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.

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.

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.

It’s my own fault, really.

I was late for work yesterday, fortunately only by a few minutes. I didn’t want to go. I fought with myself over it. I wasted a good fifteen minutes trying to figure out what I should do. I was set for destruction right from the start of the morning, and found myself frantically scrubbing the dried blood off in the shower. I knew I was going to be late, and my mother kept coming in my room to see if I was ready. I was really short with her, trying not to yell. I was walking out the door, and realized I’d forgotten my watch. I ran back to go search for it, and there were my pills sitting on my dresser. I took three again, and felt the consequences for the rest of the day.

I was so tired and out of it, that I was going to leave early. Naturally no one was scheduled for anything, and I spent most of the day with one other worker making the food, assembling the food, and doing fried products at the most busy time of day. Don’t you love how that shit works out? I went to the freezer a couple of times and just leaned against the boxes. I found a box cutter over by the microwave and was flirting with the idea of taking it to the restroom with me on my next break. I still don’t know why I didn’t. I guess because I have a knife already. It’s familiar, it’s mine.  

I made it all the way through. Don’t know how I did, closing my eyes every few seconds as I was doing things. I ate a bunch of candy from the store again, even had an energy drink. Nothing helped. To top it off I was in a terrible mood and I was sick the entire time. I thought for certain I was going to vomit sooner or later.

I have to go to work again today. I don’t want to, but it has to be done.  I’ve made no real effort to eat better, but I seem to have stopped gaining excessively, which is nice. I’m still almost never hungry. I just eat because I am an idiot and clearly can’t cope with the most basic of things, like life. Yesterday, I was sitting in the breakroom eating a candy bar I didn’t want (I was hoping the sugar would wake me up), and this woman from the front counter walks by and says, “That’s really fattening,” then walks away. What the fuck? We’ve never been introduced, I don’t even know her. It just seems like a ridiculous thing to say to somebody. It’s a candy bar, no fucking shit it’s not good for you, and not to mention she must not know what ‘fattening’ is given her own body’s state. I was just feeling like crap, and that didn’t help. The women all say different things to me here and there about how thin I am and all of that, and I kind of want to say something horrible in response. Because I don’t feel that way. I feel absolutely vile right now, and won’t even go to the store without wearing a huge jacket to cover myself up with. I won’t even weigh myself. The only reason I know I’m not huge is because my uniform pants still fit. They have always been tighter at my waist, even when I was at my lowest weight, and now they still close, but they look like they’re a little small. On the days where they feel too tight, the next day I do my best to not scarf down everything, then they fit better again the day after.

I don’t want to be bothered with anything, it’s kind of getting sad. I know I need to go out and do things, regardless of how I feel. Tomorrow is my day off and I’m going to try to convince myself to go to town with my mother while she does the shopping. I know I can’t keep staying home like this, only sleeping and avoiding everyone. It’s not good for me to cater even more to my loner inclinations. Last time my godfather was here, I saw him twice, and I didn’t even feel up to going to dinner when they all went. I think the only reason I did was out of a sense of duty. I didn’t really enjoy myself, and found that I was having trouble eating in front of everyone. I’ve even been taking my meals alone in my room, not going to the kitchen table (I eat there by myself too, but it means my parents are in the adjacent living room) since I am so embarrassed by my own behavior lately. I want to stop, but I feel like I can’t. There’s just no reason to stop when I don’t care enough about it. Yes, I feel horrible and fat, but no one sees me anyway, and I don’t have to leave my house if I don’t feel like it. This is how I keep rationalizing things, even though I know that my eating, my lack of exercise lately, and several other factors all have a lot to do with my feeling like shit over all.

I’m just lazy and don’t want to do anything that takes effort. I do my nine hours at work, then I come home and sleep. Apparently, that is my life.

How the weak one copes.

Again, I almost didn’t make it through my shift. Same problems, same shitty scheduling. I know there’s been some definite backlash from some of the higher-ups toward our manager. Rumor has it she is no longer going to be the manager here (no explanation, as of yet), and will be replaced by one of the other shift managers I’ve known for quite awhile, one who’s fair, nice, and gives a shit about her employees. I really hope it happens, because she’s one of the best people I could think of to have take over this mess of a restaurant. Regardless of what happens I’ll continue here until it either gets better or I break.

Today, as my current manager made yet another of her ridiculous comments/criticisms, I caught myself just as I began to say, quite venomously, “You know what…”. It would have ended in ”…you can go fuck yourself,” but thankfully didn’t get that far.

I’m covered in bruises and burns from all manner of things, and I’ve repeatedly smashed my fingers. I even got stung by a bee yesterday that crawled up my glove then decided to attack my wrist. We’re all beginning to accumulate scrapes and burns, and it seems everyone has a band-aid somewhere or some funny story to tell about how they maimed themselves on some hot object. We keep having to do stupid things to make up for our lack of knowledge. I was joking with someone today that we are ‘making it up as we go along’. The sad thing is, it’s true. We’re expected to do all these things, and most of us have little to no experience, and there’s no one around to give us any instruction, so we simply do the best we can to get by. That means we fuck up, a lot. But we’re learning. I suppose we’ll develop a way of doing things, even if it isn’t the correct way.

I knew what was going to happen today. I brought my knife with the excuse that it was to open the boxes I’m constantly having to get from the freezer. Half true. I did use it for the boxes. I waited patiently for my half, trying to hide my mood by laughing and being helpful. I kept myself as busy as I could, volunteering to do whatever extra thing needed to be done. Then it came, and I went to the bathroom, relieved to get away. I got interrupted after only a few moments, when someone else came in to use the other stall. I feel so sick. I almost started crying. I got blood all over the inside of my pants, but fortunately they’re black and it just looked like grease stains from the outside.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know where I’m going. I’m just going, not looking back or forward, not acknowledging consequence. It’s clear that right now either the pills aren’t going to kick in for awhile, or they’re already beginning to make me worse. Only time will tell.

When there is no escape….

I took my medication during midday, like I usually do, without giving it much thought. It hit me so horribly today, without any warning. The worst part was it stuck right before I left for work. I did damage before I left, but the mood continued to grow. By four hours into my shift I was bordering on unstable, and lucky me, I was closing tonight.

I hate this. I hate to say it. But I refuse to be such a coward about it. I did it, therefore I should be able to talk about it without turning into a mess. I locked myself in one of the stalls during my half hour lunch, in a panic. I didn’t have a knife, so I took a credit card and reopened what I’d done earlier. If I would have had a knife with me, I don’t know what I would have done, honestly. I have cuts over cuts now, this horrible pattern that keeps getting more complicated.

When I was done I walked out into the gas station, bought a couple of candy bars, then went to the front counter at work and had an ice cream, two double cheeseburgers,  two sets of fries, then a mocha and a bag of cookies later on, after already having eaten at home. It’s really pathetic how I try to feel better this way. I find myself laughing, sitting in the dark in the break room, almost half hysterical.

I said to one of the girls today, “Life is beautiful”, and she answered, “Maybe someone else’s, but not mine.” Ah, the truth. Where is this beautiful life? Who owns it, I wonder?

I was the only one in the back for closing, because we got the shipment tonight. Everyone was pissed off about it and empathetic, trying to tell me how to get things done the fastest. I don’t care anymore. I don’t care that It’s 2:00 in the morning and I just got home and at 8:00 AM I’ll be back in there for another 9 hours. I hate my life, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter where it goes or if it is horrible, because I don’t matter. Oh well. That’s just how I’m looking at it lately. It’s the only way I can deal with it, because if I try to believe it is something worthwhile that makes this so much more unbearable due to how easily I allow myself to waste it all.

One of the girls from the front was kind enough to help me out with some things, and we got to leave before the rest, which was nice. I could still be in there right now.

I’m home, for now.

Hate

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?”

More of the same.

I don’t know where to begin. It feels like a month has passed in the span of a couple of days. It just keeps stretching on and on until I think that I won’t be able to stand it, until I think that I’ll go mad with it all. Is this life? Is it really?

My medications are useless right now, and will be for a couple of weeks. So meanwhile I get to grin and bear it, hoping that it will have some positive effect while my employers do everything possible to ensure that I barely sleep because I am working so frequently.

It seems like I haven’t left that building because I keep working loads of hours over my designated time as I am apparently one of the few people familiar with opening/closing procedures and all the menus at the two times of day. I wake up and I’m there, I go sleep and there I am again. Everyone is red-eyed and grouchy, and I’m quickly learning to dislike more and more of the people there. I’m trying to blame it on the stress of running a brand new restaurant; it is not unexpected that they should be higher-strung at the moment. Perhaps when the rush is finally through their company will be more tolerable, because for now I want to turn around and have a confrontation with someone every few minutes, and I’m standing there gritting my teeth and smiling at their stupidity.

I keep telling myself it will even out soon, but it doesn’t feel that way. I have had even less of a desire to do anything than usual. I’ve come home at around 3:00 in the afternoon these last couple of days, yet I don’t utilize the time. I’m strangely not physically tired, it is much more mental. I just don’t want to deal with anyone or anything. I want to be left to myself and not have to listen to my mother speak or the people at work talking about how exhausted they are when I’ve worked twice the hours and am in the back running back and forth while they stand in the front doing nothing. The other day someone came in and complained because there were seven people in the front, most of which were milling around, while we had about four in the back, three of which—including me—were not scheduled. Why would you schedule one person to work assembly when it is the second week of opening for the store? Particularly when every night we have been so clogged with orders that not only do we have the four to prepare on the screen, but ten more backed up behind it, and a single grill person trying to man the fryers and the stove to keep us stocked.

Today, it happened again, and I was pissed. The woman I don’t like (who I believe doesn’t like me much either), had me doing grill. Well, she forgot to put someone on the fryers, so midafternoon, when everybody decides they’re hungry, I’m using all four grills at once, stocking bread because the assemblers keep running out, and trying to keep up with all the greasy fried crap at the same time because she conveniently had everyone on break simultaneously. When you’ve been there since six in the morning without stopping, it is a little trying on the nerves.

The last few days I’ve wanted to  just say “I’m done” and walk away, because I don’t care. I’m already tired of everyone having ‘breakdowns’, of being yelled at for no reason, and dealing with a bunch of incompetent morons. And it’s only been two weeks. This doesn’t matter to me. I don’t want to work. I couldn’t give any less of a shit about the money. I don’t want to do anything but fade away without being seen. I want to fall into oblivion and never come back from it, because if this is life, then I don’t want it. I didn’t want it a year ago and today I find myself feeling the same.

Sure, this is supposedly just a rough patch, but even when it isn’t, I find myself disappointed that such a dull, meaningless show continues to run when I am no longer interested in watching.

8/28/08 (a post made a day before this one, one year previous)

“College is very close. Another year of boring classes and feeling like a human tick. I just want everything to end, I don’t care if I come out of it dead or alive.”

Numb beyond reason.

Yet it was what was needed. How ironic it should turn out this way. Apathy is such an amazing thing to me; I think I understand it, but suddenly I realize I know nothing at all about its inner workings. It’s my death but it is also my life. How can it be such opposite things at once? How can it work that way? I do not pretend to know.

I learned a lot of things today. The first of which is that I am my father, no matter how much I deny it. We all grow up to be our mothers when we’re girls and our fathers when we’re boys, but I went a slightly different route. I keep forgetting I am not the only one who lies.

She was crying and I was just looking at her blankly. I was so numb today that pride was not a factor. Nothing was a factor. I went to the store and bought as much useless, sugary food as I could. She let me. Even encouraged me, following after me with a cart like a little child as I paced back and forth down the aisles, pleased by nothing. I must have spent an hour looking, but she didn’t complain. Like a good mother she thought it was helping. She does not realize she was witnessing the final self-destruction, the final shred of self-control being released for the sake of the present. All for one more day. 

I have another day to wait. I plan to make it to that day, by any means necessary. My body is no longer off limits in any way. I don’t care if they see and are disgusted. I will do what I must to live. I will destroy the outside if it will bleed out even a fraction of the inside. It can burn for all I care.

Now that I am here in this place I see that it was not what I thought it was. It is not what is going to make me better. No one can do this for me or help me in any way. I must do this myself. I already am doing it myself. No words anyone says will improve me. And maybe I do want to be comforted, maybe that’s what I want the most, but that too will not alter this. I could be loved a thousand ways and I would still choose myself, I would still choose an out. The things that we are supposed to have will not be mine, and that is something I have to learn to accept.

I confessed everything, yet I still walk this darkness all alone. What she said was true: she knows my personality, she knows my ways, but she knows nothing of what is inside of me. Maybe no one really does. 

And I know it is my fault. All my fault. But that’s okay, I can live with that.