I can tell you this, though: Whatever struggles you face, sporadically or on a day-to-day basis, they are worth addressing. Every gore, visceral aspect of your unhappiness is worth the attention. There’s no beauty in losing yourself to the voracious, venomenous demon that lives in your chest and makes you forget there’s a world worth wanting outside.You are worth the fight, I tell you. Trust me, I write what I know. So when I write about blood and vomit it’s not because these symptoms are imbued with some magic meaning, with the glory of the wicked; It’s because I am finally confident enough to ask for help. I am trying to extend my knowledge to the realm of the vulnerable and the brave. I found that sometimes recovery is as simple as choosing to walk on the sunlit side of the pavement. Sometimes it is a phonecall to a friend before you mark off another day of regret in your skin. It is counting every victory until you have no fingers or toes left, and you start with every hair on your head until your brain is reeling with admiration for what you are, but never expected to be, capable of. Some days, recovery is opting the mess of a bare, hurting heart over a facade of perfection. Some nights, it’s crawling beneath your desk with books on your feet and ribbons around your wrists to keep you tied to pinky-swear, locked-gaze, heartfelt promises. Recovery is a promise. To yourself and to the ones you love. Take care, be kind, we will make it through. We will crawl from beneath our desks, welcome the sun even when darkness huddles in the streets.  Write what you know, paint the picture, sing the songs. One day we will find ourselves again.

ready to buy now, right now. get them before they run out!

She told me to not only face my memories, but to scare them instead. The idea of scaring our own memories away seems like some children’s fantasy story with blood-red pages and clever allusions, but life is a horrible example of fiction; it lacks the beauty that is embedded into the pages of prose. Reality doesn’t possess the ability to create beautiful moments and dialogue at the drop of a hat, let alone after hours of practice and planning. So aside from verisimilitude in our stories and dramatic words in real life, I’m led back to ghosts, and the crippling fear of fear.

She said to come to Massachusetts where the ghosts are a plenty. Sitting and drinking at bars, watching the games at Fenway: the ghosts are everywhere. Our ghosts could haunt each other for a change and give us the vacation we’ve deserved since childhood. A relaxation from our minds of exploding synapses. “We will destroy them all,” she says and I feel as if I can already hear her ghost whispering to me from three thousand miles away.

So which do I conquer first, memories or fear? Are they one in the same? Memories are ghosts and ghosts are memories, but when you bring fear into the equation it becomes an unbearable, bloody mess. I feel like a king who can never seem to get my hands clean. Where does the magic stop and the truth begin? I fear that there is no definite end to either and much like our memories we will wander like ghosts, waiting to haunt the next asshole that tries to live without fear.

-Stacey Renberg

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not much a fan of holidays. Why celebrate our dads only on fathers’ day? Why celebrate moms only on mothers’ day? Give thanks only on thanksgiving? Bosses? Secretaries? Presidents? Veterans? Why does Martin Luther King, Jr. get a day, but not Louis Pasteur or Alexander Flemming? Or Ghandi? Or Einstein? Or Newton?

Why is there no universal global celebration for music? Or philanthropy? Why is there one world-wide “New Year’s” celebration when time is just a made up thing?

Why did we have to steal a holiday named for some dead guy with serious ophidiophobia to celebrate love? Why isn’t there just a world wide “love day”?

Most of all, why do we even need an arbitrary day to remind us – even obligate us – to tell the people we love how we feel? Let me tell you now… If you feel that way about somebody and you don’t tell that person you love them all the time – and make sure they both know and feel it – you’re going about love all wrong.

I’m sure there are plenty of people who would tell me I’ve got it all mixed up and backwards. They’d say, “Valentine’s day is a great excuse to show your love even more! …An extra little push to tell people that they are special to you… That they have your heart… That you love them!”

I disagree. You don’t need an excuse. Don’t wait for one. Valentines day is over for the year. Are you going to wait another whole year for every commercial on the internet, radio, television and newspaper to tell you again that it’s time to say, “I love you” again? Are you going to allow them to pressure you or make you feel broken and foolish if you don’t have a somebody else?

I hope not. I hope that you are somebody who loves because they want to love, and lets love come any time it’s right. I hope you love every day, and not just one out of every year. I hope that every single day you feel the love that exists for you. Because it does exist just as surely as your beating heart… and you deserve every bit of it.

I grew up with gray walls and then eventually deep, Margot red walls, until I was stuck under four very white and very daunting walls down the street from the happiest place on Earth. No amount of vintage posters and paintings could salvage the nothingness of that room. That part of town is a big bubble of illusion and frankly, it makes me a little sick to think I wasted a year of my life there.

But things changed, finally. I moved back to where it all began into a sweet and cozy little tree house four blocks from the beach. I begged him to go out there and find us a home. He delivered and even my dreams couldn’t have found us a better place, a better home.

The first time my eyes met our new walls, we crept around in darkness with flashlights in our hands. I could see the colors faintly peeking out underneath the shadows, but all I really saw was night. The viewing process continued slowly through a week of after-work mini-moving trips going back and forth down the 22, the 405, 7^th St., etc. I finally became face-to-face with the green, teal, and yellow of the walls, but it didn’t feel right yet. It was always still night.

Suddenly it was Friday and the time had come to move my cheap and cumbersome Swedish bed from one apartment to the other. The day began early and bright surrounded by the infamous white walls. I jumped out of bed, dragging him with me. Within the hour I was moving boxes in and out and up and down as my father pieced together the black-brown wood. Morning soon became the afternoon and the afternoon quickly became night again.

We spent our first night together. Not that we hadn’t slept next to and near each other before, but it was the first night in our home, a place that finally, and hopefully for a long time, has both of us and our things under one roof.

We both slept weird and uncomfortably. The mattress was hard, roughed up from the move, yet something happened when I opened my eyes the next morning. I was no longer looking at an empty room, but a yellow room. It felt like the sun was hanging from our ceiling. As if we were going from sleep to consciousness on clouds in the sky. I got out of bed and despite the restlessness of waking up in a new place, I was happy.

I walked into the living room and was greeted with another beautiful array of teal walls and cardboard boxes. I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water and found lime green walls dancing around me. But, what about the bathroom? Green as well, but a different one. Imagine all the colors in the world: why limit yourself to just one version?

Now I find myself waking up each and realizing, shit, they were right. Bright walls, clothes, what have you, surround your life with color and you’ll be happy. And finally, I am. I feel like the search is over and I no longer have to hunt down that lost childhood version of what a home is. We’ve found it hidden in the back and up to the left surrounded by a multitude of color and cabinets that never seem to close all of the way. It feels pretty damn good.
-Stacey Renberg

It’s free. It takes nothing away from us. But so many treat it like the most hoard-worthy commodity the world has ever seen.

I watch people act so selfishly all the time… “I’m grumpy, so I’ll act that way and I don’t care what it does to you. I’m angry, and it doesn’t matter if you made me that way, I’m going to take it out on you and everybody else I encounter. I’m sad, so I’ll bring you down too. I’m entitled, so I don’t care if I walk on you.”

So many people should be carrying signs to tell these things to the world – signs hand-lettered in their own sad and miserable script. Maybe if they had to do that they’d reflect and reconsider their behaviors. But perhaps that’s an even greater problem – the real problem. So many people walk around blind. They would be shocked if they were able to watch themselves from the outside – horrified to see themselves reflected in the mirror of truth.

I’m glad you’re not like that.

You are one of the few remarkable people who care about the world and what they do to it… Thank you for that. For being a beacon of kindness in an obliviously unkind world. Sometimes your kindness will be a single star twinkling behind a cloudy night sky, maybe obscured and changing little…. But every once in a while you kindness will be like a tiny match, struck bright and igniting some ready tinder, starting a fire that warms everybody within its cosy reach.

Either way, don’t give up. Shine! Even when the world makes you feel absurd to shine… Shine brighter! Even if all you can muster is a dim little spark, never forget that it means something to be kind. Somebody else feels it. They’ll reflect it at another somebody, and maybe even back at you.

Kindness matters… And because you have the choice to be kind or unkind, and you choose kind… You matter.

The wind has been blowing like Omaha’s wind lately and the stereo plays Cursive. The songs become better and more refined each time I hear them. I dream of horrible winters and tornados while living in some Midwestern apartment; I am alone and crying.

I want so deeply to be able assess social situations without being a martyr. I don’t want to be Lars, blinking and avoiding questions everyone needs me to answer. I don’t want to go through bottle after bottle and swell my throat up in order to avoid the inevitable: It is time to get your shit together, so do it you pussy! But I don’t learn my lesson; I blame everyone and everything else. Is it all the English classes? My mother? My ex-boyfriends? For someone who is so self-conscience and awkward, I sure am one narcissistic asshole.

Okay, take a break, a breath. Make a list, in a list, on top of another list and try to finish something. Try to get through one day without reaching that dank place. Graduate. Get enough sleep. Don’t do drugs. Get out of bed each morning. Talk to someone, anyone. Find some confidence. Save your money. Hope for something more than what you already want. Be grateful for what you already have. Give up the vices. Get some sleep.

I think it’ll be better in the morning. It usually is. If not, we always have the spring, right?

-Stacey Renberg

season two; episode six.

Somewhere between the ages of eleven and fourteen the freckle disappeared. It didn’t reappear until I was seventeen and the first boy I fooled around with began running his fingers over it the way I used to. He made the same observations about the black vs. white. He told me how it was raised and that I should go see a doctor. I had to lift my breast up and to the side in order to see my freckle, in order to see my childhood again.

Certain men seem so fascinated by breasts, but in reality they are the barrier between childhood and adulthood. Sometimes I think they’re the only things keeping me from being happy and young. I don’t think anything in my childhood was more terrifying than growing breasts. Now whenever I look down, I see these two mounds of flesh. They get in the way. They make it hard to move and bend, to breathe. They have nothing to offer except some wanted and unwanted boners.

I recently felt the freckle. I was lying in bed with my love and as I ran my fingers over it, I began to tell him about my fear. He smiled at the thought of my naked stomach and chest, but more significantly, he listened to me speak. He waited while I emptied my head of these thoughts of turning into a woman and having to go through the mundane act of growing breasts. I told him the reason men and women will never be able to understand each other is due to the process of growing flesh on and in our bodies. Sure, men have to deal with the growing of their penises, but eventually, they go back down to their normal, calm selves. They are able to go about their day. Women are stuck with their growths. Whether it’s breasts or a baby, we are cursed to live our lives and never be able to shrink back down to what we used to be. It’s not about nuisance or wanting perfect bodies, it’s that we were never given the control over our own bodies.

He lovingly kissed me, but not without touching one of my breasts, and told me no matter what I have on my body, that freckle will always be there along with my childhood. I may not be able to see it, but he could help me to envision it. He would be there to run his fingers along the freckle and listen to me tell stories about the complexities of becoming a woman. I may not be able to stay who I used to be, but I can finally start becoming who I want to be.

- stacey renberg.

My closet is seldom this well organized. It just got a bit of an overhaul today. I boxed up some items that I didn’t need in there… some I’ll say goodbye to and send away. Some I’ll visit again someday in the future.

It reminds me of the rest of our lives. We have old favorite friends that we would never part with no matter what, but we may not see them every day. We have others that were just what we needed at the time and had a good run, but have become passé because they were a little too trendy to last. Some we barely knew… that just didn’t ever click.

Be careful what you keep. We all have too much. Really. We do. The population of this closet of mine could be culled again by a good third – probably twice that – and I wouldn’t miss a thing. What we own also owns us. It’s a terrible struggle in this consumerist culture in which we live, but I think that he or she who owns the least often wins. That least must meet the individual’s basic needs, of course, but to have just enough and not a bit more? That seems the perfect balance. It means freedom, selflessness, generosity, and a sort of imperviousness toward loss.

The pen, the pencil, the keyboard, the microphone, the camera… anything that lets us communicate our thoughts without violence against another. All mightier. Not that you can’t bend any of these tools toward the violent – I’ve seen that more times than necessary – but at their best, they are tools to spread more than ink or paint. They are our means of spreading knowledge and understanding. The recipient needs not agree, but disagreement also does not equal immediate mortal peril.

Imagine if we as a species had never taken a single step down the path toward war. No guns, no mines, no bombs, no tanks, no knives or clubs wielded against each other. They’re so much a part of our culture that it’s hard to even dream of such a thing… but do. I’m not suggesting a species with no conflict. Debating different ideas moves us forward… but what if we did only that.

The best cultures would automatically emerge as victorious… not because of their military might, but because their ideas are the best… The species would have to invest all that effort and capitol that is now wasted on war (or preparation for war) in something more constructive. Health, science, and education perhaps? We would have already cured major diseases, explored planets, and advanced the collective intelligence of our species exponentially.

We have so much to learn, and so much improvement to make.

We shout to the world that we are the country of openness and freedom… But we really have just as many secrets as everybody else. The world is full of them, from the very smallest (the secrets of quantum mechanics) to the every day secrets (the ones that you and I keep hidden deep) to the big government secrets (where do all our taxes really go?) to the incomprehensibly giant secrets (how did the universe begin?).

We prod and pry and tease, and sometimes we learn what was once private. Sometimes we never do.

Imagine if it wasn’t that way though? Nothing kept hidden? No secrets at all? What would the world be like if we freely volunteered any and all information we possessed? What if we always shared exactly what we felt? Could we all live that way? Our deepest desires. Our beliefs. Our loves. Our frustrations… Free for all to know.

Would the world be better or worse? It’s hard to say. It’s easy to think that it would be ideal when we remove ourselves from the equation: “Hmmm… It would be a utopia in which openness and honesty reigned supreme! I would never have to guess about a person’s true feelings or motives! Deceit would be a thing of the past. That would be great!”

“…But wait,” we’d think, “I would have to tell all too? I would have to walk around philosophically and psychologically naked? WHOA! Hold up now… I’m not so sure about that.”

Yeah, it would be tough. But maybe it would be worth it. You would never again be hurt by a secret revealed. The burden of keeping secrets would be lifted. I think that would be pretty freeing.

Maybe we should give it a try and test it out. The next time we’re inclined to post a private sign, let’s instead lay out a welcome mat.

If only we could… Zeitgeist here we come!

It’s not easy. Walking in the footprints of others is much easier. The decisions have been made for you. They are tried and true. They are safe. They are predictable, and they let you know what to expect… They are ruts.

But in the beginning there were no footprints there at all… Until they were created by one intrepid traveller. That person either had no choice but to forge a new way because nobody had yet attempted it, or he or she saw that many had been going about things the same way, when there was a better one to be found.

Either way I want to be counted among the pioneers and innovators – the ones that change the world. I have often squared off against safety and convention with defiance and irreverent questioning. I have had to hammer against the walls thrown up by conformity and narrow minds… The followers. Sadly our “leaders” are often among them… But that should never be an excuse to give up.

Even if you end up finding a way that isn’t the best, at least you stand out as somebody who was brave enough to try. There is always a choice. A choice to walk a path that was previously unwalked. Sometimes that path has simply been overlooked, because of lack of vision. Sometimes it can clearly be seen, but it has been deemed unnecessary, or undesirable. Sometimes it has been flatly labeled impossible.

We do impossible things all the time, but only because somebody made an attempt.

Choose your own way, do the impossible, and defy convention. Life is too short to waste it on boring routine.

Walk your own walk.

This is the beginning of a Japanese maple tree. A tree that will become a carefully sculpted bonsai one day. We all are like that. We start as a seed, and grow according to our nature for a while. Some of us germinate in wild soil, and untended, we grow whichever way we wish. We grow wild as the wind and are shaped by only the sun and our own whim.

Others begin in this wild way, and then are tended and guided. Carefully, lovingly, we are shaped by our mentors into something we could never have become on our own.

We sometimes struggle against this guidance. We want to be free from the influence of any other. But nobody can truly flourish in a vacuum. When we embrace that persistent pruning, tending, bending, and encouragement from the hands of a master, we each can grow into our own masterpiece.

Here’s hoping you bend without breaking. Sprout & spread your branches wide.

There are so many doors in life. Most of them we never try. Some might have nothing behind them. Some might lead to a whole new world.

We choose. Recklessly or carefully.

Sometimes we simply stand at the door and endlessly debate… And that itself is our decision. Sometimes we choose a door, turn a knob and all the possibilities collapse into a single outcome. Sometimes we don’t even notice that we’ve stepped over a threshold. Sometimes the door is so clear and heavy it is obvious that going through it will change us forever.

How many doors did you walk through today? Did they take you where you wanted to go?

The thing is, whether the answer is yes or no there’s no going back… they all only go one way.