friends, SLB, and humpbacks...

Wherein I shrug and hem and haw and explain SLB again…

Yesterday a friend of mine was reading my last blog post, and he turned to me with fire in his eyes and a fighting look on his face. “Who is this saying these things?” He was even in a determined posture when he asked this. He was ready to TCB.

I love my friends.

I think I shrugged and bit my lip and tried to look all nonchalant. “Oh, that’s just the ball of self loathing that lives inside me. She’s always orange.” See, no big.

His shoulders relaxed, and he gave me one of those looks that only a real friend will give you. “Okay,” he said, then went back to reading.

Have I mentioned that I love my friends?

The ones who get it in one or two bizarre sentences, who manage to slip in a little look that says they’re always keeping watch. You know, the ones who give you big buckets of freedom to be, but who will also sit you down with a coffee and a chat and call your ass out if they think you might harm yourself by just being the you that is some scary times you.

Anyway, I think he realized that writing SLB is just my current way of trying not to internalize so much. I mean, I can’t speak for him, but he did let it go.

Aside from reminding me how amazing my friend is, this little moment also made me think that perhaps not everyone who stumbles across this blog understands immediately that SLB is just me confronting, well, me. I’ve been letting her speak for the past couple of months, and have just become accustomed to allowing her out. I put a few words about her in the sidebar, but not everyone sees that stuff.

SLB is short for self loathing ball. Some people call it the inner critic. When she pops up here, her words are in this color and usually italicized, so she reads like this. Sometimes she doesn’t even show up, but some posts are pretty orange.

This way, I sort of feel like I’m putting up a flag for most of the negative stuff.

Having gone on for so long about the hostile bitch in my gut, I figure that now would be as good a time as any to share a page that managed to sneak up and surprise me a couple of days ago. Turns out this page is about love. It isn’t so much about romantic love, but more about the love that is still there when romantic love is absent. How odd is it to find that I still believe in that, and that it can sometimes pat back the anxiety? It is reassuring to me that I can honestly express this sort of love with art.

Who knew?