October 31st, 2006

Happy Halloween!

Today is the first official entry for my blog. I woke up this morning to the sound of my stereo, at 5:30. But I turned it off and went back to sleep. My mother woke me up again at 6:00, which didn't give me a chance to take a shower, just to get some jeans (which I hate, because they are not comfortable, too big) and a green t-shirt which lets my bra show through, on, underneath a black GAP sweatshirt which I think is overworn. I made my hair into a quickponytail but my black curly hair was too explosive, so I decided to braid it. I hadn't done that I a long time... I guess it wasn't that bad.

I got to school on time and had no breakfast and packed no lunch once again. My first class was Bio lab. I remembered I was supposed to finish last week's report plus the week before last's report too, none of which were actually finished. The last one wasn't even started. I tried to do it 5 minutes before the bell rang for class, but soon enough I realized... the really was no hope. I think I sort of understood more that I need to do thingsand concentrate on doing them. So I got a 5 on that report and luckily, the rest of the group hadn't strted the other report yet, so the teacher gave us a chance to hand it it next week, graded over 8. Saved a bit, I guess. I am really going to do it this time. The next class I spent working on the homework that wasd ue today for Etymology, which he talked about 1 week ago. (!!!) I finished on time. At our 30 minute recess, I was sitting in the classroom talking with some girls. (Laura, the girl I am normally with in school is on vacations for the week, so I have actually been talking to more people in the clasroom these 2 days.) I also noticed I am complaining less about being in school and teachers, maybe I do it to impress her?? In Bio class, I actually paid attention and wrote things down in my Biology notebook. (WOW). Same with Math. I was a little bit more interested in the class than usual. It sometimes pisses me off that doing assignments and homeworks or simply working in class seems to be so difficult for me, and I keep putting it off, when before, I did everything as soon as I knew I had to, or at least it wasn't that hard to get started. It seemslike I know there are so many things to do which I can easily do, but I keep putting them off or leaving them for the last minute... and I hardly ever do anything properly anymore. Not like I used to. I don't like depending on other people for homeworks and projects. I like doing my own things.

My last classes were OK, I talked to people I hadn't really talked to and I had an overall good day. For a while I wasfeeling really sleepy, I don't know if I was too hungry or what. When I finished Health lab, I walked straight out of the classroom, and then I realized y wasmissing my wallet and sweatshirt. That happens often, I don'tknow why... I am not concentrated enough and tend to forget things easily. I wans't like that. I need to concentrate on what I'm doing. I am smart enough!!!

After school, I stay for Photography class from 3:30 to 6:40 Mondays and Tuesdays. Today I decided to eat outside of school before Photo class, instead of the cafeteria... I am bored of the food there. I went to a small restaurant behind school and sat down. I was sitting alone in a table for 4, and the place was full. 2 older girls were waiting for a table and standing next to me. I don't know why I didn't tell them to go ahead and sit there with me... I just pretended I sw nothing and nothing was going on. I really can't understand why I did it... maybe I feel threatened by girls who are around my age and are prettier?? Anyways, the restaurant lady came up tome and kindly asked me if they could sit there, of course I said yes. But the rest of the time I was there was very awkward... I didn't talk to them even thouh we were sitting together for 30 minutes... sometimes it amazes me how I can be so secure with some people and so extroverted... and totally become another person in situations like that. I felt like I couldn't look up. I has hearing their conversation and there were times I wanted to say something, but I felt like I shouldn't or they shouldn't hear what I had to say. ?? The thought struck my mind that I lost the chance to make 2 new friends. It was very strange... then a piece of bread was choking meand I had to cough very hard for like 5 minutes, which was very embarrassing. They left before me and I felt relieved. Then I went to photography class which was actually a bit interesting this time. Sometimes I think it is really tedious because I know most of the stuff they are teaching us.. and sometimesI think I know it all, I know it is not true, but it can seem slow when you get everything quickly and they spend an entire class on the same matter. I also don't like that they teach us in the same way traditional classes are given in Mexico, when this is (or is supposed to be) a very practical class. Photography, for God's sake! You can't spend 3 hours inside a clasroom. Today's class was good, though. Sometimes I think the teacher doesnt know enough, though. Anyway, then I called mymom so she would pick me up, and I actually spoke to her more than 3 words which I have been doing for the past weeks. We met somewhere in the middle of the way, and I came back home, where I decided to work on homework!!! I have not beenmean to mymom the whole afternoon and I am actually in a good mood with everyone around me. That is good. :)

I managed to get the most important things done quickly and well done, and plus I got today's entry done! Yay!!

Good night, I must wake up early tomorrow. I have a presentation to do.

Love,
Natalia.

Who I Want to Be

Yesterday, I wrote a small (imagine what a large one would be like!) intro of myself, so that those of you who have no idea who I am... well, get one. I decided I want to be a better person and go back to who I once was, and this is a list of the things I think will help me be the way I want to be and feel like.
______________________________________________________

Get up early everyday, including weekends. This means no more rushing before school, and no more sleeping in until 1:00 Saturdays and Sundays.

Be comfortable and look well in what I'm wearing. For this, I need to buy new clothes that fit and which I like. I want to look sophisticated, no more wearing pants or whatever I can grab in the morning.

Have more free time and do things apart from school. I want to have time to read, watch some TV, go out and spend fun time with my family. To do this, I have to me really organized with my schoolwork.

Spend less time on the computer. I need to get out and do more stuff. I want to cut down on computer free time to 1 hour max.

Learn to dance.

Take care of the small details of my body: this means to make sure my legs are presentable all the time, same as my eyebrows, etc. Stop leaving the shaving of legs and plucking of eyebrows until it is extremely necessary.

Make birthdays and special ocassions SPECIAL. Make sure I know upcoming birthdays and prepare for them with a small present, or a card with time.

Learn to drive. This would be a major help. I have been meaning to since this summer, but for some stupid reaosn, I haven't taken careof this either.

Start making my own money. Getting my eBay account back so I can sell clothes again, start teaching private English lessons.

Take care of my food and needs at all times. Stop starving myself and making sure I am kind to myself in that aspect. Stop thinking I need to lose weight. Respect my body for what I did to it.

Hand in things on time. Again,organization is what I need.

Have a clean and organized room and drawers. Empty out drawers for clothes that I no longer wear, like or, fit into. Get rid of things I do not need.

Own my own digital camera. I have not mentioned I love photography, and have ben wanting to buy a professional digital camera for quite a while now. I hope to achieve this very soon.

Show people that I care. Remember upcoming events, and comments they make. Pay more attention to them.

Get my nose piercing back. For stupid reasons, I stopped paying attention to it and it eventually closed up again. I liked it.

Do something with my hair. I think cuting it would make mylife easier and would also probably look better. In the meanwhile, actually take some time on the mornings to make it look nice. Neverleave home with nice hair.

Spend more time inplaces that I like, downtown and Coyoacán. I can practice photography here, meet people and have some fun.

Learn to cook and make meals every once in awhile, show family I care.

Keep in touch with people I know. There are some people I really appreciate who I am afraid of losing touch with if I don't take action quickly.

Smile more.

Buy a pair of eyeglasses that I like. And use them. I want to get the black outline kind. The ones I have aren't even well repaired (they broke once) and I barely ever use them. I don't like them very much anymore.

Keep my iPod usable (charged, with songs I like at the moment), and use it more often. I have one, why is it always in the darkest corner of my backpack or underneath all the notebooks on my desk?

...AMONG MANY OTHER THINGS...

About Me

I live in Mexico City. The second most populated place on the planet. Some days I love it, sometimes I hate it. I am sixteen years old and I am going through the 11th grade. 2 more years, and I will be in University... or who knows where. I will start by telling a bit about my past. I was born and raised here, except for two years during which I lived in the US. Both my parents are mexican and they met each other in school. They are now divorced, and have been that way for almost 8 years. My mother is a teacher and my dad is the manager (or something like that) of a well-known worldwide company, which I will not cite in order to avoid giving too many clues. I have one younger brother, who will be named Claudio for this story. He is 14 and is completely obnoxious at times, although I know he has too much pain inside, as well as me.
I can say I had lived an almost, if not completely, perfect life, up unitl I was 9. That was the year my parents separated and my father moved somewhere else in the city with another woman, which we shall name Judy, who also happened to be his secretary. That messed up my family for starters. I have since then lived with my brother and mother. We haven't been able to recover emotionally since then, and we have lived in an unstable kind of hell for almost 8 years. Sometimes it seems to be geting better, then we fall again. And we are used to it, which sucks. It has been like that for almost half my life now. But I can remember what it was like before, and I want it to be that way again. I just don't know how to make it.

So my parents split up when I was 9 and Claudio 6. My dad moves out, but doesn't stop seeing us often. Sometimes he would take us on the weekends to a small apartment in the south of the city, where Judy always was. I knew something was going on, but I dodn't want to believe it. I accepted the fact that "she was just a friend", even though her clothes and things were in my dad's room. She would take me places and buy me things, and I started to like her. One day, my dad takes us to a brand new house, inside a small, private neighborhood which was hard to get to. I saw there was a boy's room and a girl's room. I thought they were for us, although I knew she had 2 kids. I see clothes inside of the drawers, the clothes aren't mine. I know for sure, my dad has a new family. I hate her, but I can't tell her, nor him.

For the bizarre time span of 9 months or so, my dad stops taking us to his house, or going places with us and Judy at the same time. Weird, huh. One day, he picks me up from golf and tells me "he wants meto meet a ery small person". I know, by the sound of that stupid comment, what the next one will be. I don't even have to hear it to start crying. He thinks I'm crying because I'm happy. How stupid is that? I tell him I feel sad because the thought of your own father having children with somebody else isn't at all pleasing. But I never tell him I am furious because he kept me from her during her entire pregnancy and cowardly tells me what is going on after the baby is born. The new member we will call Julio.

A bit less than a year later, my true hell really begins. The one that I myself created. I decided to lose weight. At the age of 13. When I was not one bit fat. For some months, I had been feeling that I was getting fat, and my aunt, Paulina, told me so one night, and it really hurt. My other aunt, Andrea, is a nutriologist, and that summer, she had planned a "Nutrition Course for Girls". She invited me because she had no customers yet (now that I think about it, her problem messed up my life) and toldme what it was about. Because of what had happenned before, I did not doubt joining. I remember I saw it as the opportunity of my life. Yeah, right. I began to lose weight, and then, to become obsessed. Obsessed to the point where I would not eat anything but fruits and vegetables, like many other teenage girls do. I dropped 20 pounds (10 kilos) in less that 6 months. And I was delighted. But I was hungry. I lived that way for 1 year, except for the last monts I was allowing myself to eat anything, of course counting calories (1200 per day) and exercising like crazy, taking every chance I had to burn those calories. I was hardly ever sitting down, and was almost always walking in circles stupidly. That, among other stupid things I did. I went to bed hungry, woke up hungry, went to school hungry, came home hungry, spent the evening hungry. And ironically, that fed me up. Once again, my inner person (whose name I still do not know), convinced me that I deserved better. She convinced me I deserved to be happy and stop suffering. She won. (Or did I win?) That, I do not yet know. I began to eat, promising myself I wouln't be hungry like that again. And no, contrary to what most of you believe, I do not eat mountains of food everyday. In fact, I have a problem with allowing myself to eat. A problem I want to get rid of. The big thing is, I did gain weight. Lotsmore than what I had begun at, when I thought I was fat. I now weigh 40 pounds more than before I went to my aunt's course, before I became obsessed and starved myself to "perfection". Sometimes I can't believe what I see in the mirror is really me, sometimes I think I haven't still adopted that perception of myself, I still think of me as that thin person, not as what I look like now. Sometimes I don't know what I should eat, or if I am really hungry or not, although I know I am, I just don't want to admit that I need food, because I am scared of it. I barely ever feel full, like I've had enough and I can forget about it and do my things. I hardly ever do my things. Sometimes I feel so depressed because of what I look like, that I think I should go on a diet again. That's the least hard ofthings for me to do. I've done it and I could do it again without a problem. But I know I shouldn't and I don't want to, not because I can't, but because I promised myself I would never do that to myself again, and because I know if I lose weight like that, I will eventually have to eat again because I can't spend the rest of my life hungry, and consequently, I will gain it back again, and more. Sometimes I think I should just accept the way I look, and admit the fact that I messed my body up by making it go without food for such a long time, and it just needs to be like this now. I think that would be the best for me to accept, and the way I will feel calm and a bit more stable, not waiting or expecting to lose weight, but living everyday knowing that it needs to be like this and I can't change it.

As a result of this whole mess up I caused, my personality has also changed a lot. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I am concentrated on how much I want to be skinny again, that I don't put my attention and effort into other things that could make me happier. It just makes me so sad that lots of my friends have boyfriends or boys that like them, when I think I am a more intelligent, loving, interesting and caring person. On the other hand, I think I can't expect someone to like me, neither should I be so interested in having a boy love me, when there isn't even a loving relationship within me with myself, or amongst my family. I'm just too scared that all my dreams will be destroyed because of the mistake I made, which really steppedon my life. Sometimes I wish I could turn back time, or wake up from this dream, and it pisses me off to relaize that it's not a dream: it's my sad, vile and retarded reality.

After several weeks of total depression within me, I have decided to take actions to start living again, and hopefully find that which I lost some time ago: HAPPINESS. I believe I can get it back, and I have started by making a list of the characteristics I want to have as a person, several of which were things I had before becoming this thing I don't know anymore.

My Name is Natalia

My name is Natalia. Of course that isn't my real name. I fear that somebody I know will eventually find this blog and find out deep dark secrets nobody knows, or isn't supposed to know. So here, I will be Natalia. I will use this place as a notebook, to record what goes on in my life and how things change as I look for what I most want: HAPPINESS. I suppose that means recalling things that already happened... Perhaps someday you will find out who I am. Maybe my past, present and future experiences will help you not make the same mistakes, or serve as a guidance towards the decisions you make. Follow me in my journey to happiness, dreams, goals and changes. Get to know me, and meet me when I reach the end.

Natalia.