Fuck

Well it was kinda inevitable, I guess. But finally being confronted with it had made it impossible to deny.

On the one hand it's like coming home, because I've spent so much of my life feeling this way.

On the other hand, well... it's hard not to think: "so here's to another seven years..."

My instinct is to run.

My other instinct is to tell him.

So...

Maybe tell him then run?

I'm so fucking lost, I have no idea what I'm doing beyond the end of next month.

I want that to make me reckless but mostly it's just making me terrified.

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?