Rumour has it.

Right now, I feel allergic to sleep. So I'm blogging.

Sometimes I have these really poisonous thoughts and I don't know how to shake them but I feel like if I write them here they'll either languish in cyberspace and die on their own or someone will read them and tell me they feel the same way and I'll know it's not so strange.

I like to wear weird clothes in weird ways and it feels good in my bedroom while I'm getting ready but the second I step out of the house and people look at me in my wacky outfits, I always imagine that they're thinking "if that girl was thinner, she might be able to get away with that". Or if I was pretty and elegant, I could wear the hats I like and the jewellery I want. But I'm this incredibly ordinary-looking, chubby girl who just loves to wear bright, primary colours with bow ties and top hats and stripey socks and it's just painful for the people who see me.

Everyone acts like you graduate from high school and everything changes and somehow you're fixed and you become an adult but you don't. There's no age, no line, no rite of passage that will turn you into a mature person if it's not who you are. And I'm so afraid I'm not. I don't know how to pay an electricity bill and my bathroom cleaning skills aren't up to snuff and ringing up to order pizza or arrange Doctor's appointments still scares me. My friends drive cars and pay rent. Why am I so incapable of that, still?

People always look at me like I'm crazy in tutorials when I speak. The fine line I walk between insecurity and over-confidence means that half the time I think it's because I'm blowing their minds with my left-of-centre theories and the other half I think it's because they're imagining gluing my lips shut to stop the stupid from coming out. And what if all this thinking I do, all this study, all this talking, never gets me anywhere and I don't achieve anything and these royally awkward and self-reflective years at University were all for nought, just one long, indulgent daydream?

My Dad had a skin cancer cut off his (bald) head a few days ago, has ten fresh stitches and thus needs to wear a hat for a while to cover it. So I think I'll wear hats all of this week out of solidarity with him and also as an opportunity to indulge my hat fetish in a way that is justifiable and educational. I thought I might make it part of my "looking at a looking" assignment for an Anthropology course on our relationship with the body. People like to stare at the fat girl in the hat, as I've mentioned earlier, so it should provide easy fodder for my notes.

There's so much more, about how I'm obsessed with losing weight and growing my hair out right now so that people will like me, and how I want to go a week without speaking and see if it makes me a better person (one that people will actually like rather than tolerate) and how half the time gender studies discussions make me love my female identity and hope for a great future and the other half I resent everything, most of all gender studies discussion.

My life is this great, happy, busy, stressful, awful place to be and I'm lovehating it constantly. Especially now.

Little Boots.

When I laced you up,
we didn’t dream of what you’d see
that you had a purpose or life
outside of moving me.

We were fearless but shocked
when you stepped into the street-
you’d never known the terrain
that we went to meet-

You saw the sun shine in Ireland;
snow on the rugged moors;
pretty parks in New York;
my feet covered in sores.

You were shiny 'til then;
unblemished and young
With squeaky movements and
a stiffer tongue.

Time changes everything
no matter where you are
though travelling will ensure
the hasty getting of scars;

the talking lines you’ve acquired
from long conversations with paths
and sand you collected
from sudden saltwater baths.

Once, we were different;
you hurt my toes.
I wasn’t ready to feel
the things that you know,

but then I walked all those miles-
further than I’d guessed-
your strength never wavered
as we walked further west.

And the sun finally set
as we finished our tired trek
but you can’t retire, not yet.
Though you’re a glorious wreck

with holes at your edges
and dirt crusted to your sides;
you’ve got the perfect voice
to narrate my lived lives.