15 Year Old Me or My Second Adolescence

I’ve been joking I’m in my second adolescence. I don’t know how much of a joke it is. I wore the same My Chemical Romance t-shirt two days in a row this weekend. I had been feeling like this for a while, and then a few weeks ago I came across this article; http://elitedaily.com/life/late-20s-adolescence/1266960/. Thank you, Zara Barrie! I don’t like this feeling, but I love this feeling. While I was not aware at the time, 15 year old me was one of the most badass people on the planet. Okay, part of me was aware of it, because I was both cocky and insecure. I suppose I still am. Anyway.

15 year old me knew she was on the verge of greatness. Her life sucked, but things were about to be so sweet. She was going to go a great liberal arts college far away from her small town and meet people who accepted and loved her. She did that. She was going to meet young men who weren’t afraid of her. She did that. She was going to spend most of her free time dancing in mosh pits and dark goth clubs. She did that. She had dreams and passions and she went after them. She staged protests in her high school quads and got into fights because she believed in things and people. 15 year old me had the skill that all teen age girls have; “…every single fucking thing a teenage girl has to deal with, they still manage to do something so mind blowing, yet completely simple: love, unabashedly.” (Quoted from one of my favorite tumblr posts ever. Yes, I’m citing tumblr, gtfo if you don’t like it). 15 year old me was loud and in your face because she was so full of love. Love for life, love for bands, love for fandoms, love for her friends, just crazy in love with any and everything. Her opinions were loud and brash and she had no problem expressing them. When she was sad she was fucking sad and she had no shame about it. She was honest as fuck. She laid the foundation for a pretty rad early 20's.

If I get to be that person again, but with the knowledge and experience I have again now, I will definitely take a second adolescence. Sign me the fuck up. I’ll deal with all of my awkward emotions, insecurities, and weirdness about where I am in life, if it means I get to be that loving, ridiculous, get shit done person I was then. I’m gonna listen to my music loud as fuck, have crushes on dudes, cry when I feel like it, and do all of the shit I haven’t been doing, because I was so busy trying to “adult”. Fuck it. What do I have to lose?

My filter for most big life altering decisions is; would 15 year old me be okay with this? And if I have to think about that answer, then I need to rethink my decision. I love time travel. Ya’ll know this. I continually think that someday a younger version of myself is going to show up out of nowhere, ala Disney’s The Kid, and I’m going to have some explaining to do. As a writer/musician/film maker, I have always wanted to make young adult media. Teenage girls have always been my target audience. I want to represent my younger self, who needed media that she saw herself in. I want to honor my younger self and all that she went through to make me the person I am now. 

Maybe 40 year old me, will feel the same about 20’s me. 

xo

the backward step

my brother taught me how to cha cha when i was a kid. it’s one of my favorite dances to do, because it’s easy. two steps forward, two backwards. 

robert brault said an optimist is “someone who figures that taking a step backward after taking a step forward is not a disaster, it's a cha-cha.” been trying to live that recently. i haven’t really updated about me or life recently, because i took the backward step. i think (i’m stressing the, i think part) the big lesson i was supposed to get out of this is to not stop dancing. i got a job again. then i left that job and went back to freelancing. there’s a lot of other stuff that goes into that story, that i don’t really want to unpack, but i think if you’ve followed the blog you know why that was the backward step. 

i’ve been good. there’s the uncertainty and anxiety and self-deprecation that come with the backward step, but i’m still dancing and will figure out what the forward step is. i’ve been really big on the introspection and thinking about the coming year. i realized of the 27 new habits i wanted to cultivate this year and goals i had for the year; i worked diligently at 17 of them and i feel like i did a good job being true to them. and maybe in 2016 i need to make a shorter list.

as i’m looking to change things and figure out what i want my career to look like, the format of the blog might be changing a bit. i’m still playing with some ideas, so i don’t want to throw anything out there yet.

also, i should probably say that you won’t hear from me until the end of november, because my #nanowrimo project is still in the first act. 

Top 10 Songs

I have my first reader request! I am so excited. And flummoxed. This is a hard one. Beautiful, amazing, funny, talented, kind (I could go on about her for a long time) Natalie asked for the 10 songs that changed my life and why. Constructing this list was brutal. There’s just so much music that means so much to me… my master iTunes library has 57,023 songs in it; my playlists are sorted by year and what albums made the biggest impact on me that year…you would think that amount of organization would make this easier. It did not. Some songs were obvious and jumped out at me. Some were harder to put a read on; I ended up listing the albums that mean the most to me, and cherry picking songs from there. I would also like to note that my top three favorite songs of all time “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las, “Hands Down” by Dashboard Confessional, and “Clark Gable” by the Postal Service didn’t even make the list. I love them, but they don’t mean as much. If that makes sense. Anyway, in no particular order…

• Thieves in the Temple by Prince
  • This is the first song that I was ever crazy about. I was about 2 years old and my family was very concerned that I didn’t know how to talk. The truth was, I was very selective about when I chose to use my words. My mom caught me slipping one day, she was driving and I was in the back seat, and I sang the whole sang word for word. It was used as the climax song in my director senior project (a dance show about bisexual vampires). This song has just always had a place in my life.

(Prince has his whole thing against the internets, so idk how you can find this song if you're unfamiliar).

• Don’t Speak by No Doubt
  • I have always loved music. I always wanted to be involved in music. Rock music. I didn’t want to be a pop singer or an R&B singer, even though I liked them and admire them. I wanted to rock. At first I thought I could just be the girl on top of a car in a hair metal video. Then I realized Jennifer Batten and Wendy & Lisa were in the band, and I realized I could be in the band. It wasn’t until Don’t Speak by No Doubt, when I realized I could be the leader of the rock band. Gwen Stefani was and continues to be everything. 

• Resurrect the Sun by Black Veil Brides
  • Shitty break up of 2012. Wretched and Divine: The Story of the Wild Ones is the only album I can listen to without crying hysterically. The lyrics are all about strength and being resilient in the face of a big evil. My favorite song on the album (although I Am Bulletproof is a close second). 

• Drain the Blood by The Distillers
  • Brody Dalle is to my teen-age years what Gwen Stefani is to my even younger years. A bad ass female who didn’t need no man and wrote awesome rock music. I kept a picture of Brody Dalle in my locker. (There was a picture of Homer Simpson too, but that’s neither here nor there). “All my friends are murder” meant the most to an outcast who felt like she didn’t have any friends. Brody also utilized a lot of power chords in her writing, which made it easy for an aspiring front woman to learn her songs and feel like the heir to the throne. 

• God Called in Sick Today by AFI
  • AFI is hands down my favorite band of all time, I’ve seen them live over 20 times, am a member of the fan club, the whole she-bang. Following AFI around California for tour dates are some of my favorite memories and every show ended with God Called In Sick Today, and Davey HavoK god walking over the crowd, while we all sweated and sang and swayed in time. 

• Astronaut by Amanda Palmer
  • I love Amanda Palmer. She’s so unapologetically herself. Astronaut is such a strong album opener. This album came out when I was in a really low period, I went to see her the night the album was released, and a few days later ended up in the hospital. This album though…it spoke to me. It helped me see things through. This is a really good song about loss.

• Landslide by Fleetwood Mac
  • This song reminds me of Saturday mornings with my mom. When I went through my Stevie Nicks phase, my mom opened up her closet and gave me all of her old maxi skirts and some awesome wraps and vintage bags. My mom is basically my favorite person and this song makes me think about hanging out with her.

• The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows by Brand New
  • The beginning of my emo “phase”? I don’t know. I just know this is, in my opinion, one of the greatest songs ever written, off of one of the greatest albums ever written.

• Sugar We’re Going Down by Fall Out Boy
  • One of my high school crushes became my crush because I heard him singing this song under his breath during a quiz, and I was sure our kindred musical tastes meant we were meant to be. I first saw the music video for Grand Theft Autumn on some weird Canadian music channel my uncle got with his satellite and I was done, Fall Out Boy fan for life. Their name was an allusion to The Simpsons, Patrick’s voice was smoother than butter, and Pete’s lyrics spoke to my confused adolescent brain that had too many feelings and not enough outlets. 

• If You Can’t Hang by Sleeping with Sirens 
  • The construction on this song is amazing. Sleeping with Sirens and Black Veil Brides helped me regain my passion for the scene and tap into a part of myself that had been dormant; the weird, DIY, fearless emo trash teen ager. 

Yay! There it is.

If there’s anything you like to see my blog or vlog (yes, video blog…new things are coming!), then just drop a line in the comments, or hit the contact button and send it to my inbox.

There Aren't Enough Lifeboats

I was writing in my journal a little over two years ago, and I was feeling completely overwhelmed. I was knee deep in my quarter life crisis. I had just finished Grad School and had no clue what the hell I was doing with my life. I thought I had a plan, and then I realized I totally didn’t. I was freaking the fuck out. 

I sat down and the first sentence I wrote after I had written the date was “There are not enough lifeboats.”

That one sentence perfectly described the anxiety I was feeling. I felt like I was the captain on a sinking ship, that I was responsible for making sure everyone got off of the sinking ship and to safety, and that there just were not enough lifeboats for everyone. (I might have been thinking about James Cameron’s Titanic when I sat down to write, because I think about Titanic a lot.) Really though, when you think your life is falling apart, it’s a great way to describe the anxiety you’re having. 

If you’ve ever met me you know I talk in an extremely quick cadence…if you haven’t met me, imagine a squirrel hyped up on cocaine saying all of the following without taking a breath; I finished school and now I have more debt, I have a great job but it isn’t my dream job, I don’t know how to get to my dream job, I don’t know if my dream job will help me get out of debt or put me into more debt, I just turned 25 and that seems so old to me, I’m not married yet, I probably won’t be married for a really long time because I just went through a shitty ass break up and I hate everyone and everything, what’s the meaning of life, I just want to be content and fulfilled and warm at night, cats, internet, maintain friendships, take your vitamins, did you pay the bills or just imagine you did, maybe I should get a haircut, No but I should revamp my wardrobe, What have I been doing with my life, Oh yeah I just finished Grad School while holding down a full-time job, I finished school and now I have more debt…and then they just repeated over and over again.

I didn’t have enough lifeboats for all of those thoughts. Talking with both my mom and my therapist made me realize, not everything deserves a fucking lifeboat. Leave some of that shit on the sinking fucking boat, and move the fuck on. I couldn’t do anything about getting older, except die, and since that wasn’t part of the plan, it doesn’t get a life boat. I had a six month grace period on my student debt, so that didn’t get a boat. My marital status? No boat. Healing after my break up, that got a boat. The meaning of life? Nope. No boat. Feeling fulfilled and content and being warm at night? That got a boat. Getting a haircut and revamping my wardrobe? Those were both manageable, and would make me feel better, they got a boat. I think you’re getting the point, here. Some things just don’t get a boat. And that’s not a bad thing. Sometimes you have let the whole boat sink, start swimming, and figure out the rest later. I think that’s what most people refer to as rock bottom. The point is, my freaking out doesn’t mean I magically get more resources to handle all of the problems. It doesn’t work that way. You handle the shit you can, and the rest is the rest.

I also learned, that sometimes your lifeboat doesn’t look like a lifeboat. My mom and I love to joke about the “God Will Save Me” story. I’m sure most people have heard that. http://epistle.us/inspiration/godwillsaveme.html “And God said, ‘Son, I sent you a warning. I sent you a car. I sent you a canoe. I sent you a motorboat. I sent you a helicopter. What more were you looking for?’ “We were joking about it one day and I said, “I’ll take the boat, the catamaran, the pontoon, the sloop, the bicycle, the penny farthing…” we were both laughing too hard for me to keep naming vehicles. Sometimes I get so caught up in looking for a lifeboat that I’m freaking out and not realizing I have resources to help me, they just aren’t lifeboats. I am getting better at asking for, accepting, and recognizing help. 

I don’t wanna act like I have this shit all figured out, I don’t. Today, I feel like there are enough lifeboats. So today, I’m writing because maybe someone out there needs to read this. Maybe it’ll be me, tomorrow morning, who needs it.

Eyes towards the horizon,

xo jordi