I don’t know when it happened, but something changed in me this year. Over the winter, in the thick of school and worry (and probably mid-cup of tea) it hit me: if not now, when? It sounds corny, but after a year of plans falling through, it was like being hit by lightening- I have to stop planning and start doing. I have to find the energy inside myself to stay positive and charged up, all the time, and I have to do it like my whole life is at stake.

It sounds dramatic, right? But this is my reasoning: if all we have is what’s happening right now? Then in every decision, my whole life is at stake. And in that case, I want to be paying attention and going to bed tired because I’ve given everything I can. I want to make this life joyful and creative, and I want it to count. I have to start now - if not now, when?

So after a lot of thinking this is my birthday list. It’s big, it’s beautiful, and it’s all mine.

This year I will…

Start a real, official business and open up shop on etsy. I’ve filed all the government paperwork for this, but it won’t feel real to me until I see the cheques with my company name on them (which I’m so excited for!). I’ve been dreaming of different product lines all spring, I’m in the final stages of logo design with an amazing illustrator and this summer I’ll have lots to show you!

Be passionate, determined and single-minded. Working on Four Little Pots and doing more freelance work in the spring taught me an incredible amount about how much I can get done when I focus in and refuse to let anything shake me. Working on projects that I love energizes me. I’m aching for long work days and glue on my fingers, and I’m excited to dive in.

Get involved in the local scene. There are wonderful meet up groups, knitting clubs, yoga studios, and craft mafias where I live… and I need to get out there. The idea of making more friends who share my interests makes me really happy- I want to build a fantastic circle of local friends to complement my girls who are far and wide.

Remember my passions & invest in them. I have so many interests that have fallen by the wayside since university: city planning, religion, history, cheesy sci-fi, film noir, theatre, real literature – these all make up part of who I am and they surface in wonderful ways. I need to keep exploring, no matter what my main focus is.

Make lots of time to play with Mister. Because he’s amazing. I never imagined that another person could be so fundamental to my whole life, I never even imagined that marriage could change me, and yet here I am. Loved & fed & kept up to date on movies, American holidays, and state of the art puppy wrangling techniques. I want us to have more good food, belly laughs, field trips and adventures together, just to be gratuitous about the whole love thing.

Love this little blog! Connecting with you in this place makes me so happy, it’s one my most rewarding projects. I am so proud of what it has become! Making friends and learning the ropes of blogging has been an amazing journey so far. I want to keep making this space more and more me, and I can’t wait to see where that will take it.

Stay present. A lot of the time I get caught up in spinning narratives for myself – about anything from work to friends – and more often than not it ends up causing me to get stressed out and vacate what’s actually going on in this very moment. I’m working on living more intentionally and being slightly less day dreamy. Just slightly.

Stretch. I want to grow my comfort zone by challenging myself- this can be anything from starting to volunteer to getting a table at a craft show, or going to a professional development workshop. I want to stamp out the little voice that suggests I count my self out and tune into the one that wants to deliver above and beyond expectations.

Stay focused, work hard, and pay attention to the positive thoughts. Because the alternative really isn’t an alternative.

{Like the idea of a birthday list? Check out  Sandy’s & consider making your own!}

It was tribal and claustrophobic in the way only family can be, and as you can imagine that kind of an environment bakes rebellion into your system. So when I graduated, I did what you might expect: I took a year off to regroup, broke up with my awful high school boyfriend, cut off my hair, pierced my nose and started stretching my ears to a zero gauge.

I didn’t want to be a girl from That School and I didn’t want to go to school with Those Girls. I needed a clean slate, and if I couldn’t bring myself to move away I would be a new version of me. Only the new version of me was just as shaky and uncertain as the old version, and just as confused.

I don’t know how many people end up having their mom beg them to get tattooed, but mine did. My mom is crazy and wonderful, definitely not your normal mom. She got it into her mind that what would knock all of this rebellion out of my nineteen year old system was simple: I just needed to get a tattoo.

I started pulling together ideas and trying to find something that had meaning to me, that wouldn’t be trendy or strange when I was an old woman. I thought about the year that had put me in this strange and upset state. It had been so difficult I was nearly pulled apart.

I found out that I’d been repeatedly cheated on by my boyfriend of two years, who had spent the previous six month constantly accusing me of being unfaithful. He’d started telling me who I was allowed to see and who I wasn’t, in so many words. He was making threats. I was afraid of him and deeply sad all the time, but finally had the courage to break up with him. He retaliated by making up awful stories about things “I’d said” about my friends, until I had no friends left and was almost completely without support. He started following me, showing up at my house at all hours of the day and night, showing up at my friend’s houses, at restaurants when I was out to dinner. He was always sitting in the background to let me know he knew where I was. My phone rang all the time, and he would show up at my mom’s house, screaming and pounding on the door until we had to call the police. I was rocked by panic attacks constantly, and was eventually diagnosed with a completely out of control panic disorder that paralyzed me to the point of not wanting to leave the house.

It was months and months of heartache followed by months and months of fear. I became a paper shell of a person who might blow away or burst into flames at any moment. My mom looked into my eyes and told me we would get a restraining order, a therapist, and a tattoo*. And in the mean time she would make me some tea.

I tried to find an image that would reinforce everything I knew I needed to become: strength after being broken, peace after being afraid.

I’ve always been hypnotized by koi fish. I could stay at a pond for hours peering into their funny faces and looking at their sleek, beautiful bodies. They grow to be so large and so old, always wrapped up in the hush of underwater.

I took Japanese at school until I was in grade eight, and in their legends the strongest koi fish can swim upstream against anything. Eventually it swims to the top of a waterfall where it leaps into the air, and in the mist is transformed into a dragon. When I was nineteen I knew that I needed to be a dragon girl, no matter how scary that process would be. I knew I could make  a decision about who I wanted to be: the nervous girl at the back of the room, or someone whose happiness radiated out through their every motion and word. I could be someone joyful and unapologetic if I worked on myself every single day for as long as I could see into the future.

This May I’m turning twenty five, and I’m closer to being that girl than I ever could have imagined. In a couple of weeks I’m meeting to talk to my artist about another piece (this time on my shoulder, the chronic pain in my back is too bad to have this built on) to celebrate how far I’ve come.

Every now and then I think about what these drawings on my body will look like when I’m an old woman. Will I still like them? Will they still be me? But when I get to the heart of it, I’m not worried.

They wil be perfect because they are a part of me. An old and creaky, belly laughing dragon girl is still a dragon, after all.

{get a closer look here & here}

*While I spoke with the police a number of times, I was too anxious and overwhelmed to go through with getting a restraining order, and I can’t tell you how many times I wish I had gone through with it. Talking myself out of what my therapist and the police recommended was another part of justifying my boyfriend’s behaviour. If you are in an abusive situation, please seek the help and the protection you need to feel safe.

We started going west when I was about ten. We had never taken a road trip, but in the middle of another child custody stalemate, between another move to another school and packing boxes to move to another house my mom thought we could all use a vacation.

“Banf-f!”

She pronounced both F’s clearly and winked at my sister and I. I loved her but Dad’s jokes weren’t as funny when she told them.

Packed into the Jeep we borrowed from my grandpa, we rushed through the prairies like rocks being skipped over wheat fields towards the ocean. I would press my face up against the window in the early summer every year and watch Manitoba melt into Saskatchewan, then into the rolling foothills of Alberta until we finally skyrocketed towards the clouds and passed into British Columbia. We would camp beside lakes that were perfectly clear at your feet and the deepest royal blue where they rested at the feet of mountains, and shriek at how cold they were no matter how inviting they looked.

I didn’t go to B.C. for most of my teenage years, but during my first year of university I had to leave the prairies to clear my head. I had just met Mister, and after a series of very traumatic boy related events I wasn’t quite ready to cope with a relationship. We started dating and I went from “I’m okay” to “OKAY SO I CAN’T DEAL WITH THIS AT ALL” in pretty much one move, but I immediately knew what I had to do. I needed to think, and I needed space- the best place for that is Out West. I packed my things and stayed with a friend in rural BC for a week and then spent days wandering Vancouver without knowing anyone in the city.

While I was in rural BC I met a girl at the rural community centre who would become an extremely close long distance friend in the next years, and in exploring a city that was totally new I made peace with not having my bearings. Somewhere in English Bay I finally calmed down. I went home, let Mister in, and dug in to try and carve out a very new, very different life.

Something about going west has always been healing for me. My over active imagination can’t get over the spectacle of the mountains, the sheer scale of the lives they’ve swallowed up, and how living at the edge of the ocean while being pressed up to the shore changes my perspective.

I went west last weekend looking for peace that I haven’t been able to find in The Little House these past few months, but that’s not exactly what I found…

{image: nosexnobone}

There is something about affluent foreign ladies traipsing around far away countries to find themselves that just makes me cringe. It’s so unspeakably colonial. Wanting to see another country is one thing, but what were these women running from? Why did they need to leave their families to go somewhere so far away? What’s wrong with them? What about their daughters??

The only problem with that line of logic is that Elizabeth Gilbert doesn’t have children, and the woman who wrote Kabul Beauty School had sons…and that my mom started leaving the prairies to find herself in India when I was six.

I call the years from when I was six to eight years old my India years. My mother would go for 4 to 6 weeks at a time, seeing big cities and then going to a rural valley to practice meditation with other Westerners and their teacher. I mostly remember her coming back, she would come home to our farm house with horses in the back yard, and my little sister (who was four the first time she left) and I would lose our minds. I remember holding onto my mom as hard as I could, trying to drink in all the time we had missed. Her long blonde hair would be even longer than when she left, and she was even more beautiful than I remembered. I remember being extremely upset by how fast my image of her faded when she left. It made her even further away. Where now we have skype and broadband, in the early 90’s we didn’t have dial up in the country and the time difference made phoning next to impossible. I don’t think we ever spoke on the phone, I think it would have made her time away even worse.

When she came home her duffel bags were full of new fabrics and tiny presents for us that smelled wild and full of spices. She brought us notebook with pages that were extraordinarily thin, taught us to write in Hindi and brought us bindi’s that we wore on our foreheads with delight. Our whole language changed when she was home. If my mom was doing the laundry or making tea she was the laundrywalla or the chaiwalla (walla is a Hindi word for someone who is hired to do something). I learned how to pronounce complicated and strange sounds of another world, and read through the Bhagavad Gita with her. I liked the stories about how Ganesh got his elephant head the best.

If nothing else, my mom was alive with stories. There were ones about the buses that careened up the sides of mountains at speeds that made the western women sick with worry. There were the babies kept thin and sick at the airports by the beggars, and the dangerous power lines that were often fixed by men prodding at them with long poles and no safety equipment. There were the swami’s who were so powerful that when they meditated they could generate heat that would melt their jewelery and burn them if they didn’t take it off, and others who could create holy objects from thin air. It was a place alive with magic where things that couldn’t happen anywhere else happened every day.

I did yoga with her, meditated with her, and went to Hindu temple with her. I wrote letters to her Buddhist monk friend in my childish printing and he called me his dharma sister. And every time she left it was worse. I was convinced she would always be going away, and would never stay with us. I would dive into everything related to India so I could be closer to my mom. With everything I had, I tried to feel like India was exceptionally important so I wasn’t so unimportant and small.

India was a huge part of our lives until I was about 12 years old. I was all mehndi and plans to see the world, but as I got older my enthusiasm waned and I started to really think about that time. No matter how hard I try, I fundamentally cannot fathom what she was going through that made this necessary, and I don’t know if I ever will. I love my mom, and I know this couldn’t have been easy for her. I know she was trying to dream big - but I can’t help but be mystified when I think about it. But I love her, and while the years that led up to India and were followed by my parent’s divorce are still a mystery, I know she can’t answer my questions. I’ve tried to talk to her about it, but the person I want to talk to is the 31 year old version of her, while she’s on her way to the airport. The woman who I love and know now has as much trouble explaining it as I do understanding it.

I’ve poured over it for years and while it’s taken a long time, I’ve started to realize that the reason I can’t understand the mysterious and seductive country I’ve puzzled over for so long is because it isn’t a place on a map. India is a place in my mother’s heart that’s full of magic, chai, palaces and possibility that’s a million miles away from a normal life.

Or that’s what India used to be, at least.

It was St. Patrick’s day, I was 19, and I hadn’t seen Alex in months. Her short spikey blonde hair was almost in a buzz cut now, and her baggy men’s shirt and pants exaggerated the mock seriousness of her expression. She looked like a fine young English gentleman, and when I told her so she adopted an accent and started gesturing wildly, talking about her exploits over the past few months. I laughed while she told me about her newest girlfriend – not the one who was coming tonight, don’t confuse them! – she was always over the top. I shook my head. I told her I was single now, Mark was gone for real now, and that the scars on her arms were healing up really well. I held her forearm and inspected it while she pulled out her cigarettes.

“I love you. If you do any more of this I’ll fucking kill you, do you understand me, miss?”
“Young man to you, don’t give me away you maniac! Lets go outside, yes?”
“Yes!”

We spilled outside the bar, catching up on what we’d been up to since high school. I couldn’t believe that I knew this girl before she was this person, back when we were so small. I lit my cigarette off someone’s who was standing outside with us, then I leaned into her as she lit hers off mine.

“Hey dyke! Why don’t you light mine?”

I turned around and looked at the guy who was standing in front of me, I laughed and turned back. Alex’s friends were all over the map, but this blonde kid was really out there. What a weird approach! He looked like he should be hitting on 19 year olds and driving a pick up truck- just some normal looking guy.

“Hey dyke!”

This was a weird game he was playing, I wondered how they would have crossed paths.

“Hey dyke, I’m talking to you! Won’t you fuckin’ talk to people who aren’t queer?”

I looked up at Alex. Her jaw was locked and her eyes had gone hard. She didn’t know him. He was talking to me. He was talking to me. I felt a hand crush down on my shoulder as he spun me around, pushed his face in mine and shouted again.

“HEY QUEER!”

Without thinking I pushed him back with all the weight my body would allow, “Hey asshole! Leave us the fuck alone! You don’t say shit to me, and you don’t say shit to my girlfriend! Do you understand me?!”

Alex stood tall behind me. There was a tense quiet that lasted for a year.  He sized us up and took another step towards me, and in a minute she flew in front of me- this time we were both shouting, both moving forward, both going to guard the other. People stepped out from inside the bar and turned to see us facing off with this wall of a famer’s son. There was a deafening silence, until finally he wavered and walked away.

We stood, vibrating with adrenaline watching him retreat. Alex and I blinked hard for a moment and then tossed out cigarettes down and moved quickly back inside. Alex ordered us drinks, calm as anything while I looked around the bar, dazed. Wondering how many other people in the room had those words inside of them, waiting to explode.

K: “I didn’t think that people DID that anymore. Did we just get gay bashed? What just happened?”

A: “What just happened? Since when am I your girlfriend?!”

I took a long sip of my drink and shook my head at her amused expression, “Oh shut up,” I laughed, feeling shaky and as tough as a tomcat, “you belong to the world.”

{image: lolita.se}

There were horses in our little barn, cows and farm animals across the road at my friend Brent’s house. I knew which electric fences were on at what time of day and how hay is loaded into the lofts of old fashioned barns. I knew that when my hands got cold I could find my dad’s horse and put my hands under his chest, that he would drop his huge head down and hug me into him, making me even warmer. He would steal the toque off my head by its pom-pom, trotting away from me as I laughed and shouted – he would wave it just out of my reach as I jumped and grabbed for it while he shook his head proudly until he was finished playing and would drop it as I finally reached it.

I knew how, in the winter mornings, when the sun was too eerily bright, that meant it was really cold and when I went to visit the horses they would have beards and eyelashes made of ice crystals and would breath impossibly hot, earthy air on my face when I kissed their spongy noses.

We only lived in the country like that for a few years before my parents got divorced. I was seven and, being old enough to understand what was happening, and being incredibly sensitive, I didn’t handle it well. I know that I was happy a lot of the time – but the way I dealt with it was to block everything out. From the time that I was 7 to the time that I was about 13, I only have a handful of memories. My sister can recall things that we did that we haven’t talked about since she was five or six – but unless an event has been told again and again as a family story, I probably don’t remember it.

One of the things that I do remember was that while we lived out in the country my favourite game to play with my blonde, fey little sister was Mukluks. I didn’t know what the word meant, but it sounded wild – and so the Mukluks were people living in the forest around our house. My sister and I would track through the woods finding evidence of their existence (deer trails) and be on constant guard against their kid napping attempts. There was danger at every turn! We were the last guard keeping them from the house! It was an exciting game that had us running through the woods many afternoons.

Every winter when we get past the first date with cold, when the temperature stops wildly fluctuating, and locks in at -20 C or colder, I remember when we would play those games. There was so much possibility – it felt like just by believing in Mukluks, they could materialize from behind the snowflakes at any moment.

This winter, as an early Christmas present, I received my first real pair of Mukluks. I wore them to dinner last night, and when I saw my sister she saw my new shoes and immediately laughed,”I THOUGHT THEY WERE REAL! I believed you!”

We were in one of my favourite, run down little restaurants, where the owner is a Korean PhD who knows me by name. It’s closing down next month, finally coming to an end. As I laughed with my sister I shook the pom poms around in circles, smiling. Mine look pretty real to me!

Handmade Black Mukluks, $200 CAD

But I didn’t want people to make friends with someone who looked like the Old Me. The Old Me had a boyfriend who had been publicly cheating on her for six months before she broke up with him. The Old Me was wildly angry about her friends choosing him over her. The Old Me was always placating, accommodating, never standing up for herself. The Old Me had to hit the road, she had too much baggage.

I’d thought long and hard about how to get rid of the Old Me. My tactic was mostly superficial – I pierced my nose, got a tattoo to remind me that I was different and stronger, I was enrolling in university without knowing anyone I would be in classes with… but it wasn’t quite enough. I still recognized the Old me in my face and my want to change was so strong that it made me want to scream.

It was definitely the hair. What else could it be? It had to go.

I went to a friend of a friend at her cool urban salon. The walls were pink, exposed brick and mirrors everywhere, framed in by flat panel TVs. This place looked like somewhere The New Me would like. So I uttered the words that would banish the Old Me forever.

“I’m thinking a shaggy pixie cut.”

To my credit, I brought in pictures. I was overflowing with Mandy Moore & Elisha Cuthbert pictures. I said “pixie” but all of the photo evidence I brought suggested something 3″ long at the shortest. I meant something light and flippy. My friend of a friend talked to me about what I wanted & we agreed. She started cutting from the back, and I felt so much lighter! I could feel the Old Me falling away, like someone different would be revealed when we carved some of my length away.

She had cut about a quarter of my head and was working up towards the front when she had to step away away for a moment. I turned my head to admire the first glimpse of my new haircut…..and my hair was a quarter of an inch long.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED HERE?!!

My stomach jumped into my throat, I was dizzy, reeling, I wanted to go back and re-do the past five minutes. Why was she cutting it so short?? Why was…it was…. and it slowly dawned on me that there was absolutely nothing I could do. She had cut too much of it too short for me to be able to say anything. It couldn’t be fixed, I had to just let her finished. I was paralyzed. So I sat and chatted with her, trying to mask my horror, while she cut away all of my hair and proceeded to “clean it up” with clippers. It was a quarter of an inch long on the sides and just shy of a half an inch long on the top.

I walked to my car – hyper aware of the different looks I was getting now that my shoulder length wavy locks were gone – and tried to breathe normally. I fell into the drivers seat and pulled down the mirror to have a look. I officially had a buzz cut. This was just what I needed. Now everyone who knew the Old Me would think that I was having a nervous breakdown. This would be further evidence of my state of mind, and I would be a joke to them.

Sitting in the front seat of my little blue civic, I had a total and complete meltdown. So complete that the first person I called wasn’t even a sympathetic friend. The first person I called, howling & sobbing, was my mom. Somehow I managed to drive myself home, shaking with anger and betrayal. The New Me was just as much a stranger as the Old Me. How had I possibly managed this?

The months after getting my hair chopped right off were hard. I didn’t ever consider myself a superficial person, but I guess my hair was more a part of my identity than I knew. I felt naked and raw all the time. My grandparents were concerned about me. My friends around the university didn’t recognize me for weeks – a complete blessing – and thankfully by the time they did I had built myself up to the point of being able to wave and enjoy the shock and horror of their reactions. They couldn’t handle my transformation – couldn’t process it – and some part of me relished that. I was unfathomable to them. Good for me! It said more about them than it said about me.

It took me a while, but eventually I started to love my short hair. I maintained it at a super-short length for about 8 months. I looked beautiful in my own way – my eyes popped like nothing else and while I had nothing to hide under, my features and personality were feminine in contrast with my little cut. I got more female attention than I could shake a stick at, which I was thoroughly amused & flattered by. I felt like a walking social experiment, guys & girls who would have never given me a second look when I had long hair were suddenly coming out of the woodwork, and my old friends had no idea what to make of me. I stopped trying to hide & really enjoyed that no one could quite put their finger on me at first glance anymore.

I started dating Mister when I had my buzz cut. He was the T.A. for one of my university classes – we started dating in January 2004 and had moved in together by February 2005. My hair cut was far too expensive for me to maintain when I moved out, so I started growing it out.

The “Shaggy Pixie Cut”, 4 or 5 months into growing it out

It’s taken four years but I’ve finally got the long hair that I’ve been growing my hair out for. I really love it – but I don’t let it become part of who I am. The Old Me was a girl who was paralyzed – by her relationships, friendships, image, and the imagined expectations of others. The New Me? She’s a lot more laid back, someone I would want to hang out with. She has days where she feels like a million bucks and days where she can’t get out the door in one piece. She almost never looks perfect in pictures, is unsure of herself sometimes, but she’s happier than the Old Me ever was.

With my long hair & the way I dress I think it’s easier for people to feel like they have an idea of who I am just by the way I look. If that makes them comfortable then I’m fine with that – but the New Me showed me that really, they don’t have any idea of who I am or how strong I am. They might think they have me pegged, but they really can’t put their finger on me, and that’s exactly how I like it.

Watching Death Cab for Cutie take the stage and pull the crowd in was incredible, they had the proper vibrancy to flannel ratio of any good Washington kids. As they played the huge venue started to sound like it had the air sucked out of it as people started to listen. Young Mister Ben Gibbard repeatedly hurled a guitar (not in a ‘catch me’ way) at some poor guitar tech when the pedals and guitar weren’t picking up after repeated examination, which was hard to watch cause the kid could have been hurt but the rest of the band made small talk while Ben smashed his pedals into the ground and generally lost his shit.

But you know what? They closed with the 12 min. epic Transatlanticism so I love them, and Murphy’s Law dictates if you don’t do a sound check prepare for things to go wrong. Learn the law kids!

Neil Young was outstanding, his gravelly and keening voice whipped the crowd into a frenzy and for someone who has sung their songs many thousands of times, it all sounded fresh.

My city is where Neil grew up and its denizens are nothing if not bitter about their best and brightest growing up and blowing away without coming back to say hi or raving about how amazing his birthplace is. Like residents of anywhere in Canada other than Toronto or Vancouver We have a major inferiority complex – we want to know that good things come from our breeding grounds because that is somehow reflective of us, and who we are. Last night Neil finally talked to the crowd, which he hasn’t in previous performances here, and finally praised us. I think everyone who was at the show left feeling vindicated, proud, and mightily relieved.

That inferiority complex is something that’s hard to reckon with when you live in a place where, eventually, nearly everyone leaves. Taking the leap from renting to owning a home here this summer was a lot of fun, but also terrifying because nearly everyone I know has plans kicking around the backs of their heads to eventually up and leave. What does it say about the people who stay? Do we settle? Do we under achieve? Is there a giving up?

I don’t know how long I can see myself here for exactly, but I probably be one of the people who stays here. I like that I’m so close to Minnesota, and I’m hoping to eventually telecommute & freelance so that it won’t matter where I live.

When I get off the bus and start walking towards home, every so often Mister has been able to sneak off work early and takes the puppies for a walk to the bus to greet me. From blocks away I can see his long black work coat, and the bounding balls of energy that walk beside him. I’ll wave, and he’ll wave back, and we’ll wait to see how long it takes for the puppies to recognize me and start running at full speed towards me.

It’s moments like that where I feel like I could stay here forever. The city that my hobbit home resides in will be between me, the mister, and the puppies – and I don’t need Neil Young’s approval.