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.
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One day at a time.
that research project sounds awesome.... and really, any kid who does stuff like that in their free time deserves to go to MIT; i have no doubt you will get there if you really want it.
oh- about math class: the only reason they 'hate' you is becuase they know you have something they can never touch. i have faced much the same thing througout high school. freshman year i was the only one in honors bio, and i was pretty unpopular for it- with my own age group, classmates, and even some teachers. i've experienced some of the same thing at carroll- last semester i wrote a paper for ethics that my prof really liked. she read it to the class, and the backlash was pretty amazing. it had nothing to with the worth of the paper, but how my doing well may have brought their grades down. it was ridiculous. it has nothing to do with the person being targeted, though. it is completely about others' discomfort when faced with a talent and passion few hold. i don't know why that is, and i think that sort of thing will always surface, but also that the further along you get the less it occurs.
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