Things are beginning to smooth out again. I feel alive again today. This past week has been a hazy, nightmarish dream, chock full of anxiety and devoid of sleep. Last night I slept soundly for eleven hours, the most I've slept in months. I've needed to sleep that long for months, but all the vibrating tension inside of me always wakes me up when I'm still exhausted, still needy for more sleep but unable to grasp it.
Josh's house was a tornado yesterday I guess. I'm hearing everything from Ariel. His family had a pretty much day-long discussion. Josh is going to see a counselor once a week (and I'm assuming his little brother is too), and he doesn't get any unsupervised internet time. We are just friends until he starts to make some changes.

I've decided that philosophy may start inside of us, not outside. When I was trying to weigh those two great pains- Josh's pain if I told his family, and Josh's pain if i didn't- and what was right or wrong, I didn't need to think about philosophy. I just felt it, somewhere inside.

I am so grateful for the support I had from you and everyone. It helped me to do something incredibly difficult.

I guess things aren't the same now. And they may not be the same for a very long time. And they may never be the same again. But things can be... different. Different doesn't necessarily mean worse.

All of this has made me think about the things I'm still struggling with as well... the cutting and bulimia and everything. Maybe I can change now. Maybe I need to change now. Maybe I need to let go of all of this and get the help I need, the way Josh is.

I don't know. As hard as it is to force someone into a situation of change, it's harder to force yourself.

how to explain...

How do I describe the twenty four hours between yesterday and today? It seems as if time crawled, it seems as if it's been a millennium and not just a day.
Last night I got ahold of Ariel finally, a girl who is 18 and a sophomore in college (she is really smart) who is the older sister of someone in Josh's grade. She has been helping him. I talked to her for a long time about a lot of stuff. We could really relate on abuse issues, as she'd been through it too. Whenver I discover another victim I am always both relieved and happy while being depressed and angry- relieved/happy that I am not alone, depressed/angry that I am not alone. It is a battle between the need for companionship and the desire to just ameleorate the situation.
She didn't know about Josh's problems with ...abusing... (I guess is the technical word although not my preferred choice of word) his brother/cousins. I've been so alone with the issue since December, and I've been threatening to tell someone if he doesn't, but I trusted him when he said he would. Now I understand he's not capable of going through with that, and also he's sunk so low that his word means nothing to him (or to me) now.
He did tell Ariel though. So I wasn't alone. And Ariel, being stronger than me in some way, knew we had to do something right away. We all three talked until 3 in the morning. Josh finally refused to tell his parents and wouldn't promise not to kill himself over night. I agreed to call Ariel at 7 in the morning and we'd call Josh's parents.
I fell into bed, exhuasted, but I couldn't sleep. Everything was over between us, and I knew that. I knew also that his life and healing were more important than us. But it hurts... it hurts to love someone and then for there to suddenly be no possibility of a real future relationship. Everything in me still loved him, and I felt like there was no way I could leave him. But I knew I had to, for both of us, and he knew it too and told Ariel he would break up with me.
I fell asleep at 4 and woke up at 7. I dragged out the calling card and woke up Ariel. I tried to do three-way calling but it wouldn't work with the card. I tried without the card and it still wouldn't work. So Ariel agreed to call.
I hope that I have courage like that someday... courage to do something incredibly hard with the strength with which she did it. I would have called if I had to, but she was so much more brave about it than I could be.

(WRITTEN 04-09) Now his parents know. They're going to make him get help. They talked about putting him in a center. I hope they don't. I'm not allowed to see him for a while, and I'm encouraged to just be his friend from now on. He can't use the internet. He was so focused on his future, always, that he didn't understand that it could never come if he didn't fix the present... for him, it will appear as if I am tearing his life apart. I wish he was mad at me, but Ariel says he is not. I want him to scream at me. I don't want this helpless defeat. Ariel went see him yesterday and she said he could barely talk, he was just curled up in a little ball. I wish I could be there... I wish I could hold him... not in any way remotely sexual, but in the way that you hold a tiny dog that has been alone all night... I need him now more than ever, I will never stop needing him in some way, but he matters now, and what we are or were is something of the past, maybe something that was simply necessary to get him to this point, to get him to the help he needs.

Yesterday I played my cello solo on three hours of sleep. I was too agitated to sleep on the way to Bozeman but too tired to read. I came home and sat in my house drumming my fingers. I felt like I was going crazy. To have lost what I loved more than anything, all in one day, and so definitely... I could feel the sorrow inside me but it was buried, and I couldn't feel it yet, and I still can't, and that scares me.
I called Erin. She knew I needed her so we went to Starbucks and then I slept over at her house. I was so tired, from all these days blurring into each other, that I just talked and talked about everything. She listened, and talked when it made sense for her too. She knew I just needed to talk. I just needed to be with someone, even if inside of me I was still so far away.

I don't know how I will ever forgive myself for doing this to Josh, although I don't regret it for an instant. I don't know how I will ever forgive myself for doing this to myself. I trusted love this time, and it was a mistake because I am left broken. I have a best friend whose life is falling apart... I have memories... and past that nothing... He meant more to me than any boy ever has before and maybe ever will romantically, but to save his life I had to shatter any romantic connection.

That is what hurts... that is what makes me still feel dizzy and blurred, even though I got nine hours of sleep last night, dead to the world on Erin's bedroom floor. I want to cry. I want to cut but I told Ariel I wouldn't. I want to feel it. I know inside me that it hurts more than anything, to lose him, and I want whatever is trying to protect me from that pain to just let go and let me feel it. I need to hurt. I need to scream and get angry and cry so long that when I'm done I feel new again.

I won't believe love is like this, but it always has been for me... I love someone so much, I take a chance, and in the end the love for them is what kills me. It never works out. I am left with the tatters. There is the rational, logical part of me that knows that it could never work now, not between me and him.

And there is the part that reads all the emails he ever sent me, including the very first way back in June... the part that listens to the CD of love songs he made for me... the part that thinks about kissing him in the climbing gym, and in the snow, and everything in the world feeling possible in that instant... and that part of me is shredding slowly into confetti.

I have lost all of that to save him... and I am left with him, and he is what I loved, and the only way to have him was to let him go...

I don't know how to explain the pain. It is worse, I think, than anything I can remember feeling before. Even if I cannot feel it yet. The fact that it is totally mentally debilitating is proof that even though it hasn't arrived in full-force, it is already beginning its threat to destroy me.

I need, more than anything, to be held in his arms right now... and that is the one thing that I cannot possibly have.

(I got all superiors on my three solos and my ensamble. District doesn't seem to matter much at the moment though).

mortification

I'm probably too tired to type this. I may read it tomorrow and delete it entirely. But I'm here, now, typing, so I might as well continue.
Today my violin solo went alright. Again, my hands weren't shaking, and I was so incredibly thankful. It felt SO nice.

The more entertaining story of the day though...
Our orchestra played. I forgot several mandatory articles of clothing, including black shoes, nylons, and a black shirt. I wore ugly black socks with my brown clunky sandals and asked my dad to bring me the black shirt with a bow on it in my closet. My father is apparently unsure, at age 56 almost 57, of what a bow actually is. He also doesn't seem to understand the fact that stretchy shirts with holes in the chest are meant to be worn OVER other shirts.

So my father brought me the stretchy, hole-riddled shirt (WITHOUT any sort of bow I might add). I had no shirt to wear under it so I safety pinned all the holes shut (very stylish, you know, having messy lines of safety pins showing through your shirt). That worked all right. But I was wearing a sports bra.

I have managed to wear sports bras for the whole year. The reason for that is much more depressing than the entertaining story I am interrupting to tell you this. But last August I went school shopping and bought all new bras. Nice bras, that fit well (I can't believe I'm going on about this in a blog. Oh well- the truth! All of it!). And then I was wearing one of them on that night with Matt in the car, the night that thing happened that threw me into a depression for all those months, and I haven't worn any of the nice new ones since then.

So the straps showed. That's the gist of my depressing tangent. So I had to pull them off and put them under my shoulder. Which meant that there were now odd lumpy things visible under my tight-fitting safety-pin-decorated shirt, kind of like tumors, and also my bra was on the verge of falling off.

As I walked out there to play, obvious as first chair second violin with my clunky sandles and lumpy chest, I thought that this sounded suspiciously like the beginning of one of the articles on the "Say Anything" page in YM magazine, you know the ones that procede to tell tales of mortal embarrassment? That comforting thought led me into my orchestra performance.

Anyway, thankfully I was spared the horror of my bra falling down and safety pins coming undone all at the same moment (that would have been a spectacle for the weary ajudicators!). Although I did get in my daily embarassing moment when I tripped on my clunky sandals (or perhaps, to be less forgiving, just my feet) and fell up the stairs again, crashing into the steps as people stopped to stare, the image of politeness.

It was an okay day. Cello solo tomorrow, ensamble, and then it's over thank gosh. I don't really care about my scores this year. I remember my freshman year when it mattered and after state I cried for hours and punched my face so my nose bled and fought the monster but lost and cut my arm, and I thought that I would always feel the ache of failure.

My gosh I've changed since then.

Propanolol is my savior. I played my piano piece today for the ajudicator, and for the first time in my life my hands didn't shake; I wasn't nervous. It was so bizarre, not having the huge tremor, no painful stomach contractions. I just felt... like every time I practiced it.

Now it didn't go perfectly by any means, but man I felt a lot better than I ever have before.

Today in chem I woke from my stupor briefly to ask my teacher a quantum physics question about electrons and singularity and the different theories about what electrons are before we look at them and whether they exist in multiple places simultaneously (they do) and everyone stared at me like I was crazy. Most people think quantum mechanics are crazy, because the laws are just so different on a subatomic level than on an atomic level. Things vibrating through dimensions, not even existing, until we look at them, and then maybe not even occupying any space, and not following a path but still moving... it isn't something we can really comprhend on our level of the world.

It was sort of like they were all zombies, and they didn't care. That was what was weirdest to me. They just didn't care about quantum physics. Now THAT, more so than any quantum theory, is something I can't comprehend.

proof of a deity

I do believe in God. I have never doubted it. But if all other confirmations in my life fail, I received one undeniable confirmation of His existence today.

Last night I got really tired at about 12:30 (or rather early this morning), so I gave up on my homework. I have three tests today, and I didn't study for any of them. Math was first off this morning, and I haven't been paying attention for this entire unit. Particular spring oscillations and omegas and Hooke's law have managed to evade me a bit. I did all the homework, but I can do math perfectly without understanding it, sort of like a parrot speaks.

I was praying all this morning for a miracle of sorts. I usually do well on math tests (I've never missed more than a point or two, and always get A's/A+'s), but I knew that that could end easily with a confusing harmonic series or a botched spring dampening coefficient.

When I don't study for things (which is happening more and more often), I usually just assume I'll do well, and I usually do. But today I knew I needed help when we had ten minutes left in the test and I had about a half an hour's worth of work to do.

So I prayed, prayed to the God of second order differential equations, and farther up the hierarchy to the God of calculus, and farthest up of all to the God of the universe, alpha and omega (that's ironic, how He always calls himself alpha and omega, and those Greek letters are in the formula for a dampened spring with imaginary discriminants, which I was doing today on the test). I was running into sheer desperation when the miracle (milagre- Spanish three is underway) occurred.

I was just setting my pencil down to complete the exclamation point on my factorial under my third degree of my Taylor polynomial series when the fire alarm went off. Oh, I know someone pulled it, but I believe it was divinely inspired. Then, in that moment when I was praying most heartily for divine intervention, I received it in the form of one obnoxious kid yaking on a handle.

I was nearly crying with joy. I got to go in today after school and spend a half an hour finishing it. I still didn't get my ratio test on one summation to work, and I still failed my omegas and couldn't figure out my amplitudes, but I finished all the parts I had been unable to get to.

So now there is no doubt about God's existance. Coincidences are lovely, but some are a bit too extreme to believe in.

Unfortunately, nobody pulled the alarm during my history test today on the Cold War. My gosh, I don't know the difference between resolutions at Potsdam and Yasomethingorother. Russia and Mao Zedong and that guy in Viet Nam (Ho Shi Minh???) are bad. There. American communist paranoia understood. Who needs the test?

And yesterday my English teacher gave us a quiz where we had to decide whether questions were factual, interpretive, or evaluative, which was really unfair in my opinion as every interpretation requires a personal opinion, which implies an evaluative response. Oh well. One more C to go in the gradebook. I don't care. It's the beginning of the quarter. And somehow, miraculously, every quarter, I get handed that report card with all those lines of A's. It's like I'm a machine. No matter how many quizzes I flunk the A's still come.

read it, you know you want to

Today was going along with the usual boredom until English. My English teacher usually annoys me because he manipulates philosophy, describes a philospher's philosophy in a very narrow way, and leaves everyone to believe that that is the essence of the philosophy. Having actually read the philosophy of the philosophers he talks about, I know that he is ignoring much of the philosophy and emphasizing things that distort it.

Today, though, I was fascinated in English class. A somewhat rare occurrance.

We read this short story. Read it. It's amazing. So we read it and he finished and the bell rang, and everyone else seemed to pull themselves out of that steamy English rut and move on, but I couldn't. We didn't talk about it, so I was left only with my own interpretations, my own struggling to dissect the story with the writing of Dostoevsky, William James, and utilitarianism (Mill's, whoever). Which only lead to more questions. I was so rabid for understanding of the story that I considered skipping tennis to go to the library to look it up on the net. I managed to resist, which is good as I don't think my coaches would have quite understood or bought my reason.

So I thought about it all night, all of the crazy possibilities of it rolling around in my head, all the questions it brings up agitating themselves. I have come up with my own conclusions, finally, about the scapegoat, the need for it, the need for LeGuin to separate us from the society in the story, the people that leave, why they leave, and where they go (in the allegorical sense of course).

But if you read this, read it. Please. I wasn't expecting it. It caught me off guard. And I think this is really the first time I've thrown all of my mental faculties into something school-related since September.

Actually, despite my hazy conclusions, I'm still asking myself questions about this story. I'm curious as to whether my English teacher will try to manipulate and limit it into his own perceptions tomorrow. I'm glad he gave us a day to think (or rather me, as no one else really looked affected).

I love stories like that. But the ambiguity could drive me insane.

Then again, is there ever a right way to interpret things?

Finally, are the ideas of utilitarianism/pragmatism (utilitarianism being the greatest good for the greatest number, whatever that is... I'm sure we could dive into Histonic calculus, but let's not be that zealous) and justice (that ever person receive their just due, whatever that is... we'd have to run to another philosopher I suppose) mutually exclusive?

Some part of me is connected with the rain. It makes my father depressed. It makes me happy. I love rain.
Yesterday was going quite well. And it still did I guess. I got the rejection letter from the summer camp at MIT, I'm sure due to my low math scores. It threw me into another matrix of self-doubt and confusion overy my future- English or science, that is the question. I know I'm better at English. But I like quantum physics. I don't want to be rejected from everything because my standardized scores were low.
The old, persistant, inescapable feeling came back... I'm not good enough. Not smart enough. And I never will be.

It wasn't so much the rejection from the camp but the age-old implication that sort of turned my day. I didn't feel horrible though. Just distant. I distance myself from the things that have the potential to hurt me. Much the way I am pushing Amanda out of my life at the moment. No one could hurt me like she could.

The one happiness I had left was that I could take the class at Carroll I wanted to, the writing class. But then my mother told me I couldn't take it, and anything good in me sort of deflated.

So it was pouring out, and I knew that I could escape into something better. I put on shorts and a t-shirt and my lovely, designer Pay-less shoes that leak in water, and I ran. I'm not sure how far, somewhat over two miles. So I guess not horribly far, but far enough to become drenched in freezing sheets of rain.

I'm not sure why I thought of him. It was something about the rain. And the girl in the book I was reading was sexually abused. It was something about being that cold and wet and feeling so vulnerable to it all. Rain does that to me.

So I thought of Craig. And no amount of running, no amount of anger, no amount of desperate desire could make me stop hurting from all of those memories.

sarcasm, wit, or rather the lack of it

Oh what an exciting day, it must go down in the annals of history...
sorry, overreaction due to excess hypomania.
But I did discover Libba Bray's live journal, and considering A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels are two of the best books ever (and I have read a LOT of books) I am very excited. I love cynical sarcasm and find it hilarious when I am tired (well I find most things hilarious when I'm tired, but you know what I mean). So you should go read her live journal, it's very funny, and after that you should read her books, as they are funny, suspenseful, etc (continue list of adoring adjectives for lazy blogger).

So I have made a resolution to actually write (write as in begin, commit to, and finish) a book that does not involve all of the depressed, mopy, psychology-addicted sides of me (ie doesn't involve any sort of abuse, rape, or drawn-out addiction) but rather is written by the happy side of me, the hypomanic side of me, the side of me that is addicted to sarcasm and can write very sarcastically when I want to. I am sick of the depression and I want my writing to move on. Well, I want to move on with it. I want those aspects of my writing to combine with new aspects to polish my writing.

I suppose I need some sort of idea for the book, which I will think about today. I'm debating whether I want strictly contemporary realistic, or magical realism. I just need a general idea though, because as soon as I type the first few paragraphs of a book or essay or anything, it starts writing itself (quite convenient if you ask me).

I will now post the essay I turned into my English teacher when he assigned us to write something creative about a realistic or romantic story we've read that exemplifies our knowledge of the difference between the two. It is very long and feel no need to read it (why am I telling you this? I'm sure you won't), but I am very proud of it, and it contains the sort of attitude I want to diffuse into this new, unborn book I swear I will write.

The Gates to Heaven

It was a curious sensation, the darkness, retaining some sort of liquid quality, lapping at his body until the devastating actions of cytolysis slowly dissolved his very skin. There was no pain, no sudden clench of his muscles. It was a bit numbing, a bit calming, all of the darkness and his body fanning out into particles that hovered over the boxcar below where his wife clung to his hand. Some small fringe of him could still feel his wife’s clutch, her fingers locking in a rigid cage around his hand like somehow her touch could revive his pulse. He should be sorry she was gone, sorry he had lost that solid part of him, but he had always felt disillusioned. This detachment was nothing new.

It was only when a small sliver of sunlight pierced the shield of darkness above his head that he realized he must have died. That epiphany didn’t really bother him either. What bothered him was that there had been no warm milk this morning, no agony of his wife’s distracted eyes. He had slept, and in sleeping he had somehow discarded his body like an exoskeleton to grow slowly cold as the day plumped and ripened.

The halo of light surrounded him, and he could see the gates- not pearly like all of the stories, but metallic and so cold your tongue would stick with the faintest drip of saliva. He stood shivering with the snowy photons dotting his hair like peppery dandruff. A man in a tattered, puce bathrobe looked up with bleary eyes from a ledger book. Ink spots dotted his immaterial fingers, and his evanescent pupils were swirling drips of ink themselves, penetrating in their exhaustion.

“Welcome to heaven,” the man said, and his terry-cloth robe swayed from inertia, not wind. “You will enter here and remain forever if you can pass but one test. Answer this one question correctly and you will gain admittance.”

The man stood on a wispy fleck of cloud, thinking dully that he had finally lost those extra few pounds. When the silence, spicy as mouthwash, slowly bloomed inside his dry mouth, he realized he was expected to say something. He looked again at those steely doors. What was beyond them? More darkness? More numbing, confining cold?

“Yes?” he said after the long pause and the mounting sense of obligation. The man in the bathrobe swayed dramatically, clutching the steely gates. His hand stuck, and he ripped it off with the sound that dead skin might make if his hand were still covered in a glove of skin.

“You have to tell me one objective thing about yourself that everyone on earth would agree with.”

That’s simple, the man thought, there are plenty objective things about me. However, even as the words fluoresced inside his mind, he was remembering something from long ago…

***

He had been in high school once. He had blurred into the lockers, had dreamed of falling into the sky. He had no friends. The only thing that he was good at, or that he thought he was good at, was writing essays. So when, on a March day of his junior year when snow flurries brushed the contracted windows, and his English teacher assigned him to pick one object and write an objective, realistic, non-fiction essay on it, he thought that God, from somewhere beyond the pearly gates, was giving him a chance to redeem his grade-point average, or maybe his confidence. Which one mattered more in the end was an answer no one in high school could seem to procure.

At home that night, his fingers poised over his typewriter, the fresh strip of correcting tape looping around the iron arms, he sat in a straight-backed chair. A rock posed in front of him, balanced precariously on a jagged tip. He had no idea what type of rock it was. Classification and taxonomy and the divisions between categories had always confused him. It was a rock, a conglomerate of material. That’s all he cared to know. No framework he could apply to its name could ever be verified by the scientists that sat all day and stared at the minerals that replaced their lovers.

All of that was brushed from his mind as he started typing. His fingers blurred over the keys. He had large hands that consumed a piano keyboard far more effectively than fire consumed oxygen. He could type faster than anyone he knew. It was one more snatch of self-worth that he filed away in his mind, in that filing system that was so different from everyone else’s.

He knew that realistic literature was written with no ulterior motive and was meant to simply describe things as they were. So, with the preconceived intention of having no ulterior motive, he began writing about the jagged rock. He was proud of the metaphors and similes. Even if he did overuse them, his similes splayed out across the paper like small pregnant women: they were cute, fat, and undeniable. He wrote about the swirling of granite colors that tainted the surface of the rock. He wrote about the razor-sharp edge that had drawn a perfect globe of blood from his thumb. He wrote long into the night, and when he was done he turned the dial on the side of the typewriter to claim his last sheet, piled the papers together, and shoved them in his book-bag. The chance of him not receiving an A on this assignment was as slight as the chance of the moon undergoing spontaneous combustion.

For two weeks he floated through his existence more agitatedly than usual. Instead of drifting away from posts and large objects obstructing his path, he stared at his shoes distractedly and ran right into them. The acidic laughter that followed him hurt far worse than the throbbing pains. Laughter, more than any sort of depression, had eaten into his cardiac muscle, chewing his last defenses to shreds. He could not ignore it. It would not flow over him like everything else.

The tension building up inside of him, the desire to see his grade on the essay, was almost unbearable. He knew, like any good high school student, that his grade mattered far more than anything else in his life. When his English teacher finally passed out the essays, attached to the various objects people had chosen, he felt that the rock he had written about had migrated from the recesses of his memory into his throat, where it tore at the tender tissues. The teacher, her flat shoes clicking and her skirt dutifully sweeping her ankles, set the essay face down on his desk with the rock beside it. He could no longer breathe. The carbon dioxide in his lungs was diffusing and recycling itself over and over. The alveoli lining the visceral tissue could not handle the lack of oxygen. He felt his mind dissect into shimmering confusion, skating on the apprehensions that crested like waves, so he decided to turn over the paper before he fainted. There, scrawled in unforgiving, thick red lines, was the D. He had never thought of a letter being hideous before, but he had never been repulsed by anything as much as he was repulsed by that scarlet D.

The comments on the back were not vague. They were written in tiny, looping handwriting, almost illegible and gleefully flourished.

The assignment was to write objectively about this rock. You have not fulfilled that objective. The rock doesn’t swirl with granite; it is more brown than gray. The rock does not have a razor-sharp edge. That edge is slightly rounded. Your adjectives are based solely on your judgments. You are not in tune with unprejudiced reality. More importantly, I can tell you that you wrote this with the ulterior motive of not having an ulterior motive. The point was to avoid ulterior motives all together. I’m sorry that I have to give you this grade, but I have to be fair.

His eyes glazed over. He didn’t really see the paper. That night he burned the essay in an iron can and smashed the rock to bits with a hammer. Every blow felt like some sort of justice. It wasn’t fair, really. It wasn’t fair at all.

***

The man looked back at St. Peter in his tatty bathrobe. He remembered the depression that had filled him up the day his teacher passed back the essays, the depression that had still been there that morning when he slipped out of the boxcar and into the sky.

He tried to think of one thing in his life that had an obvious truth, one thing that had a single undisputable taxonomical classification. He stared at the freezing gates of heaven and the snow filled his hollow, spirit-bones, an ill substitute for marrow in his medullary cavities. His lips grew numb. Time passed the flurries of snow and left him in a motionless ether. People drifted in and out of the gates. He saw his wife pass. He asked St. Peter why she did not have to answer the same question as him.

“Everyone has an individualized question. It would be unfair to ask everyone the same objective question, because not everyone could have the same answer.”

There seemed something twisted about the whole affair, something unfair like that scrawled D so long ago, but he was too cold and too tired to find it.

As time coalesced into viscous droplets, he sat outside the steely gates of heaven struggling to think of an objective truth. In the end, he could not cease the inexorable tape of his memory, replaying again and again a life of subjective isolation. St. Peter wrote with spindly, blackened hands; ashen faces passed from darkness into light; the snow fell in filmy sheets of ethereal glory, but the man only drummed his knees and nodded his head, hopelessly lost within himself.

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

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

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

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

Ah, whatever. I hate the cold.

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

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

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

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

Spring

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

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

It has been so much better than the last.

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

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

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

Something like that.

small victories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

midlife crisis

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

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

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

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

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

I DON'T KNOW.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't know how!

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

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

But I did it anyway.

love is alone

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

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

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

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

Go figure.

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

quotes of people that understand things i can't explain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

assortment of randomness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

more moaning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(From "Little Sister" by Jewel)

FRIDAYS!! TGIF!

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

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

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

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

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

What I am not worth

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

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

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

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

life is good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

aftermath

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

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

I will never give up on that boy.

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

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

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

And I pressed 'send' and cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

junioritis and more complaining, whining, being a coward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

pain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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