Month September 2017

Low

thisiskrys 2 Comments

Week three of the blog and I’m already feeling like everything I have to say is super trite, unoriginal, and not worth writing, that the way I write is overblown and unwelcoming. Who would even want to read my heap of cliches? I could try to dial back my writing style, but then it wouldn’t be me, wouldn’t be my voice.

Probably adding to these feelings of inadequacy is the fact that I’ve been feeling pretty low for the past week or so. When my mood crashes, I always hesitate to call it being in a depression, because who has money to get diagnosed in therapy when there are school loans to pay? But probably that’s what it is. And I probably have proper anxiety as well too, which just makes for a delicious, occasionally debilitating mental cocktail.

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(The woods behind my house. Not a recent picture, but somehow reflective of my feelings.)

My low isn’t constant. It comes and goes in cycles (but not always in sync with that cycle, if you catch my drift). Sometimes it’s pops up out of nowhere. Sometimes the things in my life that I’m less than happy about cling to me, like when you’ve got a hair in your shirt tickling you but you can’t get it out.

My current low is an external factors low. For one, I really don’t like my job. I’ve been trying since March to find a new one. I haven’t even been called for one single interview. The past months have just been repeated silent rejection, and sometimes it wears me down more than others.

For two, I’m lonely. It’s a weird kind of lonely where I can be in a room full of my friends and feel like I’m on the other side of the Grand Canyon from them even though I know they love me, and I know I’m welcome. And it definitely doesn’t help that most of my friends are coupled up right now, to the point where if we’re hanging out someone’s significant other is almost always there. This isn’t a bad thing; my friends’ girlfriends are great people. It just makes me feel particularly angsty about a certain lack in my life.

I’ve never been the kind of girl who needs a boyfriend to feel complete. I have my hobbies, I have my friends and family. But seeing my friends holding hands, or snuggling up with their girlfriends on the couch when we all watch a movie together can make me feel a bit jealous, a bit like I’ve just opened up an old wound and poured lemon juice on it – bitter and painful. (And yes, I have talked about this with my friends.)

But these feelings shall pass, as they always do. I will be fine, until the next cycle. Hopefully I can solve my job problem in the meantime, so at least I’ll have something new and positive in my life to motivate me and keep my head above the depths, but it’s looking doubtful. And winter is on its way, a time of year when I tend to have more frequent lows because of the lack of sun.

I feel like such a whiny punk, but this is my place to talk about what I want to, even if it is unappealing, and I needed to get these thoughts out of my head.

Why do I censor myself?

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In my previous post, I briefly mentioned that there are things that I can’t talk about on my YouTube channel. I wanted to talk about why that is, because you might be wondering why I, a grown woman, would feel the need to censor myself.

It all goes back to the 2012 trip to Germany I went on with my younger brother and my aunt. I vlogged a bit, and wound up showing this video to my aunt because I thought she would like it. It’s still one of my favorite videos I’ve made, and she enjoyed it so much that she asked me for the link so she could watch it again later. Rather stupidly, I somehow never thought that she would watch my other videos, because while my family was aware that I did YouTube, no one had really shown an interest in it, and I was pretty close-mouthed and private about it, because I didn’t want them watching.

When my aunt watches YouTube she’ll do it when there’s downtime at work because she’s not that technologically inclined and doesn’t quite understand how to use her home computer even though she can use her work computer just fine for the most part. Another essential piece of background info for this story is that my mom and aunt work at the same business.

One day my mom came home and said she’d had a small fight with my aunt at work that day because of a little video I’d uploaded called “Virgin Territory.” This video was inspired by an MTV reality show of the same name that came out around that time and followed the lives of several different virgins who were in their early to mid-twenties. In it, I discuss my own virgin status, and some of the circumstances surrounding that. My aunt was rewatching the Germany video, and then picked this one out of the recommended videos on the sidebar.

My mom and aunt’s desks are close to each other, but still far enough apart that you have to raise your voice slightly to speak between them. My mom’s recollection of the argument opened with my aunt reacting to the video intro in which I tell my mother not to watch the video by calling to my mom and saying, “She doesn’t want you to watch this one!” My mom responded that she wouldn’t have wanted to watch it anyway. And then when my aunt got to the part of the video where I say that I’m a virgin, she yelled, “Oh! She’s a virgin!” across to my mom.

My mom then got into it with with my aunt about how you shouldn’t just shout things like that across the office because even though no one was really around the office at the time, the office is small and what if someone else had heard?

At this point in her recollections, my mom stopped to say to me, “I don’t even understand why you feel the need to talk about stuff like that online anyway.”

Because I want to. Because I can. Because telling all my uncomfortable and/or unusual stories could maybe help someone else, whether it’s by actually relating to what I’m saying and gleaning some advice from it, or even as a distraction from their own troubles by using me for entertainment.

In that moment, sitting there in a room loaded with my mother’s disapproval, I felt something inside of me close off.

I’m non-confrontational by nature, and in order to avoid possible future confrontation with my family, I decided that there are certain topics I could never address in video (not all of them sexual in nature, by the way). It’s a loss and a limitation that still annoys me, which I part of why I wanted and needed to start this blog.

And the next time my aunt decides she might want to rewatch one of my videos, I will burn her a DVD.

This is Krys.

thisiskrys 3 Comments

The last guy I was in a relationship with is named Chris. (Normally I’d change the name to protect the innocent, but this story won’t make any sense if I do. Almost everyone he knows calls him by an extremely unrelated nickname anyway, so it should be fine.)

One night we went to eat at a diner (I’m from New Jersey, occasional diner visits are mandatory or I get kicked out), and there was a bit of a wait, so I put my name down on the hostess’ list. Instead of giving her my full first name, which I’ve often had misheard as other names, I told her to put down Krys. (Which she probably wrote down as Chris, but whatever.) So when she called for us, she asked for Krys, and Chris said, “Why didn’t you put down your name?”

My response? “I did.”

He had no idea, and neither would most people.

—

Hello, I’m Krystal, but very rarely, mostly to my family, I am known as Krys. I’m called Krys so rarely that it sort of feels like a secret identity. And yet, Krys name is the one I’d like to use on this blog. The use of such an extremely personal name is a reminder for me to be my most personal self here. I already have a well-worn-in online handle I could have used — I’ve been krystaaaalkay since 2012, if not before. But for this blog, I want to abandon that name, for a couple of reasons.

  1.  There is a little problem with the name krystaaaalkay called “nobody can remember how to fucking spell it.”
  2. krystaaaalkay is more or less my “brand,” and in some ways it has become an alter ego. Yes, krystaaaalkay is candid with her thoughts, but she’s also highly veneered. She rarely appears in front of a camera without a full face of makeup, and won’t talk about certain uncomfortable things from her life that maybe she’d like to talk about if she didn’t want to make people uncomfortable. (Except mental health. She’ll always talk about her depression and anxiety.)

Krys is easy to spell. Krys doesn’t give a fuck about a lot of things that krystaaaalkay does. krystaaaalkay needs a full face of makeup to do a video. Krys is currently writing this blog post with her hair wet from a shower, wearing her pajamas — a floppy tank top, Walmart leggings, socks to hold in the lotion on her feet, and Crocs (her house shoes).

So here we go. Let’s lose the veneer. Let’s get sloppy. Let’s get personal.

Much love,
Krys

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