conversation

This is a conversation between me and my friend Shauna that we carried out on my notebook during chemistry. Reading over it I think she may have hit on a few really true things. She does know me a bit too well. I'm kind of starting it in the middle. She's in itallics and I'm in normal type. (This conversation transpired after she asked me if I was high last week and again today.)

Please tell me, I'm as ready as I will ever be, and a lot more ready than I was.
I have other people I can talk to.
Well then why not me? I'll be here all the same you know.
Because you don't need it right now.
Maybe I do.
Nope. You're surviving, same as me.
Maybe I would rather take the tough stuff, so we can at least laugh as well. Not this. This isn't what friendship is, this blankness. I feel like we are on a two-dimensional earth together. It is not worth it. It is just numbing. I don't want to be one of your drugs.
The only thing I'll tell you is I'm getting lost in drugs. And it sucks.
Don't you realize that you have everything you need to stop if you know you want to? You know that you don't want it. Really, what else could it take? You underestimate your will.
I don't know if I want to.
Well you don't seem very happy about it to me. You seem dead.
Ah, the joys of paint sealant. I feel numb. Okay by me.
What is there to feel numb from? What are you so afraid of?
Caring.
Well you obviously still care. Since you started writing this. So they aren't exactly working??? You haven't been hurt because you care- you're fighting the wrong battle.
Caring --> pain. Everything I believed in has dissolved. I swore I'd never do this and now I have to get high to survive a day.
What did you really believe in?
Not drugs. Not escaping from reality. Not apathy.
And why did that dissolve?
I don't know. I guess it didn't but I'm no longer living by it.
Why not?
I don't know. I seem to have failed at a lot of things.
Like what?
I don't know.
You know it is just because you concentrate too much on success.

She may have said a few things that were a bit TOO true, things I'm not sure I wanted to hear. But she did remotivate me. Tonight I took four pills. This is who I am, who I am meant to be. Seven pills a day to stabilize my mood. That's it. No more chemicals. It's so weak to run away from reality like this. I'd rather live in any moment, rather care, no matter how painful or horrible it was, than exist in a numb fog. It feels nice now but years later I will look back and realize I never really lived in high school, never really existed, and I will regret it then. If I think about all of the moments I'm wasting (these are the only moments I get to be sixteen years old) then the horrible feelings seem a bit more worth it and I feel a bit stronger.