Argh!

Hmm, how to start.

I take pictures.
I sometimes luck into a good shot, by taking a large number of pictures.
I, like most people, like getting credit for doing something good.

So when people take that away from me by taking the pictures that I have made available for their viewing, and put those on their own sites... I feel deeply betrayed.

I know they only mean to show their friends something cool, or display pictures of themselves looking good, or at a cool event...

But something in me just flares up when it happens. I described it to a friend as a "burning firey 'I will follow you and punch you until you give me credit' kind of hate." Very big issue for me.


Let me put it this way. The picture is mine, don't steal it. How easy that is to understand!

*grumble*

Alison: gets this feeling that the best is yet to come.

I don't know, I just have this idea in my head that God is saying "Stick around, you ain't seen nothing yet."

And believe me, I've seen cool things. There's just this amazing sort of build-up going on in Manhattan, and I know I'm not the only one feeling it.

Alison: feels a sense of belonging.

I had the most wonderful talk with some dear friends yesterday. Basically, I have been struggling with a feeling of complete detachment from my surroundings. Not a new feeling for me, really. One that has followed me from childhood, actually.

Okay, to start with... I've been talking lately with some people about the idea that the devil feeds lies into your life all along, and then various situations enforce those lies, and in your head you say "See? I really am __________." Insert whatever lie you have believed about yourself.

Then there are the seed moments, stupid little snippets of life that no one else would notice, but ones that rocked you to your core. Hurtful things said, hurtful things done, that help you to define yourself as something.

I define myself as not belonging. Yes, people might be friends with me, but I very rarely feel like I fit in with them. Even with some of my closest friends, I will sometimes look up and think "Who are these people, and why do they want to be close to me?" Because that's how thoroughly deceived I am. I truly intimately believe that I do not fit in, and will never fit in. I'm too weird, or too quirky, or say dumb things, or know too much, or don't know the things everyone else knows, or am not pretty enough.

I can trace all this back to Second Grade. The all school skating parties at the local skate rink were the biggest deal ever, especially who had skated at the couples skate. It was huge for us back then. For some reason, I had missed the latest skating party, so I was way out of the loop. That day at lunch, I sat down at the girl's table. One of the girls had kind of an item going with a boy one grade above us, and so I turned to her really excitedly, and asked who had skated together at the couples skate. She turned to me and gave me such a scathing look, and with a bitch tone in her voice, said "Why would YOU want to know?"

The message that little 7-year-old Alison got from that was "It doesn't matter that you're here, you just don't belong." And I believed it.



So the struggle now is to redefine myself as someone beyond that lie.