How not to know your audience

I just played a random show for 25 little kids.

It not uncommon for me to sit outside of the anythink and play my guitar until it opens. Infact, that is what I do almost every time I come here, because I usualy get here a few hours early. I play there because I don't want an audience sometimes. People here are to afraid to stand and watch so they usually hide around a corner orsit on the benches across the way from where I sit and sing, and that's okay with me, except somehow today I opened my eyes after a song and there where about 25 little kids sitting on the lawn infront of me with two women.

What I experianced at that moment was not stage fright, but I did stop for a minute because I realized I had no idea what songs to play for 7 year olds. I don't know any Hannah Montana or anything, and when I was faced with an audience of smiling youngins I didn't know what else to do but continueto play soft rock and watch them get bored with me.

I am disapointed in myself.

But all the people sitting on the bench across the way looked happy, so it wasn't a complete bunk show. I'm gonna go looking for a guitar teacher today around here.

On a side note, I admire Bieber. I saw a video of him breaking his foot on stage and finishing the song.

Fathers Day

I love you, and..... I love you

It has come to my attention that if ever you bring up the topic of people saying I love you, everyone goes, "People say I love you to me ALL the time. It's no big deal! I don't know why everyone has to make such a huge deal about there boyfriend/girlfriend saying it to them." And it makes me wonder how some people can't see the difference between the "I LOVE YOU!" you scream at your friend down the hallway, and the "I love you" you say to your parents, the "I love you" you say to your best friend, and the "I love you" you say to the person you love in the romantic sense. (By romantic sense I mean they are something like your whole world.) And I decided I would take up some of my long night detailing my thoughts on each "I love you."

The one you scream down the hallway: This is the light heart. The sometimes true, never really thought through, usually harmless little reminder to the person waking away from you, or across the hall or classroom, is appreciated by you. For some people, I tend to believe it is a reminder to the rest of the room that you are loud and excessively open, in a non-slut way. This is fun. This gets annoying, VERY easily. 

The "Goodnight Mom/Dad, I love you.": This holds more power then the first one for most people. For me personally it holds a LOT of weight, and I have hard time saying it to my parents as much as they probably need to hear to be sure I'm still aware of there presence. And I am, but parental love isn't as easy for me to feel okay expressing as it is for some people. SB? I've header him tell his parents I love you twice a day before. And he does that EVERY day. I wish I had that, and I wish I could say it with as much meaning and confidence as he does. Incase you haven't noticed, I don't take I love you lightly.

The "I love you man, I don't know what I'd do without you." When you say I love you to your best friend, you really mean it. That I love you is one from the heart, and you both know it, and sometimes it's hard for best friends to express it to each other without disguising the warm, soft hearted feelings with comedy. I love that, and I have NO idea why. 

When your lover sais, "I love you." So many times I've seen people who thought they were so, madly, deeply, drowning in love with someone... until the next week. I have a real hard time keeping track of the couples getting together and falling apart most of the time. I've had conversations with SB in which I felt like it was just him and I and one or two other couples in a the middle of giant crowd of people falling in and out of love and in out of depression every few weeks or so. And it happens in waves. But it is NOT limited to teenagers.

I watch adults stay so madly in love with each other, so firmly believing that this person is the love of there life, when even I, one the many "completely oblivious and ignorant to the world teenage girls" (It's what they all think of us, they can't deny it.) can see clearly that they have either given up on finding love, and are consciously or unconsciously settling for someone. Even I can see when an adult couple is living of dependency on each other not to be depressed and or without a life. And that's okay, but that "I love you" just isn't the I love you I'm trying to get to here. 

It's not the "mutual agreement" I love you, where you've been dating for a long time, so you just decide it will be okay if you start saying it to each other at the end of phone calls and before you turn off the lights. It's not the I love you someone says before they understand the difference between dependency/compulsive need for someone and love. It's not the I love you you tell your friends or your parents, not even your best friend. In fact, the closest thing I can think of is the I love you some of us said to our favorite toy when we were 5 years old. 

If you have to ask what love feels like, you've never been in this kind of love. (It sounds obvious, but I know lot of people who said they where in love, and found themselves asking the question at one point or another.) It is something you never forget, and if you lose it, it's a TERRIBLE pain. And it NEVER goes away. I know, it sounds horrible. It IS horrible. But now that that part is out of the way: It truly is the most amazing thing in the whole world. It's a light in the dark, its happiness in a pretty little package, it's every Christmas you ever spent with your family, it's the first concert you went to, it's fulfilling a dream it's exercising a passion it's flying in a dream. It's the closest you can ever get to a person, and still not feeling close enough. Feeling like you can’t possibly entangle yourself in them and there life and there loves and there memories and there habits and there ideas and morals and dreams to feel close enough to them. In there arms is home, the space between there fingers is a lovely little secret, because walking hand in hand you know no one else in the world can feel your connection. Even if you wanted to share it with someone you couldn't, and believe me, I've tried. I'm trying right now. Its when 30 people a day come up to you just to tell you that your cute together and you guys look perfect together and cute older couples come up to you and tell you your going to be together for the rest of your lives, and you pretend to right it off as a nice little compliment, but in the back of your mind your love it something inexpressible. You take every one of those 'compliments' to heart. It's being so unable to express the way you feel about someone that saying I love you is really something more like saying "I am trying with ever fiber of my being to try and express how amazing you are, but I just can't seem to get it out." And sometimes, that I love you is the most climactic release (and yes I am using that in a way referring to sex) of all that tension built up inside of you there ever was, it's the final wires connecting to create the peaceful energy flow between the two of you. 

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/this-is-love/

This article does a wonderful job explaining what love is, a much better job then I just did. 

But anyways, yeah, that’s just my 5:03 in the morning explanation for all these. Don't take it directly to heart, I'm sure it's different for everybody, but not by that much. ;)

I didn't proof read this. 

.....have you ever...

have you ever

been so trapped and alone that the only thing you can think to do is kill yourself, because most of the time even running away wouldn't let you escape?

Everyone says there is always a way out that isn't one of those two. But there is no escape for the kind of things wrong with me, and my life. You can pretend there is all you want, and that the world is a wonderful place and that in the end everything will be alright. But none of that is true, the world is only a happy place if your a happy person in it. And it seems like no matter what I do, if I stay where I am right now I'll never be a happy person.

But it doesn't matter. Nothing I say or do matters. Nothing I am, nothing I am every going to be matters to anyone. Because of my age, because of my gender, because of the people I love, because of the things I love.  I'm trapped here, and if I'm here for much longer I'll never learn how to get anywhere.

I need to escape, but nobody cares because from the outside everything will always look like it's perfect. They all want it that way.

There is, currently, no way out. Question is, can I stick it out long enough, and will it be to late?

On my book, the Brighton Oaisis and being kind.

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Making amends

One of my most important and prominent morals: Making amends creates peace of mind. As I write this, I'm sitting in the anythink library in Brighton Colorado, a place where there are a lot of people who don't smile back at you when smile at them. The importance of this is that a few summers ago, during the same Summer I ALWAYS talk about, at the beginning I had my first serious relationship (that led directly into my current relationship with SB) that taught me a lot about the way I should and should not be treated. I realize now that it was much more a relationship of dependency then of love, and from that I feel much guilt. But I'm trying to move past that, as I'm trying not to hold things on my shoulders as much.

I walked around for a long time down here, and I walked around in his old apartment complex. I wondered if the trees and the old swings and the grass in the shade remembered me as well as I remembered them. It was strange, in a way. Like walking through memories, trapped and fading in hte back of my mind.

To sum things up, I realized two things:

Sometimes, going back to where you started can really clear things up.

SB was the first person I loved, but he wasn't the first person who ever loved me.



I decided to send him a message in light of out recent reconnection. Things ended badly between the two of us, and I'm glad I've finally made amends.

"So, I was walking around your old apartments today. I was really kind of just walking around Brighton lol :) and I realized I could remember the path we walked to them. And I wanted to let you know that I smiled all along the way. Especially when I walked down the really thin sidewalk right on the edge of the street. It just reminded me of happy things and moment that I had forgotten about us and you, made me remember a lot of the moments I shared with you. I sat in the grass and wrote a song, and I walked up to your old apartment and looked at the door for a good five minutes before some bald guy looked at me like he was on meth and I was a hallucination before trying to jimmy the lock open and walking away.




It was great :) It was actually really really nice. I loved it, it was like walking through memories and photographs, just pictures in my mind brought back to life.



I've definitely made amends with those memories. And that is one step forward.



I'll send you a free MP3 of the song, I think I'm gonna put it on the first album. "

Tristan Prettymen taught me what I need to do.

So, I'm not sure how twitter works. Although my mother is head of technologies and I have had a twitter for almost a year... the website confuses me. I've grown to love the whole "beautiful sayings in 140 characters or less" thing, but it took me a really long time to figure out a what a re-tweet was, and how to make one. And just yesterday I discovered that the little numbers on the tab at the top of the page are because you have a new tweet. So, I'm not exactly sure if this was her original tweet, but I got on twitter and saw that Tristan Prettyman had tweeted this:

Mmmm Hmmm! Holla! RT @NovellaRoyale "To fall IN LOVE with YOURSELF is the first secret to HAPPINESS"


This is relevant because: It has come to my attention that I pretty much completely and utterly hate myself. And also, because I realize that one of the very main reasons I want to become a musician is because I feel like if somebody else likes my music, if anybody else is inspired by a song that I wrote, I am worth something. In other words: If somebody else likes me, I'll like myself, right?

... WRONG.

There are plenty of loving, caring people in my life that 'like me', and I still have trouble escaping feelings of self loathing. I always feel like I want to get away from myself, and yet, there are so many people that would hate it if I did. So what has made me think that I would gain happiness from being a musician because, someone else loves me?

And besides that realization, I've also realized that to be anything you have to have confidence in yourself. I heard somebody say it takes more confidence then talent to be a star. how can anybody love me if I don't love myself? I'd ask SB, but he probably doesn't have an answer. <3 I want to be happy.

I've had this backwards the whole time. I thought that I wanted to be a musician so I could be happy, (well, along with enough other reason to make a whole other blog about.) but actually, I want to be happy, so I can be a musician. Make sense? Finally does to me.

I have the guts, but can't except any glory because I don't feel like I deserve it. So here is my mission: to love myself.

This is why you should Smile Back

I make it a point to smile at everyone. I smile at people whenever I happen to look someone in the eyes, (which is obviously quite a bit) and this is exactly why.

I left today to try and get my mind off of my music(first time for everything), my angry abusive old friend, my failing home life and my best friends leaving home... but mostly, to get away from thought of my own self worthlessness. I dreaded coming back home where in the back of my mind I knew I was probably walking right back into my own self inflicted hell. Being inflicted with extreme anxiety, being alone even in my own bedroom is an nerve racking as being hung by the collar of your shirt over the edge of the empire state building, and watching someone get hit by a car from above them, dangling in the air. It leaves me to much time to think about myself, and the things I've failed at, it leaves me time to think I'll fail at everything else I ever try to do. I start looking at the world from a disgusting point of view, looking at all the bad things instead of the good. I forget that there is any good left for me to salvage from this life. Often I feel the world be much better off without me, and I without it. Given my current situations, thats not really to much of a stretch.

I feel like I've already typed to much to keep anyones attention, so I'll keep this short and sweet. I wasn't even home yet, and I was almost at my boiling point. I was just about to let tears fall right there on the sidewalk waiting for any one of these 20+ cars to stop and let me through, and a man stopped. he stopped his car, looked me dead in the eye and smiled at me. That man smiled at me before I even smiled at him, and that was all it took. I'm fine. Better then I've been in a couple weeks, actually. Because that man smiled at me, and made me remember that there are good things left in the world, and good people to.

My suggestion: Smile. You just might fix someone.

PS. Thank you, man with a flannel shirt and curly hair.