I have many people in my life whom I love so much and really care about. If you are reading this, you are probably one of them. Perhaps you have noticed that I am very difficult to get ahold of much of the time. Perhaps you even feel like I don't care about you because of that. You are not alone. I am afraid that most of the people I really love think that I don't care. It plagues me day and night.

Almost everyone in my life has asked me at some point, "Have I done something to hurt you? Because I feel like you have pulled away." Even more people say to me, "You never answer my phone calls, you never call me back..." I would just like to make a grand apology. If someone is looking for a friend who will be in touch on a regular basis, I am going to let you down. I'm sure I already have at one point or another. I don't like to talk on the phone... it is just something I have come to terms with.

I am actually a hermit.

I say this right now because I feel like I am being pulled in a million directions here at home. It's not even so much things people say to me as it is a general feeling of knowing that I am letting people down. I am pretty much just trying to keep my head above the water most days. Trying to take care of my children. Trying to survive.

It takes a lot of energy to make my voice sound like I am doing ok. It takes a lot of energy to make my face look like I am not completely falling apart. This is part of the reason i just really don't like to be around people, no matter how much I love them. Ask Jason. He will probably tell you that I am always trying to escape to be alone, mostly driving by myself, but now because that is completely environmentally irresponsible, I head off to the woods.

Jason once made a joke about me which is really true. There is a book about people with a personality disorder whose biggest fear is abandonment. The book is called, "I Hate You, Don't Leave Me." He said that my book should be called, "I Love You, Please Leave Me Alone."

I think I have given the wrong impression to people throughout my life, and I don't know how to change it. My dream would be for people to know that I really truly love them very deeply, and that they wouldn't feel hurt if I rarely see them or even talk to them. That I would be the kind of friend who is just somewhere out there in the universe, caring about you, and that some day our paths will cross and we will most likely have a heart to heart as if no time had passed.

Anyway... I am a hermit. I am admitting this to myself and now to you. Please forgive me. I am a hermit.

I was running today. I have gotten out of the habit. It is so hard to get started again. The air outside is so heavy and hot, it clings to me, it sticks to me, it weighs me down. One foot in front of the other, again and again and again and again until I find a rhythm.

Finding a rhythm is kind of like falling asleep. I usually don't really remember when it happens, but all of a sudden I'm not thinking about running anymore, I'm thinking about other things and moving effortlessly. Today it felt like I was trying to run through oatmeal. It was laborious, grueling, exhausting. I had to think about it the entire time. One foot in front of the other, breathe...keep going...breathe...keep going.

Sometimes life feels that way, too...

I wish I could just live in the moment, but without consciously trying to do so, I visit these little visions in the future. In my mind I am driving up 273 from Newark and passing my house. I feel a physical pain in my heart and throat. The air is suffocating... so humid... and it is closing in all around me. My piano is in there. The porch swing. The stone fireplace. I ache for my home. There it is, but I cannot go in. Even if I could, it would hurt too much.

Out here in the Pacific Palisades, it is 68 degrees and the air is clear... and I run three miles, much of it uphill. The sun beats down on the top of my head, but I don't mind. It is dry here, but not too dry. Sweat drips into my eyes and my lips are salty. I keep running. I have always hated to run. But now I am able to breathe in deeply and slowly enough as I go. I am not gasping for my next breath. That makes all the difference. I can't believe that I, the one who hates to run, am actually running. I am doing it.

When I reach the top of my route, I turn and see the ocean. There is a part of me that doesn't want to leave here. I have carved out a place for myself, finally. I am so afraid to lose it. I am finally not miserable and lonely. I am afraid to lose the security I have started to feel out here.

I'm different now than I was when I left home. I'm afraid to lose that, too. I'm afraid to lose myself entirely, as I often do. I have started to develop some kind of a consistent self out here, and I fear to go back ... that I will unravel and leave the new pieces of this girl in dead brown grass and sweltering summer heat.

While it's happening.

Afterwards, not so much.

I don't love the weight I've gained. I don't love hangovers. I don't love the crash after eating a bag of swedish fish. I don't love feeling so full that it hurts to breathe.

I want to want what is good for me. I want to want to do what is right for me. I wonder if it will always be such a battle. I wonder if it's possible for me to get to the point where I actually WANT to do what will be better for me in the long run. I've actually met people like that. They enjoy being healthy. Sincerely, literally enjoy it. They have said that you go through the struggle for a while, but then eventually you know how much better you feel when you take care of your body, and the good outweighs the bad....

I just want to feel better.

I definitely feel better mentally when I go. Over the weekend-- when I didn't go-- I felt pretty bad again. There was a definite difference. Exercising that hard for an hour every day seems like it helps. I don't think I can continue to wake up that early after boot camp is over... especially because it means I have to go to bed at 9, which is just about 1/2 hour after my kids finally fall asleep. Maybe I could wake up at 5:30 instead.

I will write the lyrics of the songs I have written soon, and hopefully post the songs themselves, even though they are not good recordings.

It feels like the middle of the night at that time of the morning...I guess because it's right on the threshold of being the middle of the night vs. the morning. The moon is bright, the stars are still out, and I'm running up Temescal Canyon Blvd (a complete incline) with eight other people in formation. Who's life is this?

It's all said and done by 6:30-- when I normally would just be waking up.

It hurts like hell. But it feels good.

This morning they worked us really hard, but I can do just about anything for an hour. By 6:30 it was all over. Usually I'd just be waking up at that point. I feel like I'm beating the system.

I came home, and after the morning get-ready-for-school routine, I came back and wrote a song. Maybe this is what I've needed all along. To just sweat so hard that a song comes out.

Up until this point, I have just eaten to comfort myself and wished that I liked to exercise. But I realized that if I waited until exercise sounded like fun to begin doing it, I'd find myself 65 and still waiting. I was too hopeless to actually motivate myself enough to join a gym, but a friend of mine is in this boot camp and emailed the trainer for me. It all sort of just happened, and I found myself signed up to begin tomorrow.

This is going to take a lot of self discipline.... to wake up before 5 am and to do whatever Boot Camp entails. (The fact that it's called Boot Camp gives me an idea of what it entails.) I am doing this to feel better physically, but especially mentally.

It begins in less than 12 hours.... yikes.

Right now, I am sitting in a bright room overlooking beautiful flowers, palm trees, and green mountains. The sun is low in the sky, and the clouds around it are illuminated. Objectively, it is beautiful. Inside me, there is torment and noise.

Troubled obsessions, cyclical and swirling. The deep emptiness and hunger eating away from the inside. The intense desire to not ever have existed. Knowing that is an impossibility, I ache to escape somehow. I am claustrophobic inside myself, clawing and desperate to get out. Trying to maintain normalcy on the outside; suffocating within. This can't be how people are meant to exist. And yet it is how I have always been. During some periods of my life the torment has been a little more sublimated than others. But it has always been there, and I don't know life without it. I don't know why. I was born this way.

There is nothing wrong with my circumstances. I have an incredibly wonderful family and supportive and loving friends. I live in one of the most beautiful places I've ever experienced. I lack nothing on the outside. But inside... inside...the way I describe the inside makes me feel like a broken record. Please forgive me. It is, and has always been, a terrifying place. I am my enemy. I am inside my own prison. There must be a way to change this. I know it is up to me. What is left to do? I would do it.

I have been through four years of therapy. I am on two different kinds of medication. I have done years of inner healing. I have gone through hours upon hours of all kinds of deliverance. I have asked Jesus to save me. I think he must want me to save myself.

I am trying. I am trying. It must be possible. It must. I tell myself this, over and over.

I cannot give into this screaming inside to self destruct. Breathe in, breathe out. I will learn how to be ok.

I'm not talking about ennui, although I understand that too. I'm not talking about an occasional feeling of being lonely. I'm talking about a starvation inside that must be talked to constantly. No, I can not fill you with liquor. No, I can not fill you with food. No, I can not fill you with sedatives. No, I cannot fill you with life-ruining encounters with random people. No, I cannot fill you. No, I cannot make God fill you. I have been asking for years. I cannot make him fill the emptiness. I cannot ask my husband to fill the emptiness or I will drain him of his own life. I cannot use my children's lives to fill the emptiness. I wrestle constantly with a tormenting desire to shut the mouth of this screaming void. I must continually tell myself that I must not fill this emptiness with the available things that promise at least a few moments of distraction.

I'm not saying that I have abstained from all of the above. I feel shame for some of the things I have done in attempt to silence the emptiness for a little while. I feel shame that I'm not the kind of person who can ignore the emptiness. It's always there, always. Sometimes it's been so loud that I have had to go to sleep to keep from doing something I would regret. Sometimes a scalding bath will distract me for a few minutes. But then I emerge, pink and raw looking, and not a moment later it's back again.

I would like to know if anyone honestly feels a sense of peace... a sense of wholeness inside. A sense of integration of all the restless and aching fragments. If you do, please describe it to me. I would just honestly like to know if there are people who are truly at peace, people who are whole. I would like to know from a first hand account what it is like, and it would make me really happy to know it is possible.

Since I have lived here in California, there are things that have brought some relief. Beauty brings comfort... mountains and the ocean and flowers and birds and lunar eclipses and a cool breeze... I try to tuck these things away and retrieve them when I need them...

Do I really want just anybody reading these thoughts? I guess I write in hope that someone else who is eaten alive by the emptiness will not feel so alone...

I have a routine. A lot of it centers around a little elementary school, but that's ok. It's a simple life for me here.

I don't know if I will do anything significant in my life. At this point, my dream is just to have my piano again somehow. I don't think I can write music without it.

I guess the most important thing to me is somehow bringing some kind of comfort to anyone who is in a dark and (what seems like) an unreachable place. I have been in that unreachable place, and often live there. There is a gentle comfort in hearing, "I understand.." and to know it is the truth.

Why is it so comforting to be understood?

That is what I want. To be a place of understanding, and to create beautiful things, because beautiful things also bring comfort...

Everyone wears sunglasses here. I may be the only person in LA who does not wear sunglasses all the time. I just can't do it... If I am having a conversation and I can't see someone's eyes, it kind of drives me a little crazy inside. I think I rely so much on reading people by their eyes, and when I can't see them, I don't know how to relate.

I have no idea what to do with my life. I haven't been able to write music for so long, and it is making me overwhelmingly frustrated.