"but no one ever told you it would be perfect"

 I keep wanting to buy ever more glitter from colourpop, but I'm really not wearing enough to justify it.  My arm is still in the sore part of post-tattoo, but this tegaderm stuff seems kind of magical. (Not peeling it off prematurely is haaaard.)  

 

I asked Abundance last night if I was finally heavily tattooed, and he said yes, but I still don't feel it. I suspect I never will.  I did ask Light to promise to support me forever if I can't ever get another paper-shuffling job because this tattoo really puts the nail in the able-to-look-bland coffin.  

 

I still care how I'm perceived, even if I'm trying ever harder to give zero fucks. I maybe want to look counter-culture enough, though I'm not sure enough for what?  membership into a secret club? To instanteously give the impression of bad-assery? I assume that if you want to give the impression of bad-assery, you automatically can't, that it's a title only conveyed by not caring about whether or not you have it. I wonder why I care about how I'm seen.  I wonder if there's a particular audience I'm trying to play to that I've only identified subconsciously.

 

And the rest of this is just for me.  Something everyone else can see, but are the things I need to remind myself to be me, to stay me, that there are things that comfort me and things that protect me and things that ground me and stories I want my skin to at least hint at, because stories are important and the fact that I'm still telling this story and not some other one is important.

 

Polyglot (boisterous's fascinating and adorable girlfriend) (yay poly?) came over on Wednesday and we ended up sharing things we'd written and now there's even more old words floating up to the surface of my mind. "gather my symbols like stones / to ward off the spring"

 

Therapy was rough, as per usual. Talking about other people's parents and other people's parents health and other people's complicated feelings about their parents, and not being sure that I'll have any particular feelings when my parents die.  I mean, I might, but I almost hope I've given up enough that I've already experienced the loss.   

 

For all my talk, I haven't actually cut them completely out of my life, I talk to them every couple of months or so, I visit them occasionally and usually once around the winter holidays, I call on birthdays.  But I don't think I feel any particular interest in them as people, I don't feel like I owe them anything.  And of course, the fact that they called me ungrateful regularly as a kid makes me wonder if they were right, maybe I should be feeling gratitude and when I'm already feeling like a failure of a human for not loving them, like a failure of a human for not being lovable, being ungrateful slots real nice into that narrative.

 

I need to remember that starting an entry after 9:30 never works out in my favor and if I'm really dedicated to posting daily, I either need to start in the morning or build up a backlog of posts.