the world splits like an orange

I have a hard time with oranges. First, the outside has to curl off in tilted tectonic plates (I could give you the three variable equation if you wanted it). Then one is left with a round ball full of water. It can hold itself together for a while, it can pretend to be whole and fool you with its semblance of a whole object, but as soon as you start prying at the top or the bottom the fault lines appear and the orange splits. Sometimes it splits cleanly, without shedding suculent juice; sometimes it splits in a messy tear of fibrous bundles of liquid, splashing all over everything.

So, too, is the world.

I'd like to first remark that bourgeoisification is in fact a word. I have Foucault to thank for that discovery. I am delighted. Usually when I add "isification" to the end of nouns in English essays and such I get little red lines drawn on my papers, or when I try to incorporate a noun-turned-verb in my conversation, I get awkward silences. I'm glad someone has gotten away with it.

I haven't been sleeping lately, not really. I'm addicted to Xanax, but I refuse to take it. People keep assuring me that life is better when you are not addicted to things. I have been addicted to various things since... um... forever, so I wouldn't know, but I'm willing to trust these people despite my fear. Anyway, I can fall asleep all right but then my dreams are really restless and I'm only sort of half-asleep; I wake up after like four hours. I have dreampt about the people I loved getting murdered, all of this in a sort of half-haze, that horrible place where it is too real to be a nightmare and maybe not too nightmarish to be real. These past two nights I have dreampt about math; the night before last I dreampt that I was existing on a plane of the equation f(x,y,z)=5+2x+4y or something like that. I kept trying to tell people that it wasn't right, I couldn't exist on a flat plane like that, but they kept telling me it was the philosophical plane and I should just accept it. This morning as I was half asleep and my dog was barking I dreampt that I was being spun around in a computer graphing program, that I was really four-dimensional and the only way to see me was the contour I could make on a 3D graph. Mostly these dreams are incredibly agitated; I wake up tired.

I suppose most people go through their periodic religious doubts, but this is the first time I have really considered all of my subconscious naggings. It has split everything open like an orange, like an unclean orange trailing jagged translucent pockets of flesh dripping sticky juice all over the place.
I can't drink orange juice anymore, because of my teeth. You know what's funny is that when I used to OD on lithium to make myself throw up (which caused this teeth problem in the first place), I usually swallowed the pills with orange juice.

If I didn't feel somewhat awake, I would believe I am sleeping in that agitated state of restlessness. I feel restless. I have been so anxious this month. It doesn't help that school is starting. I am worried about everything. I can't stop worrying. The medication helps, but I don't take it during the day. I should and I will, but it makes me tired. Not tired enough to sleep.

I want to find the bit of me that triggers chain reactions and kill it. Why are there wires connecting all of the vulnerable areas of my mind? Now that the religious globe has blown up in plumes of flame like the friendly analogous orange, everything else follows. I can't quarantine myself anymore. One part of the castle goes and they all go. Where are my walls? Oh right. I've been trying to tear them down for two years. I'm starting to succeed, but am only experiencing the detrimental consequences of a relatively naked psyche.

I was reading my sixth and early-seventh grade journals today. That was before the first explosion. I wasn't really bipolar back then. I was depressed in elementary school, but although in middle school I was angry at my mom for hitting me and yelling at me, my mood was somewhat in the middle, until november of seventh grade at least. I worried a lot about being liked, about being popular. Now I read it and I'm glad I've changed, but I wish sometimes that just once I could try another week without the bipolar. I can't remember what it felt like to be somewhere in the middle. All I know are these poles of the orange where I pry, pry, pry and crack the world into sections.

I used to be a lot more sociable too. I used to do a lot more things with people. I had a lot of friends. They weren't all really good friends at all the way my friends are now, but there were lots of them. I still felt alone, though. I always felt alone.

I remember that in elementary school my friends would ask me to play during recess. The boys always asked me to play kickball with them; the girls wanted to play our imaginary animals game. I was very involved in both. I had a lot of friends then, too. But there were some days when I sat against the building and watched them play while I read. I remember reading those books about the mouse that had a motorcycle. They were always easy for me to read. I remember reading the book and watching my friends play kickball or imaginary animals. I remember feeling very far away.

I remember reading The Devil's Arithmetic in fourth grade. I remember writing about this too. Maybe in this blog. Oh well. It is proof that my past never really recedes for me; it is on a conveyer belt going so fast that centrifugal force holds things to it. Even at the end of the belt, the memories stayed glued as the fall off the edge of the world. Inevitably, they all come up again to repeat it all over and over. It is like Nietzsche's idea of reocurring life (I seem to be referencing him a lot lately), except that the lives are all superimposed, occuring within eachother. Anyway, in fourth grade when I read that book I remember sitting outside and carving UIKI1 into a metal plate on the playground all alone, watching people. I can't remember what all of the letters stood for. It was akin to the holocaust numbers people got burned in their arms (which I was thinking about because of the book). I remember what the 1 stood for though. It stood for me, just me, all alone. Even when I was playing kickball or imaginary animals (of course we grew out of imaginary animals in fifth grade). Even then I was all alone.
Whenever we did play imaginary animals I was secretly afraid. I knew that I didn't really believe in our animals or our alien games or anything we made up; I also knew I couldn't tell anyone that, in case they all believed in it but me, and I was the wrong one. But I felt left out, then, then as we talked about the animals that were sitting in our laps. I couldn't understand where the line was between make-believe and real. It was so horribly blurred for me.

It's not that I didn't have friends. I've always had a lot of friends. It's not that I wasn't good at kickball or imaginary animals. It's that I didn't ever believe in them. I was never a part of my peers' world. I always felt alone, until pretty much a year or two ago.

My problem is that I'm just so nostalgic, and I'm so circuited; the conveyor belt loops and loops; the explosions trigger more and more explosions.

I don't know what to do anymore. I'm very afraid right now. I haven't self-injured in three months. I haven't binged or purged in three months. I feel very lost without these things, and now I have lost my religion as well. I feel so vulnerable and empty out in vacant space. I want to find somewhere where I belong. That's what I've really always wanted: to belong somewhere.