I am a firm believer in letting go and allowing the universe to take you where you need to be.  Some people might say this is because I just don’t like to be held responsible for my choices, but I really think that it’s because whenever I try desperately to control everything, things just turn to shit, and when I roll with it, everything just sort of works out.  Mostly, I just want things to work out and the letting go produces better results than pretty much anything else I can think of.

So I let go and currently there is a chance that I will have to end my torrid un-affair with Married Boyfriend.  So the next-to-none chance of us ever sleeping together will turn into never, ever.  And somehow, I am sad.  This isn’t like anything terrible.  A bunch of awesome things are going on right now, and if everything falls into place I will be very excited about where I am going and what I’ll be doing with my future.  But to think that I won’t be flirting with Married Boyfriend or calling him up to flirt with me when I am down, I dunno, it just feels very empty.

I know this stupid post is kind of cryptic, but I guess it has to be because the things going on are not mine to share.  Not yet at least, but even then, it wouldn’t matter, because I respect the hell out of Married Guy’s privacy and would never be able to betray him.  Maybe the worst part about this is that I secretly wanted his wife to just disappear into thin air so I wouldn’t have to be the bad guy.  Now I’ll never get to be the bad guy cause he is going to give me something better than a dead wife.  And I can’t really give him anything in return.

Someone sent me a message telling me that my blog as probably way more interesting than I was in real life.  I like how people understand that my blog is some sort of extension of my real life, but not exactly real life.  If it was real life, today I would complain about how I am on my last roll of toilet paper and entirely too lazy to walk 100 feet to the store and buy more.  And I have already left the house three times to get coffee.  I could have easily gotten toilet paper, but I just didn’t feel like.  I bet around 4am, I will be like WHY COULDN’T I JUST BUY THE FUCKING TOILET PAPER?  WHY?

I think the funniest thing about my blog is the confusion people have over where it ends and I begin, especially highlighting the fact that there might not be a beginning or ending because it might be one of the same.  I don’t know if it’s worth my time to even clarify that.  All I know is that I selectively write about things that interest me, topics I cannot get out of my head and the drama that I know people will feast on, even if I end up looking like a monster in the process.  Actually, most of the time I prefer to write posts where I end up looking like the fool or the monster, it’s just more interesting that way.

The thing is, in a way, I know my real life is exceptionally more interesting than pretty much anything I write on my blog because I don’t feel any need to censor myself.  I can keep things quiet and underwraps and if I want and I can become insanely private and withdrawn if I need to.  You can always tell when I am doing this because there will not be any posts for an entire month.  If there are no posts, I am up to some super exceptional real life bullshit that I cannot appropriately hash out.  And I’ve got a list of stories I want to tell but I just know that I’m not ready to write them and it’s likely that no one on Earth is ready to read them.

But I wonder about the people who amp up their personal level of cool/interesting on their blog.  Like, exactly what is the point in that?  I mostly tone things down so that people who think it’s clever to look me up are not floored by the sorts of bizarre decisions I’ll make in the name of an adventure.  And I mostly leave out all the boring mundane things because, like this post, you’d just skim it and waste your time on something much more interesting.  Something else, just like me.

Somewhere, somehow I got signed up for a sexy party guest list.  It’s always from the same group, which highlights various events in the swinging community.  I guess I could spend this time postulating how it came to be that I ended up on their mailing list or I could talk about how I am sort of obsessed with the idea of going to one as a single woman.  Even typing that is strange.  Guess what internet, the part of me that needs to know, has been playing with the idea of what it would be like to be a single woman at a sex party.  This is where you all decide that any personal growth I have achieved recently has been nullified.

It hasn’t.  And that’s barring the fact that this is real personal growth I’m going through anyways.

I don’t even know what I would do at a sex party.  Maybe stand around and stare, likely drink a lot and try to stay cool.  I brought this up to my friend Pam and she was like, “I think what you need is a buddy system.” Implying, that I need to bring a pussy posse with me and hold court at a sex party so there is no chance that I get to turn into Jodi Foster in “The Accused.”

Although, I know this will never happen and not because I am scared or disgusted by it, but because girls don’t get to show up to something like a sex party without a social stigma.  So if we did decide to do something like this, we’d have to take out our scarlet letters and carve them into our chests in the case that anyone decided to tell what we did.

And if anyone knows, it’s not a secret.  Someone I am friends with, recently told me that when she first moved to Los Angeles that she worked as a escort.  I asked her if she meant hooker and she nodded.  She made $800 an hour for doing what I do FOR FREE.  I have sex for free with people I like.  She had sex with apparently good looking men and made money off of it and she’s the one that’s ashamed.  And that blows.  If people want to go to a sex party or sell their body, why should anyone give a shit?  I know by posing this question I’ll get some asshole who’ll be like, “Because you’re supposed to respect your body.”  But you know what, most of the time, when a woman has sex with a guy she thinks she likes and she’s used, she’d probably feel better if she fucking got something out of it.

Really, I think the point I’m getting at is that people spend a whole hell of a lot of time, money and effort getting into other people’s business and then judging them for their decisions.  Life is so short and almost everyone I know is miserable.  Maybe some people are fulfilled going to sex parties and other people find that same satisfaction in having a family.  Honestly, I can’t say that it matters either way because the same jackass that is super overjoyed with their judging bullshit is likely the person that secretly watches sex party porn.  But they’ll never quite make it to that point where they are completely fucking free.  And even if they did, they’d get loaded and decide to tell someone because you’ve got to get that sort of secret off your chest, and when they did, they’d be the asshole getting judged finally.

At least it’s full circle.

“Oh Sabrina,” her voice quivers through the phone. Whatever she’s going to say next I know will not be good. “Please tell me you will hangout tonight.”

I did not want to hangout or go out or do anything. My entire plan consisted of Chinese takeout and working on some stories.

I’m always trying to work on something, right? But the sound of her voice the way she said please like a little girl, I knew I couldn’t let her go through whatever had floored her alone.

“I’m on my way home. Want to meet me there?”

“I can pick you up, where are you?”

I was next to the beach, I’d been reading books there under a giant hat all day and it was amazing but now I was going to have to regroup and hold her hand instead.

It was what anyone expected, the guy she liked, it seemed less and less like he wanted to date her and more like she had been used.

Men always want to know why this generation of women are so jaded and withdrawn. It’s the same reason that men have mostly assumed a much less masculine behavior. There’s been a giant shift in gender roles that has everyone confused about everything.

Am I supposed to act nice, shy, feminine and vulnerable? Cause I am. Or am I better off being brazen an irreverent so that I can hope to avoid that moment when a guy is like “I dunno what’s happening, I didn’t expect to like you as a person and don’t want to date you.”

I didn’t know what to say to her then cause I don’t know how to deal with it myself

Cause that moment is exceptionally devastating and initiates that same feeling you get when you fall as a kid and have the wind knocked out of you. At first, you’re sure you’re dead or close to it but eventually you get up and realize its nothing.

But we’re not kids anymore, so why are we all spending so much time acting like one?

I lost my license for a year. It turns out, in the state of California, if you refuse to breathalyze and won’t give blood it’s an automatic forfeiture of your right to drive.

Dealing with the police is very much like managing yourself around a very controlling boyfriend, you’re going to get a lot of bullshit rules imposed on you, but when they’re not looking you cheat like a mother fucker.

Somehow, losing my license for a year hasn’t impeded my social agenda, if anything, it made it much more focused. People pick me up or at least pick someplace convenient for me.

What was I doing driving across town so fucking often? People pleasing. That’s why.

I guess I don’t come across as a people pleaser with my GIVE ME EVERYTHING agenda, but it turns out part of managing to get your way is to keep people happy, or at least make them think they’re happy. But is anyone very truly happy or sad?

I am not even sure as a society we have an idea of what those emotions are in their purest forms. Mostly, I think it’s all social conditioning, which is why your super spoiled friend says her life is over when the guy she likes this week doesn’t pay her any attention.

Everything is how you perceive it, including losing your license. What could be a giant pain in the ass has really become the perfect example of how sometimes life has to shake things up for you.

There’s no reason I should have been driving after drinking, who did I think I was, Dolly The Demolition Derby Dipshit?

I read more. I write more. I spend less time hunting down the perfect party. I spend less money going from store-to-store trying to purchase my own happiness. I’m in the midst of wheedling through all the erroneous, negative people I do not have time for in my life, even if some of those people are my sisters.

That old saying about how you can turn lemons to lemonade? No one ever mentions how lemons are kinda sweet by themselves and how you can think you enjoy lemons on their own until you’re finally treated to lemonade.

Sometimes you don’t even know you’re in a bad situation till you’re given the opportunity to make it better overall.

Clearly, I got lucky.

However, what I discovered was about the most broken down group of people I’ve ever had to share an hour of my time with.

Most everyone was scared of other people. I’m not sure how else to put it. Story after story basically broke down their inner fear of being used or hurt. Most of the members made a big deal out of stressing how arduous it is to manage a new sponsee, even pointing out that they never plan to take on a sponsee again.

The meetings, I think, are designed to get people to participate and share but most people in the groups I’ve been attending spend very little time talking about their drinking & lots of time complaining.

From what I can take from this is that alcoholics are scared vacuums that enrapture everyone around them into a devastating chaos but at least when they’re drunk there’s hopes they’ll pass out.

Now, this is where I mention that I understand that these people consider themselves to be powerless over the self control needed to function as an adult. But it’s also where I tell you had I had to endure observing this depression suckhole once in the past 6 years, I probably would have been a lot less reckless. But then again, maybe not.

I’ll venture to say that it takes most people years to get the kinds of answers and conversation out of me that she did.  Perhaps it was good timing and perhaps it was a little Jessica magic, but probably it was a bit of both.

Anyways, what I thought would be a fun, snarky & hilarious podcast ended up getting super serious because I openly address a lot of things I rarely do.  Including but not limited to my breasts, emotions, my car accident, my food issues (which is really the fight I have with my overeating disorder), life, death, risk-taking and alcohol.

I totally should have published this last week, but then I got the flu and then I had to be put on antibiotics and really, I just wanted to sleep.  So I spent St. Patrick’s Day sleeping.  Now you can spend the rest of your Tuesday listening to me be about as honest as I can get on the YesJessica podcast.

Because I planned to be dead by now I never really planned for the future.  When everyone was trying to figure out where they wanted to be in five years or ten years, I didn’t care cause I was going to die.

Then I didn’t die.

I decided I wanted to write, not because I thought I was any good at it, but because it didn’t matter if I was successful at it.  I was going to die super young and hopefully that could catapult my shitty stories to super success.

Maybe some asshole would compile my work into an anthology of my poor choices and girls everywhere would read it as a cautionary tale.  But I didn’t die and everything I have ever written is just words I put together in my head when I am desperately trying not to focus on the details of my life.

I never bothered to love anyone because when you’re going to die young you need as little baggage as humanly possible.  Loving lots of people means they probably are going to love you back and then a lot more people get to be devastated when you die.  I gave up on loving cause I am selfish and silly.  But I lived anyway cause the future you plan on isn’t always the one you get.

I didn’t plan for anything, I just took a lot of chances and made a ton of reckless decisions.  Now I am thirty and I have to wonder, what the hell am I doing?  Now I have to make real decisions because there is a future awaiting me and it is so scary that I sort of wish I had just died.

I have a future and it probably will not have picket fences.  My future will likely be unconventional, but it might not be.  Some of the people that I never thought would settle down and engage in life, they are the people that have impressed me the most with their personal growth.

This year is so weird because it’s the first time that I can remember in my adult life where I have tried to make sense of things.  It’s the first year where I have had reality thrust upon me.  It’s the first time in my life where running away seems futile and destroying everything around me isn’t an option.

I have a future and I am more scared about it than I was ever scared about dying.

However, it became clear to me that I do not blog enough because sometimes it takes a long time to get what I want to say right and I regard this blog with more esteem than I did in 2002 when I would just post three fucking lines of something clever I thought up while lying in the shower and praying for sudden death from a hangover.

So, I Tumble or whatever the fuck you want to call it.  And I’ll probably be updating there a billion times a day because it’s super easy and I can do it from my stupid phone. I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re one of those readers that feels gipped cause I never post enough, simmer down, I got the e-mails and am doing this for you.

Now allow me to present you with Tits & Bricks, my fucking Tumblr account.  Go there.  Follow me.  Enjoy it.

But a wonderful thing continued to happen, no matter what I have done, no matter the people I’ve hurt and the wars I have waged I preserved a hidden hope inside myself for the future.  It may not be such a secret to other people, but I have been running for so long and from so much that I simply forgot that happiness may be in the cards for me, somehow.

Today, two exceptional things happened.  Firstly, I fell and I destroyed my face.  Not to the point beyond repair, but in the way where you sit in the mirror and think to yourself, “What ever did I do to my pretty face.”  And then I said it.  My.  Face.  Is.  Pretty.  It’s strange but I have never said that to myself or anyone else for that matter.  I like my face, there are things I wish were pristine, like my skin, but in the end, overall, I love my face.

Now my face is swollen, bruised and scraped.  In a way, it resembles the way I looked after my car accident.  Not exactly, but close enough where looking at myself in the mirror made me think about that accident and how I’ve spent the past 11 years trying to escape that terror.  But you cannot escape something like that.  That event becomes apart of you and rests inside of you everyday until you deal with it.  But I never dealt with it.

Instead I ran from it, partying, playing, seducing men and generally living in up as though each day were my last.  Every morning I’d be reborn and each night I would try to kill myself off again.  Wash.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Today, I decided that I was sick of not dealing with it.  I was sick of not dealing with everything.  Today, while I walked home I looked out into the city, stopping along a freeway overpass and into the night I yelled, “I’m frightened to care but I care so much.  I’m terrified to love but I love so hard.  I am finished hiding inside myself.  I am finished.”

And then I said one more thing, but softly and to myself, “I want to love someone and I want to be loved and that does not make me weak.”

I have never been one to sort things out with the help of others.  I am strangely private despite putting all my poor choices into print in this silly blog, but here I am explaining these things to no one in particular.  2012 might be more difficult than 2001, but for the first time since I got into that car I feel like there’s real hope for me, for all of us.