It's just a number

Aside from Christmas and summer vacation, I'm pretty sure there is NOTHING that gets a kid more excited than their birthday. Birthdays meant parties with your friends (a PRIVATE skating party at the Rink in SL if you were lucky), birthday cake (from the STORE if you were lucky), and presents. Personally, I always liked getting cards in the mail because I was weird and liked getting mail (bonus points to Grandma Struck because her cards always came with $5, which was a pretty big deal when you are a kid.) After you get a bit older, the only birthdays that seem to matter are the ones where you gain a cool "privilege" or whatever, like turning 14 (learner's permit), 16 (driver's license), 18 (ability to purchase cigarettes and porn, not that I've ever bought either), and 21 (ability to *legally* purchase and consume booze in the public venues.) After those big "privilege earning" birthdays, the only time anyone seems to really give a crap about a birthday and throw a big party is when your birthday happens to be one in which your age will now end with a "0." It really just starts to become another day of the year where your phone is constantly buzzing with "So and So posted on your Timeline" notifications from Facebook, you go out for food/drinks with your friends, and then come home and go to bed. I turned 23 yesterday, and it literally was just any other day. I woke up, I got ready for school, I went and taught. The only difference is that instead of coming home after school and working on a puzzle and watching Disney movies, I went out in Sac AND in Lake View (party animal, am I right?) I don't feel any different being 23 than I did being 22. It's just a number. Somedays I feel like I'm 60, some days I still feel like I'm 12, but 23 is the real "number." The only difference I can foresee anymore is that I have to remind myself to say 23 when people ask me how old I am.

One Last Goodbye

They say that people come into your life for one of two reasons: they are either a blessing, or they are a lesson. For a long time, you were a blessing, but I guess that blessing ended up turning into a lesson. I hate that things went down like they did and I hate that they ended this way, but I fought and fought for what we had as long as I could. The sad and the stress just became more than I was willing to keep fighting through.

Every Easter, I always buy an Easter lily. I'm horrendous at growing things and keeping plants alive, but I buy one nonetheless. And my lily always ends up in really bad shape, but I keep watering it and pulling off the dead blooms and setting it in the sun so it might have a chance to come back. No matter how much I try, I always end up throwing a half-dead, sad looking Easter lily out. Our friendship was that half-dead lily. I wanted it so bad, and wanted to keep it alive and looking beautiful. But after awhile, I was just watering and taking care of a flower that I knew was gone and just needed to be thrown away. So much time and energy I spent taking care of something I knew wasn't good, time and energy that I took away from the relationships and the friendships in my life that were alive and blooming and flowering. It's not fair to those relationships and frankly, it's not fair to me.

I'm in a hard place right now, because we had so many good memories and good times together. I can't forget about those, and I don't want to forget about them. Maybe that's a good thing, because I can focus more on the good memories we had together, rather than remembering me fighting tooth and nail to fix a shitty friendship that eventually just ended anyway. And I cry a lot sometimes when I think about those memories, and I had to put your pictures and anything that reminded me of you in a box so I wouldn't have to see it, but I hold onto the fact that someday I'll be able to think about those memories, and you, without going through a half a box of Kleenex and crying for 3 hours. It's just going to take some time I guess.

I don't know if you'll read this, or if you even care about me anymore. You always said you did, but words are just words. So if you are reading this, I guess I want to say thanks for the memories, even though they are kind of making my life miserable right now. And I want to say I'm sorry, that my fighting and my love and my caring about this friendship wasn't enough to save it. I know this is what I need to do, but that doesn't make it any easier. Hell, it's the hardest thing I've ever had to do. But there's only one direction to go from here I guess.

- Teacher Lady

Giving Thanks

I've got so many things to be thankful for. But one thing that I'm going to say I'm thankful for that may shock you is this: I am thankful for the copious amounts of stress in my life. You're probably saying to yourself "Kels, I think you're delirious from all that food you ate. Probs should wait to do this post when you are making a bit more sense." But I'm serious. I'm thankful for my stress, and let me tell you why.

* Being a first year teacher with a very full schedule and lots of cute little kiddos
- I've got a job, a job teaching something that I'm passionate about. And yes, my schedule is very full, and sometimes (more often than not) I get very overwhelmed, but I landed a good paying job in a good district right out of college. Definitely something to be thankful for. And the cute little faces I get to see everyday are definitely an added bonus.

* Not feeling like I have enough money to pay all my bills, eat, and have some fun on occasion
- I have a place to live. I have cable and internet, a smartphone. I just bought a brand new (literally, brand new) car a month ago. I always have food to eat. I might not get to buy as many "fun" things as I used to, but I still manage to go out every now and then and buy things that my dear mother would classify as "wants" instead of "needs."

* Missing some of my friends so much that it's like a piece of my heart is just MIA
- This one is hard. I used to see my best friends every single day, and now weeks go by without even having a conversation with them. I'm going to turn to the wisdom of One Tree Hill for this one:

As hard as it is to not see my friends or talk to them everyday like we used to (let's be honest, I can't stay up until 3 in the morning driving around anymore, because I'm on teacher time. Although, there have been some late mornings since I started teaching, but that's a story for another day,) it makes the times we do talk and see each other that much greater. Even if we are just making stupid jokes about our egos that nobody would find funny except us.


Anyone close to me will tell you that I don't handle stress well. And it's true. I don't. I stress eat, I don't sleep, I cry so much that my eyes are just now permanently puffy. But when you step back and look at the stress from a different angle, they really are stresses to be thankful for. I'll be much more thankful when some of them aren't as stressful, that's for sure, but being a recently graduated 22 year old, I can't complain too much about where my life is right now.

Easy come, easy go.

People come, and people go. A simple, true statement about everybody's life. Not everyone you meet is going to stay around forever. But sometimes if you are lucky enough, you get quite a few people who come into your life, and don't go. That's not always to say that their presence in your life won't have it's difficulties. There will arguments, there will be fights, there will be moments when you say the words "I wish I'd never met you," knowing full well that you don't mean that. There might be times when you don't talk for awhile- whether it's because you're having a disagreement, you had a stupid fight about stupid petty stuff, or you're both just really busy and although talking to them remains a priority, things like sleep and work and eating override that. Long-lasting friendships like this aren't easy, in fact they are EXTREMELY hard work. But it's the moments where you're drunk at a bar screaming about getting some "mother-effing chicken fries" and your best friend finally complies (after helping your drunk self down a couple flights of VERY steep stairs) that make all that hard work worth it. Moments when you miss your turn into town and end up taking the scenic route home, and pass the corner where we sat parked for 10 minutes because I was stubborn and wouldn't say which direction to turn. Memories that you'll never forget (and some memories that you can't really remember.) It's in those moments that the hard work of keeping up a long-lasting friendship is worth it. Sometimes, the effort of these relationships gets to you, and you just want to throw in the towel because it doesn't really seem like its's worth it. But you talk yourself out of it because you know you'd be 40 times more miserable without them in your life at all,  than you are with the arrangement that isn't perfect but doesn't completely suck. And we don't get to talk as much as we want, and we don't get to see each other as much as we want, but when I need them, they're always there for me. And I hope they know that the same goes for them.

One more thing.

Another thing they don't tell you about heartbreak: losing your best friend the first time sucks. But it's nothing compared to losing them the second time- after you've tried so hard and fought and fought and fought to stay best friends, because that's what you want so badly, but it doesn't work. That's when you spend a Sunday night watching Hallmark Channel sobbing as hard as you did the night he told you he just wanted to be friends, but this time you're crying because you're not friends anymore.

It's Yours

You've still got my heart. Take care of it please, because there is a giant hole in me where it used to be.

The heart-breaking thing about heartbreak

You know how everyone tells you that there is no pain in the world like that of your first broken heart? Believe them when they tell you that, because it is an extremely true statement. I've cried more in the last year since getting my heart broken than I have in my entire life, I've had more sleepless nights because of my broken heart than anything else, and I've generally been extremely pessimistic and hated life because of my broken heart more often than not. Loving someone and being willing to do anything for them, and to not have those feelings returned in the same way sucks beyond belief. But nobody every tells you about the worst part of a broken heart: losing your best friend in the process. Because that's what you were. Not only did I love you more than I ever loved anyone, but you were my best friend. Always there to talk to, to make me laugh, to make me smile, to tell me it was going to be okay when I felt like it would be anything of the opposite. Crush you to death hugs that made me feel better than nearly anything else in the world. And, now it's gone. I can deal with the fact that you broke my heart, I can deal with the fact that over a year later it still (obviously) really bothers me (barely, but dealing.) But I hate the fact that I lost my best friend in the process. And what makes me madder than a wet hen is the fact that all along it was all these sweet things about "you're still important to me," "I'm still going to be your best friend," "I'm still always going to be there for you." Apparently not so much.
I went into this whole thing knowing that my heart could potentially get very broken, and I was willing to take that risk. But nobody told me that I was going to lose one of the most important people in my life too. Believe me when I say I'd go back and change everything if I'd known this would happen.