On cancer and cars.

(And also worry and goals, but those aren't as nice of an alliteration.) 

Hi friends. Remember how back in January I said that I didn’t make resolutions, I make goals, because goals are something that can always be added to, or changed? Here I am, proving my own point, because I’m going to add a goal right here, right now. And that goal is this: By February of 2018, I want to be a licensed driver. That’s right, you heard (or rather, read) correctly – I, at the ripe old age of twenty-two, have still yet to get a driver’s license. Sorry, I’m not all that sorry.

            Here’s the thing – I wasn’t going to make this post. Mainly because this is a thing I am a little embarrassed about. (More than a little – I am a lot embarrassed about it.) I know it’s ridiculous – I’ve been old enough to drive for six years now, and the closest I’ve gotten to a license is a permit (now expired) and a couple of driving lessons with my friend K, who seems to constantly be helping me better myself. It’s gotten to the point now where I know when I tell people I don’t drive, they immediately assume it’s because I got my license taken away, which… no. It’s honestly a little insulting, the question of, “Is that a choice, or…?” but to be fair, I do bring it upon myself a bit.

            So yeah. I wasn’t going to make this post, because I’m embarrassed, and it honestly involves more personal introspection than I was certain I was comfortable with sharing on the Internet, where everything lives forever. But we’re reading this book about fear and anxiety with the fourth graders, and talking about our anxieties and how to deal with them, and that’s honestly what made me feel like I had to post this. Because if I’m being completely honest, the reason I haven’t gotten my license yet is simple: I am terrified of being behind the wheel of a car.

            If you had asked me about why I didn’t have my license as little as a year ago, these are the reasons I would have given you:

1.     I went to a charter school – Driver’s Ed wasn’t offered during the school day like it is at the regional high school, so I would have had to attend at night, which felt like a big deal for sixteen year old me.

2.     I skipped a grade, so I was younger than all of my classmates. The people I knew who would be going to Driver’s Ed at the same time all went to the other high school, so they wouldn’t be there at night with me, and all of the kids who I was in classes with every day had already gone through it the year before. Again, felt like a big deal for sixteen year old me.

3.     I didn’t have much of a social life in high school (read: I didn’t have one at all.) There was nowhere I wanted to go that I couldn’t get my mom to drive me.

4.     Driver’s Ed was expensive. There were other things I wanted to spend my money on, namely a new computer and books. (Spoiler alert: there’s always other stuff I want to spend money on rather than what I should be spending money on. Or not spending money.)

5.     Multiple doctors had told me that with the insane cocktail of painkillers I was on to deal with some really fun health complications, there was no way I was going to be allowed behind the wheel of the car. By the time I was off all of them, not having a driver’s license was my way of life.

Those reasons seemed more than valid to me, so I never really thought past them. Then one day this summer, a new friend asked me why I didn’t have my license, and, knowing my past, asked me if it was because of all of the crazy health-related things in my life. And CLICK. Some gear I wasn’t aware was malfunctioning started working at full speed again and I knew that while all the reasons listed above were a good cover story, the true reason was that I was scared out of my mind of being behind the wheel of a car. I think for me, what it comes down to is that there were a lot of things that happened in my life that were life-altering, life-threatening. And I wasn’t in control of any of them, but they still happened. Why would I want to put myself in charge of something that could kill me? Why would I want to make the decision to get behind the wheel of a car, knowing that car accidents are things that happen? It feels stupid, to choose to do something that I know could end with me seriously injured or dead, when those are things that I already had to resign myself with many times before, and it WASN’T due to a decision I had made.

Logically, I know this is ridiculous. Logically, I know that literally everything you do could result in something bad happening. That’s just how the world works. The odds of something bad happening when you’re doing every day things are slim to none, and I can do other things with no problem. Hell, I have no problem being the passenger in a car. It’s just the thought of being in control of it that freaks me out, I think. I’m not sure.

Another friend of mine tells me that as soon as I actually am behind the wheel of a car, I won’t feel like this. She’s probably right – I have driven before, and I wasn’t having a panic attack the whole time, or unable to do it. The problem is that this discovery I’ve made of being scared is still sort of new. So when my brain tries to “redirect” me, telling me that I’m too busy, or have something else I have to do, or literally any other excuse it can come up with before the acceptable amount of time for a response to the question of “do you want to go driving this weekend?” has passed, I don’t have the skills to be able to recognize that avoidance and avoid it. (Avoiding avoidance, my mother would be so disappointed in my lack of vocabulary here.) So I’m working on being able to work on this fear. I have a lot of people in my corner (hi, people. Thanks for coming.) who are willing to help me, and a few people in my corner who are willing to kick my ass into gear until I have a driver’s license (you know who you are. Love you too.).

Woof. Okay. This was a long blog post, and a hard one to write. Seriously – it’s taken me over a week to write because I’ve been avoiding this topic like it’s a bill collector. Because once it’s out there, it’s real, and it’s something I have to work on. And it’s going to be hard. But here’s the deal – when it comes down to it, having a license is part of being a functioning adult in today’s society. And I need to be that. (A functioning adult, that is.) Plus, practice what you preach – I can’t tell a bunch of ten year olds to be bigger and better than their worry and not take the steps to be bigger and better than mine. To be fair, I have a lot of other worries to tackle that are quite a bit larger than just not having a driver’s license. But this is a good start.

Alright friends. Until next time. Love you, mean it, bye.

The beginning of the "junk habits" overhaul...

            Hi friends. I’m going to start this off by informing you that I am not a messy person, no matter what this post leads you to believe. Got it? Me, Hannah – not a messy person. Now we can move on.

            As I said in my last post, I live with my mom and sisters in the same house that I grew up in. I’m still in the same bedroom I’ve been in since I was about eight or nine years old. It’s been through multiple arrangements and three different wall colors. The furniture has stayed the same, with two exceptions: a bookshelf and a wall shelf, both added within the last six years. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with my room (other than it being a tad on the small side); but I’ll admit to feeling sometimes as if there’s nothing really right with it either. (I’m being a tad dramatic here, but doesn’t it make everything feel more interesting?)

            But here’s the thing: as much as I do love my bedroom, it is definitely very small. And as happens when you live in the same place for your whole life, I have accumulated a lot of stuff. And the thing with having a small area to do with as you please is that there isn’t a whole lot of room for this plethora of stuff. And so it starts to feel cramped. And cluttered. And dare I say it, messy. Now, some people may be able to live with a messy room. I know people who get mad when their room is clean because then they have no idea where anything is. Organized chaos, they call it. That’s all well and good – I can do a bit of organized chaos. It can be exhilarating, honestly. But I can’t live in it. For me, when I live in a space that’s cluttered, that isn’t organized and doesn’t seem clean, that’s how my brain feels. And if you’ll remember from my last post, I have some goals I’m trying to achieve this year. Goals are hard to achieve when you feel like you don’t have your shit together, and a disorganized room makes me feel like I don’t have my shit together.

            Since I’m trying to be all introspective and junk this year, here are the issues I have with my room:

·     There’s too much stuff. This is the overarching issue – too much stuff, too little space. The reason there’s too much stuff is because I am a packrat. I keep EVERYTHING. Case in point – behind my dresser, there are probably about twenty-five paper bags that I have thrown back there instead of throwing them out or recycling them, because WHAT IF I NEED THEM?!?!? (Spoiler alert: I’ve never needed them.)

·     Since there’s too much stuff, there’s stuff everywhere. On the floor, mostly, because any free space on top of shelves or tables has been claimed long ago. One of my more genius moments was when I realized that gravity made it so that I could hang clothes on hangers without having a closet by balancing the tips of the hangers on one of the two shelves in my room. #physicswinning

·     I definitely have a habit of just dropping things on the floor. Since there’s not a lot of room, it feels like nothing has a set place to go. So I get a bit lazy and just sort of put things wherever they fall. Definitely not the best habit I could have formed. This issue is really all on me.

·     All of these issues snowball and combine into me feeling like crap. Like I said, I’m not a messy person, inherently. And no one likes feeling like they’re living in squalor. (Again, a tad overdramatic. But hyperbole is one of my favorite writing tools, so you’re just gonna have to learn to love it if you don’t already.)

The "before" panoramic shot.

So how do I fix this? There are a few options. One – I could burn the house down. Bit extreme, really. Plus, it would lead to a whole host of other problems that I really just don’t have time for. (In case it isn’t obvious, this is a joke.) Two – I could just embrace the mess and try my very hardest not to let it bother me. This is not a good option, because if you know me at all, you know this to be pretty true: I cannot let anything go. There’s stuff that happened years ago, that other people have DEFINITELY forgotten, that I still freak out about. Elsa and I are pretty much exact opposites. (Though to be honest, I don’t think she’s as over everything as she says she is. But that’s a whole different post about the virtues and vices of Frozen, so we’ll move on.) Three – I could keep doing what I have been doing, which is trying to keep the piles on the floor contained to only a couple of main areas, cleaning up when I feel like I can’t even sleep in my room because the mess is too much, and doing a BIG clean-out two or three times a year, where I usually end up throwing out about half to a full bag of stuff I just don’t need anymore.

That third option has been my go-to for a while now, and on the surface, it works. It’s minimal effort with the most bang for my buck. But it doesn’t truly fix anything. It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a cut that needs a couple stitches – sure, it helps keep the blood from getting everywhere, but it doesn’t actually help your body heal. For whatever reason, I’m tired of getting out the box of Band-Aids. So I decided to make a bigger change.

So today (today being Saturday, January 14, 2017), I undertook the task of an overhaul. I spent four hours going through everything in my room, doing a bastardization of Marie Kondo’s de-cluttering tips from The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, where I pretty much just looked at everything, asked myself if there was really a reason for it to be in my life, and if that reason made me happy, and if the answer to either of those questions was no, I tossed it. (To be fair and completely honest, there were a few things I did not do this with. I found a lot of old photographs. There’s really no reason to keep them, other than they’re fun to look at occasionally, and there was room in my under-the-bed container for them, so I kept them. Same with a few other pieces of nostalgia from high school, and a journal I found that I kept during one of the hardest years of my life. This is why I say I did a bastardization.) (I also say I did a bastardization because I haven’t actually read the book yet. #oops.) I had to continually remind myself that not everything is as important as I think it is, and that it’s okay to throw things out, even if maybe one day in the future you end up needing the thing you throw out.

I got rid of a lot of stuff. Four trash bags worth of junk went into the garbage, and one trash bag full of clothes I don’t wear or even look at anymore went into the corner of the living room so that I can bring it to the Red Cross donation bins ASAP. I feel like I need to throw out more stuff, honestly. I had told a friend of mine yesterday that this was what my plans for the day were, and when I texted her to let her know I had achieved it, I told her that it didn’t feel “done.” But I think that I was just getting trash-happy. Throwing out more stuff just for the sake of throwing stuff out wouldn’t have ended well, I can say that with the upmost certainty. I also am quite annoyed with my cleaning job, just because it had the unfortunate side effect of me needing to go buy a new computer charger. (While I was vacuuming, some cords got tangled and ended up knocking my laptop off my bedside table. Originally I thought the fall had broken my entire computer, but it just broke the charger. All in all, a better outcome than it could have been, but it’s still almost $100 I would rather have not spent today. Damn you, Apple and your inconceivable prices!) But all in all… I feel accomplished. There’s a whole lot of clutter that was in my life this morning when I woke up that isn’t in my life anymore now. That’s never a bad outcome, really.

Here's the "after!" The picture makes it hard to tell, but it really is so much better than before.

This corner was one of my biggest problems before. Now... things have their own spots! Yay!

The trick now will be to keep it this way. I’ve found some places for things that didn’t have places before, and I’m going to try and make a conscious effort to put them there after I’m done using them. It will feel like a lot of effort until it becomes a habit, because that’s the way life works – habits can’t become habits overnight, no matter how much you wish they would. We’ll see how it goes.

I think that’s it for now. My stomach is growling, plus I need to go put the vacuum away. Alright friends. We’ll talk soon. (You’ve actually managed to get a second blog post within the SAME MONTH, so who knows? This thing might actually stick.) (Knock on wood.) Love you, mean it, bye.

January Jumpstart

            Hi friends. Or at least, I’m assuming you’re a friend. Why else would you be reading this blog? (You can’t see me, because that’s how computers work, but if you could, you’d see I’m winking at you.) Welcome to a blog that I’m almost certain will fall into oblivion within the month, but am trying out on the incredibly small chance that I actually keep it together enough to write here regularly. Just to get this out of the way – I am a notoriously bad blogger. Life always gets in the way, and if life doesn’t, my anxiety about not having anything to say helps out and gets in the way instead. I’m hoping that I can change that this time around. (Famous last words, am I right?)

            In case you just stumbled upon this blog, here's the deal: My name is Hannah. I’m in my early twenties, and I work as an assistant in the fourth grade at my local elementary school. I live with my two younger sisters, my mother, my grandmother, and a cat, in the same house I grew up in. Everything else you’ll have to learn as we go.

            I’m writing this on New Year’s Eve, but the chances are that you’re reading this within the first week of January. (There’s no way I’m going to have my shit together enough to post this tonight. Ha! The idea is laughable, really.) People get introspective on New Year’s Eve, and I am no different. 2016 was a big year for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. It’s being lauded as “the worst year EVER,” though I think that there are definitely other years that could give it a run for its money. (Just off the top of my head… potato famine, World War I and II, Yellow Fever, the Black Plague… you get the idea.) Personally, the year wasn’t so bad for me. It was definitely… uncomfortable, at times, but when you experience growth, there’s bound to be some discomfort. And more than anything, 2016 was a year of growth. Just in overview – I tried my hand at substitute teaching due to the urging of one of my closest friends, and found that I loved being in a classroom filled with children; I left a job that I no longer looked forward to and went right into a new job that I did; I took a chance and applied for the teaching position I currently hold and adore; and I stopped letting the negative “what-ifs” affect me more than the positive ones. Big stuff. Good stuff. Like I said, 2016 was a big year. But just because it was a big year doesn’t mean that 2017 can’t be, as well.

            That’s meant to be a seamless segue into 2017 resolutions. But here’s the thing – I think resolutions are dumb. Everyone makes them; people rarely actually stick to them. They’re just something people make because they feel like they should. They’re a conversation topic, and rarely anything more. So instead, I’m making – get this – GOALS. A rose by any other name? Maybe. But there’s less of a “thing” about the word “goals.” Goals aren’t specific to any time of year. Goals are a thing that you can add to or change whenever needed. Plus, I feel so much more legit saying, “that’s one of my goals” in lieu of saying, “oh, that’s one of my New Year’s resolutions!” (Cause let’s be real, you can’t just say “resolutions.” People will think you’re talking about levels of pixelation.)

            So I have six goals for 2017. Hopefully, posting and talking about them here will hold me more accountable than if they just live in my room on a sheet of notebook paper (albeit very pretty notebook paper).

1.     Save that $! – Start a budget. Stick to it. Start a savings account, and deposit a set amount every month/pay check. (Along with being bad at blogging, I am also bad at money. Normally I would say #sorrynotsorry, except I really am sorry about it.)

2.     Go back to school! – It’s unavoidable, honestly. Teachers need degrees. At least, teachers who have their own classrooms do. It’s really not rocket science, no matter what your anxiety says.

3.     Create an all-around healthy life. – Help yourself out, girl. Cut out the maximum amount of junk possible – junk foods, junk habits, junk stuff, and junk people. None of it is doing you any favors. (Notice how I put an exercise goal in here without saying it’s an exercise goal, just so that I don’t beat myself up about not going to the gym all the time. I think I’m so smart.)

4.     Write more. – Write novels. Journal. BLOG (wink wink nudge nudge). Letters. Writing makes you happy, so do it, dummy.

5.     Make new friends. – Screw this “no new friends” shit. FULL offense, Drake. Having more good people in your life is never a bad thing.

6.     Overall, choose happiness. – Don’t let yourself get stuck. Do the things that make your heart dance, even if other people are telling you it’s dumb. You do you, boo-boo. Unless you’re drunk, and it’s sober people telling you it’s dumb. Then it’s probably dumb and you should listen to your friends.

So that’s that. My goals for 2017. Like I said, hopefully this blog post will help hold me accountable. Don’t hold out high hopes for this blog, though. I’m not. But hey, don’t people always say, “New year, new me”? Maybe that will hold true for me. (Again, you can’t see me [see above for reason] but know that I am winking at you.) Alright friends. Love you, mean it, byyeeeee.