10 Things that You Wouldn’t Be Able to Tell Just By Looking at Me

I’ve done a lot of thinking the last couple of days - actually, let me rephrase that. I’ve had a number of thoughts that have almost been living me the last couple of days. Despite having what seems like a million and fifty things to do, I’ve just been caught up thinking about the fact that I haven’t been to the gym in a while, thinking about setting up a new computer and formatting the hard drive from an old system to use for file storage and I’ve been considering the fact that, well, my attention span just hasn’t been up to par.

So, just for a break from all of the work that I should be doing but haven’t been getting around to, I thought this might be an interesting exercise if nothing else.

10 Things that You Probably Wouldn’t Guess Just By Looking at Me

1. There were two times that I was hospitalized for problems with my heart before I was 21, long before I started to really spiral out of control. There was another time, when I was 29 that, if I had been honest about what I was doing to my body I would have been hospitalized for cardiac evaluation. Since then, I still struggle with regulating my heart rate if I’m frightened or working out hard and my pulse speeds up beyond a certain point.
2. Even though I haven’t had my camera out more than twice since the move in the beginning of June, I’ve still been selling photos on microstock sites.
3. If it weren’t for music, I wouldn’t exist. It’s more important to me than oxygen.
4. There are times that I’m convinced that if I didn’t like beer so much, I’d probably still be underweight.
5. Yesterday after finding out the someone I knew was in inpatient treatment, I went out to dinner to celebrate the fact that I’m not in that situation anymore - and had a killer cheeseburger and fries.
6. Despite the fact that I have a civil union in Vermont and I’m aware every day of the fact that separate but equal is nowhere near equal, I’m more outraged about the kids in foster care who will go without loving families simply because of the ban on adoption by anyone who is unmarried - including special needs kids and kids with terminal illnesses - who could be given love by two parents who want, more than anything to have a child - in Arkansas than I am California’s Proposition 8. However, in terms of prop 8, Keith Olbermann’s special comment at the end of Countdown last night made me cry.
7. I know that I would be a different person if the first high school that I attended had not closed, because, thanks to sites like Facebook, I’ve been in touch with friends from that year (20 years ago) and the bonds between us are like family; on the other hand, almost every person that I’ve reconnected with from the second high school are extremely conservative and still have no idea where I’m coming from.
8. There was once a time when I suffered from such terrible anxiety and depression that I didn’t shower for two weeks - and when I did, I loathed my body so much that I didn’t take my clothing off when I finally did.
9. While I’m a ghostwriter and seem to hardly be seen anywhere without a computer and while I take what I do very seriously, the reality is that I look at almost everything that I write for work as a sort of fiction.
10. Some days the person who I miss most in the world was one of the most destructive forces that I’ve ever come up against.

Every once in a while, I feel like it’s so easy to hide behind the computer or to just avoid getting personal in this space. Every once in an even rarer while, I think it’s important to put myself out there, if only a little bit.