rambling rambling all the day

Hopefully this entry will not be as grossly long as I feel it needs to be. But I need to explain things... not to you, but to myself. Nothing becomes real until it is written for me. Real life exists in suspension, and cannot be fixated until I write it down.
I seem to be drifting away again. I noticed this first on Friday when I was obsessing over dualism and Descartes. There is a gap between cells and soul. No fusion can be made. Dualism is undeniable. It is so obvious in the nasty shock I get every time I see myself reflected palely in a display case. Some separate aspects of me refuse to connect.
I have never cared much about my body. It is odd, struggling to recognize it. I have starved it, lacerated it, bruised it, destroyed it, all in some desperate attempt to connect the nerves, to feel physical pain, to validate the phantom emotions. The value of my split nature should be ballanced, equal. But I cannot seem to care much about my body. There are odd surprises, like my teeth. But when I feel so incredibly detached to physical reality then it is not hard to cut, to throw up, to destroy myself. It is almost amusing at times.
I suppose I need to change that.
Friday night I was intending to read but I got distracted by one of my half-finished books, and I got writing. It is about a boy whose dad attempts suicide and gets put in a hospital. I keep trying to write books that are not so close to the truth, but when I write about what has happened to me I feel as if I can control it. I can't seem to help myself anyway... all books start out fiction and end up painfully like an autobiography. So this boy went to visit his dad in the hospital again, and it was a really good session. The boy and the dad really connected, which was fiction because my father and I have never connected like that. It was so easy to write... it had almost happened. It was a mixture of everything. I've had so many family therapy sessions in my life that it wasn't difficult to recreate one. In the end the mother believed the doctor, thought her son had something really wrong with him, like what happened to me in that hospital with that idiot who wore a white shirt and khaki pants. I hated him... why can't my psychiatrist defend me? Or my therapist? Why did they let him tell my mom I was a hypochondriac so she had an excuse for all of the things that are wrong with me that involved her? Anyway, this wasn't supposed to happen but next in the book the boy's teacher sexually abuses him and somehow writing that, trying to explain it, trying to make that pain believable, make that disconnection plausable enough for people to read and understand, really drained me. I didn't mean to write it but I had to. And I realized that in all of these years I have been writing about all of these horrible things it was the first time I've fictionalized the sexual abuse. And that hurt for some reason. It really hurt.
Anyway, the pain and disillusionment from that leads into what happened yesterday. I woke up much earlier than I would have liked but read in bed for a while- Speaker for the Dead by Orsen Scott Card. I finally got up and decided to make myself a casadilla (wow I don't think I'm spelling that right). So I got out part of a pita pocket and started cutting myself some cheese.
I wasn't paying attention I guess. It wasn't intentional. The knife slipped. At first I was only mad at the blood getting on my cheese. It didn't hurt of course. Things never seem to hurt me. This dissociation saves me... and often frustrates me when I need so badly to hurt, to feel the pain but I cannot because of something that happened so long ago.
I finished making the casadilla. I ate half of it before losing my nerve (cheese! I can't eat cheese!) and giving it to my dad, who then asked why my finger was bleeding so much and said I needed to go get stitches.
There are so many ironies about this. One is that although it was a very deep cut it was not as deep as some of the times I have cut myself, most of them lately, and nobody stitched those up... I nursed them with hydrogen peroxide and gauze for weeks, struggling to fight off infection. A second irony is that I NEVER eat cheese. It's way high in calories and fat. I just did yesterday because I knew I was going to take the laxatives (which made me feel even sicker because last week I took them with the wine when I got really sick, or drunk I guess). A third irony is that I was using the same knife I've used before to try to cut my wrist and leg and it was way too dull then to cut when I wanted it to, but now that I'd accidentally slammed it into my finger it was sharp enough to severely cut it (I guess my mother had just sharpened it).
My father wanted to watch a basketball game but he took me to the hospital, and so began a day of incredible disconnection and confusion.
We waited at the actual hospital for three hours. My finger was numb, and eventually quit bleeding. Nobody came for me. I read my book. I watched people in the waiting room. I think one girl was there because she'd attempted suicide and her parents were talking to her in loud, tight voices and she looked angry, and I wondered if I'd looked that angry during those identical conversations I've had with my parents.
Part of the book I was reading (Card): "'When you really know somebody, you can't hate them.' 'Or maybe it's just that you can't really know them until you stop hating them.' 'Most truth can only be expressed in circular paradoxes.' ...'Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart."
This passage represents something I would die to defend: all humans have the capacity to understand each other. We have had the same emotions as the most cold-blooded of murderers at times. And once I have understood this, I have found it impossible not to understand people, love them, and forgive them, even those that have hurt me the most severely. I refused to understand my father's suicide attempt for a long time because I wanted to be angry at him for it, I wanted to hate him for it. But in my heart I understand what happens when you attempt suicide, how nothing else matters. And once I couldn't keep hating him constantly I began to understand, and because of that I could only love and forgive him. Same with my mom hitting me. I tried to hate her, tried to stay mad, but once the anger fades I know that inside of me are all of the emotions that made my mother hit me. And I can't hate her anymore.
I thought about a lot of things in the hospital waiting room as I stared at my father who watched the game. This is truth. We can pretend we exist on a surface of basketball games, but real truth attacks you violently. With all life, with every human breath, comes pain. We can try to run from it and only achieve more. We can consciously understand our fears and consciously embrace misery. But everywhere... it is there. It is life. And I learn that what I am most afraid of is not what I thought it was; it's not the possibility of eternal, perpetual pain. It is the possibility that one day I will hate that pain so much that I will choose death, or, far worse, eternal apathy. Death, nothingness... is far worse than pain. For so long I just wanted to cease existing. Now I fear that desire more than anything.
We went to urgent care after three hours. In one hour they were stitching me up. I don't mind pain at all. I love pain. I won't lie and say I didn't like it, every bit of it. I loved that it was excusable, having this done to me, and that I did not have to deliberately cause it. I loved the anesthesia being pumped into my throbbing finger. I loved the needle going in and out, the scissors tying the four knots in my finger.
I believe God must pay attention to me, because so many times lately when I have felt like I would explode if I did not cut I hurt myself like this. It lacks the control, the charged emotion of deliberate pain, but it is enough to keep me going.

I understand myself. I understand that I fear happiness enough to choose pain. I understand that I have chosen to do unhealthy things instead of be happy, and I am not totally sure why. It seems so much easier for me to fear happiness, to fear things that others enjoy like sex, to fear a world in which I could touch people, a world in which I could be close enough to someone to be willing to have sex with them. Now it is a sick lurch in my chest... I cannot even begin to imagine being that close to a boy. I am myself. I am my isolated island. How can I ever let someone in, and someone who is constantly thinking about sex and girls? Why does it bother me so much? Why does it make me sick and my body tingle?

I worry, sometimes, a lot, that my fear and my need for pain will keep me forever from happiness or any sort of real sexual contact. But I guess that more than that I fear what is infinitely more likely than happiness or contact: that I will accept apathy, that if I do not kill myself I will choose to live while I am dead, dead and numb.

I don't want that! I don't! I want to live! I want to feel! I want to someday not need these little everyday pains to survive... I know I am strong enough, if it takes strength. But I don't want to be happy. How can I ever overcome that simple fact?