Stories

Leo envies writers. 

She can say things and make them sound nice, but that's not what she wishes she could do. There are so many stories inside her head and it seems unfair to her that she keeps them hidden but she can't help it; the words never come out right, and she refuses to put down some twisted notion of the real story. 

She knows people who are absolutely amazing at storytelling, and she envies them for their ability to spin words in just the right way, and also their confidence to let other people into the worlds they make inside their minds. Leo has been telling herself stories since she was very small, and they are absolutely beautiful, but they are just pictures and feelings...Not words. She doesn't need words inside of her head, and things clash when she tries to pull them out. Journaling like this is fine; she has never had a problem saying what she thinks, given the time to write it out properly. It just seems a little unfair that she can be good at this kind of writing, but not the kind that she really wishes she could do. 

She can't even practice because she gets so ashamed at how horrible and fake everything she writes seems to sound that she deletes it before she can even begin properly. How does one get around that? Does the hatred of one's own work ever go away, or at least get easier to manage?

An Explanation of 3rd Person

This post is going to be in the 1st person, try not to get too confused, it'll go back to 3rd person after this. Promise.

Clearly, Leo is not my actual name. It would be kind of cool if it was, but it's not. Leo is the name that I gave myself; I created her several years ago and she's sort of taken on a life of her own. There is Leo and there is Sophie. Leo is is a happy, good-natured soul who always seeks to make other happy in any way she can. However, Sophie sometimes forgets the joy of other people and separates herself from others because she tends to only focus on the intellectual side of things. I suppose the reason Leo is so cheery and friendly is because I created her in a time when I still didn't really know how to make friends. It was easier to be Leo because I could be someone else, and 3rd person was easy because it's much easier to say what she thinks and feels than it is to say what I think and feel. For whatever reason, that distinction was enough for me to talk to people and make friends. 

Leo speaks in the 3rd person, but I can always tell the difference between speaking of her and speaking as her. There is always a small mental shift that happens when I'm Leo; I'm happier and more likely to express my emotions, I'm not as shy and I don't hold myself back. Leo is limited around other people, since I can't wander around speaking in the 3rd person all the time, but she appears to be more in charge either way; she knows how to use 1st person just as well as I do, it's just not as easy. Having Leo in charge is not a bad thing at all; she is me. A happier, friendlier me. We are not separate, even though there are clear distinctions between us.

 For all that she can appear like a child, Leo is not the one who is the most afraid. All of my insecurities come from the part of me who is Sophie. Leo is critical of herself, but she can always recognize the good aspects of herself, and she thinks she's pretty awesome thanks very much. She is also much more trusting; more likely to believe that we are safe. She knows that we will not be abandoned by people we love, because they love us as well. When I'm Leo, I can be much braver than I normally would be.

Of course, I'm not super happy all the time even in that mindset, but if I'm sad or angry when I'm Leo it is much easier to manage because it's easier to look at the happy side of things. I can't really figure out why it's easier, but it definitely is. I would be Leo all the time except for the fact that she has difficulty focusing on things she finds boring. Like homework. Also, I sometimes need to be able to be away from people which Leo absolutely hates, and in those times it's good to be Sophie so that I can go and be by myself without getting lonely.

I am a terrible writer and have no good way to wrap up this post. There is no way to make it end gracefully. Sorry. 

Dealing with Stress

Fun fact: The more necklaces, chokers, scarves, etc Leo is wearing around her neck directly relates to how emotionally unstable she is feeling. She always wears a little choker that is basically just a wire, thin and unnoticeable, as a comfort thing. However, she has recently been wearing other things as well because she needs them as a shield. It's one of the ways she handles stress. Leo is in her last year of high school and there is a lot of pressure. This year is the year they decide where the next step of their life is going to take them.

Everyone is tense, they all have very short tempers and get upset very easily. It's scary.
Leo's patience has been reduced, but she mostly shows her stress by getting horridly depressed. She's been holding in tears for the past few weeks and it's entirely unfun. Stress always does this and her dance class is a good outlet, but it only happens once a week. This year has been driving her insane.


Leo handles it by pulling at her hair. She has this lovely little OCD-type thing called Trichotillomania, which is basically where the person who has it obsessively pulls out their hair. Leo hasn't seen her eyebrows fully grown out since she was nine years old, which is when she started.

It's not a big thing for her, since she is able to rein herself in enough to keep most of her hair...some people who have it are totally bald and she's not nearly that bad, she just doesn't have many eyebrows or eyelashes. She used to be super ashamed of it though, because in her nine year old head something was Terribly Wrong with her and if any of her friends found out they would think she was insane and not want to talk to her again. She also sort of blames her skewed perception of her appearance on her hair pulling, because the mirror in her house was covered by construction paper for years so that she couldn't see herself, because her parents thought that would discourage her from pulling at her hair.

The whole thing was really handled quite badly by her family. They tried so many things to get her to stop, which did absolutely nothing and helped reinforce the idea that something was Wrong with her. She had a therapist for a while, and they tried bribing her and there was this weird medicine thing that her doctor said sometimes helped people with OCD and even though Trich isn't really OCD it's similar, so the medicine sometimes helps but not a lot (it didn't help). There was also the whole covering up the mirror thing. A few years ago she told them to cut it out, and she's been working on figuring out that there is actually nothing Wrong with her.

What angers her the most is when people assume it's some sort of self-injury thing. Like she does it because she hates herself or something. That's not it at all; it calms her down, helps her when she's stressed out or about to cry. She doesn't hate herself at all; she has the standard self-esteem issues one would expect from a teenage girl, but nothing major. She sees herself in a better light than most people her age see themselves.

Leo once heard Trichotillomania described like this: If you show a normal person two individual hairs and ask them to tell you the difference between the two they would look at you like you're crazy. They're just hairs, right? A person with Trich would describe how the colors are different, how one might be crinkled, one might be straight, one is thicker than the other, etc. And on top of that, they would be able to tell you which one is "wrong." 

Leo has found, however, that if she tries to get rid of a hair that is "wrong", it makes the ones next to where it was look "wrong" too, and so on and so on. She can't stop though, the feeling is hard to explain. There's this need that builds up and builds up and she can fight it for a while but eventually it snaps, and when she starts pulling out her hair there's this huge feeling of relief. It doesn't hurt, it feels good. It lets out her stress and anxiety and puts her into a sort of trance: calm and focused. She has to fight her way back out if she wants to keep her hair looking normal, so she's sort of given up on her eyebrows and eyelashes; those are small, and she likes the hair on her head better.

She decided to dye her hair pink in 9th grade as a way to sort of take ownership of her hair, and she's found that if she takes care of it and makes it how she likes it, she's less likely to pull at it. So her hair is her one vanity, and she dyes it strange colors all the time and she loves it. It's one of the best ways of expressing herself that she's found, because no matter what she wears she always has a bit of color on her just because of her hair. It's a very personal thing for her and not just a fashion thing, she doesn't care if other people like it or not because it genuinely makes her feel better about herself.

So that's her weird little trait, and if anyone actually reads this, she would love to hear about yours because it's kinda fun to take ownership of the things that make you imperfect, isn't it? 

Hugs

Leo recently had someone tell her that they didn't like hugs very much because too many hugs make them lose their value.

This confuses Leo greatly, because to her it would be tragic if no one wanted to hug her anymore. A hug tells someone "I notice you, I care about you, you're allowed to feel safe." When Leo gets a hug, she feels perfectly safe and cared about for those few seconds before the other person breaks contact...Sometimes it even makes her entire day. She never feels as though hugs lose their value, unless they're bad hugs. A bad hug is when the person is distracted or rushed; you can feel the difference between that kind of hug and a full-on good hug. Good hugs will never lose their value because they always allow Leo to feel loved, no matter how many she gets.

Cuddles, of course, are even better.

Leo has made it her goal in the past year or so to make as many friends as possible and to give them as many hugs and compliments (which are verbal hugs) as she can. This is because she has noticed a trend in her life where more and more people are becoming sad, or not enjoying the way things are or putting themselves down. Everywhere she looks, people are reinforcing negativity, and she would personally like to see a little more effort being put into reinforcing positivity. If she can make a friend's day better by giving them a hug, talking to them like they matter and not contributing to the little voice society has cultivated which tells each and every individual that they are not good enough, that is enough to make her life much brighter.

The funny thing about thinking positively is that it is completely discouraged as being naive and ignorant. Leo is neither. She knows that there are things in the world that completely suck, but does it change things at all to sit around depressed? It does not. Leo feels that her individual Happiness Campaign helps the world much more than it would if she sat around moaning about how bad things were. Happiness is contagious, thinking positively is a habit just like any other thought process. Leo would like to see more people training their minds to say good things instead of bad things, and if she can help her friends see things in a better light, hopefully her friends can help their friends and so on and so forth.

A network of happiness would be a nice thing to see.