired and empty and overwhelmed all at the same time but I keep going because what the fuck else am I going to do. Food for us and food for the dogs and gas for the car and laundry to wash and storage and insurance and cell phone won't happen by itself. My transmission died during thanksgiving and that caused a whole bunch of expense. I brought my grandma and had her stay with us. We were able to supply a hotel room for 2 weeks or so before money was gone and the car was broken so she stayed with us through new year. I was actually relieved to have her with us where we could make sure she was fed and interacted with and showered and taken care of. Shes losing her memory now and at home unfortunately she can't provide herself with the self care she needs. Its a very complicated situation so even though she drove us all insane and we were almost always arguing at the end of the day my shoulders felt a little lighter knowing that my abuela was being taken care of properly.

I stopped going to church in 2017. I think I finally came to realize pushing myself to go when it drains me isn't taking care of myself. Plus, my spirituality was dragging just like my situation. I was visiting with a friend from San Francisco during Christmas who had asked me why i no longer attended and I eventually figured out that I felt crippling loneliness when I visited church. That is not the reaction you are supposed to feel when going to a place like that although to be fair I feel quite alone in the world too but you never wanna willingly place yourself in a place that creates that feeling. Not to get too real or dark on you here. You still there? I dont come into contact with a lot of homeless young brown women like myself. Not to say that they aren't out there but the lifeline I wield hasn't given me that gift...yet.

This is more of an update post than a reflective one and I am quite okay with that now. I think I would put so much pressure on myself to make a great reflective post every single time that I didn't even wanna try anymore. I realize now that I'm not going to get more than a couple views and that feedback just isn't happening but regardless I need to write. Besides having it out in the open is so subversive.and freeing that I'm going to learn how to make it feel enough.

I am making it a plan to have a new post every Friday and I hope those of who you reading now will check in, read and reflect with me.

I suppose life would really suck if I didn't take advantage to grow and learn from all the pain. The day I decided to use my pain as fuel instead of an anchor is the day I created a million and one opportunities.

Healing is everyday and chosen and uncomfortable and difficult and hard work but so is the alternative.  At least healing gives you freedom.

-Analaura