Sounds like self-pity…

I don’t know what I am going to do. I can’t stay home like this; it’s driving me insane. I need something to do.  I need someone to stand in front of me and tell me exactly what to do. So I don’t have to think, so I don’t have to spend all these waking moments looking for an out that I’m not supposed to want.

I’ve changed. I can’t sustain myself anymore. I’ve weakened from all the pressure and now I can’t do what I used to do. The pointlessness of everything is glaring back at me more than ever. I get home and look around and think, “What now?” I don’t care if I have the job that people consider the lowest, I don’t care if all I do is work. They keep calling me in, or having me stay late, and not once have I protested. It’s better that I’m not here. It’s better that I’m not home. I tire of my daydreams of suicide.

I finally allowed myself to heal a little. Now there are pink lines instead of red, and some a deep purple, just everywhere, as though there was no rhyme or reason to it, only a sick kind of desperation. But I admit that I am throwing tantrums more often than ever. Tossing things into the wall (particularly in the freezer where I can’t be heard), or randomly sobbing when something doesn’t go my way. No one has witnessed any of it, thankfully. The crying is almost comical; it is literally over the stupidest most mundane of things. I want to laugh at myself, at how pathetic it is. Can’t live at all, can you? Can’t take it when something is broken, or the food you want isn’t there, or you can’t sleep? What a waste it is for me to even breathe sometimes, such a snivelling, stupid thing. You know why I won’t work the registers? I’m afraid I’ll fuck up the math. I’m sure counting coins would be too much for me. I’m just that stupid. Don’t even give me that responsibility; I’m sure I can’t handle it. My register would probably be off by twenty dollars.

What does it matter, really? It was all over before it began.

Obscure

The changes in mood are killing me. I can even feel it in my body now, this deep ache of exhaustion. When you are away, working, it’s easy to get lost in thought, it’s easy to forget everything but never-ending line of meaningless tasks. I’ve been less low lately. Not well, but at a spot that was almost bearable. Then I wake up yesterday and that feeling of pointlessness was stronger than ever. This numb state of mind and body has overtaken me once again, to the extent that I feel automated. I feel…as though I am not really alive. And why must it be this way? Why does it shift so rapidly? Why, if it is just hormonal, can I not bring myself to change anything?

I’m falling faster and faster, down into the black, all my senses fading–literally. I get so bad at times that food has almost no taste, warm doesn’t feel so warm, and pain is a dull, pointless thing that barely touches me. I don’t understand the purpose of this, I don’t understand what it is that I am asking myself to see. That it can be worse? That I am nothing? That even the smallest of pleasures can be taken away?

Numbness is beyond pain, and somehow it hurts more than anything.  I can’t be emotional. I will die that way, I see that. My worst moments were lived when the numbness was gone and there was nothing but a raw wound. I can’t bear it. I can’t feel. I am so used to being without it, that to experience it is overwhelming.

They say that each day survived is one that makes you stronger. But why is it then that I only find my resolve growing weaker, my mind struggling less and less to evade these thoughts? Am I obsessed with it? Have I become so enamored with an idea that I have allowed it control over my life? The answer I get is probably. I am lazy, I am weak and stupid, and I don’t want to try. What better a way to end that misery than to simply…stop it from existing?

I am sick of apologizing for my selfishness. I am tired of my own inaction. Everything about me is so horrid that I can’t bear it sometimes. I feel smothered by my own self hatred, and even locking myself away in this darkened room isn’t enough to ease it. It just keeps getting worse and worse, to the point where I find myself laying in bed, willing myself to call into work and tell them that I am through. I can’t do it. I can’t do anything, because I can’t stand to be myself, and I am too set in my ways to ever change.  

Every morning I have this fight with myself, and every morning the numbness is all that convinces me to get up. I don’t know what else to do, and sometimes I know I don’t have it in me to finish this. All it takes is a single bullet and one simple squeeze on a trigger, right below the chin. Kaboom, and there is nothing to fret over. There is no job, there are no problems, there is no pointlessness. There is nothing. And most importantly there is no life. And is that so terrible? Do I honestly believe that I make a shit bit of difference anywhere, to anyone? I am not an integral part of anything; I hold nothing together. I have always been something clinging to the fringes of existence, too small and insignificant to ever hold sway.

 And I don’t feel sorry for myself; it was all my own doing. I wanted obscurity and here it is. I would have been out of here a long time ago without it. I am grateful because I know that the day I die I will have accomplished and meant nothing, just like everything else, and at least my one redeemable quality was that I was not stupid enough to deny and fight it.  That will have to be enough. It must be enough.

It is all that we can ever expect.

The lies may just be for myself.

There comes a point where you have to admit that there’s a problem. Not just acknowledge, but openly accept that ‘hey I am doing this to myself’. This isn’t one of those ‘hand yourself over to a higher power’ things, this is a ‘okay, I am being fucking stupid’ kind of things. I know this woman from work who’s in AA to clear up some DUI or something. She gets drunk after every meeting. The irony of that is beautiful to me; I don’t much believe in self denial in any form. You do what you feel is necessary, even if it is self-destructive. Getting there is half the journey, I guess you could say, why waste it in more misery than is required?

My main concern is that I am stuck in a cycle of reward/punishment. Always have been. But with added…annoyances, it has progressed into a much more formidable monster. I’ve been bingeing/starving consistently, hurting myself, and growing ever the more solitary. In fact, there have been times where although I live in the same house as my father, I have not seen him for days on end. I sleep as much as possible, though it is not nearly enough. I deny myself painkillers for my useless back and whatever other ailments this ridiculous job has further irritated. I sometimes have trouble getting up in the morning. I find myself closing my eyes at every opportunity, and slinking off to hide in the parking lot on any breaks I might have, wherein I pace back and forth until my time is up. Caged, is one way to describe it.

Then the moods. These moments of panic where I convince myself that death is the only way out, my only escape, my only freedom from this place that has trapped me in this dark, grubby little corner. I want out, the voice says to me. And with an hour of crying and anxiety, I fall asleep. Sometimes I wake feeling better, others…only worse. I feel like part of me is constantly rebelling from life itself, and that yes, suicide is the only cure for something so diseased and fucked up as myself.

Many things do not deserve to be born. Many things that do are never given the proper chance. Then there are those of us who float along somewhere in between, these forgotten, lost children who can claim no god or higher purpose as their own. There will never be peace. Maybe that is why I always laugh when I so much as hear that word. For me, there will be no rest, not until I am gone. There is nothing shameful in pulling out of a race you know in your heart you can’t complete, however, there is a problem with lying about why you chose not to finish.

No, I am not fully done. Everything about me is incomplete. I am simply tired and no longer wish to try. And maybe that is cowardice, to shun a future, maybe it is weakness to not carry on because you refuse to summon the strength. But then, so be it. I will never be perfect; I can never see myself as what I always wanted to be. I am doomed to strive for it yet accomplish none of it. Sometimes that is just how it must be.

Head in the clouds.

Every day is becoming this agonizing trial in patience. I’m so used to my little world of nothing that this is all a complete shock to me. I was so far away from the petty squabbles and the gossiping, that even now I stand back and barely understand it. Why are feelings important, I wonder? I only ask this when I feel nothing at all. It’s as though all memory of feelings and what they mean gets shut down. I grow confused. Peoples’ reactions make little to no sense to me. Why do they concern themselves over such things? Why do they believe that I too am worrying over it?

It’s difficult to worry when you don’t care. I can’t form a normal attachment these days, and perhaps it is the people. But they are nice—a lot of them—we get along, yet the idea of carpooling with them or meeting somewhere after work makes me cringe. I instantly think, “how boring, how troublesome”. It would be my younger life over again, sitting in a friend’s bedroom in the dark trying to recuperate before returning to the screaming, giggling bunch in the next room. I often found myself bored and uninterested, and it used to drive me crazy.

And these days, the disinterest continues to grow. I’m losing hold on the things that meant so much to me before, and I have little explanation as to why. All I can conclude is that I am slowly letting go. I am slowly becoming something that finds no pleasure in anything. And it is so dull a mindset, so drab a future. I don’t want to bear more years in this room staring at the walls, or doing something new every five minutes to keep my mind moving. Why does it have to be this way? Why does this only grow worse? I am not sitting here alone all day, I’m interacting as everyone told me to, but yet I feel so much more discontent than before. It has solved nothing. I feel so ill when I think about it all later, when I’ve gotten home. I always regret every word I have said.

My little shows of rebellion are laughable. I am so weak now, moreso than ever. I’m losing sight of what I believed, falling in and embracing this hollow nothingness where everything is inconsequential. I didn’t want this. I wanted to be numb, but not all the way. Not to the extent that I can’t function. I can’t live in a place where I get nothing out of it, and even the suffering is pathetic.

All I want to do is lie down and sleep this life away. Sleep has become like a hobby to me. I still don’t hurt like I thought I would. It’s been days and I still don’t hurt. I’ve gotten past the worst of it, I think. I want to go on indefinitely, see what happens. See if I break. I don’t understand these extremes, but I will use them regardless. Sometimes I like to think I am indestructible, maybe because it seems funny to me: the thing that wants to die is the thing that cannot. I will fail; I always do. But I won’t think about that just now.

Endlessly

I would have titled this pain, but that doesn’t seem to suit this feeling. It’s beyond that, I think. Withdrawls? No, I don’t think so. I was like this before those useless little pills.

I want to cut pieces of myself off, all the ones I don’t like. I want to mutilate this shell and see if it touches the inside, see if it makes the hidden parts bleed. I’m so far gone now.

I went to the store and purchased a present for my dad for Christmas. I decided to give it to him today, for various reasons, rather than waiting. It should have made me happy to see him happy, but everything plummeted like a rock in water and there I was starting the cycle all over again. Eating, wanting to kill myself, driving my whole being to breaking point. It seems like any strong emotion is triggering it, this loss of control. I eat, I make my discontent be known on my body. It’s here now, lines of red so plentiful they have begun to blur and nearly 20 pounds of weight that I gained in only about a month’s time. This is me destroying myself and not fighting it. This is me giving into abandon because I know that nothing will make me better.

I know that part of the reason I gave it to him early was because in a way I don’t really believe I will make it to Christmas. It’s too far away and there is too much that can go wrong. I feel it coming. I’ll be on the edge soon enough and I will jump. I have it in me, somewhere, it’s only a matter of finding it now. There’s no reason to fight inevitablity. Soon, soon. I won’t have to be in pain forever, that is the one promise I have made myself. It will stop, even if the answer is in the end of everything.

I don’t mind anymore. It’s alright. There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just me, all alone. It’ll always be that way, and maybe that’s not so terrible. Maybe that’s the only honorable way to go, with nothing to bind, nothing to bring guilt. This is my life and in the end I am the one who has every right to take it. I’ll be damned if I let anyone keep me from what I want, what I need.

Reign

I feel like I’ve been walking in darkness and finally a light was switched on for the briefest instant. That one flicker and a mirror was revealed to me. I saw myself. I’m beginning to think it happened in a dream. I’ve had so many that I can only just recall lately. I’ll be doing something and suddenly that little television in my head will click on for a moment and I’ll have a feeling. Something’s changed. I know what it is, to be honest.

Words can be like a knife. They can make you or break you. They can encourage or send you into despair, and are at the mercy of mood.

My father used to always say to me that to see the future you must learn the past. “Read your history,” he used to advise. To understand ourselves I believe we must first look to where we came from. The most startling thing to me, is that I see now what I only suspected before. I see it now more clearly than ever: I am my father, whether I like it or not. He used to do this, what I’m doing. He used to work and work and never be home. He would sleep so early, that I recall having fits about it as a child. He eats and eats, rarely ceasing, and he hardly ever leaves the house for any reason besides buying groceries. He’s jealous to a fault, moody, depressing, has very low self-esteem, and now I’m beginning to believe, is as suicidal as I am.

 I hate him at times, and my trust of him is extremely limited. There’s something a little too animal about him that I don’t like. I see it when he drinks, and it concerns me. I see that same thing in me, but the scary thing is that it does not take the drink to bring it out. I’m much less restrained, and I guess that it is likely because I am young. Given time, maybe I would be smarter about it. Maybe I would not do so many terrible things when I believe no one to be looking.

There is something needy and weak in me that I will not speak of. It’s there, thwarting every damn step of progress I make. I deny it. I deny myself. I don’t believe we have to be what instinct tells us to be. I believe we can be what our head tells us we should be. We can overcome anything, any flaw in our design if only we choose to use that power. If I did not want to be depressed, perhaps I could stop it. Yes, I will forever be leaned toward it, bent in that direction, but if I fought it enough, maybe I could overpower it, mask it, at the very least. But I don’t. I no longer try, and maybe that is because I have seen doom, I have seen death, and I like what it has to offer me. It holds in its fold all that I have never had. Rest. Peace. Chaos denied. Life snuffed out.

The answer is there. I found it before, I was only sidetracked. And back to the path I go. Alone, always alone. We must do what we must do. In the end it is not ourselves that must be denied, but those who would dare pretend to hold sway over us.

I am not my father if I so choose. I am not anyone at all but who I wish to be. I see a future of darkness and much more misery to come, and I see myself sitting in the dark surrounded by half-empty bottles and broken furniture. I am nothing but hate and temper and loneliness. Apart they are nothing. Together I see them as a key to salvation. I can be free of this prison, or I can take this cell and reside within it, make it my own.

What does it matter, really? I have been this way so many times before. I get down this path and it becomes too dreary, so I turn back. I get frightened. I don’t like the person I see. Some kind of dark, apathetic thing that looks at death and laughs and scorns anything that would value its existence. That person is only terrible because others have told me she is.

The truth is of my choosing. The way this goes is up to me. And if I should decide to go how I see myself as almost destined, my will won’t be denied.

Same old, same old.

Tomorrow will be three full weeks of taking the pills. My doctor told me to come back to speak with her in 3-4 to see how it was going. I don’t know what I would say really, other than that I am no better yet, probably worse. I’ve had some terrible mood swings, much more drastic than usual. I’ve been very irritable too, I’ve noticed. Everything seems to get on my nerves and I have been avoiding my parents for the most part. I’ve also had a few crying fits, for absolutely no reason. I’ll just be doing something random, and suddenly I’ll start crying profusely. Then there’s the numbness, which, I hate to say, has been increasing. I feel almost like something dead at times, I am so flat.

Why is this happening? I don’t understand. I’m going to give it another week probably, before I call her. I really want this to work. I’m so tired of it all. I need a break, even if only for a short while. I’m nearly out of pills though, so I may have to contact her sooner than I would like.

I’ve been trying to stop the binging. It’s been bad, but not like it was. I think I am stressed, but I’m too numb to feel it, and this is my reaction to it all. I’m not hungry; it’s become almost a way to pass the time, and to get myself sick so that I’ll fall to sleep. I wake up despising myself. I loathe myself while I eat, but no matter what I tell myself I find no reason to stop until I am satiated. If I keep this up much longer I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop. It’s pathetic, honestly. I don’t know what is wrong with me, because I can go the whole day without eating, then the second I get home and I think about my day, it starts.

I did an 11 hour shift today. Breakfast was a banana. I got shaky during my shift and drank some sugary soda to get through. When I got home I made myself something nice, but apparently that wasn’t enough, because I kept going and going. I hate myself. I hate my lack of control. I hate how it feels as though nothing matters, because that’s what hurts. I should be able to do what I want because it doesn’t matter, right? Who cares what I am physically, who cares if I’m dying, who cares if I’m bruised and cut up and disgusting, right? It doesn’t matter because I am going to die anyway. This is how I rationalize it. I feel like death is coming and nothing long term makes a difference anymore.

Swallow the light.

I want to go for a walk today; it’s still early, it’s still possible, but yet I have been sitting here for over an hour doing nothing. It’s been months since I’ve gone for a walk, because I just don’t have the time anymore and I often get home when it is growing dark. I would walk in the dark, but I know that my parents wouldn’t allow it. Perhaps I will go for a walk in the dark sometime and just keep quiet about it.

There are some angry lines from a few days ago, but I am healing. I know if someone were to see they would think something was wrong with me. At the end of the day, who’s to say there isn’t? Every time I make a new one, an old one begins to bleed. They cross over, the past and the present, proving that they are the same in a sense, as a new one grows old and meets something fresh again.

Yesterday was a good day at work, I guess, as good as it could be. We’re always short-handed, and I’ve begun to get over it. We all just try harder and pick up the slack, but everyone is red-eyed and weary. They come into their shift in a daze, taking several minutes to warm up, like abused machines. I am the same way, and I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter anymore if I get proper sleep. I get sleepy no matter what, and I feel like shit no matter what, so why waste my night away on drifting through dreams? I sleep during the day, whenever I can, as long as I can. It means I don’t have to talk to anyone or face my life.

I take a lot of trips to the freezer. I stand in the cold room, surrounded by boxes, cursing, and ripping them open with a savagery I forgot I possessed. I’ve even cut my hands in my haste, which usually just incites the flame. I’ve even taken to throwing the 40 pound boxes of frozen meat into the wall, or even into more boxes, which causes them to teeter and fall. I really do feel like I am giving my blood for this. I am losing myself to a person I do not like or understand, and it infuriates me. I want to stop her from having this, even if I don’t want it. If I can’t have it, if I don’t want it, no one should be able to have it. Regardless of how I feel, this is mine. This pathetic life, this battered, fucked up soul? It’s mine, and it’s my right to destroy it without so much as a word from the outside.

Then I have these moments where I want to repair this. I want to try, and I feel both relief and hatred for it. I hate myself for changing my mind, yet I am relieved that I have enough feeling left to not throw this all away without a proper fight. The one thing I cannot stand is giving in, admitting that something is superior to me. And maybe I am rationalizing it by saying that life is the weakness, not death, but I think in a way I do believe that. I shouldn’t need it. I shouldn’t need anything. I should be calm in death, I should have no internal struggle. I should be able to look upon something beautiful and not feel jealousy because it can’t be mine. Nothing is mine but this, and this too, should be— and is—expendable.

Dream

It was only as I was driving down this narrow road that my dream from last night reemerged for me to remember. I swerved to avoid hitting something in the road, and it’s when I saw what it was that it all came unburied. There was a head in the road, a buck’s head, missing the chunk of its skull cap where it antlers should have been. It still had the fur on it, fully recognizable as what it was except for that the body was scattered all around, and its eyes were missing.

Bloated, dead horses, that’s what came back to me. There was this muddy slope covered in a myriad of them, many of them still living. They came in an assortment of colors, but the filth had marred the shine from them so they all appeared dull and monotonous. Except for the white horse. I’m walking along the hillside, calf deep in sludge that was a combination of manure and old, rotting hay. They are shying from me, their manes matted, dreadlocked from years of neglect. The white horse is standing at the base of an oak, appearing untouched by the famine and dirtiness. He’s thick through his neck and limbs, like he’s been eating very well. I’m heading toward the leaning oak.

The horse is eyeing the small animal in front of it, snorting and acting generally displeased. The creature is tiny and white, too-long legs  folded under it awkwardly. Just as I approach, the stallion begins to trample it. The little splotch of white rolls over and cries out, as the horse repeatedly knocks it around. I start to shout, and I see the white horse’s ears prick in my direction, and he even ceases his bullying to glance at me. But then, as though he never saw me, he paws at the ground again, pushing the small animal with his hard hooves. I’m waving my arms now, hollering ‘hey!’, and going as fast as I can to them.

I continue to make a lot of noise even as I get feet from them. The white horse doesn’t seem to know what to think of me and seems to have abandoned his little game in order to better stare. He’s moving from foot to foot nervously, but I keep thinking he’s going to charge at me anyway, as I reach down and grab the mangled little creature. As soon as I have it in my arms I start backing away, and much to my luck, one of the other horses starts something with the stallion, biting at the graceful white neck with yellowed teeth. I take the opportunity to turn away from them and hurry back up to the top of the hill.

I realize that the animal is not what I thought. I mistook it for a lamb. It’s a newborn goat, blue-eyed with fur whiter than snow beneath the grime.

The darkest night.

I had a very vivid dream for the first time in a long while the other night. It was strange, because I was completely aware that it was a dream. I knew I had nothing to fear, though when I looked up at the greying sky and the slashes of purple across it, I seemed to doubt myself.

My childhood friend had this huge, sprawling yard, almost eaten up by dark green grass. It was picturesque, so much so that I can still conjure up a memory of it in my head with no difficulty. It has stayed with me, one of the few things I have not clouded over with distrust and hate. That’s how most of my memories are: tainted. They have become worn by years of resentment.

But in this dream the yard is very different. The sun isn’t shining down brightly, spreading the scent of grass with its heat. There is no sun. There is nothing but a vague light to the sky, heavily filtered and eventually drowned out by clouds. It is day, but yet I get the impression that it is night too. How could it be both?

The trees are all wrong. They are white-barked, yes, but these ones are covered in tiny pink and white blossoms. There are so many, that the trees look like powder puffs from a distance. Up close, every flower sways, and the tiny, gnarled branches dance and click together as the storm brews. And it’s coming, it must be coming.

I begin walking the path toward the house, staring up at those bizarre trees wondering why I am dreaming such a dream.

When I woke at four, it was black out. I showered and picked at some fruit, still half asleep. I stumbled out to the car with a jacket pulled around me, and let my mother drive me to work. When I looked out the window, I felt like I was in the dream again. The moon dusted with such a light patch of clouds, that it seemed hazy, as though it were emerging from a mist. And it was huge. I hardly ever see it that way, where it seems to eat the sky. Even the orange glow of the sun rising wasn’t enough to cause distraction from it.

I woke from one dream to fall into another. It was almost like never waking up. It wasn’t real until I was walking across the newly-laid concrete, staring up at the neon signs instead of the trees of blossoms. I still do not understand the purpose of either, perhaps because I search for something that isn’t there.