"Get Busy Living, or Get Busy Dying."
�I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.� - Oscar Wilde
Buon giorno a tutti! Jess here. I am filling in for the lovely Jackie, as she did me the great honor of providing me with my very first and very lovely guest entry. I hope that I can bestow upon her diary the same eloquence, wit, and charm that she bestowed upon mine.
To be honest, when I first started reading Jackie (whom I found through Imadad2, I was not sure that we had all that much in common. Here was this busy mother of 3 and stepmother of another 3, somewhat happily married, and successful. I always envision people with children to be on another planet. I have never felt like I could relate to them. I felt as if they had some special charm or hold on life that I just could never comprehend. Probably why I always try (and fail) to avoid visiting my boyfriend�s sister and brother-in-law. Married, baby, successful. But Dukkha surprised me and really opened my eyes. Her sarcastic sense of humor and intelligence to boot was what really captured me. So even though our lives are infinitely different, our minds were alike, and as you know�great minds think alike. She has become one of my very favorite diaries, and she is one of the few that I sincerely would not mind meeting in real life if the opportunity arose.
Here I am. And it is a pretty accurate picture of my state of mind.
If you visit my diary, you are often going to find me pissing and moaning about this or that, something or another. I am a depressive, angry bitch who just started meds to help deal with generalized anxiety disorder and depression. Yay. I work a job that I hate even though I believe it is a good cause (with a manic-depressive, morally repugnant co-worker and an evil Jabba the Hut boss), I live with my boyfriend who drives me nuts but is my soul mate, I am obsessed to an unhealthy degree with my two cats, and I spend the days wasting away wishing that I could return to the lovely city of Firenze, Italia, where I lived for a few years. Come on, you can admit it, you are so jealous.
Like many others, I wracked my brain trying to think of what I would write in Jackie�s diary that would do justice to her daily ramblings. One thing that truly comes to mind is friendship, or lack thereof, for me.
Over the course of a few years, my social status has gone from existent to non-existent. Plain and simple. Becoming one half of a very isolated and poor couple will do that to you, but also growing up and realizing the kind of people that you want or do not want in your life also contributes to this. But all in all, it has made me feel very empty and alone, even though I am the last person to ever admit that. In just the past year, I �broke up� (on amicable terms, I guess) with my female best friend because she got back with her pathetic, cheating, rat of a boyfriend, told off my male best friend for flaking on me repeatedly and have not spoken to him since, and shunned most of my college friends; partly because they smoke, and I quit almost a year ago (a year in January, baby), but mostly because the majority of them are jobless, party every night, and have no idea what it is like to work a full-time job and pay bills. Some of this was situational, and some of it was just me being a big old bitch.
I have a tendency in most of my real relationships (friendship or romantic) to find a way to sabotage the relationship unintentionally. I can be very critical and judgmental and unapologetic about it, but I also strive to live according to ideals that I have set for myself, and I find myself getting impatient with those who live in ways that I just cannot rationally understand. But then the pendulum sways and I can be entirely too forgiving and generous, which often makes me resentful of people. So, it is a constant battle. But mostly, I am finding it hard to relate to people these days. When I am sitting with old friends having coffee, I feel like I have nothing to say to them and often feel uncomfortable. When my boyfriend is debating with people, I am often a silent partner (unless of course it is in regards to one of my aforementioned ideals) and often feel as if I have nothing to contribute. I have a terrible time making decisions, even over things as ridiculous as deciding on where to eat. I tend to have high expectations of people, and I often feel let down when people do not act accordingly. Terrible shrew, I know.
I think what is wrong with me is that I am just discontent with life. So then I find things wrong with the people around me. I can dissect and pick a person apart in my head without even saying a word to them. I lose my temper and have terrible verbal fights with my boyfriend. I get unnecessarily stressed and have panic attacks. See why I am in therapy?
But D-land has been a good outlet for me. I have been able to chronicle my pathetic, boring life and all of its discontents into one solitary journal where I do not have to worry that anyone in my real life will stumble across and expose me. I have also made some of the best and true kind of friends that anyone could ask for. People on D-land have reached out to me when my so-called �real� friends were nowhere to be found. Nobody on D-land ever encouraged me to smoke when I was trying to quit, like my female ex-best friend. Nobody ever made me feel bad for going to bed early and not going out because I had to get up early in the morning for work. My so-called �real� friends do this and call me a �yuppie.� And I have met quite a few other people who are also on medication and in therapy for mental disorders. Everyone in my real life would belittle my problems and just find excuses for why I was acting the way that I was acting. So thank you, D-land.
After having said all that, if you still want to read me, I am locked, but happy to give out the log-in info, granted you are not related to me in some way, or are my psycho ex-best friend trying to get my log-in info by pretending to be someone else.
I am going to leave you with one of my absolute favorite pictures of the lovely Jackie. I love it because she is with two of her beautiful children, and she looks genuinely happy.
I heart you, Jackie!