I'm so sick of fighting a battle I can never win. I will never be truly happy. I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I somehow felt happy. As Agent Smith said in the original Matrix, humans define themselves by their misery. I am certainly human, then. Good to know.
I'm weary of struggling against a current that tries so hard to drag me down. The chaos swirl is tireless and mechanical. My feeble mortality cannot stand against it, yet I am expected to continue to valiantly thrash about. I don't want to anymore. I want to just let the water crush me until the last holdout bit of me gives up and lets me go.
I don't want to kill myself, so don't get all frightened. Or, if I do, I'm not going to try. Much as it might appease me, it's a horrible thing to do to my family and friends.
Friends. Hah. I'm supposed to have friends too. That's the idea, or so I've gathered from watching laughing passers-by on the street. People do things together and enjoy being around each other, and these people are called friends.
I'm not sure I have any friends, of the tried-and-true variety. My testing techniques have a strong tendancy to drive people away. I don't consciously mean to. My personality is so volitile, though, that I probably have to use a trial by fire to see if people have what it takes to stand with me even in my darker hours. Perhaps that quality I seek and need is simply not found in mortals. If that is so, then my lot in life is truly dim.
I keep returning to the same methods. I can go without taking a razor to my forearm, as I have dearly wanted to these last two weeks, but this self-restraint is not total. In place of physical self-injury, I end up deliberately putting off major essays for my classes. The end result is the same. I slaughter myself in any available way. I treat myself like meat to be carved and devoured.
I'm broken, aren't I. But I know that answer. Yes, I am. I'm mangled -- by my own hand and teeth, no less.
I saw an ad yesterday for a product that could reduce the appearance of scars, even old scars. My mother asked me what I would want with such a product. You know, my readers. Ah, I'm sure you know. I have a great many scars, but topical creams and bandages can only fade the scars on my skin. The majority of my injuries are on my inside, in my psyche, tucked away where nobody is allowed to reach.
And I'm angry with the world. For years I refused to let myself feel anything. I bottled everything inside and refused to touch it. When I was 17, the bottle broke, shattered by the expanding rage it contained.
So now I feel. I feel every slight done to me, intentional or not, because I lack the thick skin to repel anything vile cast my way. And then I'm not supposed to feel, even though not feeling is bad too. There's a happy medium in there, or so I'm told. I have to take anyone's word for it, because I can't reach that middle ground. All I can do is swing madly back and forth like a mad pendulum. Nothing I do is good enough! I'm supposed to magically know exactly how to behave myself, but nobody ever taught me. All I know how to do is hate and hurt and that's not enough for anybody, is it?
I'm insanely jealous. Some people have a natural balance within themselves. They smile and the sun smiles back at them. They do their work and then calmly, neatly enjoy some accepted hobby. They passively nod at everything that happens to them and are generally unimpressive little twats except that they never go overboard. They do all things in moderation and never exceed society's boundaries. I hate them, and hate myself for hating them. I can't be like them. I can only wear their faces over mine, but it will never be genuine, and I can only manage the masquerade for a little while. Eventually I have to go to some dim corner with a towel and sob my brains out.
I know life isn't fair. I'm at least that mature, though not much more. I'm still horribly confused by these perfect people, though. Is their complete passivity innate, or is it something I desperately need to learn? All I can do is bottle up the sorrow and pain. The bottle's broken now, though. Remember? So everything I try to cram away just seeps back out, like an infection that drains and builds up some distance from its source.
I just want to go home. Not where I live, not where my mother lives, not where I grew up. There's some other Home out there, in a place I can't get to, and all I know about it for sure is that I am keenly yearning to go there. Now. I don't want to take another minute of this sad, pathetic, pointless existence. I want to go Home. I want to know exactly what I have to do to go Home so that I can devote myself to doing it, just so I can go Home right away. I want to go right now. I hate not knowing what I'm supposed to do with my life. Somebody just tell me so I can do it and exit stage left!
I hate this shell, too, this ugly and increasingly large ball of flesh. It's distorted. I'm not supposed to look like this. I'm supposed to be kind of pretty, and tall and slim. I'm not really this bulbuous creature with the broad waist and puffy upper arms. I'm supposed to have firm, taut calves and pleasing curves about my waist. I want to look nice, but apparently I don't really. All my actions, all the foods I gobble down and all the physical activity I hate to try, shows that with nauseating clarity.
Nothing's ever going to be okay, is it? Something will always be hanging over my head, stressing me out badly and eating my life away. I'm never going to be a healthy person, am I? I'm always going to be broken and messy, a burry copy of the person I was supposed to be.
I think about alternate worlds sometimes. I suppose there's at least one where I'm a panhandler on the street, out of my mind because nobody was around when I first thought I was losing my mind, and perpetually exhauster without the medication I need. That Ree may not have graduated from high school with her class, or even at all. Or she may have gotten her G.E.D. but suffered cultureshock upon entering college at barely 17, and never recovered her innocence.
I like to think that somewhere, there's a Ree whose father never left his wife. That Ree wouldn't have had her world turned upside down. She's probably still sweetly ignorant of the world, having attended a Christian college, just as her family always wanted. She'd never befriend a gay man or a Jehovah's Witness, or even have ever roleplayed -- that's evil, y'know. Maybe she's closedminded, and not at all a person the current me would like. That's actually kind of an uplifting thought, because it means there are ways that I have grown that I might not have. It means that maybe, at some point that I couldn't see then, I made a good choice. I hope it will help me in the future, too. Something better or I'll go down fast, that's for sure.
Is that why he left her, God? Did my father hurt me with his adultery just so that I wouldn't stay comfortable in some conservative Christian dreamland? I really liked it there, God! It was plush and warma and it smelled like freshly cut grass in the spring. It was smooth and reassuring, like chicken noodle soup when you're ill, and I don't remember asking to leave.
So that's it, then. I should know better by now than to rail against God for an answer unless I really think I'm sure that I want to listen. I'm not supposed to be ignorant of people. I'm supposed live in the world and see what it's like instead of cloistering myself away. (A little voice in my head snickers snidely, "And you wondered why you couldn't have been Catholic, prude.") Sweet dreams are nice but eventually, always before I'm ready, I have to wake up. So it is with life, it seems. Depsite my sincere and strong aversion to maturity, it looks like I have a clear message. Grow up. It hurts, but it's worth it for the end.