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?