I'm terribly sad today. The sun is shining, it's beautiful outside, and I've got Annie's macaroni and cheese cooking on the stove.

Okay, now I have the mac and cheese in a bowl next to me. I didn't feel like dirtying a colander to drain the water from the pasta, so i just strained the water out using the pot lid, dumped the powdered cheese into the pot, added a little water and olive oil and mixed. Doesn't work well that way. I've destroyed the peace symbols that the pasta is shaped into and can feel the granules of half-moist clumps of cheese in my mouth. Tasty. They look like yellow Amtrak logos.

My parents were not very nurturing to me. Maybe as the third child I was victim to parents having had enough rearing. My oldest brother had social issues, and my other brother had unavoidable and obvious visual art talent. They both received plenty of parenting, whether discipline or encouragement. I, on the other hand, was "fine" my mother told me later. Little did she know I had developed a debilitating self-diagnosed neurosis that would lead to a desire to study psychology-- the basic course of which I nearly failed during college, because I had trouble reading with then undiagnosed ADHD.

It was very difficult talking to my mother. Her expectations for me were far beyond anything I cared about. Image still is very important to her, having been born into an aristocratic Korean family. My father was also difficult to talk to, but for different reasons. I don't really know why.

While I had ideas and dreams as a child, none came to fruition until high school when I inadvertently instigated the implementation of a recycling program in our upstate New York county. That was in the late 1980s. All I did was put out empty boxes labeled, "Please recycle," and they filled up rapidly. So quickly that a Board of Education member took notice and somehow made the program happen. I wish I could remember who that was. When she asked me what I did with the cans, I told her that I took them to the dump. But really I just threw them in the trunk of my mother's old Buick Century. Later, my dad took them to the dump.

Whatever I wanted to do, my mother was vehemently opposed to it. Once I wanted to bake brownies and sell them, because I wanted to save money for a car by the time I turned 16. I was 8. Someone had to take me to the store to buy ingredients (the store wasn't walking distance), so of course I had to consult the parents. That went nowhere.

I always wanted to make money somehow that wasn't an allowance. But my parents squashed every effort. I did get to sell brownies during summers, but only with a partner who had been selling them already at a local concert hall. The concert hall was walking distance. I was not allowed to be a self-starter.

Now, however, I have been self-starting since 2002 and before during adulthood. I can't say I've been self-finishing though. I did write a book. But it hasn't made much money, which is why I'm sad. I feel as though my parents are squashing my efforts. They really aren't, but all those years of repressed feelings of rejection are coming up. God, I could use a good cry. Then pull up my bootstraps and get back to it.

Don't ever let anyone stop you from doing what you really want to do. Not even yourself.

I ate the entire box of Annie's mac and cheese.

"I'm just a little girl." That's the line I'm thinking of today. It's from the play The Owl and The Pussycat by Bill Manhof. I read the lines of Doris in a Stanislavski acting class at NYU's continuing education program (adult night school).

I decided to write a personal journal online. I have nothing to hide and everything to give. This journal is therapy for a wounded heart. While I'm writing this for myself, I'm also sharing with the world to let others know that they're not alone...or they're not that crazy...or they're not the only ones who are crazy...or you may live vicariously through me, if you'd like.

How did I become "crazy" and why would I say such a thing about myself? That's what I'm going to explore as I write. I guess this is a memoir of sorts. But really it's therapy.