The Introduction: Oh Lord, Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood

Disclosure, please don’t share this blog. This is not an intentionally public document and I don’t want my family to read it haha xo

Also I sometimes use bad words sorry

Also idk if all my grammar is correct all the time, I used to be way better. sorry again!!

“Know who you are in truth, and not who you imagine you are. With this knowledge you become the wisest man.” - Elder Joseph the Hesychast

Hi, my name is Allie. It’s just Allie; it’s not short for anything. My closest friends call me Al.

I was named after my father. I’ve been told my whole life that I look and behave exactly like him and both of my very intense grandmothers. We were all born inside out. In my opinion, everyone is but we pretend like we are made of concrete instead of fleshy, bleeding bags of soft goo.

Only God is good.

Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.

This is my blog. Welcome to my mind palace.

I have always felt like a freak

Now I am in the final year of my twenties with a husband and a child, I don’t seem to fit in any boxes no matter how many I try and fold into existence.

I teeter on the edge of wanting to be freely floating in space outside the box or be tucked warm and safe inside one. I’m sure this is an insecurity that stems from toxic perfectionism and late stage capitalism. (Will the empire hurry up and collapse already? Jeez)

I grew up lower middle class in a dirty three bedroom two bathroom house (go figure, it was the 90’s) with one alcoholic father, one scatterbrained but loving mother, two rivaling older brothers, six dogs, one large aquarium, one pot belly pig who was so fat from her diet of dog food her eyes were swollen shut, and a partridge and a pear tree.

We lived in a sketchy little neighborhood across the street from a known drug dealer whose house was continually shot at. (You should ask Ethan about the drummer who was shot and crashed through their living room window trying to get to safety, that’s a much better story)

We also had pretty large backyard; the other side of it was a junk yard in the middle of the woods. My brothers and I would scour it and build rollercoasters and haunted rides.

My parents are wacky characters and they homeschooled us for our entire school career. We were five strange, mentally handicapped birds trapped and flapping around together 24/7 in our isolated little nest.

The only other socialization we got for the first eight years of my life was at a small pentecostal church that we attended until the congregation spilt over- can you guess?

Fucking MONEY, of course.

But that’s where I met Mara, my childhood best friend. We held on tightly to one another and that’s one of my life’s greatest blessings is keeping a close friendship alive for that long.

I was fully aware of how people talked about us at that busted little church on the wealthier side of town. We were white trash lite. My father literally has a permanently red neck from working in the sun.

One year the church put on a play: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. They cast me and my brothers as the poor, dirty, lying, stealing kids on welfare who drank jug wine and smoked cigarettes.

I played the role of Gladys Herdsman: the youngest hood rat and angel of the Lord.

“Hey! Unto you a child is born!”

I was 6 or 7 and don’t remember much but I do remember receiving uproarious applause when I took my bow at the very end.

Gummo 1997

Many years later I did the wedding photography for one of the assistant preacher’s kids. I hadn’t seen any of these people since I was eight years old but everyone was fascinated that I hadn’t turned out to be complete trash.

I sat alone at the end of the night and watched people dance to mariachi music while I sipped on a beer. One creepy father of a particularly predatory boy came up to me and loudly accounted how perfectly my family had been cast in that old play as sinful poor folk.

I was embarrassed at first but I just smiled and took it on the chin. It was an honor to play that role; true, I was a little shit, but I was also an angel of the Lord!

But isn’t that true for all of us? Everyone, deep down, is a massive freak and that makes me feel safe to know.

I’ve come to know many different kinds of people in my life so far and owning a business has really helped me to restore my faith in humanity.

Most of my life I would get lectures from adults on why I should think before I speak, why I shouldn’t share so much personal information, why I can’t just say what I’m thinking out loud.

But that’s all my parents ever did, especially in social situations which is why we were such outcasts.

Then mental health got less stigmatized and we have names for their behavior now. We’re just now learning that my father is pretty up there on the autism spectrum, a few of my family members are.

My raw honesty about my flaws and past mistakes are what has brought me my most tender and life changing relationships. It’s what makes my clients follow me around their house and tell me what’s going on that week, good or bad. I’m more than happy to listen and offer a word of comfort or outrage, or celebration or condolence. It makes me feel good to make other people feel at ease.

I love people. I always have. I fall in love with most everyone I meet; what makes them unique and different is what is beautiful and interesting to me.

Rick Rubin said in his book The Creative Act: “Many great artists first develop sensitive antennae not to create art but to protect themselves. They have to protect themselves because everything hurts more."

Everything hurts more.

Bliss of the Millennium

When I heard that I almost broke down crying, and not because I didn’t already know this information; it’s the validation and understanding in that statement that moves me to tears. I feel seen.

I’ve always craved feeling seen and heard yet at the same time I panic and freak out if I feel too seen and too heard. It conjures up the image of the Eye of Sauron, lol.

To be completely honest, dawg, I just need to get this shit out of system before it eats me alive, you feel me?

And would you still love me if I was a worm? If you knew how much of a slimy, writhey worm I truly am deep down in the pig slop pit of my soul?

When I asked Ethan if all of this is too much of an overshare, he said, “that is why people love you. You’re open and you’re vulnerable with people and people like that.”

That made me feel ashamed. First of all, I never truly believe anyone when they tell me they love me and second: I wish I didn’t feel the compulsive need to overshare.

But the more I talk to other people about deeper stuff the more I feel like I am piecing together the bigger picture, getting closer to completing the puzzle that is humanity… Except the older I get the more questions I have.

I desperately want to talk about pain and trauma and healing and miracles. I want to know other people are freaks too so we can all perform in the circus together all the time no matter where we are.

“Gooba Gabba, Gooba Gobble one of us! One of us!”

Freaks 1932

Time, as a symptom

I felt back in early September that a change was coming, something big, something bad. I felt so terrified every day.

The Gaza genocide struck about a month later.

This happened back in September 2018, too. I felt something eerie shift in the air.

A few months later, the global pandemic started. Rick Rubin describes it as being able to feel the energy of a "societal wave." Imagine it like sound waves.

The culture moves through time in currents; everything is energy. We're fluid beings.

I am so acutely sensitive to the world that it can be a paralyzing experience. In fact, it was late September 2001 I think when I was awoken in the night by a storming conscience. I felt the burning need to confess every single sinful thought I ever had. I was six years old!

I felt like this thick, heavy hopelessness would beset my whole being and melt me from the inside out. The pain was so bad it felt like I couldn’t breathe sometimes. It was like all of my previous storage of dopamine had suddenly been spilled out of my ears like the elevator blood spilling scene from The Shining

It lasted for what felt like years but I think was just a couple of months. Towards the end of it I was obsessively washing my hands so much that the skin was beginning to peel off.

American Delusion

I've spent my entire life being terrified of feeling that sad ever again. I think that was the closest I've ever been to hell. I’ve gone through short seasons of depression since then, mostly in the winter time, but nothing is ever quite like your first time.

I think I am motivated by the anxious need to explain why I’m so fucked in the head to unconsciously escape the looming possibility of either falling into another battle with soul crushing doom or getting my ass torn to shreds by my father’s old, leather belt. Either way, I rarely feel safe or acceptable. We are the monster under the bed.

As a sensitive child, I always had the ability to disappear into my own little world via dissociation in order to protect myself. I would compulsively draw pictures (some of the recently uncovered ones are extremely disturbing lol) and eventually I really pressed hard into writing/storytelling.

I would pace back and forth in my backyard or swing on the swing until after dark telling myself story after story. My best friend would eagerly wait for me to come over and tell her the latest one.

Writing is my favorite artistic medium because I don’t feel I can adequately speak well to get my point across. I feel choked from second guessing myself. I talk too fast and trip over my words; I developed a pretty bad speech impediment early in life that got better in my twenties.

Writing helps organize my chaotic thoughts, pinning them down like pretty dead bugs on Styrofoam in order to display them in neat rows.

Not Enough, Too Much

If you’re a creative, you probably know how it feels to be crippled by not feeling good enough to express yourself fully. The shackled feeling of needing to create through whatever medium of art you choose and at the same time feeling choked by an inner voice that absolutely busts your balls before you even do anything.

“This has already been done,” The Voice says. It kind of sounds like your mother after she read your first full length novel about the end of the world.

“This is an overdone plot. I’ve read stuff like this before, you're not offering up anything unique. Keep trying, watch out for too many commas, run-ons and-"

But the sound of cracking ice is echoing through your seventeen year old brain and your cheeks are burning. You feel like you’ve just wasted three months of your short life typing away in the silent dark of your bedroom staring into the white, pixelated void of Microsoft Word.

And maybe The Voice is right. You are a little comma crazy and you tend to ramble. Maybe the plot is kind of like a movie you saw about a dystopian world in the future and maybe that is an overdone trope for like over a hundred years… Listen, I'm not ashamed to say The Hunger Games was a great series!!!!

But respectfully, Voice… With love, Voice… You don't read anything except for things like the Life of Martin Luther and watch the Food Network and Prophecy in the News so maybe I should listen to a different voice.

I had my first experience with true euphoria when I learned I could escape into my made up story. I was no longer an isolated, lonely teenager with an emotionally absent, alcoholic father; I was the character I had created and was living vicariously through the pages of my own book. My name was Guitar, I was traveling on foot across the country trying to find shelter and community, trying to not go insane from the grief of losing everything. It was as if I had disappeared and someone else had taken over. It doesn't sound healthy now that I am relaying the sentiment, lol.

I wrote most of the second book intending to write a third and final one but I gave up. I felt embarrassed and silly. I didn’t let anyone read that one, though. To be honest, it was even better than the first. Looking back, my first book actually WAS pretty awful so The Voice was correct.

But I had posted it on a website for young wannabe writers and several people enjoyed it, so that felt enough for me even if the approval wasn’t coming from the person I wanted it to be from.

After my attempt at a trilogy, I never tackled the task of trying to write another novel. But who knows, when I’m seventy I may take up smoking cigarettes again be one of those crazy old ladies who crank out smutty murder-mysteries like nobody’s business.

Moral of the tale: don’t let anyone’s opinion affect you so much you quit trying. Don’t be a sore loser, be a determined one.

And I’m not saying you should pretend to be in jaw-dropping awe over every doodled piece of computer paper your kid brings you… Sometimes a simple “neat” will do just fine. ;)

Maybe someone reading this will appreciate and relate to the words I am stringing together. Perhaps the tapestry of these thoughts will cuddle up next to you with a warm cup of tea and a butter cookie.

:)