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!

Drifting off (again)... wow how boring is my life?

Here is more on the book I read by Orsen Scott Card like I promised, as that book fascinated me... I think this is the theme:
Even the most hideous truth is less painful than the lies meant to repress it- when we destroy or try to dominate and suffocate what we cannot understand, and therefor fear, we lose all of the truth and the qualities of authentic civilization.
That's the message I got anyway, and I believe it's true, and I believe that if another race were to rise, humanity would do anything to separate it from us and to, eventually, destroy it. We seem to be like that, as a whole. We are so afraid of what is alien that we would destroy a new species before we would ever consider that we could learn from them, that perhaps the way we do things is not the right way, and surely not the only way.

On another note... Oxytocin, I think it's called, the 'cuddle hormone.' It makes people touch, trust, connect. I must be deficient in it. My pituitary gland must be disabled when it comes to cuddling production. That would explain something.
But it wouldn't explain the psychological hunger I have for all of the things I cannot seem to do: hug, touch, trust.

The more I write the more I uncover within myself, the more I understand the depths of the oceanic world. But the more I write the more I lose sight of the bladelike surface where I get the feeling they want me to live, my parents, my therapist. They call it reality and say I am floating. Maybe I am diving to a place they will not go, not floating- a place I may not be able to return from, if I were to ever want to.

Random Emily Dickenson quotes: (I don't really like her poetry for the most part but she too has her moments)
"Forever is composed of nows." (very true)
"That it will never come again/Is what makes life so sweet."
"The truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind."
"If I can stop one heart from breaking/I shall not live in vain;/If I canease one life the aching/or cool one pain/or help one fainting robin unto his nest again/I shall not live in vain." (This is my favorite bit of poetry of hers, and I believe it thoroughly, and live by it... I seem to have always lived for others. I seem to lack the ability to live for myself at the moment).
"I many times thought peace had come/when peace was far away/as wrecked men deem they sight the land/at center of the sea/and struggling slacker, but to prove/as hopelessly as I/how many fictitious shores/before the harbor lie." (welcome to bipolar, tourists).
And a quote not by Emily Dickenson:
"Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but he cannot speak it. It is for this reason that love becomes the ultimate human answer to the ultimate human question." (Archibald MacLeish).

With life comes dissociationg and I dissociate more and more. I don't remember driving places. Whole classes are eaten away. This saved me once, when I was three and four and could not handle what was happening. Now, it only serves to cut me off even more completely from the world. Everything is so far away.
How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there *is* no going back? There are some things time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep... and take hold."-Frodo (J.R.R. Tolkein)
I so wish I didn't believe that quote. I so wish it wasn't the theme song to my life.
I want to believe in myself as a human being, but somehow I can't seem to. Somehow my life seems to only exist in the art I create, and it is all dark... everything I write is about pain, abuse, misery, isolation. Some stories end happy, many end with the same clean-cut nausea I feel every day just at the physical horror of being alive and not being able to truly believe it, or want it, or care. Maybe the only real sense of happiness is in the suspension between heaven and hell, in this gray area I exist in.

Everything is just so numbing. I try to hurt but life is an anesthetic thanks to my dissocative disorder.

Josh told me he had oral sex with his brother again. And I've been having more dreams lately, nightmares I wake up from hot in a cold room, dreams about all of that, all of that stuff I hate, I try to forget.

I'm not unhappy. I've quit eating meat, which is a step up from quitting eating. I figure it's progress.

I drift away... the world is a smear under a coverslip.

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?

My brain was on hyperdrive today even though I was uber tired. I thought about philosophy all day. My life has been a struggle to juxtapose my dual nature (yes Sartre it IS dual), balance physical and psychological. I've destroyed my body, tried to repair it, etc. etc. I've been trying to come up with my own philosophy on the dual nature of humans, how people can be a summation of themselves and also exist in dual dimensions. I need some sort of fusion between soul and body... maybe that's what Descartes lacked. Anyway, I thought about that...
And I thought a lot about politics, and the unbridgable gap between philosophical politics and politics in actuality. There's so many great ideals for societal systems, so many social contracts, so many different theories of government. Monarchy, plutocracy, anarchy, oligarchy, democracy, socialism, theocracy... they are all lovely in theory but they can never work. Take socialism. It's a fantastic idea. But put it into practice and it degrades into communism. Communism as an ideal is great too. But put communism into practice and you achieve 'absolute' corruption of one individual due to an excess of 'absolute' power. I'm pretty sure as well that democracy is pretty much impossible to achieve in reality.

The problem with all social theories, and most theories of any nature, is that they work perfectly well in calculators, on paper, in people's minds, but once you try to enact them they all deteriorate into chaos. I know that different logistics and discrete math can be used to predict chaos, but in my opinion that's a bit of an oxymoron. Chaos is unpredictable. We can make some accurate conjectures on how a society will react to something based on political knowledge and precedent, but in reality chaos controls. We cannot be guaranteed that a system will behave in the predicted way. I guess it's all chaos theory...

I was also thinking today about Darwinism, and how many have manipulated it i.e. Herbert Spencer, and I was wondering if it could possibly be directly applied to psychology. That seems to be implying determinism though, which nobody really wants to believe when it comes to psychology. We can believe that evolution exists on a biological basis, and that due to the berevity of our generation it is difficult to manipulate, and that one generation could never reap the benefits of its own manipulation anyway. But could we accept that evolution occurs on a psychological level, that the evolution of the mind follows set rules, rules that seem like chaos to us now but really dictate psychological development absolutely? Is it even possible?

dissected cats and my theory of relativity

We are dissecting cats in biology and I positively HATE it. I feel like I am destroying something sacred. I really believe in the sanctity of life. I know that probably shouldn't have much to do with this, but those cats were alive once, and I feel like I am, without permission, destroying what little remnant of that life remains. It feels so wrong. I feel sick every time I look at them with those cuts down their bodies... not because I think it's gross, but because I feel horrified at the violence. I know it's carefuly, calculated cuts with a razorblade, but I hate every part of it. I hate the way that our first cut looked just like my arms do when I cut them, except with less blood. I hate probing into their bodies like no spirit was ever in them. I am so morally opposed to it that I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I can't drop the class. I can't refuse to help, or I'll forfeit my grade. I have to help. But how can I?
Right now we are skinning them, and looking at them, holding them open, I always feel tears burning at my eyes. I feel like there's something wrong with me. Nobody else is crying about these cats. Just me. Nobody else is freaking out. Nobody else can't handle it. Just me.
So my lab partner treats me like a fragile child. She does all of the difficult stuff for herself, tells me what to do, supervises all my actions. And I love it. Nobody has treated me like a child in a long, long time. And although I'm not sure my aversion to dissection is childlike, I know that I need guiding through this if I am to mentally survive. I'm not sure what I'm going to do.

Another thing that has been bothering me lately is how relative everything is. I mean, we've managed to concretely define most nouns, although even those definitions are occasionally subjective, but adjectives have absolutely no basis in anything that is definable isolated of all other experience. What is 'high'? To me the Empire State Building is high. But what about to God, or to some huge alien on another planet? That may be short. It may be tiny. My definition of 'high' is totally relative. All adjectives are. I can't tell you what an adjective means without using it in reference to something. There can only be references, only proportionalities, nothing definite.
Isn't that alarming to you that a huge bulk of our language exists only in a web of words and cannot exist as a single entity? For some reason it really bothers me. I want to believe that my opinions of the world, shaped in adjectives, are true, not just relative or only true in context.

It's all catching up to me...
First of all I think I drank enough wine yesterday to get really sick, and when I get sick off things I usually don't eat/drink them again, so that's a good thing.

Secondly... I went to the dentist today for the first time in a few years because somehow my appointment got messed up. And my teeth are really straight and all that. I got a retainer, but it was just to close a gap, I didn't really NEED it. I brush every morning and every night, and I floss every night. But last year... it did take its toll... I was worried it might, but not worried enough.

I guess my teeth are all broken down and I have a ton of really tiny cavities. And my teeth are really succeptable because they've been eaten away. So I can't eat simple carbs anymore, and I have to brush and floss after everything I eat, and it'll take like ten years before my teeth are okay again, and I have to get like fifty tiny fillings.

WHY?! Because I threw up... I threw up every few days for over a year... and all that acid stripped my poor teeth...

I don't feel good. I still feel sick and it can't be the wine anymore. Why did I do that to myself?!! Now I'll have to change my whole life just to save my teeth from destruction.

Another odd day. I cooked my parents a really fancy dinner (chilled banana rice pudding with cinnamon/other flavors, pasta with caper sauce and olive oil and balsamic vinager, key lime cheese cake with ice cream a la mode, cranberry kiwi punch). I was very proud of myself; it all turned out quite perfectly. I really am okay at cooking when I bother to take the time to be patient.

I found the Chardenay though. And after the dinner when my parents were elsewhere I sat on the counter and drank half a bottle. I don't even know why. I don't believe in that. I don't believe in drinking, ever. I've been really happy lately. I was happy even as I drank it. Drinking it depressed me. I think some part of me is still really holding onto misery. Anyway, I stopped halfway through and dumped it down the drain. I was a bit horrified with myself to tell the truth. It was 14% alcohol. I can't really remember what that means. I thought it was really odd the way it burned in my stomach after I swallowed it. The vodka I drank a few years ago didn't do that. It was a nice sensation. Not worth becoming an alcoholic over though.

I was slightly drunk for a bit, but I didn't really drink enough to really effect me. If I'd drank the whole bottle it would have, and for a second I regretted it as I watched the wine go down the drain, but I'm really glad I did it. I don't want that. I really don't.

On another random note, after talking to my friends/counselor I guess that as abysmal as my PSAT scores were they were good enough to be a national merit scholarship finalist. I was in the 99th percentile, which I guess is really good. That would be nice, getting a scholarship. Even if I don't get the scholarship, being a finalist looks good.

Until they look at my math scores that is.

This may be some unconscious signal or something, but yesterday as I was leaving the house to go to coffee with Charlie my mom said, "Isn't that the sweater Josh gave you for Christmas?" and it seemed really fitting to be wearing that, just one more manifestation of deception.
Coffee (well, non-coffee) was quite fun. We sat and talked for literally over three hours. I really like him I think... I can feel myself relaxing around him. He's not Josh but still. I think somehow what I am doing is wrong, letting myself like a guy when Josh is there and not telling anyone about anyone, but it's what I'm doing, so oh well.

Last night Erin slept over and we watched funny movies and ate ice cream and popcorn and I told her a few things about my past because I thought, nobody really knows me, but then I realized that Erin does know me. My past is important in that it has shaped who I am, but who I am not is just... how I am NOW. If you know me, alive, right now today, you know me. I don't have to become some sexual abuse poster child. There's definitely resdiue of abuse and the things I've done to myself in everything I do (especially in the way I handle boys), but I am more than my past.

I've been reading Sartre. I thought his idea was interesting, about existence. He says that everyone else has a dualistic psychological theme going on, like all philosophers thought that your appearence was some flaky shell that your real being hid behind. He thinks that there's no dualism, that people are simply the sum total of all their manifestations, that people are both finite and infinite and that's where all the dualism goes- you are finite in that you exist right now as an appearance and total of previous manifestations, but you are infinite in that you have infinite aspects and possibilities.

I don't agree with him, but it's interesting. Very interesting.

I hate school. Did I mention that? Once? Twice? A million times? Well it wasn't enough. I hate school.

psychological philosophy

Warning: This is a bit of a rant. But it's important stuff to me... (Also this is not mean to accuse anyone of anything, it's just an observation).

I have come to the conclusion that most people are afraid of being happy. They think they are striving towards what they think of as happiness, that far-off destination, but in reality they sabotage themselves with pain and addiction in order to avoid that frightening concept- happiness. Why? I think maybe because they don't really believe in happiness as an end. They think happines can only be temporary. Maybe happiness means vulnerability. Happiness means insecurity. It could be an illusion. It could be taken away.
So misery, in its consistency, is better than happiness. Misery allows control. It allows a real sense of security. You hurt yourself and no one can hurt you. You create this miserable life and you can count on the companionship of depression in a way you'll never trust that fickle happiness.
Everyone chooses (clinical depression aside) to be depressed. Tehy choose to be addicted to unhealthy things. They choose to feel horrible. But they have convinced themselves that they are fighting, that they are trying to be happy but are incapable of it. And why? Because they fear it! Because they need the pain! Because they don't want to get their hopes up when they know that nothing that good can last! And so they do it to themselves. Some part of them is so scared of being happy that they need to keep hurting themselves. They keep relapsing and they think it is because they don't have the self-control to abstain. They're wrong. It's because, in their quasi search of happiness, they are constantly choosing to be unhappy.
Afraid of happiness? It sounds ludicrous at first. Think about it though. There is a reason you are unhappy, a reason you are incapable of fighting, and it's not becasue you're incapable; it's because some part of you buried very deeply in your subconscious has decided that the safety in misery, the control,, is better than taking a risk.
And all of that... all of those misconceptions... they can be fought. You have to understand yourself. You have to understand why you're afraid of peace and understand why you chose misery. And you have to want to be happy. Not the destination of pseudohappiness, but real happiness.
And what is real happiness? Not a destination, no. People are constantly moving, changing. This destination people are afraid of really is inconsistent, is untrustable. But it isn't happiness.
You plan for the future. YOu do everything you can today to be happy tomorrow. But what about today? NOW is the only time you are alive. Tomorrow never comes. If you don't want to be happy NOW, you will never be happy, no matter how hard you work for it. Happiness simply isn't a destination you work towards. It is a way of life that you choose. It is available to everyone (again, clinical depression aside), always, every second of every day. People only have to choose it, and everyone is capable of making that choice. Nobody has a life that can't facilitate happiness.
Frankl expressed it best in his book, in his philosophy of living in the now. You have to understand that happiness is not a place you can reach. It is a warm coat in a blizzard, and you can choose to ignore it and feel your limbs all freeze and say it is because your life is so uncontrollably miserable, or you can put it on and understand.
Events that you can't control don't need to affect your happiness chronically. Events that you do to yourself to avoid happiness can cease once you understand that you don't need them.
And you DON'T, you don't you don't you don't.
How can you be happy? You can live to be the best you can be and stop trying to be perfect. Stop focusing on destinations and focus on the journey. Understand that failure doesn't come with results; failure comes from fearing hypothetical results so much that you won't even try.
You thought misery was control. Happiness is the ULTIMATE control. You can choose your reaction to every situation. You can choose to be happy because you are living for happiness, not because it seems like a nice place you could go. You can decide to stop being reactive and be proactive- don't just let your mood be something that controls you; control your mood.
You are alive here and now, and now is the only time happiness will ever exist and the only time you will ever exist. Whatever you see on the horizon, whatever perfection you feel like you need... you'll never achieve it. Whatever it is that makes you feel helpless in depression, you are in control of it.
I begain to understand these things last year when I read Man's Search for Meaning. I began to understand how they dictate my world when I went to the seminar. I began to understand that they dictate the whole world a few nights ago when I spilled them to Josh.
People will never tell you they are not happy because they are afraid of it, but they are.
Based on results, they have exactly what they intended, conscious or not.
Your mind is an iceburg; the very tip is conscious; and you don't even use large portions of your mind at all. You have one life to understand yourself- start scuba diving.

I could start a library with all the mail I'm getting from colleges. They all seem to start with, "We know that you are not just the summation of your PSAT scores, but due to your high PSAT scores..."

Yeah, whatever.

Today we went to the humane society and I walked this cute rottweiler-lab mix that was much bigger than me, and I was wearing gloves that were very thin with holes in them, and we were walking in a very windy field. It's slightly cold here. Windchill in that field probably made it about twenty below. By the time we got back inside my hands felt kinda like they did after the Powell trip last year. They hurt SOOOO badly.

I don't like being outside when it's cold. But I like it being cold out and me being inside.

It seems odd, but I'm awake, I'm not dreaming

Things slog on, mucky day after mucky day, sleeping through seminary, failing quizzes, drifting away from the people I loved. It all seems like a revolution of mud after a while. And then there are days like today... days that remind me I am alive, here, now, and only now.

Today my orchestra teacher sat me down and told me there is a man in our community who is very rich and who supports orchestra students who work hard. He comes to all the concerts, watches at the festivals. Every six or seven years he picks a student and he pays for them to go on one of the overseas trips.

I knew all that... she'd told us all that my freshman year. I'd forgotten it, but it began to surface and bloom in my brain...

Apparently this man has been watching. And he's decided to pay for me to go to Australia and New Zealand in 2007, which I really wanted to do but knew I could never come up with the money. It's $3000.

I felt like I had a heart attack. She only told me I could tell Erin, no one else, so I sprinted down the hall and I hugged Erin. What an excitement boiling inside you... I haven't felt that excited in a long time.

I kept waiting to wake up, waiting for it to have been a joke, but it wasn't and I knew it wasn't because she'd told us about it two years ago, and I remember thinking, "I'll never get that, but it would be so nice."

I thought about it maybe being my teacher but she doesn't have that kind of money. Who is it then? I don't know. I won't ask. I will take this gift and make the most of it.

CAN YOU THINK OF ANYTHING MORE EXCITING IN THE UNIVERSE????

Even today at the Humane Society when we got yelled at for letting our dogs walk on the wrong patch of grass I didn't feel depressed. There was this in my head, in there all day, growing bigger and bigger...

I thought things like this only happened to other people, people on TV. Other people win the lottery, never you.

Oh man typed words on the internet cannot do justice to how I feel and how amazing this is to me.

The conversation with my dad went okay. Somewhat along the lines of "I didn't want to have premarital sex and I regret that I did every day." It doesn't matter- I know what I want. There's no way I'm having sex before I'm married. It's going to be too big of a deal for me to throw around. I wanted to have sex with Matt briefly, to keep him, but I don't think anything he could have said or done could have convinced me to really consider doing it. I don't know.

School isn't going so well. I missed so much of it last week, four out of five days, that I have been doing very badly on all these quizzes I think. But debate is over, tennis doesn't start for a month, and I will unfortunately/fortunately be at school every day, so I won't be as behind.

Josh said he's falling apart. I guess he OD'd on ibuprofin twice last week. His addictions are making him feel like dirt. 256 miles away... I feel so helpless.

All the pain seems to coallesce into a dull ache after a while.

SUCKED SUCKED SUCKED SUCKED :-)

WEIRD weekend. I planned before going to my first round to come home on Saturday and drink hot chocolate made with milk and relax and feel sorry for myself. I never thought I'd say it but I was tired of debating. It's been a really long season. I'm glad it's long, and I love it, but these past few tournaments I haven't had much motivation.

And guess what? I SUCKED!!!! I totally and completely sucked. Out of forty-five people or so I was one of the first four to get out. And you know what? I didn't feel disappointed. I didn't hate myself for it. I was angry or hurt or confused or upset. Not because I didn't care... but because I knew that what I cared about wasn't winning. What I cared about was that I've done well this year. I cared about having fun. I cared about improving my record and breaking consistently. I cared about not getting all upset when I lost. And I have done all of those things. So was it a failure? No, not really. It was hilarious, doing that badly, but I know that it didn't have anything to do with me being bad at debate. I hit some really hard people. My second round I accidentally said that in a hypothetical situation it would be okay to rape children, and I had do defend that. I laughed at myself as I said it, and I didn't care.

I like winning. It's nice. But it's not what's important.

I wanted to go out with a bang. Well, I did. I went out with a spectacular bang of major suckage (word of the round round 1- 'suck'). I wasn't expecting to win anyway. Why should I complain about not having to debate as much? I got to sleep in until nine on Saturday. I got to wear my jeans and sweatshirt. I got all my homework done and I went to a public forum round and two policy rounds and I really enjoyed the policy ones. People say policy is boring but I thought it was amazingly fascinating.

SO say it! Say it loud! I SUCKED!

Nothing to be ashamed of. And by the way my father told me this morning that he wants to talk to me today about me considering having sex with Matt. Now I am very opposed to the abuse of the perfectly legitimate word "awkward" that is occurring in my city, but I can use it correctly applied to this situation. AWKWARD. Why does my mom have to keep reading my journal? I am not really looking forward to this enlightening conversation.

...And to conform with internet manners...

Four jobs I’ve had: (actually I've never had a real job but I've done these things)

1) librarian helper
2) church positions
3) teaching violin lessons
4) Symphony

Four movies I’d watch on repeat:

1) Pay it Forward (no matter how cheesy you insist the ending is)
2) Finding Nemo
3) Shrek
4) X-men, Spiderman, Batman Begins, and other action movies I still enjoy

Four TV shows I love: I don't really watch TV, but I used to love:

1) Lizzie McGuire (yes I'll admit it)
2) anything cool on Discovery channel
3) CSI
4) Growing Pains

Four vacation spots I’d love to frequent:

1) London
2) anywhere in Europe
3) Alaska
4) anywhere exotic like South America

Four websites I visit daily (among many others):

1) LD debate forum
2) thisisawar.com
3) I can't think of another one
4) a bazillion blogs

Four radio talk shows I love:
1) I love making fun of the Savage Nation because he's so agressive and scary
2) I love getting mad at Dr. Laura

Four foods I lust for:

1) smoothies
2) coffee cake
3) mudslides
4) tropical Blizzards

Four changes to my house: (changes I want and don't have)

1) a clean room
2) a self-cleaning bathroom
3) brick
4) carpeting that doesn't show every piece of lint

Four beers I like:

none. don't drink.

Four artists I like:

1) Goo Goo Dolls (music)
2) Deathcab for Cutie (music)
3) e.e. cummings (poet)
4) Magritte (art)

Four tags: (CnB, you already got tagged, he he he)

1)actually i think everyone I know has been tagged... um Shea? if she will conform...

My confidence comes in dizzy spells and waves. I am totally devoid of it for weeks, and then all of a sudden it will appear unexpectedly from some abyss inside of me that has the potential to fill with self-affirming beliefs but keeps having the plug pulled. I've felt pretty confident this week. I'm finally coming out of a long depression. Apathy... I can't believe I wanted it. I'd rather be in agony every day of my life.

I gave Erin some ice cream today, which is kind of a long story, but basically she has become so important to me... she is such an amazing friend. At festival I talked to her about a lot of things, and she talked to me, and there is this definite connection between us that I need so badly, as I have drifted so far away from all of the rest of my friends. High school shoves people apart and builds motes between them. I needed someone to come along and save me from isolation.

Festival was fun. I didn't screw up although this senior girl from my school was a jerk to me all week because I guess she wanted to be first chair. She could have had it for all I cared. Anyway, I roomed with Erin, and it was really fun getting to know her better. She is such an amazing person, and a truly amazing example to me in every way possible.

Today was horrible. I've been bogged down with SO much work, trying to catch up, and I'm missing school on Friday as well for debate. I also had my tutoring tonight at Sylvan Learning Center and that went pretty well. I think it will help.

My mom had to bring me this portfolio thing I left at home (we got back at 2 AM this morning so I was really tired when I went to school) and she said that she had read my journal (for, what, the fiftieth time?), and I was just really too tired to care. I just felt numb and decided whatever happened happened.

Anyway it wasn't too horrible. But it just seems like my life is all about keeping things secret, and controlling the damage that results when my fortress is compromised.

On Friday I went in during lunch to get my violin music and my orchestra teacher said, "Lindsay, you're first chair second violin in the big group [of three schools] next week [at orchestra festival], if that affects how much you practice." And I said, "What?!" and nearly threw up. That means I am not only first chair for our SCHOOL but for that humongous conglomeration of schools. Oh my gosh what a nightmare. I have to go frantically practice right now in fact. Pray to God/whatever agnostic greater power you believe in that I don't screw this up. I really haven't practiced much.

"I did it because I trust you, Lindsay," she said. My gosh why does she have to trust me? There are plenty of trustworthy people in the world! Surely there is someone out there who would do a better job!

Anyway, I got home from Idaho late last night. It was fun. Let's just say we crashed in all this powder in the middle of the trees and stayed there for a while and decided to see if the Spiderman thing worked (if you've seen the movie you probably know what I'm talking about). It was quite interesting. Even though my toes were freezing off and my pole was jabbing into me, I felt like somehow I belonged there with him all buried in snow.

Today... I got three math books so I can cover two years of math in my nine-week, 18-session cram course at Sylvan Learning Center to survive the SAT math II's. I decided I am running for key club president next year, which is a LOT of work, but I can do it. I'm pretty sure I'll be the only one running so I'm guarenteed to win. Only four other juniors regularly come to key club anyway.

I walked dogs with Brittany... no actually the dogs walked me... did homework... thought about my status as a lying deceiver...

SO... I am going to Idaho tomorrow to see Josh. I spend Saturday with him. I'm talking to him on instant message right now, but I just got off the phone with Charlie, and I'm going to go on some sort of date with Charlie next week. Josh knows somewhat about Charlie, but Charlie doesn't know about Josh, and... my gosh this sounds like a soap opera dripping in pathetic teenage angst. I guess I'll take things one day at a time. I've made no committment to Charlie yet.

We had a school assembly the other day, and as usual my friends and I spent the whole time making sarcastic, cynical comments about how pathetic school spirit is and how stupid the cheerleaders are. Some part of me wonders though if we are only cynical because we cannot find it in ourselves to be as involved as them and enjoy it. Maybe we resent them for caring. Do cynical, apathetic people harbor bitterness simply because they are jealous of those that are able to care and benefit from that caring? It sounds almost suspicious enough to be partially true.

So... the slog of life at a superficial level- the volunteer work, the tests, the studying for these bloody SAT's- trudges onward, as an inner life of my struggle towards happiness also continues. Something drastic had better happen to shatter this monotony.

OH I KNOW! They found out our gym is falling apart, and that if it snows more than eight inches it will sink into the ground and maybe collapse or something similarly radically cool. Start praying it snows eight inches tonight! As expensive as it would be, it would definitely be exciting if our gym collapsed. No more pep rallies!

Quotes and such

"When the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, it may be that they take better care of it over there." (unknown).

"When the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, it may be that their house is a delapidated piece of crap that nobody can see becasue people only look at the grass." (me).

I think the second one is true. When we envy people, because we think they have it better than us, we often don't know the whole story. We only look at the surface. The first quote is implying a responsibility towards your own "grass," which I would agree with, but I think that my quote better captures people's victimization of themselves (if I may humbly say so myself).

"How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?" (John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath). (I am unfortunately being forced to read that book at the moment. Steinbeck is very good with descriptions and character development and even the aura of the book, but it is very slow. And Steinbeck is usually depressing so I'm just waiting for everyone to die).

"In the coming world, the capacity to face the new appropriately is more important than the ability to know and repeat the old." (Carl Rogers).

Those last two are obviously contrasting. I think that (as is usual) the truth is somewhere in the middle.

In English we watched the movie The Scarlet Letter, and it made me think a lot about conformity, and whether the real sins are what society says they are, or if the real sins are accepting what society says and how it molds you without fighting it and trying to discover yourself as an individual seperate from the often corrupted practices of society.

Also, I am finally reading The DaVinci Code and I am really curious as to how much of it is actually proven true (I don't believe most of it, but it's interesting). The Gnostic Bibles I must admit sound nothing like the King James bible or whatever... I must admit it confuses me that people that knew each other would speak and write so incredibly different from each other when the tone of the bible is pretty much consistent. I don't know. You could drown in that skepticism. The simple fact remains that religion can't prove there is a God and that Christ was his son, but science can't prove there isn't, and the negating clash is usually required to have the burden of warrent for their claims.

I don't know. I'm really tired but I'm not depressed this week for some odd reason. I wasn't really depressed this weekend either, which was very good considering the tournament. Debate makes me so stressed out... when I'm at debate I could eat 50,000 calories and I'm pretty sure I'd metabolize it because stress does some really screwy things to my body.