kyle gray

Feminism

Don't look at me with those eyes
of hate, of anger and despise.
I know you may feel disgust
for the things I've done against your trust.

The dirty whore inside
with every woman she does reside.
She must come out to play,
so today

Indulge.
She won't be out for long.

Confusion and fear consume,
and it seems nothing will resume
to be what it once was,
so now what does

She do with herself?

No barrier any longer exists,
and so she continues to persist
to throw herself around.

But why this view,
so dirty and skewed.
No religion to "guide" her way
and yet still today

She feels like a whore.

You're Not Alone

Do you ever stop and realize that you are not the only one living on this planet? At the same time I am typing this, someone else is dying, some little kids are playing soccer while their parents are watching, someone is sitting on a plane flying over me, etc, etc. It's so weird. I was just sitting in the car as my dad was driving and I saw this little kid soccer game, and a bunch of people... and for some reason I guess I realized how disconnected me and those people at that game's lives were. We all have our own problems to worry about and our own concerns to concern ourselves over. I guess for a brief moment we were connected as I looked over and viewed them... but other than that none of those people's lives will effect my life or play any role in my life and same goes to say vise versa. It is just weird to think about that. Or when I was flying to maryland, I thought of all the people underneath me who know and care nothing of my existance. 6.4 billion people on the earth, all living their individual lives... I don't know it is just really weird when you actually think about it. I got to thinking about what could one person do in life that would defy those odds. As an environmentalist... I guess I am working for the people, but there would not really be any tie between me and the people... no one would ever know about my existance or view my work. As an artist, I suppose there is more of a relationship, like if you did a show or put your artwork up at a coffee shop. All the people that enter that place will see your work and in that sense will be connected to you. Or if I was a fashion designer, most likely I would not get any fame because that field is so compatetive... but if I did get somewhat famous off of that or if I did just become someone's stylist or pieced together outfits for magazines... then all those little girls who read those teen magazines would somehow be connected. Hmm... I don't know it is just weird and something I have been thinking about. I guess becasue so many people, including myself, get so involved in their own lives and do not ever realized or acknowledge how many other lives are going on at the same time. It makes you feel so small, it is weird somewhat sad to think, but at the same time somewhat theraputic. Does one life really matter? It does to an extent, but then it really doesn't. I don't know... I'm really dumb.

Learning to Let Go

“So let go, so let go, jump in, oh well what are you waiting for, it’s alright, cause there’s beauty in the breakdown”

So all my life I have had a problem with being able to let go of things. For this reason I’ve always considered myself a “past-oriented” person. I constantly dwell on things of the past and many times this leads me to “beating myself up” for making certain mistakes. I guess in this sense, I am in constant regret. Always wishing and wondering: If I had just done this or that, or if I could just go back in time and do this or that. I am sure this is not healthy for me, but I do not know how to stop myself. I can’t seem to hold on to things physically, but I hold on to so many things mentally, but I do not know how to let go of it. When my mind wanders, it likes to wander to the past. So how do you control a mind from wandering?

I think what I have to do is just accept that that is who I am, and that I cannot really change it. Maybe when I finally accept it, I can overcome it. I once tried to forcefully change the person I was and that was probably one of the worst mistakes I have made in my life. It left me feeling depressed and hopeless. I stopped accepting who I was and started thinking that I was bad for being the person I was. I must admit, that the implication that it was bad to be that way was not fully brought on by my own doings; I had outside influence of people who seemed to look down upon the kind of person I was. So many times I was told, “I think too much”, “I’m just beating a dead horse”, or “we’re just going in circles”. It really made me feel horrible for being they way I was, and being “negative”. Now, I do know that it is not healthy for me to hold on to things like I do, but I also know now that I cannot just suddenly try and force myself to be a different way. Also, it comes into question with what is actually wrong with the way I am. Who is to say what is the wrong way to be and the right way to be?

Bringing this topic to current issues, I have recently been dealing with an event that set me back or maybe took me a step forward as a person. A somewhat recent break up with someone I grew very close to left me completely devastated. In the past four or five months, I have been dealing with letting go of the hurt and trying to move on. In most people’s minds it has taken me a long time to get over this guy, but there are a few who have been through similar situations and understand that this is a slow a gruesome process for some. I feel like I am finally beginning to fully let go. However, in recent days, I feel like I have been preventing myself from letting go. I do not really know why, but I feel like I should not be letting go so quickly. I feel like I should keep holding on to past memories and wants. I cannot really tell if me “letting go” is actually me letting go or just me avoiding, but knowing my nature, I suppose, I am assuming it is more of the latter. Although I know many people who do just choose to avoid problems as long as they possibly can, I know avoiding the problem is not good because it will come back haunt a person, so I try and make myself sit down and face the facts and really deal with the issue. However, right now I am confused if my mind is actually naturally letting go, but my conscious is making me continue to hold on, or if I am really not ready to let go. Whatever the case, this is one area of myself that I really need to work on.

Ignorance vs. Confidence

So in these last two years, I have experienced two different types of happiness which coincided with two different ways of thinking. One type of happiness could be seen as a somewhat “false” feeling. I was happy, but oblivious to everything around me accept myself and to somewhat petty things. In addition, during this time I seemed to have confidence issues. Before this, however, I was not necessarily unhappy, but I was pessimistic and had a somewhat negative attitude towards certain aspects of life. At this time of negativity, however, I was very happy and confident with myself. Right now, due to recent events, I have to deal with and decide what kind of happiness I want, which out of the two is better for me. Of course, in ideality I could have both, and maybe when I was younger I was able to be both oblivious to things and confident, but I feel now I can only have one without the other. In this sense, it is a trade off for me: Happy Ignorance or Confident Pessimism.

Two years ago, I was one of the most confident and independent teenage girls around. No one has probably met a seventeen year old girl as confident as me. I held my head up high as I fashionably strutted around the hallways of my high school. I felt a bit superior to all the other people around me with their petty self-centered troubles. Crying over failed relationships and broken nails was never my cup of tea. In a city full of wealthy spoiled conservative teenagers, I was different. I was liberal, passionate, and I was concerned about more important things: the destruction of the environment, the starving children in overpopulated countries, the endangered species of the world, and the corrupt politicians leading our nation. I was as much of an activist as a person from the suburbs could be: forming environmental clubs, posting environmental quotes around my school, making artwork with political statements, attending political protests, making and distributing arm bands in protest of the war, joining political activists clubs, and refraining from conforming with my fellow students. My pleather backpack displayed a “Fake for the animal’s sake” sticker on it and was covered in green party buttons, environmental rights stickers, and buttons of underground bands. I felt like I had so much going for me, and I probably did at the time. However, sometimes people thought of me as a “downer”: always feeding them with bits of environmental and political facts. I never really saw myself as pessimistic, however, and instead I saw myself as a realist. I was a strong, independent girl who felt like she knew her way around the world. I may have felt the world was screwed and thought that I could never truly be happy because of how corrupt the world was, but in reality I was happy. However, it is questionable whether my confidence was a false confidence built from a false sense of superiority. At the time I did not think so, but this idea soon came into question and as soon as it did I began questioning myself. In the span of a year, I turned completely around and became one of those people I used to despise. Before I go on to describing my transition I wanted to make one important note that while I was in this independent phase, I had myself a boyfriend who of course I never referred to as my boyfriend. This piece of information will play an important factor in future events.

Entering college I still had the confidence factor. In my college entrance essay I described myself as a passionate, caring, and opinionated person. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self Reliance was my bible. However, after a few months in a school full of thousands of independent students like myself, I began to loose my sense of independence and started to feel equal and non-special. I felt that everyone was the same and experienced the same emotions, and I felt that I melded into the crowd. I started to doubt myself and my ways. I guess since I did not feel that “special” quality anymore I did not feel that confidence with the way I was. On top that, I started to somewhat envy the people I used to deem as ignorant and sometimes I wished I could be like them: carefree and worriless. Little did I know that in just a years time my wish would be granted.

My identity was completely lost and altered in the year of 2004. I went from being one of the most confident girls around to one of the most insecure girls around: from being independent and not wanting a boyfriend, to being needy and clinging to my boyfriend. I don’t know how I made the transition or what exactly caused it, but throughout that year my confidence took a huge drop, and along with my confidence fell my passion. No longer was I concerned with politics and no longer did I have a strong desire to have an impact on the environment. But by the end of the year I only concerned myself with my relationship with my boyfriend and my family. I guess it’s not a bad thing that I focused more on my family as compared to how I was before, but I don’t think it was healthy for me. I grew extremely dependent on my boyfriend. I suppose I was finally happy and carefree in the sense that I no longer worried about the starving children and about nations being raped by other nations. Now I just put my time and effort into “fixing” my relationship with my boyfriend. The girl who didn’t believe in love, suddenly felt like she was in love. I was probably the hugest hypocrite ever, being so critical before and then becoming those that I criticized. This false sense of happiness and security was soon ripped away and destroyed when my boyfriend broke up with me at the end of the year and began seriously dating another girl only a week later. I had my “heart broken” and suffered an extreme amount of petty pain from this event. To this day I am still dealing with it, but I am realizing how petty it is. And that brings me to where I am now, on the edge of both ways of thinking, a fork in the road and I must decide which path to choose now. Should I become oblivious but “carefree” or should I be pessimistic but confident?

As of now, I feel the latter is the better. Actually a happy medium would be the best, but finding that happy medium and actually taking the actions and making the effort to become that is the part that’s hard. I think it is easy to fall into one of the extremes, but it is hard to find the balance in between the two and maintain it. How does one concern themselves with environmental and humanitarian issues and not let themselves get too down about how the world is? How do you avoid disappointment when it seems that so few people truly care? How do you maintain your own independent identity and ideas amongst a crowd of people just like you? How do you get yourself to quit comparing yourself with others and just be happy with yourself? How do you realize that everyone is the same and yet each individual is unique? How do you build confidence without a feeling of superiority and arrogance? Is there even a way to balance the two or does everyone who has some confidence have some arrogance? Is arrogance even that bad of a thing to have?

I have to figure these questions out in order to figure out what I want out of life. I am so confused though on what I would like, and therefore, I don’t really know what actions I should be taking. I guess do know the answers to most of the questions posed above, but things are so much easier said than done. If one could see the bright side of things, see that there is change and there are people and things being done to help the environment and feed of that positive outlook; this would solve the first two problems. The third question is just a matter of doing. Just don’t compare and be happy with yourself. I know it can be done because I think I used to be like that, at least with physical attributes. I never once compared my physical attributes to another; the mere thought of even doing this never even dawned in my head. However, I think I did mildly compare my intelligence level and I took pride in my grades, but I don’t know if that was necessarily a bad thing. Is pride a bad thing? It is listed as one of the seven sins. The question about arrogance and confidence still completely baffles me. I have no idea about the answer to that because to me a sense of confidence coincides with arrogance. I guess that will be one of those philosophical questions that never have a right answer and that I will be left to wonder forever. So now all I have to do is follow my own advice? All I can say is that it is so, so much easier said than done.

Is Independence Necessary?

In high school, I always used to take pride in the fact that I didn’t have self-esteem issues like most other teenage girls do. However, I guess I never knocked on wood after I said that, and so it came back to bite me in the butt because in the past year, I’ve experienced the lowest confidence levels ever. Currently, I am still recovering from the loss. I don’t know how the loss came about, but there could be numerous reasons. It could be reasons due to another person, it could be psychological imbalances, or maybe it is inevitable and everyone must experience a time of low self-esteem. Whatever, the case, I am currently experiencing my time of depression, and I am trying to work my way out. However, in order to know what actions to take to get out of the rut, one has to know what maintained the confidence level before. I think this certain aspect varies from person to person, but for me, I think that main thing was the feeling of independence.

In my high school years, especially in the last two years, I was extremely confident. I was not too confident, to the point where I was egotistical, but I was confident to the point where I never ever compared myself to others. The thought of comparing myself to others never even dawned in my head. I was happy being myself and did not feel the need to change anything about me. I never once looked at another girl and thought – “oh, I wish I could look or be more like her”. I guess in a superior/inferior sense, if I ever did look at others, I felt gladder that I was not like them. I was proud that I was different and wanted to be nothing at all like anyone else. However, somewhere in my time of college, I lost those feelings. I began comparing myself to everyone else, wanting to be something I was not, and feeling as though I was not special enough. It worked in reverse order for me, I guess, because in most scenarios people hear about insecure high school students going to college and gaining a sense of independence, but for me I went to college and lost that sense of confidence. Maybe it was because there were so many other kids like me, and so I lost that feeling of being different. I do think that played a huge part of it. I relied too much on “being different” in my last two years of high school for my sources of confidence. Perhaps my confidence then was false. Why do I have to feel different to feel confident and independent?

It is extremely hard for me to feel independent when I am engulfed by masses of people that are just like me. When people exhibit just as much passion, if not more, for the same things you possess a passion for, and when people are just as unique as or more unique than you, it really makes it hard to feel distinguished from others in any way. I suppose one could think that everyone in the world in unique, but a lot of times, I doubt and feel that everyone really is not unique. This world is so interconnected; everyone it seems goes through the same emotions and experience similar events. It is almost scary how universal feelings are. Judging from experience, to me the saying that almost every thought is unoriginal is so true. So how do you fight that, accept that maybe you are not unique, and still be confident?

The definition of confidence is: “freedom from doubt; belief in yourself and your abilities”. I used to possess so much of this before, but now I feel I always doubt myself. I do not feel I lost any abilities that I possessed before, but I feel as though what I had is not really enough anymore for what I want to be. In addition, as mentioned in previous essays, I feel that I have lost some of my passion. But I think a lot of my passion was fueled by the same theory: that I had this passion and no one else did as much as I. I really need to dispose of this false feeling of confidence gained from feeling different. I need to realize that you don’t have to be different to be independent. I think I am starting to gain back my confidence, but I think I am doing it in a similar manner as before: by banking on the fact that I am different than others. But now I am wondering if I need to change that, is it really that wrong to create a false feeling of difference to gain confidence? Maybe I am heading in the right direction and by writing about this; it just shows that I again doubt myself. I do not know. My roommate was the one who first brought this to my attention… asking me “why do you have to feel like your different”. But thinking about it more, I think she herself, prides on the fact that she is different and unique. She has that arrogance I used to have in high school, but I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing.

Age-Influenced Passion and Optimism

So I recently the question on whether passion and optimism is really determined by how a person feels or by their age was brought to my attention. If you meet a child, and have a conversation with them, you realize that they are filled with so much optimism and so much passion and purity. Merely asking a child what they want to be when they grow up, most will respond with extravagant answers such as an astronaut, an actor, or a doctor. However, as one grows older, “reality” sets in, and the ideals begin to weaken and the individual begins changing, accepting and compromising. If you ask and older person what they want to be, the answers become less and less extravagant, and a lot of them end up with the classic, cubicle, nine-to-five job. So bringing this idea with myself, I begin to wonder if my passion, creativity, and optimism to see change done with the environment is really fading out because of other reasons such as school, or if it is fading out because I am getting older and maybe that is just the natural progression of things.

This topic was brought to my attention through the simulation game we did in class. The instant I heard about the environmentalist – I knew which group I wanted to belong in. I actually thought that almost everyone would choose this option and that, some would have to sacrifice this group and to be in another, to make the numbers even, but surprisingly enough, there were the fewest amounts of people in our group, and it seemed as though some of the members were a little reluctant to join. In addition, after reading the scenario, which I thought was reasonable and agreed with most of it, many of my group members, especially the older ones, were somewhat satirizing it and wanting to alter it. “Do we have to go by these thoughts or can we modify them?” they asked.

Apparently they felt that the environmentalist scenario was too extreme and too optimistic. They wanted to modify it in a way that would make it more realistic with more compromises. One of the girls kept laughing and saying, “This was so me ten years ago”. Basically saying that was how she felt ten years ago, but how she no longer feels to this day. I’m sure she agreed with some of the thoughts, but she and many others in the group wanted to take a more “realistic” approach. (But then the question comes into mind, who is to say what is “realistic” and what is not? But that is another topic discussed perhaps later. For now, we will assume that realistic views, in this sense, deal with making compromises and accepting some things as impossible.) Although I say that my passion has faded some, after this exercise, I realized that I still have it in me. I still have a lot of that optimism and perhaps “extremist” passion in me, it is just buried, but this exercise brought it out some and re-reminded me about those feelings. It rekindled the flame a little. The people in my group had to turn to me for the “youthful, enthusiastic” ideals, for I suppose their purity had been tainted with realism and acceptance. But I am fearful that my optimism and passion, which I have already felt has faded, will deteriorate as I age. I fear that I will be one who thinks, “This is how I used to think ten years ago.” But hell, when I was reading that scenario, I was thinking… “This is how I used to think a year or two ago”. Now I understand why my father once described me as an idealist.

Does passion and optimism always have to die out with age? Does reality always have to “set in” as one gets older, or is there a way to stop it from happening? If there is a way, what is it? I want to find the way, and I want to take that path because I don’t want to loose more than I have already lost. I already feel my passion and optimism fading, and I feel its fading fast. College perhaps has for me made reality set in fast. Disappointments after disappointments have made me very weary. I have realized that maybe I will not be able to get all that I want done, done, and maybe I’ll just have to accept just making a small impact on helping improve environmental conditions on the world because every effort helps, right? These are what my recent thoughts have been, but they were not always this way. Perhaps it is too late for me; perhaps I cannot go back to that way of thinking. However, rekindled passionate feelings give me a little hope. Maybe there is a way to go back to those feelings, since I know they are not completely lost. But if I do go back, how do I keep them? How do I deal with dealing with disappointments, while keeping my passion and optimism alive? These are things that I need to figure out soon, so that I know what actions I need to take.