It is none of my concern.

I must be under stress, but I’m so numb, I can’t tell. All I know is that I hate myself a lot more than I usually do, because I am completely out of control. I feel like it’s horribly obvious, that everyone must know, must have figured it out by now. I realize I am probably just being paranoid, but I can’t shake it. I’m fixated on this notion that I am failing. I must be breaking, but I’ve been too far in my own head to stop the degradation. Now I’m watching the fractures crumble further and I can’t bring myself to care. I’d rather the destruction. I’m too lazy to fix this anymore. I can’t care enough.

Apparently I am going to repeat myself over and over. I still haven’t figured out much logic to any of this. But if it makes me feel even slightly better, I suppose it is serving its purpose for now. 

I went in at five this morning. Naturally, for the entire restaurant, they scheduled all of three people to open. I spent the entire time running to the freezer prepping everything, which is the job no one is keen on doing. Somehow they expected me to have all of the food ready by the time we opened. Right. No one bothered to tell me this either. Somehow I got it all started up, late, but at least it got done. No one else showed up until later. One of my favorite people ended up doing grill (the meat and all of that), and for the whole of breakfast, I did all the orders alone until the changeover to lunch. I was incredibly grateful that she was there. She’s a bit like a mother hen with me, and she did several extra things that she didn’t have to just to help me out. I really wouldn’t have made it without her; she was one of the few people to even pretend to give a shit that I was having trouble keeping up with everything all on my own.

There’s no use getting pissed off about it anymore. They just don’t care, therefore I won’t care. It will get done when it gets done. I’m passed the point of giving a shit. Fuck them. Fuck their business. They aren’t worth this misery, and on second thought, neither am I. I don’t know where this will go, but I guess it’s not all that important.

I don’t have to be anyone.

The food didn’t taste like anything this morning. I didn’t want it. I finally gave up at trying to make it sweet and settled for bland. I ate as much as I could convince myself. I want to be Raymond. I want Tyler to put a gun to my head and see if the next morning I have the best breakfast I have ever tasted. I want to see if I wake up that morning and don’t feel sorry. I want to see if something comes to me in the morning haze, a feeling maybe. I want to wake up and experience something besides dread and a wretched disappointment with myself. 

People are in love with an idea of themselves. Maybe in a sick way, I am too. That vision is supposed to propel us through life, make us desire improvement and recognition for our efforts. We all want to appear better than we are, and as a consequence this gives us motivation to live, to have the satisfaction of not only pleasing ourselves, but receiving praise from others for being so fucking incredible. A vicious little cycle.

But if you don’t care? If that vision is all about being the cruelest person? You must find enough satisfaction in what you selfishly get out of it. I’m not suggesting that it isn’t always selfish, in fact, come to think of it, conventionally this is less so than most visions. In truth, you have to settle for less than everyone else. You have to be alright with the fact that no one is going to understand it or appreciate it as you do.  You have to go it all alone and hope that the monsters that lurk aren’t going to feed off of you in the dark. Your suffering means nothing to anyone, and they will laugh at you and attack you until you are beaten down and weakened. No one will tend to your wounds. No one will regret that they tore that wretched thing down. Ugly things shouldn’t be suffered to live, after all.

And I am not ready. I leapt off the tower of humanity out of fear instead of faith, and there was nothing below to break my fall. I crashed all the way down, condemned to be a mangled heap of something that once was. In my eyes you either accept yourself (even if it is reluctant) or you spend a lifetime doing the job of killing yourself rather than allowing the world to do it for you.

Maybe the true escape is being nothing and having no qualms about it, not being burdened by what you’ve been taught or by whatever inadequacies you see yourself as being afflicted with. Maybe we are being stupid by trying for something that we all know is as pointless as anything else.

All we do is struggle constantly against who we are because we are so enamored with what we could be.

Oh don’t worry, it’s not your life!

This week has been terrible. I’ve been holding the anger in, making a pretty good attempt. But fuck it. It’s not like saying it aloud here, in the abyss of ‘anonymous’ internet is hurting anyone. The people who should be reading it—my parents—are about as likely to stumble on this as the spear of fucking destiny. But well, with my luck…let’s not even get into it.

I woke up on my day off (this was a couple of days ago) to find my parents trading car information back and forth. My mother is on her computer, my father on his. Apparently if I am registered with an older vehicle it cuts down our insurance payment by about a hundred dollars a month. So there they are, looking for a car. They didn’t even ask me. They’re talking about forking out some of whatever they’ve been saving, and I know that in the end I would have to produce something as well. Which is fine. I don’t care about the money. What I care about is when people make decisions for me, when I am legally considered an adult. Usually I am nonchalant about that kind of thing, so maybe that is why they thought it would be alright to start searching without telling me about it. But I don’t know…it made me furious. I may not have much of a life, or put forward much effort, but I think I still deserve to make a few choices in it. 

They had even called someone who was selling one of the cars. Without me.

Maybe I’m taking this too seriously. Maybe I’m being a stupid cunt about it, and I should get over it since they are being nice enough to even consider paying for part of it. But fuck, is it so much to ask that I be included from the beginning? I’ve talked a lot about getting an old car, for the purpose of having something that I wouldn’t have to worry about wrecking. But I’ve been working all of a month, so obviously, that is not at the top of my priorities right now, and probably never would be, because for one I don’t like to drive anyway. I was never all that serious about going through with it. At any time.

Then the other day, I was quading over in this area I wasn’t familiar with. I was about fifteen miles from my house, not a good place to get stuck in. The stupid thing was roaring and bogging down. It’s been doing this, even though the throttle was adjusted and it should be just fine. It has always had problems, so for the most part I ignore it when it acts up. Eventually, about halfway up the fucking mountain, I turned around and went back, because I could tell it was going to die. I did get it home, but only by gunning it the entire way to keep it from hesitating to the point of stalling.

Then I had left some money on the washing machine for gas—dad went and bought premium fuel with it. I can barely afford regular fuel, so now, instead of filling the gas canister in the garage all the way, it was only half full. All I do is use my ATV, really. There isn’t much else I do, so it kind of pissed me off. Yeah, I get that he wants them to run better, cleaner, but if it had been hismoney he would never have bought that fuel. He would have bought regular like he always does, otherwise I wouldn’t have had an issue with it. I’m trying to be lenient and show some trust and it just keeps blowing up in my face. I honestly couldn’t care less about the money, that’s what is so ridiculous. I’m not planning any future or doing anything with it. What angers me is that other people seem to think it is okay to do things without my permission. I’d like to have a fucking say in how my own life is run, thanks.

I guess it doesn’t matter. I’ve never shown an interest in deciding anything anyway, have I? So people assume I will continue to be the same way.

Those things are just a few in the long list of things that have gone wrong this week. I hope it lets up soon; I don’t have much tolerance to keep handling it all silently.

Crawling through darkness.

There’s a little demon in my brain that is laughing at me now. Laughing and laughing at how foolish I am, at my indecisiveness and cowardice. I am a coward, that I will not deny. I am afraid, so terribly afraid, but at the same time compelled beyond rationality. I can’t even type it out; that is the extent I let the fear grip me.

For the day it was not a burden, but a prize, something to hold above my head and look to when I felt the edge of weariness blurring my composure. Those thoughts come back and I shove them away, sometimes with more brutality and certainty than I think myself capable, until eventually they grow sick of the game and make their own retreat. But yesterday was such a terrible day. How can I look at the sun of today and not feel the ache that was there? Why was it not a sunless sky that greeted me when I woke? How can I live today and nearly forget what was there only an instant before? I don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t know why I can shift as quickly as the wind, one minute beyond certain, others clinging to my life as though it is precious to me when I know it isn’t. There is nothing precious about it, and never will be. It is as precious as a grain of sand; the wind could swipe it from the shore and no one would be any the wiser.

I spent money today, for no reason other than that I could. I bought a fishing license so that my father wouldn’t have to go to the lake alone. He kept hinting that I should go with him, but I have long been ignoring the veiled request. It was hot, the sun was bright. We walked downs slopes, descended from a plush forest to a rocky shore where a lake of glass lay in wait at the bottom. The trees were the deepest green, and their reflections made the water equally so. We caught several fish, even letting a smaller one go. 

I sat watching the water, wondering over and over how I could have been so sure yesterday, how I could throw it all away when there are still a few things to be had. But I know that in time the feelings will return, and again I will turn my back to that perfect image of a lake and I will curse it. I will hate it and tear through it as though it were painted on canvas. It will be despised for what it represents: beauty in a world of ugliness. It too will be taken, raped and pillaged, changed to some asphalt superhighway. Nothing perfect ever stays. Something comes and greedily steals it for itself, distorts it to its own dreams of perfection, and how subjective those visions are. How I loathe them.

Only time will tell.

Tick tock.

Surrender.

I don’t know what I was planning. The day started off bad, probably due to yesterday’s not-so-pleasant ending. I needed to get out of the house this morning, found that I couldn’t, since I happen to be at the beck and call of my mother. My driver’s license isn’t valid right now because I’m not on the insurance, so there was no hope of even driving to town to get away from myself, not that I would be brave enough to do it anyway. 

I was stuck in the house going fucking mad. I barely slept last night, and for whatever reason decided to leave the cats out of their cage to wander around aimlessly so that there would be something alive and breathing, even if it meant hearing them crash into things at all hours. I couldn’t stop thinking or get my body to rest, and today it was the same, though with a lot less panicking and crying and a lot more anger. I had to tell a lot of lies yesterday to keep my little episode a secret; blamed my crying on hormones and a stupid story with a bad ending (I wasn’t even reading yesterday, but of course, my mother believed me). Then my godparents decided they wanted to talk to me over my webcam, and wouldn’t leave me alone about it. So I told them I was sleepy and looked like shit, to give them warning. All they said when I got on was, “You do look really tired”. It’s amazing how easy it is to put in that ridiculous cheery tone and act like I’m perfectly fucking fine. I even baked cookies yesterday for distraction.  

Today I was a belligerent fucker. I snapped at everyone and everything. Even my cat was an annoyance, though he has been hounding me since yesterday because he knows something is off. He keeps trying to crawl into my lap and I just shove him away. He finally went and fell asleep in the window after a long session of staring at me unblinkingly and getting yelled at for it. I think today I was mostly annoyed by the confirmation that no one is ever going to notice. Even crying can be written off as from something else. My pacing is normal. My moodiness isn’t unnatural to them. 

Months of living on almost nothing with binges in-between, have really fucked my body over. All I want is sugar and sleep. I end up forsaking actual food for a few bowls of ice cream and nothing else. And that only lasts two or three  hours before I feel the gnawing hunger and have to do something to keep my mind off of the sweet, sugary, packaged crap stored in the next room. But I’ve kept my weight normal enough that no one is worrying, though they certainly comment enough. I want to throw people out of windows sometimes. Needless to say, being perpetually starving has done nothing to ease my temper, and it has made my mood swings all the more terrible. I still feel fat, awfully so, which I acknowledge is just stupid. But for whatever reason, I can’t get it out of my head and I keep losing more weight as the months drag on. All of the clothes I bought recently are too big now. I have to keep altering everything so it doesn’t look like I am wearing something two sizes too large.

Yesterday all I got was the sugar, not the sleep. Today I only got the sleep. It makes me feel psychotic, being this way. Trading one sin for another and hoping that it will be enough to get me through another day. I went quading after waking early, since it became obvious that the only way I was going anywhere was if I did it myself. I nearly crashed a few times driving far too fast around winding corners. I didn’t care. I came home no better, no freer. I still feel my chains no matter how far I run, that is the sickening part. There is no getting away. I finally drugged myself up with some pills from the cabinet. Fell asleep for hours and hours, and woke with the night creeping in through the curtains and a cat milling around below my bed.

I can only ask myself these days, if there is anything worth it to make going on like this a bearable burden. I can write all I want, read, I can draw, I can fight all I want, but every single day I go to sleep knowing that it will get no better. I can integrate, I can make a life for myself, but it will not make me happy or even slightly less insane. I will never wake up feeling vaguely contented with where I am at and who I am. There will always be visions of something wretched.  

In the end I know that all I am doing is the thing I so adamantly disagree with: searching for reasons that I’m never going to find, just like everybody else.

Visions.

I’ve spiraled down into nothingness. Yesterday, I was attempting to rationalize what I’ve been trying to do, but by the end of the day the truth of it emerged, that whole other side of this that I have been desperately trying to ignore hit me with full force.

What do I think I am doing? Do I really believe this is going to work?

I’ve been on edge, flinching every time the phone rings. It doesn’t help that I’ve been in an almost manic state, where my mind won’t calm down. I don’t know what’s causing it, perhaps stress or too much exercise, but whatever it is, it makes me feel like no amount of sleep will cure it. It seems even physical exhaustion doesn’t help—and I’ve tried.  

 I’m going to the Human Society this coming week, to go to the volunteer orientation. The two interviews I had a couple of days ago (I’ve had three in all), forced me to postpone doing the volunteer thing sooner, as they ran over. I went in at 1:00,well ahead of time, but there were so many people I wasn’t able to leave until 3:00. This child was throwing herself across the rug and screaming in tantrum every few minutes. There were so many people there, all crowded into this tiny room. The woman behind the desk kept watching me, and after a good half an hour finally approached me, maybe because I was one of a handful of people that wasn’t wearing cut-off shorts and flip flops. She went and sorted through the papers to see when my turn was coming up, since I had been “standing there so long”.

Even if I do get accepted…fuck. I don’t want it. What am I going to do in a fast food restaurant all day flipping burgers? I will go mad. I can hardly walk into a store and ask for something off a shelf, let alone deal with people for hours on end. Not only customers at wherever I’m working, but the employees who work there. The last thing I want is to get to know people and be forced to deal with them, daily. 

I can’t exist here, that is the simple truth. Whatever reserve I’m on now is only going to end. Then I’m going to be left behind by it, crippled by anxiety and completely alone with no barriers to protect me. The apathy will flee for awhile, and I won’t know what to do. But I won’t be able to stay here in this room until the weakness passes, until the numbness comes back. It will be school all over again, and I don’t want to face that after it took so much effort to stop going in the first place. I don’t want to wake up and expect to hate myself for not doing something about that the night before. I can still recall those times where it was so strong I believed that I was capable, that it was in me to go through with it.

I looked back, found the exact day. And what a fucking special day it was. I made a choice, and I regret it now. I hate myself for making it. I chose quitting school or death, so I quit. But I still remember that day, the feeling of it. A recklessness beyond anything I’ve ever felt before. It’s sick, but I want that back. I want that loss of sanity to come back to me, to take over, because in this state of mind I’m in now, I’m too weak to do it. The doubts are shouting back at me. The guilt is heavily on my shoulders, a constant reminder of the debts I owe and must someday pay, somehow.

I owe my parents things, even though I never asked to be put here. I guess I should have never even thought that the world might be fair on that count. It angers me that their feelings have to be my responsibility, that they hold me back. Because I know my father will shake his head and curse my name to his grave, and my mother will sink into a hole she will probably never crawl out of. I would destroy their lives for myself. I would abandon them, like they both did me once.  

Technically, I still have my one mistake to make, but I would lose what little respect they have for me. What little respect anyone has for me. I fought for that—I don’t know why, but I did. I fought to be the impervious wall, nothing but an imitation of humanity that bristles when others cry and snarls when they dare venture close. Why should it matter what I mean? I mean so little now as it is. But it makes me hesitate, so it must be something to me. Such a waste, all that time I spent trying to make something out of me.

I’ll try to keep my head about all of this. I’ll endure for a few weeks, watch, wait. It doesn’t matter. The universe will either accept my awkward attempts at trying to make a life for myself, or it will do what it usually does and spit in my face and laugh at me. I can decide where to go after something happens.

Sometimes giving up sounds so much better.

I feel like I don’t want to fight for me anymore. I want to give up, just stop all of this madness. I keep telling myself that it is so pointless to continue, that I am not going to be mourned long, that there is nothing in this life I’m going to be missing out on. I can’t love, I can’t be, not without feeling so incredibly wrong. I want nothing from this place. It holds no magic for me anymore, no mystery that must be solved. I figured it out as well as I ever will and now all I want is out.

I don’t want to have a future. I want to jepordize it so that there is no chance, no more excuses for me to continue. I’m only doing this because it is what I was taught. It’s not what I want. Fuck, it’s never what I want. I know I am a failure for willing this all away. So many people certainly have it worse, but they want to be here, for whatever reason. In these moments of clarity, it is not the uselessness and pointlessness that hurts the most, but the knowledge that there is something in me, somewhere, that has inadvertently kept me going. I know that this survival instinct is so fucking futile, and it disgusts me that I hold onto something after learning just how ugly it is on the inside. I’m stupid for doing so, just as worthless as the people I hate for accepting this system, embracing and loving it for the pseudo power it grants them.

Wave salvation in my face and I’ll throw it all away. I don’t want to go to the interview in two days; I’d rather…not be around instead.

How fucked up is that? I need to stop thinking like this. I need to face what I hate. But all I want is an easy way out, a permanent darkness where consciousness doesn’t exist. Where I don’t exist. I want to never have a thought again. Because I think I won’t make it. I can’t bear going on when it’s nothing but pain and hatred and wallowing and lies. This isn’t going to change. I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and feel like I live in a beautiful world, with wonderful people that I want to care for and help. If I make it, I’m going to hate every second, and I’m so sure of it…that I can’t stand it.

If I live I’m an idiot. If I die I’m a failure who gives up too easily. There is nothing to win, always a draw.

Always grey.

Nothing changes, not when you look closely.

I was leafing through an old journal for lack of anything else to do. I’m biding my time still, and know that my chances are still incredibly low of getting out of this anytime soon except by an unnatural means. God, I keep saying that. I keep saying it and not doing it, and I still can’t figure out why. It’s getting to that point where whatever conclusions I have drawn are starting to disintegrate around the edges from being over-analyzed. I’ve gone and tattered what little hope there was.

6.26.07

“I want to destroy things. I want nothing less than chaos. My thoughts lately have not been good ones.”

Then another, undated one, just one line.

“Something horrible is growing.”

My oldest one is falling apart. The pages detach from the slightest touch, so it’s been wrapped with a rubber-band. The earliest entry is dated 12.25.04, since the journal was a Christmas present. There are several passages about God that I don’t recall writing. It starts off fairly benign, then progressively becomes more hateful. It sounds much like me, but different somehow. The bitterness isn’t quite so strong. There’s, dare I say it, hope.

1.13.05

“I keep thinking I want to die, but do I really? I’m not quite sure anymore. There must be something better than this, somewhere.”

I love my naivete. It’s sickeningly sweet, makes me want to jump into a time machine and go corrupt myself early. I was still in highschool in these entries, as there are references to my friends outside of school and my trouble with the very few “friends” I made in the home school program.

12.25.04

“Is it normal to have such hatred for people? Or am I just insane? I ask others—and they hate people—but they still seem to like to be around people. How is that hate?”

I know who this is. It came to me the minute I read it. Those few ”friends” (who insulted me more than befriended me; my first taste of a purely selfish friendship where I had no attachment to the individuals), were the first open ‘misanthropes’ I ever met. It was the first time I heard it spoken about openly–the hatred of all things human with a pulse—even if it all was garbage from a bunch of ignorant, sex-starved morons who were more or less cowards when I finally confronted them. There was a short period where I idolized them for being so open. But then, as the year went on…I changed.

When I finally had gotten what I needed—gall—I tore their egos down without a backward glance. And they shattered. The feeling of power was so new and fresh to me, and the vitriol tasted better than anything. They had belittled me, laughed, yet  reluctantly acknowledged me because I didn’t ask questions and didn’t reveal their secrets. In truth, they hated me because I wasn’t openly cruel, because I didn’t seem like a bully. I was shy beyond belief, in a very innocent way. I used to let my anxiety overwhelm me back then—it still does sometimes—but I was so consumed by it that I never stood up for anything, I just hid away in a corner, willing it away.

But then it all made sense finally. They didn’t hate me. They liked me, because I was the sort they thought they could torture and get away with it: I was the perfectly willing masochist, painfully sycophantic. But…the snake always had fangs. And I bit. I snapped like a twig when everything came crashing down at home, and that sadistic, hateful bully inside finally snatched onto the hole in the curtain and ripped it clean open. Instead of hating only myself, I hated them, I let the evil in me lash out at someone new. 

And when the shy, demure girl in the corner struck, nobody saw it coming. They stopped talking to me. And all it took were well-placed words and a withered, pathetic ego that I distorted to the size of a cathedral. They were all talk. They were afraid. Action wasn’t something they did. No, they were the sort that laughed and harassed, believing that nothing would come of it, that there were no consequences. So when I was the one to stand up and ‘do’ something, it was enough to send them running, tails between their legs. And I always thought they were so brave. Fuck, I was such an idiot.

Undated, sometime in 2005.

“Everyone is their own god, their own devil, it just depends on which side we favor and allow the world to see.”

I honestly don’t remember any of this. When I open the pages, it’s my messy, twitchy script in black ink, but it feels like I wrote down someone else’s history. Was it really mine? I keep forgetting that I was once normal and had friends and people who were acquainted with me. Nowadays I walk into the local store and no one knows my face. Since moving, I’ve barely left my house. I stay home without leaving for a few months at a time sometimes.

There’s a strange awakening of hatred when I read what I’ve written. I guess it is the bitterness. I hate that there are weaknesses in those words that are so glaringly obvious to me now, but were only harmless words when they were pressed into the pages. I know that if I do manage to make it ten years (the thought alone is daunting) I’d end up staring at this and laughing hollowly. I’d tear it all apart like I seem to do with everything these days. I’d see the flaws, standing out starkly in the neat type reflecting back at me from the monitor. I’d look at everything I’ve accomplished and disregard it with a wave of my hand as a time when I was too dumb, too young to know better.

And by now, I should know better, but this time around I’m not stupid enough to think that this is all I can learn. There’s always room to become more bitter, to hate everything just the tiniest bit more. To lose even more of myself along every winding trail that I walk, without even noticing until it’s all fallen away.

See it through…if only for proof.

I’ve been caught up in reading, consuming my waking moments in dark, cruel characters that are always on the brink of suicide. Rampant self-destruction. It’s funny that these things almost propel me in a way; they provide some weak, watery resolve in me. It shatters in the dark though, always does. When I’m lying there, thinking about how useless my toiling truly is…it all just falls away, then glares back at me like the fragments of a mirror. So many little pieces, my pathetic reasoning cast aside in one fluid, hopeless motion. It’s so easy to fall into the darkness, to let it take over the living aspect of this, to be my automated savior that does the awful deed of existing for me.

Tomorrow I go to where my dad works. They’re having some sort of job fair that I’m being forced to go to. I already put in my resume for a few jobs, but I know that with my useless talents it will do absolutely no good until they see my face. I know that’s one of the reasons I haven’t been hired; my anxiety was always too strong to permit me to bear the thought of facing a possible future employer face to face, where through sheer humiliation and misery I would have to list just how much I am unqualified with a fake, disgusting grin. I’ve never been one for begging. And to me, that’s what it would be.

I don’t feel it today; my apathy has been washing over me the last few weeks, thickening like a fog until I am blinded to all else. It’s best that I don’t feel it. It’s best that I’m distant when my failure—my hopefully final failure—becomes apparent to everyone. I already have seen it coming, but they are ignorant of it. 

I lie in wait for it to be over. For that last precious shred of my sanity to be torn away, where my stupid, weak mind catches up to the fact that has been blatantly clear to all other sides of me for some time: I am doomed to fail. It was meant to be this way. I don’t belong here.  

I wish for it to be over. I wish not to have to do it myself, that one damn pardon. But I know that I am the only salvation now, that I always was. Let it be done, let it be finished. I just can’t bear to breathe and know what I know anymore.

Annoyed. Hopeless.

I’m not in a very pleasant mood. I think I’m just tiring of doing the same old shit all of the time with no way of escape. No one will hire me (and believe me, I’ve applied everywhere), so here I am at home, day after fucking day, doing absolutely nothing. That, and hey, I do have a driver’s license, but I’m not allowed to use it. I feel like everything I’ve tried to do means nothing. It’s all in vain. This is all just a mistake, living is a mistake. All I do is buy useless shit I don’t need, and sit at this computer typing when I don’t even want this.

It’s not a matter of feeling sorry for myself, it’s a matter of realizing there is no reason to be here. I am trapped—chained—to my parents and whatever befalls them. I can’t get away. I could run, sure, but to where? And not to mention, I would have nothing. I have all the comforts in the world here, but the unhappiness wells up so strongly at times that it feels suffocating. This is supposed to be what everyone wants. Being comfortable as well as you can be, all from years of throwing money into the system and accumulating everything you could possibly need. But I don’t need the things half so much as I am starving for just a taste of independence. Of getting the hell away from humanity, away from all the things that pull them down, all the things that are pulling me down because I’ve let this place poison me.

I’m dying slowly. Maybe I do deserve it.