Two entries for the night of one...
I have insomnia. Insomnia sucks. I haven't been sleeping well since I read the Child Abuse blog Carnival I came across the other night. It stirred too many things up for me. On the bright side it drew my attention to this neat blogging service. On the dark side it was a poignant reminder of the fact that I will never be normal. Whatever that is.
I spent last night staring at the ceiling and attempting to comprehend the mind boggling fuckedupedness of me. I do this periodically. I interrupt my normally sunshiney life to confront my problems and it inevitably leads to insomnia and too many nights spent staying up watching moody mvs on youtube or doing dangerous self analysis. Once upon a time I would have written something. Once upon another time I would have found something sharp and done a little self soothing, aiming for minimal scarring because appearing normal was more important to me than my sanity. My boyfriend ended that when he bought books on SI and I fully comprehended what I was doing. I haven't felt the urge in months.
I actually tried to be proactive about this slump once and looked into support groups, but there are none in my area so it was back to self medicating with fanvids and introspection. Talking to friends is always an iffy proposition because there is a fifty percent chance that the person you are trying to confide in will feel akward and commence avoiding you, sometimes because they can't relate and sometimes because they can. Even my normally understanding boyfriend is difficult to talk to; the product of our times, he is convinced that the time we talked about it should have healed me and I should now be bouncy, happy, and functional because discussing these things once automatically fixes everything (thanks Oprah, for that load of crap).
I get tired of editing myself because my life makes other people uncomfortable. Yet another reason for the second blog.
My story is pretty standard really. Depressingly standard. Apathetic parent left me in the care of a relative who was emotionally unstable and mentally undone to the point of hearing voices that would accuse me of doing things wrong. Whackjob spent the next six or seven years alternately beating the crap out of me and threatening to kill me. Attempts to tell apathetic parent were ignored, and apathetic parent rapidly became emotionally abusive and neglectful parent. Eventually I became the family pariah because I was always vocal about the abuse and no one wanted to hear it. Then the whole family was emotionally abusive, because I had devolved into some sort of whipping girl for things no one wanted to take resposibilty for. Sometimes in my house there was no food, or even soap. No one bought me clothes for a period of four years. Unsurprisingly this did nothing to enhance my popularity at school. In high school I was sexually assualted by someone that I thought was a friend and developed a habit of freezing and dissasociating in sexual situations that left me vulnerable to more attacks and one boyfriend who specialized in sexual torture. A self injurer since age eleven I took to eating every other day, not only to preserve my attractiveness but because I thought that I deserved deprivation. Considered gifted by my teachers, I was flunking in school because I doubted that I would live to graduate. Both running away and staying home had their perils. All this before I was seventeen. At eighteen I had a medical emergency and should have died. The resulting procedure left me with scarring and was follwed by weight gain. The weight gain kept coming as I grew less confident about my looks. I have not lost it. I haven't regained my confidence about my looks either. At nineteen I was engaged. He was less than faithful. At twenty I was homeless and couch crashing. At twenty-one I ejected my more toxic relatives from my life and built my life around close friends, rather than family connections. I don't look back often, but the past follows me anyway. No matter how well I do something I am always convinced that it wasn't good enough; that I am not good enough. Compliments make me uncomfortable because I fear sounding arrogant in any way. Sex was a major problem until recently; I think I have a grip on my dissasociation now. People have told me that I am gifted but I always feel stupid. In my head there is a tape that plays every negative thing anyone has ever said about me or my work, and this tape goes back YEARS. I find it hard to make friends because I really don't know how to start that process, so I usually just hang around the people I like until its been so long that we are friends by proximity. I have this overwhelming desire to help people but my exterior is so hardened that no one would ever think of asking me.
Such is the fuckedupedness of me.
One good thing came out of the crap though. I started writing when I was eleven or twelve, because I was trying to talk about in metaphor what no one would listen to in truth. My first big work was a series of junior high novellas in which i divided myself into six flat characters based on aspects of my personality. It was a juvenile attempt to see how I worked. It also taught me how characters worked. I then put them in a concentration camp setting (before I knew that such things had really existed) because it was the best metaphor I could come up with for my life. Writing was my lifeline. I spent at least three hours a day at it until I was seventeen. My craft was pretty finely honed but I never sent anything off for publication becuase I was convinced that it was never good enough. I keep promising myself that I won't do that this time.
I spent last night staring at the ceiling and attempting to comprehend the mind boggling fuckedupedness of me. I do this periodically. I interrupt my normally sunshiney life to confront my problems and it inevitably leads to insomnia and too many nights spent staying up watching moody mvs on youtube or doing dangerous self analysis. Once upon a time I would have written something. Once upon another time I would have found something sharp and done a little self soothing, aiming for minimal scarring because appearing normal was more important to me than my sanity. My boyfriend ended that when he bought books on SI and I fully comprehended what I was doing. I haven't felt the urge in months.
I actually tried to be proactive about this slump once and looked into support groups, but there are none in my area so it was back to self medicating with fanvids and introspection. Talking to friends is always an iffy proposition because there is a fifty percent chance that the person you are trying to confide in will feel akward and commence avoiding you, sometimes because they can't relate and sometimes because they can. Even my normally understanding boyfriend is difficult to talk to; the product of our times, he is convinced that the time we talked about it should have healed me and I should now be bouncy, happy, and functional because discussing these things once automatically fixes everything (thanks Oprah, for that load of crap).
I get tired of editing myself because my life makes other people uncomfortable. Yet another reason for the second blog.
My story is pretty standard really. Depressingly standard. Apathetic parent left me in the care of a relative who was emotionally unstable and mentally undone to the point of hearing voices that would accuse me of doing things wrong. Whackjob spent the next six or seven years alternately beating the crap out of me and threatening to kill me. Attempts to tell apathetic parent were ignored, and apathetic parent rapidly became emotionally abusive and neglectful parent. Eventually I became the family pariah because I was always vocal about the abuse and no one wanted to hear it. Then the whole family was emotionally abusive, because I had devolved into some sort of whipping girl for things no one wanted to take resposibilty for. Sometimes in my house there was no food, or even soap. No one bought me clothes for a period of four years. Unsurprisingly this did nothing to enhance my popularity at school. In high school I was sexually assualted by someone that I thought was a friend and developed a habit of freezing and dissasociating in sexual situations that left me vulnerable to more attacks and one boyfriend who specialized in sexual torture. A self injurer since age eleven I took to eating every other day, not only to preserve my attractiveness but because I thought that I deserved deprivation. Considered gifted by my teachers, I was flunking in school because I doubted that I would live to graduate. Both running away and staying home had their perils. All this before I was seventeen. At eighteen I had a medical emergency and should have died. The resulting procedure left me with scarring and was follwed by weight gain. The weight gain kept coming as I grew less confident about my looks. I have not lost it. I haven't regained my confidence about my looks either. At nineteen I was engaged. He was less than faithful. At twenty I was homeless and couch crashing. At twenty-one I ejected my more toxic relatives from my life and built my life around close friends, rather than family connections. I don't look back often, but the past follows me anyway. No matter how well I do something I am always convinced that it wasn't good enough; that I am not good enough. Compliments make me uncomfortable because I fear sounding arrogant in any way. Sex was a major problem until recently; I think I have a grip on my dissasociation now. People have told me that I am gifted but I always feel stupid. In my head there is a tape that plays every negative thing anyone has ever said about me or my work, and this tape goes back YEARS. I find it hard to make friends because I really don't know how to start that process, so I usually just hang around the people I like until its been so long that we are friends by proximity. I have this overwhelming desire to help people but my exterior is so hardened that no one would ever think of asking me.
Such is the fuckedupedness of me.
One good thing came out of the crap though. I started writing when I was eleven or twelve, because I was trying to talk about in metaphor what no one would listen to in truth. My first big work was a series of junior high novellas in which i divided myself into six flat characters based on aspects of my personality. It was a juvenile attempt to see how I worked. It also taught me how characters worked. I then put them in a concentration camp setting (before I knew that such things had really existed) because it was the best metaphor I could come up with for my life. Writing was my lifeline. I spent at least three hours a day at it until I was seventeen. My craft was pretty finely honed but I never sent anything off for publication becuase I was convinced that it was never good enough. I keep promising myself that I won't do that this time.
posted by jen at 11:18 PM
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