Plus ca change...

I am so tired, all the time, despite lying around all day like a lazy fucking slug.

I am so scared that my panic attacks are getting worse.

I am disgusted by my eating, by my gaining, by my failing.

I am completely crushed by thoughts of the future, which is ever more rapidly bearing down upon me.

I am so sick of being me.

I just want to be better.

Excellent work

Well done, libido. You would go for her, wouldn't you? That is one fucked-up triangle-esque mess waiting to happen. Or not happen. Definitely NOT happen.

I know what it is. She has that same magnetism. And of course she's hot as fuck. And wears corsets.

Well done, libido. Excellent work. A+. Good job.

Welp

I made the mistake of having a conversation with my mother.

Apparently:
-feminism was a bad thing
-women and men are 'different'
-people born outside 'normal' male or female genders are 'nature's mistakes'
-the sexual revolution was a bad thing
-women don't enjoy sex
-sex should be within marriage
-the equal marriage campaign is pointless

And also my dad is even more homophobic than I was hitherto aware.

I actually don't have anything else to say.

Apart from I kinda want to smash things.

Hide and seek

Sometimes I just feel like I am making a complete mess of my entire life. That I'm wasting opportunities and being a coward and hiding, always fucking hiding.

I'm pretty well-practiced in keeping secrets, but it never stops being lonely. The loneliest part is... I don't really want to keep most of them anymore.

But who do I tell?

Who do I force to react to my confessions?

Who do I trust not to change their opinion of me?

Who could I stand to lose if their reaction was worse than I anticipated?

I am a fucking mess, and I am still so, so reluctant to make anyone else deal with my shit. Why should they care anyway? Why should they care about my sexual orientation, my religious beliefs, my mental history? Why should they care who I loved, who I want, who I'm sleeping with?

Why do I think they'll judge me?

Why should I care if they do?

Of course, the answer is obvious.

I'm still fucking terrified of being abandoned by everyone I care about.

The mental parentals

Last year I swore I wouldn't spend another summer at my parents' house. The simple fact is that being there, with them, puts me in a bad place. It depresses me, or maybe it just prompts me to depress myself. It's sad, but it's true. I spent two days there last week, and even 48 hours was enough to put me on the edge of a slight breakdown. I don't know exactly what it is about being around my parents that makes me feel so... insufficient. Maybe parents always make you feel a bit like a child.

For now, distance is the only solution. I love my parents, but I can't be around them. I'm still hauling myself back up the slope from the hideous depression of November-January, and I don't trust my ability to cope with the guilt-tripping and the ignorance and the lack of understanding or any desire to understand.

I'm being selfish, yeah. But right now I really have to do what is going to make me happy, because fuck knows I'm useless in every respect when I'm not.

And my dad can be disappointed all he wants, and my mum can guilt-trip me all she wants, but contrary to what they sometimes seem to think, I have got a life of my own and I'm doing whatever the fuck I like with it, and the reason they know so little about it is only partly because they would disapprove or not understand... it's mostly because they never bother to ask.

I know most of this is probably coming from me rather than them. But I think my insecurities are very much taking their form at the moment. So I'm keeping my distance. Because self-preservation may be selfish, but it's damn well preferable to self-destruction.

Things that aren't funny

Today I scrolled past a post on tumblr that said "Reblog if you started worrying about your weight before you were even 16", and I laughed a little to myself. Not because it was funny, but because the entire bloody thing is so fucking ridiculous that I don't even know what my reaction is.

I have no idea when I started worrying about my weight. I know that I was referred to as 'chubby' as a child. I know that by age 7 I considered my best friend 'the skinny one'. By age 10 I consistently skivved off school on Wednesdays to avoid swimming lessons because I was too embarrassed of how I looked in a swimming costume (odd the details that stick with you, I remember that it was how large my thighs looked when I sat down that really bothered me). By age 13 I'd begun to consciously reduce the amount I was eating in order to try and lose weight, only to give up when it never worked. By 16, the yo-yo-ing of attempted weight loss and self-hating weight gain had become normal.

I still think of myself as fat, a lot of the time. I think I stopped, briefly, after my 8 or so months of drastic weight loss, when I finally hit my goal, almost exactly a year ago now, I think maybe I thought I'd escaped it, that I didn't have to think of myself as fat anymore. Of course it didn't last. I've gained weight since then, so in my mind, I'm fat again.

But the bizarre thing is the idea that other people might not see me this way. For the whole of my life up until the drastic weight loss, it had been an unspoken truth that I was 'fat'. I rarely brought it up, because I never wanted to put people in the position where they felt they had to deny a plainly-obvious truth in order to be polite when we would both know they were lying. I had basically been overweight (and for a long time actually obese) all my life. It wasn't a matter of opinion or insult, it was fact.

A few weeks ago, I jokingly called myself fat in front of a friend. He's a genuinely lovely person and also aware that I have self-esteem issues, so I could have expected him to come to my defence. What I didn't expect was the bafflement with which he repeated: "you think you're fat?" and the certainty with which he said "you're not fat", and the elaboration that made it really sound honest: "you're not a stick, but you're not fat".

So who knows anymore. Sometimes I think I don't know what it is to think of myself as not-fat. Because I think that ever since I've been self-aware, that's a description I've applied to myself.

The same friend asked me where my self-esteem issues came from, and I had no idea how to answer. If something has always been with you, how on earth do you work out where it came from?

Because dreams are dreams, and progress is progress

Bad dream last night. First one in absolutely ages, so it kinda took me by surprise.

The sensation of being unable to control my limbs, unable to escape, unable to fight back... yeah, that's still about as terrifying as you might expect. The feeling of being unsafe, vulnerable to attack, isolated from help... yeah, that still had me sweating and shaking in the dark at 3am.

But, in the dream, I tried to fight. And the more I tried, the more I found I could. The angrier I got. The more determined to get away. And I knew where my safe places were. I knew how to escape.

And when I woke up, instead of giving in to the panic attack, I drank a glass of water, found headphones and put on a music album, and let myself go back to sleep.

Because dreams are just dreams, and they can't hurt me.

Something like an epiphany

So get this.

I can do whatever the fuck I like.

I can say whatever the fuck I like.

I can wear whatever the fuck I like.

I can think whatever the fuck I like.

I can feel whatever the fuck I like.

I can eat whatever the fuck I like.

I can be whatever the fuck I like.

And I am enough.

I have worth.

I am a good thing.

I am me.

And I like who I am.

And maybe I won't feel this way tomorrow.

But that doesn't matter.

Because I feel it now.

And it's real.

And this is progress.

And it came from me.

You just gave me permission to accept it.

But it's me.

It's me.

Back to the playground

So it turns out that the days where I really fucking hate myself are even harder to deal with, now that I also have days where I feel kinda great about myself.

Swings and roundabouts, I guess.

The higher you climb

I am happy.

I am so very happy.

But I'm also feeling the nigglings of doubt, of dread, of inevitable downward spiral. Because I still don't think I think I deserve to be happy. I still think I will make a fuck-up of anything good. I still think I will ruin things and hurt people and deny myself for the sake of isolation and cowardice and self-sabotage.

This is such a hard balance to find.

On the one hand, I have never felt so good. But on the other, I have to be prepared for it all to suddenly disappear, because it could. It very actually could, quite apart from anything I might do to ruin it. There is no guarantee here. There never has been. I can't depend on this. The very last thing you want is for me to depend on you.

On the one hand, it's so completely simple. But on the other, it couldn't be more confusing.

On the one hand, I'm okay.

On the other, I'm just waiting for disaster.

I need to remember

That it was real.

That good things do happen.

That I deserve to be happy as much as everyone else.

That it was real.

Dream a little dream

Hey you,

Dreamed of you last night. It's happened before, but this was more vivid. We didn't just kiss.

The worst (best?) thing is that it's not outside the realm of possibility.

You do treat me slightly different to other people.

We do occasionally overstep personal boundaries.

I did kiss you once, friendly, and you liked it.

You put up with my weird attempts at conversation.

You seem to want me around, at least some of the time.

You do talk quite a lot about being single. On Saturday you were even bemoaning that you're basically the only one in our group of friends who is. It was pointed out that I'm the other obvious one. As someone said, "there's a simple solution to that." Unfortunately, I was too busy trying to make sure my reaction wasn't incriminating to notice what your reaction was.

This is my problem. I've spent so so very long learning how to hide feelings, that I'm not sure I know how to show them. And I don't know if I should. Because, when I do, people get hurt.

Because in all likelihood I still wouldn't be what you want. What you deserve.

No matter how much you want someone, I can't expect you to be so desperate that you'd settle for me.

I'm a penny in a diamond mine.

Fuck, I want you though.

A penny can have dreams.

Lying Bastards

So the scales claim I gained five pounds this week.

If it were one or two, I'd be freaking out, but that much? I'm sure (well, 85% sure) that can't have happened.

It hasn't been a perfect week, but the desire not to eat has been pretty dominant. Even if I slipped up on a couple of days and ate more than I meant, there's no way I did it to the tune of 3500 x 5.

So fuck that.

It hasn't been a particularly good week emotionally either, but we can deal with that. Or rather, we can ignore that and pray that it goes away. Hilariously, I actually made an (admittedly pretty pitiful) effort to reach out to someone last weekend. I didn't actually tell them anything, because I they were obviously busy and knee-deep in other people's problems already, and I still haven't entirely shaken the feeling that they only put up with speaking to me because they're too nice. But, I think, if I ever found the courage or the right moment, I think I could tell them. If not everything, then a lot of it.

Until then, I remain a lying bastard.

Limbo

It could go either way.

I'm sitting high on a week of successful restriction. Old habits are like old friends, once you have them back you remember how good it feels to have them. But I'm more aware now too. I know I can't push myself too far. I'm not playing How Low Can I Go. There's no point running myself into the ground. I'm in the middle of a fucking degree here, I need my brain to work for me, I need the energy to concentrate on my academic work, else I risk failing at the one thing I've ever been good at. I also have sufficient of a social life that I can't risk going too hard and being noticed. If I start blacking out from blood sugar lows when I'm with friends, well, it's just not a situation I want to encounter. When all's said and done, I don't actually feel the need to starve myself into submission. It's enough to have control. It's enough to be able to set my own limits.

Fuck, it feels good.

I've been waiting for the inevitable moment when I screw up, when I push too low and enter a dangerous head space, or when I slip up and shoot too high and undo all my progress. It could go either way. A week is usually how long I can manage being good before I fail somehow. But it doesn't have to be that way. I can sit here happily in limbo. It's not completely healthy, I know, to do what I'm doing, but if it keeps me sane, if it keeps me in control, then it's the lesser of many evils. If I start getting good losses then I'll quite happily ease off a little, even. This week just proved I still had it in me. I'd been beginning to think it was all some freakish dream, all that strength of will I had before. I'd been beginning to think I was still my high weight, deep down, and the slightly-less-fat view in the mirror was just an illusion, another facet of my body dysmorphia. But I got up the guts to get back on the scales last weekend, and - miracle of miracles - apparently I'm the same weight as I was in January. I don't know how the fuck I managed that, given the disgusting way I've been eating and the complete lack of consistent exercise, but I'm too relieved to dare questioning it. Granted, it's still a good 20lb above my lowest weight. I'd like to knock off two stone, at least, but that's okay. It's a goal. I can work with goals. One of the reasons why everything went to shit last summer was that I met my goal. I met it and it didn't solve a fucking thing. It was a hard fact to face up to, which is why I haven't for so long. Even in my success I still managed to feel like a failure. And isn't that the fucking story of my life.

Breaking the Fourth Wall, or Method Acting

"Just be yourself," they say. And I am. When I'm with my friends, my family, I am myself. It's true, I don't tell them everything, I don't answer completely honestly, I hide and divert and avoid. But I still feel like me, like the me I properly am. I feel content and secure. I'm still full of self-doubt and self-criticism, but it doesn't hold me down, because I can't let it. Because if I let myself get dragged down, when I'm with them, they'll notice. And that's the one thing I can never let happen, even when I think I want to. Hiding the fact that anything's wrong has been primary objective from Day 1, so much so that it's not even an objective anymore. It's just automatic. Trying to change it is what feels like the act now. If ever I try to let someone know that something's wrong, it feels false, fake, artificial, attention-seeking, play-acting. As though the public me has become the real me. As though the act has become the reality.

The only trouble is that I've broken my own fourth wall. I no longer believe the act. I can almost believe it for as long as I'm in it, for as long as I'm with my friends and there, in that moment, in the group, where maybe they don't know me all that well but they accept me as I am and they don't ask, they don't question, they don't suspect, they just let me be me... there, all the crap that weighs me down just lightens. It doesn't vanish, but it takes a backseat for a while.

But it only lasts so long. The moment I leave, even for as long as it takes to go to the bathroom, when I'm alone, and I glance in the mirror, or look at myself, and there's no one left around me to drown out the internal monologue of shit, and it takes mere seconds, mere seconds, for me to crumple, to curl in on myself, to cry, to rake my nails across my skin as though they can scratch the disease of doubt right out of me.

Now, so long as I can wipe my face and open the door and smile and go back, it's all okay. I laugh again, and no one notices, and I slip effortlessly back into the act that is so ingrained that it has become reality. There's a method to the madness, you could say. It's wonderful. It's freeing. It's when I actually feel like there's hope for me yet.

But then it ends. And I go home. And shut myself back up in my bedroom. And then I'm alone with myself. The audience is gone and I'm back behind the curtain. There's no script anymore, or any chance for improvisation. All the props are gone. All the costumes. The stage lights, the microphones. All of it, gone. It's just me, only I don't feel like myself anymore. I don't feel as though I fit into my own body. I don't feel connected to myself, to anything that I was only a short time ago, to all the things I know I've done, all the successes I know I've had. It's as though they're not me anymore. As though I'm not me anymore. It's more than loneliness. I don't know what it is. Maybe dependency. Maybe neediness. Maybe selfishness. Maybe it is just loneliness, but in my self-obsession I think it's more than that, worse than that, that such a common word as that isn't enough. I hate it. I hate hating myself for it. But even writing this post is making my skin crawl, because how much of a selfish little fuck do I sound. How much of a whiny ungrateful brat. I know, that's the worst part. I know. I may not have a script here backstage, but I have a monologue, a constant chiseling rant that comes from inside me and all around me at the same time. Selfish, it says. Pathetic. Weak. Its lists go on and on, as though its swallowed a fucking thesaurus.

It only stops, briefly, when I'm with other people. Maybe because it can't risk them overhearing its ranting. Maybe because it fears, if they did, they'd start to believe it all too.

To Do List

1. Don't tell him.
2. Stop staring at him.
3. Don't make him deal with your crap.
4. Don't tell him.
5. Let him find someone else.
6. Don't let him know.
7. Don't tell him.
8. Don't make things even more awkward for him.
9. Stop laughing quite so hard.
10. Don't tell him.
11. Don't dream about him.
12. Don't kiss him.
13. Don't tell him.

We were emergencies. We still are.

WE WERE EMERGENCIES

Buddy Wakefield

A poet

can stick anything into the fog and make it look like a ghost.

But tonight let us not become tragedies.

We are not funeral homes

with propane tanks in our windows

lookin’ like cemeteries.

Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go.

Let go.

Tonight, Poets, let’s turn our wrists so far backwards

the razor blades in our pencil tips

can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside.

Step into this

with your airplane parts

and repeat after me with your heart:

I no longer need you to fuck me as hard as I hate myself.

Make love to me

like you know I am better than the worst thing I ever did.

Go slow.

I’m new to this

but  I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop without jumping.

I have realized the moon did not have to be full for us to love it.

We are not tragedies

stranded here beneath it.

If my heart really broke every time I fell from love

I’d be able to offer you confetti by now

but hearts don’t break, y’all,

they bruise and get better.

We were never tragedies.

We were emergencies.

You call 9 – 1 – 1.

Tell them I’m havin’ a fantastic time.

Dreaming of an author

I dreamed I could play the piano. That I sat down and laid my fingers on the keys and made up a song. People stopped and listened. You came up behind me, and with a smile laid you hand on my elbow. When I turned to leave, you hugged me. You smiled, looked at me with a simple fondness I haven't seen in years. You were there behind me, hand in mine, supporting me, grounding me, as I faced down uncertainties and triggers. You understood, and silently, with a touch of your skin to mine, you were my reassurance.

I miss you. And maybe part of what I miss is a memory. But I know you're still her, in all the ways that matter. I'm still me. I think, just maybe, we could still be us. But maybe not. Maybe all it is is nostalgia. Melancholy yearning for an imagined past.

It's not fair, the way my mind plays tricks with me. If only a time-traveller could document my memories, make a timeline of my heart and yours, take statements and accounts that could be analysed and understood, and write a history of how we got from there to here. If only someone had been watching, and could explain to me everything I have forgotten and distorted and dreamed into a facsimile of reality. Then they could write me like a character in a book, with motivations and reliable narration and emotional development. They could show me how I feel, and why. They could show me what I should do. They could write my life for me, because all the drafts I can manage would end up in the editor's shredder.

Unjinxing myself

It's been three days. I'm doing okay. I'm really doing okay. I pray it lasts. It's so hard to remember, when I'm bad, that things can feel so okay. If only I can remember this, how I feel now, maybe I'll remember that I can do this.


A song that calms my head, sometimes.

Dear you (plural)

Dear you,
I would tell you, I swear I would, if my problems didn't feel so insignificant compared to what you deal with on a daily basis. One of my greatest communication fears is that I will be told my problems are as small and petty as I tell myself they are. Of course, the other of my greatest fears is that I will be told the opposite, because then I would have to accept that there is legitimately something wrong.


Dear you,
I know you have a lot going on right now, and I know you definitely don't think of me anywhere near as much as I think about you, but I just want to see you some time. I just want to hang out with you. I have dreams about looking at you and smiling. Just smiling. That's all I want. Just to smile at you and flirt with you and laugh at your inane awesomeness. You gave me hope, you know, and even if all my instincts tell me to stay back, because you don't want me, because you deserve so much better, because I just screw everything up... I just want to see you. Bump into me in the street, eh?

Dear you,
I'm sorry I never pick up the phone when you call, but honestly, I look at it ringing and I just don't have the energy. All my conversations with you feel like lies, because I don't trust you enough to tell you how I'm really feeling. There's so much about me that you don't understand. And I don't see that changing. You brought me into this world but we've been growing apart ever since.

Dear you,
I really hope you don't think you've done something wrong. You haven't. The gaps between our conversations get longer and longer. I just... can't. All I see when I think of you is how much I have screwed you over. All the pain I've caused you. All the secrets I've kept, all the truths I've told. Everything. You, who I loved more than anything. I hope you don't miss me. I hope you don't feel like you need me, because you don't. I am a dagger in your back. I am a weight around your neck. You may have forgiven me, you may even think there's nothing to forgive, but I know better. I know the extent of my guilt, and I will never, ever forgive myself. I know I'm hurting you even more with every day I don't talk to you, but I just can't. Everything I do makes everything worse.

Dear you,
You're a great friend and I love you a lot, but sometimes the gap between us just seems so large. I mean, how can you not know the difference between a clitoris and a cervix?

Dear you,
I wonder if you hear me through the walls sometimes. I hear you playing the flute. Do you ever hear me crying? I hope not. I already feel too much of an inconvenience in my own house.

Dear you,
Help. I'm not fine. It hurts. Again. Talk to me?

Week by weak by week

I do so well, and then I don't. Usually I manage about a week of success, and I feel fantastic, and I hope, and it all feels so good... and then something goes wrong, and all of a sudden I'm back to square one: unable to leave my room, shaking, crying, feeling so fucking filthy all over that I want to scratch my skin away and crawl out from inside this hideous waste of flesh. Nothing even happened. I'm ill, so I feel like crap. I have to give a presentation tomorrow, so I'm having a fucking panic attack every time I think about it. I'm desperate to just hang out with my friends and laugh and forget everything, but I'm suffocating under the terrible feeling that I'm an inconvenience and a nuisance and a fucking burden to everyone around me. What the fuck is wrong with me what the fuck is wrong with me what the fuck is wrong with me. And how will I ever get help when all I can think is that I don't deserve it.