Anna: ................

So I figured it was time to write an actual update and not a quick airport-bitch post like the last one.

Life is stressful. As always. Except that this is the very first time that I've felt in actual danger of burning out/going off the deep end. I don't know if I'm going to pass Arabic. I am barely keeping this hanging on with regards to MUN. And the only reason my other two classes are functioning parts of my life is because I'm spending more time on them than on Arabic.

I don't even know how to say anything. I am having about a breakdown per day. I've called home (read, Utica) TWICE in four weeks to just cry. I literally feel like everything is spiraling out of control and that this term is it for me. Either I make it and somehow survive Spring until summer hits, or I crash so hard that I won't be able to pick myself up again. Its scary, because failure has never been an option for me. If I get anything lower than a B in any class, I might as well kiss law school goodbye. I need to figure out how to juggle school and an internship or two or three to even be considered by a university such as American or Georgetown or basically anywhere that has the kind of program I'm interested in. And I need to be careful to make sure that everything runs smoothly for MUN so as to not go down in history as the batshit crazy president that fucked everything up.

I'm just a mess. I've never been great at handling stress, but this is a whole new level of incapability. I have never felt more demotivated, helpless, or disgusted in myself in my entire college career. I know I fell into another depression cycle after I came back from New York, but I didn't think it'd get this bad. Where my life starts to spin in crazy circles and I either don't sleep or sleep too much and I can't think of anything without wanting to cry. I was depressed last winter too, and I was taking 16 credits (I'm only taking 12 now) and I pulled through great.

The thing is, I keep being lulled into a false sense of security by random mental health things, like an overnight trip to Seattle or a weekend in Salem or something. Both of those were great, but as soon as I got back everything crashed again. I just don't even know. I tend to plan out my life and schedule everything, and while I can usually handle unexpected events and changes in the plan, I don't know what to do with this. I don't know how to handle the feeling that my entire life is about to crash and burn.

I know I sound dramatic, but I literally don't have anything else except school. I'm lucky that I get so much financial aid to allow my mom and I to pay for school, but money is quickly running out. This is my only chance. School is the only thing I have ever really been good at. I have other hobbies, sure, but they're not honed enough for me to make any kind of living on. My whole life has been entirely academically oriented. Do well through junior high to get a scholarship for expensive Catholic high school. Do well throughout high school to get scholarships in college. Do well in college to even be considered for admittance to any type of graduate/law program. Or career opportunity. I don't need to be New-York-penthouse-jet-to-Europe-every-other-week rich, but I want to be successful. Successful in the sense that I am working toward something and that I have attained the goals I worked so hard to reach. In the sense that I am engaging life and learning everyday, not just going through the bare-minimum movements and pretending I'm happy. But the way everything is structured, my worth is based on marks on a paper. Grades, activities, performance at internships, etc. And if I can't upkeep that, then I am absolutely nothing in the eyes of anyone making any of the decisions.

I always hear "failure is an essential part of life. Its a learning experience." Absolute shit. Sometimes failure is inevitable, sure, and you could learn from it if you had the right outlook, but crap like that leads people to think that you don't have to try hard or basically work for anything because if you fail, well, its a healthy organic process of growth. No. No. No. No. I can't stress that enough. Failure is not accepted in the path I want to go into. Failure is a measurement indicator people use to decide who to throw aside and forget about. I can't afford to fail because then everything is over, because everyone is conditioned to look for perfect people who do everything perfectly and can perfectly fill the role of lawyer, grad student, whatever. The fact that I burned myself out/worked too hard too fast/tried to keep everything together but just couldn't at that point in time.....no one will care.

I'm freaking out, obviously, because I can't handle having worked hard all my life to fail now. Maybe it sounds like I'm overreacting, but this is the lowest I can remember being in quite a long time. I don't know what to do. Its not going away, its not getting better after having talked to people and after having taken some time off to think. Nothing is helping and I don't know what to do.

Except say "fuck it all" and buy a train ticket to Cali for Spring Break regardless of what my finances are. I can starve for a while, I don't care. I need to be around awesome people I love in a non-stressful situation.

AJ- "We Get By With a Little Help from Our Friends"

I haven't written much in a long time, but I have been following this blog very closely for whenever anyone updates. I must admit, I spend my free time rereading the entries. I enjoy seeing how much we've learned, how much we've grown, and enjoying how we've managed to stay close. Anna's video post inspired me to keep up the sporadic updates here.
Since winter break, I've spent half a week in Oregon with Zach and almost a whole day with Anna. I've been very pleased with myself, knowing that I finally kept my promise to get my butt to Oregon. (Even though, all the driving was done by Ryan and I owe him very very much.) I can see why Oregon is so dear to both of you. In addition to the tax-less shopping and the gas pumping oddity, traipsing around Oregon was, simply put, fun. Cooking, watching Firefly, exploring shops, and poking at Zach's nerves by cleaning his kitchen has really made my winter memorable.
Meanwhile, school is starting well. I'm quite excited about the classes I'm taking. There are 20 units involved and very heavily physiology and nutritional based. It's interesting to me though, which is all that matters.
I have my intermediate future planned as far as school goes. I need to get my game up with homework as usual. I'm stuck when it comes to what happens to me after school ends. The usual.
In randomness, Ryan asked me to be his girlfriend. It's a comfortable role. I don't know what will happen after he graduates and such, but it's something I'm going to let slide and play by ear. I'll enjoy it as it is.

I sometimes find myself feeling lost when I see my friends here getting frustrated, unhappy, and stressed and knowing that I have no way to help them. Just hearing news from you, whether happy or troubled is somehow comforting. I'm glad to have you, to have this.
I love you.

Heaven: 12 Steps to Happiness

It's been since October that I last wrote a blog to my friends. November came. There were countless times in November that I logged into our blog to write to you all, to write to myself, to write, even if only to let someone know that I was alive. But I didn't write in November. The days grew shorter and we turned the pages of our calender to December. Again, I wanted to write, I tried to find the words in my heart to say, but I found nothing. And so December passed and I still didn't write.

And now it's January, and it's a New Year. I puked on the couch on New Year's Eve and fell asleep before midnight, and no amount of shaking or yelling or gunfire could wake me. As the year passed from 2011 to 2012, I was drunk asleep, but I think that, really, I just did not exist. Drunk asleep, my heart beats steady, my lungs breathe steady, my body and my mind can rest. My little friend Rita says, "When you die, your mind can rest." So maybe, drunk asleep at the turn of 2012, the phoenix in my chest burst into flames. Maybe before the chick peeped out of the ashes of its former Self, my mind was at rest.

My friends, I feel as though I have been dead for quite some time. I've lost myself. I can remember the person that I was when I was at my best, and I am the opposite of that. I can remember the person that I was when I was at my best, and try to mimic the qualities that I admired so much in myself. The soft sun through the canopies of trees on a clean winter morning. The dewdrops kissing a spider's web. Lying on the ground and watching the blades of grass tremble in the hurricane from my lips, and knowing how big I was, but then turning over and seeing the sun above me and knowing how small I was too. Knowing that others could love because they had been shown love, and knowing that, because I had been shown love I could also love.

I am no longer the person that I was when I was my best, but, God damn, I want to be. I want to be as tall as the Redwood trees, but I've been timbered. I want to dance with the wind, but I hurt my knees running. I want to grow, I want to grow, I want to grow, but guess what? We're halfway through January and it still hasn't rained. This whole place is dead and I've been dying with it. It was much easier to write this than it was to write about the person I was when I was at my best. It was so much easier to write suffering and misery than it was to write nature and to write beautiful. My inkwells have run dry.

It has been so much easier to See the negative, and whoever's been developing these pictures has been forgetting to fix my positives. I watch them fade over time. I hide them at the bottom of dark drawers so that I might keep them hidden from the light. What good are they if I cannot recall them, if I must hide them away to better preserve them; while all these negatives surround my, perfectly clear.

I let Myself get lost in myself; I ventured into the labyrinth without my breadcrumbs. I have been lost for a long time, so long now that I have to force myself to smile, so long now that I must drink from a sea of tears just to stay hydrated, so long now that my inkwells have run dry and all the paper was burned for warmth.

But I don't want this anymore. I do not want to sail this sea of tears. I do not want to wear this cloak of sadness. I want to empty all of my father's pill bottles into the gutter and be done with them. I want to sever the tie between us and realize that some people are better off without their mothers and fathers. Some people are better without them. In psychology, when we had to stand before the class and tell everyone our biggest fears, I remember mine. I couldn't look anyone in the eye, and I'd been crying that morning, and I said, I don't want to be my parents. But, see here I am, miserable and sad and lost, just like my parents. I am lost without my parents, but I am Lost with them too. I want to cast them off. If am composed of their DNA, let that be it, and if I must be like them, let me be only the best parts of them. Let me be my mother's love for a good book and my father's musical muscles, let me be all the childhood camping trips and family art projects, let me be humbled by talent that surrounds me and the industry that raised me, let me as tough as helltown and as tightknit as them too. Let me be all the best in the people that raised me. Suck it up, my dad always used to tell me. Aaron Burtch, my dad, always told me to Suck it up. He's forgotten how to, but that doesn't mean that I have to. So, Heaven, suck it up. You're tough, so suck it up.

I want to be the best of all the people that raised me. I want to be Helltown, I want to be Oakdale, I want to be Grandaddy and Built Like Alaska, Off the Air Modesto. I want to be Troy and Robert, I want to be my Yaiyai and Papou. I want to be the best girlfriend for Sonny Malcom, because, the truth is, I see him, I want to share and create the best life possible with him. I want to be the best in all of you, my friends. Because without all of you, I would not be here. I would be someone else, somewhere else. But the Universe put me amongst you, and you are the best company that I could want. I look at all of you and I see the best. When I turn to myself, I only see the worst-- but if I am surrounded by the best, I should want to show that I belong with the best.

I want to be the best for myself. I want to imagine the best person I can and become that person.

That was my dream once. It is my dream again. To make myself into the best person I can be.

And so, I've started a personal 12 steps to happiness program. I'm developing the steps as I go, figuring out what I need to focus on in order to better Myself. These are my steps so far:

Step 1: Point out the positives. Stop focusing on all of the negatives and realize the beauty in life again. A shake-shingle wing, a smiling dog, a bird singing in the bush outside my bedroom window.

Step 2: Be physically healthy-- eat well, exercise daily, and dress nicely. I have never really been comfortable in my body, and God knows having the boyfriends I have had didn't help me with my self-esteem any either. But, you know what, I am the only one that has to live with my body forever, so whatever I can do to make myself physically happier is a must. I did hurt my knees running over a year and a half ago and they still haven't healed, but I've been running and hiking on them anyway. I'd rather live with the pain in my knees as long as long as I get to spend the rest of my life climbing mountains.

Step 3: Love yourself. Written on the same notecard, it says, "You are a good person. You are beautiful. You are loved." I have stopped believing all these things. To say them now makes my mouth taste dirty. They all seem like lies. All this negativity has poisoned my heart; there's a worm that lives inside that whispers all of these lies, and I believe him. But I know that he is lying. When I find myself within my chest, I know that he is lying. I am a good person. I am beautiful. And I am loved. I've poured so much love out of me in the past year and a half and have felt no love. What little love I do feel drowns as the oceans rise. I love, I love, I love so hard and so much, but I have forgotten how to feel loved. And so I give and I give and I give, and I am exhausted, but I feel as though I cannot take. I cannot take because I have been denied; what is not offered is not available for the taking. And so I closed the shutters and I didn't pay my electric bill, and I have been living in the dark. But God, I am dying for light and I'm dying to be loved. I'm dying for rain, I am so thirsty, I am dying to grow.

I know how to feel it now, I know what I need to do-- I need to let myself feel it. I need to realize that when Sonny says he loves me, that he loves ME, all of the best in me, he can see me. I'm cheating him when I don't let the best parts of me shine out. It's as simple as letting myself feel the love that he is offering me. I can love him and love him and love him, but until I can let myself feel the love that he has for me, I won't get it. But right now, I get it. And I feel so much love and I feel so loved. As I write this, I feel the love that I'm looking for, I know that's it's everywhere around me and I only need to open my heart to it to feel it. I need to keep my palms up and my eyes green and I need to let it in and out, in and out, as easy as breathing, as rhythmic as the sea, in and out and in and out, I need to let my Mother hold me to her chest the way she's been longing to for so long and like I've been longing to let her for so long. And I feel her, yes, I feel her, she is breathing into me the very best parts of her.

This is what I am working toward, bettering my Self, because I'm tired of spending everyday with the person that I've become. I want to be happy. I want it so much that I'm dying for it, but isn't that wrong? Isn't the point to be living with it?

So today, I am going to stop dying to be happy and start living to be happy.

After all, it says right on my arm-- "To live will be an awfully big adventure."

Zach: And End and a Beginning

Hey

So I'mma talk about the Beginning first. Tomorrow is the first day of school. That's kinda exciting I guess. Even if it is a national holiday and we should have the day off, but whatever. We always start on MLK Day. I'm over it. It snowed today/ last night. None of it stuck, but it was fun to walk in.

I don't really have anything else to talk about in the beginning section I guess, but I will come back to that.

So the End. Andrew and I are no longer anything more than friends at all. We are still good friends, but nothing is going to be more than friends. We both understand how the other one feels, and we both like each other (as people, not so much romantically anymore), but we aren't going to get back together. I don't think that things are going to change in that area of my life for a while. So although I still like him, I'mma move on. Still gonna spend time with him, but I am going to not think of any of it romantically anymore. It was nice while it lasted, but it's over now so.... there.

You guys have probably by now noticed all of the videos I have sent on facebook. Kinda because I am a little torn up by the whole Andrew thing. I have been unsure about us for a little while now, but we hadn't talked about it until today, so now we are both on the same page. But anyway. Making videos for other people helps me to keep my head clear, so... I did that.

But I guess this ending is the beginning of something else. I'mma take some time for myself now. I kind of talked about this in my last blog, but I have been feeling kind of empty for a while now, and I need some time to be selfish. I am not going to do anything for anyone else for a while. I am not driving anyone to the store. I am not ordering food for people (even if they pay for it). I am not planning anything unless it is for myself and no one else. I kind of feel terrible doing it, but I really need some time to be selfish. I need to do something for myself, and I don't need to give any more of myself to anyone else until I have some of it back for myself.

I love you guys. And I miss you.

Anna: Blah.

I just want it to be known that I really don't want to go back to Portland at all, and if I don't express this sentiment somewhere then I am going to end up breaking down and crying on the plane (a public place) which absolutely can't happen.

I just want to spend more time with my family and I don't think its fucking fair at all that everytime I leave I don't know when I'll see them again. I'm tired of busting my ass at school and in MUN only to have people continuously yell at and discourage me. I need a good long break from all this crap that makes me want to shove my head through a window.

I don't want to go back. I want to stay here and be with my family and chill.