Only My Knee got hit by a truck

So, over break, I went skiing. For the first time in my life, I went on slopes. It was fun until I got off the ski lift. The ski instructure and I were heading down the mountain again, (well, i guess it would be not so much fun if we headed up) when I fell. It was a pretty lame tumble, to say the least. But basically, my knee popped because of my idiocracy and lack of skiing ability. I vow to never ski again. Come to find out (after I get home and go to the doctor) that I tore my ACL. one of the most important legaments in the knee. Oh joy. So doctor, what does that mean? I have to get reconstructive surgery. Which happened today.

Well, I want to curl up into a ball and die. except i can bend my knee, so i guess I can't curl. But pain killers are really really helpful :D I currently have an ice pack wrapped around my knee, having ice cold water pumped around my knee. It is a pretty nifty feeling, because It is so numb by now that my mom touched the water and asked if I could feel how cold it is. Nope, I cant really feel at all. When I got home, I cried. Trying to get up the steps, trying not to fall over while walking on crutches. I must have looked so pathetic, but it hurts to putt any kind of weight on it.

It's gone..

I've lost it. The drive to play my flute. For a split second in time, I had the vision of brilliance. I was going to be a performer. There was nothing except music, playing it that is. I knew what I wanted to be for the rest of my life and it was a musician. But it's gone. My image, my vision, has left me dry. I can not muster up the energy to pick up my flute because of the dream that I have lost. I play and my fingers do not cooperate anymore. My eyes go blurry and the notes all fuzzy. I have lost something precious and I want it back, but it does not want me.

What went wrong

I often reflect on the turn that my life has taken by actions that were decided by others. I entered High School a totally normal young lady. I feel that I am leaving it extremly changed in so many ways that I did not anticipate. It is never normal or healthy for a little girl to witness her parents fighting. I tried to shield my younger sister from it often times because I had been subjected to it when I was her age. As a young girl, I would lie away at night and hear my parents arguing, loudly. They must have assumed that we were asleep because they never fought in front of us. We is refering to myself and my older sister of 3 years. I don't remember what the arguments were about except that my father would always walk away and my mother would yell at him not to walk away while she was talking to him. That she was talking. He would passively ignore her. I think that I attribute this to my avoidance of conflict. The sound of arguing makes me uncomfortable and scared, frankly. Unsafe. My father was always there for me. I looked up to him when I was younger, but I was the second child. Softly pushed aside in favor of my older sister. I love her dearly, and I don't resent her for being first. I simply got used to being second. I understood and complied with my treatment. This isn't to say that I was flat out ignored, but I learned my place, which was not in the spot light. She was talk with at night, and it was a common practice that I would be ignore for bedtime "tuck in". That was the way it was. And then my younger sister came along, and she got more attention than I did. She is the sensitive one. She needs to have the special attention. Again, I got used to it.
But my parents: their fighting got worse. We never really went on vacation as a family, and my father was often busy with his biking. I don't much remember my mother in my early years. I think because she was like a ghost. Quiet in the background, helping us along, having snacks for us after school. She was not a major actor in her own life, I think. After the divorce, things changed. My mother, my father, my life. Everything is different. Everything and Everyone. My mother has found her voice and my father has changed personalities. I sleep in a bed that is not my own and eat other people's food. I have to smile and pretend that this new life, this new world that I have entered is perciesly what I asked for. Because watching my father dote on another woman is exactly what I want to see. Hearing him speak to her in ways that I did not know he could to someone that is not my mother is just what I love to hear. And then he tries to be my best friend. He can not see what he has done to my life, to my personality. I am scared to death of comitment. What if my special someone leaves me like my father left my mother? But my mother!! Her strength has become a brilliant and beautiful thing. She has found her strength that was always there but lay dormant inside of her. It has come alive in ways that are just beginning to unfold. I admire her more and more each day. I wish I had noticed her in my childhood. I am only starting to appreciate her and I am really saddened over our loss of time. I am going to run away for a while. I need to find my own voice. I need to seperate myself from the strangling oppression that I feel around my father. I need to break out of this shell that has been created by my parents. They have instilled in me virtues that are important, but consciously and invertantly. But starting this summer, I plan on writing about the things I AM doing, not what I WISH to do.

Into the Wild

I recently read a book called Into the Wild. Actually I read it last summer, but the impact that it had on me was so huge! Maybe I've talked about this before. The book is based on a true story about a young man who travels across America, basically. His life is so wonderful though. Full of everything that I long to do. I was discussing this book with my father, because I encouraged him to read it, and he thought that it was almost cruel for the boy to cut ties with his family. How can he not understand though? I see and understand his motives clearly.

I see my life, and what it is cracking up to be, and I am a little disappointed. I wish for it to be adventerous and amazing. I want someone else to see my life and go "wow, she really lived" not, "what was she doing with herself?" That is what I have been doing for the past 18 years, just living, just existing. Chris McCandless knew how to live. I love my family, but when going into the adventure of a lifetime, it is not wise to tie oneself down to family and relationships. Someone said that Chris had a problem with intimacy. I think not, but just being tied down to something pointless. My father thinks that it is because he was angry with his father. I was thinking about it and realized something: Chris's father had almost lived a double life and he found out that he was illegitamit. His whole identity was shattered. Your parents bring you into this world, and you expect them to know and understand themselves in order for you to define yourself. When the image of who your parents are is shattered you have to reevalute yourself.

Who you are becomes someone else. This whole image that you have had up until this realization is someone completely different from then on. Who you are is very dependent on who your parents are. But once you find out something about your parents that shatteres your image of them in consequence shatters your image of self. Your world crumbles around you. I think that is why Chris was able to become closer to those that he met on the road. They did not define him, but he could start clean with that relationship. He had to reevaluate himself in order to re-learn and understand who his parents were. Maybe I am reading too much into this and projecting my life into this situation, but that is how I see it. How I am beginning to see it.

Floodwood is one place where I can redefine myself, and figure things out. It is so easy to see who you are without the complications of family, which is another reason why I think it is healthy to seperate from family for a while. Not sever the ties completely, because it is family that should love you unconditionally, but just for a season. It is important to define yourself by your own standards. I see who I am most clearly when I am surrounded by nature. Others in other places. But Chris was able to be himself, most comfortable as I understood it, around nature as well. I find him to be a tragic hero, because in the end he did discover his tragic flaw which killed him. He had been living a secluded life. And I understand it. But he realized that having companionship of any kind is a gift as well. "And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness....And this most vexing of all, HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED."