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."