I feel like there is a wall between myself and my reality. It’s always that sensation of looking through the glass, but never touching. Maybe that is why the world is so unreal to me, because I keep it at arm’s length.
Look, but don’t touch, they say, and for once I seem to be following the rules.
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.
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.
I’m really hating on myself right now. Another bad day I don’t want to think about. It really does seem to be getting worse, this workplace. I’ve decided that I don’t just dislike my boss, I hate her. I can deal with her, sure, but I constantly have the urge to be a real ass to her, which isn’t the greatest of ideas. I even cursed in front of her today, and couldn’t be brought to give a shit about it. She surprisingly made no comment. I think every other word out of my mouth is ‘fuck’, because every time I turn around something is going wrong or I do something clumsy that I end up having to clean. Interestingly, so is the same with everyone. We all cuss, we all get annoyed.
Today one person made a comment that it’s always livelier with me around. I thought it was funny considering what I’ve been doing on my breaks. We started singing the hokey pokey about an hour into my shift, quite obnoxiously, which made everyone cringe and laugh. It’s the only way to make it through these days. We all try to be nice and polite, because the rest of the time we’re either pissed off or irritated.
We’re always shorthanded because of the shitty scheduling the manager does. Even one of my shift managers gave me a bit of a look when she was talking about her and the hours she’s been giving people. That, and we’re always out of something and far too overstocked on other things. I’m just tired of it, already. How long has it been, even? It hasn’t been a month yet and I am already worn so thin. I came home today and just wanted to collapse in bed. I don’t want to talk to anyone, and everytime my parents ask me, ’how was work?’, I want to scream. You can ask me a few hours after I’ve been home, but not right when I come in the fucking door. Tomorrow will be my first day off after six days of working. Then I go back to work again for a few more before I get another day off. It’s not that bad, I realize, but I’m kind of going a little crazy. It’s the pills, it’s the food, it’s everything. All of it is fucking with me at once and I’m not strong enough to try and deal with any of it, so instead I try to ignore it instead.
I almost feel like I’m purposely being helpless. Like I want to drown, so I’m swimming out as far as I can go, as deep as I can get, so that when it happens I won’t have any energy left to turn around and get back to shore. I know how to get myself to feel a little better, to get my mood up a tiny bit, and I’m not even doing it. I’m not doing anything. I’m continually making it worse, knowingly. I seem to like being in misery or something. Everything is so confusing. I want to die and I can’t even do that yet. I don’t have anything in me to go through with something; I drift along because I don’t have any drive to try something, no interest in pursuing some dream like everyone else does.
There’s nothing that makes me go forward except boredom and apathy. I have no interest in stopping or going, so I merely go because that happens to be the direction other people pushed me in. If they had never pushed, I would have never started in the first place. I wouldn’t be in the game anymore. Maybe that would have been a better alternative, I don’t know.
All I know is that I am doing things out of duty with no desire to go anywhere with it or do anything. Unfortunately, I just can’t seem to bring myself to care about that.
I feel like I’m waiting for a train that’s never going to come. I realize it’s hardly been any time at all, and that I need to give it awhile, but already I’ve grown very impatient with this whole deal. I feel like shit, and no matter what I do it doesn’t go away. This is beyond the regular numb/apathetic I-couldn’t-care-if-the-world-exploded attitude. I haven’t done anything. I had the day off yesterday and I must have slept a good 20 hours, if not more. It’s not tiredness either, which is what I first suspected. I’m not tired, not physically anyway. I have books to read, games to play, a quad to mess with, yet I find myself with no desire to go through with any of it. I’d rather sit and do nothing it seems, or sleep and dream my strange dreams instead of staying awake only to feel perpetually restless. Nothing pleases me, and that is a little scary.
Work was fine, though still as unorganized as ever. Two of the guys from where I used to work came to help out. I hate one of them, but the other and I are almost—dare I say it—friends. I pretty much spent every late shift I used to have with him, so we got more or less used to each other and traded bits of language back and forth. Today he somehow ended up with me, which was nice since it meant everything got done much more quickly than it usually would of had I wound up with someone else (e.g. one of the shift managers who STILL doesn’t know how to assemble). The other employee was cordial with me, even joking around a little, which isn’t anything new, but this time it was much less…vicious. He has that way about him that is joking bordering on serious, and the looks he’ll give you say enough to relay that he often thinks exactly what he’s laughing about.
I made the most money I’ve ever made in two weeks. I guess that is something to be excited about, though I was as flat about it as ever. I really wish I could feel a sense of accomplishment or something, but nothing has happened, not even the slightest rush. If there was one thing I could change, it would be to make myself feel something about all of this. Even if I can’t care about it, at least feel as sense of self-worth or something, rather than constant hate. It’s hard to get by when you loathe yourself this much. But I feel like I can’t stop the cycle that has already begun. Maybe I am nothing without it. Maybe if I didn’t hate, I would never have tried to do anything at all.
I have to say though, I no longer consider nothing to be a bad thing. I think it’s all just a matter of where you are in your head at the time.
I confess: today I feel like death warmed over. I got up this morning and actually had breakfast because I wasn’t sure if I’d be alright without it. I had no appetite yesterday, and didn’t eat all day while doing an 11 hour shift. I got home and more or less force-fed myself because I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning. Apparently I wasn’t the only one feeling like shit. There seemed to be a group consensus that we should all pack up and leave, and even one of my favorite shift managers was joking around with me that she was going to lock all the doors and let us go. We all were more sluggish than usual and constantly asking the time.
I was ready to just stop. I was so groggy and out of it, that it was like operating half asleep. By the time I was four hours in, I knew I had to eat something or go home, so I went next door to the gas station and bought a bunch of sugary junk to try to revive myself rather than stand around the rest of my shift being entirely useless. I need not have worried, really, because we were all fucking up, dropping things and taking longer than usual. Thankfully our forgiving shift manager was just as exhausted (I worked with her at the other restaurant, so we were already acquainted).
I have the day off tomorrow, and I know all I am going to do is sleep. I guess it doesn’t matter. I’m so numb nothing makes sense anyway. I’m sure it will all get as blurred as this day already has, as all meaning already has. Nothing at all seemed to matter today. All I could think of was sleep and getting away, far, far away. And death. But when don’t I think of that?
Damn this apathy. Damn it to hell. I’ll sleep it off.
I truly wish I would just die. I am weak and want the world to do it for me, because most days I don’t have enough left in me to follow through like I need to so badly.
Day two of feeling like a train wreck. There were a couple of days last week where I literally rolled out of bed, did my hair, then got dressed and left, wearing the same clothes underneath as the day before. I didn’t do anything that wasn’t immediately required, because I was so out of it I couldn’t be bothered to care. I have never been like this. A shower has always been my top priority, which shows just how fucked up this whole thing is getting.
I’m whining, I realize that. But I haven’t told anyone about the reasoning behind my perpetual sleeping yesterday, or the extreme feelings of misanthropy the other day. All I want to do is sulk off by myself somewhere and not be asked any questions.
If this feeling lasts longer than a week, those pills will get fucking flushed without a second’s hesitation. Yes, they need time to begin working, yes I need to be patient, but when your mood has a tendency to change from alright to extremely suicidal within the span of a few minutes, every day counts more than anything. Maybe that sounds melodramatic, or childish, but when you’ve lived it there’s nothing more terrifying then suddenly deciding you hate everything about yourself more than you ever imagined, and that in a sense, for being such a failure, you deserve to die for it. Because it’s not as though you’re going to amount to anything or you’ll be good enough to change anything, is it? Might as well be done with it now to not only save yourself further humiliation, but save what little self-respect you have left.
I hate this. Waking up and feeling like it’s over when it’s a brand new day, because now I’m going to think about it, obsess over it. If I get tired today or fuck up like I sometimes do, I know that silently the words that always hit me at a moment like that will seep out of my subconscious to remind me of my constant, inevitable failure at nearly everything.
“If you had just taken care of the problem this morning, you wouldn’t be here doing this right now, would you?”
Tomorrow is my last day. I’ll be going to the other restaurant beginning on Monday. I’m not sorry, and I haven’t even given any thought to the fact that the majority of people I get on with aren’t going to be with me. They’ve been more than kind to me, most of them, so it makes me bitter to realize how I can’t form attachments. I spent hours and hours with these people, getting yelled at and working closely with them, hearing them talk about their kids at home or their husbands and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends and the things they did over the weekend. I’m truly like a shadow slipping through time; I’m there but I’m not. I can’t be held onto by anything. And when the hours change I fade away until I feel like coming back.
They keep asking me if I’ll miss them, and I always lie and say yes. What I really mean is that I’ll miss the routine of it, I’ll miss seeing the same faces and the sense of security that provides for my unpredictable anxiety. My thoughts on this entire thing were drowned out more than ever today, though. Now I am even less sorry than ever. The hummingbird and one of the other girls I see frequently (who is 19 as well and has a kid of her own), have a tendency of ganging up on me. They can’t do anything, obviously, which they know. But I listen to them talking and I hear my name garbled between quickly-spoken Spanish, and they laugh with that gleam in their eyes like all those perfect, thin blondes in 200 dollar jeans used to do when I was still in school. I do something at work, make the slightest misstep, and there they are giggling and looking over at me while exchanging grins. Yes, I am so fucking funny. My constant apologies and the way I stand there so uncertain and out of place is absolutely hilarious. My awkwardness is laughable. The child in me wants to sulk and shrink away from them, but whoever I am now is hostile and vengeful. I just lean against the heated counter, pressing my fingers into it until they start to burn, the nerves on fire, and I smile, watching them. I never say a word.
I’m so funny, I say silently. I’m going to be so funny when I go home tonight as a mess, finally giving up the mask and letting the numbness and darkness seep out of me. It’s going to be funny when I sit there staring at the walls for hours, rocking back and forth in the blackness of my bathroom with the candles lit trying to find my sanity. It’s funny because it is pathetic, and I have enough left in me to know to be ashamed. But I’m still cruel enough to laugh. No tormentor is worse than myself. There are no words from anyone that are as scarring as the misery I can cause. I am all powerful, you are not.
No, I will not miss them. I will not miss the scent of cinnamon in the morning, I will not miss the people making fun of me in Spanish. I won’t even miss the kindness. Nothing lasts, I know that. I will move onto this new place and do what I will. Except now I’ll know what they are saying, and that will make it easier to fight back.
I keep thinking I should quit, but I know it is just the defeatist in me talking. I look forward to leaving my room, I anticipate it, even. I feel better when I walk in the door and clock in, because I know that for a few hours, no matter what, I will be alright. I only want to quit because I no longer wish to try, and that really is sad. I will go all the quicker if I stay here in this place forever. My madness is written on the walls.
I went to work, otherwise I think all I did today was eat. I watched television. I pretended to care that people were visiting, even though I was counting off the minutes until they left. I said I would see them tomorrow. Stupid. Fucking stupid. I can’t feel anything right now. I feel like a masochist, because all I want to do is hurt. I’ll take anything. Anything at all. Just give it to me. I don’t want to be mindless and unfeeling like this. I can’t be this cut off from everything. I’m still human.
As much as I hate to admit it, I still need to feel. Otherwise I’m just deader than dead, and that truly is pointless.
There’s no way to hurt that’s good enough. You can’t black out the world. You can’t black out yourself. Sometimes there is no distraction that can take it away, and maybe that is the mind’s way of forcing us to acknowledge ourselves and fully recognize our childish ways of dealing with things.
You’re not supposed to cope, you’re supposed to live.
I’ve made myself sick in every way imaginable. I’ve done some things. I feel it all mocking me, with every breath. It’s a waste. It accomplishes nothing. It’s like even the pain of everything isn’t touching me, just this wretched numbness bearing down, taking it all away like a savior, yet nothing about the act is benevolent because it wants for itself. It stole everything away, and I am so apathetic as to not even be angry. I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to move. I want to lay on the ground listlessly and wait for the inevitable, whatever it may be.
Too much to take, darling?
There’s not enough, I want to say. There’s never enough.
Chains, these chains. I really am strangling myself with them. I go one way one second, then suddenly I bolt the other, only to get choked regardless. I want to hang. Let me hang. I feel like I’m doing this so damn publicly, right out there where the world can see it, but they only gape or say the all the wrong things to me. I don’t expect them to step up and stop this. I don’t expect consolation. I was a stupid kid once (oh, wait, let’s not get ahead of ourselves), and yeah, at one point I thought that it was possible to accept an offered hand and maybe move onto where this would be emotionally bearable.
I know now that I was wrong. I didn’t need a friend, I needed an enemy. I needed someone to beat me into place, to tear out those pipe-dreams and give me a colder world to look at. It explains my fucked up relationship with myself, at least. All sides against the middle, all fucking propelling me toward doom. I’m waiting for impact. All those times where I sit here and tell myself it isn’t coming? Lies. Fucking lies. It’s coming. There’s no avoiding it. Sooner or later it’s going to come down to the end. It will be me against myself against the world, if you want to romantisize it. We’re going to brawl, and we’re going to look each other in the face, all bloodied and destroyed, and we’re either going to come to an agreement to suffer and pull this pointlessness along until breaking point together, or we’re going to decide to take the other path. The brighter one.
Oh, and how it is brighter. Like a beacon in this black that I’m crawling to, hands and knees scabbed over, all subservience. Torture me until it makes sense or until I get so jaded by it that I can’t feel it anymore. I am weak and petty and I want to lose myself in this. I want compulsion and confusion and pain and recklessness beyond anyone’s understanding. I want my pursuit of stupidity to blow up in my face and prove something to me, be it reasons for an end or reasons for continuation.
I know that maybe it hasn’t been long enough. Maybe I haven’t hurt enough. Maybe there’s a lot more to come before I’m worthy of being granted an exit. Or maybe I’ll tear the gatekeeper’s throat out and go early. I never was one for waiting for permission. Worthy, there’s an idea. As if I owe this world anything beyond what has already been given so unwillingly….
I bled for you. I bled for this place even when I didn’t believe in it. I beat myself for you. I took pain for you. All those people, I died a hundred times over for, and they never even knew. And it was all my fault. I act like I was valiant, like I did something. Oh, but how that was not the case! I did nothing but stand by stupidly, a monument to inaction! Brave? No, I was the coward. I was terrified of being alone. I took it all on for myself, to prolong the fantasy as long as was possible. I did not really bleed for them…no.
I bled for me.
Selfishness. It’s a start, at least, is it not? How’s that for optimism?
