Day 4-A Habit That You Wish You Didnt Have

I have a lot of bad habits, but none of them consume my life enough that I have to change immediately. I guess my worst habit is my need to be in control of everything. I am that person that has to make a list for everything, has to plan things out and needs everything in order. In other words, I can be pretty uptight. I need to know what is going on, when and why.

Over the years, I realized how unhappy that made me so I made an effort to change. I have certainly gotten much better at it, but regardless a bit of this still lingers. I dont plan things out to the second like I used to. I still make lists because, really what's wrong with that? But I no longer need to know what is going on, when and why. I try to go with the flow as much as possible and see where fate leads me. Every once in a while, I feel that anxiety to have structure and order bubble up but I push it back down and remind myself that being carefree makes me a much happier person.

Day 3- A Picture of You As A Child

This one might be hard as I dont have any digital pictures of myself as a child. I'll have to look for this and come back to update. Sorry...

Day 2-The Meaning Behind Your Blog Name

The name of my blog is "And So The Story Goes." This is a play on a lyric from a Bon Iver song called "Lump Sum." It is a song about recovery, starting over, finding inner balance and reflecting on your life...what it was, what it is and what it could be.

I chose this name for my blog because this is my story. My journey to recovery, to finding myself, to documenting my thoughts at certain points in time. This is my memory to reflect back on, to analyze, to criticize, to remember myself by. It is my auto biography to see how I have grown, changed, and matured. This blog serves as a way to record my history, my era, my youth, the prime of my life so I could look back and see how many people I have been, how many people I could be...or to prove to myself that I am who I am and will be who I always have been.

Here is "Lump Sum" by Bon Iver:

Day 1- Recent Picture of yourself and 15 Interesting Facts

Pic taken 5/21/2011

1. I am getting old-I am turning 25 in 2 months

2. I can speak, read and write Spanish fluently

3. I have been with my, now, fiance since I was 18 yrs old

4. I am very shy, which people misconstrue as being stuck up

5. My favorite color is black

6. I am an auntie to beautiful 4 month old triplets :D

7. I have 4 tattoos

8. I get a tick when I see people use incorrect grammar, especially when it's willingly!

9. Interior design is a passion of mine

10. I am extremely neat, organized and clean to the point of OCD

11. I cannot watch horror movies-they scare me :/

12. Call me a nerd/geek but I LOVE to read

13. I dont dream...or I cant remember any of my dreams

14. I am a coffee addict. I need at least two cups of it to start my day

15. I am horrible at decision making

It was really hard to come up with 15 facts. I had 5 of them and I was stuck for like an hour. So either I am a loser that has nothing interesting to say about herself or I dont know myself very well.

30 Days of Blogging

In order to get myself back into the habit of blogging, I am going to try a new 30 days of blogging list I stumbled upon while going through my dear friend/lover/godsister's blog. I thought it would be fun to try this again and just see where it goes.

Here is the list:

Day 1 – Recent picture of you and 15 interesting facts about yourself
Day 2 - The meaning behind your blog name
Day 3 - A picture of you as a child
Day 4 - A habit that you wish you didn’t have
Day 5 - A picture of somewhere you’ve been
Day 6 - Favorite superhero and why
Day 7 - A picture of someone/something that has had the biggest impact on you
Day 8 - Short term goals for this month and why
Day 9 - Something you’re proud of in the past few days
Day 10 - Songs you listen to when you are happy, sad, bored, hyped, mad
Day 11 - Write a bucket list of things you want to do before you die
Day 12 - Write a poem to someone you love
Day 13 - Your 5 favorite books and why
Day 14 - A picture of you and your family
Day 15 - Put your iPod on shuffle: First 10 songs that play
Day 16 - A picture of yourself
Day 17 - Someone you would want to switch lives with for one day and why
Day 18 - Plans/dreams/goals you have
Day 19 - Write about a sweet memory from your past
Day 20 - Write a letter to someone
Day 21 - A picture of something that makes you happy
Day 22 - What makes you different from everyone else
Day 23 - Something you crave a lot
Day 24 - Post your favorite quote or verse of scripture and why
Day 25 - What I would find in your bag
Day 26 - List 10 things that you are thankful for
Day 27 - My day job versus my passion
Day 28 - Cruise a thesaurus and pick out 10 words you like the sound of
Day 29 - Favorite TV shows and why you like them
Day 30 - Movies you can watch again and again

Day 1 will be today, so look for a second post :)

We Could've Had It All...

Hey there...lots going on lately. I definitely plan on getting back into the flow of blogging more often. I have one of those 30 day blog things in mind, so it will force me to blog every day for a month.

Anyway, lately I have been OBSESSED with Adele's new album, 21. I eat, breathe, sleep and shit this album. No joke....I need help to get over this addiction.

21 is a breakup album and boy did this asshole break Adele's heart. You could certainly feel her pain in her lyrics, in the melodies and just in the way she sings. Some songs border on pathetic but she realistically depicts the pain that comes from heartache. Not everyone can just get over a lost love quickly. Sometimes we need to wallow in pity and in pain. Sometimes we need to be consumed whole by this pain to point where we burst. Sometimes we need to analyze ourselves and blame ourselves for what happened. Sometimes we need to promise to be better, to change, to be what this other person needs. Sometimes we need to reach the lowest of the low in every possible way in order to rise back up again, rebuild ourselves and find the strenght to move on.

Adele certainly went through this healing process and you can feel it in this album. Songs like "One and Only" and "Don't You Remember" where she begs this guy to love her and think about her again. She focuses on what could have been and blames herself. But then there are songs like "Rolling in the Deep" where she realizes that he played her and fooled her and she threatens to "lay his shit bare" if he sells her out. Also "Set the Fire to the Rain" where she talks about how she fell for him but she had to start to let go because she realized there was a "side to him that she never knew."

She finally ends the album with "Someone Like You" where she talks about how this guy has moved on and is now married. You get the feeling that she has realized she has no choice but to let him go. She wishes him "nothing but the best," however, she begs him not to forget her to which he responds that "sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead." She has accepted this to be true and you feel the album end with healing.

I definitely recommend this album in its entirety. I have loved Adele for quite some time and I am so happy she is finally getting the public recognition she deserves. Below is the one song I am stuck on. It's called "One and Only." I sang this to one of my 4 month old nephews, Aaron, and he smiled at me the entire time. Not only is this song beautiful, but I picture his smiling face everytime I hear it.

Too Young to Die But Old Is The Grave

I have kind of been neglecting this blog for a bit. There are some serious issues that I have been dealing with that have really made me struggle to hold onto who I am as an individual, a daughter, a sister, a girlfriend, a friend, and simply as a human being.

Over the past few months, my family and myself have noticed significant changes in my father. My father was the type of man that enjoyed simple things. Spending an entire weekend eating, drinking wine and watching movie marathons on the SciFi channel would be a perfect weekend for him. There was nothing that he loved more than having a few drinks, creating new mixed drinks, or sharing a whole bottle of any type of liquor with people. As of recent months, my father no longer drinks any alcohol, not even wine. There aren't even any liquor bottles in my parents house. He no longer eats, he no longer sleeps and he no longer watches television. At all.

He is a completely different man

He has also been stuck on the idea that my mother is having an affair (well, several affairs now). At first, we thought he was being a typical jealous Dominican man. Jealousy runs in Latin men's blood since they are raised to believe a woman should stay home tending to her husband's every need (holds back vomit.) However, things kept taking a turn for the worse. He would accuse my mother of sleeping with any and every man we knew. He even accused her of sleeping with family friends that were women! He accused her of poisoning his food, of performing voodoo on him, putting sleeping pills in his drink, dressing provocatively, cheating with her doctors, her co-workers, her co workers husbands, her friends husbands and pretty much anyone that came to his mind.

All the while during his accusations, he was unable to produce a single piece of evidence. No phone calls, no voice mails, no sightings, no pictures, no text messages, no comparisons, no motives, no nothing. He would follow her, watch her, even hired someone to follow her, took her cell phone, and did several things that would have led him to find SOMETHING, anything...but he still produced nothing. And since he has been unable to produce evidence, he started saying that my mother placed a spell on him to blind him from seeing/finding evidence. She had a spell put on herself to protect her while she is out and about fornicating with several men and women. He became paranoid about everything and everyone. He would ask a question and you would answer him and then 5 minutes later he would ask the same question in a different manner to see if you would give him a different answer so he can try to catch you in a lie. He became a man obsessed, a man on a mission to catch my mother in an act that she wasn't even doing.

My father even went as far as saying that my mother belongs to a cult where women meet once a week to devise plans on how to control their husbands so they could go around whoring themselves out. This cult would send subliminal messages through the phone to people they wanted to influence and this is also how they would "prey" on the men that they wanted to sleep with. Mind you, my father is a very intelligent, scientific and highly educated man who got a Master's degree in Mathematics.

Wait, it gets worse...

This whole time all these things are going on, we had an idea that something was not right with him. We knew something was going on, but couldn't figure out what. We chalked it up to a mid life crisis and perhaps a nervous breakdown, but he just kept getting worse and worse. We started to notice these changes I spoke about in his behavior. We would also notice that he would suddenly break down in tears often. He would also threaten to disappear from our lives, threatened suicide when nobody believed him, and he would sometimes regress to child like behaviors and patterns.

Even with all of these somewhat clear signs, I still had a thought in the back of my mind that maybe he was right about everything. Maybe there were things that we just weren't seeing and weren't catching on to. Maybe, since he was obsessed, he noticed things we didn't. So I started to watch my mother's every move, watched the way she spoke, her behavior, analysed her words, dissected them, read into every line, noticed how she dressed, how she walked, how she moved. I watched every single detail my brain was capable of processing. I found nothing different, nothing that seemed like strange behavior from my mother, nothing out of the ordinary and nothing to lead me to believe that my father was right.

Then earlier this week, my father called me with something that made me realize that he was in serious need of help. I realized this was not normal jealousy or a mid life crisis or a nervous breakdown as we previously thought. My father had a mental problem...something way more serious than I ever imagined. Earlier this week, he called me and told me that he had discovered something that would seal the deal and convince everyone of my mother's "infidelity." He told me he was more than 100% sure of this news and he would lay his neck on the line to show he was right. He spoke with such conviction that I believed him before he even told me what it was. He went on to say that he was certain that my mother was sleeping with my fiancee, Victor, and with my sister's boyfriend, Stephen, who lives in the basement with my sister and her kids.

My heart literally came out of my ass at this point

It was right then and there that I knew he was not in tune with reality and he was not mentally well. I did some research on the Internet and looked up all his symptoms (delusions, paranoia, etc) and I discovered that there is a disorder called delusional disorder. There are 6 types of delusions, and one of them is jealousy where the person is convinced their spouse is cheating on them.

This disorder is a psychotic mental disorder where a person believes a delusion that could be possible and plausible, but is certainly not true. People with this disorder lead high functioning normal lives and don't really exhibit bizarre behaviors other than the delusions. These delusions can also be linked to other psychotic disorders, such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. The symptoms of this disorder, along with everything else associated with it, describes my father to a T. I have no doubt in my mind that he is suffering from this...no doubt at all.

People who suffer from delusional disorder often fall victims to depression and anxiety and suffer from this chronically and often for the rest of their lives. The only way to manage this is through drug therapy, where the patient is prescribed anti-psychotic medication, and through psychotherapy. However, most patients do not seek any help since they strongly believe that they do not have any type of psychological problem. My father, of course, is one of these people. He does not think there is anything wrong with him and he swears he will find evidence soon.

My family and I all went to see a family therapist yesterday (my father refused to attend) and we told him everything that was going on. He agreed with my diagnosis of delusional disorder and also told us that it sounds like my father might be suffering from a mix of mental disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.

I have no words to describe how that information made me feel...no words at all

We devised a plan to trick my father into coming to see this therapist. I don't know if it's gonna work and I don't know what to do if it doesn't. At this point, this is one of those things that my psyche cannot process. I feel like I am watching a movie and I am just waiting for it to end so I can leave the theater and go back to my normal life.

Title post is "The Bucket" by Kings of Leon