important stuff

The date went well... I don't want to talk about it now. I like him a lot, and I think he will probably ask me out again. I'm okay with this, I'm ready for it. As mad as I thought my parents would be when they found out some of the things Matt and I were doing, they were actually just as overjoyed as they were mad. They were so glad I was able to have some sort of sexual life. I think they were scared for a long time that I would end up lesbian. My mom said she was worried at least. Anyway...

I'm very angry today. Same old memories. I'm not just angry about my past, I'm angry about the world in general, hurting little kids like it's okay. Even the codependent people that put up with it and don't help their kids, like my dad. He watched my brother and I get hit and shoved and choked and did nothing. Then again, we watched him get screamed at and hit and shoved without doing anything as well. Therefore I suppose I can't really be blameless when it comes to codependency. He wasn't the only one codependent on my mother.

I've spent so many years running from this anger. Overdosing on all sorts of drugs, popping xanax, high and dissociative. All of the things I did, all those drugs, all that cutting, even the eating disorder in the end, was a desperate attempt to escape from this world and my life. It is odd how I never tried to do any of that while I was being abused. No, while I was being abused I was content to stand there and let her humiliate me (I did scream back at her sometimes, but in the end I always gave up, and I never physically fought back because that just made it hurt worse, and she always won. Now, I would give anything to go back and fight it, to have the satisfaction of knowing I didn't just let it happen. But no. I don't think I was a coward. I refused to hate myself for not fighting. But there was something in me that just got too tired to fight. I got passive agressive I suppose.). But as soon as my mother and various others quite abusing me, I started trying to escape.

That's the odd thing. That escaping from the abuse was never a desperate desire of mine. The more desperate desire was to escape from myself and who I was without the abuse, to escape from the fragments the abuse left in my life. It's also odd that after the abuse ended, what I wanted more than anything was just to have it back again, and in addition to try to stone myself out of reality, I tried to abuse myself back into a comfortable world...

It's never going to go away, is it, this anger I am running from? I might as well face it, hadn't I? It's okay to be angry. It's okay Lindsay it's okay. Anger means you're healing. Anger means you're not running any longer, not floating through the days in some alternate universe induced by some drug.

IT IS OKAY FOR ME TO BE ANGRY. Anger is helfpul. I'm not angry with myself, really. I did everything I could. So I didn't fight back. So freaking what? Some people do, some people don't. By the time I was six I had the mind of a twenty-year-old. Submission came with it, in some ways. A tiredness of sorts.

I think that in life, we start out and end the same. When we are very, very young, we don't know anything about the world, and so we instinctively trust it; childlike innocence I suppose you'd call it. With growing up comes cynicism, comes doubt, comes anger, comes confusion, comes disgust with world. And from what I have seen, and sense, and what I dearly hope is right, that after a life spent in self-discovery, with old age childhood comes back. We trust the world not because we know nothing about it, but because we know everything about it, all the horror it holds, and choose to trust anyway. We are innocent not because nothing horrible has ever happened to us or we have never done anything horrible, but because we realize innocense is a state of mind, a choice, completely based on internal decisions; the world cannot take innocense away from us, no matter what we believed when we were thirty. And so we die like we were born... innocent, trusting... not because the world is perfect, or fair, or good, or anything we believed when we were young, but because we love the world, because ballance is life, because life is... worth it.

I'm probably sounding cheesy and dramatic. I know that a lot of people's lives don't end like that. But the happiest people die with a knowledge that although we as individuals and humans contain a horrible capacity for evil, we contain an equal capacity for good, and everyone has both, and most people choose good, most people choose right. It is something, to die with pity, not anger, at those that choose evil.

But right now I am not young or old, and I mistrust the world, and I see so much evil in it, and I am angry at the people that perpetrate it. And that is okay. That is middle age. That is life.