Existence.

I don’t know what to say.  When I pray for guidance, when I ask what I’m supposed to do, I keep getting pointed at “write.”  But I don’t know how right now.  I don’t know how to be creative when every day I’m reduced to tears b y a situation that I can’t remedy.  I know it must be killing LAboy’s patience, that I’m so depressed.  That I cry every day.  That I don’t know what to do with this situation.

My mom came to visit for Thanksgiving.  I was okay before she came, but now I’m devastated.  I miss her.  I miss her so much that I hurt every single day.  I miss NY, I miss my mom, I miss my friends and snow and safety.  I miss that my life was comfortable.  My life was easy and golden and I always had everything I wanted and needed and I didn’t know how much I had until I’m here, freezing my ass off in a house with no heating with no friends and no family.  No random trips to the mall with my mom.  No movie nights with my friends.  No cousins and friends and support system.  I miss my mom more than I ever thought possible.

All I have right now are LAboy and my dog and it isn’t enough.  We’re getting married in April and I’m afraid of how it will feel to be back in NY.  I miss it, but we can’t leave here.  We can’t leave his daughter; she’s a child, she doesn’t deserve her dad leaving.  I don’t deserve to live away from my mom.  It’s breaking me.

We can’t leave here.  I can’t go home because he’s here and I want to be with him.  But my mom’s there.  I hate LA.  I hate this state, I hate the weather, I hate that so many things I love and need and want aren’t available here, aren’t part of the culture, aren’t even part of the vocabulary.  I hate that I feel so out of place, so alone.  I feel so foreign.

I feel like I’m living in a foreign country and my only link to my world is a fucking phone.  I love LAboy and I won’t, can’t leave him.  God brought me here for a reason, and it’s probably to grow up and learn how not to live with my mom for the rest of my life.  But it’s the hardest fucking thing I’ve ever done and I’m miserable.

I am miserable.  I’m depressed and what little medication I’m taking isn’t working.  I’m cold, I’m lonely, I barely have a job and I’m in the house with no car and nothing to do every day.  I can’t even write.  The words won’t come.  All the words I have are trapped in this impossible situation, where my heart is torn in two, and will be for the foreseeable future.

There’s no way out.  No matter where I am, I’ll always miss someone and something.  And I just don’t know how to exist right now without being sad.

How do I…?

I look back over the years of my life and remember when it all started.  I remember sitting on the floor listening to my mother tell me that my parents are getting a divorce.  I remember middle school, and wonder if flirting with depression was a precursor to or the reason for it developing.  I remember the first day that I took a blade to myself–a shaving razor I’d kept in my room for “missed spots” on my legs.  I ran it across my hand–my knuckles, I believe–and it was over from there.

How do you write when your days are consumed by a malaise that you can’t conquer by yourself?  How do you work through emotions–or lack thereof–that it took over a decade to conquer with medication, now that the medication has run out?  How do you stare at the blank screen and be productive, knowing that you have hours before you and behind you, where there is nothing–no one–no interaction, no duties but housework and homework?

It’s a first-world problem, I know.  I wouldn’t be complaining about my depression if I didn’t have food on my table.  And while we have our financial woes, I’m not starving to death.

But even as I hear my ex’s voice in my head telling me that I didn’t know what real problems were (ostensibly because I’d never been to Bosnia and seen real suffering like he had), I know that there are others out there that understand how smothering depression can be.  It’s like a weighted, all-encompassing, suffocating blanket that you have no control over.  The edges are nailed down, and you aren’t strong enough–you’ve never been strong enough–to rip it open.  You breathe the stale air, the reverberations of the thoughts and feelings you’ve never been able to rid yourself of tainting each inhalation.  You pray for the tools to escape, knowing that you can’t fight your way out of this thing that moves with you, that moves around you.  You wait, smothered in the heat of your own existence, exhausted from fighting, unable to find the energy to beat against the immovable object.

It’s almost impossible to turn on the lights in your darkness.  To find that place within you that is the well of creativity past the feel of breath-stealing flannel shoving itself into your mouth, stealing your words, keeping you gasping.  It’s almost impossible to remember what fresh air feels like; to know the touch of coolness against your skin and the knowledge that you aren’t alone in this and that someone else can reach out their hand and touch you.

It’s almost impossible to remember that no one else can see the blanket that steals your life away.  That it’s all inside of you, as you twist and turn and writhe, screaming just to move the staleness, to create a breeze, to make some kind of change–even if that change is for the worse.

It’s the hardest thing in the world to remember that there are things in this world to help pry up the nails, even as you watch others tear you down because they can’t see the fight that you’re struggling with.

How do I sit down at my keyboard and churn out stories, prose, words and nonsense when some days, it’s all I can do to breathe?

I just don’t understand.

I found out tonight that my ex has spread some rumors about me back home.  Rumors that I can’t defend against – because I’m here.  Rumors that I slept with several men while we were together.

He was the first person that I ever did that with (and I regret every moment of it, especially the first time).  The second was LAboy.

Friends that I really thought would come to my wedding and laugh with me and be a part of my new life with LAboy (we’re getting married back home) have carefully excised me from their lives, so quietly that I didn’t know what had happened until it was too late.  Facebook messages and emails going unanswered.  Questions that I can’t respond to because they aren’t being asked.  Because they’ve already decided what type of person I am.

I don’t understand how someone can be with a person for six years and be so hurtful.  I don’t understand how you can spread lies about someone you professed to love.  I don’t understand why you would want to do something like this.  I just don’t have the capacity to understand why someone would do this.  It hurts, and I don’t get it.

I just don’t get it.  I don’t get why people would believe that about me.  I don’t get why he’d do that to me.  What does he gain?

There are many regrets that I have in this life.  Giving myself to him – well, really, letting him take what he wanted – was the biggest mistake I made.

I’m so, so sorry–to myself.  I’m sorry that I let myself be manipulated and hurt like that.  I’m sorry that I thought that that’s what love was.  I’m sorry that I didn’t understand until it was far too late that I’m worth more.

I’m sorry.  And I’m hurting.

Oh, the irony.

So, like anyone else in the known universe, I’ve been known to periodically facebook stalk people.  Like my ex.

On a visit to his World of Warcraft girlfriend, he proposed to her (yesterday).  I’m not sure how to feel – but I know that it makes me laugh.

You see, he proposed to me before he even met me.  On the phone, no less.  Reportedly, he proposed to a mutual friend of ours when he dated her.  J is unfortunately known for asking that particular question and it meaning very little, evidently.

I’m also wondering if he’s getting this girl’s hopes up.  His credit score is absolutely abysmal; it’s unlikely he’ll ever be able to buy a car, let alone a house.  He doesn’t know how to manage money and he spends the majority of it on videogames.  He is irresponsible, short-tempered, and not particularly hygienic.

I don’t really want anyone else to feel the same way that I felt.  He can be extremely charismatic when he wants to be – that’s why so many girls on the internet get a crush on him.  I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that he was flirting/sexually roleplaying with this girl while we were still together.  I just hope he doesn’t screw with someone else.

And if he does, that’s okay.  I facebook stalk her too.  I’ll send her a margarita.

Don’t sit with him.

The post of a friend of mine from BB2G (HI PRINCESS ANDY!) made me think about another friend of mine.  His name was Dan.

The “was” is sometimes the most important part.

I remember being in tenth grade.  He was the older brother of a girl in orchestra with me; he’d been away in Japan for a year, or I might have met him in orchestra, too.  I vaguely remembered him, but wasn’t sure from where, and never did figure it out.  Either way, I remember coming to lunch one day and he was at the end of our table.

“lagirl,” C. told me.  “Don’t talk to him, don’t sit with him.  There’s something wrong with him. He cuts himself.”

Me being me, I sat down and asked if I could draw on his arm.  Confused, Dan said yes.

We spent the next year as best friends.  We skipped lunch to sit in the hallways and talk.  We shared poetry.  I hugged him as he cried.  He came with me to stupid meetings for school events and I listened to the way he felt when he punched the wall.  He even did a spell for my cat when I thought she was going to die, and she got better.

If I still lived in my home town, I’d still remember, every single time I drove over that bridge.  The bridge we walked over to get to the store to buy candles to save my cat.  For some reason, that period of time, more than anything, is the strongest memory I have of him.  I remember when he told me what whale blubber tastes like (not good); I still have the notebook he wrote my name and “little wolf” on in kanji.  I still have the note that he wrote to me, telling me what a good person he thought I was.

I remember when he came to my door and told me he did a voodoo spell because he was in love with me.  I was in a long-distance (abusive) relationship.  I felt like he was going too far, and I don’t even remember what was said, at all, during that conversation.

It was one of the last times I saw him alive.  We didn’t hang out after that.

A few years later as I sat on AIM trying to remember his screenname, a message popped up.  “Did you hear?  Dan S. died.  I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

He died in his backyard.  He died because he used drugs and it hurt his brain and he dropped dead in his back yard of an aneurysm.  He died because he hurt and sometimes, it feels like he died because I wasn’t there for him when he needed me.  He was there for me – he called planned parenthood for me, when I wanted to know if I could get pregnant if a boy put his fingers inside of me after touching himself (probably not).  He was there for me – when he made a speech that that boyfriend didn’t want to go to.  It was Dan’s Eagle Scout ceremony and he said wonderful things about how much I meant to him and how much I’d helped him as I sat in the church that he went to.

The church that I sat in, staring at his casket.  The church that I got up in and spoke in front of everyone that I couldn’t see through my tears.  The one and only time that public speaking didn’t make me want to throw up.  I wanted to say so much – that he was my best friend, that he cut himself, that he was dead and I hated that I was trying to find him when he died, and he was lost and alone and I couldn’t help.

I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself for it.

I still have the letter.  And I hope he knows what it means to me, now that I understand.

My father.

My relationship with my father is one that I’ve briefly talked about here, but it’s also the most complicated relationship I’ve ever had.  My first memories of him are some of the happiest of my life; I remember sneaking downstairs on Christmas before my mom was awake, sitting on his lap and watching Star Trek, refusing to look at the tree so it would be a surprise.  I remember using our absolutely ancient Tandy computer, with a “writing” program that no longer exists, making storybooks with pictures about dragons (Smaug was my hero then).  I remember singing our “MacGuyver Night” song and taking way. way. too. much. time. learning the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air song (to this day, I know every word.)

I also remember the first time he ever yelled at me; when my mother threw a chair at him (and missed) and I ran down the stairs to see what had happened.  He yelled for me to go back upstairs.

I remember the way he acts when he’s drunk.  I remember what it’s like to pack my tiny pink Troll Doll suitcase and carry my Puppy in the car, driving to my grandmother’s house in the middle of the night.  I remember that I was excited that I got to skip school; the reality of running away from home didn’t hit until several years later.  I remember what it’s like to recognize the fact that my father is an alcoholic – and what that could mean for my own future.  (Self-mutilation addiction much?)

I remember what it’s like to crave affection and attention and male recognition so damn much that I dated that scumbag A for way. too. long. and let him do things I never thought I’d let anyone do.  I remember what it’s like to throw my own personal rules out the window, to give parts of myself away one drop of blood at a time.

I pray regularly that he finds happiness, my father.  I pray that he’ll let go of his “love” for my mother, that he’ll find happiness.  I pray so fervently that he’ll finally want to be happy, instead of being a martyr.

But I’m not so sure this is a prayer that will be answered.

Ch-ch-ch-changes.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about past/present/future lately.  Life is moving fast and in ten thousand directions; I’m engaged, may have a new job, and will hear from a program I want to get into next week (pleasepleaseplease!).  But I’m still haunted by things in my past.

A co-worker smacked me on the ass today and I panicked.  I wanted to scream and hit and hide under the table.  I wanted to flee and get the hell out of there.  I felt small and scared and vulnerable for a long time after that.

I think of That Boy, the ex, and compare LAboy to him.  I can’t help it.  I think of how strange it is to be able to go to bed before LAboy and not worry about what he’ll be doing while I’m asleep.  To not wonder who he’s talking to online or if I should worry.  To know that he’s doing yard work while I’m at work on his day off, and not spending his time playing World of Warcraft and masturbating to God knows what.

I trust him with my secrets and insecurities.  I know that he takes the best and worst of me and loves me anyway.  He holds me when I feel small and laughs with me when my day has been horrible.  I never fear him getting home, worried about what drama will be there tonight.  I never think about whether or not I’m good enough for him.  I never wish that I didn’t have to worry about what he’s doing when I’m not there.

Because I know, and I trust.

It’s terrifyingly beautiful.

Him.

When I was thirteen, I joined a Star Wars club on IRC.  That club became a huge part of my life, but that’s another story entirely.  At around the time of my being fourteen, I was “dating” a boy.  I met him offline once, and he was very sweet, but there were several problems with our relationship – including the fact that he took a bottle of pills while on the phone with me.

I broke up with him for A shortly after that.  The two aren’t unrelated.

A was six~ years older than me.  Enough to know better.  Enough to know that he shouldn’t have done the things that he did.  I met him for the first time a few days after my sixteenth birthday.  My rules were easy: no touching below the belt.  I wasn’t ready.  He agreed.

Within an hour of meeting me he’d broken that rule.

I didn’t know it then, but I craved acceptance.  I had become co-dependent on him; I needed him to love me.  And that’s what older people did, right?  Stuff like that?  Unfortunately, it didn’t take long before we reached territory that I was really not okay with.

The first time I ever touched a penis was on the edge of my bed.  We were watching TV and laughing.  He moved my hand to his jeans.  I pulled away.  He did it again.  Slid my fingers under the waistband.

I touched it briefly, curled up and cried.

I said I had a migraine.  He believed me.

That was the beginning of using sexual actions to get attention.  He wasn’t an affectionate person; he didn’t cuddle or hold hands or kiss just for the sake of it.  All of these things led to sex.  He woke me up early sometimes on his visits (this was a long-distance relationship) so I could give him a BJ.

To this day if someone guides my hand toward their pants or asks me to do that, I’m thrown into a violent panic attack.

We went to take professional pictures once.  I was feeling lonely and wanted affection; he didn’t want any part of it.  He basically said that if I’d wanted anything so badly, I should go buy some condoms.  That was the one thing I kept from him, the one last stronghold of my sanity – I did not give him my virginity.

But I gave him everything else.

I gave him the ability to have someone come up behind me.  My pride, when he strung me along for a year with phone sex and promises of getting back together after he shattered my world by breaking up with me over email.  My self-respect when I begged and pleaded and screamed.  My skin, when I began cutting myself.

I have panic attacks for other reasons.  If someone tickles me, I throw myself under the nearest object and sob like a broken child, panicking and rocking, an unthinking animal in pain.  There are other things about me that came before, like the dissociation.  There are things that came after, like That Boy.

But A holds the trophy for teaching me the depths I can go to in losing my respect for myself, utterly and completely.  It’s only now that LAboy is starting to teach me what I’m really worth… and that affection can be simple, with no strings attached.

Irrational fears.

This post has been wandering around in my head for awhile now, and I still don’t think that I’ll be able to do it justice.  I’ve been struggling with this issue for a long time, whether I recognized it for what it was or not.  It sounds so stupid to say it.  To know that I actually believe it.

I am terrified of being happy.

There is an absolute and overwhelming fear that lurks in the back of my mind whenever I’m truly happy: that it will get taken away from me at any moment.  That if I’m happy, it must mean that it’s setting me up for a devastating fall.  I have a truly wonderful relationship; I know that at some point in the near future, I’ll be engaged(!) to the man of my dreams… and I am terrified that he’s going to be taken away from me.  That he’ll get sick, or that God forbid something will happen to him.  That he’ll get sick of me and leave.  Just… anything.

I’m afraid that my happiness will be taken away from me, so I can never truly enjoy it.  And I want to, so painfully badly that it aches.  I want to know what it’s like to not have to be afraid anymore.  To feel like I deserve to be happy, that it’s safe to be happy.

But how can I convince myself it’s safe when there’s so much out of my control that can take it away?

 

Leaving him.

Right around a year ago, I was in my therapist’s office.  I was sad, all the time.  I was nervous whenever my ex would get home because I’d have to deal with drama if he was in a bad mood.  He spent 90% of his time home alone, locked in our library, playing World of Warcraft or… uh, with himself.  I spent most of my time downstairs on my laptop with my dog, talking to LAboy about my life, trying to see a future.

My heart was breaking.  I spent six years trying to help That Boy become a better person, but all we did was fight.  I “made him feel dirty” when, after foreplay, I asked for sex and didn’t give him a handjob first.  I wasn’t “taboo” enough.  I “never” wanted to roleplay.  I “hated” videogames.  I “hated” a lot of things.

Really what I hated was myself.

In my therapist’s office that day, I was crying, as usual.  I asked her in a tiny voice if she thought I should break up with him.  “Yeah, honey, I think you should,” she said gently.

Those words changed my life.  It was the validation from an outside source that I needed.  I was bolstered by LAboy’s support of me, no matter what I did – and don’t judge me that this was a few days after he finally said he liked me.  The two aren’t unrelated – I needed to know that I had options.  That someone liked me.  That I wasn’t bad or dirty.  That I was good and worthy and desirable.

I went home from therapy and told him we needed to talk and that it wasn’t working.

We hugged and cried and talked and he asked me if I wanted to have sex one last time (NO!).

Six years down the drain and it was the best move I’ve ever made.

Thank you, L.  Thank you, LAboy.  I’d probably be cutting again if you hadn’t given me the courage to leave him.