I really want to know who you are.

There is a lady here who does our laundry who is, how do I put this delicately, the biggest lump of a woman I have ever seen. She is so large that simply walking around is difficult for her. She is like the present day version of Vladimir Harkonnen, minus the suspenders that allow him to carry all his extra weight without severely impeding his movement. Yet, in the entire time that I’ve been here, I have never once seen her eat.

How can this be? I have asked myself this many times.

Then, one day I saw her in passing through the village carrying home three or four giant takeaway containers of food from the diner. We had a casual conversation and then went our separate ways.

Knowing that it would have been a faux pas, I averted my eyes from her containers of food, despite being very curious as to what was inside those containers, as I wanted to spare us both that embarrassment.

This evening, I saw that she had started using those reusable (opaque) supermarket bags to transport her food from one place to another.

From this I can conclude that, until our brief encounter, no one had caught her in the act of taking home food before. The time of day that I saw her doing this would also support this conclusion. And now that I have seen her, she has started going to even more lengths to hide her shameful habit.

Those of you who are frequent readers of this blog know that I despise fat people. Like most prejudices, this stems from my own fear of becoming that way. I am a little overweight at the moment, but in my mind, I may as well be that woman, which leads me, in turn, to hate on every fat fuck I encounter the same way racists and homophobes hate on their preferred group of people. Bind judgement and abhorrence.

However, after seeing her tonight, I really, really want to help her. Never in my life have I had sympathy for someone so lacking in self control that they would let themselves end up that way; to me, obesity is the ultimate marker of a lack of discipline, which is another quality I despise in human beings.

Still, this woman is clearly so ashamed of herself that she can’t bear the thought of others seeing her eat, or even knowing that she eats at all. I mean, clearly, from her appearance, people can gather that she over indulges in food. But as long as no one sees her do it, she can go on living freely in denial.

This is not ok. Apart from being a clear marker of self-hatred, this woman is obviously depressed as fuck. I have never once seen her smile. Ever. She does not fall under the ‘jolly’ fat person stereotype; in fact, her disposition is the exact opposite of jolly. And for some reason, this evening I find myself feeling incredibly sorry for her and wanting to help her.

I won’t. Because I have way too many of my own problems to deal with and… well let’s face it, I think this woman is beyond help. Especially living in an area so remote as this.

However, I can’t help but ponder, what does this mean? Surely it has to be some kind of positive sign for my own mental development… but at the same time, I can’t help but be disgusted with myself for sympathising with her.

I will continue to ponder this and most likely end up hating her again. But for a brief moment I got over my prejudice and saw this woman as a human being… that has to be a good thing, right?

Hey Alfred,

So I was thinking about our conversation earlier and I appreciate the palm reading, I really do. It’s a very romantic notion. Far more so than tarot cards or astrology. It’s just that I am a firm believer in the fact that the only thing 100% predetermined in this life is death. Everything else is just random occurrences in-between. Which, of course, you knew before you started. I hope I didn’t actually offend you. I still thought it was interesting and it still gave me something to think about. Being forced to think about one’s choices in life is always a good thing, regardless of why you’re forced to think about it. Obviously right now there are some changes I need to make… but I’m really not sure I’m ready to make some of them.

Regarding the whole sexuality issue, if there is one thing I am sure of in this life, it is that I am attracted to women. I just don’t like penises. And I do not find a man’s well sculpted body attractive. I never have. I can certainly appreciate the beauty in it, artistically speaking, but in terms of something I want to fuck, men just don’t hit the mark. I find them imposing and vaguely threatening; not because of the unfortunate incidents that occurred at the beginning of my sexual awakening, but because in my mind, that is supposed to be my role. In a sense, I feel emasculated.

Throughout my life, I really have thought of myself as ‘one of the guys’. It has always been my role. I think part of the reason I have such a strong desire to be stick-like is because it would make me more androgynous and, thus, more masculine. I’m not saying I want to be a man; I don’t. Besides, I think I would make a pretty crappy guy anyway. However, in saying that, my venture into femininity is a very recent thing. I did not wear skirts or dresses by choice until I went to Mexico and I literally had to because I couldn’t find pants to fit when I put on weight. I point blank refused to wear a bra until I was 14 and used to strap my chest down daily.

This was partly because I used to believe I simply wasn’t pretty enough to wear feminine attire, but also because it never felt right. I have recently come to realise that there is a part of me that is attractive in a feminine light and this is why you see me wearing dresses and low-cut tops now. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m a woman and that, with a bit of work, I could look like the girls I want to fuck. Which was one of the most personally fulfilling realisations I’ve ever had. Still, at the moment, the fact of the matter is that I have yet to properly bed a women and I have been accustomed to being a male’s play thing my entire life.

The reason I’m finding it hard to break into my sexuality properly is because firstly, I am terrified of going after what I want. I am terrified of failing, I am terrified of them failing me and I am terrified of extreme pleasure. That being said, anytime I have been with a woman, the terror never arose during the process of making out. It only ever came as an afterthought, or beforehand when I was working up the nerve to go there.

Secondly, as mentioned before, I feel a major disconnect towards my body. While I have come to embrace my femininity, I still hate my body, I still hate my curves and I still feel like my body doesn’t really belong to me. Body Dysmorphic Disorder is the same one where you hear tales of people cutting off their own limbs because they feel unnatural. It feels like they were born with an appendage that just doesn’t belong there; like it’s alien. That is how my curves feel to me. So once you combine this feeling that my body isn’t my own with my past rape experiences, it is not surprising that when men start to hit on me, I just go with it.

I hate to let people down; I hate to disappoint people; I hate to hurt other people’s feelings and I have very little regard for my body or myself. It may seem stupid, but in my mind, especially when intoxicated, it is much easier for me to just go with it, block everything out and let them have at it, while I pull myself inwards and ignore it all. That way I don’t have to hurt anyone but myself. Which is a double win for me, given my taste for self-punishment.

I know this behaviour needs to stop. And I want it to. I don’t want to end up pregnant or diseased because I didn’t know how to say no out of some sick desire to punish myself. Thankfully, there aren’t many chances for me to get blackout drunk whilst I’m on Night Audit, which means there will be far fewer chances for me to punish myself by drinking, letting men fuck with me, or avoiding opportunities with women.

Still, it is the fear of going after what I want that is likely to be most prohibiting for me in my sexual ventures. It befuddles me that I have no problem going after what I want professionally speaking, but when it comes to my personal life, I am a blubbering, blundering fool. Why, oh why can’t I have the same confidence personally as I do at work? Much of it isn’t even that different, given that most of my confidence comes to me when I’m dealing with guests; strangers. I think for the most part it’s that viewing myself as a sexual being still makes me very uncomfortable. And imposing that sexuality on someone else feels very wrong to me. I don’t want to make other girls uncomfortable the way I was made to feel uncomfortable; I don’t actually think I could live with myself if I found out that I hit on someone and they felt threatened or grossed out. I would have become rapey and evil, like the men that fucked me up.

Anyway, I would be surprised if you even made it through this whole thing. But I needed to get this out; it is 3.40am and that is the time this shit tends to come to light. And given our previous conversation I wanted to make it abundantly clear that I am, in fact, a lesbian. I just don’t know how to be one properly yet. I still have a lot more learning and growing to do before I will fit that identity properly. But I am ready for it. Bring it the fuck on.

I hope that those of you who used to be interested in my life are still here, because I plan to crank this blog back up.

Since my break there have been many ups and downs. My final year of uni really took it out of me.

A few months after recovering from the ankle break, I shattered my elbow and had to have a full reconstruction. I almost didn’t survive it, mentally. I had to resort to smoking weed all day, every day. Even at uni or whilst doing assignments… And while some of my best work was done during that period, I am very, very glad it’s over.

In terms of my personal life, Alex and I split up earlier this year, two weeks before I left for my dream post-uni job on a beautiful tropical island. Well not necessarily the dream job, but close.

However, it wasn’t because of the move that we split. As you may recall I had been grappling with my sexuality for quite some time. I finally came to terms with the fact that I am, indeed, a lesbian.

It came to me one night when I was at home and I felt as though I had been knocked over the head and slammed into the ground. I lay on my living room floor and suddenly my whole life made sense in the context of this realisation.

Telling Alex was by far the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do, but we are both far better off for it and still best of friends. Seriously, we chat it up on skype and Facebook like nothing else. He is doing very well; making art again and has a girlfriend who shares a lot of his interests. I still worry that he will waste his potential, because they both have very avoidant tendencies, but for now at least, he is doing better than I’ve seen him in a long time.

—- —- —- —- —-

Island life has been very up and down for me. Despite coming to terms with my sexuality, it has been very difficult for me to embrace it. Very soon after I got here, I fell into bed with a guy who reminded me a lot of Alex. We had a short term thing that ended when he left the island and since then I have had to deal with almost everyone I became close to leaving.

Seriously, it was like I would meet someone, become close with them and then, bam! they would leave.

But now I’ve settled. I’ve found a good circle of friends and I am on the path to embracing who I am personally and professionally. Artistically speaking, it may take awhile longer, due to the limited resources this place presents, however once I am back on the mainland there are many steps I will take to become who I want to be in an artistic sense.

Still, I have started singing again. Events staff are aware that I am a singer, I have taken some amazing photos and have even done a bit of drawing during my time off. I am slowly getting there.

Anyway, shortly I will post a letter I wrote to a friend I met here during my last night shift. It was around 3.30am and I had finished my work and a conversation that we had had earlier that day came to mind. I feel it will explain a lot about my current mental state and, hopefully, you will find it an interesting read.

Before I do though, I should add that Body Dysmorphic Disorder has been added to my list of diagnoses, while Borderline Personality Disorder has all but vanished. Of course, there are still remnants, but I am no longer that person with wild emotions and crazy abandonment issues. I am finally starting to embrace who I am.

Aww thanks. It’s nice to know that someone’s been thinking about me :) I’m doing a lot better actually. I’ve been meaning to update my blog, but sooooo much as happened since I last posted that I’m not really sure where to begin! I’m pretty busy with uni too, which leaves me little time for tumblr, but I will give you a proper life update soon :) Thanks for caring!

Abstract photo of my moon boot/air cast. I made it pretty with diamontes.

It has been some time since I’ve written on here. There are many reasons for that. As you know, I’ve become increasingly avoidant of this blog in the last few months. I have wanted to think about the horrible shit going on in my life less and less. However, I think it’s time for a bit of a recap and post-trauma analysis.

The most prominent cause of my absence has been a suicidal mood that really got going on New Years Day. Since then I have awoken every single day, overwhelmed with hopelessness and despair, determined that, ‘today will be the day I end it all. Today I will overcome my fears and the pain. I will end all of this bullshit and die happy knowing that for once, I had control over something important in my life.’ Today I have spent the morning (beginning at 4am), mentally constructing and playing out various suicide fantasies. It’s almost like a game; the longer I do it, the more brutal, painful and grotesque they become.

After laying in bed, vividly imagining killing myself in many horrific fashions whilst drifting in and out of sleep for a few hours; I figured I would do something constructive and write about why I feel this way as opposed to wallowing in it. I guess I’ll go in chronological order, just so I can make sense of it. And if you’re not a regular reader, you should probably go and read these posts [link] and [link], because this will be treated as assumed knowledge.

So I’m pretty sure that the last time I wrote on here properly, it was about that fucking psychiatrist. This caused me a lot of anxiety for several days, which exacerbated my low moods; however, the most prominent cause of my severe depression of late can be attributed to an event that occurred almost a week earlier.

As it is summer and beach trips are awesome, in mid-December I went camping with a bunch of friends. Well, one friend (who I will talk about more later), one girl who I want to be friends with, I’m just not sure if we’re there yet and a bunch of other people I don’t know. That was a horrifically scary and intimidating scenario for me and I was freaking out about it for days beforehand; I was having panic attacks about ‘all the bad things’ that were going to happen. Unfortunately, the things I imagined didn’t happen (they probably would have been far easier to deal with in the long term); instead, I broke my fucking ankle.

The first part of the trip, however, was awesome. Even the car ride down was fun. I was talking and getting to know these people and, once we arrived, I had no trouble feeling included or fitting in… for pretty much the first time in my life ever. I was confident and talking to everyone, even the kinds of people I would usually be too intimidated to approach. I think I even accidentally cock blocked one girl; which I feel pretty bad about… but I honestly didn’t even realise it until afterward and, also, I don’t think I’ve ever flirted with a guy and have it feel good as opposed to scary before, so bitch, I’m taking this one.

But all this kind of makes the whole ankle breaking thing even more awful; I have a feeling that, had I been able to go out that night and stay for the rest of the trip, it would have been the beginning of a beautiful summer full of all the things I have been dreaming of for years; friends, going out and dancing and some kind of feeling of belonging. But anyway, that never happened because I, after getting ridiculously wasted, started doing backflips with the acrobatics kids and messed one up pretty badly. Which caused me to crunch and shatter a bunch of bones in my ankle and tear some tendons.

However, because I was heavily intoxicated, I didn’t feel anything. I was walking around like everything was fine while I could feel bones crunch around in really unnatural ways (it turns out that I had split the main ankle bone in half and the crunch I could feel was the two halves grinding around on each other; which, now that I know how painful that is supposed to be, I have a lot of trouble writing about it and not vomiting, as I can still remember exactly how that crunching felt), until around when everyone went out to go clubbing; then it really started to hurt.

I ended up holding off going to the hospital until about 2:30 in the morning, by which stage, my pain level was at about a 9. Calling the ambulance was a fucking ordeal. And then I ended up in this tiny little shack of a hospital with a girl I barely knew (though she was incredibly kind and supportive [even if it was a bit awkward] and I’m really glad she was there). Anyway, they were able to x-ray my foot, but the radiologist, who I presume must have been half asleep at the time, (or possibly just fucking retarded), said it was just a sprain, that I’d be better in 2 weeks, and sent me back to the campsite with a bandage and some crutches.

I was able to get a ride home with the acro kids the next day; but that was a horrible ordeal too. They gave me a shitload of codine at the hospital when I had only ingested a few chips and a fuckload of alcohol far earlier that day, which caused me to have a lot of issues with road travel in the morning. I threw up twice in the middle of the main street of a small town and we had to pull over once on the actual trip back so I could vom some more. It was a pretty embarrassing and horrifying experience, but they were all pretty understanding, so I got through it ok.

The next day I went to my doctor, who told me that it was definitely broken and sent me for CT scans. He told I’d be out of action for 6-8 weeks. That was pretty devastating in itself, but also kind of reassuring, because I was sure that I had broken it at the time and it had really pissed me off at how dismissive the hospital staff had been.

The CT scans revealed a LOT of damage. My doctor then told me that I should get MRIs done and said I was probably looking about about 3 months of immobilitly.

This is when I broke down completely and the suicidal tendencies really began. Pretty much right there in his office (on the bright side, I think he finally believes I’m BPD after witnessing my swift mental disintegration). It was in the week leading up to New Year’s, just after Christmas and I was devastated. Not just because it meant that I would be stuck in my house alone for three fucking months, just as my social life had started to look awesome, but because it would have ruined a bunch of plans that I had in place for my future. At that stage I was planning to try and change to a completely different degree, uni and city mid-year and work for the first half the the year to save up a shitload of money before moving. I also wanted to do some short courses up here so that I could get credit points in the new uni course and reduce my new study time.

But being out of action for three months made this impossible. I would have had to have gone back to my old uni course at the start of the year, just so I could keep getting money to live, because there’s no way anyone would hire me with broken foot. Naturally, this meant that my entire future was ruined.

As it was, changing degrees when I hadn’t even finished the first one was risky, especially since I wanted to change to a creative field in which I had little experience. But more importantly, it would mean that I would be 27 by the time I finished the new degree. I would be so old! I had always planned on being a huge success and having a million dollars or so by the time I was thirty. Whatever my chosen field was, I was going to be fucking awesome at it and leading the field. I was going to be the best. And I had to do it while I was still young. Otherwise it didn’t count. I had to do something really fucking extraordinary. And changing degrees to a creative field significantly diminished my chances of that.

In tourism, I have a super high GPA and a wealth of experience. Play it the right way and I could walk out of uni into a high paying job and be fucking rich and on the way to building my own hotel empire by the time I was thirty relatively easily. I had a whole plan worked out. But the more I studied it, the more I realised that it isn’t what I want to do for a career; not yet anyway. The kind of high pressure and snobby environment that upper tourism executives breed was just not what I wanted anymore. The only appealing thing to me about that life was the glamor; but why bother to be glamorous when you don’t enjoy the company?

So I was all set to change to this new field that would, sneer, make me happy. But I had to set about it as quickly as possible. It was a race. I had to make it happen as fast as I could, so that I could still be young and amazing. But it was also doubly terrifying because I couldn’t fail. If I started this new venture and failed, my life would be worthless again; I had to get it right. But the chances of getting it right when I had to rush it so much were slim in the first place… and now that I was being slowed down by having to add another year of fucking around to my schedule so that I could save up some cash to move, all because of poor fucking timing (in both the case of the injury causing backflip itself and where it fell on the calendar), well, it ruined everything.

It was now impossible for me to stand out and be amazing in a field that would make me happy. I would have to either stick with tourism and be unhappy with my actual job, but complacent due to my awesome success for the rest of my life, or a mediocre piece of crap in my new field. If I wasn’t some kind of genius, that meant I was a failure and that was unacceptable.

So yeah, that was the pits. I almost killed myself several times. Alex had to stay home from work and take carer’s leave to watch me. It sucked. Then the MRIs came back and the doctor said it was less bad than what he thought and it was back to 6-8 weeks.

It took me a long time to recover from that emotional rollercoaster. Even though I could go back to my original super fast, get everything done all at once plan, I was still reeling from the idea of failure and was deathly scared and heavily questioning my original plan to change degrees. I got over it enough to go out on New Years Eve. But that night, even though it was awesome, led to the next phase of my depression.

I went to a party at the girl I went camping with’s house. The one I referred to as my friend earlier. Being around this girl always makes me nervous; and I both love and hate being with her. She is so bouncy and happy and adorable!, yet somehow inherently, sexy underneath it all. I sort of have a bit of a crush on her; but I’m not entirely sure if it’s all sexual.

I think it’s more that she is pretty much everything I want to be. Like my amazing Canadian friend, who is kind of my ultimate role model, this girl has the spark that I want. That spark that I’m pretty sure I’ve always had somewhere, but never known how to find. I was always too scared to go near those people in highschool. I found them too intimidating because I wasn’t ready for them to bring out the spark in me. It simply wouldn’t have worked under my mother’s regime. There was no room for explosive happiness in that house.

But this girl lights up the entire room with her smile. She affects the entire room with her happiness; pushes it onto other people and creates excitement where there was only silence before. And whenever I’m around her I feel infected by her. I can feel her drawing out all this positive energy from somewhere in the depths of my mind; an energy that I don’t know how to unleash by myself. Her happiness is intoxicating and it is both astonishingly beautiful and utterly terrifying. Being around her makes me feel like it’s ok to be my own person. But in a way that I’ve never been able to express myself before; a happy way.

Whereas Alex is amazing because he allows me to explore my dark side and provides almost limitless support; this girl is amazing because she allows me to explore my happy side. And I’ve never done that before.

Anyway, I had an amazing night at that party. It was a small, intimate group and, even though I was pretty overdressed and was kind of self conscious about it for the first hour or so, I eventually found my confidence and had fun. For the first time in my life, I felt included. I felt like part of a group. I felt like many people liked me and actually wanted me around. It was incredible and it still makes me tear up just thinking about it. I don’t think I’d ever been so happy…

…but then, in typical BPD abandonment issue style, the post-party low was so bad that I turned straight back into an anxious mess the very next day. And since then I have been suicidal, or close to it.

After experiencing that amazing feeling of acceptance, the coldness of my lonely, messy apartment was horrible. And Alex has been severely depressed lately, so it hasn’t exactly been a whole bundle of laughs when he’s been home either. Shortly after the party, I had my first therapy appointment. This triggered another emotional realisation about my mother, providing the final piece to this ultra-suicidal puzzle.

Remember earlier, when I was talking about my plans to change degrees? Remember how I was talking in past tense and how a lot of those lines of thinking sounded incredibly fucked up? Well this next realisation explains why. Basically, even though I hate my mother more than anything in the world for the horrible things she did to me, I also crave her approval and affection more than anything in the world. To the extent that it has guided every important decision I’ve ever made and would have guided the decision to switch degrees. All of that stuff about needing to be super amazing, beyond a level of actual achievable awesomeness, was for her. I realised that I’d always felt like I needed to basically be the most undeniably perfect, publicly awesome and well loved person in the world, or she never would or could love me.

But I also realised that it doesn’t work that way. No matter what I do, it’s never going to be enough or change her attitude because she is so fucked up that she doesn’t even know she’s done anything wrong. So, while this means that I’m now ‘free’ to pursue whatever career I want (and I have made plans for the future which I will talk about later), it also means that my mum will never love me. That I will never be good enough. That she will never even know how much she has wronged me or negatively affected my life.

This prompted a pretty significant shift into mourning the loss of my childhood, my ability to love, and my ability to form relationships properly. This was unfortunate for me, because a large part of getting through that process is about forming new connections with people. And I am not in a position to do that at the moment.

Yes, as you may recall, I have a broken fucking ankle. And while everyone else is out having the time of their life in the summertime, forming their own new connections and partying it up, I am stuck at home, alone, on my couch 5/7 days a week. And when I’m with Alex, we either stay at home and do nothing together or go to the mall and do nothing together. I have not seen anyone since New Years.

I have wanted to kill myself pretty much since September if you want to be technical about it. But in the last few weeks it’s been a more intense and prolonged desire than anything I’ve ever experienced. Every morning when I wake up, I cry because I wish that I hadn’t. I go to sleep wishing to not wake up. All I do is think about ways to die.

Sure, there are times when I reach out to people and they sometimes, if I’m lucky, reply and provide some temporary comfort. But wonder-girl has her own horrible shit going on and no one else will do anything with me. They are avoiding me like the plague. If I ask them to come and hang out or take me somewhere, I get ignored or sometimes if I’m lucky, bullshit excuses. Whereas at the start of this summer I thought it was going to be the greatest time of my life, full of personal growth and development, full of friends and beaches and outings, full of excitement and teaching myself new things; all that is going to happen is… nothing. I’m going to spend the rest of the summer, alone on my god damned couch.

Wonder-girl may even come around a few times, but even then, she is the only person who cares enough to. Apart from this one other guy who comes around to emotionally dump on me and then leaves within an hour or two to go and fuck up his life some more, without giving me a chance to talk about anything. But that doesn’t really count in my opinion.

So yeah. That is my life at the moment. Writing this did not actually make me feel any better. I’m going to go and continue smoking weed, crying and sleeping now. Maybe I’ll go have a bath and drop a toaster in it. That would be fun. But the layout of my shitty bathroom means that I would need an extension cord for that… and I can’t find one and I can’t go anywhere to buy one. Great, my house has built in suicide prevention -_- I wonder if that was intentional..?

Merry Christmas to you too ^_^

The aforementioned Christmas bud, ready to go.

Christmas bud

Those of you who follow me know that I have some pretty strong views about medication for my mental illness. Yesterday I went to see a psychiatrist as a sort of fill in for Xanthe over the Christmas period. Xanthe was supposed talk to this new bitch before the appointment, but everything was organised pretty late, so it didn’t happen. As a result, I basically went in there on my own, disadvantaged from the start; and by the end of it, this woman, being the first psychiatrist that I have come into contact with for my own, personal mental health issues, turned me off seeing psychiatrists for the rest of my life. Sorry, Xanthe, but if you want an extra pair of eyes on my case, you’ll have to look for a psychologist, not a fucking arse hole medication pusher psychiatrist.

This woman seemed very good at her job and had a pleasant enough manner. She was easy to talk at first and, had she not started pushing her fucking drug agenda, I think things would have gone pretty well. However, she did make me talk about the rape stuff, which I haven’t even talked about properly with Xanthe, so I was super fucking angry about that. And traumatised. The last thing I wanted to do was talk to a fucking stranger about that, but when I said I didn’t want to talk about it she fucking made me keep going.

Anyway, back to the drug issue and why I fucking hate psychiatrists. This whole thing started when she asked about substance abuse and I replied with, “yes, I smoke weed everyday”. After that, she pulled out every piece of anti-marijuana propaganda I’ve ever heard. At first I tried to play the pseudo-science card, but I haven’t properly read about this stuff in a few months and it was pretty clear that getting into a science argument with a psychiatrist was futile anyway. So I started to tell her the actual reasons I don’t want to take medication, but every time I started talking I would get cut off. And every time I told her why I was doing it and my reasoning for it, I just got told I was wrong (she actually said the word, ‘crazy’ at one stage), without being offered a counter argument for why I should be taking anti anxiety meds first.

From the beginning of the discussion, I was on the defensive; she put me there. I’m not sure if this was a deliberate thing or not, but it seems to happen with all doctors when the medication subject is brought up. Maybe it’s me and I am automatically defensive with this subject; however I am more inclined to believe that with the average person, if a doctor puts them on the defensive and barrages them with a bunch of “but you’re wrong, it’s dangerous and our drugs are tested and safe” comments, most people will ‘see reason’/be convinced to at least give medication a go.

This woman wouldn’t listen to me or give me a chance to collect my thoughts and put a proper argument together. She just assumed that she knew everything about drugs, me, my problems, how it affects me and told me I was wrong. Flat out, without even considering that it could be beneficial.

I tried to tell her the practical reasons I don’t want to take it:

• I don’t want to have to fuck around trying to find the right medication; dosage and types of medication are tricky to match to an individual and I have body chemistry so sensitive that it would take forever to find the right solution.

• I don’t want to end up numb.

• I don’t want to end up a happy, loopy, up in the air person who just doesn’t give a shit about anything and floats around with their head in the clouds all day long.

• I don’t want to put on weight; that would far outweigh any positive effects of medication and directly lead to suicidal thoughts.

• Anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication is largely guess work. People still don’t really know how they work, just that they do. Yes, it’s tested and proven to work in some people, but that isn’t good enough for me.

Then I moved onto the more emotional reasons:

• I don’t actually like taking man made substances (not even painkillers, usually), because a) my father was a chemist and had a very, “drugs fix everything” attitude when I was growing up and, b) I don’t trust man. If we made it, we could fuck it up. If we made it, something could have gone wrong. It takes me a long time to feel comfortable taking a drug and I research the shit out of it and weigh everything up before I do.

• I don’t want to lose control over my brain. I DO NOT want some chemical fucking with my brain chemistry and changing the way I think and feel on a permanent basis. With marijuana, I have most of the control. I get high, a few hours later I’m not and I can go on living my life however the fuck I want to. Medication is a semi-permanent change that I have absolutely no control over. And what’s worse, if something goes wrong I’ll be unlikely to even notice, because usually it’s a very gradual change and one day I’ll just end up a fucking zombie without realising it.

• I don’t want to slow therapy down. I believe I need to learn to deal with my problems myself in order to solve them. If I go off to lala land and stop caring, I’ll be slower to learn to use emotions properly myself, slower to learn to regulate them properly myself and slower to complete therapy. I really do not give a shit if it hurts more, I want this done and over with as quickly as possible. And you can’t treat a problem if you make it invisible. Medication is a quick fix and that is not what I’m after. I don’t want little pockets of relief, I want this shit fucking done. I want nothing standing in my way with as little inhibitions as possible. I don’t care about keeping me day to day life comfortable and regulating my moods and keeping myself ‘functioning’ I care about getting the fuck better so that I don’t ever need to go to therapy again. I care about becoming a normal person on a permanent basis, not a drugged up ‘temporary relief’ type basis.

Then it was explained why I use it:

• At the moment, it’s to help cope with anxiety and has become somewhat of an unhealthy crutch. I’m aware that I display high-risk behaviour. But I was aware of this before anyone pointed it out to me, and have been self-monitoring for a long time. Many people probably say that, but I am incredibly self aware and have other people looking out for me as well, and at present the positive effects are far outweighing the negatives.

• It began as a way to stop me being lonely. I was depressed and alone so often that I needed something to make me feel better and less lonely. It worked well enough and, while I’m aware that being a stoner can lead to social isolation because of the nature of the drug, I have been taking more steps to have an active social life lately than anyone I know. And have been succeeding.

I’m not entirely sure how well I got to explain these things to her. It would not have been as eloquently or clearly stated when I said it, because my anxiety levels were skyrocketing and she wouldn’t let me finish my sentences or formulate proper arguments.

However, to every one of those arguments, the only response I got was, “Weed is bad for you and can lead to schizophrenia. You shouldn’t be doing this when there is actual medication available for this problem.”

She did not once try to explain the benefits of medication.

She did not once explain how it works.

She did say that I seem to have attributed ‘magic powers’ to medication; but did NOT tell me why I was wrong, or what it was actually like.

She kept calling me things like, “illogical”, “crazy”, “irrational” and I think “stupid” may have even made it in there once, for not considering medication. Firstly, I am none of those things and, while I recognise some of my arguments are more emotion based, I can recognise that and I know why I’m making the decisions I am. There is nothing irrational or crazy about that.

She treated my like an uneducated fool who simply preferred getting high to getting better and just wouldn’t listen to me when I kept trying to explain my position. She kept acting like weed was my main problem, like this is what I should be seeking treatment for above everything else, when I was there for completely different reasons and, on top of this, I’m not even actually addicted to it!!!

Additionally, I have researched the shit out of this stuff… and just because I couldn’t remember the name of specific medications that I know have fucked people up off the top of my head, doesn’t mean I’m stupid. Just because I couldn’t remember the science about a field that I have never actually studied, haven’t read about in ages and looked into of my own accord to fucking educate myself, doesn’t mean I’m stupid. Just because I couldn’t put my argument together in a manner as succinct as this at the time, doesn’t mean I’m stupid, just under pressure.

I am not saying that marijuana is a magic cure all. It can lead to respiratory problems (which I currently have and fucking hate) and has some kind of connection with schizophrenia. However, this bitch was talking like marijuana causes schizophrenia, but that simply isn’t true. Correlation ≠ causation. And from the studies I have read this whole thing is a chicken and egg type scenario. From what I understand, troubled youth who have dormant schizophrenic tendencies can have them unlocked upon trying marijuana. From what I understand, no one really knows if the tendencies would have developed on their own without the marijuana. If you’re young with those tendencies, you’re more likely to turn to drugs, and psychedelics have the potential to magnify any schizophrenic tendencies that are already there and sometimes bring them to light in a much more obvious way than before, thus leading to a diagnosis of schizophrenia, usually after a terrifyingly bad trip. This is how I understand it, if I am wrong, please re-educate me.

If this is indeed how it is, marijuana is not the culprit here. The solution is better mental health treatment and education for everyone as well as better drug use education for everyone. Obviously, this doesn’t solve the problem of, “Do I have underlying schizophrenic tendencies, could this unleash some kind of horrible mental illness in me?” But I am fairly certain that with all the horrible shit that’s been happening to me lately and with all the fucking stress I’m under, something would have presented itself by now. Seriously, if I was going to freak out and go nuts from this stuff, it would have happened. If the science is wrong there, ok fine. Someone correct me and I’ll add it into the pros and cons list.

And, for the record, I do have a constant pros and cons list going in my head. I keep track of this shit and lately I have been thinking I want to quit weed anyway. Not right this second, in my own fucking time. It’s not something I want to do forever, but right now it helps me. At any rate, by the end of next year I plan to be a recreational user once more, not an almost daily user.

——-*——-*——-*——-*——-*——-*——-*——-*——-

Now, aside from all this; aside from the fact that she greatly offended and insulted me, aside form the fact that she scared me, aside from the fact that she treated me like an ignorant fool and showed me very little respect by not even listening to me or producing proper counter-arguments; drugs were not even the reason I went to see her!!!

I went to see her for some extra support over the holiday period because Xanthe was unavailable. I did not want to talk about medication and debate a topic that I already have a firm position on. I did not want to go in there and have my intellect and ability to make decisions completely invalidated. I wanted to go in there for some extra fucking support and help.

She did not offer that at all. She would not let this issue rest and would not accept that this drug is beneficial to me. I am aware that there are lasting mood effects afterward. I am aware of how this affects me. But I am also aware of the fact that I would be fucking dead if I didn’t have weed to get me through difficult times. I would have killed myself, this is no exaggeration.

Obviously, medication could help with this too, I never said it couldn’t or wouldn’t. But medication is not for everyone. I will never give someone or something control over my life like that. If I ever actually become addicted to weed, there are people there to help me, and they will see it. Furthermore, I will see it. As I have said, I am incredibly self-aware and self-monitor this shit all the time. However, at the moment it is not controlling me. Giving permanent control of my moods, and thus my life, over to some doctor and some drug is a horrifying concept to me. Especially when the person in charge of dosage would be some fucking bitch who doesn’t even listen to me.

…from a letter I just wrote to Xanthe will follow. It pertains to the problems I’ve been having with my diet and body image recently and some other general stuff. It’s relevant and should go on here, but I’m too lazy to re-do it, so here it is in pure, conversational, letter form.

_{Context: I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on here before, but over the last few months, in stressful periods I’ve been finding it very difficult to eat (and swallow stuff in general), even when I’m physically starving. It’s been causing me a lot of distress (and social awkwardness) and, even though Xanthe assures me that it’s a trauma related thing, I’m very worried it will eventually develop into a full blown eating disorder seeing as I spent a great deal of my teenage years actually trying to give myself anorexia.}

I just remembered something else notable about the body image stuff.
If I look at myself in the mirrors in my house, I always look fatter. Always.
I used to think this was because stores use ‘skinny mirrors’ or whatever, which I’m sure is sometimes the case…
But I noticed today that there is a huge difference between how I see myself in the mirror in my room/bathroom/other bathroom and how I see myself in the reflection of the downstairs door to my apartment. All three mirrors in my house can’t be defective, though I didn’t buy them, so I guess I can’t be sure… but it seems unlikely.
But yeah. In window refelctions and others peoples’ mirrors, I look better.
It could possibly be because I hate being at home lately. I’m usually alone and because I don’t have any hobbies I’m always bored, so I basically just exist in this stoned state until someone gives me a reason to go out of the house.
It’s awful. I’m almost at the point where I hate getting stoned just as much sometimes, but it still provides comfort and relief, so I end up just hating the house.
It’s become such an opressive place to me now.
I think I will have to move once I’m over this…
Um, but yeah.
I don’t know if this is related to why I look better in other mirrors, but it’s the only explanation I could think of.
You know, unless this is turning into an anorexic thing.
I’m worried, I feel a lot of old tendencies and desires being stirred along with this rape stuff.
And you’re right, I’m a completely different person to how I was back then.
Now I’m the kind of person who doesn’t need food for comfort, because I’m learning other ways of doing that… which means that most of the barriers blocking my old anorexic desires are gone.
I also really want to get better now, so I’m try to catch and dismiss a lot of the unhealthy thoughts I do have…
But at the same time, I’ve never had a healthy self-image of any kind, so I don’t even really know what healthy is.
I can catch the extreme thoughts, sure, but I’m willing to bet my whole line of thinking in this area is very off.
From what you said today it sounds like this is still very much trauma related… but at the same time, every time this cycle repeats itself, or every time I get stressed, it gets worse.
And so does my anorexic thinking and body image distortion.
I start thinking of my inability to eat as a good thing and try to keep it going, even after it’s gone.
Last time it was starting to go away, now that I think about it, I created more mental stress for myself so that I would continue to not eat.
It wasn’t a conscious thing at the time, but I can see it now.
Anyway, I thought this was all pretty relevant.
Also, upon further consideration, the more I think about trying new foods, the more terrified I get.
For the last few years all I have done is exclude groups of things from my diet, rather than include them.
And I know that the aim of trying new foods is actually to try and help me eat healthier, which will ultimately result in weight loss anyway…
But the thought of starting to actually enjoy food is really making me sick.
I don’t want to enjoy it.
It’s sort of like why i’m scared of being happy.
I fear that if I let myself enjoy more kinds of foods, I’m just exposing myself to more things that can make me fat. More food = greater choice, which means I’m more likely to eat when I would usually just forgo food.
Since I started dieting in 2008 I guess I’ve come to see food as a very functional, rather than enjoyable, thing.
And now I’m scared of enjoying it.
Just like I always saw life as a very functional thing and now I’m scared of enjoying it.
I don’t know how to do things half way. Finding balance is very difficult for me, obviously.
And I’m terrified that if I let myself enjoy these things that I always thought of as sterile, emotionless things, I will lose any sense of discipline I ever had and go nuts.
You know, eat ALL the things! Forget ALL work! Play ALL the time!
Because I guess that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. Escape and go nuts.
And I’m scared that if I actually learn to enjoy life, I won’t have any work ethic left…
Which is still very important to me (biggest understatement ever).

_{[random crap that doesn’t need to go on here]}

Anyway, this is getting very long and less and less relevant.
I hope you don’t get it until after the weekend, so it doesn’t cut into your play time.
Also, sorry for not structuring this better. It must have been a bitch to read…
I’m just very stream of consciousnessy today, I guess.

It happens to the best of us.

Lately, the focus of therapy has been geared towards my identity and self-hate issues. I can accept that emotions are necessary. I can even express them willingly now (though admittedly it’s still a pretty controlled and mechanical process where emotions are seen as ‘tools’ to be used, rather than a part of me), but I still can’t really understand them. Part of the reason for that is my distorted sense of identity. When presented with positive emotions, particularly those expressed towards me by others, I don’t know how to react to or feel them. It doesn’t seem correct that people would or could feel anything positive towards me, so, when this situation arises, accordingly, so do problems.

On Tuesday morning I arrived at Xanthe’s office an absolute wreck. I was to go to the beach with some friends afterward, stay the night with them and come back the next day. A super fun holiday activity and an awesome way to spend a day or two over the summer. There was only one problem: recently with all this identity work taking place, I’d found myself unable to pretend anymore; unable to play the roles I usually play or meet the needs of others the same way that I used to. The recent identity work had slowly been building this stuff called ‘esteem’, but it was hidden, developing separate from my conscious mind.

Suddenly the idea of suppressing almost everything about myself to be perfect for other people in such a way that required them not to notice what I was doing in order for it to succeed didn’t seem so appealing. Suddenly, I wanted a fucking break. And I wanted people to like me. And not only that, but I wanted people to like me for me, not for the stuff I did for them.

But that presented many problems:

1. I didn’t know who I was;
2. I had been actively suppressing and running from who I was for my entire life and was convinced that I was a horrible, wretched, despicable person;
3. Obviously, I didn’t think anyone would like that person if they saw it;
4. I had been pretending around people for so long that surely they would notice if I started behaving completely differently, right?

Xanthe asked me why I hated myself so much; why I was so afraid of looking inwards to find an identity. I also wanted to know; I had felt something building inside me for ages (hint: the esteem)… and it felt good. But at the same time, it scared the shit out of me. I could feel it was ready to explode out and make my life exciting again… but I had no way of even comprehending what that meant. I was utterly terrified.

Especially because I had been conditioned to believe that my being a horrible person was the reason for my mother repeatedly abusing and hating me. She was my mother; I must have been the most despicable person ever born to make a mother hate her own child. I didn’t even do anything half the time, just tried to grow as a person; but I was punished for it constantly, so that person must have been evil and awful. That is what I truly believed.That is why I thought I had been running from myself for all these years.

I can’t even really remember what Xanthe said anymore, but I know she told me how child abuse works; she told me many times. She told me why I have value as a person and why I didn’t have to pretend to be anything on my up coming beach trip. Again, many times. A look of pity kept flickering across her face as I struggled to understand what she was saying. It made me so ashamed. But then it was the end of the session and I had to scamper off to the beach and struggle to find a way to be ‘me’ in front of all those people. I had no idea what was going to come out and I didn’t want to know.

As it turns out, nothing bad came out on the trip itself, it all came out afterward. I enjoyed both the trip down to and my time at the beach. Even after getting caught in traffic for aaaages, I had managed to find a rhythm to set my conversations to and I was feeling ok. We talked about things, we listened to music, we checked into our hotel and then we splashed around in the waves (and I got to feel sexy because they were both fatter than me).

At one stage, splashing around, there was this moment when everything Xanthe said suddenly made sense to me. I didn’t hear any weird voices, or have montage visions of my life or anything, I just felt something shift inside me and suddenly I felt free. In an instant, the concept of ‘pretending’ didn’t matter anymore and I felt amazing.

The only problem is, as soon as I realised that I felt that way, it stopped. But hey, small victories, right? For the rest of the evening I tried to make sense of what had occurred in the waves, while at the same time getting drunk and trying to converse with my friends, going on an outing to the casino, getting stared at by strange men all night long, getting even more drunk and learning how to deal and play blackjack properly (so we could gamble at the casino next time) in our room… with chocolate chips. All in all it was a good night.

However, I was pretty emotionally drained and needed a shower/cry before bed. In the morning, one girl left to beat the traffic home, the other girl and I stayed for a little longer, had a morning swim and ate breakfast before taking off home.

Getting home turned out to be a complicated process, but when I did, Alex and I hung out and I told him how fun it was and we watched some TV and got intimate… before I completely disintegrated into the self-doubting/loathing, second-guessing mess that follows every social outing these days.

Only this time, because therapy with Xanthe had been pretty traumatic the day before and I never really got a chance to process it properly, all of my identity issues came to the surface as well. And somewhere in between all those painful memories and my newly found self esteem/sense of freedom from splashing around in the waves the day before, my brain found room to re-interpret a few old memories for me. Or rather, the sudden burst of self esteem I’d experienced in the last day or so meant that I was now capable of seeing certain events as they actually were.

I felt this negative energy manifest out of nowhere and all of a sudden I was consumed with dread. Which quickly turned to utter horror and intense physical and emotional pain when I flashed back to some painful memories.

It turns out that I was repeatedly sexually abused and raped by both of my high school boyfriends. I’d always known that these relationships had been less than desirable in a lot of ways, but I’d never really acknowledged that I never wanted any part in my first sexual experience and that after that, more than half of my sexual experiences with those two boyfriends weren’t exactly voluntary.

At this stage, I find myself unwilling and unable to talk about what happened with the first guy, but by the time I was with the second one, I had such a distorted view of both relationships and sex that I’m not even sure if he knew how much he was damaging me. I know he cared for me, we really were in love. As much as I could have been at that stage anyway. It was puppy love. But he came from an abusive household and had some fucked up viewpoints of his own. It was a perfect storm of fucked and he couldn’t understand that I literally just did not understand sex.

It scared the shit out of me and confused me and I didn’t really want much part in it. But I knew it could feel good some times and I also knew that if I didn’t have sex with him eventually, he would leave me. So I tried it with him. But it didn’t work the first few times, which he blamed on me. So I tried to perform other sexual acts too… but, as I’d never done that shit before and I was doing it out of fear, not any actual desire to explore someone’s body, I was pretty terrible at it, which also caused him immense frustration.

His answer to this was to try and force me to masturbate when he wasn’t there. You know, cause that’s how you ‘get better’ and ‘discover’ your sexual needs and blah blah blah. But that doesn’t really work if you’re basically doing it at gun point. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing and I had no idea that it was supposed to make me feel good. The internet still didn’t really exist properly back than and, even if it had’ve been as easy as googling it, I wouldn’t/couldn’t have.

Anyway, long story short, I didn’t really improve much at sex, even though we were together for a year and a half. I wanted to be good at it because I wanted him to love me. I wanted to have sex, because I wanted to get better, so that he would love me. I also wanted to have sex so that he wouldn’t get angry/frustrated and trigger my abandonment issues. But there were very few times in our relationship that I actually wanted to have sex. It was just this thing that I had to do to keep my boyfriend.

Everyone else seemed to have sex too; it was normal, and occasionally it even felt good, so why would I ever complain? The rest of the time I just zoned out and let him do what he wanted. And when that meant I was crap at sex and his attempts to help me want sex failed, I put up with his anger and tried harder next time.

That was the most loving relationship I had ever been in at that stage in my life. Apart from the sexual dynamics, he was a kind, sweet boy who genuinely cared about me. In fact I think a great deal of his frustration came from the fact that he couldn’t help me build up all the self esteem my mother had stripped from me. He knew how evil she was before I did and hated her for what she did to me. But he couldn’t shake any self esteem into me, he couldn’t make sex appealing to me, and he ended up letting that frustration out in destructive ways.

This all feels like a bad dream. I can still remember the moment that ruined the rest of my adult life. From the moment I met my first boyfriend, I was adamant that I wouldn’t have sex with him. And he was ok with that… because sex wasn’t the only way to get off.

I didn’t like the way he pressured me, but I kept saying no and he kept stopping, so I figured it was ok. Plus, he said he loved me. No one had ever shown interest in me before, let alone said they loved me… and all teenage guys wanted sex, right? And that was all they wanted, right? Teenage boys don’t ‘get’ emotions like girls, they’re just crazy sex machines. So his behaviour seemed completely normal.

Whenever we were together he would touch me. My arms, my legs, and then it would get more intimate. I’d make him stop, but it was usually only a matter of about thirty seconds until he’d start again. One day, we were sitting on the top deck of my house and, for once, we were having fun. We were flirting and he hadn’t started touching me yet and… well I think it was the first time I’d ever properly flirted and had fun with a member of the opposite sex. It was fun and he was charming… so I kissed him.

And I’m pretty sure he took that as a sign that I would always want him, all the time, for the rest of the relationship. I don’t know if that was his first kiss or what, but he seemed to think it entitled him to my body. Like the fact that I acted first meant that I’d already said yes to everything else. For the rest of our relationship I was fighting off his hands.

Eventually it got to the stage where I was comfortable being topless with him. I’d had a shit tonne of massages for gymnastic injuries before, which was basically the same thing, right? The only difference was that they touched the other side. No big deal. Plus, it was strange and sort of exciting to think of my boobs as sexual objects*.

Once he’d broken down that barrier, he started trying to get into my pants. The hands got ever more frequent, until he was basically touching me any time I was within an arm length of him. I started to think that maybe this relationship wasn’t the greatest idea around that time. But I wanted it to work because I’d never had a boyfriend before, so I sort of ignored the warning signs and just kept telling him to fuck off when he touched me and started staying out of physical rage a lot of the time.

One night we went to a party and a bunch of us went back to his place. I hadn’t been drinking (I wasn’t into that because it contradicted my hyper-vigilant side, not that abstaining ended up doing me any good -_-) and as far as I know, neither had he, but most of the others had. We all went out to the annex (a cabin/room consisting of two bunk beds, a mattress on the floor and a small kitchenette with a work desk to one side) to sleep and, through his careful engineering and my being too tired to care, we ended up sharing a bed. Once again he kept touching me, kept trying to undo my jeans, kept trying to get to my fucking vagina.

And then something inside me just broke. It died. It detached. The last of my will and sense of self preservation was snuffed out. I just didn’t care anymore. I figured, it was going to happen sooner or later, why not with this wanker? My body went limp, my mind went numb and my eyes closed.

I don’t really remember what came after that, just that parts of it made me feel good; it aroused something in me that I didn’t even know existed. And it made me feel disgusting. He didn’t actually fuck me, and he acted like that made it ok. But it didn’t matter, from then on, basically every time he touched me my mind retreated to its hiding place and I just let him go to town. I was ruined.

The last of my dignity and sense of self had been taken. I let him break my free will. I abandoned myself; the poor, tiny, abused and neglected little mote that had somehow made it through years of child abuse; the last little spark of my sense of human rights; the last little speck of my personality and independence; I let it go. It needed me to keep fighting, I needed me to keep fighting, but I just let it all go. I gave up and let him take me.

There are no words to describe how deeply and utterly ashamed I am. It doesn’t matter that he is some crazy sex fiend that coerced me; I should have held out. I had spent my entire adolescence preparing for this; I basically made myself a bene gesserit, I mentally trained myself using ninja techniques, physically, I knew I could hold my own against most people, I had made myself a weapon and provided ample defenses for myself…

And then I let the first charming person who told me they loved me get past my defenses without question, even though I always knew he was a fucking creep. I always knew. And once he got past my defenses, he took away every thing else. And I let him do it.

This is exactly what I didn’t want to find. This exactly why I have been dreading the inwards search, the exploration of identity… This is what I didn’t want to know: that I actually deserve all the self-hate and self-abuse that I’ve been dishing out over the years.

Everyone told me that whatever it is I was running from wouldn’t be that bad. They told me I was a beautiful person. They told me that whatever was hiding under the surface wouldn’t make me a bad person. But they were wrong.

I gave up my right to be a person the night I let that arsehole touch me. I gave up my free will and let him break me. I remember thinking, “Fuck it, I don’t even care anymore”. I actually don’t deserve to live.

And now I have to live with this knowledge.

I have to live, knowing that I betrayed myself. I have to live, knowing that I really should have killed myself when I was 15, before all this even happened. Why do I have to live? Because I promised Alex I would.

Because since this revelation, my life has been insane. I have had intimate, loving sex for the first time in months… multiple times. I have felt closer to Alex than ever. And, most importantly, I felt his emotions. When I spoke about suicide this morning and how I really thought I might do it today, sorry if I did, it wasn’t his fault, he broke down. And this time I do mean in the (almost) crying way. It was horrible, and painful and powerful. I don’t even understand how, but I felt what he was feeling.

And I realised, if I kill myself, all I’m doing is creating exactly the same kind of pain I’m trying to get rid of in me, in him. And then he left for work (after a few more words and calming down) and I started writing.

I’m so fucking… numb. I hate myself so much for what I did. But Alex is adamant that it’s not my fault. Whether it is or not, it still feels like my fault. And I don’t want to have to live the rest of my life being a rape victim. I basically taught myself to be a fucking assassin in high school (as much as you can obsessing over certain books, psychology and Kill Bill anyway). I built my entire sense of self worth around being impenetrable and badarse. And now all I amount to is a pathetic, deluded, rapey piece of shit who let herself get fucked over, multiple times. Everyone in my life has treated my like shit. And now I know why I deserve it.

I don’t know how I’m going to make it through the weekend to my next appointment. I don’t want to live anymore. I haven’t wanted to live for months and now this has been revealed. I keep flashing back to the moment when I let him take me, and in an instant I am crying, trying to fight off the urge to tear off my own face or just straight out fucking kill myself. I don’t want to have to be this for the rest of my life. I don’t want these memories. I’m so fucking ashamed.

Sorry if there are typos etc in this… I can’t be fucked editing.

_{*I wore a crop top until I was 14 because I refused to acknowledge that I had boobs or had even hit puberty (even though I got my period at 10) until then, and only switched to bras out of necessity because it was actually impossible for me to fit childrens’ garments by that stage; boobs as something that made me sexy and desirable was a pretty new idea for me.}

A lot has been happening to me over the last few months. As I continued to grow increasingly more suicidal over a period spanning many weeks, I concurrently (and paradoxically) grew happier and started to grow as a person. It was this growth, in addition to involuntary re-examinations of many painful memories, that exacerbated my self hate and suicidal tendencies.

As a child, I was abused by many people, primarily by my mother (while my father buried himself in his work, providing, so that he could convince himself that he was at least doing something to help the family while his wife set about destroying herself, him and both of his children). I always had a sense that she was very protective of me; but only so that she could control me. I knew that she loved me; but it wasn’t really me. She loved her daughter, this thing that she had constructed in her mind, a fantasy that she’d already played out. And if I ever showed any signs of individuality, if I ever expressed personal taste or desire, I would be put down for it or told it was wrong; because to her it was wrong.

It didn’t take much to set my mother off. She was a meticulous woman who planned things out in such detail that a regular person wouldn’t even be able to comprehend the sheer amount of time and energy that went into just one daily activity. If anything went wrong and ruined her plans, she would freak the fuck out. On her saner days, a minor hitch was fixable and she could find a way around small obstacles; but more often than not, she was consumed by stress and the tiniest problem was enough to make her break down entirely, even if a quick and easy solution was right in front of her.

However, when I say ‘break down’ I do not mean she collapsed into a pathetic pile of anxious tears; I mean her sanity broke down; her perfectly crafted facade broke down; all normalcy broke down and a monster was unleashed. Shit got real.

Children aren’t the greatest at fitting in with perfectly crafted plans. Children are curious creatures; they want to explore, they like to play and, more importantly, they fight with each other. Not even necessarily in a malicious way; play fighting and debate are an important part of personal development. However in my house, fighting was fighting, playing was annoying, and exploring was forbidden.

A pattern emerged where any fight that started and almost any problem that occurred within the household was blamed on me first. It was very difficult to shift this blame afterward and my younger sister frequently took advantage of this (though I treated her rather poorly at times so it’s hard to know if this was a chicken or egg type thing). As the eldest, I should have known better; regardless of my emotions and why I may have been acting out, regardless of how much I had been provoked into reacting unfavourably, it was my responsibility to know better and behave responsibly.

After many years of this treatment, I basically attempted to purge myself of all emotions, personal wants and/or needs. At the same time, I put up a huge shield. Though ‘shield’ doesn’t really seem to cut it in this case. I enclosed myself in a fortress, a citadel, to ensure that no one could ever hurt me [again].

This meant that in highschool I didn’t know who I was or where I fit in, not only in relation to my peers at school, but in relation to anyone. I was nothing, no one. And I existed between a dark abyss of nothingness and suicide. It was like they played tug of war with me. That was my existence.

After I made it out of high school and got as far away from my family as I could at 17, I realised a few things about myself. Firstly, that my inability to make friends was not because I went to a tiny religious school where no one shared my interests or experiences; I just couldn’t make friends. Secondly, that there were norms in social or business circumstances that I’d never encountered before and were thus unprepared for. There were many other realisations, but those were the main two.

By the time I got to uni, I’d figured out a way to sort of get friends. The idea of anyone actually liking me had never even entered my head: firstly, there had never really been a ‘me’ to like before (as far as I was concerned, I’d killed ‘me’ long ago; though looking back I guess I did always know it was still lurking there somewhere); and, secondly, I loathed every single remaining part of myself for so long that I couldn’t have even understood the concept of someone liking me, were it ever presented to me. This meant that my method for attaining friends was very task-oriented.

I evolved into this person that existed to make things better for others, a leader, a servant. If there was a problem of any kind, I would fix it because that would make people like me. If I could help them to feel good and create positive memories for them, they would have to like me, because they would associate me with those positive memories. Ideally, they’d never even know I’d had to ‘do’ anything, I’d just make sure everything went smoothly, keep everyone happy, and then… hello happy memory that would make people want to spend time with me! (Yes, I basically played god to try and make people like me.)

It sort of worked for awhile, but then I wanted to know why no one wanted to be close to me. What was wrong with me? I’d tried literally every strategy I could think of, but still no one wanted me. This is when I ended up in therapy.

After a year with Xanthe, I learned that emotions were an inescapable part of life and something that I really needed to learn to deal with. I learned that the reason ‘no one wanted to be around me’ was that I wouldn’t let them. I learned that I didn’t really have a sense of self and that I hated and feared what little was there. I learned that my mother abused me throughout my entire life and my father let me down. I learned that all my squandering of emotions and erecting of walls did was make everything far, far worse. And I learned that my current boyfriend, my best friend and the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, had been mistreating me rather badly for a significant portion of our relationship.

That is where I was about a week ago. That is where I was after a year. That is where I will end this post. But I am about to begin another. Because since Tuesday, events have transpired that have changed the way I view a significant period of my life and, more importantly, how I view myself. The core reason for my deep self loathing has been uncovered in a way that I never expected, nor desired, nor know how to deal with… So I will write.