Follow the leader

I don’t know what to think about work at this point. It’s a very love/hate thing for me. It’s keeping me occupied, that’s for sure, but it is also still continuing to drain me dry. I feel like a shell of my former self, like all the strength is gone, leaving behind something weaker. I mean this physically and mentally; I am too much of a fucking pussy to really handle any of it, and it’s getting to me. I come home so stressed out it is unbelievable. And it’s not the food or doing orders or even fucking up, it’s the people. It’s having to deal with their moods and work around them. It’s the standing up all day, running back and forth, bent over this table that burns your hands if you touch it. I’ve put so much strain on my back carrying boxes and constantly kneeling that this morning when I got up, I realized I couldn’t even curl my back slightly without a hell of a lot of pain. I had to squat on the ground to do anything because I couldn’t bend down to do it.

Today was a 10 1/2 hour shift, and an odd one at that. I ended up giving orders in the back, which is kind of new to me. I’m used to asking people to do things, but because of where I was placed, it was all day, nonstop. I had to keep an eye on certain people because some of them are lazy and more or less useless—you can tell them to do something three or four times and they claim they will, yet when the time comes for everything to be finished they never got started. I was frustrated and unsure of how to make it clear that things need to get done; I don’t have the authority to really get on someone when they aren’t doing their job. I can’t do everything. I was doing the line, putting things down into the friers, reloading the trays, shouting at people to do things, while meanwhile the screen just keeps filling with more and more food and the people in the front are yelling that we aren’t getting everything out fast enough and things keep getting sent back because they are ringing the orders up incorrectly. What can you do, really?

The dynamic of the place is what is difficult. You can’t talk to certain people about things and you have to know how everyone handles everyone else so that you don’t go stepping into unfriendly territory. Everyone has an enemy, another employee that they don’t get on with, and you constantly have to watch for that. Some are stubborn and outspoken, and you have to be harsh to get through to them and make a working relationship possible. I feel as though I have to put on a new mask for each and every person just to keep the peace so things won’t be anymore difficult than they already are.

To top it off, the person I get on with best has been incredibly moody lately. We’re both moody (though she knows nothing of my moods; I’m known as perpetually friendly and get harassed if I don’t smile), which is likely why I understand it and take it in stride. But she’s been short with me when she usually isn’t. She is about 100 times worse with everyone else, so I consider myself lucky. I suppose it’s probably all the training she is having to go through and the testing. That, and it seems like whenever she runs the shift, something terrible happens that is out of everyone’s control. The computer system might fail for no reason, or we’ll run out of something essential. She acts like she shrugs it off, but I suspect she doesn’t, not really. 

I don’t know. It’s tiring. And I almost have to laugh at how meaningless this job is, and how stupid I am for allowing any of it to hold sway over my life and my moods. Flipping hamburgers shouldn’t make you suicidal.

Unrest

It was quite a disastrous day. Everyone was moody and gloomier than usual, a side-effect of the holidays gone bad. I stayed 9 hours, which I haven’t done in a while. I felt every hour of it, because for whatever reason I woke up not feeling too well. I was tired and physically felt like crap, which makes little sense since I got more sleep the night before than I generally do in two combined nights.

I also made the mistake of not eating. I was there from 10:30 to 7:30, and by the time I got home I really needed something. I must have been more stressed than I thought, because I ate more than I should have. I didn’t binge, but it still wasn’t good. I wasn’t even hungry after I ate leftovers, but for whatever reason I kept going. I was pretty pissed off at myself.

I have the day off tomorrow, and I don’t really know what I’m going to do to keep my anxiety at a minimum. I’m sure I’ll probably go at it again, eating until I get too sick to continue—that seems to be one of the few ways to find some sort of temporary relief. I don’t know how else to deal with it at this point. No matter what I do, nothing seems to provide enough distraction and I slowly slip into a horrid state of mind where I end up laying in bed for hours, awake, planning things I shouldn’t be planning. Death has become this obsession to me, and sadly, it is one of the very few things I waste energy thinking about. I run the list off in my head of the things that I could do with my life, and every time I find myself disinterested.

There is no time other than the present, at least it is that way in this head of mine.

More evil is all it is.

I went to bed shortly after 4:00am last night. It seems like the better the rest feels the more likely it is that it will not last. I’ll wake in the night countless times as I always do (I tend to be a terribly light sleeper), and feel completely at ease because I know that I don’t have to get up—yet I know it is too good to be true. And of course, at 7:00, only a few hours later, I got a call to come into work.

What is sad is that I was suddenly relieved. I hadn’t even realized how much I have been dreading being awake, in having an entire day off that I wouldn’t know what to do with. I felt so much better that I did yesterday when I got up and took my shower and got dressed. I didn’t even feel too terrible at work; I drank down my loads of sugar and caffeine and I was fine. I haven’t been sleeping anyway, and as bad as it is, I’m getting accustomed to being perpetually tired and sore everywhere. Oh well, shit happens.

I went five days without a binge, which is more or less a record for me in the past two months. I binged on my last day off, but not since then. I’m eating absolute garbage for the most part—I even went out and bought bags of candy on purpose, but at least it keeps me from constantly making myself sick by eating so much. I eat so little when I don’t binge anyway, that even with all the high-calorie foods I am losing weight because it tends to be all I eat. Just a candybar and a couple of cookies, and I might pick at some of whatever my parents are eating, or have toast in the evening or something (always with loads of something sweet; either jam or honey). It’s better than eating half the pantry and constantly having to make runs to the grocery store.

The last few days I tried to be better, and had salads from work, which are actually quite nice. But that won’t last, I don’t think. I may go back to shoveling down as many vitamins as my stomach can take without making me vomit. I have to keep buying different brands, because most make me so ill I will throw up right after I try to eat anything. Honestly, I’ve used it as a method for purging on a few very desperate occasions, and it’s not something I’d like to return to, so I tend to be cautious with what I buy since my self-control in that regard is so lacking. Fortunately—or unfortunately, I sometimes think—my gag reflex doesn’t like to cooperate with me. I have never successfully purged, even when I tore up the lining at the back of my throat with a toothbrush by being too forceful about it. No amount of pressure seems to make me vomit; I simply sputter, cough (usually violently), and salivate, but no bile or food rises, even if I spend ten minutes trying.

It’s probably better that way. I don’t deserve an easy out on this one. I don’t want to go that route, I really don’t. I’d hope that I could at least be better than that. I felt so weak and horrible. Eating and eating and eating, then trying to throw it up because I didn’t want to deal with the consequences. It’s a stupid way to be; there are always consequences, and like anybody I should have to face them instead of casting them aside and thinking that doing so somehow gets rid of them. It would only be a trade, and an awful one at that. But that reality is hard to see when you get so low; I’ll have to remember it anyway, somehow. I’ll just have to stop being so weak. It’s not that difficult to diet; I’m being impatient and ridiculous about it.

Insensitive

I had a bit of a bad day yesterday, regardless of anything I may have said. I almost didn’t leave the house to go to town for groceries. Again, one of those tiny things setting me off. I weighed myself, had a fit. It was literally like taking a trip back in time. I remember these moments.

I have ten different things piled on the bed, and I keep tearing new things from the closet, pulling it over my head. I walk to the mirror, reject it, and the process starts again. Then half my closet is strewn across the bed. For some reason I grabbed for my old favorite shirt. At one point when I wore it I weighed 190 pounds. And that’s what I felt like in it. Like I was back there again, out of fucking control and with no willpower to stop it. Even though it was as loose as a nightshirt, nearly down to my knees, I couldn’t take it for some reason. There was nothing comforting about it. It was horrible and painful, and I found myself fisting bits of my hair, wanting to rip it from the roots.

Oh yes, this is a possibility, oh yes, this is where I’ve been, where I’ve gotten to. We’re the same person this girl and me, no matter how much I want to dispute it and claim that I’ve changed. I can be there again, and I know exactly how I feel about that. I’d rather be dead. I feel like I’m there already, even if everyone tells me I’m thin already and can stop now. Doesn’t look that way. Doesn’t feel that way.

I ended up ripping the seams on a sweatshirt in anger and throwing it to the back of the closet. I wore all black again, layers over layers so I wouldn’t have to feel like I could be seen in any way. I even coated my face over in make up, which I never do. I almost couldn’t bear to go.

My father and I had an argument. He keeps telling me to keep a checkbook, which I should. Unfortunately banking falls into the ‘I absolutely don’t give a shit’ category, which is why I made a mistake recently. I look over to him and mumble that I’ll watch it from now on, and he goes into this whole, “well why are you saying it like that?” line of questioning.

“I don’t care. I just don’t.” Unapologetic, flat.

His irritation is building. It’s coming off him in waves, and he won’t even look away from me to give me a moment’s rest from that accusing fucking gaze. I stare at my computer screen, blinking rapidly. Not because of him, but because of myself. Because I really don’t care, and only ten minutes earlier I was laying on my bed studying the pattern on my comforter thinking about the next time I can go up the mountain. Thinking about going off  into the snow. It would be a miserable way to die.

He goes on, asking me why, and I have no emotion. There’s nothing in me that wants to tell him. Now I’m getting annoyed myself and I want him to leave, and I’m hiding behind my hair because I’m crying from my own lack of caring. I know it’s wrong. But I can’t change it. It’s the one thing I have no control over, though I hate to say it. I hate to admit defeat. I loathe it. But I have lost. I lost a long time ago. This is why I continue my downward spiral.

“You wouldn’t understand,” I finally get out, still looking at the screen.

 I feel like one of those angsty teenagers in a Lifetime movie, but I don’t seem to have any pangs of regret about it. I don’t want to explain. I could talk of it a thousand years and he will still not get it. I would not get it if I hadn’t felt it for myself. How is it possible to be so blank? This I can’t answer. It seems against everything to not care, to have not the slightest bit of feeling over your own life and where it’s going. I’m a feather floating around, soon to hit the ground, soon to lose all flight. But what does that matter to this head of mine? I make no sense; even I can’t understand myself.

What he says next almost makes me want to smile. All I catch for sure is: ”You can shoot yourself.” Then something about ‘this is your life, start caring about it’.

Yeah, I can shoot myself. You don’t think I’d do it, do you? How wrong you are. It’s nice to know you haven’t forgotten our little conversation.  

I keep saying I’ll take care of it, but I don’t sound even slightly convincing. I can hear the irritation in my own tone, and he’s giving me one of those looks like I’m the most useless piece of trash he’s ever seen. I don’t care. I am not valued solely by his interpretation of my worth.

He walks out, finally, and I breathe in, embracing my own apathy.  

I can hear him through the wall, in an angry, loud voice: “She’s insensitive to her own plight.”

Yes, yes I am. That is the only thing about me that can be called beautiful. At least I am smart enough to know that I am inconsequential and anything I do in this life makes no fucking difference. It’s over when your born; it’s even more over when you die.

You’ll get over it.

A way of life….

All I think when I am awake is ‘I should be sleeping’. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong anymore. I’ve done what I was expected, but found nothing in any of it. I’ve worsened. I haven’t even tried to go for walks. I always go every day during the fall, but not this year. Winter is already setting in, and the sky is black long before its time because there are always heavy grey clouds layered over the blue, blocking out the few straining rays of sunset.

It’s a bleak transition from night and day, one that I have come to like because it feels like less time is spent waiting for night to come. Just the same, the days feel far to long. Time crawls by, and I find myself doing nothing more and more often. It seems like I lie in bed perpetually while I’m home, only getting up to eat. Sleep doesn’t come easily like it used to, and instead of losing myself in it I just stay motionless for literally hours on end, staring up at the ceiling.

There must be better than this, but in this mood I will not find it. I could be dropped into the world of paradise and I would still find a dark, forgotten corner to hole myself up inside until the brightness leaves the sky. It’s a crazy way to be. It makes me feel inhuman. I’m like some animal, only awakened by the most basic of things. Leave the higher thought to the others, I say, I will not be bothered with it. I don’t care what this is or why, I only want to fall away from it. I want it to be gone from me like a demon banished so that maybe this won’t feel so much like a hell.

Under

Another memory. I think it’s true, the whole ’stranger than fiction’ saying. 

When I was six or seven I used to bathe in the creek at my friend’s house. There were parts of it that were so deep I could stand in it with water to my waist. The water was calm in most places, and clean—melted snow runoff from the distant mountains. It grew into whitewater further down, but that far I wasn’t allowed to go. It was the first place I learned to spend time alone. I’d have a fight with someone back at the house, and I’d go there, out to that creek. The slippery rocks gave me my first scar. That’s how I know it was real.

One of her older sisters has a friend living with them. On the edge of the property are several campers and trucks, most of which don’t run. There’s a truck with a shell that they frequent. The sister steals cigarettes from her mother’s stash. Eventually her mom begins to lock her car. Money keeps disappearing. They are beginning to blame the friend, but I know better. She and the sister are fighting more and more often, but they still disappear for hours at a time.

Their room is filled with incense. It stinks too much for my sensitive nose, so I tend to avoid going in. It’s poster-covered room with a spiral drawn in black sharpy on the ceiling. I’m too young to know that the incense is to cover the smell of pot. I just look at all the Metallica posters every time I walk in. Sometimes I look up at that spiral, even though it makes my vision fill with dots.

The sister usually won’t let us in, but occasionally she does when she wants to have what she must consider a heart-to-heart. This consists of her asking us in several different ways if we think she is fat.  

I stay for days in a row sometimes. Some nights I see shadows across the lawn in the yellow moonlight. One night I hear sounds and walk through the dark to that door. There’s light beneath it. I hear voices. My friend is beside me, and after a bit of arguing, we finally open the door. I catch a glimpse of a teenage boy hurrying out the sliding glass door. The sister laughs and says, “shhh! Don’t tell mom!”

Some nights she sneaks him in. We don’t say anything. Apparently that makes us cool. We play Supermario until three in the morning. Some days we get up the next day and go to school. 

I’m sitting at the table, eating dinner. It’s hamburgers and hotdogs, a staple for the family. My friend is hardly eating. I tell her that I’m going to go get more, and she shakes her head. “I’m too fat. I have to go on a diet.” She’s six. By 14 she’s probably bulimic or anorexic, but I’m not friends with her then. I just see her, collar bones sticking out. I’m later told that eventually she looked like nothing but a skeleton. It happens.

It’s a few years later and I’m out on the trampoline at another friend’s house.  I’m probably 8 or 9. My friend from before is there too. They keep leaving me behind and whispering every time they see me, so I can’t really figure out why I was invited. They’re comparing weights and get angry when I’m the lowest. Suddenly they don’t want to talk to me.

It gets worse and worse. They come over to my house and won’t play with me. My mom gets angry and sends them home. At school they start spreading rumors and making fun of me. They tell everyone horrible, embarrassing things about me. People don’t want to talk to me anymore. They’ve made up lies about my mom, who often comes to the school to help the teachers. Everyone is saying things. 

One day I go back to her house. It’s after things have cooled down a little. My friend isn’t home, but her mother is. I say I’m going to go to the creek. She suggests I go swimming in the pool instead. So I do. She shows up, with that Mrs. Robinson smile of hers and stands in the water watching me, wearing some stupid bikini. She doesn’t swim, she only stands there, talking to me quietly like she does sometimes, like this fucking adder waiting to strike. And I’m 9 and don’t know how to handle her. And then she’s saying things about my mom and I’m getting angry, and I say I want out, so I leave. Leave the adder in her pond to wallow. I want her dead. It’s the first time I really want it, but I want to see her hang. I want to see her bleeding in pain, misery, dying. But she’s not dying. I’m sure she’ll live forever. The assholes always live forever.

I get new friends and it starts all over again.

You can always fall farther…

Sometimes we have to do things we don’t necessarily like. Sometimes we need to be punished and have all our hopes and dreams shit on in order to gain back pieces of our resolve. Other times, you just hate yourself so much that you’ll do anything to make even your simplest of likes about yourself disappear entirely.

Self destruction is the road to being able to exist, I think, even if it makes that existence nearly unlivable. Sometimes we have to beat ourselves into submission because we have no others to do it for us properly.

I never got to sleep last night. They called me at 5:30 in the morning, on my day off. It seems like a joke, almost, this life of mine. I don’t ever feel awake or asleep; it blends together into something indistinguishable. I also found out that coffee is free, which wasn’t the case at the first store I trained at. Needless to say, I’ve been taking advantage to the point where even my unaffected body finally gives in and reacts to the caffeine of all the black sludge I swallow down. I end up shaky and overly-alert with a bad stomach ache every time, but it’s better than being so tired that all I do when I get home is crawl into bed until the sky gets dark.

The opening shift is really killing me. It fucks off my routine completely. I have to get up a bit after 4:00 in order to allow myself time to shower and wake up somewhat. Then I spend most of the morning at work having to do everything on my own. It’s just a very shitty arrangement and plenty of people are unhappy with it, coming to me and complaining about my schedule, which I think is funny. I asked for the closing shift and I get opening. Shows just how much my boss likes me. She’s been sick, fortunately, so I’ve not had to deal with her.

And this is what everyone wants, supposedly. I think if it was my choice I’d only work 12 hour shifts so that I wouldn’t have time to think about it. They’ve cut my hours quite a bit along with everyone else, so I am doing a regular 40 hours a week instead of 50. The extra time is hard to make up for, honestly. I come home and don’t know what to do with myself. I sleep for a few hours then get up, generally going back to bed at least three or four times for short intervals, trying to sleep out of sheer boredom. I either fall to sleep, or give up and watch some shitty television program until I’m too tired to sit up anymore.    

Complaining accomplishes nothing, they say. But for some reason it makes me feel better.

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.

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.