((Erika Stieglitz continued from Don't Stop Dancing))
I have a good memory.
Always liked that about myself.
I kept a lot of little pieces of junk in a box at home.
Concert tickets, activist pins, old printed photos, notes written on napkins.
Every one of them had a story, and looking at them helped me remember what they were.
If I ever felt invisible, I'd look through that box.
When I had people over, I'd pick some things out and tell them a story.
Easy way to let my guard down, a little bit.
It's hard to feel like a stranger to yourself, when you've got something like that.
I used to pick snails off the sidewalk as a kid.
There was this patch of road that ran next to a marsh, a lot of people biked down it.
I knew they’d run over them and I hated to see the crushed shells.
Even if snails were slimy, and they killed gardens.
I just didn’t want them to die because no one cared about them.
I walked the walk.
People made fun of how I had all this handmade stuff.
That I always knew if you could recycle something.
Gave me looks when I said I wanted to build a tiny house.
Like I was just hippie trailer trash that didn’t know it yet.
But then sometimes people just thought all that was kinda neat, and that made me feel like I wasn’t crazy.
Sometimes I’d stay awake a whole night.
Long enough I’d see the sky turn from black to blue, and to hear all the birds start to sing.
It was nice to watch the world as it slept, and to see it all wake up again.
To remind myself that the sun's always going to rise.
I met my favorite musician.
They say never meet your heroes, but I just wanted to thank them.
No pictures or signing anything.
They didn’t have to live up to who I thought they were.
I just wanted it to be a two-way street for a moment, to let them know their art was appreciated.
It was after a show, I think they’d drank a bit.
I got a hug, instead.
I tried hurting myself once.
Someone saw the mark I left, and I felt bad that they were so worried about me I never did it again.
I kept a promise.
That helped ease the pain, in its own way.
If I could've chosen right at the beginning, like in a RPG, I would’ve been born female.
I wasn’t.
Chose that anyways.
It actually worked out, despite everything.
Something I did for me, no one else.
The people who knew loved me anyways.
Even if I knew I didn't need anyone's approval.
Doesn’t always work out like that, for people like us.
I never did a Legion playthrough.
Yes Man, all the way.
I'm really socially awkward but sometimes I'll just say hi to people who look like they're lonely.
Even if I weird them out.
I like it when people would say hello to me, even if I didn't know what to do.
It took me out of my head.
I spend too much time there.
I like to go on message boards and write nice things to people who are struggling and asking for help.
Sometimes reading a kind word from someone you don't know can be really helpful.
Like it's evidence there are all kinds of people out there who'd care, if they just got the chance to know you.
Or that there are more options than just turning inward, and being alone.
It makes me feel useful.
My boyfriend came from a broken home and didn’t think anyone should love him.
Blamed himself for the hurt others caused him.
Like he wasn’t strong enough.
It kept him at a distance from most people.
I thought that seemed kind of sad.
He started to really open up to me.
Stopped saying he didn’t think he’d make it to thirty.
He was probably right.
I just gave away a whole lot of weed.
A lot of folks didn't have the money for it, or a connect they felt comfortable with.
Maybe it wasn't the best thing.
I think I spent too much time high.
A really convenient way to run from your problems without actually going anywhere.
It seemed to help some people, at least.
The world’s burning.
Everything I did to try to stop it, as an angry and naive teenager, probably didn’t matter.
Still figured I ought to give it a shot.
Nobody who really could make a difference seemed to give a shit.
So there wasn’t any harm in trying.
Any little thing I could do was better than nothing, convincing even one person it was a problem was better than staying quiet.
Thinking that helped me make peace with being small.
It’s just hard to find comfort that the world will go on after you do, when it might not.
Still tried.
I liked shooting, but I never needed to test myself against other people.
Never liked competition, against anyone but myself.
Beating my own score was the thing I cared the most about.
Really, I went to those things because Mom wanted to spend time with me.
I wanted her to be proud of me, for being good at something.
My Uncle was diagnosed with cancer last year.
I didn’t know what to tell my Dad.
Didn’t know how to comfort someone who knew so much more about the world than me, how to tell him it was okay.
I tried my best.
That was all he needed.
I saw a short film with an old philosopher talking about death, and how he’d written a book on it back in the sixties on how it was just ridiculous to be afraid of it.
Apparently it was his proudest work, or at least that's what he'd thought for most of his life.
By the time of the film, he was ninety-something, and dying, and now he was terrified.
He didn't know how to handle it - the man who wrote the book on why fearing death made no sense.
That kind of scared me too.
Someone like him should get it, right?
What hope do I have?
There was this moment when he went out in his garden and looked at the trees.
Thought it was so magnificent, the simple beauty in the world.
He wondered why he hadn’t spent more time in awe of it, appreciating it, when he was a young person.
I thought to myself, I must have been so lucky - I figured that out years ago.
That made me happy, for a while.
Even though I used to lie awake night after night, terrified and confused
Despite days where the world just didn't make any fucking sense
I learned to love being alive.
I really did.
Was any of that even real?
((Erika Stieglitz continued in I Tried To Drink And So I Drowned))