It's cold and the sleeves of my coat are too short.

This is still my uncensored haven. I feel the need to remind myself of that.

I had to move in with a roommate. I was nervous for obvious reasons. She puts her own needs and wants aside for other people sometimes, I feel. And I think it makes her very angry. She reacts angrily to things, but does not realize it. She yelled at me for waking her up. I got so so angry and couldn't sleep in the room with her and then I cried and cried and cried because it had stabbed down into the darkest of all places that rears up whenever someone yells at me. I couldn't talk to her, I was scared and angry and guilty and sad. Someone made us talk it out, but I don't feel better about it. I never told her that I do not appreciate being ordered around.

The next day, I went to a nurse for my back pain. She made sense, she said that I have nerves in my back that are pinched and my spine is slightly twisted, all which leads to my back and arm pain. Then she massaged my back to try to get the kinks out of it. I felt weird, as I always do when someone massages my back, but mostly okay because I've been in dire need of a massage for a long time. I felt myself relaxing. She said I needed to "lose the weight" because extra weight on my frame can make pain worse. I stayed silent because I had no idea what to say to that. I spent the rest of the day glancing at my reflection in windows and wincing at what I saw. The 14-year-old in me was livid, so I guess I was livid. I hate that way of someone telling me to lose weight especially. More than one person has said it to me, though I haven't heard it in years. I'll never go back to her, because she looked at my body and felt the need to comment on it.

Then today the bus driver threatened me. I jaywalked to get to the bus. He told me that if I ever did that again and he was driving, I would pay for it with my life. I didn't react to it at first, I apologized, but then I slowly realized what he had said to me. My back started hurting really badly. I felt the intense need to get off the bus, and I did after a little while. I got myself lunch at a restaurant because I decided that I deserved it. The guy at the restaurant was very nice to me. I didn't know how to tip with a debit card, but he didn't seem to mind.

I don't see the point of all this. I don't see the point but something's telling me there is one. How can I connect and talk with people when it seems that each and every one of them is damaged and broken and spitting ickiness? I'm tired of people who take their sadness and anger and self-hatred out on other people, no matter how small it may seem. I don't want to talk to anyone. I want to cry but I can't because I'm in someone's room and she blasts horrible music. I watch cartoons I've seen a million times and doodle and sometimes I work through things, but mostly I escape. I've been working so hard lately to accomplish what I want, what I've decided to do, someone who's not a shithead told me that something will give soon, that I'll get that job I can enjoy, that I'll get what I need to finally get out on my own and become the person I want to be, the person I really am.

But if this is what I'll experience in the world, what the hell is the point?

I had a dream about my sister last night.

We were in a vast field, which was very dark because it was the weird time between daylight and full night. Her face was shadowed and I couldn't see it clearly. The sky was dusky and the grass was muted green, flat where we were standing and knee-high around us. I was so angry at her, we had been fighting. I don't remember what about. We were both very young, just kids. She said something that made me so damn mad, and I took out my gun and fired into the sky, in a somehow mopey way. I wanted to shoot her, but not really. That's why I fired into the sky. I watched as the bullet (which was about the width of a penny and flat on both ends) flew up in an arc, slowly, and landed in the right side of her head, breaking away a large piece of her skull. I saw her face finally, as it went dead. She fell to the ground. I had killed her. A moment passed, I could hear the breeze around me. And then I started screaming. I threw down my gun like it was poison and I screamed and screamed and screamed because I thought that if I screamed loudly enough, it would shake everything back into the way it had been, before I had killed her. My whole being was consumed with grief in an instant. I had killed her, she was dead and it was all my fault, and there was NOTHING I could do to take it back.

Then the dream switched, seeming to be an entirely different dream. I was a teenager, sitting with my mom and dad. They were married and we all lived together, a happy family. In the middle of breakfast with them, I had a flashback to killing my sister in the field. I thought It wasn't a dream. I actually killed her. I started to freak out. I tried to tell my parents what I had done all those years ago, but they wouldn't listen to me. They kept telling me to forget it, that it didn't really happen. But I knew it did, and I knew they were trying to make me forget so things wouldn't be difficult and sad. I kept pushing it, I kept telling them that I had to tell people what I did, but they kept dismissing me. I knew I would probably go to jail. I didn't want to, but it was better than silently living with what I had done.

Then I woke up.

I really was more eloquent at the bus stop.

I'm beginning to feel the pressure.

I was so eloquent at the bus stop. I never put myself first, ever. No matter how much I dislike someone, so matter how much I may get hurt, no matter how much someone abuses me, I'm just not as important as they are. I work very hard to keep everyone happy and things calm without even realizing it. I hate it. It makes me resent people who don't deserve it and it gives control to people who don't know their asshole from their eyeball. It makes me explode with anger and hate because I start to feel like everyone is telling me what to do and I don't have the spine to say "But I don't want to do that." I treat people close to me like I had to treat my family in order to survive. I make abusers out of people who really, honestly love me, because on some level I actually believe that I'm not good enough to deserve real, healthy love. I want to tell everyone to fuck off and crawl into a hole, where no one will look at me and I'll never do anything I don't want to ever again. I know I don't mean it; I know, deep inside somewhere that I love people and need their contact. But at this moment in time, it's hard to care about anyone, especially myself.

I feel like most of my life, if not all of it has been following everyone else and never creating my own path. Even a person whose job it is to help me come into my own is trying to get me going on things I'd rather not bother with. And I do those things, I listen to her opinions like I actually care, because I'm so terrified she's going to shove my head into the wall or scream at me or make me homeless or rape me. I know logically she won't do those things, but it doesn't make the fear go away. Even if I tell her my thoughts and what I'd really like to be doing, it doesn't do shit. She gets condescending and talks and talks and I think "Damn, why did I even bring it up?" I wonder if she does it specifically to deter people from speaking up.

I've never had a life that was truly my own. I've never lived without trying to meet someone else's expectations of me. I've never trusted myself as much as I forced myself to trust everyone else. In human relationships, there must be autonomy. There must be boundaries set, and all that other shit, or the relationship becomes suffocating. At least, in my experience. The self-destructive part of me believes that losing the people I love is imminent, and so I must push them all away before they have the chance to abandon me. Because being abandoned is heart-breaking, it's soul-killing, it's so damn painful that it makes me never want to trust anyone again. But the people I love now can't abandon me; they are autonomous beings themselves, not my mother or father. They didn't raise me, they don't have a natural obligation to help me survive. I don't want to depend on them for my survival; I want to rely on them for love and support, and I want to give them the same. But dependence, no. It's poison. It makes the world look the way it did when I was three. It makes me feel like someone is trying to shove something into my mouth and down my throat and telling me that they're doing so because they love me.

Obviously, there's a lot more to this than meets the eye. It's not really about the people in my life now at all. It's about THEM, it always comes back to THEM, because they forced themselves into my body and then left me to die on the inside. They wanted me to depend on them, but then refused to take care of me. They never protected me, they never taught me how to protect myself, and so I was stuck with them inside me, because it was my only means of survival. They're still there, and they're always shouting at me and dismissing me and hitting me and raping me and doing everything they can to remind me that I'm a worthless sack of shit who doesn't deserve clear boundaries or to be loved. And I believe them, because for the first chunk of my life, it was my only way of surviving.

I can't express how angry I am. I hate repeating myself, but the same shit just keeps coming up. I'm less afraid to say things, but I'll still take responsibility for them. I understand a little better where certain adults who have been in my life are coming from; when you've been told most of your life that you're wrong, that you don't know anything and don't deserve to think you do, it's so damn tempting to forget everyone else has emotions and do whatever the fuck you want. Yell, scream, hit. But unlike them, I don't think I'm anywhere near the end. I know under all the anger is a human being who loves people and doesn't want to hurt anyone. These two parts of me should get together and have a baby. Express your feelings unapologetically, but not abusively. Work through the abusive side, release it, and then become the person you really are. Because I don't believe anyone actually wants to hurt anyone, not really.

FEAR.

False
Evidence
Appearing
Real

Or

Fuck
Everything
And
Run?

In Fear of Fear (Ha ha I'm quoting Bauhaus)

I'm depressed again, and I have been for at least three weeks, though I didn't notice until yesterday.

I'm not eating right. I binge eat because there's something I don't want to look at. I turn my brain to mush by watching things on my DVD player because I don't want to think or be productive. I draw, but only if I'm watching something at the same time. I'm frustrated. I want to be DONE with this shit, all of it. The shelter, the control, the fear. I saw my mom at the store a few days ago. She and her partner were putting groceries into a bag. I froze. My heart stopped for a moment. They didn't see me. I turned around and nearly ran to the other side of the building and hid in the notebook section because I don't think my mom ever buys notebooks. Even when I was sure they were gone, I did my shopping too quickly and out of breath because so much had been dredged up in a split second. I forgot a lot of stuff and didn't have the guts to go back. I walked very quickly back to the shelter and I couldn't shake the fear that she was following me all ninja-like in the shadows. But my mom isn't ninja-like. She walks with a limp. I live in the same neighborhood as she does, mere blocks away. I must be insane. This isn't safe. It grinds against the inside of my head, the energy and the fear that she'll see me and break down and I won't be able to stand up against her because the guilt will wake up and eat me alive. I was scared that she was following me everywhere, either on foot or in her car. I was scared that she HAD seen me, but acted like she didn't for some reason. That night, I was so scared that she was going to break into my room and kidnap me. Part of me wanted to go to her apartment and knock on her door and say "I'm so sorry, I'm just making it all up because I'm mad at dad and projecting it onto you, like you always thought. I'm so sorry please forgive me please forgive me please forgive me I'm so sorry." Because the only way I can love her is through guilt and shame.

I doubt my memories and think "I'm not damaged enough for all that shit to have happened to me." But normal people with normal, loving, supportive parents don't have fears of their parents kidnapping them.

More fucked up shit that happened in the past

I wish I could just pick up the phone and call them.

"Oh, me?
I live in a domestic violence shelter because one of my best friends took advantage of me.
I'm consistently terrified of doing anything because I think somewhere in my mind that doing anything will get me raped or beaten.
I'm trying to get better, but I keep remembering all these horrible things you did to me and sometimes I can't sleep because of it and I feel like I'm fighting off a tidal wave with a cardboard sword and shield. Cardboard doesn't do so well in water, you know.
But other than that I'm fine. How are you?"

***

My dad used to pray after he raped me. After every time. He wanted god to cleanse him. He made me pray too, but more because he didn't want the devil to get me or something. He could be cleaned, but I couldn't. I just had to hope that god didn't notice how dirty I was. My dad blamed me for his actions. Of course he did; taking any sort of responsibility for them himself would be admitting that there was something horribly horribly wrong with him and that he needed help. I can't look at crosses. I can't enter a church without getting the molested sensation. I have a hard time being spiritual because I equate it too much with religion. I can't believe I'm outside right now. I'm in my dad's neighborhood. I don't know what I would do if he saw me.

Mommy Time

I realized today that my mom never cared about me, or what I did, unless it pertained directly to her.
I was thinking about kids and thought that when raising a child, you HAVE to set boundaries with them, otherwise how will they know how to set boundaries for themselves and with other people? And then I thought "But maybe I'm just really really biased because my mom never paid any attention to me unless it was entirely negative and abusive and self-serving and something to know that she was watching over me in any way would have been wonderful."
I can remember one or two times when my mom set rules for me, mostly what time I was to be back by. If I didn't listen to it that one time, she yelled at me endlessly for a few hours and then it was never brought up again. I can remember the one time I got in trouble for ditching my curfew, and that's because it never occurred to me that I had to listen to anything she said. I wasn't being difficult or rebellious (consciously), rules were just so foreign that it never occurred to me to follow them. Most of the time she would set boundaries and absolutely nothing would happen when I ignored them. I mean nothing. NOTHING nothing. She didn't even notice. I don't think she even remembered setting them. And I think, "Well, she was mentally ill. There's probably a lot she didn't remember." And then I think of EVERY SINGLE TIME she perceived that I was being abusive, and how she would bring it up OVER and OVER again over YEARS, and never once forgot. A boundary or two would have been nice, something real, something to let me know that she was watching what I did and cared about my well being. But she didn't, unless I was in her periphery and doing something she thought was manipulative and mean and abusive. I didn't exist unless I filled a role she thought she needed, a horrible one that someone my age could never fill.
I remember when I did something "bad" and she said I couldn't take tennis lessons. She and my dad had hassled me and hassled me about my eating habits and absolute lack of exercise, and so tennis was what I chose as my healthy activity. And that was taken away. And she still hassled me about my eating habits and lack of exercise. The one productive thing I could have been doing. I remember waking her up and telling her that we were late, and she groggily told me that I couldn't take tennis because of what I was done. I froze for a second, the mental kind of freezing, and wordlessly left the room. It didn't make any sense. It angered me, but I didn't know why. I cried. I had been really excited about playing tennis. I don't remember what I had done that was bad, but I'm absolutely certain that I did it again with absolutely no punishment. The one thing that would have made sense.
She never cared about how my day went, not really. She would ask, but it was always really obvious that she was only half-listening to everything I said, especially as I got older. The older I got, the less she cared. The less she was able to control me, I guess is what it was really all about.
My mom made me out to be her. The things she constantly accused me of doing, the abuse that she was certain I was heaping on her, I recently realized it was all things she was constantly doing to me; putting me down, yelling at me. (Yes, she accused me of yelling at her while yelling at me.) She treated me like I was an idiot and yelled and cried and screamed when she perceived that I was doing the same thing to her. This was usually when I would say something funny and she would just whip out this meaning to what I had said that was NOT THERE WHATSOEVER. I could never get her to believe that I was JUST talking, that it wasn't about her. I try to tell myself that she had and still has borderline personality disorder, that there was something REALLY wrong with her, but it doesn't make it any better. It doesn't make the pain any less.
After an estranged relationship, we started talking again. I was in my early early 20's, so this was just about three years ago. We saw each other once a week for dinner and she always insisted that we go to a bar. Talking to her was like talking to a brick wall; she cared even less, but there was this weird energy about her, like she was trying really hard to pretend that she did. Something was there that hadn't been there before, but something even bigger was completely lost. I can't be anymore clearer than that. I felt like crap around her, but I was desperate for her love and attention. She got frustrated with me when I said I didn't want to eat in bars anymore because I was trying to quit smoking and drinking. She told me to "stop being difficult". I don't think she was ever okay with my trying to quit smoking. She never said anything directly of course, but she always got silent and grouchy when I would talk about it or having withdrawals or something. We didn't have a relationship, we had dinner where I talked and she barely responded except when I did something she thought was stupid. Then she gave me crap about it, smiling, but it felt horrible. Then on thanksgiving, I felt so depressed and edgy and upset that I couldn't imagine going to a party and being around a bunch of people I had never met, as were our plans. I called her to tell her. She exploded. She sounded just like she did when I lived with her and even gave me crap about the fact that my sister hadn't been calling her. Then she cut off and said the my mom equivalent of "Fine, I don't care. Fine." I was heartbroken. I tried to make it better, I apologized and apologized and told her I would see her next week. But her tone was still malicious and angry. She hung up without saying goodbye. I broke down completely and cried slept through the whole holiday. The most emotion she had shown me in a matter of months, and it was to yell at me like she used to. I realized that she hadn't changed, no matter how much she and I wanted to believe that. That was nearly two years ago, and I haven't spoken to her since.
I quit smoking cold turkey the following January.

Last night was weird. But then, every night has been at least a little weird recently. I was talking to someone in my head, someone I admire creatively. I do that a lot; if I have to talk to someone in my head, I'd rather it be someone I think is awesome. So anyway, I'm talking to this person and I was laying on the floor because my right leg has been killing me and I had been doing stretches. Suddenly, this person whose personality I had totally created rolled over and opened up my ribcage and looked inside. This also happens a lot, a pleasant conversation in my head ends with whomever I'm conversing with doing that, and it's always when things continue to go pleasant and don't devolve into a rape fantasy. It always catches me off guard because I'm not controlling it. I almost yelled out. The the person faded away and all this weird shit started happening. I tried to focus on the music I was listening to to make things safer, but I realized that all the music was doing was keeping things in a very uncomfortable position. So I turned it off and laid back down. I don't know if I was remembering things or releasing energy in picture form. My dad was hitting and beating me and throwing me and screaming at me while he did it. He was yelling "I HATE YOU I WISH YOU HAD DIED YOU'RE NOTHING YOU'RE NOT WORTH SHIT" as he hurt me. A couple of those had come up in dialogue in a short film I had written the day before, so it just made the question of whether it was real or not more confusing. Then he did the same thing to my sister while I watched. But I wasn't really watching it, I was just laying there and feeling her pain and my own fear while he hit and beat her and screamed at her too.

This probably doesn't make any sense to someone who has never experienced it before.