Tag Archives: Miranda Cosgrove

My Declaration Of Independence

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I fired my psychiatrist today.  First I purchased some books, rear-ended a guy in a Lexus, bought gorgeous eyeshadow for charity, and almost had a panic attack, but I would say the day’s main event was the aforementioned dismissal.  No.  That was eclipsed a few minutes ago when my sister, who had brain surgery yesterday afternoon, called me.  And talked to me.  Coherently.  Only for like two minutes, and my brother-in-law had texted me yesterday that everything went well, etc., but there is no substitute for actually hearing her conscious, drugged up voice emanating from my phone. . .

Anyway.

My PCP told me something yesterday that got me thinking.  Very stupid thing to do, and it will backfire on him in all sorts of ways, but it did good things for me today.  He told me that I was a good actress, and that regardless of what I was feeling, I needed to act like I was all calm and collected when I spoke with my psychiatrist.

I got pissed off because if there is one thing you don’t do to me (and there are so many more than just one), it’s tell me to shut up and not be myself.  After I blogged this morning I was doing well, I put on a pretty dress and went out to face the world.  I felt calm, like I could handle things, like I wasn’t going to flip or freak out and everything would be okay.

Then the whole rear-ending incident occurred and I kind of started to feel like crap.  I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through the appointment, I felt like an idiot, in short I wasn’t at all myself.

Somewhere in the back of my mind the actress comment had been simmering, though.  I decided it actually was a very helpful suggestion, although of course not in the spirit in which it was made.  I sat in the waiting room and began to channel.  During my appointment, I acted – and even looked, thanks to the outfit I had chosen – every bit the part of Grace Kelly.  Inside, though, I was 110% Kate.

This didn’t conflict with my pathological need to be myself, because I think that in many ways, I am Katharine Hepburn.  I don’t know really how this could be possible.  I do believe in reincarnation, but to the best of my knowledge, the person (or animal etc.) whom you were in a previous life has to have died before you were born.  I’m not 100% on that one, but I do know that Kate was very much alive when I made my debut.  Regardless, as much as I have this irritating propensity to question everything, there are some things that I know it’s better to just accept and not try to define or put any form of constraint on.  I’m going to say that reincarnation falls into that category.

When I left my psychiatrist’s office, I felt like I could fly.  I thought to myself, Let’s ring bells, let’s let off fireworks, let’s turn on every light in the house, at least!

I settled for buying a super-cute mid-weight trench and some new tee shirts (no one ever warns you how expensive losing weight can be!).

And then, to put the perfect finish on a (mostly) perfect day, my E called.  I don’t give a rip what genetics say, she is my sister and she called me because she knew I needed to hear her voice, and because she is the only person I know of that would celebrate my triumph today as enthusiastically as I.  I didn’t tell her about it, but she had obviously felt me longing to talk to her across the miles, and she picked up that phone and called me.

I can die happy.  :D

Moral of the story:  ”Never tell a girl to calm down!  Guys always tell girls to calm down and it never works, it just gets us all whipped up!  You see me all whipped up now, it’s cause you told me to calm down!”  ~ Miranda Cosgrove, iCarly

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Do You Believe In Magic?

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I do.  Because of John Sebastian and the Lovin’ Spoonful, and their capacity to lyricize something that I felt but didn’t know how to express.

At this point in my life, I don’t believe in much.  I used to wish, to have hope, to trust that love would make everything all right, and that if I just tried hard enough, I would find something that could allow me to live a life free from constant mental anguish.

Those urges, impulses, and ideas all got shot to hell, for various reasons.  Although I do still believe inside of me that I’m not trying hard enough.  I’m working on that one.  I read a study recently which reported that people who are most understanding and forgiving of others are also generally hardest on themselves.  No kidding?  I could have told you that one for free.  But, then again, I wouldn’t have been able to isolate it as a scientifically provable human trait.  I would have just said that I was a fuck-up and because I could understand what causes others to act the way that they do, I should be able to apply those principles to my own life to make me a better human being.

I used to be able to hide from life and take comfort in my favorite books.  ”I have my books/And my poetry to protect me. . .” (~ Simon and Garfunkel, ‘I Am A Rock’).  I would read everything that I could get my hands on, during every free second that I found.

I haven’t been able to sit down and focus on anything longer than a magazine or newspaper article since I underwent ECT.  Which was more than a year ago.  That hasn’t stopped me from trying to, though.  At the moment, I’m hanging everything literary on Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.  It’s a book that has been very good to me in the past, and I’ve read it enough times that if I set it down for a month or more, I can pick it back up and still know exactly what’s going on.

Sometimes, when I’m too far gone to read, but not so far as to be unable to focus at all, I can watch old films or good television shows on DVD.

But there frequently come times when it’s all just too hard.  When I can’t lose myself in Katharine Hepburn or Miranda Cosgrove, and I can feel the weight of the world pressing down on my chest as though I were three miles beneath the ocean without benefit of pressurized air to breathe or encompass me.

“And when the static’s screamin’ louder than your life/Just try to ride the waves in the air tonight. . .” (~ Goldfinger, ‘Radio’).

It’s then that I turn to music.  It may not fix me, or even make me functional again, but it does pull me back from the edge, from the point where if a feather landed on my back, I would go reeling over into the abyss, not sure if I was ever going to hit the bottom.

And if there is anything worse than bottoming out, it’s knowing that as low as you are, you can and will get lower.  I don’t really give a shit when people say, ‘Everyone has their breaking point,’ and ‘You have to hit bottom before you can climb back up.’  Because the bottom doesn’t exist for me.  I never hit.  I just keep falling, falling, falling. . .

Moral of the story: “Do you believe in magic/In a young girl’s heart/How the music can free her/Whenever it starts/And it’s magic/If the music is groovy/It makes you feel happy like an old-time movie/I’ll tell you ’bout the magic and it’ll free your soul/But it’s like tryin’ to tell a stranger ’bouta rock ‘n’ roll. . .”  (~ The Lovin’ Spoonful, “Do You Believe In Magic?”)

To John Sebastian, a.k.a “Mr. Woodstock”

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.