My rose

Friday, January 21, 2011
11:07PM

Sitting down here to watch Up with John "on demand." I'm not sure that's either of our type of movie, but what else are we going to do on a Friday night? We went to Pizza Hut for dinner. I was still wearing the cardigan over a button up, and I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. I looked like I was forty years old.

This am (italics is messed up and will not turn off...) I wanted to go swimming at the Rec, but because of the snow, I decided it was safer to give the road workers a few more hours to clear the streets. I stayed in and did yoga instead. Sometimes Shiva Rea gets a little out there for me... don't get me wrong, I'm into the spiritual aspect, I just don't think I need to stick my tongue out and grunt to get at that aspect. That just makes me feel odd. But I did enjoy... sort of... the first meditation. You were supposed to visualize a flower at heart center and pull it up to third eye. That was fine, relaxing. My flower was immediately a white and yellow rose in full bloom. Then you were directed to visualize yourself in a river and to give your flower as a gift to everything... I tried and then before I could see anything else just started weeping. The universe did not want my flower, my gift, me. That's just generally how I've felt lately, like I have things to give to people and the world but that... are not accepted, and that hurts ridiculously.

My mom called me up a few weeks ago with some personality test thing she'd taken for school and wanted to know what my results were in comparison... I'd done that very test a few months prior and come up INTJ, which according to the results constitutes only a very bizarre 1% of the population. My mother went on to say how strange it was that I started out the extrovert and Carly the introvert and how it had changed. And she was hyper-interested, wondering why that happened, and I sort of just muttered, well... I think it was gradual. I so many times just came to people with everything I am, think, and feel, and as many times was rejected. So I stopped. She went on to say some interesting things about herself, which I'll not disclose her with the potential for others to read... but I think I always knew that. As a kid, I knew no strangers. Every summer we'd go on vacation, and I made friends with every single other child in the hotel. I had a new friend every day on the beach. I asked kids for their addresses. I wrote them letters. People fascinated me. I talked to everyone. Gradually, for various reasons, that changed.

Last night I was playing piano, singing a song that has had me baffled awhile. Suddenly, I got it. No conflict. It was what it was, and I sang as tears streamed down my face. It was fine, great, impossible. Some things are. And that sort of came back to me this morning in my meditation... I have me, myself, whatever gifts I might possess, in my mind I see this rose, and I've wanted so much to love and give myself to others. To me, five, six years ago, that would have been invariably a good thing, but as I felt more and more rejection through the years, I came to think that whatever I had originally thought I could offer was no more than malignancy to anyone else. I don't feel like going into a lot of details since I'm online... this is just quicker and easier than writing things out, so I'm more likely to do it on here. Anyflip... so it's been an issue trying to reconvince myself I had anything to offer. Based on the rose I saw in my meditation, I decided to make a picture of one such flower. I was going to hang it over my piano, I had decided... I'll look at it and try to love it and find it acceptable. It was only for me to look at to help myself, which is never a motivation really for my art. Obviously, it comes out of myself always, but this was just... different. I was sitting on the couch tonight, making this flower, kinda happy that I was doing it, sad about what it meant to me, and then John claimed it. He just said, "I want that one." I had to think about it. But in the end I gave it to him with an explanation of what I had made it for and this am's yoga. He said, "We do that a lot with each other." Yeah, I guess. Anyway, it is what it is tonight. My rose is sticky tacked to the wall above his computer.