Wednesday 9th May 2007

It’s the one year anniversary. I guess Hallmark doesn’t make a card for this sort of occasion. Congrats on not being crazy anymore; at least not as crazy. Well done for living in the real world instead of in a psychiatric bubble. I thought I’d make it the whole year without cutting again though. And I didn’t. It was only two or three slips but they still happened. Actually maybe I didn’t ever believe that. I found something I wrote just after it happened the other day. That deep down I knew it wouldn’t be the last time I had a so-called ‘crisis’ and that I knew my relationship with insanity wasn’t done. And it isn’t. I’m about to take the year off to go work on this. To understand and figure out quite why I’m not a whole person. Why there’s still something disjointed and fractured inside of me.

More than anything I don’t understand the downwards spiral on which I always seem to fall. I remember secondary school and being pulled apart by two opposing desires. Being the golden child, straight A student, one of the best. But also being the goth, drawn to the darkness, drinking and fucking to access. Wanting it all, trying to have it all, doing it all until finally I cracked and broke under the pressure. The sides have taken on a different form now, but still I’m broken down the middle.

I’m split between male and female, which fit together perfectly but only when you’re not trying to fit them together inside of you. The image I have of females as being weak, needy, dependent, pathetic. I despise it. I’ve seen what its like to have men ruin you, to make you so afraid and scared that you’ll do anything to placate them. You bend and serve, and break and give and never demand anything back. You don’t expect anything because you don’t feel like you deserve it. And if you ever did ask or demand, well who knows what would happen. He might raise his voice, his hand, his fist, or just leave. But I am a woman, who craves love and affection and attention and his arms around me, to hold me and protect me.

But since I still seem to end up hurting I behave like a man myself. I drink like one, I fuck freely like one, pretending I don’t get attached and that I don’t care. Say that I don’t want a relationship, that I want sex and only sex. That my drinking isn’t a problem, I can do it just like they can. Isolate myself so I can kid myself that I don’t need anyone.

I do though. And the behaviors that I engage in and repeat so they become habit hurt my inner core. They go against everything my soul cries out for. Which is love and nurturance and acceptance. Things you don’t get when you’re a women who acts like a man. I guess I just like to hurt myself. If I’m the one doing the hurting then what room is there for anyone else to do it?

May 2007

The saying, that tomorrow’s a new day. It’s not always a positive one. In the moment you can tell yourself, well its only tonight. Tomorrow I can start afresh. This night of drinking and all that it entails, tomorrow it won’t matter. Not even tomorrow, there’s always some marker you set, some time in the future, that’s when you can deal with everything. Hit rock bottom and start again, they’ll always be another chance. But you start running out of chances. Or maybe not chances, but you end up ruining everything that you value. You waste opportunities that before mattered so much. You loose friendships and relationships and real chances for happiness. But in the moment what does it matter? You feel it in you body, running down your throat coursing through your veins, filling your body with a warmth that you simply don’t know how to find otherwise. The taste, caressing your mouth, loving you in ways that no-one else has ever been able to. Or perhaps they have, but because you’re so broken and have such impossible needs, that when it came you just didn’t feel was enough. Maybe nothing would ever be enough, nothing from an external source. But that’s the thing with alcohol. It will never leave you. It’s always there. You know you can always find it, and it will always open its arms to you in love and affection and reassurance and comfort and anything else that you want it to be. And it hates you, deep down inside it hates you and strives to destroy you and wants you completely in its clutches. But that’s alright. Because the love in your mind overcomes that, it drowns out that voice in the back of your head saying don’t do this. And anyways, what do you care? Because you love the hate, you love how it kills you. Because that’s all that you know and all that you deserve. And so you go back. It shields you from what’s outside. Drink it till you don’t care or feel anymore. Facing up to life and more specifically the things about life that make you drink, well that’s a thousand times harder than just drinking it away. Honestly, life is horrible. At least your life. And those feelings of worthlessness, failure, rejection they drift away with each sip or at least while you may still feel them, you just couldn’t care anymore. You don’t care. Well, I don’t care. I may tomorrow, but then I’ve always been a creature who lives life dictated by my feelings and right now I’m not going to care. Or at least not care in the way I would if I didn’t have the glass in my hand.

Monday 15th May 2006

I’ve wanted to write all weekend yet the words just don’t seem to want to come. How am I feeling? What do I want to say? What are the words that refuse to take shape in my mouth? Am I just as white as these walls?

Less than a week ago a sad commercial could make me cry. Most songs would have a cord that raised something inside of me, tore at my strings and made my heart hurt. Tonight they wouldn’t come. Those tears. Those salty bitter sweet tears that warmed my cheeks. They said all the words that wouldn’t come, that I didn’t know how to say. They carried the pain that came from a time before speech, such a raw old emotion that it cannot be put down on paper, can’t be expressed in any other way. Any way other than the tears from my eyes, the bleeding scream from my throat and the scars on my body. They tell what my words cannot; they serve while the words fail.

I can feel them coming. I can feel them just below the surface. I’m curious as to tempt them or not. Do I want to feel them? Or will, once they begin their fall, they simply never stop coming? That’s always been my fear. That one day I will fall, fall onto the floor in sobs of agony, and never be able to get back up again. That the tears will never dry up. Because the pain is never-ending. And there’s never anyone there to catch you.

So what is it? What is there beneath the surface of bouncing and smiles that I’ve made for you? Why am I so afraid to break? What drives me to feel this need to be that girl? What makes me need their hands on me? Why do I have this pain in my chest? Why is the screaming always just around the corner? What makes me hold that blade in my hand? And why, why do I know that deep inside I have all of the answers to this yet cannot, perhaps will not, let myself know them? When will I leave whatever fantasy world I have created and come into this one? When will I look in the mirror and know the girl who is staring back at me? When will she not be a stranger to me?

In the end it all comes back to this. This core of dark, that ball of dirt that lies inside me, poisoning every inch of my being. Seeping through every vein and leaving nothing untainted. All of it bad, all of it dank, all of it me.