I came out of my counseling appointment today, and school was out because of early release, and it was warm, and somehow I decided I am not a bad person, no matter how many times I binge and purge, no matter how many drugs I take or how many times I discard my standards to take a sip of wine. All of that is absorbed inside of me, and the result is a spring day like this one, a whole day of nothing, just warm air and frantic practicing for district music festival.

I love playing the piano with the lid up. I can somehow abandon myself to it. All of anger can go into the song I am learning, Rachmaninoff (sp?) C sharp minor prelude. Wonderful song. And I love my violin song too, the Rumanian dances by Bartok. Cello cool as well... some French guy, allegro apassionado.

I felt panicked and skittery today at the happiness. I don't think my life is getting better. I just think my attitude is. So I am afraid it is fleeting, but I know I can fight for it. I know that I can choose to be happy.

It still scares me. With every happy thought I want to run. Is it better to have an unreliable warmth or a consistant, aching cold?

Ah, whatever. I hate the cold.

It's spring, spring, spring. Nothing matters.

I am taking Spanish three by correspondance and I took Spanish 2 my freshman year. AAAHHH!! I've been trying to go over direct and indirect object pronouns today. It's returning haltingly to my mind.

I feel like something should be wrong, but nothing is. Spring break is coming.

I think that I love myself. Even if I don't like myself most of the time, I do love myself. Love isn't affected by horror at the things I am capable of doing.

Spring

It may be spring. Everything is hazel, washed-out brown tinged with green. I guess hazel is spring's color. The color of my eyes anyway.

It rained today. It flooded the tennis courts so I couln't play. It wasn't a warm rain, but cold, rain bordering on freezing, rain that every once in a while spat bits of sleet that slid gracelessly down my windshield. But it was rain, rain that meant that maybe this schoolyear will end soon.

It has been so much better than the last.

Still, everywhere I look I feel punched with pain. It is in everything.

It is beautiful, in a way. Beautiful almost like the antithesis of spring. Necessary, for all the times I am left with my lungs empty from it.

Yes, that chapter of Ecclesiastes (or is it Ephesians?) is true. Chapter three maybe. To everything there is a time, and a season to everything under heaven.

Something like that.

small victories

I ate some angel food cake (which I love by the way) tonight and immediately regretted it. I knew I had to purge in some way. The only thing it wasn't too late for was OD-ing and throwing up. So I planned it all out.
Then I thought about my teeth. And because they look fine to me now, it doesn't seem quite real that all that throwing up is destroying them. But as I spent another two lovely hours with the dentist today, and I think that by now I have more fillings than I have teeth (or at least it seems like that), I was forced to think about it.

And I hate how I lose my coherency when I'm high (is high the word? I can't think of a better one). I imagined playing tennis tomorrow, stumbling around like an idiot.

So I decided to think about it. And the best way I know to think is to run. I grabbed my handy dandy ipod and my handy dandy payless running shoes that I got when some idiot stole my nice Adidas ones from my gym locker freshman year, and I headed out the door into the night.

I'm not sure how long I was intending to run. Not that long. Maybe twenty or thirty minutes. But I ran my usual fast two miles, and it wasn't enough, I still felt like OD-ing. So I decided to run until the desire was out of me, until I didn't need to anymore.

I ran about an hour, about five and a half miles. I ran, spending time I could have spent practicing for district music festival or (God forbid) doing homework. I ran and the temperature was perfect and it was all perfect, that running rhythm that settles into me, the way the stars were just barely visible behind the clouds. I ran out all of my anger and frustration, and I remembered why I ran every day all summer and September. There is something so amazingly therapeutic in running...

When I didn't feel like I had to OD anymore I came in. It was about 10:00 p.m. I wasn't tired, but my hands were really shaky. I proceded to aid my parents' attempts to sleep by crashing Rachmaninoff (sp?) on the piano.

My father looked in my ear because they've been hurting, and the pressure's been annoying, and apparently my eustachian tubes are all messed up, and in my right ear I have an infection and in my left ear I have negative pressure. Both of those things make me feel a bit far off, like everything is seen through a layer of... something.

Today in chemistry my teacher was trying to blow glass and he exploded his bubble and paper-thin glass shards were flying everywhere like confetti. It was the only exciting thing to happen all day.

Well the point is I am going to go do my homework and then eventually go to bed, but I didn't OD. I didn't somehow, and that is a major victory, because I had my mind set on it when I went out running. I guess some part of me didn't want to though or I wouldn't have ran. I need to pay more attention to that part, and less attention to the part that needs control desperately enough to destroy my mind, body, and teeth (part of my body, but in need of differentiation) for it.

midlife crisis

I am having another midlife crisis. With my excess of these at my young age, maybe I won't endure one when I really am in my mid life.

Sometime after lunch today something began to dawn on me. I'm not sure what brought it out. But I realized that maybe I don't have to do quantum physics. Maybe I can major in literature and creative writing etc, and go to grad school for that, and minor in philosophy. I would really like that.

Then I started thinking about math and how much I like it, and I don't think I could bear not taking as much math as I could get (which sounds really geeky but it's the sad truth). Then I thought about writing and I knew it was nearly my favorite thing in the world, that and reading. And talking about books and interpreting them.

So I was decided for a while but now I'm back to indecision. I don't know. For another few years my future will be a sort of buffet of amazing opportunities. After that, everything will begin to close. I don't want to choose wrong. It's my whole life I'm dealing with.

I did a budget for MIT for money management though, and I think that with working and scholarships and student loans it just might be possible. But then I thought about writing and reading at Oberlin maybe and that sounded very nice too.

I DON'T KNOW.

I get sick of Simple Plan. But last night I listened to their "Untitled" five times in a row. It says exactly how I am feeling.
Today I went to the temple with my church group. I shouldn't have been there. I'm not like them, not clean in that innocent way. The wine and the pills and everything is enough that I should have not gotten the recommend. But I needed to go... I needed to feel clean again, if only for an instant, even if it wasn't for me. It was a selfish reason to go, and we're supposed to go for others. But it was a reason.
I tried positioning my arms all different ways as they baptised me. No matter how I turned them you could see at least one long, shiny pink scar. You can't wear jewelry or watches or anything, so the reflective strip of tissue on my wrist glared with every light.
I can't explain in words how sad that made me feel, all those scars. And what made me sadder was the binging that I still did, the purging that I still did, the plans I made to get a razor that I still did, even as I regretted with every part of me all of the things I have done.
I just hoped, numbly, that someday, sometime, somehow God will forgive me, and I will deserve it.

It's like the Simple Plan song except one thing... it's not "how did this happen to me." It's "how did I do this to myself, and watch it happen, and let it happen, and end up so shocked at how bad it has become?"

I didn't imagine a few years ago that I would be abusing drugs, somewhat alcohol, razors, and all of this. I thought I was 'stronger.'

But it's not really about strength, is it? It's about learning. Learning to love and be something...

Half of my friends from church are going to college next year. It scared me. I'm scared of losing them, but the fear is more consuming than that. You know that feeling you get, when you've had a great day and you're somewhere far from home and from family and from friends that are like family, and everyone goes to sleep, and you can't? You just sit there watching them all night long, and the panic builds up inside of you and slowly chokes you so by dawn you feel insane?
That's how it feels to me, this college businesses. I've had a wonderful day, I'm ready to go to sleep, but I'm so afraid I'll be the one with insomnia.

It's not that I fear independence. It is that I fear being so far away from the places that I lived as I learned how to be.

I try to live my life, no regrets, no wishes, but I sure do wish I could have friendships like the girls in The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. Somehow I'm not capable of it. Somehow I can't connect. There is no balance. I throw myself in, or I keep myself out. I can't trust I can't love I can't help I can't hurt I can't do anything.

Josh emailed me and told me he wished I would start communicating with him how I feel.

I don't know how!

I went and I drank some wine. Some wine and then some chocolate milk.

And the whole time I kept telling myself, you can't do this. You can't take out your problems with alcohol and food.

But I did it anyway.

love is alone

One of my friends emailed me and asked me what the point of life was, why she was alive. I called her and we talked for a long while. It really reminded me of how imperative it is that people think about things, and read psychology, and develop their own philosophy about life. When we are children it is sometimes okay to get by on borrowed philosophies, but as we grow up those philosophies cannot be enough to live for.

I've been thinking... I really believe that humans have the ability to decide not to be miserable (excluding, again, chemical depression etc.), to decide not to hate someone, to decide to be positive about experiences. I think that people pretty much have control over their emotions. Except I don't think it's possible to decide not to love someone. I don't think that's something that you can really ever control. And I wonder why... what is so different about love? Why is it the one thing that we cannot control? That is why it is so frightening I think... it doesn't allow for control the way I like.

In biology those razorblades are starting to drive me crazy... I'm not desperate enough to grab one that's been slicing through cat muscles, but they look so perfect and gleaming and capable of easily slicing through me. I know it's just my residual past, holding on, but every time I close my eyes I can plan exactly where I'd cut, how deep, how to care for it, etc. It is a bit of a sickness, I think. It can't go away with anything but a lot of determination and a lot of time, both of which I can have if I choose to. ("Never end a sentence with a preposition.")

What else is weird is that there's this girl in my math class, Hilde, and I really like her. I think she's really nice, and I like her clothes. I try not to talk a lot in math class, but I'm sure even my existance makes me annoying sometimes. She's playing tennis though, and she's on JV because it's her first year. And for some reason I really care what she thinks about me. I don't understand why I'm like that with some people... I really care for some reason. I can't care about the big things like my body being healthy and whatnot, but I can care that Hilde doesn't hate me.

Go figure.

EDIT: You know what I want today more than anything? I want to go through one day just feeling the way stimuli make me feel, no bipolar, no short-circuited seratonin or whatnot... just me. Because with all these disorders I have, I don't know what's me anymore. I don't know if I've ever known what's me. And with bipolar... I don't know if anything I feel will ever be trustworthy and reliable. Two days later I could crash or soar. There's not really any predicting, no telling. Boom and bust.
As important as bipolar, OCD, GAD etc. are to who I am now, I can't help but wonder who I would be without them... and want to have just one day when my body does not randomly control my emotions. I just want one day to not be bipolar. I want to know what it feels like to trust myself.

quotes of people that understand things i can't explain

There is nothing like spending a day high to make you appreciate lucidity. I positively love waking up two days after I've OD'd when my mind and body are back to normal. It feels so nice just to be able to think clearly and walk without falling over (although I fall over a lot whether I'm high or not).
I've felt a little better today but I'm crazily nostalgic. Pain is so circular for me. I just can't escape. Things are shed but then I reenter the chrysalis, emerge again as a caterpillar, confused that I ever had wings. Time screeches to a halt at inconvenient moments, and begins to move backwards. Progress is lost and I am again immersed in the unsurmountable nostalgia.

"It was a kind of pretending composed of pride, of the pain of powerlessness, of need- and fear of need- and it came from caring: from caring so much that you were fearful for your own self, and how alone you were, or might someday be." -Lois Lowry.

e.e. cummings puts it best in this quote which I am sure I am not quoting word for word: down the brittle, treacherous, bright streets of memory comes my heart.

"Love is an excuse to get hurt And to hurt. 'Do you like to hurt?' 'I do! I do!' 'Then hurt me.'" -Bright Eyes (lover I don't have to love)

"Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths, but no truth. Socrates' 'know theyself' has as much avalue as the 'be virtuous' of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance." -Albert Camus

I will write all the words of the people that can explain what I cannot. I'm so sick of bulimia. I'm so sick of looking for a meaning of life in my scared, watery reflection in the toilet. I'm scared of everything and I'm sick of it all.

e.e. cummings always can say it better than I can.

in a middle of a room (e.e. cummings)

In a middle of a room
stands a suicide
sniffing a Paper rose
smiling to a self

"somewhere it is Spring and sometimes
people are in real: imagine
somewhere real flowers, but
i can't imagine real flowers for if i

could, they would somehow
not Be real"
(so he smiles
smiling) "but i will not

everywhere be real to
you in a moment"
The is blond
with small hands

"& everything is easier
than i had guessed everything would
be; even remembering the way who
looked at whom first, anyhow dancing"

(a moon swims out of a cloud
a clock strikes midnight
a finger pulls a trigger
a bird flies into a mirror)

Nights like last night seem to pass in jerks. I'd wake up, go throw up, curl up in my bed, drink milk, throw up, etc. I finished The Catcher in the Rye last night. I read it freshman year but I wanted to read it again. I'm glad I did. I like that book a lot. My favorite part is where he's talking about the museum, and how everytime you go there you're a little bit different. The only part of the book I hate is when he wakes up and his teacher's patting him. It doesn't satisfy me. It leaves me wondering what kind of guy his teacher is. Maybe it shouldn't but it does.

I'm still sick as can be today, but I'm not throwing up anymore. I have a rash and my skin is tight. My mind is blurry and I can't walk straight. Same old lithium high. I haven't OD'd in so long that I'd almost forgotten the misery. I can't believe I did this every week for over a year. I was so sick by the time Amanda etc. came barging in.

I have been reading all of my old favorite books lately, all the ones that hurt me to read. I'm reading Speak again now, which also crunches me up inside. Last night I had a nightmare that my uncle was molesting me. The books do this. They bring back the old nightmares. I need to read The Perks of being a Wallflower again after this. And I read I was a Teenage Fairy and America a few weeks ago. And every book hurts me. Most of them involve sexual abuse. It is weird, that they do. I wasn't aware of loving all the books about the parts of me I try to bury. But that's how it is. That's how it turns out. I like reading them because they make me cry. It's so much easier to cry over a character in a book than to cry over myself, although after a while they become one and the same.

It's crazy what books can do, how much they change you.

I'm sorry. I'm still high. This probably makes no sense. My hearbeat is still at 30 beats per minute. I still can't think or talk, can't really feel. Sometimes, though, I think that when I'm high, off drugs or inhalents or anything (I'm not using those anymore, don't worry) I make more sense to myself than any time I'm sober and all. It's like your mind drops all the silly pretenses and remembers what it is.

I don't think I make sense to other people though, so I'll shut up now. I'll go back to sleep. Tomorrow I'll be me again.

I can't lie anymore. Not about any of it.

Fourteen pink pills and my stomach turns and turns and will soon come up again.

Five laxatives and my stomach clenches and I double over in pain.

The real monster isn't something I can see or feel. It is the thing inside of me that wants to be anyone, anyone but me.

I have to go throw up now.
My mouth is filling with spit.

assortment of randomness

It's interesting how your whole life can be dictated by one malfunction in your brain... I can't even remember how bipolar works. Something to do with seratonin. I hate it though. I don't know why but I've been rapid-med-cycling lately. That's my on-med cycle (my off med one is longer and way more extreme). It's watered down, but it's bad enough, and rapid cycling is almost more frusterating than the extreme kind. Math geek that I am I kinda view myself as a sine or a cosine function. We're doing oscillations of a spring in math, and I kinda feel like one of those springs, not the kind with the dampening first derivative coefficient, but the kind that could bounce forever over their amplitude with no resistance...
Yesterday in biology my lab partner cut her finger on a razorblade as we were putting our cat ("Cousin It"... my gosh who names their dissected cat with all those bisected muscles hanging out?) away. I stood right next to her and watched her go through the normal human being's reaction to a painful cut. First she exclamed... I can't remember if she swore or not. Then she looked shocked at the blood welling up inside her latex-free glove. Then the pain hit her and she started crying and was taken to the nurse. Normal. Me... my reaction was not normal. I have been struggling in biology for weeks with the desire to steal one of those new, clean razorblades we go through like crazy. The problem is you get in so much trouble if you're caught. So I haven't. But when Heather (my lab partner) cut her finger I just wanted to grab a clean new one in its cardboard sleeve and cut my wrist, right over the pink ribbon scar. Then, instantaneously, every cell of me went numb. I was gone. I was floating away.

Everything about me when it comes to pain is abnormal (whatever normal is). When I cut my finger, I felt nothing. Either I dissociated right away or I am so used to cutting myself that I stored the pain away in some inaccessable part of me. I didn't say anything. I finished making the stupid quesadilla. Normal people feel it, say something, cry. Anyway, seeing Heather do that threw me into a depressive loop which lasted until sixth period when I went with my mom to buy another tennis racket for the one I ran over the other day (presumably). I hadn't studied for that test so that was a good thing. I was as depressed as medicated depression can be as I stared at all those rackets. But I cylced immediately, confusingly, a little later and was hypomanic, excessively happy, a little irritable.

I have made JV tennis, not varsity. I have not played well at all at tryouts. I go back and forth from caring to not caring with the oscillations of that spring. I like the people on JV though. I think it will be fun. I might shatter this sphere of dead air around me and be friendly and make friends. There's another junior on the team and a senior; other than that freshman and sophomores. I'll finally be the older one. Funny thing is I think I'll still be afraid of and intimidated by everyone on the team. I can't seem to be one of those confident upper-classmen that ruled the JV tennis with an iron fist when I was a freshman or sophomore.

What is interesting about math (I'm sorry I'm being so random) is that there are some instances when the question is simpler and more accurate than the answer. Like the question what is the squareroot of two. Spitting that back and saying the square root of two is more accurate than the analytical answer. Maybe I'm weird but I see metaphors in everything. For a few years of my life my writing was dominated by allegories. Eventually I gave up because I realized that everything was connected, and everything's qualities could be compared to something else's. But I still think about them. And that is an interesting quality of some mathematical expressions.

I haven't cut in a few weeks and I'm not sure if I'll do it again. I sure wanted to yesterday in biology, but it was only for an instant before I slingshotted out of my body. It's not that I have any real conviction to quit or anything. I'm not even trying to quit.
As to eating, I really need to lose the weight I put on this week. Today I ate a cookie. I'll pay for it. Binge, purge. There's pills for everything. I don't even know how to eat normally anymore after all this binging and purging. Maybe the way I eat will always be screwed up. The problem with bulimia is that if you finally stop purging, you still binge every once in a while, and if you can't purge there's no way to not feel miserable about it or get rid of it.

Finally, I found out today that fantasticality is a word but fantastical isn't. That seems weird to me for some reason. Why would you reference something's fantasticality? You could just call it fantastic. I realize that fantastical (which I wrote on my English test) is redundent, because it's turning an adjective into an adjective, but I was trying to think of what the quality of being a fantasy was. Oh well. Making up words is always fun.

Tomorrow I am hanging out with Charlie again. The guilt keeps creeping in. I wonder if there will be a point when I will just crack from it all?

more moaning

Yesterday I went to the dentist for more fillings. The whole time my jaw was aching and my lips were numb I just told myself, this is your fault. I always brushed my teeth after throwing up. I guess it didn't matter. Protection is gone. My teeth are in a precarious situation. Every time I brush my teeth at school and someone walks in and stares at me I remind myself, you did this. You did this with your pain and your anger and your obsessions and whatever drives you in this eating disorder.
You know what? I would still be doing it if the OD-ing didn't get so horrible due to tolerance.
I don't really like the dentist. Someone doing things you your mouth with you powerless. I know it's not sexual at all but it brings back memories. Does that make me sick?

Today was not so good. I went to a math competition. None of my friends were there. I've decided the people in my math class probably think I don't have friends because whenever I am with them I am alone. I sat with my math teacher for heaven's sakes. How pathetic does that look? And you know what? I don't really care. I know I have friends. Anyway, I got really frusterated at some of the math. Permutations and statistics. I don't remember how to do arithemetic sequences either, besides by dull iteration on my calculator screen (and that's so easy to lose track of).

At tennis we ran about two miles, which wasn't too hard, but for some reason I could not do anything today. Couldn't do forehands, couldn't volley, couldn't serve. They started separated the varsity people and all the contenders for varsity. Needless to say I didn't get separated. I think there's one slot left and I probably won't get it. That was so... horrible. That feeling. Them watching, not being able to serve, watching the kids that havea sure path to varsity. I felt like giving up and walking off that court. I'm so pathetic.
I walked to my car after practice and more sprinting, set my racket on top while I dug through my bag to find my keys. I finally found them. I drove a few blocks, feeling miserable, hating myself, going through the motions that become a theme when you're so used to putting yourself down. That voice in your mind that is constantly degrading you takes over and you sit back and agree, or disagree feebly. It doesn't matter. The voice always wins. I am weak, stupid, pathetic, selfish, devoid of commitment.
I heard this sound, kind of a scraping. Some dim, far-off corner of my mind clicked but I was too busy tearing myself apart. A few blocks later I realized that the scraping noise was my tennis racket falling off the roof of my car.
I drove back. I parked the car. I got out and I jogged about two miles, tracing where I had just driven. I found nothing. It was nice out except for everything miserable inside of me. The air felt like spring. Not as cold as Monday when my hands turned blue. My legs were sore from sprinting but I slowly fell into the jogging. I love running.
My mind was going through the permutations, just like on that math test today. My mind was thinking of every insult it could throw at me. Is it a part of me, that says those things? I can always feel this weak opposition, but that is just one more thing to ridicule, my inability to even stand up for myself when... who? Me? Is it me that hates me? Are those several very separate people in my mind all me? Man I hate dissociative disorders. You lose yourself. There is no single 'you' anymore. There are only pieces fighting for attention, all with different fears, emotions, and convictions, some stronger than others.
I ran and I ran and I hoped it was spring and I thought about killing myself and it seemed nice. I thought about tennis and not making varsity and it made sense to just let everything go. And then some part of me, one of the many, said I was shallow and stupid for feeling suicidal over losing my tennis racket and getting stuck on JV. It wasn't worth dying over.
But somehow it was more than that. It wasn't just the tennis. It was the way I felt so far away from it all. The way I wasn't even that concerned that I'd have to come up with $150 to buy a new tennis racket before tryouts tomorrow. That all seemed so far off, so trivial even though it affected my emotions in ways I couldn't control. I was just running, and there were my legs, sore, and my hands and my face and my body and sometimes maybe me, but mostly just some random, disconnected hunk of flesh and I thought, "FAT, STUPID, UGLY, WEAK." And I thought about accountability and how so many people weren't accountable, and how accountability was the one thing I thrived in. I can blame myself. It can be my fault. Fine. You can win.
I never used to give up this easily, to just accept things like now. I used to believe I had some sort of say in my life. Now I seem to be degrading into naturalism.

I'm not suicidal anymore. I ran it out of me, gave into that absence of logic. Now I am here and I will spend all of my money tomorrow on a racket and I'm not sure how my car will survive without gas, but those things happen, they work themselves out. I can jog everywhere if I have to with my twenty ton backpack. No sense in trying to avoid scoliosis and the like.

There are periods, painful, when I believe in myself, when I love myself. How awkward. How much more natural to slip into this state of mind where I am not worthy of even the oxygen diffusing into the alveoli in my lungs.

There's a lot I could write about. After a disaster violin performance on Saturday due to earthquakes in my hands, my father finally said there's nothing else he can do but prescribe me some pills to take right before I perform to calm me down, as nothing else has worked on my stagefright. I'll try them, but it is becoming the story of my life... if something doesn't work, take some pills and make it better.
The tennis tryouts are going okay except for my serving. When we had to run today I thought I was getting deathly pneumonia but my father just told me it was asthma and to use my inhaler and stop being dramatic.
I've gained two pounds and I won't let it stay that way. I'll lose them again by the end of the week, no matter what I have to do.
Cutting definitely doesn't work anymore. I just feel mechanical, hollow. It is terrifying to try to understand who I am without it, but I don't think it's a big part of me anymore. Just saying that makes me want to go do it, just to reassure myself that I still need it, but maybe I don't. Maybe I'm done with that part of my life.

have been lost the millions with lots
who feed on addiction selling pills and what's hot
I wish I could save her from all their delusions
all the confusion
of a nation that starves for salvation
but clothing is the closest approximation
to God and He only knows that drugs
are all we know of love
Every day we starve while we eat white bread
and beer instead of a handshake or hug
We spill the pills and sweep them
under the rug
My little sister is a Zombie in a body
with no soul in a role she has learned to play
in a world today where nothing else matters
but it matters, we gotta start feeding our soul

(From "Little Sister" by Jewel)

FRIDAYS!! TGIF!

Fridays are the reason I drag myself out of bed on monday mornings. Thank gosh I have grown accustomed to the method of delayed gratification... by the time friday comes nothing could ruin it. And I always buy myself a steamer on fridays as a reward for making it through the week. And this morning I had a pancake! And so far no attempts to purge. Today may not have been lovely all around (stupid muscle test in biology... how can you tell whether the pin is in the cleidobrachialis or the acromiodeltoideous?) but it was awesome just because it was friday. So I have formulated a new incentive program... every day I will give myself a reward for making it through the day, all my homework, lessons, etc. That will make the current tediousness (is that a word?) of life more bearable.

In English we were trying to decide whether this story about ants by Driesser (spelling?) was more realistic or romantic, and we started talking about whether it was subjective or objective, and as tends to happen we got confused over the line and blurred it hopelessly. Siobhan decided everything was subjective and I told her she should be an existentialist... but that existentialism implied that everyone is hopelessly trapped in an isolated sphere of subjective material and can't really interact due to the lack of anything common and objective. Siobhan said that sounded nice, (Sad!) and my teacher told me I should read Kierkegard.

I went to coffee with debate people today and Amanda, also ran into a ton of people, including Kristin and Alexis, who is the hottest guy in the universe, and smart too, and who had a conversation with me, and Brittany later was going on about Schroeder or somebody or other's cats. What if a cat is in a box, and if you open the box you'll spill acid or something that will kill it, but you don't know if the acid is already spilt and the cat is already dead? Could the cat be simultaneously dead and alive? I told Brittany that was stupid, because if you believe in the objective then it wouldn't matter if you knew the cat's status or not- the cat would either be objectively alive or not. But taking this example and taking away any literal meaning of cats drowning in acid etc. (and I know this is a somewhat stupid observation but it's friday, my brain has given up) what would an existentialist think? Just in general... if you define your world, and everything is subjective, what happens when your senses cannot give you any subjectively objective (lol, confusing) data? You don't know if the cat is dead or alive... what is it? In limbo? Dead and alive? In pergutory paying for it's sins before damnation or redemption?

The more I read philosophy, and think about what it means, love of knowledge, the more I realize how circular everything is... in the end, with all of that contradicting info, what can we trust besides our own instincts? And if those differ, how can any philosophy be true? Also, you don't really achieve knowledge from philosophy. You simply end up realizing how undefinable 'knowledge' really is.

Where is the off-switch in my brain? I am tired of the endless speculation!

What I am not worth

What do you say when someone has just changed your life but continues to stand there, stupidly, like it was just a hug, just some words, like every moment is the same, like this moment is just like the last? But everything is different... so what do you say? You can't say anything. Any words you say make it fake, belittle it. Words are awkward. There's no way to explain to someone that they've revolved your world. You can only stand there, smiling stupidly, and praying that some small part of them understands the weight of the gift they have given you...

My stitches are out. We were supposed to leave them in until Saturday but I was fed up with them so we pulled them out tonight. My finger looks like a train crash occurred on it... there are the tracks from the knots in the stiches, there is the train that's this hard, half-healed cut. I am fascinated with it somehow. They said I will always have a train track scar on that fingerprint now.

I was feeling sorry for myself a few days ago because my grandfather spent thousands and thousands to keep my brother alive in residential treatment, to keep the drugs out of his reach, and he won't give me money for college when all my work has been largely for him. I've always wanted to be accepted... to replace Craig somehow. Craig had all the attention and all the money all those years I was growing up, somewhat unnoticed. But then today my parents told me they would sell the house and move into an apartment if I got into MIT or Caltech or Berkely or the like. And now I feel so undeserving. I don't want them to give all of that up for me! I'm not worth that... but it does make me realize how much they care for me. I have never doubted that they loved me very much and would do anything for me. Even if they hurt me with neglect and calling me names and hitting me they still always have made me feel loved. And that means a lot to me now when I am dissecting the world in terms of love. I need it there, some sourt of source for life.

Well I have to go read The Grapes of Wrath. I have a hundred pages left and the test is monday or tuesday. And I am hopelessly behind in math. I don't understand at all how we are mixing up difference and differential equations like conjectured smoothies. Probably because I always do my history during math class. I just can't bring myself to pay attention in my classes anymore, which is a problem.

life is good

Although I am still struggling with eating (I swallowed more pills today... I imagine they turn into bugs in my stomach, tunneling through me), and although I am positively sick of school and desperately need some new source of motivation, and although I am not so sure about this happy thing, and although I am hypomanic at the moment...
Life is pretty good.
I have a little over two months left to be sixteen. But I am sixteen... now, alive. My parents thought I would be a lesbian or really afraid of guys, and all I can think about lately is the way Charlie cupped my cheek in his hand before he kissed me, and Josh (who I think may have told his parents he needs help). I have letters coming from colleges saying I will probably be a national merit scholarship semifinalist. We have no money to send me to MIT, but I still believe somehow that I'll come up with a way, and I know I'll go somewhere nice for grad school. I have a new best friend who is awesome and who I feel like I can talk to, the first person I have really talked to in three years, since I talked to Siobhan for hours every night (she is really mean to me now).
Tennis starts next week. I will probably be put on JV because I am too busy to come to enough practices to satisfy the varsity coach, but my friend is doing it this year so I won't be so alone.
Every time I've cut lately it has felt hollow, meaningless. As horrifying as it seems to me, maybe I don't need it anymore.
There are times when every tiny bit of me aches to be depressed and fragmented again, to go back to my comfort zone, but if you always settle for what you know, you'll never experience anything better.
This summer I am working on a research project, doing PCR (polymerase chain reaction) on segments of DNA and then doing gel electrophorysis on them to see if the carriers of some allele are shaped differently than the homozygous dominant and recessive. Or I am going to the MIT summer camp.
I am going to Hawaii this summer, Maui again, with Siobhan. I think that when we are alone she is herself again, the way I remember her, her eigth-grade persona. A year from this summer I'm going to Australia and New Zealand.
I get to go to the college next year to take math, mulitvariable calculus and linear algebra two. Although they will all be juniors and seniors in college, at least they won't know me, or hate me from knowing me the way all the seniors in my math class this year do. Maybe I'll have a chance to not be hated in math for the first time in a few years.

I went to my church youth group tonight for the first time really since September, and I sat there eating popcorn and watching movies with my old friends, some of them I've known since I was four, and I felt like I was alive. As horrible as everyone makes out high school to be, for me it has been an infinite improvement on middle school emotionally, althought it has gotten much more annoying academically. Unlike some people I know, I refuse to live high school just to prepare for college... I want to live it for NOW, kiss boys NOW, go to movies NOW, ace tests NOW, love myself NOW.

Tomorrow I may fall back into a depression and doubt everything I've written here (by the way another cousin was diagnosed with bipolar... now everyone on my mother's side I know has it except one uncle, one cousin, and my brother), but I'll have this written: My life is good. I am blessed with the life that I have. I can be happy in this... I can move horizontally to become something tangible. I don't have to be miserable to survive.

Even on my darkest days I hope that I will still admit, unfailingly, that all the pain, depression, anger, and horrible feelings in the world are worth the joy, happiness, and simple sensations 0f being alive.

It's so warm here and I can't figure out why I am happy when everything else is wrong. I guess this has been the best year of my life in many respects. I'm struggling to convince myself that happiness is possible. However, as happy as I am whenever my parents talk to me I feel like crying and punching them... way irritable. And I don't know why, why the way I feel should be so drastically different when I'm with them than with everyone else. This is my last year and a half with them. I don't want to make it miserable for all of us...

We are all so sick of school... can't handle anymore... the only answer is to work harder. Shove calculus and analytical solutions in through my eyelids, read Steinbeck until my brain shuts down from exhaustion. I have a mental battle every day trying to force myself to read the history chapter, do my chem homework, pay attention. I want to just sit back and read The Bell Jar for the third time, which makes me feel so acquainted with madness or slipping from the world. I want to be absorbed into the books I read, where I care about the world and the characters. I wake up every morning and my life becomes tautology... over and over again, the redundancy of mondays, the endless stretching of weeks until spring break in the far future. One foot in front of the other, I'll say, keep moving.

I turned in poems for our annual school literary magazines. I always feel a bit weird sharing poetry with the school; it's like taking some rotted piece of me and squelching it around to everyone. Poetry, unless factitious, can only expose a vital part of the author. I don't want the school to see me.
So I pick my least personal poetry, poetry more about others than about myself. I pick poetry that I want them to read, some veiled responses that I could never deliver to my friends. I remain icognito.

On the subject of poetry here is some Stephen Crane poetry I like:
Iwas in the darkness;
I could not see my words
Nor ther wishes of my heart.
Then suddenly there was a great light--

"Let me into the darkness again."
-----------
The Wayfarer
The wayfarer,
perceiving the pathway to truth,
was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
"Ha," he said,
"I see that none has passed here
in a long time."
Later he saw that each weed
was a singular knife.
"Well," he mumbled at last,
"Doubtless there are other roads."

aftermath

Well I instant messaged Josh for a long time today, and we yelled at each other a lot (if caps lock messages are yelling on IM), but maybe I got through... I don't know. I told him he needs to stop killing himself with his school schedule. He said he needed to think about college. I said that college didn't matter because he wasn't going to just magically quit destroying himself or hurting people around him. It was a long conversation in which I found myself telling him things that people always told me, that I never believed... that he needs to love himself, that he's worth it, that he's worth more than this. I seem to be getting put on the opposite end of everything lately... and I realized that I do love myself right now (that could change in a heartbeat, but it's something), I do care about myself, I do think I'm worth a lot, I don't want to destroy myself. All new emotions after years of hating myself far more than anyone else in the world. And the reason I do finally love myself is because people loved me. People never gave up on me. Some people have abandoned me, but some people have stuck with me through every horrible moment, and those people made all the difference in the end.
So I will do that for Josh.

I finally got him to agree to calling a psychologist and asking about insurance, which is a start. I will not give up on him or leave him alone though until he has the professional help he needs. I don't care if he hates me (and some part of him must be really mad at me right now)... I love him and I will do what's best for him, even if it hurts me, even if he thinks it hurts him.

I will never give up on that boy.

the action's taken now... it's more than just a thought

Erin and Olivia came over and we talked about high school and Josh and me and life and I felt safe. Friends. I had forgotten what they felt like. I had forgotten what the word meant. I am so terrified of losing people by burdening them too much. Well Olivia knows nearly everything and has never left me, and Erin knows enough that I don't believe she will.

They both hugged me and walked out the door and I came downstairs and I wrote Josh an email saying either he gets himself professional help or I intervene. And I told him he could hate me if he needed to.

And I pressed 'send' and cried.

And in this corner... CHARLIE! And in that corner... JOSH! And standing watching with fist in her mouth, wanting control... LINDSAY!

I sort of said this already but yesterday after my therapy session I was so mad at Josh I felt like breaking bottles, anything to get the anger out of me. I'm angry so much and I hate it, it has a horrible wet taste, it tastes of hypocrisy, it tastes of everything I pray to never become.

And the relationship is suffocating me. I feel my sanity slip away... I hate feeling helpless and he has done that to me, shown me a situation like my worst nightmares, a situation in which Josh self-destructs and destroys everything around him, and given me no way to intervene as I am forced to watch the situation play out.

My counselor also said that because the age difference between him and his brother is three years, the legal statute would call it abuse in Montana. I know that his 13-year-old brother is old enough to know what's right and wrong, but what Josh did was take the worst thing in his life, the one thing you shouldn't wish on anyone, and shoved it down his brother's throat, one consent at a time. Maybe it was consentual... it can't have been right. And I can't stand by and watch it happen. I have a responsibility in the situation to Josh and to his brother and his parents and everyone to make sure that Josh stops and gets the help he needs. I have to intervene in some way.

I will never leave Josh, which is what matters, but I feel like running like hell away from him. The feeling is okay as long as my actions don't reflect it. But I'm so mad at him.

And so that's Josh. And then there is Charlie. He came over and watched movies with me all day today. I sat on the couch and held his hand and he kissed me and it was uncomplicated. There was no nightmare baggage like there is with Josh. I love Charlie's personality, and actually I really just like Charlie as a whole. And there doesn't need to be an exchange of unbearable secrets. I think that's the way it should be, in high school, fun, not painful. What I have with Charlie is fun, refreshing, enjoyable. When I am with him I think about things like how special his kisses make me feel and the way he holds my face. When I am with Josh I imagine him engaging in incest, stare at the scars on his arms, and choke hearing about how many pills he just took. It's almost too much. I almost can't handle it, though I love him immeasurably.

So... I have some options with Josh: 1. cut off the romantic involvement, just make it a friendship for the moment so I feel safe 2. tell him I won't talk to him until he's proven to me he's gotten professional help 3. Not see him until he's worked through these things 4. If he won't intervene, I'll have to intervene. I'll have to tell someone.

Maybe the fact that some part of me wants to abandon him, wants to not have to deal with him isn't what matters. Maybe it matters that I refuse to abandon him and will never give up on him.

I think I would feel better about Charlie if I cut off romantic involvement with Josh as well. I don't know. I'm so confused. And some part of me also knows that every time I kiss Charlie just a little bit of my mind is thinking, "So there, Josh, I can hurt you too," even though he'll never know, and you have no idea how ashamed that makes me.

junioritis and more complaining, whining, being a coward

At school they don't seem willing to admit that senioritis is a serious disease that sets in about the last part of your Freshman year and intensifies to an insane buzz by the months right before you graduate. Today in my Carroll calc class everyone was bouncing off the walls. Sometimes I feel like that. Sometimes I want them to all shut up, grow up, and stop talking so dang loudly. But the truth is I really hate school by this time of year. I hate the idiot seniors in math that all stare at me like I'm a paramecium (doesn't help I just got fourth on the AMC, better than them). I hate history and my idiot liberal teacher that thinks liberalism should be smashed in everyone's face and that someone ought to be murdered or something like that if they get in a hunting accident and accidentally shoot someone. Like I've said, I'm more democratic than republican, economically at least, but some of the idiotic teachers and kids at my school make me want to be an extreme republican just to rub it in their faces.
And I hate dissecting things in biology... I HATE it. And I hate chemistry because my teacher can't teach. And I hate money management because she grades our papers so horribly I want to punch her. And I hate my English teacher who thinks he understands philosophy but really only indoctrinates us with his own incredibly subjective (and selective) viewpoints.

I had a therapy session today for the first time in a month. I sat on the same couch I've sat in since I was seven. I remember when my parents told me about my counselor I had a dream that she was a witch. I wouldn't talk to her for years. Now I want to go back and make the way I played with things less suggestive. It was so obvious how angry I was. Today she asked about cutting and not eating and I told her little half truths. I did cut last week but it didn't feel like anything. It felt... mechanical. I don't know. I am so disillusioned. I am sort of happy but I don't know how to deal with being happy. I can cope with depression and self-destruction so much better. I've never been happy in my life until this year. Am I supposed to think this is me? I know what happens if I stop taking the pills. I know where happiness goes. Does it count then, if it's artificial? I hate the pills. I hate the way I can't write, can't think. I hate how sick I am with every pill I take because of last year's continuous overdosing.
Just being in that room reminds me how screwed up life is. How many bad memories do I have in that room? I remember a few times when my counselor would point at the messy little-kid drawings on her wall and say I drew that last week. And she said I told her my name was Leena and that I was four. And that's how it was in the hospital. I kept shifting in and out of myself. I couldn't remember half of things. Half of them I could feel the identities in my mind caving, splitting. I cried myself to sleep every night. They needed to get an EKG and they took me to a room and the nurse said take off your shirt, your bra and I became so many people at once, fighting to control me, and I finally settled into somebody young, someone who thinks her name is Leena and that she's six years old, and I sat on that chair holding my knees in and rocking myself and crying and crying until they came and took me away and I was fourteen then. But not all of me. Some parts of me weren't fourteen. I was split open, split up. And my mom moved out and nothing made sense.

It is like that now. How do I live when I know that craziness is in me? The only reason I survived the hospital was Spongebob and the friends I made there, all us "crazy" kids who wanted to die or kept switching personalities or who cut their arms with razorblades or threw chairs when they were angry. All of us rejected. I may have been the "craziest" one there. And I remember when they told me they needed to write down all of my scars and I stood shivering as they drew some picture of all of my mistakes (they were mistakes, weren't they?) and the nurse looked so sad when she drew that scar on that paper girl's wrist. And I remember that night they thought I was going to drink the shampoo out of their little paper cup, like I thought that would kill me or something. I remember lying in my bed with my house a few blocks away and my father five hundred feet away in his office, not visiting me. Maybe he hated me for mom getting taken away... I remember how terrified I was. And I just lay there sobbing becuase they wouldn't come.

I've never been as homesick as then. Every night I would lie on my bed and remember pieces of my past until I didn't know what was real anymore, how much could possibly have happened and how much I am sick and made up in my mind. And I still don't know! I don't know whether my flashbacks are real, whether all of my horrible memories are fabricated because I need some excuse for the tatters that I was ripped in, for those crazy people in my head (they're still there, waiting for me to get older, to get as raw and close to the edge as I was in that hospital).

I hated the windows bolted shut! I hated the group therapy where we all taked about getting raped and wanting to die. I hated that little room, that room with the office and with my folder on the wall and what were they writing? I hated the play therapy, those stupid games, our stupid lives, the girl throwing chairs at the wall, the people with flashlights every fifteen minutes all night long...

I don't think I can ever forgive them for making me go there, even if it did save my life. Every time I look at that stupid picture on the wall at my counselor's that that girl- Leena- drew, that little kid who is somehow part of me, the bottom drops out of my stomach. I didn't know who I was anymore after I went there. Maybe I never had, but after that I didn't have a past, only a thousand fractured memories of people screaming, hitting, taking my clothes off, of me crying, screaming, laying on the floor when my brother left, and how do you make a picture of that many pieces, mismatched, unordered?

Do you know what I want? I want to know the truth. I want to know exactly what happened to me when I was little, exactly why I'm so crazy, why I can't even be happy. Because I can't. We talk about nihilism... I can't imagine that. But I can't imagine it's antithesis either. And most importantly, I can't remember myself. I am a void. I am all of the bad dreams, the bad memories...

And now I am me, struggling to live, because I am happy now and I don't know what to do with the past and I don't know how to become all of the people inside me.

OH... and I'm telling Josh it has to stop, he has to get help or I get him help.

EDIT upon regaining sanity: I really sound like I'm complaining in this post, because I am. I'm sorry. It was a cathartic. All of that was built up inside me and I didn't know it. I'm really angry today, and I think it is Josh I am angry at, but I am angry and frustrated and determined and confused and I'm happy, and I don't know who to be when all those things make no sense together.

pain

March. March comes with so much nostalgia.
Four years ago I was diagnosed with bipolar, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and put on two drugs... now I'm on four.
Four years ago I first cut myself, on a day when I wasn't even sure who I was anymore.
Four years ago I first OD'd- on my mother's prozac, so desperate to escape.
Four years ago I first attempted suicide...
Five years ago I stopped eating for the first time.
Three years ago I started throwing up through every method possible.

It's all March. February, march, the months go on, they all mark aniversiaries of the things I told myself I'd never do...

Now March and I'm defending someone who is sexually hurting others to help himself because I'm in love, and it's so against everything I could have possibly predicted. Do you know how badly it hurts to defend someone committing incest? I had oral sex with my brother and it took so much pain, so much effort to escape... I'm still not totally free from it, and before I'm free I'm defending someone who did what my brother did...

IT HURTS!!!!!!!!!! I don't know what to do! I love him but I hate him! He scares me... I'm scared of what he's doing, but I know him, I understand him, and maybe I never wanted to understand what goes on in the mind of the people that do this, but I'm forced to, I'm forced to understand and to love someone who is doing something that ruined my life. And I am helpless... I can't betray him, I can't stay with him, I can't talk to him, I can't not talk to him...

I want to scream. You are separated from this. This is me. This is my life. This is what I have gotten myself into... what I have feared more than anything I have ever feared... trying to understand the mind of someone who can't control sex when I can hardly make myself think about it... It's hell. It's the worst torture God or anyone could ever give me, to make me suffer through this, and I'm not sorry for it, whatever happens in my life happens, no regrets, not ever.

And I can't tell anyone around me really, and I can't think about it because my stomach gets sick, and I can't not think about it because it won't just go away...

I'D DO ANYTHING FOR HIM!!! I LOVE HIM!!! I loved him in June... and now I am faced with this and I don't know what to do because I've never loved anyone before. All of me is torn apart, every filament tearing...

I can't turn this off, it's my life. I want to walk away but I"m connected. I want to give someone who is me advice and then return again to a safe, sex-free bubble. I can't handle this. I can't handle thinking about what my brother did. How can I ever handle trying to think about what Josh is doing, and help him? And all the while love him, because I can no longer control it, because I took a chance and I'll never regret it but it's ripping my heart out, whether my heart is made of neurons or my heart is something more, I feel it, and it HURTS!