11/11/23

What’s wrong?

They always ask.

Most of the time I don’t know.

But there’s a few things wrong that I really know. 1. I’m a lazy piece of shit but I also don’t want to be and I know it’s no one’s fault but  mine and I’m ungrateful but I just don't know how to stop 2. Everyone hates me and I’m not sure why. And not in that overdramatic way. Like it’s genuinely true. They agree. And I can’t figure out why, which just generally hurts but also makes it hard for me to succeed in the ways it’s already hard for me to try at. 3. There’s more but I can’t remember.

my dream

i get angry sometimes too. but then a blue butterfly flys out of my binder and i think how can I be angry in a world where something that beautiful happens?

how to tell someone you love them

“You have to care about someone to hate them.”

“I don’t think you understand what the word ‘hate’ means.”

I shook my head, “Hating someone takes effort. If you didn’t care, you just wouldn’t care.”

“I guess I hate you a whole fucking lot, then.”

“Thank you?”

“You’re welcome.”

“Well, I guess that’s the closest to you admitting you care about me that I’m ever gonna get.”

“Correct.”

the intelligence of happiness

I don’t know if I believe in God or fate or anything, but I like to think that my sadness helps other people be happy. Maybe there’s only a certain amount of happiness this world can hold, and me being sad makes space for other people’s happiness. It’s a nice thought. Or maybe a really fucked up one. Or maybe just me trying to make myself feel better, but I know I’m strong enough to carry this burden.

I guess I do believe in God a little bit, because every night before I go to sleep I thank them for everything they’ve given to me and everyone I love. What’s that called again? Oh, right, praying. And sometimes I’ll ask for happiness, and then I think, Oh, shit, wait, don’t waste your time on me instead of making the people I love or people more deserving than me or people sadder than me happy. Empathy and depression do not mix well.

The thing I was the most grateful for was them and our conversations on the fire escape while we smoked our cigarettes too fast, even in the dead of winter, like we were competing in a race to the death.

Half the fun of the fire escape was the people watching. 

“I never really understood what ‘You are in charge of your own happiness,’ really meant until now.”

“What, are you gonna embroider that on a fucking pillow?”

I gave them a dead glance.

“Please, do tell.”

“Happiness is just an emotion. You think that your happiness relies on your life and your environment and you can only be happy if something’s making you feel happy, but you literally don’t need a reason to be happy. You just need to feel happy. That’s it.”

“That simple, huh?”

“Half the battle is wanting to feel happy. I used to think I was above these happy-go-lucky-ray-of-fucking-sunshines, but I’m not - they’re far better than me.”

"They just make it seem so simple. Why can’t I do that? Why can’t I be a happy-go-lucky-ray-of-fucking-sunshine?”

“Well, for starters, you think they’re idiots.”

“Your words, not mine.”

“I don’t actually think they’re idiots. Anymore. I just used to.”

“That’s a shitty defense.”

The man reached for the woman’s hand.

“I’m just not explaining this well. I really don’t think they’re idiots anymore. People think that their sadness makes them more complex and interesting and that happiness is simple - your words not mine - but that’s bullshit. A bullshit excuse to make themselves feel better and superior to the people they really envy. Happiness is complex. Being happy is hard - a lot fucking harder than being sad - and it takes a real fucking intellectual to achieve happiness.”

They stopped in their tracks, just looking at each other and smiling.

“I’m not making some insane claim that people are sad or depressed just because they think it makes them feel like some sort of cool ass sophisticate. I’m just saying they’re desperate to convince themselves that there must be some good coming out of their pain, that maybe it makes them better than the more well-adjusted people, somehow.”

They stood like that for a moment, then turned their smiles ahead instead of at each other, and kept on walking against the grain of the city.

I raised my cigarette like we were toasting drinks, “To the well-adjusted people, then.”

They reached over and clinked their cigarette against mine, “To the well-adjusted people. May we join them in their higher knowledge one day.”

We stopped speaking, just looking at each other as we inhaled.

We made eye contact like that for a moment, then turned our heads ahead to the people on the street instead of at each other, and kept on exhaling our smoke against our view of the city below us.

shitty people

“I’m scared I’m a shitty person. Every time I do something good I wonder if my motives are selfish, like I’m just doing it to feel like a good person even though I’m not.”

“There are multiple versions of ourselves. The person we see ourselves as, the person some people see us as, the person other people see us as, the person we want to be, the person we truly are, and the person we may become. So you can’t really be a shitty person, because you’re not really a person at all. You’re just some fragmented version of yourself at this point in time that happens to be shitty. Actions are shitty, people are not.”

“Do you really believe there are truly no completely terrible people out there? Ones that don’t just do bad things but really are bad people?”

“I don’t know, but what I am sure of is that if those people do exist, you sure as hell aren’t one of them.”

call me a poet

Bite my lip and drink my blood like wine

Hold onto me instead of holding onto time

The water we quench our thirst with now

Turns to sweat and tears later anyhow

grief

“Tragedy makes people uncomfortable. For both you and the people around you. You get the bullshit ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I’m sorry for you loss’ and you have to respond with the bullshit ‘It’s okay’ which makes the ‘I’m sorry’-ers feel uncomfortable because they know it’s not okay and they know you know it’s not okay. And it’s weird, like, what are you sorry for? What did you do? And it’s so fucking weird that this little parade is just a social norm, a polite mannerism - like, who the fuck came up with this? Maybe it’d be even more uncomfortable if we didn’t have these fake little scripts to stick to. I mean, I don’t know what I would say if I didn’t rely on the whole ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘It’s okay’ routine.”

They were dead silent except for the sound of them dragging on their cigarette, allowing me to rant, wordlessly telling me, Go on.  

So I went on. More quietly, this time.

“But there was this one time, my mom’s friend said something that believe it or fucking not actually helped. And she didn’t even know it, because she didn’t even say it to me. She said it to my mom. I was in the car with her - after he died, on our way home - and she was on speaker phone, pretending like I wasn’t in the car, as per usual. Her friend was talking about me to her, saying, ‘She’s so strong. She held him until he died, she didn’t leave the room when she could’ve, she was there for him, because she’s so strong.’ I hadn’t really cried yet, but that broke me. In a good way, a good cry. I turned my head to the window so my mom wouldn’t see. My mom’s friend never knew I heard, never knew how much that meant to me, but it’s the only truly comforting thing someone has ever said to me in the wake of tragedy. Am I a fucking narcissist? Someone died and the only thing that made me feel better was someone boosting my fucking ego. What the hell is wrong with me? Whatever. I don't care, because I know it was a hell of a lot better than ‘I’m sorry’ ever could be.”

the sick fucking joke of life

Being a girl in your teens or twenties is a sick joke. Like a sick fucking joke. I know not everything is that black and white, but I have constant mood swings set off by the dumbest things or sometimes nothing at all, and all the guys I know think that’s crazy. And I also know there are bigger problems in this world than being a teenage girl in her 20’s – terrible, heart-breaking ones that are truly sick fucking jokes – but it’s crazy how much, at times, it can feel like there is no one in the world who is possibly in more pain than you. Even when you know that’s not true and insanely overdramatic, and sometimes it’s all over something as stupid as dropping your food or not being able to figure out your homework or your hair looking frizzy. Or sometimes it’s over something big. Or sometimes it's over something small that's really about something big. And then, here comes the next mood swing.

It’s a sick joke being human. A sick fucking joke. But you gotta learn to take a joke and laugh.

Being alone was slightly less terrifying than settling. I guess what I’ve really done is settle for being alone. 

I have all this love trapped in me with nowhere to put it, so it rots and turns to bitterness and resentment.

I learned I was an overthinker when I wrote a short story for my creative writing class with a character based on myself and the entire class described her as an overthinker. I was genuinely not aware of it beforehand. I thought everyone was that internally analytical.

I say, “I don’t like people” in place of the truth, which is, “People don’t like me.” It’s a defensive survival instinct because I can’t take the trying anymore. I’m too embarrassed and ashamed of the truth. I’ve always been aware enough to know most people don’t like me, but never aware enough to know why. I’ve never really been able to figure out why people decide they dislike me when they don’t even know me, before they even have the chance to get to know me. I don’t know what’s so off putting about me. My friends think I’m just mean, but I’m not; furthermore, I wasn’t always like this, but the world and the people within it have hardened me and poisoned me with bitterness. I know this is close minded and I’m not giving people a chance to prove me wrong, but it hurts too much, and how many times do I need to be proven right time and time again? I know I’m the problem, but I’ve decided I will no longer give them the chance. I can be my own problem and not burden anyone with being their problem. I can keep them safe from the posion, I can shield them from it. This is my act of liking people; doing them the favor of keeping them away from me.

I hate when someone says something to me and I instantly know I will never forget it, will never stop thinking about it. It’s usually a thoughtless comment with no harmful intentions.

I looked at them and listened to the silence between us, even when the lights went out.

But I am not a good person. I am a shitty person who takes care of people and tries to serve everyone around me in a feeble attempt to amount purpose to my life, like doing enough good things makes up for the fact that I am not a good person.

You can’t be a bad person because you aren’t really a person at all. You’re just one version of yourself at this point in time. Everyone is broken into a million different fragments – the person we see ourselves as, the person some people see us as, the person other people see us as, the person we want to be, the person we truly are, and the person we may become. Actions are shitty, people are not, so it isn’t really possible for you to be a shitty person.

Immediately once we say the words we say and do the things we do they become changed into new matter entirely. But perhaps in the few seconds where we open our mouths to speak and begin the actions we take they are just that – words and actions, unchanged. There is simply not enough time to live in those few seconds. Instantly after, those words and actions become altered by perception. There is no truth, only memory. The window for the present is so small, that there is no life, only memory. And it is impossible to share an identical memory with anyone else and nearly just as impossible to convey memory in its entirety with anyone else. As such, we are all stuck living in separate lives, in separate memories.

A thing. But which thing? I'll take any thing.

I want to live my life for the sake of being happy and not caring. But I also want people to not look down on me and to think I’m smart and be impressed with me. I don’t even know why, because it’s not like people give a fuck about me anyway. I can do my makeup or not, dress up or not, be smart or not, and it isn’t really the fact that they don’t give a fuck, so why do I cling on to the concept of seeming minorly intelligent like it’s the one thing I might halfway succeed at? I’ll never be pretty or skinny or funny or likable and I never was, but I used to be somewhat smart, or at least other people thought so, but now I’ve lost most of that. But I can’t let it go, because it was the one thing people used to even slightly care or like about me. Even if just a sliver. I want to let it all go. I want to be that one extreme. I want to not care and do some dumb shit with my life that at least can attempt to make me happy even if people think I’m 100% an idiot. I want to care about something. I want something to matter to me. I want to stop feeling like I’m just moving through each day. I want to have something that fulfills me. Even if it’s a stupid thing. I just want a thing. And the only thing that seems obtainable or feasible for me is some sort of mild success in my career, because I know every other thing is far out of reach. But this thing isn’t working for me. But everything else is not working for me so much harder, that this seems like my closest shot. Maybe I can force myself into this extreme of discipline and success and drive. It used to be foreseeable for me. Now nothing seems foreseeable. Not this or the other things. But I need to pick a thing and try. All I can do is try. Deep down a part of me – that’s realistic, not pessimistic – knows that this is my life and it isn’t changing. I know there’s those people that sound ridiculous and overdramatic saying their lives won’t get better, but I know mine won’t because I’m stagnant and stubborn and incapable of making change. Any time I’ve mustered up the courage to try my efforts have failed, anyhow. And I’ve just given up on them. And even if I try again, the outcomes are always the same. My life is going to be this endlessness of nothing and no change and no fulfillment and the same boringness, just trying to fill the time. Just trying to feel okay and not 100% shitty. There will be nothing big or new exciting that has any real meaning to me. I know it has to be my fault, and I’m not just the unluckiest person on earth, but I can’t figure it out. Time and time again I acknowledge that I’m the problem but I’m incapable of figuring out what that problem is and how to fix it, which is the real reason I’ve given up – I don’t know what to change. I don’t know what to change about myself and/or in my life.

10/27/23

I’m sick of living in simultaneous extremes. I both wanna not care and be lazy and look down on judgemental people that look down on people they feel don’t meet their level of motivation and simultaneously want to be driven and successful and motivated and smart, if not for the sole purpose of others viewing me that way. I sometimes feel like I never care about anything for my own sake. just for how other people view me. I wish I could stick to one. How do I even feel both at the same time when they’re such opposites? Everyone kept asking me what was wrong tonight and I hate it so much. I try so hard to seem normal to everyone. I try so hard for no one to notice. And it’s still not good enough – everyone can see something is wrong with me. But I don’t know what to do, because I’m trying so hard to make them not worry and see nothing, but obviously I’m so much more transparent than I thought.

Someone teach me how to try...

I really can’t wait for everyone’s birthdays to be over so I can crawl back into my depression hole. Maybe that’s selfish and pathetic and dumb and overdramatic but I feel so much pressure on everyone’s birthdays to try my very hardest to be a normal human fucking being, which is very hard for me. I’m stressed over all these interviews. I don’t know how I live in all these extremes at the same time – I both wanna try so hard and be smart and good and hardworking while simultaneously want to not give a fuck and fuck society and be a lazy piece of shit who leaves capitalist standards alone. But I realize no one cares and that's on me for wallowing in my little self-pitying reflection on what I want from life. Either work hard and be good or shut the fuck up and be a lazy shit that’s gonna be judged and accept that. But my problem is I simultaneously live in extremes. I genuinely believe I’m bipolar sometimes and experience something called “mixed moods.” I don’t know, though. I really don’t. I keep getting drunk and making therapy and diagnostic appointments then getting sober and stressing and canceling them. I really want some help but don’t wanna deal with it because I’m scared. I act like I hate the help and care so much but deep down I just want someone to come in and force me to let them coddle me and care about me and force me to do what I need to do because sometimes I realize how much I really can’t live like this and need someone to be there but I know I will never let them. I have so much anxiety over so much dumb, inconsequential, upcoming shit that I need to let go. Deep down I know I need someone to lovingly care but all I can think about is I really just need someone to slap me and beat it into me that I don’t and that I need to man up and just deal with it. I hate to admit it but I just want to be normal so bad. I want to have normal thoughts and normal relationships and a normal life and a normal outlook and thinking. I know normal people have unnormal tendencies sometimes, but I really know now how fucked up my brain is and I just want it to stop but I don’t know how. I want to fix it. I really, really do – but I’m hurt and so much of a pussy when it comes to making the effort. I’ve tried so many times and then chickened out. I’ve canceled so many therapy appointments. I've drunkenly convinced myself so many times I’ll be honest with myself and others who care about and are my friends. But I can't. I really fucking can’t. And before I can, what I really need to figure out is how I can make myself try. I know once I commit to therapy or other shit that will make me feel better I’ll be okay because I’m such an analytical overthinker that I know I am capable of figuring out, but all I need to do is overcome that hurdle of forcing myself to start and to try. But that is so, so FUCKING hard for me. And I have no clue how to go about doing that. I didn’t realize how much of an overthinker I am until recently, at least compared to most “normal” people. I also realized how much of these overthinking thoughts are so crazy and fucked up and weird and genuinely embarsassing that I can't even force myself to write them down in a literally goddamn private Googel Doc. I want to be normal or relatively normally or just more normal so fucking bad. Sometimes I feel so strong and resilient and sometimes I feel so overdramatic and stupid but deep down I know neither are true and when it comes down to it I can keep neither of these up. I just want someone to beat me down and force me to fix everything. I worry about my capability to keep this up. I worry about what will happen to me. Will I fly off the deep end? Will I adhere to one extreme consistently? Or the other? Will I ignore both and adhere to nothing and be nothing? I don’t know, I really don’t fucking know. And I wish someone would enlighten me, but I know there’s no one there to do so until I let them and/or man up and do it myself.

Had a rough night and I wanna vent about it...

All I ever try to do is stay away from people and keep them safe from me. I feel like I was born with a slow-acting poison that has spread throughout me and touches people via contact. I really don’t know what to do besides go off and live off in the woods and never speak to a person again. I know this sounds so fucking overdramatic but I’m a logical and analytical person and I know that I’m the only common thread. I’m too aware to understand that I’m the problem but not aware to understand how or why and no one can seem to figure it out. I just wanna know what it is about me that makes people so angry and hate me and wanna hurt me. I just wanna stop hurting them with my presence and I don’t fucking know how. 

I really really hate my life. Which is ungrateful and pathetic. Because my life is pretty good on paper and I’m very privileged and blessed in so many fucking ways and I still fuckign hate it. I’m so unhappy with it and I can’t imagine any future where I am ever happy. I can’t even think of anything that makes me happy. I can think of all the things that are supposed to make me happy and then feel guilty that they don’t, but they don’t. And I don’t know what to do about it. It’s hard for me to imagine a future where I’m happy and fulfilled because I genuinely can’t think of that as a possibility. I can’t think of anything that would make me feel that way. I don’t know what to do. I just want someone to be there for me and tell me what to do but I have no one. Even the people I have I don’t have. Everyone acts like they wanna be there for u and listen to your feelings but the truth is no one wants to put with thatshit because everyone has their own shit and shit is just ridiculously stupid. I really don’t know how to solve all my fucking problems because htey’re idiotic dogshit fucking problems. I think I need to un-cancel my therapy appointment. But I also lowkey have too much going on. And also not enough.

My life is legitimately fucking oathetic and sad. To the point I can’t even admit the things that are making it fucking pathetic and sad in this private ass doc. I can’t admit it out loud or on paper or in private and I swear to fucking god I don’t fucking know what to fucking do about it and it just sucks so fucking bad and how the fuck do I handle it. What the fucking fuck is the solution. 

I’m just gonna go to sleep and forget about it now. Fuck this shit.

my notes app

writing this sitting in my car in my parking lot

i just took my last final and said goodbye to my last friend still here and i feel so weird and there is such a heavy feeling in my chest. i was excited to go home (unlike every other break) and was even a little a excited for my friends to leave so i could have a night alone but now i feel so strange. i don’t feel like a college student now that all my work’s done — i just feel like i’m some adult living in the area with a real adult life. even though i’m not doing no adult things it feels so weird that i’m not in college for a few months living my normal college life. it must just be nostalgia goggles. i haven’t even been liking college lately — i feel like i’m getting older and outgrowing the high school, camp vibe of my school and want to feel more adult. but now for some reason i can’t put my finger on i feel so scared and anxious and overwhelmed. nostalgia is such a weird feeling man. i’m excited and nervous for this summer and the unfamiliarity of what life will be like for the next few months. this is good, though. i’ll be excited to come back and the fall and ready to start a new year and my new half-collegey, half-adult i

My final today went well and I feel fine about my final tomorrow. I'm still feeling shocked at how fleetingly my moods change. If anything, I think I just feel so hopeful right now, and that's all one can really ask for. I feel hopeful about my future; not in the sense of some full and promising future of success and achievement, but in the sense that I can think of a near future where I'm a little bit happier than I have been recently. Lately, when my friends have been talking about their futures and asking me to hypothesize about my own, I merely shrug it off. I hate this game. I just can't imagine my future because I can't imagine anything I want or that really fulfills me or makes me happy. Not even in terms of a career or the big things in life, but the day to day activities. I can't imagine a simple day in my future because I don't really care. I can't think of anything I really want or desire for it. Having hope for me isn't being able to desire and seek out a bunch of things for this theoretical, happy, fulfilling future. Instead, having hope for me is thinking that there is a future out there full of things that fulfill me and make me happy more than the things in my life fulfill me and make me happy now, even when I can't imagine what they could possibly be. Maybe not by much or in any real, big, significant way, but there's a future there, even if I can't quite discern it, and that's more than I could've envisioned even yesterday.

I spent the better part of the day desperately trying to study and staring at a computer reading words over and over again barely able to process them. I couldn't even memorize formulas. I gave up after wallowing all day, plagued by anxiety, assuming there was nothing I could do. And there wasn't. And then later I felt better, and I studied, and now I feel pretty okay. It's kinda funny how you think things will never pass and then they do. It's kind of crazy that no matter how many times you remind yourself everything worked out the last time you did this, you really, truly can't believe it will this time. And it doesn't always, but it sometimes does, even when you most doubt it and least expect it.