I’m upstairs, listening to music, mooning over my beautiful new Kindle Fire, and completely in love. Because that’s what Christmas is about, along with Jesus, of course.

My family is amazing. We spent the morning as we always do: stockings, presents, eggs benedict. And there’s nothing better in the world, I think, than Christmas morning soaked in buttery sunlight, nothing better than seeing Denise smile, nothing better than my mother’s eggs benedict. Christmas is soaked in love, fried in joy. It’s perfect. It’s days like Christmas that I remember that, through the good times and the bad, the times when we adore each other and the times we hate each other, we are family. And that’s more precious than anything in the world, even my gorgeous, lovely Kindle, who I am considering naming Charles. I am so happy.

Life is good.

The world is at peace for me.

I’m ready to face the year ahead.

I’m in love, full of love.

This has been the best Christmas yet.

You bought me my sparkle picture. And everytime I look at it, I feel strong, really strong, because you are.

I always say, “Hey look! It’s the queenofspain! I love that woman!”

Mommy always asks why.

It took me a really long time to figure out that the reason why was because you were who I wanted to be. It took me a really long time to figure out that the reason I loved and admired you so much was because you’re brave, and strong, and a truly amazing woman.

You tell the world to suck it if it’s wrong.

You are so loved by people because they hear you, they hear your voice.

You fight, and never stop.

You sparkle.

And you’re more beautiful than I can say.

You said in your post that love was kicking Lupus’s sorry butt.

I want you to know that,

along with respect, and admiration, and all around adoration,

you’ll always have my love.

Keep fighting. Keep being you.

One was to be named “After”.

It was going to be about our second performance, which was lovely. And it was going to be about the acting still involved afterwards. I was going to talk about how when Dad, or Mother, or our director greeted one of the audience, it was like they shrugged on a coat, like a smile for their adoring fans would settle upon their faces like a lazy butterfly on a summer day. Easy. But still acting. It was going to be a post about the beauty of being someone, about being beautiful, about being an actor. Because sometimes, when you’re on stage, when no one can make presumptions about you, when you’re never what you seem, that’s the only time when you stop acting, and start living. I was going to write about how it’s only once you step off that stage that you have to don that smile and do that perfectly rehearsed song and dance. I was going to write about acting, and how it was something that speaks to the soul, that is perfect and pure and empowering if people would stop thinking so darn hard about it.

But.

I was also going to write a post called “Mediocre”.

It was going to be about pain. And feelings of inadequacy. It was going to be about how when people say nasty things, they stick like honey, while compliments roll off like so much water. See, because my amazing, sweet cast told me today that they thought yesterday’s post was really nice. And I was happy because they were. But one person, just one, told me it was a mediocre post. And suddenly, I couldn’t think of it as good anymore.

And I hated myself for that.

I hated myself for letting one person’s opinion break something like that, break my words. Am I so fragile, a being of glass threads, brittle and braced for one raindrop to shatter me. It’s not fair, and it’s not right. But it’s true. I was going to write about weakness, and power, and I was going to try and scrape some sort of epiphany about the nature of myself or humanity out of it, like scraping old, gray gum off the sidewalk, and chewing it to make it seem fresh again.

Pointless.

I was going to write lies, and truth. In both posts. I was going to omit, and be too honest.

And it got me thinking about choices, about this blog, about life. I need to make a choice, because I can’t just present joy and fluidity, nor can I just present the sticky, hard cragginess of feeling inept, of being broken. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what to say.

I’m trying.

I think I’ll just say both and do my best to speak the truth and from the heart. Because I’m sure

I am sure

that if I do that, if I really do, anyone can call me mediocre and it won’t stick.

I am sure.

I’m RJ. Some people call me Rebecca, some people call me Sunshine. I started this blog three years ago because I wanted a voice, but I didn’t know that yet. Back then, I just did it for my awesome master bloggers in the house.  This blog started out as reviews, and vocab, and the joy of 7th grade enthusiasm. Now, I suppose a lot of people would call it a life blog. I call it a nothing blog, and here’s why:

I promised change. To try and find the joy again, to write quality and quantity and to be proud again, proud as I was at my first BlogHer conference when I got to hand out my glossy business cards and I cried from pride over my mother’s keynote. I promised to blog to the fullest of my ability, and I haven’t. Not really. And if I have, I should just quit now.

This is a nothing blog. It’s not life, or reviews, or “un-life”, even. It’s not me, but it is. It’s a lot of unfinished ideas, a few gems, and, through it all, me screaming, “where is my voice? I need a voice.” This is a nothing blog where everything suspends in limbo, than dashes forwards at times. This is a blog in fits and starts, in moments of clarity, and moments of confusion, in tears, and, sometimes, in that terrifying numb space where nothing seems really real, where life has pushed you too far. It’s that sort of blog.

I’m a nothing blogger.

That sounds negative, and I suppose it could be, but it is what it is. It is what Vampire Vocab is.

It’s just, I’m tired of boxes. I’m tired of pushing on walls, screaming myself hoarse to try and make people see, then, even if I push and shove and shoulder out of one box, one category someone has put me in, I just find myself in another.

My name is RJ. Some people call me Rebecca or Sunshine. I’m a nothing blogger. I’m looking for a voice.

My name is RJ.

But who am I?

I cried for my mommy and I wrote all through math about NO for my daddy.

I could write here for hours, let words fall into poetry, or stuff them into labored sentences to try and describe how I feel: recovering from a cold, with tears leaking from my eyes in joy. I could try to describe how I feel, how loved I feel. Because love is here, in this family, right now. It’s in Joe letting me sit up front in the car ride, no arguments. It’s in a friendly morning with Lizzy. It’s in “Happy Birthday, kid.” on my FB wall from Denise. It’s in triple-ginger cake for breakfast and lunch. Love is remembering New Orleans air, spiced and bitter like chicory coffee, thick with music and my father’s and my joy. Love is reflected off the surface of the opal mommy compared me to. But mommy, it’s you. It’s all of you. It’s my family that gives me color, that fills me with sparkle.

I love you, all of you. I can’t say enough, not if I read the dictionary and used every word, not if I wrote a poem every day, not if I could write a blog post to span the world. I can’t tell you how much I love you.

And mommy? Anything, Anywhere.

Thank you for 16 years. Thank you for the rest I know are to come.

1. What do you love?

I love Piven. I love the feeling that I’m changing things with my words, that the clearly defined line between mind and body are blurring, and power emerges from the tearing out of that cocoon. I love that, at Piven, I feel like it’s raining, just in my ensemble’s honor, that thunder will roll from the tips of our outstretched fingers, and that the Earth will shift, warm and giving, under our feet. I love that, at Piven, a word is enough, or no words at all. That power and opportunity can be born just from the clash of eye contact.

I love my body. I love that I’m a woman, and have curves. I love that I’m feminine, undoubtedly so. I love my changeable eyes.

I love the Earth, a panorama of water and earth and air, sunshine, rain and hail.

I love writing, and feeling words fall in intricate designs upon paper.

I love words, in general. Words change things. Words can fill people up, spill over like jewels. Or words can be short and cold and hard, like pennies in a icy alley. Words can overcome people with joy or anger, passion or loneliness. Words change things.

I love physical contact. I love hugging people, kissing people on the cheek, holding hands.

2. What do you fear?

I fear failure.

Rejection.

Breast cancer.

Becoming mentally handicapped, incapable of  speech or thought or communication.

Never seeing myself as beautiful.

Burning out.

Being too old to walk.

I fear taking chances.

I fear not taking chances, and losing because I didn’t.

I fear my family dying or being hurt.

I fear being raped, being pregnant, STDs.

3. What do you want?

I want to be happy, loved, and loving.

I want to get past this mental barrier that I can feel is keeping me from being the best actor I can be.

I want to be successful (read: happy in my work and financially secure.)

I want to learn more about people.

I want to write better birthday posts.

I want to win Blogher Keynote.

I want to really, really live.

So, tell me.

What do you love?

What do you fear?

What do you want?

Because I’m afraid. Because this goes past writer’s block, or whatever you’d like to call it. Something has died. Sometimes, I still feel it, sometimes, when I sit down, let myself write a story, or really feel strongly about something. But that’s only sometimes. I feel like my sparkle is fading, like an old, worn actor who looks in the mirror and still sees youth and talent superimposed over her withered, graying frame. She doesn’t see the truth. I’m bitter. I’m bitter like dandelion greens and chill fall wind. I’m bitter because, once upon a time, I wrote six word sundays because I thought it was fun. I’m bitter because I’ve started tons of books this year, gotten half way through them, and dropped them. I’ve only finished a few. I’m bitter because I can see my writing changing and warping, over the years, I can see how it develops, an I’m not sure I’ll ever be satisfied with it. I’m bitter because I feel like any wit or talent I once had is eing mowed down, cleared out, neutered and sterilized by complaining about physics and promising outcomes that don’t occur.

I feel old. I feel like my words, phrases, are creaky and aching, like they get sore and stiff when it rains. I need this to change. I can’t just let Vampire Vocab devolve into one of those life blogs that no one would ever THINK of reading because it’s just that uninteresting.

I fear that it’s already there.

Oh, please don’t let that be true.

This weekend.

I’ve decided. This weekend, I’m going to write a story. A real story. Not a poem. Not a “six word story”. A real story. One I can be proud of. If nothing else, that is what I will do.

And I’ll do at least one Vocab.

One interview.

And one book review.

Because this ISN’T HELPING. I decided to blog every day because I want to win keynote. Because that would be the one thing I do for me, because I want to, not to please my parents, friends, teachers, or anyone else. But blogging every day is just throwing into sharp relief not what I can do, not what I should be proud of doing, achieving, but what I’m not doing.

I want to do this. I want to turn this ship around. I want to return to where I was when I wrote “Blogher. There’s nothing I can say to describe it. Really.” Or, at least, the state of mind I had then.

It’s time for another self-intervention.

I’m going to go for quality content.

No.

I’m going to speak from my heart, feel my youth, let myself truly feel what I’m saying. I’m going to speak for myself, revive my wit, let funny things be funny, and let sad things be sad.

I’m NOT going for quality content.

Because I believe that, when something is true, when something is real, when someone has a goal and commits to it, they don’t have to “”go” for anything. It just is.

Piven is like being in my own world, the world of my ensemble, where our voices are the oceans and our bodies are the shifting earth. It’s like our imaginations cause trees to grow and shift, leaves to unfurl in fast motion, buildings to rise and fall. At Piven, in a room empty but for chairs and an ensemble, there can be a field of dried corn stalks that crackle and sigh, or a graying barn with broken shutters. There can be a child’s birthday party with squeals of laughter, a camp, a suburban house, a waterfall or a desert! Anything! Everything!

Piven is a place where you feel like my heart is swept away on a tide of passion, like I’m walking on a floor made of switches where every moment something new and exciting is activated by my movement, my voice. There is no hiding inside candy shells, or hiding. There is only planting my feet, turning my face to the lights, and feeling the sunshine, undiluted, inside myself.

It’s such that, sometimes, I forget how lucky I am to go to that school. I take for granted that we have a GSA and a Women’s Empowerment Club and teachers and staff who accept people’s lifestyles. I forget that in different schools I would have been shunned for being a feminist, for being bisexual, even for the way I dress. But reading this article (click here) I remembered. And it made me so angry that anyone, anyone at all, would be incited to suicide over something so idiotic.

I cannot believe that there are still people who believe homosexuality is evil or wrong. I cannot believe that anyone could hold to such an antiquated and irrational argument and receive even the tiniest semblance of respect. I cannot believe that  children have not moved past that and found some other ridiculous and unfounded thing to bully others about. It’s wrong. I think that it is wrong that anyone would treat any human being as evil or wicked based solely on their sexual orientation.

This is just so obscene. It’s like when women were burned as “witches” just for being women who seemed strange. It’s like when African-Americans were treated as animals because of their skin color. Today, we look back on those things and think: how brutal and narrow-minded they were! How idiotic and unfounded! I have this feeling that people will look back on this and think the very same thing.

This whole thing, it just makes me angry. More than that, it makes me disappointed. I thought we had gotten past this. I thought we were more evolved, or at least more mindful of history, of past failings. But I guess not.

Not unusual, seeing as it was chemistry.

But there were too many variables, too much margin for error. I saw it all play out, watched my experiment take place and all I could think of was: “what is wrong with this?”. I wondered about contamination of my petri dish, the residue from the lipid trial, the temperature, the environment, the brand of milk we were using, the type of cow, cross-contamination from other groups, difference in the time between drops of food coloring being administered, the effects of homogenization on the milk, the minerals in tap water…

I was crazy with ideas. Errors. Possibilities. Uncontrollable factors.

It was terrible. It was wonderful. It filled my heart with fear and joy to know that there were so many factors.

And I realized that it was like life. In a strange sort of way.

Because in the lab, in life, you just do the best you can, and free up a margin of error. Things don’t always go perfectly, there are things we can’t control, we just live with it.

Life is terrible. Life is wonderful. Life is frightening.

It all works out in the end, though. I believe that.

I believe that life never throws anything at us that we can’t handle.

Just like chemistry teachers. My experiment went fine.