The foundation is the most important...and

how much can one really change? Jamie should be proud...I've spent some "Lisa time" and thought about a few things that I've come across at ACE. I keep thinking... I had everything 2 years ago. or even 1 year ago. I felt like I had a great wonderful foundation set...I had ups and downs but when the downs came , an up followed at some point. It's not until now that I realized how weak of a foundation i had set up. Not only weak but very superficial. I wasn't using the best material possible, I was using the cheapest, easily accessible material. I built building and building upon this weak foundation. I used the same cheap material to build the many many buildings on my land. This building represented all the different situations I've been in, each new trouble, boy or "semester' of my life. My semesters in undergrad always changed drastically. The buildings were all I was familiar with and I built them all the same way. Slowly, these buildings were cracking, decaying, crumblings but I was in denial or if I saw a crack, i put a giant band-aid on it. If I saw something decaying, I'd cover it with something ( a tattoo maybe? ).

Some of the buildings were small and rarely used, others were magnificent huge mansions. These represented the facades and the intricate and careful actions that I did to make sure that I was wearing a socially acceptable face- in my mind. The tough chick. Not the drunk crying girl in the corner. The grinning joker, the strong one, etc. In order to cope, every face I had must have been carefully thought out so that things seemed genuinely okay in the end.

Eventually, the band-aids were falling off, covering up the decay was becoming too exhausting and expensive, my buildings were falling apart. My old ways of coping were becoming useless. I couldn't put on the facade anymore. I recall thinking to myself about a year ago..."I've been faking this so long, maybe it really is who I am now"- it wasn't long after that that things slowly underneath the buildings started to crumble. These buildings started falling apart in front of my eyes and I was running around like crazy attempting to rebuild them, but the problem was the foundation was flawed as well.

Therapy, Emory, A certain relationship or one specific situation had not done this to me. It began to happen slowly after it was built. Sure, triggers along the way may have caused some more damage than natural causes and shitty material would but it was flawed to begin with.

Now, my job is to willingly tear down these building w/out regret. Learn how to build a new foundation with the help of my support system and then build these new buildlings slowly and carefully with the best material that could be bought. This process will be long, expensive and hard but I can't keep living with decaying buildlings falling apart. Eventually everything would have fallen apart..