BIOS

having a normal one. i mean, i guess i really am. nothing bad has happened recently. it's april all of a sudden and i suppose that's just how it is when you're getting used to adulthood. time starts slipping fast.

i don't have a way to start talking about this in mind so i guess i'll just vomit a bunch of stuff and see where the entry goes. i hate my body. i hate having to BE in this body. it's mechanically terrible; it's painful to open a lot of exterior doors, i can't open any twist-top shit without asking for help, it hurts. i can't hold anything normally. people think i'm a freak or stupid for it. it hurts to carry things. it hurts to do most activities from typing to drinking from a mug to eating, all due to disability. and i just don't notice, most of the time, that it hurts.

i have cptsd so i have stupid cptsd brain about this, but the body -- it's also gendered. it's sexed. people form opinions on me based on fatty pockets before they'll ever know me. it's even the "passive" type of sexed, the one that things are "done to" in the miasmatic cloud of collective cultural consciousness floating above everyone's head, the one you can DO things to. even ignoring the wage gap and shit like that, i hate it. i hate walking around feeling like it's only a matter of time before something bad happens to me because of it again. i feel it. i feel it all the time. one time, when i was smaller, i hid from my father in a jack-and-jill bathroom, with two doors on either side of the tiny room. and i tried to hold both of them shut because i did not know where he would be coming from and which door i could run out of. and sometimes it feels like i have been holding those doors shut for years.

and i have this fear of it -- the cultural notion of sex, sexual expectations -- when i'm not in the firing line at all. not actually. i get to be scared forever of something that will not happen because i am not desirable. and i don't WANT to be desired in that way, by anyone, ever, but that's just how being a human works, i think. evading trauma by having a face only a proximal relative could go for isn't exactly winning the war on rape culture. it's an unsatisfying solution that isn't even really a solution, because i know that at any moment practically any person could turn. not to rape, but to harm, more generally. well, i don't "KNOW" that, i feel that way because it's basically all that happens. other people always seem to go on the attack eventually, and you don't know why or when it'll be, because it probably doesn't even have anything to do with you as much as it does their own desires and inner life. this has stopped being about my dysmorphia.

that's fine. god, i never really thought about that, but that really does happen a lot. i meet someone, we get along, and then next thing you know there's some kind of thing. i guess my parents are the most obvious examples, but i've had that issue with friendships and romantic relationships, too. when my last ex searched for my diary and read that i wished for the other shoe to drop and for him to finally start hurting me like other people, he was furious and diagnosed me with bpd and an obsession with him on the spot. geez.

back to dysmorphia, though. even though it's funny that i technically don't have it professionally speaking because my perception of myself as repulsive is not incorrect. um. well, it sucks. it's sucked less in recent times because i am not around my mother. no one comments on my appearance anymore. i don't ever look in mirrors, ever, at home or at work. i smooth my hair down by feeling where it is instead of looking in one. but unfortunately for me i still have an appearance even though i'm not looking at it. and i can't cover it up, at all. i got new glasses recently, but i can't wear them, because doing so sends my ugliness past the threshold of acceptable and i would rather be using my dead grandparent's prescription than mine. i cannot stand looking that stupid. i can't even wear sunglasses outside because of how stupid they make me look, forget an overly-strong prescription. i cried for a bit about it because my current ones are so broken, and so crooked, and because i had to look at myself in the mirror, and because i spent $50 on a cleaning rag and case, basically.

(a/n: just looked in the mirror and the old glasses do the same warpy shit to my face. what a fucking idiot i am, i swear to god. i don't even know how to start to cope with this bombshell!)

and i can't cover it up. i can't cover any of it up. a standard covid mask reveals the laughable shape of my jaw. an n-95 masks this but still leaves my mis-aligned eyesockets and eyelids open and obvious. my countenance, which has been described as "doglike." too greasy. too red compared to the rest of me. my ever-oily hair that sticks out at all the wrong angles. the enormous pores i remembered hating seeing on my mother when she sprayed spittle onto my face. moles like hers. a face to entice a hundred joke romantic propositions and a handful of real ones from keyboard warriors with addictions to slashfiction.

stick-thin arms and Woman Thighs. underweight enough to be a rectangle, comfortably androgynous, yet lacking in the definitive must-haves for workable androgyny, such as "broad shoulders" and "a jaw of any kind" and "not having tits." gnarled, fucked-up looking hands. none of these would be so bad if not for the fucking head. i wish i could cut it off or something.

i cut off a mole once. in high school. i couldn't afford or justify the expenses of the laundry list of cosmetic surgeries, medicines, and time that it would take to make me look normal, but i could at least take action against one little imperfection. my fucked-up wrist couldn't quite twist to reach its angle on my collarbone, so it was a slow sawing off. when it was done i lamented that not everything could be fixed by just cutting it off of me. my victory was short-lived, because the melanocytes grew back -- of course -- which prevented me from doing anything about the one on my face. i wish i could adequately describe how it felt to cut a flaw off of myself before it did so, though. it was like getting the last piece of food you're throwing up out of your throat. there was a rush of hope as though i could somehow apply this to other parts of me. i don't think my ass would have gone completely jeff the killer, mind you, but i was just so relieved to have gotten rid of it.

that's just how it goes, i guess. nothing i can do about any of it. sitting with that's been my main way of coping since blacking out the faces of myself and throwing away the few photos my mom took of me did not produce meaningful and emotionally helpful results. just, avoiding thinking about it because there's nothing i can do about it. it's hopeless. it's really, really funny to me that if i think about my appearance with any depth i just go fucking nuts, a little. it's the elephant in the room of my brain, man. oh well.

uuuugh. this is what i get for trying to write an entry yesterday and leaving it alone until today because i had nothing to write about, aside from mom getting out of the hospital and being fine. shocker. surprise. not the end of the world to go to the hospital. who knew? not this 50something.

i'm writing this from a university computer way past working hours because i cannot go home. more precisely i cannot go home because my roommate wants to spring something on somebody, and if that somebody can't be hal, it's going to be me. so i'm waiting until it gets out of work at 8:30 to go home and claim i was working on an event for my work so that i do not have to go home now and inevitably get strung along on a 3-hour long dinner or other THING i don't want to do but can't say no to or else she'll be even more depressed than me dodging her call for ~4 hours. the least i can say is that i have TOLD her i only use a different messaging client and she still regularly just does not use that. because she doesn't listen. ever.

it always sounds frivolous when you have to say it's just a million small things, but i'm going to keep it real with you and myself, reader, and just say flatly that that's how it usually is in relationships that don't work. it's not one extinction event, it's more like a tree getting its bark stripped off one beaverbite or grabby puerile fistful at a time. and by god does she take fistfuls at my fucking sanity. it's the singing in the morning. it's the door-slamming at 6:40. it's the not respecting my arfid and texture sensitivites when she claims to have them herself, but getting hurt and pushy when i say i can't eat something. it's the condescending to me if ever i mention my mom that i should just cut her off even if she kills herself when she doesn't do the same with her mother. it's the pantomime of political philosophy, it's the claims she's a real moralist when she can't stop drinking starbucks even if i've shared how they undercut farmers in the global south and now when they fucking love sucking the bloodsoaked israeli boot. it's the making hal and i do all the chores and complaining when they aren't done to her self-admitted "insane standards." it's the using hal like the house dishwasher and cook and then insulting the way it cleans and cooks behind its back. it's the way she's gotten onto hal for "self discipline" issues related to depression and then just cuts off her job because she doesn't feel like it. it's the constant judgment i sense from her because i am also disabled but unlike her cannot do shit if i just put my mind to it. it's how she has us entertain her friends and explicitly pushes them away to their faces. it's her staying in the living room all the time because she can't clean her room and so she just will spring a conversation with you if you need to piss half the time. it's the weirdly limited belief she has in my and hal's ability to walk anywhere even when we tell her we do not want a ride. it's the spontaneous friends and parties we have to tend to. it's the fact that she cannot stand not being a part of anything between hal and i. it's the fact she is uncomfortable with you drinking or touching anything in the house but pretending she's not, refusing to be honest while also freaking you out for wronging her. it's the way she just interrupts you while you are fucking in the middle of a sentence pronouncing a word, just like her mom.

and she's nice. she's nice to your face. and then she spends hours, and hours, and hours talking about herself without so much as a "how are you." it drives me up the wall because that -- that fucking air of respectability, deniability, is what makes me lose it. if we had her sort of rude and "inflammatory on purpose" pal as a roommate instead, hal and i both agree we wouldn't be having such a hell of a time because if we told him to fuck off or that he was being annoying or that we don't want to do something he'd be fine. with a, though, she's NICE. why would you do or say something like that to a nice person? she suffers so much and works such long hours (for no reason) and has a disability and her mom was shitty to her and and and --

god. it just upsets me so much that i went through all that shit in november, and also all that shit since the early aughts, just so that i could move into another fucking house with my mom in it.

goddammit she's calling me again. whatever. short entry i guess.

mom got hospitalized by friends and was told she had congestive heart failure a few days ago. she set up a DNR and signed her will over the next few days despite the advice of doctors and myself that it's not really an immediate death sentence. after a few days of intensive pre-emptive mourning and all the attention-baiting by bemoaning the cost, saying she'd rather get a DNR than burden me, asking what jewelry of hers i want, just for -- surprise surprise, for what may now be the sixth time now -- her to come around to the fact she isn't dying a tragic instant death on stage right now and that tomorrow keeps coming. so she picks herself up off the floor (because i am not there to help her up), goes and does the things she'd said she'd rather die than do, and acts like she wasn't just losing her mind. or, more recently, that it was reasonable to, actually.

"you know how anxious i get" "you know how i am about things like that" yes and so do you, clearly. and yet. and yet again you lash out at doctors, friends, and me for telling you a lesson you've already learned five other god damn times.

hate it. it's so funny to me that she's going to use "well i felt like doing it! my emotions! let me FEEL my FEELINGS!" until she dies. she said she "used to do what she did" (hit slap choke throw) because of her emotions. yeah! i know! it's why whenever you had a bad day it meant i had to suck your dick and try not to visibly cower. yeah, your husband not giving you enough attention -- your anxiety -- is always a good enough reason to lash out at others and be incredibly irresponsible.

she's so illogical. it used to drive me insane, but now i guess there's some intrigue to it now that i can observe from an only moderately-uncomfortable distance. she calls me states away that she's dying while it's 4am. what am i going to do to help you, ms. horseman. and of course, instead of calling for emergency services or any of your satellite friends and family (who've all come out of the woodwork during your health crises), you call for me, your caretaker. of course. of course you do. that's just the way her mind works, i have to assume: emotions at the helm. i can't understand it personally, but i've had enough experience decoding it to gauge threat level and whatever.

i want to stop talking about my mom so much, which is funny considering that remembering her actions was a stated intention of mine in writing this blog. i guess it's just a little disheartening to think that someone i want to detach from so, so much is responsible for whatever proportion of my "web presence." it's actually a little gross to me, how deep her claws are. in my brain. in the phone i have to carry with me in every room i'm in. oh well.

it's kind of funny that my grendel is my damn mom. out of everything in creation to struggle with, it's my mommy. oh well; many such cases. nothing to do about it, i guess. all i can do is live with it and try and make things easier for other people with other issues. man, being in recovery is so weird. when nothing's happening or stimulating me, and i'm feeling stressed by some thing or another, i mutter "i wanna kill myself," on reflex. so i have to go "no, you do not want to kill yourself. the world is wondrous and if you have the capacity to live this life in a way that serves others while also gaining personal gratification from the experience, you will have left enough of a positive mark on the world, however ephemeral, to justify the difficulty of continuing to face the risks of, and endure more generally, life." and then i call myself a windbag, which i am. but that's a step-up from "kys," so suck it!

the world really is so nice. it took me longer to be able to admit that than i'd like. people aren't naturally pollutants on earth, that's ecofascist westbrained rhetoric. people aren't inherently bad, that's just a prevailing theory that REALLY supports fascist governments and police states and prisons. i don't think the universe was made for people or with any value systems in mind, but it's like that bit in nitw: i believe in a universe that doesn't care and people that do. i like how much people care. i like that people care enough about marine biology so that i know what a siphonophore is, and that people care enough about fossils that i know what a uintathere is. i'm glad people live their whole lives and i get to experience whatever fruits from that: whoever learned how to make the injera i eat, whoever first grew coffee, all that.

i'm trying to be more present in the world. write my thoughts down and actually keep them somewhere. learn how to tell conifers and birdcalls apart. drink 60 oz of water a day necause apparently the new thing on hydration is that it's weight/2 in oz. i try to find what i can forage for in whatever season. i go to someone else's house for dnd now, and i talk. i try to be funny instead of just sticking with the way less social, way less revealing "intj autist" archetype that i'd been leaning on for years without realizing that tailoring a facade to be as unapproachable and irreproachable as possible to survive school and home and whatever was abnormal; i assumed that everyone had an image that they worked to put forward and then made their decisions and conducted their actions based off of that.

it's not all easygoing -- being more "present," i guess. i have my hikkikomori problems insofar as it applies to my momlike roommate. i have my eating problems. i have a lot of things i want to do and change -- i want to do more exercises for my muscles, i want to take testosterone while i'm young. i want to learn to identify the plants white usamerican culture stresses aren't worth knowing. i want to eat more in general, but i also want to like, start buying the materials for, and eating, salads with bok choy and leafy greans and shit in them (mom's heart shit worries me). i want to learn how to read books without it feeling like an assignment i can be late on. it's a little weird realizing you're not just living to die eventually anymore, and it's like, oh, shit, i have got to make my life more pleasant or it's gonna suck more than it has to the whole time i'm living it! and there's no reason to suffer like that -- there's so much i can't change to make myself happier with my life, but there are still things that i can.

and it's an uncomfortable change, trying to embrace that idea. it feels like some kind of surrender. i don't LIKE acknowledging that i'm a pack mammal who needs some degree of social interaction so i don't go insane. i don't LIKE acknowledging that i'm a biological construct that needs energy. and it's not like it feels any less lame admitting the shit the other way around -- that i'd usually just aspire to live like a brain in a body, or a ghost, or thoughtform. untouchable. a self comprised wholly abstractly. now that i read that back, no wonder i keep using the word "present" even though it sort of pains me with how millennial white buddhist it sounds; i think i really must have had dissociation issues. or still do, but am addressing them now a little more because that way of thinking has stopped serving me now that i'm out of my mother's house and the public education system. at last the costs outweigh the benefits, and all it took was -- literally -- aging out of the goddamn house. well, also leaving, that was a decision i had to make and put effort towards, but you get it.

there's something else i want to say on the matter, but i'm not quite sure what it is, nor how i'd say it. part of the point of this journal is to explain things to myself, since i seldom get to when it's mired in the sludge of an internal, critical monologue which always gets the final say given that i'm not trying to play stenographer. it's about the body. i guess it's about ghosts. you know, i don't particularly love ghosts all that much? i guess i have a passing interest, but i'm not really "into" them like some goth people are, nor am i superstitious. nevertheless, i think about them more than the average person would. i guess they must just be a good metaphor.

that's how i feel, anyway. like a ghost haunting a body, or something like that. a ghost in general, maybe? i feel listless and anhedonic a lot of the time. i feel so in my thoughts that i can't connect to other people; i don't know how to communicate with them, especially not in a meaningful capacity. i used to feel as though people "couldn't see me." not physically, though i did do my part to stay out of peoples' vision and not draw attention to myself, but it felt as though both i and other people presumed conversation was a foregone conclusion. they don't have the "sight," to use a silly supernatural word. they don't possess whatever overpriced beeping hardware to understand what i'd have to say to them, or, more likely, they wouldn't care. why waste our time?

other things...frequently i feel like i'm standing still in time and can't move on and let go of old things, good or bad. i feel like at some point along the line i stopped growing, on some level. i've definitely grown mentally -- out of the old grindset, thank god -- but i just...i don't know. i trace the same pathways in my mind over and over again, a lot of the time. i feel as though i'm stuck in the past and all i want to do is talk about it, though not to anyone, per se. i just keep muttering the same stories to myself, barely remembering them. it's like a compulsion, like some kind of obsession i have with the old days that doesn't really even make me feel all that much anymore, except for when some variable is set to some number and it triggers frustration or hurt or fear or what-have-you. it is all a little frustrating.

and then there is the fact that for much of my life, i wanted -- maybe not to disappear, but to be someplace and someone else. it consumed my unstimulated mind then, and still does sometimes now, although i am for the most part happy with where i am (roommate aside). i spent a lot of time imagining being dead, of all things, but not the violence of the act of dying or the emotions of people who might miss me -- i'd just usually position myself as an observer with no attachment to the place. i revelled in the idea of going unseen forever, able to watch and learn and be comfortable in a location away from home, never to be observed by another person nor be stuck with the onus of communicating with them and my inevitable disappointing them. i've written about this desire before, to "live" without having to live. never again would i have to hurt or fail anyone, nor myself, but instead fill my endless time with the solitude of quiet observation of my surroundings.

not very conducive to being a happy, healthy social animal, as you might imagine: there's the rub. oh well. i'm not dead, so i might as well get used to it!

ugh. it's around noon 3/6 at time of writing. the first thing on my mind is my mom, who wants to give up again for the third time in like two weeks. i'm so tired. i'm so tired. why the fuck is this my responsibility. i have a full time job. it's so stupid that i have to keep telling her i believe in her and love her so much when i don't feel anything at all. well -- that's not true. i feel something that i don't think has a name. it feels like a roiling pit in my stomach, though. like a bunch of parasitic worms or something. i always have this graphic visual where i go to a therapist's office and they try to get me to tell them everything and i vomit up some disgusting, pulsing wet mass out of my gut. they charge me $500 and i leave, unburdened forever. that'd be nice.

anyway. god, it's so funny, because she's made my life miserable. she's usually behind most things. in fact, when she texted me, i was thinking about how long it would take me to get on testosterone once i felt secure in my finances because she would be an absolute hag unless i got therapy first. she heaped her god damn lid when she learned i was wearing boxers at like, 17-18. i can't imagine what she'd think of me changing my voice, which she loves, because it sounds just like hers. it wouldn't even be a side effect, i want my voice to go deeper. not just because of her, of course, but she'd think it were just because of her if she knew. everything i do is related to her, either to impress her or to "abuse" her, by, say, wearing different clothes than she does, or not putting the dishes in the dishwasher correctly.

last night i relapsed. not the end of the world, it's happened before in recent times. i'm not mad at myself as much as embarrassed and a little frustrated. someone said something i knew was light, and not very much addressed to me, and joking, and the rest of the dnd session went on as normal, but i just broke. i hadn't done that in years. i wondered if it was the effects of alcohol i had had, but i doubt it, because i didn't really feel off at all and i'd eaten a big meal anyway. what was said was just so specific and made me feel so guilty in such a specific way it just cracked me open. i didn't feel the need to punish myself in so many words, i just felt SO deeply that i deserved pain and death that avoiding it would only somehow bring further pain to others, and so i did the deed in private. right on my arm! i've never!! god, i wish i had felt not so much immediacy so that i might have done it on my upper arm instead. at least i was sapient enough to do it at a diagonal so it looks random. i have a story for in case anyone asks anyway.

i guess i'm just sort of surprised i'm not over it. i've felt so normal here that i sort of doubted the level of my mental problems. then again: telltale sign i'm not over it. hindsight is 20/20, though. never is reasoning all that useful in the moment. i tried to tell myself i was having a flashback (duh, nonstop crying, inability to hear things very well, derealization, shaking i thought was shivering at the time, lol?), but it didn't really make me change my mindset as much as it sort of went "i'm having a flashback AND i'm a vile, cruel, terrible, useless person."

pain in the ass. pain in the ass. even banged my head on the wall. christ, i hate my mom for that. why am i like this?! it's so funny! i knew i didn't do anything wrong when she fucked me over; like, every time, i KNEW i didn't deserve what was happening! and yet every time i self harm after she gets mad at me (or in this case, after a friend got sort of passively fed up with side talk) it's all, "you deserve this and worse, you're the worst, you're the worst, everyone in your life is obviously much worse off because you're not dead, anything you're trying to tell yourself to convince yourself that's not the case are more disgusting, selfish lies you tell yourself so you can keep being a parasite!! graaah!" i can't make heads or tails of it. cognitive dissonance?

like, maybe when i was a kid, it was 'my mom is hurting me even though i know i don't deserve this level of pain, so i have to make myself believe i deserve it?' why do i cut myself anyway! why is it never enough to me when my mom hurts me? i have sense memory of my ears ringing and my face stinging and my legs hurting and i still took up the knife! why on heaven and earth can't i be satisfied with the first pummeling, or in this instance, take the comment that i personally found triggering and take it with grace as though it were just something that hurt my feelings? that would have been the normal thing to do. and annoyingly, i think my self harm got way worse after mom moved from really hitting and shoving to slapping and shouting as her primary moves. so stupid. she "gets better" and i end up picking up the mantle and taking it upon myself to explain to myself why i deserve to suffer, an impulse which i, after last night, must realize is beyond my conscious control at the moment, buried in me from before i can remember.

she might have dialysis on top of blood pressure issues and diabetes. she's suffering for sure, but god damn it, i have to hold her hand through it and lie through my teeth about not wanting her to die. she never had to do that for me! not really. she didn't want me to die or kill myself, but not because she actually loved me like a person. she loved me like some kind of dog you can kick out and around but who still "has to love you" because it lives in your house. it makes me sick to think of how she "loves me." i'd rather she loved me like i loved her: straight lies that the teller doesn't believe for a second.

still more nothing happening. mom's "better," she had another freakout at me that did nothing to improve her situation then smoothed it over, nothing new. i exhaust less mental energy on her tizzies than i used to but still find myself exhausted by her. i guess it's because i feel sort of exhausted by everything, now. i mean, sort of...i guess. i don't really know how i feel. i don't feel "bad," but i don't really remember feeling "bad" in recent memory, at least outside of dog-related grief. it's fine; it's whatever.

my life feels both too small and a little overwhelming. i was invited to a dnd campaign with new friends of mine, which is great, but having two sessions a week is pretty wack for me to wrap my brain around. it's not even that i'll have less time to do things or whatever, because i've been slacking egregiously on reading and learning japanese grammar as it is, it's entirely the social aspect. i'm scared of disappointing or coming off as strange or unlikeable. the cost of being able to fumble into being "effortlessly" entertaining sometimes also means i think i haplessly fall into faux pas at times. i don't know.

i'm too afraid to leave my room most afternoons and on the weekends, for whatever reason. i don't know what i think is going to happen. i don't honestly believe my roommate is going to disembowel me with her claws or throttle me or anything. i doubt she cares very much about the condition of my room enough to chastise me all that much about it, much less threaten me. (that damn hardwood nightstand is a deathtrap.) i think i'm just scared of disappointing her in behavior or in conversation, which is funny both because i don't value her opinions particularly highly because her standards are atrocious and because shutting myself in my room is one of the particular things she EXPLICITLY dislikes.

i also do think she does kind of care about how i look and what my room looks like, though. which is sort of strange to me because i try not to pass judgment on those things -- i admit to doing it back at her when she's been passive aggressive about it, though. maybe i should stop that. i've been considering trying to stop being all tit-for-tat about her, in case the negativity is poisoning my brain into being a meaner person, but i don't think so. trying to make excuses for her behavior in my mind out of a desire to be a "kinder person" not only makes me feel performative and strange, it also makes me feel...sort of indignant. however, i must admit that that indignance i feel when i limit my feelings and external discussions, that irritating "but i deserve better!" instinct is probably a holdover from trying to rationalize my mom's behavior. some kind of stupid ego-preservation impulse that wins out over just being chill about the fact that a and i aren't the same kind of person and that's fine.

embarrassing. embarrassing! who cares, even? is my argument REALLY "oh, well, it's fine, see, because it validates my feelings of hurt and nobody is negatively affected by it?" god, please.

whatever. i can't argue with myself about it being wrong or right to do what i'm doing because all it does is benefit me and be kind of culturally improper, really. and can i just say that doing things just for your benefit has got to be the shittiest thing in the world? it feels fucking terrible every time! what a pain it is to be an adult and tasked fully with your own wellbeing and normalcy. i could only eat as a child when food was put in front of me at school lunch, and would under-eat to avoid upping my mom's cafeteria bill until we finally got free/reduced lunch. eating as an adult is quite literally just as overwhelming in terms of money woes except it's fully within my control to just try and avoid being a hole at all costs, but i have to not do that so i don't starve (2013). even the successes at this "self care" make me feel stupid and vain. 'oooh, look at this little asshole brushing its teeth; do you want a gold star for hogging the bathroom when someone else could use it?'

so stupid. i think the whole of middle age is an exercise in liminality. childhood and old age are the only spans of time in which you know what you're doing, even if it is, in that microcosm of time, always ending. as a child i had no choice but to shower to not look disgusting and to eat to not make my mom look bad. now i do it for what reason? i don't know. the same ones, i guess, with the same amount of care behind them, which is to say very little. as i'm older i expect it will have become obligatory routine. as it is now, i have little concept of why i do as i do and an obfuscated map for the future.

i hope i reach old age, and i hope it's the more comfortable type where financial and health management are my primary tasks and not so overwhelming. i hope all i have to worry about is death coming, and not really worry that much at all. i've been thinking about it for a long time. even in childhood i was really preoccupied with it as the final task. it only happens once, you know. what'll it be? will it be a surprise to me, those who knew me, or both?

i skimmed a piece of fanfiction the other day, which i never do ordinarily, but it was being pushed by an undertale fanartist who has a pretty unique take on chara undertale, and it had to do with their suicide attempt written in second person from asriel's point of view. it sort of gave me a little shock, not because the focus of the little short story was unexpected, but just because it reminded me so intensely of how i used to be. at one point chara announces, "I need to die. Humans are rotten. I am rotten, I can feel it inside me. This is the only way." now, of course a fanfiction piece written in that style and on that topic was probably pretty emotionally cathartic and personal to the author themself, but it still struck me. i could've said that to myself, honest to god. i don't remember what exactly i thought the first time i attempted, but i knew i had to because i was an unforgivable, terrible pit. i know i felt very strongly that i was inherently a failure of a human, unable to please the people who matter most to me. i don't think i truly lost hope in "humans" until i was around ten when it set in that real people didn't seem to care about "evil" (the great pacific garbage patch, child abuse, whatever). i still thought i was, though -- evil, that is -- and that it merited physical punishment. god, 6-18 was such a blur of being a hater. and what a stupid age chunk to list. i don't actually know when it started, but i tried to die at 6, so i just have to put 6 there. ugh.

i don't know why i mention all that. i think about death kind of a lot, but it's not like i have a lot to say about it, not being a man of religious conviction, and it's such an anterior fixation that more pressing things tend to set the stage for the journal entry. i guess it's weird that i don't have a say over my death anymore. for my whole conscious life i was certain i would do it in a way i selected, when i wanted to. poinsettias, buttercups, rope cord, phone charger, car exhaust, overpass, top of a building, gun, gun AND overpass. now it's completely unknowable and out of my hands, which, like all surrenderings of control over physical pain for me, is pretty unappealing. i guess it adds some more intrigue to my life. now i have to actually be scared of dying in a car accident instead of feeling at peace when someone in front of me slams on the brakes or the car closest to me isn't slowing down appropriately. just another one of the small fears inherent to choosing life, i guess.

what a pain. god, if there were a way to just be a ghost, for certain, i'd have done it. many a time have i thought how wonderful a sight would be if i could just dwell in it, detached from worldly concerns like finances and food and social ties that bind. i like to go on windowswap sometimes and imagine this. my favorites are the ones where they've set the camera in their house, but acquiesce to having conversations in front of an invisible voyeur (to my endless amazement and personal terror at the thought. i have an entry i didn't publish here that involved notes i took during a "dissociative" "episode" at work and it included the phrase 'everything is eyes.' it was demonstrably metaphorical, but you get it).

but yes, windowswap. i like to imagine i'm there watching the wind in the backyard and getting to witness lives whose affects and effects are outside of my concern. everything i've done and had to do is behind me; never again will i have to witness the consumptive effects of my life on the world nor fear the disappointment, the discomfort, the annoyance i bring others, those unassailable beasts of being alive. all that i have to do in that infinite moment is listen to the people in the house scrape their forks on their plates and watch the birds at their feeder. i don't hate life, really, not all parts of it and not all its people. i love its sights, its art and music and animals. i love its culture and its little things, like its sparkly concrete and the way a fir tree's branches sway in a strong wind, and the way that squirrels' tails twitch. being a waking, ineffective participant in it is oftentimes just disheartening and cause for self-hatred. i can't excise myself from the cycle of endless energy consumption that characterizes terrestrial life (electricity for my tech and home, carbon for my shipping, silicone for my tech, food, other people's labor) without excising myself from life itself, so. dissatisfaction is sort of the only answer.

i've had an odd week or so -- a bit has happened. on my mom's birthday she texted me that she was hyperventilating, and then 'help.' i stayed on call with her for a little around an hour while trying to get ahold of her friends and failing as she made some truly horrible, ghastly sounds; worst i've heard in my life to be honest -- she screamed at the mention of 911 each time it was mentioned, and it was only at the end of our call that i able to convince her that as she was the only one who had her friends' numbers, that she would have to text and call them if i wasn't permitted to call emergency services. she didn't, and fell asleep. she was fine, and apparently as of today, several days later, she has mentioned she's due to see a doctor.

most people, including an ex-boyfriend who returned my calls, would look down on my decision not to have her admitted. for one, she'd take money out of my account to pay for it, and two, she would certainly otherwise try to find ways to get her revenge on me. even to this day, miles apart, after years of declining physical aggression from her, it is still obvious when she is having her most anxiety-inducing or body-image-issue-rife days by her behavior with me -- saying it's obvious i'm disappointed in her because of "word choice" or amount, or tone, or response time, or whatever else. the other day she did the old trick of activating my phone's alert system in the morning to wake me up because she felt neglected. i hadn't had that happen in a while -- in fact, one of the most liberating things about moving states away from her for the first time was being able to sign out of my account and effectively remove my phone from the "family." i'd only re-signed in to get her to answer her texts after she'd alluded to having a medical incident and failed to respond for a couple days, then forgot to sign out again. apparently being asleep at 11 after a party she knew about on a sunday morning -- or being at a college course, or work, or otherwise living a life apart from her -- is not as good an excuse as "oh, i forgot for two days and didn't feel up to returning your calls."

whatever. i'm just glad it's over after years and years of having a brief turn in my stomach every time a message buzzed, or panic every time i finished a class and saw i'd not answered a text she sent while i was busy. every failure to communicate in a timely manner was an indication that i didn't love her or "respect her time." it was humiliating to have my backpack chime at amber-alert decibels in the middle of a high school class because she hadn't heard my response on her outfit after two hours. a few times she even declared that my inability to keep my eyes on my phone at all times meant that i hated my beloved grandpa, because i "didn't care if she would need help with him when the time came." whatever that meant.

in related news, my sweet puppy dog of almost 12 years is declining more, and my mom has said she'll need to be put to rest sooner rather than later. when at last i put my phone down the night of hearing that, i suddenly cried for about two hours and wrote a very extensive, emotional...thing about it. i might publish it when it comes, but as it is, it would mourn her preemptively, and i don't want to post that. i haven't cried over any deceased relative as much as i have wept over her, but i try not to take that as an indication of anything -- i'd read up on pet grief and found that, unilaterally, suicidal, isolated people tend to take it much harder, to say little of my dog's role in being my sole supporter for the worst decade of my life. there was one person whose blog i read who said her mother had to tell people she'd lost a child to explain her dazedness and watery eyes, when it had been a pet cat of a few years who had prevented her from suicide at the eleventh hour, an experience i've had numerous times.

i can't remember it well for obvious reasons, but i think i pulled myself out of a noose once at the thought of pookie being left alone without any idea of what'd happened. this certainly happened at least twice. that's to say nothing of her constant passive impact on my will to live over the years. i'm going to try to keep it together, but i suspect that, as was the case last night and the night i heard the news, intense grief is just going to take me. the first night i wondered how i'd be able to manage regular coworker small talk when i felt so derangedly incapable of emotional self-regulation -- particularly so since she was "just a dog." but i know she wasn't; not to me -- so i'll try to give myself personal grace even if that does come to pass. unsure. i seem to function fine until all distractions are completely removed and my mind wanders. oh well. take it as it comes.

otherwise, things have been going alright. my primary concerns outside my mom and pet lie with my roommate, who, as mentioned on fleshprocessor's blog, is easily one of the most inconsiderate people i've ever met. i haven't written about her because i practically mount a diatribe every lunch with my qpp, who, by the way, i must pretend not to love "in that way" lest "a" the roommate feel left out. she drives me crazy -- she's just like my mother, like her mother, and every wretched thing she does is because of something that happened in her childhood, or her "depresso," or whatever.

i am sick of it. i'm sick of not being able to talk to hal in the communal spaces without her butting in and not leaving, sick of her condescension about my food habits, of her insistence that hal and i must clean the "filthy" house to her hoarder-mom standards because she's too busy with two jobs and a once-a-week afternoon babysitting gig to do anything around the house except purgeclean monthly and leave her laundry piles and disgusting plates in the communal areas like some sort of sim while chastising hal and i for "letting" the plates "sit there." i shit you not -- we had two cockroaches at one point and she acts like it's our fault for eating in our rooms and not keeping to her admittedly "insane"ly militant cleaning expectations when she's an utter hypocrite and also leaving food and textiles just, out, in public places.

that's her biggest problem, aside from her unbelivable self-absorption: hypocrisy. according to her, i "should" just be able to cut off my mom entirely because it's not my fault if she kills herself, but she'll excuse and not report the serial-assaulting e-pedo on her text adventure game because she's definitely his "favorite" after he went after 3-4 more women/girls aside from her and has told them she doesn't matter, because she's been "trained into protecting him." you are 22. there are young children at risk of assault. you disgust me beyond my own limits -- she told me this story recently, which i suspect is why i feel to need to complain about her here after months of cohabitation. more pettily, what else pisses me off...

makes hal do all the dishes and most of the cooking because i am banned from the first for not doing it to her standards and she also makes a big show of not eating some of the times that it hasn't premade dinner for her.
she put old furniture in my room that i can't use in the lieu of a gift, but it's just to store it. it's in the way and hurts to use.
she told me having my door closed all the time is a sign of mental illness and self-isolation and that i should feel more comfortable in the house. (yeah, that easy! maybe you can just get over yours and get rid of the cart of trash blocking the way to my bedroom!)
acts like an expert of every hobby she's entertained in an afternoon and explains it to anyone with condescension
has intense, specific dietary preferences and shames people for theirs in a surreptitious manner.
is fatphobic and makes fun of people's appearances, and also takes them as some kind of litmus test for morality.
big fan of fast fashion and slavery coffee while also posturing as some sort of virtuous angel and aesthete -- 'look at these 2 pairs of $200 handmade shoes i got! i looked for fast fashion first, though.'
takes an open or cracked door as an invitation to literally tell you to come out and sit with her because she's "depresso." have homework? too bad! come to the kitchen and watch her cook in silence because you're the one who has to entertain HER. and if you're too busy with your work and say that, she mopes like a kicked dog. every time. sure, being in my room all the time because i have a deep-seated fear of your exact personality type from my mom sucks, but it's not like it's mentally healthier to need to have someone looking at you and praising your cooking know-how all the time!
scolds people for touching certain things in the house (unavoidable, all the furniture is hers) and then tries to sound less insane by saying "she wouldn't actually care if you broke, she'd just wanna die really bad." what?
keeps alluding to how weak i am. i know! i know! i've known my whole life! i can't wear short-hemmed clothing i'm so ashamed! stop bringing it up!

there's more, but the gist of it is that it's like living with my mother again --inconsiderate, self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing, condescending, time-consuming, invasive, and in constant need of validation and attention. and she just -- acts like she doesn't have very high standards, instead opting for passive aggression and "passive hints" when she told hal when they moved in together that they had a mutual hatred of it. she's always passive, always the one things happen to. when she talked behind hal's back with me to complain about both of our apparent shortcomings in cleaning the houe (which she did last night at the time, rather than any other time, and did not previously explain her standards), she likened herself to an exhausted housewife with two ("not in a bad way") inept husbands and chastised me for asking her to do the "emotional labor" of explaining what chores she wanted done and how often because she just didn't communicate before martyring herself in a solo deep-clean. she also said it would be "too draconian" to, and then did, while also not allowing our autistic selves to get a chore wheel to remember, because it was also "too much" -- read: is an obvious display of how nuts she is to our guests since she gave herself a bunch of home improvement projects instead of chores, oh, and, "cleaning her own bathroom." which, by the way, she did NOT do, because during our weekly ttrpg session, she hogged the main bathroom for over an hour exfoliating and when i knocked on the door and asked if our guests could piss in hers, she said we could but she'd rather not because it's a disaster.

and her room is too full of garbage and windchimes and clothes and baskets to even GET to her bathroom, but oh, yeah, when hal lamented his struggles to do shit in a class environment, "if you want to be better, do better." meanwhile she was failing all her classes and has practically dropped out in some part due to academic difficulties with deadlines...not to mention her saying she couldn't stand to live in hal's room, which is LEAGUES less swamped with shit than hers. again: not a moral failing! the hypocrisy is! i would literally not give even half of a shit about most of her shit if she wasn't such a passive-aggressive hypocrite.

hal and i plan to move out next year. having to do all the damn chores while not being able to spend time alone ourselves or touch some of the mounds of shit in "our" home or even drink together (the fallout would be insane; trust me, as someone who lived with an older version of anna, sometimes mental predictions of people's behavior is just useful) is insane. sick to death of limiting myself and shutting myself in a room to avoid getting sponged off of by a self-proclaimed "introvert." i wouldn't be such a shut-in if she was capable of taking no for an answer.

i think that's it as of late, but hey, a diary is mostly meant to be boring.

eating is so hard, and it's so embarrassing that it's just a maladapted strategy to deal with control issues. like, it's "disordered eating," but ironically, it's basically completely detached from societal pressures, unlike a lot of my other problems. i've always been underweight and my female family members have always opined on how envious they are of my gut and thigh proportions. people who say "skinny oppression" is real are fucking stupid and should try getting denied surgeries and medicine until they change their genetics; that's all i'm saying.

anyway. i think i might have a weird appetite or a weird stomach because i get hungry not too long after i've eaten close to half of the time, so i end up hungry when i go to sleep. and i hate it! i just lie there. any crappy snack food i'd eat then is wasted since i'd probably fall asleep regardless of if i'd eaten, and then i'd have just consumed something for literally no purpose. basically just shot a resource to shit for fleeting comfort. it's not indulgence in the typical sense, and i know i sound insane, but god. i just know i don't actually need it to get through a work day without killing myself or whatever, so it could be better spent elsewhere. you can't have your cake and eat it too, and if you go ahead and eat it when you don't REALLY need to eat, well, when you're really hungry you're also going to be really sorry.

i have to wonder specifically what made this happen. my partner was the one who proposed that it's (definitely) trauma-related, and more specifically likely related to my lack of control over my time, body, and safety in my youth, which is very illuminating if not also embarrassing. i was very proud of not having "control issues" in the sense of not lording myself and my opinions over other peoples' best interests, and i still have that, but if i say i have "control issues" of some kind, people would assume that. good thing i don't talk to people about that.

last night i cleared out my photos on my phone. they're not as numerous as i'd wished because i moved phones recently after my old one went kaput, but i ended up finding a lone screenshot i took of a text conversation with my mom for my friends-at-the-time to rag on her about, and it took a lot of sleuthing to deduce that it was about visiting an ex-partner on (THEIR!) dollar, saying that "we can't afford for you to make splurges like this" and, when i tried to deescalate, "fine. live out of your car this january and freeze to death because you can't afford to keep an apartment. what do i know? i'm only the adult. fuck my advice."

i don't remember the texts at all. i don't remember the conversation and the new phone doesn't have the text log saved -- and it took me until writing this to remember what it was regarding. how much shit like this has she said? there must be more, i'm assuming. i used to hide food in my closet and drawers...to avoid her? to not seem so greedy? i don't know anymore. i barely even remember that i did that except for sort of remembering that she hated it even though she said she used to do the same thing with wrappers. and i still have food in my room to this day! though i also think it's convenient, and also because i am scared of one of my roommates because she is an absolute little terror and a carbon copy of my mom put in a "mom friend" mold.

it's so embarrassing to have this problem; god. there's no solution. i am an asshole and let my partner who works part-time buy our groceries. it does it because it's sweet, and caring, and very kind, and of course we'll be using my money to move out and on any adult things that come up like education or auto shit, whenever it is the latter comes into play, but oh my god, there's no way that's equivalent at all??? and i don't know what to do. i should man up and help with groceries because i still eat the fucking food that he prepares. god, i need to like, get my new credit union account working so my card isn't always auto-declined.

it's the fucking worst. i was thinking to myself last night; what can i cut back on? and it's impossible. i have the cheapest possible bread and bulk peanut butter for my emergency meal when stuck in my room. i have chicken nuggets for a "hot food" i can eat when i can't eat what's for dinner due to texture issues so other roomate, who i'll call a, doesn't feel bad when she cooks something i can't eat. i have rice and ramen that is already bounteous in this house and which i haven't had to repurchase. i realized i could cut off frozen waffles theoretically, but my partner was the one who bought them last and likes them, and the other roommate eats them sometimes, so i can't actually. last time i got groceries (delivered) i got chips to bump up the price to get rid of the surcharge, and at first i thought "well, maybe i'll just have one bag of chips for every month as a treat rather than normalizing this as a regular thing." but that's still like 72 bucks a year! i can't justify that on SNACKS. if i had my stupid rice cooker i could just cook myself my rice if i'm that hungry, or just use the communal one.

argggh. rice. i shouldn't put anything on it anymore. my roommate noticed i kept using ponzu, and she made this little joke about how i must really like it since we just went through a bottle (apparently she assumed we'd gone through a new and not-yet-used bottle because the one i had was almost empty), and it's like, wow! god! i'm being such a total shitty selfish hog! she's completely right even if she didn't quite realize it. all i do is take and eat and waste and siphon off everyone who works hard; christ, the least i could do is not fucking consume EVERYTHING. and she likes nice stuff, too! and what do i do but just eat and take and take and eat and take? but what can i do, aside from not using the condiments and the milk and any other flavor additives i didn't pilfer from work? i can't refuse the food she's making tonight because it'd hurt her feelings even though i really do not need to be eating so god damned much.

hilariously, though, there's just NOTHING i can cut back on! i haven't bought anything of substance for myself in the past four months but a down winter coat, which i sort of regret, and a wool sweater, which i kind of also regret. i'm eating complementary snacks i pilfer from work for breakfast; i just squirrel them away to gnaw on on the days i don't just drink the work coffee and let it suppress my appetite, which is more food than i used to eat. i check the garbage at my apartment complex for food. i eat half if not all of the free meal my partner gets from working at a restaurant for lunch every day. i'm afraid to go to the dentist for my broken, rotting teeth, and afraid to order replacement glasses for my severely out-of-shape, crooked, and not-full-prescription pair, and i'm afraid to go get a haircut for my hideous mullet-mane, and i'm afraid to be a burden, which is hilarious, because the state of affairs brought on by my OBSESSION with frugality is making me an objective financial Hole for people to throw their own money into. it's all so stupid. i know hal doesn't mind, and i trust it to tell me when it's gotten too much, but nonetheless it's tremendously embarrassing and shitty to be all, hey, can i move in and rely on you for food and to open my sodas and unlock the door and for food and for medicine and for food? fuck! "it's rotten work not if it's you" and all but my god!! patience and compassion of a saint! let's hope i don't martyr it!

i'm not even sure what all i'm saving for; what i'm so scared of. obviously medical bills as i don't think i'm actually insured in this state and yet am locked into paying my mother a hundred bucks a month for coverage. the dental problems that'll flare up at some point. but i think i might be able to get my MA for like $3k if i just chip at it slowly, and i intend to get a very modest used car when i eventually need one again...whenever that is. it's so fucking funny i wrote a thesis just to make $15 an hour, which is way worse than i thought it was for a full-timer?? i'm so boned. lol. well, it's not like i was going to buy the chips and shit anyway. there are no expenses i can cut out. all i can do is work and hope the number in my bank account is eventually "enough." $30,000 is a year's wages untaxed. my insurance is like, $1.2k a year...rent is like, $5,040 a year... so...man, i don't know. somewhere in the mid-$20,000s range, which will come maybe in one or two years from now if i could photosynthesize. then i won't be so terrified.

apparently that's actually how much 65+ year olds have and people 18-34 have an average of like, $8k and a median of a thousand, and the median is considered a more realistic estimate. christ. okay, when i have ~$10-15k i'll stop being as scared. i guess. enough about money! the connection between how insane this sounds and my mom telling me to go freeze to death is giving me firsthand embarrassment!

one final thing -- it's so embarrassing to have disordered eating and literally have no baggage about weight -- and nobody made me feel that way, that's just me. lmfao. i mean, i used to take into account, but only in the sense that i'd punish myself for "overindulging" if i got a little over a hundred. i wonder what i am now? it's probably best not to know. as much as i'd like to gain weight, that'd more be for the sake of making my arms look less horrible and my body less ET-looking, but i know eating more won't do that, so the whole "eat so you can look less horrific" thing is a farce and i know it. i mostly eat because it's the healthier thing to do and i have a reason to care about that these days.

god, this whole thing is just fucking embarrassing. i'm reading this back and i can practically trace some of the shit i've said back to my mom hitting me for eating too many of the blueberries she brought back from the store, or eating her popcorn that she prefers, or drinking too much of the fruit juice. and the awesome thing is that that doesn't actually help. my mom was a bitch, and wrong, and cruel, and i still feel like i should kill myself for how much food i eat and how much of a piece of shit ungrateful burden i am on other people. but i can't! i just have to keep at it.

this kid keeps coming in my office to meet with one of my coworkers, and i can tell they're transmasc. unlike my most recent ex, they're not the kind that wears only dysphoria hoodies and tries to compensate for his lack of dick like any stereotypical man would -- aggression, lack of consideration for others, talking a big fight. if i had to guess, they've still probably listened to cavetown's "lemon boy" and have questionable media/fandom taste and habits. it's a little interesting, because they seem to be sort of like me. waifish, unimposing, yet still taking a half-hearted stab at "masculinity" -- short hair and pants. you know, the type of person to only be they/them'ed by the most culturally competent coworking acquaintances. and i think they might be on testosterone. good for them! it just got me thinking.

i have a weird relationship with gender, like i do most things. i feel like i can't talk about it a lot because it's something very specific to me, and because it sounds really fucking weird and rude to bring up to friends. being gender nonconforming is sometimes just fucking awful, not even just in the sense that i've gotten backlash for it, but in that being outside the gender binary means that most shit is just unattainable, completely. i'm not going to be gendered right by any stranger on first glance; i'm always going to be "ma'am" if i'm not lucky enough to get called "sir," i will not receive validation from an "x" gender marker unless i have time and money to vent into it as well as a sympathetic government -- and, again. never. never ever ever will people assume right about me. the cultural practice of gendering someone with "ma'am" and "sir" from the start is not going to erode in my lifetime. i have to be a cisgender woman to my coworkers basically for the rest of my life. forever. it will never get better than this on this front. maybe people stumble for longer.

there are options. i could go ahead and ~try~ to be openly nonbinary; i'm sure we've all stumbled upon a nonbinary 'content creator' in a journalism content aggregation website or some other nothingjob at least once what with nonbinary peoples' habit of needing to eat. this does, however, require being full-throttle "out and proud," which risks judgement, hate, and unemployment, regardless of whether or not your coworkers ACTUALLY use your pronouns for the weeks or months prior to sacking.

or i could go ahead and shoot my shot at being regarded as a man. or masculine. which won't happen. i'm "butch," but barely. i'm not masculine because western masculinity is exclusive on purpose -- i'm weak, i can't build muscle, i'm small, i'm unable to do so much shit. there is nothing archetypally masculine about either my physical appearance or my abilities, at all, except for having a brain. i'm hardly even "butch," i'm just nothing. i'm just a "woman" who can't do "woman" stuff; i just can't do man stuff or look like a man either. my gender identity and presentation is defined by lack, which, funnily enough, is something that really shitty waifish white trans men on tumblr are really into -- like, of course being pale and skinny and feminine is still considered the standard for those gaggles of trans men.

the kicker with that idea there is that i'm not even a man. i don't want to BE a man. i don't want to be presumed male all the time. a state where i'm called "sir" and thought to be a gender-conforming, frail fail-man is still a loss, because i don't have any desire to be that, either. even if i weren't disabled and avenues of masculine of gender expression were open to me i don't even think that'd make me happy.

that's why i haven't gotten on testosterone. i know it wouldn't make me happy. i am never, ever, ever, EVER going to stop hating my body, and being in my body, and the way it looks, and the way it works. it is always going to hurt, and look bad, and make me look stupid and weird with how i have to carry cups and boxes and bags, and will never, ever, be comfortable to have to exist in public with, and i KNOW that testosterone will not fix anything. having to sit with the reality that i spent however much grocery money on testosterone in the vague hope that its fat redistribution or voice lowering would in any way put me closer to gender affirmation, gender euphoria, self-love, body neutrality, or reduce my anxiety or body hatred would just be completely fucking humiliating.

it's so funny that you can be born with a piece of shit body, and it's just never going to stop being humiliating. you just get to be in a body that ALWAYS hurts, and ALWAYS looks bad and weird to other people, and you just have to accept that there's no changing it. you either stop caring or you don't, and neither one of those will actually make you happy. if you're happy, it's in SPITE of the thing that lets you physically interact with the rest of society, which, incidentally, the rest of society hates looking at, too. it's just objectively difficult to exist in society. they don't WANT to look at you. they don't care if you can't leave the house, make the walk, climb the stairs. any "victory" i get over my agoraphobia isn't just in spite of my mental illnesses, but in spite of the fact that the manmade world is frequently just as hostile as the natural one, and done so with an intelligence behind it no less! and nobody can take the time to care.

all this is completely egotistical and other people have it worse with greater systematic blocks to their life. but i'll keep going. all these entries are so fucking brazen and winge and whine endlessly about horseshit that objectively doesn't matter to anyone but me, but like, i'm doing this for myself so that i don't lose every hurt feeling to the primordial ooze of forgotten feelings and events that comprise the working base of my brain.

ugggh. back to t-pain (transgender pain). i haaate how i am. i haaate my identity. it took me years to actually be comfortable with the fact that my labels don't do anything for me and i still feel let down by that reality. i don't feel any special pride in "figuring it out" or "finally having a word for it." i'm just nonbinary agender, and that just happens to sound like horseshit to most people.

nonbinary "agender" doesn't even get to the heart of it. nonbinary "i can't perform either gendered expectation because of my disability." nonbinary "othered by my body's appearance and locomotive abilities by society." nonbinary "got mad at the teacher asking for a strong boy to lift the chairs but physically unable to prove her wrong personally." nonbinary "gender is a completely subjective and culturally-informed experience and i feel a deep isolation because i do not personally feel anything with regard to it and am without exception completely inept when performing it." nonbinary "not an athlete, not a cheerleader or social butterfly, not anything but academically-inclined, which we guess is masculine, but what matters is that this is all i CAN do so essentially it had better be good or else i am and have nothing." nonbinary "gender is like a language i can interpret but not speak because i have nothing to say." nonbinary "i have no culture, no special abilities, no body that looks normal in any dress or a suit, and what features i do have to gender me are embarrassments to that gender." nonbinary "why doesn't it work that way for me." nonbinary "why can't i do any of it right, and why do i even want to in the first place? why does it all hurt so badly and feel so uncomfortable? why am i so weird for not being able to participate in it?"

i don't even feel right calling myself a "dyke" sometimes, but it's all i have outside of the above -- more conversational, more 101. like, a lot of gnc lesbians use "dyke" as a gender marker, and i get that (nonbinary, boundary-setting, political), very cool, but i also have nothing to do with the generally-understood concept of dyke masculinity. "you don't have to be physically fit to be a dyke" -- true! but it feels like i have to! i don't even want to get involved with a woman, which is like the definition of dykehood since antiquity! i would feel more comfortable if i had SOME trait that demarcated me as a dyke, but i dooon't! it's not that someone's STOPPING me from saying i'm a dyke, and it legitimately is apt enough a label, and disabled butches and shit exist, of course, i'm just frustrated with the fact that it fits like a shirt i can't fill. which is my favorite kind of shirt! but it always does make me exceedingly ashamed of my body...like all shirts do!

my complaints are as rooted in my insecurity as they are with the barely-extant cultural conception of dykehood. the shortcomings of dyke labels to describe a number of performances and body types is liberating just as it is limiting -- naturally when there are fewer options to choose from, dominant images become the ideas of the day, and just like that, butch and femme take on a normative character that reiterates the hegemonic culture in which the labels were derived. it's a sociologist's tale as old as time. once again, my personal problems fruit from my brain as guided by the tender loving farmer's hand of late-stage usamerican capitalism-culture. i can't imagine how the compounding effects work on racialized peoples, god. this itself is enough to make me crazy.

i want to end off with something not so depressing, but i just can't. it/its (and they/them to a lesser extent) give me "gender euphoria" in that they feel accurate and good enough respectively, and accepting that the first set felt ACTUALLY RIGHT was so momentous for me! it just...probably won't get any better than that. i have no reason to suspect it will. i suppose there's some chance i go on t and feel legitimately better about myself, but the chances of that are so slim, and i find myself unwilling to spend the money on something that, while unlikely to make me dislike my body more, would contribute little-to-nothing to my overall wellbeing. while i would theoretically LIKE more fat on my abdomen, more weight on my arms, and a deeper voice, i might as well just spend the money on...i dunno, a bunch of snacks. is it self-harm to deny myself something i think i could like but have no proof of, or is it financially reasonable? i don't know. maybe i'm being petulant by refusing to buy it if it won't significantly increase my quality of life the same as it does for ablebodied binary transgender people like my ex. maybe i'm just jealous and lashing out at myself.

at the same time, though, even if i take testosterone, i change the name i use at work, i wear a pronoun pin, it does nothing to make the outside world less intimidating and aggressive. nothing to be done about that. i guess my advice to a friend would be that it'd be irresponsible to let the world's arbitrary and molasses-slow cultural competencies define whether i "live as myself" or not, and because that's true, i'd say "that's true." but it still sucks. it's still lonely and isolating and confusing and embarrassing and a huge pain in the ass. it sucks that my preferred pronouns are a step beyond even what trans queer people are "okay with," and my auxiliary pronouns are typically just within or far beyond the scope of acceptable for the average cishet.

it's funny that this all just amounts to impotent frustration with society at large. i'm fixed; stuck; unchangeably this regardless of if the economic superstructure can take time away from imperializing elsewhere to keep pace. i cannot will myself into having a binary gender. i cannot force myself to enjoy other pronouns or gender presentations. it's just that instead of cursing god for "putting me in the wrong body," i'm cursing western society at large for their culturally and legally limited conception of gender and their ableism/racism that led to these constructs becoming so rooted in the ground that their stele is impossible to unearth and disestablish totally without many hands.

she gave away her cat today. she sent a message saying that she didn't want to talk about it, but she had done the right thing. shortly after she sent a photo of herself smiling as compared an older photo of herself smiling, with a caption that it was "still her. old broad."

nothing matters to her. it's really something i can't wrap my head around.

ash was a good cat. my mother didn't deserve him. he was the unfortunate victim to her self-aggrandizing and i hope he receives a new, wonderful family shortly. his story is so: my mom, then employed as a solicitor for temp workers, stopped by an adoption agency to do her business, and of course looked at the animals. it had just been "free adoption day" yesterday, so the cat room was almost completely cleared out -- except for him. she pitied him, messaged me, and came home with him to our mildly-surprised grandfather. at the time we already had a cat she had adopted, but as she didn't like having to have a litterbox in the house, she let him outside, and he was spending less and less time indoors. if you love your pet cat or the outside environment do not do this. casper was left in the hands of our neighbors -- whom he frequently visited while locked out -- when my mother and i moved out of that house following my grandpa's/her father's death, and he has since "gone missing" because he was allowed to free roam. i may write about him sometime, as he was far more familiar to me.)

ash's original name was olaf, perhaps for the nefarious-looking curlicued milk mustache on his facial fur pattern, or perhaps just because we live in a post-frozen (2013) world. she renamed him "ashley" after some sort of military man or actor; i don't remember, but i called him "ash" because he liked to stick his nose and paws in the fireplace. however, he spent the first several weeks of his time with our family hiding in my mom's closet -- she had a large chest in there, and so he would hop up atop the blankets and loaf there, sandwiched between her dresses, for hours and hours.

in time, his skittishness wore away to reveal his mischievousness and his love of using his claws and teeth. he enjoyed kneading every one of my mother's blankets, her favorite wicker chest, and "customized" her bedspread by ripping out threads simply because he was happy to knead them. he would also bite them, as cats who are imitating nursing are wont to do. he didn't like neither casper or pookie very much, and would swipe at them when they got close, though he completely stopped once he seemed to notice that pookie was a complete nonthreat whose sniffs were not a threat of violence. he cared little for toys, but much for treats. it was a later morning ritual of my mom's to get woken up by him because she had had a habit of making him go outside in the morning by throwing treats out the door, but that just led to him waking her up earlier and earlier so she'd give him his treats at the crack of dawn, more or less. he grew to vy for her attention (and mine) by chewing at her sleeping fingers, her phone cord, and simply doing a standing-in-place trot with his claws.

i didn't know him for very long, or particularly well, though i loved him dearly. he must have been in our family for a few years -- i want to say maybe 2017-2018, which means he's spent more time alone with my mother than any other pets have. though he was adopted in my mother's less physically-aggressive years, he was still a semifrequent target of her anger, whether it be simply to her mood or because he was prone to light trouble-making, which is, incidentally, a patent risk of pet ownership. she usually didn't refer to him by name, usually just curse words meant to sound affectionate but which usually upset me for "had a normal childhood" reasons.

he would follow her everywhere, room to room. after a long day of being made to sit out in the living room with my mother, i'd notice he'd usually depart the shared space to retire to her bedroom when she did. some nights i would walk into the bedroom she had me share with her and i'd see him sniffing her, pacing around. there were, i believe, a couple occasions when he got so clingy she set him outside, then it turned out she was having a low.

what can i say? ash was a good boy, a playful goofball, and my mother's cat. and he deserved a lot better than that. may fate be kinder to him than it has been, as i hope to be the case for all of us.

i had actually wanted to write an entry today before i'd scrolled past her selfies and seen the news, but i didn't have anything in particular on my mind, so i'm not sure what exactly to talk about. i guess i'll just leave it there.

i want to keep writing even if nothing's new. mom's not dead yet, but also not healed, but, like, whatever. i'm not investing more emotional theatrics if she can't be assed to go to the hospital nor climb on the catafalque.

anyway, i had a weird dream last night. my dreams usually end up being bifurcated with two plots that behave like they're the same story, but are obviously disconnected when i wake up and try to remember them. the first part sucked, and had something to do with a pedophile very markedly similar to my dad, and trying to escape from his suburban home like some kind of...like, imagine if hello neighbor was set in a bunch of liminalcore suburb edits. it was kind of similar to jack stauber's opal?

then from there i like...had died, or somehow been told, like, 'hey, you can't be alive anymore, but there are options,' and at that point i became some sort of grim reaper -- bones and cloak and scythe and everything. i dreamt of haunting my current place of work, except there was no one there -- but after a moment, who else but the stock pedophile shows up at my workplace to come find me, i assume. he wanders into the public office, and i can tell his time is inexplicably coming up soon. i'm not sure what from -- i think about it for a second -- pulmonary embolism, sudden heart attack, trips and breaks his neck? -- but i didn't really have time to puzzle out what it was since he was due to die practically right then. i guessed he was doomed to die at that point from me abusing my power to kill him.

the coworkers stopped existing as characters at that point, somehow. it was like they didn't notice his corpse laying there. he -- somehow corpse and ghost -- lay for a little while, as if in disbelief, and while i waited for him to become a little more conversant, i wandered around the workplace a little, thinking about how i'd just killed someone. when i came back, the spectral self looked like he was in his early 20s, and a lot like me -- thin, a little frazzled-looking with unkempt hair. he could've passed for a male version of me with a better chin. when he saw me he seemed both panicked and overjoyed, perhaps in the latter case because he had someone to look to. it's like he was an actual young adult now, like he'd forgotten everything he'd done in his later adulthood. he didn't want to die, he didn't know what he was going to do now. he didn't know why his corpse was there, with its/his head resting on my desk's foot. he wondered why nobody saved him. was it too late? was it really too late for him? he wanted to know. he wanted me to tell him so badly he was in tears. he had no idea who i was.

i started to feel bad. i don't know if it was because i'd forgotten what he was in the moment, or if i'd somehow strayed from my understanding of the dream's narrative, but as he lay there -- well dead, realistically, but also sort of, i don't know, still viable? i don't know, i was death and it was a dream, safe to say i have the authority here -- i tried to give him cpr. his corpse coughed and rattled a little, but he looked like he was smiling, thankful, gleeful. he stopped when i stopped, so i kept trying. i could feel the air leaving my body and going into his, like i wasn't just filling his hours-old corpse with actual air, but pneuma. i woke up in the middle of that. i don't know what happens next.

weird, right? it feels like it's full of symbolism and whatever, but it's all so ill-defined and piled up, i don't actually know if it could really "mean" anything -- i tend to think most dreams don't mean anything, anyway, not that that's a bad quality. i don't have a fear of turning into my pedophile father, or any sort of pedophile. i don't kill things and i wouldn't feel guilt about killing a pedophile. i don't even have revenge fantasies about my dad. maybe it has something to do with my hesitance to allow the state to cull pedophiles given that the state has an incentive to ascribe sexual deviancy to "undesirables" in society, as has already been done over countless decades to countless men of color? birth of a nation and all that. haugh, i dunno.

it was weird to kill a guy in my dreams, though. i've seen a fair amount of dead people, likely more than the normal white usamerican, so it's surprising it's taken me this long. or maybe i have and didn't even remember it? dunno. it was bloodless, though. i just swiped the scythe like i was beheading him and he collapsed. very odd. i think i have more thoughts about that dream world's concept of death than anything else, though. i never got to see if there was anything "next" because i had to toil on the earth. i think my existence was painless, and any difficulty was relegated to the metaphysical and ethical sort. i liked that a lot. i daresay if the afterlife were on the table, as banal as it may be, a continued existence treading unseen and materially unburdened on earth and meeting a lot of people at their time of death wouldn't be so bad. i liked the anonymity of the reaper outfit, too. just a skeleton in a shroud: timeless. if it weren't for the fact that a scythe isn't a ubiquitous farming or death-related implement it would've been even cooler, but like, what are you gonna do? if i had notes for my dreams that my brain would've taken into account i'd've been able to skip the hello neighbor anterior portion of the experience.

on that note, i wish i dreamt about death more. being awake and thinking about it just feels depressing or overly-edgy. sometimes i peruse obituary websites not to daydream or aestheticize, just to ponder the thing. death. the one thing i am sure to have in common with other people; the arresting of lively functions and trespass into "whatever's next." i admit, as much as i am an atheist, it leaves me a little unsatisfied. i'm a hopeful animal with philosophies, so of course it irks me to think we all get one ticket to a life of some level of comfort or torture and that's it. reincarnation in no way elates me, and in fact instills a tremendous dread in me, but -- damn, i just realized i never clarify "egg theory" reincarnation when i say that. okay, reincarnation based on karma doesn't upset me, but the idea of having to live the life of all living things that have been and are yet to come does. the ceiling of human pleasure is in no way comparable to the scope of human pain there is to experience, forget ENTIRELY the guilt that can be earned from accruing any creature comforts. fancy house: sure, it's nice, but what did it cost in blood. maybe there's the pleasure of mastering a craft or winning a lottery that raises your beloved family from destitution, but good lord am i unfit to conceive of those since i don't really have a frame of reference for either, nor most "spiritually fulfilling" joys out there. yes, i would gladly take my life of comfortable lower-middle class mediocrity (??? american standards are wack as fuck, i don't know) than several other lifetimes of...what, i don't know, neoconfucian ancient chinese noblewoman footbinding, drowning on the titanic, whatever, just so that in another lifetime i get the rush of helping land the apollo 11 or whatever my passion is.

also, wouldn't hate being a ghost, but this nothingburger's too long already. another time.

every website's advice for a parent who refuses medical care goes one of two ways: either you should try hard to convince them to take care of themselves and do everything possible, or that you should accept that you can't do anything because the individual is an adult.

that's it. try as hard as you can to force them to change, or accept that you can't. why is it always down to this? why do i have to bear this? why does she keep putting her well-being in my hands? it's too heavy for me to carry and it hurts, but there's no one else for her to give the burden to and she will not or cannot take it on herself. so she hands it to me.

is this what i was born for, in her mind? am i a punching bag, a retirement home, a replacement mother, a murderer, a guardian? why do i have to be. why am i only what she wants. why did i spend so long being what she wants because i believed it was the only way to be. it didn't even help me. it didn't feel good. success didn't and doesn't mean anything. there IS no success point anymore.

i don't know what i want to happen. i do know it doesn't actually matter. whether i want to fight her to keep her alive to keep me miserable or whether i want to guiltily let her fall into the grave she's digging, it doesn't matter. i don't know if she's going to survive this and whatever option i'd prefer is out of my hands either way. the control she's giving me over her life is an illusion; ultimately, as much as she wants to be rescued, that doesn't amount to action. more than anything i think she just wants to tell me how hard it is and for everything to be okay after that. i don't know. she can't eat anything without throwing it up and her brain fog is so bad that driving seems dangerous, but she doesn't want to go to the hospital because it's "too chaotic" and there was "rude care." so she sends me her funeral home information and instructs me not to call her friends because they have their lives -- implication: by leaving her in texas despite her plans to follow me, i've deprived her of meaningful family and a will to live.

of course that's implied. the last time she was forcibly hospitalized she didn't say that part outright until months later when she talked about how hard it was for her that i continued to attend university rather than breaking from it to help her, despite her verbal instructions to do so. the funny thing is that i knew all along she didn't mean it, but she would rather play the role of slighted victim than actually be straight with me: for once, in this situation, a good quality.

the way i write about her comes across so hatefully sometimes, i think. for me to be lamenting her apparent impending death, that is. i think, like i've said, that i'm just stuck. stuck with her. it's a compulsion i get, to text first, to call when she isn't messaging back, to feel a pang of guilt when i tell a coworker i plan to move to canada someday. maybe i can't admit to myself that after all this time i still wish i could have made her happy. it was one of the only things i was raised to want, and although she made me pay dearly for my inevitable failure to entertain and soothe her enough to counterbalance her mental illnesses, through all the resentment and pain, i still find myself wishing i had the right answer and could solve whatever problem she had. it took decades of physical and psychological anguish to realize that it was unfair, and only recently have i realized that i simply can't have the right answer every time -- in many cases it hasn't been that i chose "wrong," but that there is no solution or correct course of action for the situation apportioned to my plate.

today has been a slow and painful exercise in considering and reconsidering my options, as well as not answering her texts. i don't have an answer. i don't have an answer. i don't know what you want from me and i can't even trust you to have your best interests in mind because your judgment is shot. all i can do is guess. all i've ever been able to do is guess. there isn't a most fortuitous direction, there is no best option. i'm your stupid fucking kid and all i've ever been able to do is stress myself to death over how to properly take care of you because picking "wrong" meant hell to pay. this is the first time that you're on the chopping block for making the "wrong" choice in a situation and i'm STILL the one paying for it, STILL the one you've decided is ACTUALLY tasked with the choice. forcing the knife into my hand again.

it'd be cosmically funny if she ends up dying because i listen to what she tells me to do. even if calling 911 on her might make her chances of survival better, that is, if she doesn't choose to go hospitalize herself, eventually, i'm too scared to go against her word because i'm terrified of what she, a sick, diabetic woman states and states away would manage to do to me. one of these earlier entries catalogued my whole breakdown over a time she called me on the phone to curse me out. i confess that before writing this paragraph i'd scant considered violating her orders to call the medics on her, even with her last text so far being "i'm done. no more. can't do it," so intense is my aversion to the idea of directly disobeying her.

last time she did this, all the while cleaning her house ("swedish death cleaning," "making [her] life smaller," and "preparing for the inevitable") when i was moving out, i confess, i broke down multiple times in tears. i begged her to stop killing herself. i wept for her to stay alive for me. i asked her to please stop planning for her own death just because i was moving out. i cried so much.

she sneered at me. she told me i was being overly emotional and that she knows better than me and that she could feel her life ending, and "wasn't [she] entitled to her feelings," and "don't say [i] know more than [my] mother even if [i] think [i'm] so smart." at later times when i mentioned my future she said there was nothing left for her as an empty-nester, that without me she had nothing. i don't understand--she was so excited about all her new fandoms and interests now that she had to build a new identity. she survived, like i expected she would.

why is she making me responsible for her death? my helplessness and guilt make me feel all sorts of disgusting and stupid things i shouldn't even type out. i'm so tired of living like this. i'm so tired of feeling like a complete and utter failure in every respect because of her; as a person, a friend, a social animal, a body, a child, a student, a worker, everything. i'll never be good enough for that woman, ever. even if she says it sometimes because she wants to feel like a better mother than her own, just like half the shit she says, she doesn't mean it. no wonder i'm out of my fucking mind; this woman had complete control over my psychological development and i can't tell if anything is ever real because of her. but this is real, and i'll never know if there's anything i could actually do about it. no matter what happens it both is and isn't my fault because nothing i do matters or means anything. i don't know what to do, and i feel absolutely terrible, and there's nothing i can do about it that means anything at all.

bought all my mom's birthday gifts today. she's turning 55 in february, had a diabetic high this morning, and hasn't gotten back to me yet today after the texts she sent to let me know her hands were shaking, she was short of breath, and going home.

i know she's probably fine. i know tomorrow she'll probably text me that she fell asleep some hours after i had texted her, but she hadn't been looking at her phone prior. even if she doesn't...it'll be fine. sorry in advance for how jumbled this entry is going to be. i wasn't even sure what i wanted to say when i started writing it.

i'm so tired of the feeling. i'm tired of bearing the responsibility of her. take your insulin, mom. you look younger compared to that photo of other women from your graduating class, mom, don't worry. yes, you woke me up at 6am to tell you if your outfit looks okay, and it looks no better than "really good," because good is bad and fine means i called you fat. yes mom, your hair does really look great in that color. yes, your boyfriend was so mean for getting offended that you implied he thought you were ugly because he wasn't as impassioned about your choice of lipstick color as i have to pretend to be. i'm so tired of having her as a part of my life but i can't actually excise her without feeling the guilt. i wish there were a way for her to be happy without me, honestly. i don't care what she does as long as it's not hurting people anymore. i've been reading a bit about complex trauma, and it's interesting to see the usual symptom of aggression listed, because i just...have never had a serious moment of that. maybe brief moments where i visualize the feeling of doing something aggressive, but i never seriously would, and i don't think about it in depth...i think it's more about lowering my heart rate and venting my pent-up frustration through visualization so that i can continue to listen and respond to her without starting to shake or make noise or breathe heavily. because that's my job. i am the eternal witness to her.

every day, that's our relationship. for years. "look at me. look at me. look at me. look at me. do you see me? aren't i beautiful? you didn't look at me. do you love me? do you love me like i wish my parents had? look at me. look at me. look at me. look at me. look at me. look at me. my thighs are fat. do you hate them? do you think i should get a twin-sized bed after you forced me to divorce my sex criminal husband because i'm not sexy anymore? am i sexy? do you think i'm attractive? do you love me like i wish my husband did? lay down with me. do you love me like my mother should have? look at me. love me. look at me. look at my makeup. look at my hairstyle. do you like them? do you like me? did you see i didn't buy harry potter merchandise? did you see my selfie? i didn't take my insulin. do you want me to take my insulin? look at me. do you love me? how much would it hurt if i died? do you really care at all? just checking, of course you do; look at me. if i wrote something, would you read it? would you love it? do you love me? look at me. look at me. look at me."

i want to help you but i don't know how. all i've ever wanted was to help you. you made me to help you. you made me to save you from your life, but i just can't do it. i was so young all i could offer was my flesh as stress relief; my ugly face, just similar and distorted enough from yours, my underweight stick-skinny arms, the envy of a severely disordered dysmorphic, my greasy, long hair that flew away and stuck out no matter how much you wanted to style it like yours. it's all i had for you. you took it all.

narrative exposure therapy is a potential treatment for individuals with cptsd: "survivors" are encouraged to make a line, or road map, that represents their life -- stones for bad events and flowers for good events, the size of which represent their magnitude, so that the individual can recover from the "altered self-narrative" cptsd impinges on them and begin to synthesize traumatic memories/responses and the positive relationships or personal traits that allowed them to survive their trauma into a more cohesive self-narrative.

i cannot do this because my childhood is an indeterminate sludge of aggregate concrete, not a discrete garden path. time, space, these mean nothing. there is only my mother gripping a knife in my hand and trying to force me to slit her wrists with it because i did something to make her think i hated her. there's only howling in pain on a tile floor. there's only the flash of pain of touching a bump on my head the day after and remembering what happened. chasing her to my bedroom on slower, smaller legs, stammering apologies because i'd put the dishes away wrong, which means she's had enough and "might as well check my room to see what else i've done." there's concrete under my head. there's a belt digging into my skin. there's spittle on my face and my vision and hearing are rapidly dimming as manufactured darkness crowds in around my mother's screaming face. she's stuck in a picture frame of fuzzy-edged black, a portrait in profile: trembling with rage, eyes squinted into glittery studs of dull blue, mouth cracked open in a belted, ghoulish howl inches away -- contact, a hand the length of your entire head sending a sharp spur of pain unfurling across your cheek. the frame is cast aside as you go tumbling off balance. whatever catharsis she got from that is lost, her fist now balled; how dare you accuse her of hitting you that hard, you are lying, you're a liar, you just want to make her feel like the bad guy when she is not the bad guy here. you're 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16; it doesn't matter, in this moment as she's walking closer to fill the space she made between you, it doesn't matter if you know this is abuse yet, or if you know you don't deserve it. it doesn't matter. here, in this eternal, everlasting moment where you have already been hurt and are going to be hurt again, it doesn't matter if you tell the psychologist you're aware you didn't deserve it, pretending you're talking about the events she banned you from talking about instead of the sex abuse because she hurt you so much worse. "deserving" of it or not, please...you were made to experience it and will experience nothing else. the differentiation feels completely moot.

a child shouldn't be made to feel responsible for their parent's physical health, emotional well-being, self-image. a single mother shouldn't take her sex life woes, her interpersonal struggles, her strained relationship with her parents, her insecurities all to her child to fix. there has to be some other adult person involved. but it doesn't matter. "should" doesn't matter. the individuality of truamatic events don't matter. no systems of "should" mean anything, really. it doesn't matter that citizens of an imperial nation "should" do this, or that parents "should" do this, or that cps "should" do that. systems of belief have their place, but in my material and psychological reality, there is only that which is and that which isn't.

justice. codes of conduct. inherent responsibilities. these are some of the lies we have to work tirelessly to maintain the impression of or else we'd all kill ourselves from hopelessness and impotent, teary-eyed frustration. in my experience, as a child, other, more specialized representations of these concepts were discarded for their uselessness -- a just god. a guardian angel. the safety or support of extended family. the justice department of the united states. police.

maybe it's a good thing it all happened. maybe i'm like the ad-bloated websites hawking trauma-informed therapist-guided personally-useless workshops on reconstructing disrupted identity and i'm objectively better off for my trauma, which i do believe at least in that it let me see the forest for the piles of shit inside it.

at the same time, i'm stuck in it. i'm stuck on my mother's leash. i'm stuck looking at her screaming face, her endless barrage of daily selfies to approve of her makeup, her clothing, her under-neck, her weight, her hairstyle. i'm stuck hiding in my room, hiding in the corner, obsessively cleaning my room in terror-filled spurts. in other ways -- i keep looking backward, trying to remember the layout of my childhood home, visiting my hometown's mall's website at work, committing to memory what stand out as moments of particular agony. i don't crave or miss it, not really. i guess being out of my mother's house just means i still don't know how to be. i live in it. as i sit unable to know if my mother has self-neglected into a coma, knowing she probably isn't, a day after telling my roommate i can't feasibly cut her off without her killing herself, the responsibility of being her child sits uncomfortably on my chest the same as it always has.

i could leave it there, but i won't. space, and my partner, have given me perspective. my acceptance of my situation and my awareness that i wasn't entitled to the remedial forces of justice, love, or care means i tried to control my circumstances in other ways. clean your room regularly so you can prevent getting hurt. eat less so your self-fulfillment won't be a cause of suffering later. don't get a haircut when your vanity could otherwise amount to food, shelter, or a degree. don't eat unless you're starving to avoid wasting your money on fleeting, not-life-or-death fulfillment, because if you end up choking on medical debt like most of the people in this country you'll deserve it. don't leave your room so you won't get judged for how you look or act, which would result in negative social capital just because you wanted to get a snack or something inessential like that. don't go outside if you don't have to because your medical insurance might not work here and if you get hit by a car or break your ankle you'll have deserved it because you chose your personal, inessential, fleeting fulfillment despite knowing the dire cost that might come from that.

it's like i'm preemptively justifying every bad thing that could happen to me. the culprit behind all this is that i would want a temporary comfort -- something to quiet my stomach from the kitchen or the grocery store, my hair to stop brushing the collar of my shirt, a release from the temporary choke i sometimes get in the form of a carbonated something-or-other -- and it's always "you'll have wanted that or the means you used to procure it later, and you will suffer for your selfishness and/or ignorance." if i eat my cake and no longer have it, i have to buy another one to eat again, and eventually i'll need that money for a dental filling or auto repair, and i won't have it, and i'll wither into poverty -- a painful experience, at which point you become human-shaped shit to most of the country -- and the thought is that i'll have deserved it because i was aware of the risks of superfluous indulgence and decided to spoil myself anyway. the line of thinking posits that i am indeed actually responsible for everything bad that happens to me, which i honestly can't even shake even though i'm aware it's not been good for my physical health, at least because our economic system renders my "if you eat you have to buy food again and that food money could be vitally necessary to be used elsewhere later" hypothesis pretty true. there it is again, i guess: it doesn't matter if it should or shouldn't be the way it is, because it is the way that it is, and i have to live with the consequences of that. all i can do is try to minimize damage. look at my mom, boost her ego when she asks. avoid eating a slice of bread when i can sleep off the hunger.

i'm trying to get better at least, i don't know. the process is just extremely slow and makes me feel completely reprehensible. it is what it is, though. sorry for the sort of bummer posts being all there is to the site recently. i want to add more secret wizard pages, i'm just feeling sort of iffy recently for some reason.

i've been reading homestuck meta today. and, in personal time, watching homestuck for the first time -- as in, watching one of those bloated read-alouds of homestuck for the first time rather than consuming it in its native format.

i strike myself as a strange person. personally, i think anyone who read all of homestuck any number of times at least WAS, at some point, a strange person. you've got to be, i think, to be willing to partake of a comic that is at times very hostile to its reader, occasionally mired in the author's latent, roiling racism, and, at least in its heyday, updated very sporadically and in a way that might leave you unfulfilled.

but, honestly, maybe "occasionally unfulfilling" isn't the worst thing a piece of media can be. or maybe it's unfair to call its sloppy misfires at catharsis "unfulfilling." i like to think it makes a stab at filling -- after all, it could be both racist and not try to induce any emotion in its reader at all and make a billion dollars at the box office.

boy, you see why i can't diary physically while arthritic? so many digressions. anyway.

god, homestuck is so fascinating. i could write a hundred things about it as a fiction, which is precisely why it doesn't have a shrine yet, despite the fact that it's molded the trajectory of my life. i love the narrative deep-dives you can do with it -- narratively-rich fiction -- and i mean RICH -- is one of my favorite things. homestuck is perhaps the crowning jewel in the few stories i know that count as "rich," at least because in many cases the richness and symbolic paths you can tread and re-tread are usually constructed by how much room for interpretation there is (is chara the narrator of undertale, a spirit reincarnated into frisk, a non-sentient framing device? is off literal, a metaphor for capitalism, a biblical allegory, a metaphor for the woes of married man life?) -- but homestuck, HOMESTUCK is something you can rip apart for years and still find new connections. there's a hundred characters and if you want you can allegorically divide a huge chunk of them into like, two families. everything is a foil or a mirror.

i'm not writing this to sing its praises, though. honestly. i think i've just always craved something like that -- not, necessarily, to write something like homestuck, but just...it, in general. some all-encompassing fiction. a narrative so dense with meaning and potential meaning that even though it's self-contained and finite in what it can offer, you can hold up so many lenses to it and pick it apart thread by thread to such an extent that it's functionally infinite as long as you're willing to assail that mushy equine carcass. which i am, forever.

it's embarrassing for me to admit this because it reveals a potentially very self-absorbed thing about me: i crave a narrative. not only that, but one as cohesive as homestuck's. for as long as i can remember, i've wanted everything straightened out, everything to have some specific meaning for being that way. roxy's name is what it is because it must be four letters; it must start with "r" to match her progenitor, it must have a third letter later than rose's "s" to continue the rainbow of alphabetized kids' names, and it has an "xy" at the end as a chromosomal reference to her interest in genetics, which she has both because her original counterpart had it, and because of her predilection with reproduction. ahhh. isn't that nice? everything has a reason for it. every rendering is meaningful, every symbol is a perfect encapsulation of the "real." there is no missing out on the true meaning of something if you look hard enough -- maybe that's what i envy, the possibility of nothing being inscrutable if you're a devoted enough student.

seriously, these things drove me crazy for years. as a child playing on animal jam -- a flash game that was my developmental romping ground for ages -- i had a username, reflective of my legal name, and each animal avatar could have a different name. craving cohesion, i used one animal most of the time, and my friends came to call me by its name. by the time i had laid down my legal-name-like username as first my webkinz, then animal jam, then deviantart username, i was going by a completely different name. the discrepancy gnawed at me: and to make matters worse, i related to neither. i had a preference, but if neither name suited me, perhaps they were equally invalid. after dropping my animal jam friend(s), i proceeded to use a shortened version of my first username, now barely recognizable as my legal name, until i was well over voting age.

i couldn't choose a favorite color, either. the primary colors were the most evocative, but so was cmyk -- however, an adherent to the philosophy of material reality's "realness quotient" overpowering the digital world's at the time, i preferred red and blue, for whatever reason (yellow, while managing a role in being a font of color in paint and printers, failed to impress at all levels and barred it from winning my favor by virtue of ubiquity). i considered my obligation to choose pink, being a "girl," and completely rejected the notion...maybe blue, to completely embrace my personal rebellion against gendered expectations. or, maybe red, as an analogue to pink, but still uniquely masculine, and of perhaps greater intensity. yet, red represented passion and emotion and anger, which i refused to allow to come to symbolically represent me (naturally what the point of a favorite color is). compromise -- purple -- meant kneeling at the altar of femininity, all while having the image of someone trying and failing to run counter to it. the shame! for many years my response was "red and blue, evenly swirled, but not mixed."

every time i was to define or interpret something about myself, there was the implicit or explicit question of what it would imply -- how well would the sign do at symbolizing the signifier? is there a way, through language and visual media, that one could, with the appropriate knowledge as their guiding light, shine their beacon of knowledge through the impenetrable fog of all that is 'other' and 'unknown' and come away with an impression of a silhouette of me? is there a way to master meaning and be able to cleanly understand myself at the same time as present a full, rich version of myself outwardly?

(author's note: this isn't to say that i crave to be understood. maybe at some point in childhood this neurosis was the nasty burst pipe of some odd years of neglect, and my assumption was that maybe i wasn't expressing myself clearly enough, but the emotional need for connection you might come away from this asusming that i have is both met and largely irrelevant to my desires.)

i have a peculiar habit of perusing -sona suffix tags on tumblr. i admit that i have, at infrequent junctures in my life, attempted to make some kind or another. i've managed the task once per fandom, and immediately cast the reflection away in dissatisfaction. i am, however, continually interested in the world of other peoples' self-reflections. it's a museum of the most personalized, and fascinatingly to me, probably-incorrect self portraits in the world. how do you come away with such a strong core or sense of self that you wake up and decide to tell the world that you feel best represented by a sexy purple bunny in a pentacle bikini? how do you know so definitively that your homestuck trollsona would have that blood color? per the narrative constraints of homestuck, how did your self-shipping self-insert respond to the kid-version of their real life guardian?

the brazenness, the clarity of purpose, even if i should disagree or whinge on whatever detail, is perhaps what i find so interesting. looking at the way people think of themselves and having no real knowledge of them to compare it against, nor what information they're working from.

i suppose the time that i stopped trying to author myself was when i truly began to grasp how unknowable all things are. knowledge is culturally contained and generated. a name means something completely different in another language. an animal has a completely different cultural role elsewhere, if even it is known about there. i think one of my first crises of the true lack of concrete meaning in culture is as a child on therianguide, a forum of part tetchy old-timers (including the site owner, a mysticist who uses the anti-rromani slur as part of their new age shop's name) and pubescent, autistic children coming to terms with the implications of having been assigned the role of "dog" in the "playing house" games of recent childhood. a recurring topic of inquiry was: why so many wolf therians? there was a slew of answers offered: we're sympathetic to them spiritually because of our dogs, social pack animal souls would be attracted to becoming reincarnated as humans, we have long-standing spiritual-cultural relationships with them that leads to frequent human reincarnation, wolves are the last animal a soul typically is before being reincarnated as human, and so on and so forth that at the time i felt like i was in a room of people petulantly screwing their eyes shut at the elephants shuffling their trunks around the place -- that wolves are cool. that wolves are the most popular fursona. that wolves occupy a particular place in anglo-european cultural-folktalic mythology. that the dime-a-dozen "wolf in a past life" whiteboy new age spiritualist tapping away at his keyboard could really benefit from picking up a copy of "playing indian." there's a deluge of wolf therians because this is a usamerican site with some western european traffic and wolves are like cool wild dogs that happen to occupy both of those geographic regions so that anyone is free to claim a cultural attachment to them; there's a reason we don't have a lot of white australians hopping on to call themselves coyotes or a "northern rocky mountains wolf with black fur" or any other bizarrely specific species for someone to be able to identify upon meditation; our interest in some particular animals is because we've arbitrarily ascribed certain traits onto them and project ourselves onto them and them onto us -- which is fine, if not brusquely rendering the entire exercise in obscure spirituality OR psychology utterly meaningless.

all i wanted was a meaningful fiction of the self, brimming with authorial intent, and, while perhaps occult, still bursting with symbols, signs, motifs, callbacks, and thematic cohesion which could be puzzled out into a real, bold truth. i didn't care for the student's existence in my life, necessarily -- just the idea of my fiction being interpretable. perhaps i didn't actually need anyone else to understand it as long as i could deduce my primitive sense of gender and humoral temperament from my favorite color.

i like a comic where you're the same gender as your most narratively-prominent elder, and where the geographic location of your house corresponds to both your corresponding classical element and possibly slight details on your relationship with your parent. i have a problem with my parent's alcoholism, and i'm adrift on a planet that's waterlogged. i never knew my caretaker, who was an explorer and is now dead, and i'm on a frozen planet covered with decaying ruins (which are png rips of a location used to shoot his younger self's favorite movie). i wish that navigating this world was so simple and complicated in such a manner. you didn't get in a car accident because your daily existence is governed by countless unseen forces that don't actually have any rhyme or reason in their relentless or occasional persecution of you, you got into a car accident because it was a metaphor for something.

i wouldn't say that i crave the knowledge that someone else has been lovingly or hatefully orchestrating my life's events. i don't find the idea of "the guil show" very compelling or likely, nor do i take comfort in the idea that my life was scripted either by an unseen simulation dev nor a loving god. these desires are as personal as they are impossible and tiring to fulfill. if i were to construct a fully coherent mapping of my life that thematically ties all events and relationships and items together into a radiantly cohesive projection of myself, the unavoidable truth of such a reality would be that only i could understand it -- it's not possible for any onlooker at all to be able to share my precise individual and societal knowledge which has informed my view of myself.

and yet all the same, i occasionally frustrate myself by indulging in the delusion of there being such a truth which i am too inept to grasp, and that someday i would be able to interpret myself and make sense of it all. (the days before i could come up with a proper name for myself were incredibly restless, and each new attempt felt like 'the one' until i would decide i, as a person, didn't suit the name for whatever reason.) i don't crave to know my purpose, nor how to be happiest, or gain a fuller picture of myself -- i only want the cohesion and elegance of there being a reason for everything, a "right" or at least "sensible" path for me to take in life (whether it be comfortable or fulfilling for me or not), and perhaps being able to wrap red cords from a behavior i exhibit now to personal philosophies, past relationships, or, scandalous, an event in my past. oh, and i guess magical powers as thematically reflective of whatever essential component of physical and immaterial reality i embody as a person. the hard lesson of being an adult homestuck long after your tweenage introduction to the media, an identifier synonymous with long-term mental illness: sometimes you just don't get what you want!

a ticker-tape of "organic" "bpa free" "usda approved" seals on a squeeze bottle of chia seeds meant to "feed your soul" with no reference given to ethical supply chain considerations. a $17 hamburger combo from a place that pays $7.25 an hour. perusing my college's catalog for my one free employee-benefit course and looking at nonprofit management course minutes after reading an article about how nonprofits failed to save jordan neely and fail to save palestnians. life feels like a parade of absurdities these days. that's not to say it wasn't always -- just that i feel it keenly now.

as i write this, a muted, 2x-speed linkedin learning course on "work prioritization and management (competency) plays on my other monitor. it's approximately 11am, and i've scarcely worked for a full minute of my wage, unless you count worker-on-worker socialization part of the job, which i do (six minutes, then.) maybe it's the sleepiness of the first day back to work, but the absurdity has existed before then. sometimes in between news articles at my desk, i sit and think, "what are we doing?" it's almost a prayer for me at this point; an actualization of my woes and incredulity. it's venting, i guess.

a reference to weight loss on this workplace prioritization video when 98% of diets fail and the dieter's weight slides back to where it should be within months. what are we doing? a million personal articles about long covid and no pressure to mask during flu season. what are we doing? a new video of raw human agony posted to the site formerly known as twitter, arguments as to why it looks fake sandwiched between broken heart and prayer emojis while the permanent council of the UN does nothing. what are we doing? a 2x-speed linkedin learning course muted on another desktop. what are we doing?

does any of this make sense to anyone? has meaning lost all meaning, or has it ever had it? do the words of kindness and equality we preach to one another and our children actually belie greater concepts and cultural values, or has language declined to howling without anyone ever realizing it? how old were you when you realized that the moral ground on which we stand is more silty than imagined, possibly even vapor? it's du bois' veil meets wile e. coyote: the second you realize that you're not standing on anything, it's probably because you've been excised from a dominant group, somehow, and at that point, you might begin to fall. as long as none of us looks down, though, (that is, continue to have no reason to doubt our safety), we're standing on cloud nine. and what an absurd way to live. what are we doing with our mental faculties, our lingua franca, our translation apps, our special rituals for international policy and politeness, our budgets for social benefits -- what is the point of all these social constructs, and further, what's the point of all this money?

obviously the point of money is to be useful, and only to some people. the point of money is to have it, and if you don't have it, to acquire it, because you need it to play the game. and we have the money, and we stole the money, and we can give away the money as a damn country while only suffering the harm of, what, not having shitty year-round bananas because we'll have let go of the reigns of our ~~banana republics~~ disadvantaged trading partners and sites of economic underdevelopment? but we don't. why, though? because we need to subjugate every other country? and the citizenry of the u.s. just accedes to this? why?! what are we DOING?

it's amazing to think that for many years i labelled myself a misanthrope. now, am i socially awkward and avoidant to the extent of personal social underdevelopment? almost certainly! but i can't believe that i love human beings more than the average middle-income american, but i must! at least conceptually. i don't mean to say that my inaction is any more meaningful 'because yes, well, i did nothing, but at least i felt bad the whole time i did nothing too' -- just that...how can it be?! how can it be that someone who can count its past k-12 friendships on two hands has more of an obsession with the social currency of cultural values of love and respect than the average emily smith, age 22, of my demographic peers?! how is this the society we've built, where i'm endlessly lucky to get paid $15/hour to watch a bottle-blonde woman with veneers sit down and ask the ceo of warby god damned parker how he splits up his work life and relationships.

it was at this point that discord stopped remembering what i wrote when i switched tabs, so let's just say the rant is done. i'm not really MAD, per se, i'm more just awash in the absurdity of it all. it has a serene quality to it, this shock at man's inhumanity. moving on to personal matters, i didn't really ever write explicitly about thanksgiving, so trying to do so for the lesser beast, christmas, would feel a little silly. my mom was far less draconian, in part because i made sure to keep my visit shorter and in part because i wasn't tasked with navigating an airport, a rental car, and the denver metropolitan area for my poor overwhelmed mother. at one point, after missing three turns on the interstate in austin, however, she began cursing at me to "fucking help her" lest i be late for the flight i was already late for because she spent 5:30-8:30 am caressing my sleeping body instead of checking my departure time. my help was largely limited to reading off the directions her phone had been giving her, all while she sang "i'm a fucking idiot" to herself in the driver's seat. you know, like a normal person.

i'd feel less aggressive about my mother's mental abnormality if she treated it less like a sword buried in her gut which has caused her frequent aches and pains throughout her youth, marriage, and middle age, and more like the same sword but which she is capable of dislodging at times if only to swing it, wild and unskilled, at whatever was close and weak enough to be hit by its blade, which often turned out to be my small, underdeveloped body. saying that sounds so irritatingly self-pitying, ragh. she made me eat dog food to punish me for being dirty, alright? trust me, she's been bad enough to warrant this. her insecurities are, and were, a wildly out-of-control force of destruction, and i have recognized her as a dragon since before i could put together that "not re-folding clothes with your baby arthritic hands after going through your drawers" means "i think of mommy's labor as a housewife-by-choice as superfluous" were connected concepts, and furthermore that the mahogany drawer sailing at my breadbox-sized torso was additionally related to these concepts. nevertheless, SHE put these ideas together -- that her little tyke's apparent adamant refusal or lack of regard for proper shorts-sorting meant that on a deeper level i did not respect her, that she was a bad mother and her mother and husband and husband's parents were right, that she should have finished college, and that not even the fruit of her womb (A/N: gag) would give her the unconditional love she'd been craving since her late-teens early-20s bio mom put her up for adoption and her austere, strictly-german adoptive mom brought her home.

i think she has a case, truth be told -- it's obvious that for as obnoxious as i've found her cries for pity, particularly as adolescence took hold and my desire to cry for help to get away from her cooled into bitter acceptance -- she is genuinely unwell. i'm past the years of self-preservation where i refused to entertain any explanations for my mother's behavior out of fear they'd worm their way into sympathies (a valid concern for someone to whom the badge of "unconditioner lover" is permanently affixed). now i can reflect more astutely on her life -- which she has regaled me with a dizzying number of times -- to trace back the behavioral patterns i developed psychosocially around to greater themes and influences throughout her life. it's all shockingly straightforward after you spend enough years apart so that thinking about your mom doesn't feel like touching your wet, jellylike brain to the surface of a stovetop.

and yet. no matter how compelling i find the story of a woman, insecure from the day she could congeal her adopted status and her adoptive mother's frigidity into a theory of intrinsic undesirability that soon grew to incorporate her tepid love life, her "amazonian" build, her blonde-haired "invisible" eyebrows, and her prospective underperformance compared to students who attended a school her father slaved as a custodian for her to enter, i ironically cannot be the one to steward sympathies for her despite being the primary librarian to this tale of woe since i could put together a clause. i can't say why easily. it's the jovialness with which she tells me over the phone that she decided to stop taking antidepressants and she feels all better -- antidepressants she would always "forget" to buy for me, even after a suicide attempt. it's the innumerable hours spent consoling her. it's the fact that the first, second, and liably seventh question she asks me in the morning is related to her appearance; the first thing on her lips when she wakes me up to check her before work. it's the fact that i have to text her every day to ask about her, and yet can go weeks without having her ask me how i am. it's likely i'll have more reasons to resent her childrearing technique even a few months from now when i respond to a cue of hers in another person and come off as ungrateful, rude, or stupid. this morning i failed to do a wake-up check on my roommate by knocking on her door out of fear that i would be condescending her intelligence; after all, she'd gotten up two days without my help. in the car i realized this is only something i'd fear doing to my mother, for whom ritual was a stranger, and to whom any pressure at an unwelcome moment is an invitation to get yanked about by the hair and scolded. it's any wonder she's confused by my adamant refusal to let my hair get any shaggier than it is.

i can't imagine living the way she does. it's a hall of mirrors where nothing actually matters or holds any substance. i absolutely cannot wrap my mind around it -- she was telling me over holiday how important INTIMACY COORDINATION work is, out of nowhere, after months and months of being a fan of high school drama shows with too-generous helpings of nsfw scenes with adult actors and questionably-of-age characters. she's always had a bit of an obsession with that kind of drivel, which i admit i probably disdain too heavily because i'm sex-repulsed, but gah. anyway, she tells me she's "taken notes" on it, and "talked to" ICs who work in the field, which i have to wonder if they're as ephemeral as the celebrities she "knows" who have retweeted praise she's sent their way. she told me she was inspired to look into it by my real-life abuse, which she hasn't involved herself in any advocacy for and which she ignored for ages until the cops came a-knockin', but yes, this is her "advocacy" for young adults who run the risk of being endangered sexually -- glad she can muster up the concern so long as they're young, attractive, written into fanmade-erotica, and not in her backyard literally or figuratively. i have to grit my teeth and bear it with the knowledge that she thought having a thousand point six likes on a reaction gif to an instagram post made by a celebrity was something worth giving me on-the-hour updates on for three days. it is my hope, at least, that i never lose myself in the sea of artificial meaning and ego-stroking that THAT will be something i report to my adult child. i almost feel bad for her. almost.

i could keep going, but then i'd never get any work done. i wish i could commit to doing these weekly -- maybe i'll aim for that.

posting time: just paid thirty bucks to someone definitely running a scam pretending to be a palestinian woman. i'm like a parody of a liberal, god.

i dunno how to reckon with it. childhood. talking about it is painful, only because the phrase “my childhood” is such a loaded phrase. it makes me think of a bojack horseman type. like, there’s people starving and all, but “my childhood.” it’s a microcosm of material existence. it’s a chunk of time that existed and exists no longer, anywhere. the only thing your childhood does is degrade with time and become LESS meaningful than it was when it was “now.”

and yet. and yet it has become undeniable that it’s still here. it’s still something that has some effect on me, and i’ll never be able to easily explain why i do what i do without committing a social faux pas and expending energy i’d rather keep for myself. something bad almost happened the other day, and because i was anticipating hurt that had come to me by chance which i was powerless to do anything but wait for, i panicked. i breathed heavily in my bed, i changed to a short sleeved shirt and walked laps around my apartment building for i don’t know how long until it felt like the muscles in my arms were twisting under the skin, maybe from the cold? the funny thing is that the ritual of self-harm i’d usually take felt like too much work in comparison.

i take any chance i can to stay in my room with the door shut. i can’t have my computer face a door. i hid from coworkers at an office party today out of shame for nothing specific. there’s something wrong with me, and it’s the fault of childhood, and what? what about it? what am i supposed to do with that?

go to therapy. talk to people. join a community. but i can’t. i could, but it would be useless. i can’t relate to anyone, which is normally not that bad of a deal for me socially speaking, but i need someone to relate to if i want to derive any personal benefit from an attempt at “healing.” people talk about being a “bad victim,” about violent rebellion and a sense of retaliation and nonbelonging, about dreams of killing their abusers with only their teeth and hands.

and i don’t relate. and i’m sure in many cases theirs is “worse,” and i sound like a bellyaching “gifted kid burnout”-poster, but i don’t feel anything. i didn’t feel anything. i felt hurt, i guess. sadness. once or twice the indignation has burbled up and before i knew it i was sobbing on the floor at my mother after saying she’s “ruined my brain,” which i remember only because she fired it back at me for years. but i don’t feel anything but that, and even less now. maybe a little hurt. maybe a little sad. if something’s just happened, maybe i feel a little indignant. but it’s mostly just nothing.

i don’t want to “defend my inner child” or “advocate” for it. it didn’t want for that either. i guess i used to like hiding behind my dad and trying to stuff myself in a corner, but i don’t really care about defense now.

i keep coming back to stories about dead children. they were always my favorite. there would be these children, and they didn’t get a chance to become adults – and that was usually the thing people would find so sad about them. they had just started out, and it was over for them already. in most cases, for me, they weren’t even characters. not even fleshed-out people with rich dialogue or anything. they were children, and then some horrible, gorey, nasty thing happened, and they were gone: there’s nothing more you really need to know. there doesn’t need to be anything else. maybe they languished for a time. maybe they didn’t die, like the children in over the garden wall. maybe they committed suicide. maybe they were killed by a trusted adult.

but it doesn’t matter. we don’t get to know every detail.

i used to think about it a lot. i felt so attached to these concepts. i lamented ‘ghostkin’ as a label for not making much sense, because otherwise…

well, i didn’t think i was dead. nothing like that. but i would think – how nice to have it all be over. complete detachment from the body, the logical conclusion to the loose connection i have with my body and the physical world around it. and if i were to die at my age (then), everyone would feel a fleeting piece of empathy. “she was so young,” they’d think. “we have to avenge this,” they might also think. but i wouldn’t think about it nor wish for it, because it wouldn’t matter anymore. my biggest problem would be taken care of. anything after that, well, i could go either way.

but i think i was wrong, actually, to think i wasn’t dead. i spent all those years surviving that a ghost was basically all i was. i didn’t speak unless spoken to. i put countless hours into impressing teachers and fellow classmates. i didn’t want toys or games or clothing, i didn’t say no to anything i disliked. i wore clothes i didn’t like for my mom, watched television i didn’t like for my dad, ate what i was given even if i choked on it or had an allergic reaction to it so i wouldn’t appear ungrateful. i told my mom about two of my interests on two separate occasions and she repudiated them both times and told me to shut up. and i did. whatever “self” i had existed only on the internet.

i graduated a college a year early, and you know part of why? i thought, “people are going to think i’m so responsible for doing this.” i don’t know any “people.” nobody asks your age at a job interview. nobody cares. and i still thought that was a reasonable thing to think.

it feels like i’m sitting next to an inert corpse when i consider my childhood. she’s right there, and i don’t feel much of anything about it. i don’t know anything about her, and neither does anyone else. i knew her personally and i still don’t know anything about her. what did she want? did she ever want anything of her own volition? was everything, even her most personal, sacrosanct passions, just another reflection of her upbringing? it’s all dead children. it’s all dead children, even her, and i still have to keep growing. i still have to figure out what to do from here, how to proceed, and she can’t tell me anything because she’s been dead the entire time. from the start she was dead. she was dead even while she was alive, when she could say was living during “now.”

she was always going to BE dead. she always WAS dead, even if she didn’t know it. it wasn’t even one fantastic event of trauma, a serial killer flash-of-the-knife. it was over before she even knew what happened. and i can try to put it together. i can try to feel bad about this kid who died, because it’s so sad it happened because she had just started out and it was already over for her, and she was so young, but she wasn’t, and she isn’t, and i’m the one stuck carrying her body around.

i’m not haunted. i don’t “carry her with me” in the psychological, emotional sense. for all my love of ghost stories and dead children, she isn’t a phantom who whispers her wishes in my ear and gives me clues to her murder. she isn’t a poltergeist who possesses me and makes me throw books around or shatter plates. she isn’t a vengeful spirit who directs me to make her tormentors pay, makes my head spin, and has me come to my senses with a bloodied knife in my hand. she’s not anything anymore, and we’ll never know if what little she was would have ever become anything. and isn’t that so sad, except she didn’t even fucking die.

i remember what it was like; the fear, and the pain, and the hurt. i don’t feel it anymore, but i trace subconscious steps as if i do. i hurt myself in ways not meant to be noticed by other people. i live quietly with my door shut and the back of my computer facing the door. i’m trying to grow, but i keep being forced to realize that i have more wrong with me than i realized. more missing to me than i thought.

i was such a good kid. excellent grades, attendance, “maturity,” manners. i was the child who took guilty pleasure in hearing friends’ mothers ask their own children why they couldn’t be more like me. i did the extracurriculars i didn’t actually want to do so that i could be seen as responsible, and upstanding, and worth knowing even if i didn’t know anybody. i knew what i wanted to do for a living because people said i would be good at it. i knew i was going to get a doctorate specifically because it was the highest academic rung i could climb to.

she was such a good kid that i can’t help but feel it would have been better if i had died and had preserved her as she was forever. but i know i’m on the right path. i know now that those were the behavioral patterns and future goals of a deceased person and they don’t serve me anymore.

i wish it were that easy. i wish i could let her stay in her past; let her stay in the 2000s and 2010s. lose her in the rotting nylon thread and foam padding of blocky interior playground pieces. let her decay in the closet that doesn’t exist anymore in my partially-exploded, remodelled childhood home. leave her behind in every gym locker room i’ve ever been in, in every vestibule of a church, in every backyard. but i can’t surrender her thought patterns or her interests or her family at the door. i have to live with it all; the sum of all those years: adjacence to a corpse.

and i’ll tell y’all something. it really fucking stinks.

i don't really have a reason to write anything today, but i've considered writing more frequently enough these past few days for me to want to do it now. there's not one particular thing on my mind.

like i said last post, my childhood pet is being put down this friday. can't do anything about it. my apartment doesn't allow pets, not that i'd ever want to move an old dog so far or subject my roommates to pet care, and my mom says her energy is really down lately. she's an old dog, and she has gone blind, so i'm not going to fight it. i'm devastated i won't get to say goodbye. i can't really focus on exactly how i feel about it without really feeling terrible, so i won't. you might think that's horrible, but god, trust me, i will not be able to function if i do. it won't help the situation, even, since i can't fly down in time and god knows i can't drive.

i'm hoping it'll be okay for her. she's used to people no longer being around with no warning. she's lived through my dad's departure, my grandma's death, and my grandpa's; the latter of whom she loved very much. i wish i could communicate to her somehow that i love her even if i just can't make it down. maybe i theoretically could, but i don't know how i'd rationalize all that money and hassle to travel thousands of miles just to see her die. i don't want my mom to see what it would do to me. i don't want her comfort.

you might think i'm a freak for being this fucked up over an animal, but she was really my guardian angel for ages. like her page says, she's been the only constant from my childhood to my adulthood. i didn't have her for my single-digit ages, but she was there to witness every other terrible thing that happened with me, and she was always there for me. i remember that after every time my mom did something horrible, she'd come to my room, beg to be put on my bed or in my lap, and come up to lick my face. she would never do it any other time, so it would always catch me off-guard and make me laugh. she did a lot for me during the worst years of my life. it feels like losing a childhood friend, a witness, a co-sufferer under my mom's policy of kicking and screaming at things that get in her way, and somehow a sibling, baby, and parent at the same time as losing a dog. i really didn't have anyone else for most of her lifetime. certainly no one else who understood and knew what i was going through.

i should save some of this for her page update, whenever i can set aside time and brain space to do that. adding to it before her scheduled death date just feels too macabre.

what else...i'm starting my job next week. it's going to have some customer service in it, but it's at a nice big library nonetheless. it's in some office IN the library, not THE library, but that's fine. there was a book i had wanted to find online, and it popped up at the library. i can't remember what it was, but, well, there's at least one book there i want to borrow. it was something marxist or about racial liberatory politics, so that narrows it down considerably. my supervisor seems really nice, too. flexible start times were not listed as a perk of the job, but she's fine with them. i'm not sure what i'll go for -- as much as i'd like to wake up at ~8AM to start at 9AM and not ~7AM to work at 8AM, i don't know if it'd be worth it...especially since my partner would still need to go to bed at the same time, and because it just cuts into the time i get at home with my partner after work, presuming it'd be 8-5 and 9-6. unless i can do what i did at my last job and not take a lunch hour...? if i have a lunch "hour." i know most places do half-hours. whaaatever. this is boring and i don't actually have enough information on-hand to strategize.

there's genocides still happening. i'm glad some people are doing things about it, materially. it's wild to see this sort of thing happening in my lifetime, even though it's been done before -- person-first uprisings, that is. it makes sense, though. bernie sanders, joe biden, and donald trump all being pro-genocide at once? theoretically unsurprising, but one hell of a shock to a centrist who has not had an original nor anti-government thought in their lifetime. not that i'm particularly hopeful of "we the people" doing something about it, collectively, soon. hope is important to liberation, but damn, so is movement. i admit my own internet-leftie hypocrisy in talking about "nothing being done" from my seat, though. disability, work, and complete social isolation make me a pretty subpar "active"-ist. at least i care. people care. someday we'll have to explain what that means to the people who are being bombed with our tax dollars, though.

i've been thinking about memory, mind, and body a lot recently. not sure what i mean by that. years, months, but also these past couple weeks; the past couple posts can sort of attest to that. i kind of hate talking about trauma as a framework, but this is buried in this boring-ass post, so i can pretend it's not here. i don't have a lot of organized thoughts, anyway. i just have a lot of thoughts about myself and how i feel that feel super masturbatory to discuss, so they're going here.

i don't really feel like a person. not necessarily in a bad way, but i guess it could be. i feel more like a consciousness, if that makes sense. some people talk about feeling like they exist in the space behind their eyes, but not even that really clicks fully for me, even though it's close. i don't really feel like i exist anywhere but the brain. i don't "feel" myself in the skull or anything like that, i just know that my consciousness is only present inside my brain, ergo, that's where "i" exist. it's just also that i don't feel like i exist anywhere else.

i used to get frustrated with myself in trying to talk about this. of course i have a body; it's hideous and disabled and has defined how i interact with the world forever. i'm no blank mannequin who's gone through life functionally disembodied; i've experienced problems and self-hatred directly related to my body. it's sort of how people talk about race: white people never have to think about it, they tend not to put their race in their bios because they don't feel like their race affects who they are in the slightest, they're just "normal" or "default" in a hegemonic white culture. they often don't feel the impact of their whiteness on their social or material experiences because they've never been othered by a coworker or a wall of pale, grinning children's dolls about it.

my ugliness and my disability are very, very obvious to me. i've had social experiences absolutely contingent on their existences. their presence is real. i am "unconventional" in my appearance and disabled...but i don't feel like an embodied person. i know i am, and i have a body, i just -- i don't know if i reject it or what, honestly. i used to get angry with myself for "rejecting my reality" and "refusing to acknowledge my flaws" by confronting this feeling of disembodiment, but i'm less angry at myself these days enough to acknowledge that i've never really done either of those things. i know full well i have bodily flaws and that the reality i inherit from others is (in some way) affected by their perceptions of my body. i have one. it belongs to me. the body i use has traits that mold my mental self-perception and my material and social reality. but i don't see myself as a body. "a person WITH a body" is still a stretch.

i don't really know how to use language for it. i don't feel like a person "with" a body, or "in" a body, or a brain "piloting" around a "flesh-suit." i have no connection or regard for "my" flesh and blood at all. it's just here and it's something "i" have to deal with, which is a sentence i just analyzed now and inserted quotation marks into because the use of "i" as referring to my mind there is kind of interesting. "i" deal with my body; "i" am not my body. if i were forced into attempting to use linguistic conventions to get this across, i feel as though "i," not necessarily my brain but some sort of theoretical mind that embodies my consciousness, "have" or "use" "my body."

any guess what might have caused this split. physical abuse? physical disability? body dysmorphia, from both of those? dissociation? it's not dissociation. i feel real enough. sometimes i think -- well, no, that's not right; there's no cognition involved...i have some sort of automatic, visceral "thought" that my surroundings are somehow "less real," like a video game, or some sort of "sub-reality," but they go away quickly with little effort. i tend to feel like i am a sapient consciousness regardless. huh. i guess it's weird i've never thought about my body being "unreal" in those moments, but for one, i tend to forget i have a body and spend as little time considering its existence as possible, and also, it wouldn't matter to me. i would fucking love if my body were something i was distinct from and something i could egress out of.

if i can be honest, that's part of why i would like if i could just have some matrix shit happen to me. some ready-player-one shit, or better yet something that does away with the physical reality of my body entirely. i love the seasons and the rain and the cold, but sometimes i feel like i'm just not up to being physically embodied. i like to think, and i like to learn, and i like to write. but i don't like the other human being stuff. i don't like to cook, or draw, or paint, or sculpt. i don't find food or eating motivating or worth seeking out on my own. ditto with sex and romance. as a rule, i don't like to talk to people because it's overwhelming and confusing and scary (unless it's small talk or complimenting them, because i enjoy making people happy even if it's only fleeting. that is something i do very much enjoy, and is probably what lets me do regular check-out at the grocery store sometimes...). granted, most of these are from physical disability, not because i actively hate these things conceptually, but that stuff affects me all the same.

it's frustrating to have my idea of myself shaped by lack. i lack the ability to do things physically, and thus my mental self-perception is warped into lending power; credence, to my material form. i don't see myself as an embodied person, and yet all the same, my self is shaped by my body's limitations.

less overtly, i guess it would be silly to say my childhood didn't shape how i think about my body. the thing is that i really don't know how it would, specifically. i don't remember. the science on memory repression is a mess. i do think it's possible to repress things without trying to, though, since that seems to be something that happens with other people, and i certainly don't remember telling myself to forget things my dad did that my mom brings up. i wish i had a more reliable source on that, but i doubt i'd get the reward of solid triggers for my mom's abuses since hers were kind of...nonstop...? i don't know. i know i dissociated a lot back then. i would see darkness closing in on my sight, and feel as though i was a lot further away from my "normal" field of vision. i was still vaguely attentive to sound; not enough to understand what might be being said, but enough to say "yes ma'am" at junctures. i would think "this doesn't even matter," "this isn't even happening," and stuff like "this is so excessive," but nothing like "i'm gonna forget about this!"

i dunno. i dunno. that's kind of off-topic, but i genuinely just don't know what specifically might have happened vis-a-vis "child trauma" to make me think of myself as only a mind, but it's there, i guess. it's also part of the reason i...i relate to, and see myself in some technology, but don't really 100% feel a kinship to certain characters, autistic as they may be. my idea of myself, though it recognizes only my mind as "me," is shaped by physical limitation and experience. my disability and my experiences at the hands of my parents are so vital to the concept of "me" that my mind is obliged to still involve "my body" as a tangential extension of my identity, which makes me sort of frustrated. like, 'get that thing out of here! i hate it!'

i guess that's just how it goes, though. it represents my weakness, my obstacles, the shitty events that effectively make me a less functional person, but it's here. even if i consider myself computer-y because i'm kuhrazyyy, it doesn't make it true. computers may also not eat and would not be motivated by the experience, aren't communicative, follow strict rules, are unfamiliar with and unable to perform human social customs, are arguably more capable of textual communication than auditory communication, and arguably take to "rituals" rather than "chaos." unfortunately for me, however, in reality, i am not a computer, and am a person. i have a body that has needs and wants outside of my conscious control.

i can't escape my body because it is me. god, i almost shuddered writing that. gross. i'll acknowledge that here, but i don't really think i'd benefit from thinking about it that way. there's this post on tumblr that was like, "if you have problems motivating yourself to do self-care, you could always just call it something like 'system maintenance' or whatever." it was longer than that, but man, that doesn't work for me either. i'm too realitypilled to do that; it would feel cheesy. i'm just some fucking guy or thing or whatever who has to deal with the material world for some reason. god this is such word vomit; whatever.

i don't hate it! i don't hate the physical world! i enjoy some foods, i like the weather, i like plants and plains, i like animals, i like making strangers happy. i think earth is a beautiful place to live, even if it can be mildly painful (not sure about those who endure extreme pain, but that's not me). i think i was born at a decent time in human history so far. i'm eternally glad the physical world has my partner in it.

i just don't feel connected to it. i eat to survive. i don't feel like investing time or energy or money into my nutrition; especially since it hurts to prep food. i feel nice when i'm on a walk, but i don't ever feel like going outside, and my mom's need to have access to me ruins it since i don't have cell service here. oh, and i wouldn't have my maps app functional, which means i could get hopelessly lost since i have no sense of direction, and i fear uncertainty at the best of times. even if i like making people smile, i know my impact is temporary, and i want it to be. real connection with people doesn't attract me much because outside of occasional conversations where i can help them, or listen to them, i don't derive any pleasure from the idea of going out for coffee to talk about nothing serious or having an unpredictable variable in my home that affects what rooms i can be in and what i can do for leisure. close connection feels like an extra obligation that runs the risk of making another person feel hurt, which i would hate even more than the extra work i'd need to do to make a friendship work.

i just don't "get" a lot of "universal" human things. i don't like or identify with my human body outside of the bad things. i don't get gender at all. like, from a functionalist and anthropological perspective, it makes sense, but god, i just don't get it at all. no pronouns make me "euphoric" or "feel right." i prefer gender neutral ones, but they don't make me "happy." getting she/her'd doesn't make me that dysphoric or anything, i just wonder what part of my body tipped them off. getting he/him'd gets the most reaction out of me because i just think it's funny that it whiffs both my agab and my "gender identity," which i do not have. i absolutely want my gender marker to be "x" someday, i guess, for political reasons, but i really just do not care that much about my gender.

i'm not a gender abolitionist because i know gender is very, very, very important to people. just because i'm personally frustrated and confused by it doesn't mean it isn't vitally important to individuals and cultures; i guess this topic of alienation is just a little bit weirder for me since a lot of people who i think are similar to myself all seem to have very strong understandings and personal reflections on gender.

physical disability and child trauma coming back again for the double-whammy of completely fucking over my sense of something, except this time it was something super important in leftist spheres in addition to general human stuff. i never felt like a girl because of my disability and autism making me kind of ugly and weak and weird, and i never felt like a boy because of my disability (and trauma-charged distrust of the gendered class).

i guess child trauma might be what makes me feel subhuman, like it "un-personed" me somehow. "subhuman" usually refers to being less-than, but i don't think i'm a bad person or less worthy of respect than an average guy; i just don't feel like a normatively-functional human or a human living in a human world. some people have used "inhuman," but that one feels silly for me to use. i'm not a lycanthrope or non-human alter or anything. i am a human, materially and functionally, and that is a reality i cannot escape. my past happened to me and i consider myself disabled because i am obligatorily human. i've been using "thing" a little bit to describe myself, which i think is fine. it makes me feel a little bit like a weird internet user, but i am one of those, and "inhuman" would do the same thing with a different sort of connotation. it isn't even quite appropriate, because "thing" implies some kind of physical presence or even exclusively physical presence, but if i wanted to refer exclusively to my self in a way that would evoke exclusively its mental iteration, i would have to say "concept," which sounds deranged, or "ai," which is deranged and also just plain wrong. i guess i'll just continue to not have a fitting term. that's just how it is for gender!

it's probably not something a therapist or a normal person would understand or condone, but that's fine. i don't enjoy or understand a lot of the pleasures of mammal life, at least consciously. i don't feel a deep connection with material reality. i don't feel like a very enthusiastic participant in the inescapable social-material slurry of human culture. but it is what it is. i used to think self-reflection was selfish, useless, stupid, and bourgeoisie (because i could afford to do it but someone looking for their next meal couldn't), and honestly, that did probably save me a lot of time in trying to figure myself out. i've accepted that no category which could be established or understood by most people will serve me. that's to be expected considering how little connection i have with human being stuff.

ok i'm out of words.

a new low for me. my roommate caught me losing my shit because of my mom.

i'm not even writing about that. i just need to write this down so i don't forget it. i was trying to type down everything i heard her say to me on the phone after i hung up before the panic truly fucked my capacity.

i'll just try and give context for myself in the future, or for whoever would choose to read this for whatever reason. she wants me to come home for thanksgiving (eugh) by plane to see her. my job only gives two days off, but the calendar shows three. i'd told her on the phone i'd buy plane tickets when i found out what two days i have off. this was a few days ago. she opened by sending these texts:

"i'm not stupid, honey. if you don't want to come just tell me. if i don't hear from you by 3 pm my time i will determine we aren't doing thanksgiving and probably not christmas. i'm not upset about you not coming. i'm upset about you not telling me. that is cruel and kind and unworthy and i don't deserve a childish game like that from you."
"it's fine. you don't have to come. i'm sure you made other plans there anyway."
"i sense you don't want to come. your lack of communication on the topic has been obvious. i won't interfere."
"your lack of communication indicates your level of interest. it's hurtful and shows deception."
"i know you didn't match that level of enthusiasm. i'm not stupid. i won't be moving so close you have to see me often. i'll move closer for your convenience when i die. i'm trying to be helpful to you, not ruin your life or run it. i'm getting tired of texting about this. it's only going to get worse.
"you don't want to discuss it. we won't. it's done. don't worry about it. you've been deceptive and you're not being mature enough to actually discuss it. so you play your games. i was hoping for 2 days with my only child for a holiday. i apologize for wanting to see you and troubling you. i love you. i don't appreciate your behavior. i deserved not to be lied to or deceived. and that's what you've done."

she called me when i began typing. "so what do you have to say to me for being a disrespectful, deceptive little piece of shit?" god, i burst into tears immediately. it doesn't even matter that i'm states away. it's humiliating to be fucking twenty-one and still break out in terror. she kept accusing me of not "communicating with her" when it's been maybe four days, and i told her i'd tell her when i got news -- and it's sunday. i hadn't gotten any news; i had nothing to say; she said nothing to me about wanting me to give her daily updates even when i learned nothing new. i don't know why i'm writing this down; why i have to explain that she had made up a reason to scream at me. if she wanted more information she could have asked and i'd tell her i didn't have any.

i don't know what got into me. maybe it was because i was on some level aware that she couldn't hit or throw me here anymore; i don't know, i said something like "why do you always have to call me that? why do you need to say that to me?" i kept babbling about how i didn't understand why she needed to do all of this when i didn't have anything new to tell her and even said something about how it didn't matter what i'd try to say in order to convince her that i wasn't trying to disrespect her, or that i wanted to come; that she had made up her mind about me and nothing i'd be able to tell her would make her believe me. she screamed into the receiver, something about "how dare you?! how dare you?!" i couldn't hear it. she was furious i'd tried to "manipulate her," i think.

i didn't understand what she wanted me to do differently; why accidental silence meant i must not "respect her." i kept holding onto my indignance. she said "can't you fucking understand how it FEELS in my position for you not to have mentioned your plans to fly out to me?" and i said that i was sorry that i had hurt her feelings. usually i suck less at apologizing, but she let me have it for gaslighting her and giving her a "false apology." i don't know why i tried to hold on to the idea that i was right. it wouldn't have helped me. trying to argue that i didn't really do anything out of line to hurt her doesn't mean she'd actually listen. it doesn't matter what i mean or don't mean, if there was nothing i could have done and no way to predict what she wanted, it doesn't matter if i wait before acting like she's told me she wanted. it doesn't matter if i'm even doing what she asked me to do, or what i made sure she was okay with me doing. all that ends up mattering in the end is that i consistently fail to do the "respectful" or "right" thing.

she forced me to apologize for not communicating, and for neglecting to tell her "how i feel about her." she called me a liar. she howled about how i don't care for her time. i ended up paying for my impulsivity in begging her to stop cursing me. "don't you fucking dare get upset with me over that! i'm allowed to feel! are you saying i'm just not allowed to have feelings?! you fucking be careful of what you're accusing me of! i didn't say i HATE you, i didn't say you're STUPID! why are YOU angry with me? am i just NOT ALLOWED to feel anymore?!"

i had just been crying.

i said "no, i'm not angry at you. i just wish you hadn't called me that."

"call you WHAT? i didn't "call" you anything; YOU mistreated me and lied to me by pretending you wanted to see me! whatever i said was justified! what is it that you think i said?"

"you called me a disrespectful lying piece of shit."

"oh, sure. fine. i guess i shouldn't have called you a name, but you understand why i did. you cause me to get frustrated when you disrespect me -- don't accuse me of anything!"

i couldn't speak. i don't know why. she's never cared about me, truly, so why does it hurt? why am i angry, disappointed, frustrated? it doesn't come as a surprise.

"i'm SORRY that you got hurt by some words i said. i shouldn't've cursed at you. it's just that you should have talked to me before today. you can understand how it feels to be me, right?"

i just wanted it to be over. "yes," i hissed, exhausted. "i'm sorry." even though i don't know what i was apologizing for or how i should know differently. her hurt feelings aren't even hurt feelings. her "hurt feelings" just mean rage, and hatred, and swearing, and insults. she doesn't even cry, or look disappointed. she just screams and hits and swears like some kind of maladjusted toddler. she calls me a piece of shit before she calls me anything else. it's a fucking catchphrase for her at this point but to her it's "some words." not the trumpet of angel israfil sounding the ruination of the day.

"good. thank you. i'm really not asking much."

i couldn't think. it was like being bathed in the first kick of adrenaline when something scares you. i couldn't control my sobbing, i could only try and make it not hit the receiver to avoid her accusing me of "guilt-tripping her for having feelings," which is what usually happens if i'm still crying or hiding or what have you after she feels better. i tell her that i just have to go now, and she lets me.

i collect myself for all of a couple minutes while i type out what i can remember her saying, and then i just kind of implode. i feel like i can't breathe, and i try to calm myself, but all i can think of is what it's like when i'm like this. i can't think the words "calm down" without hearing my mom screaming them and feeling her striking my face and squeezing my neck, shaking me. i feel like i'm going to die, even though i'm internally aware it's impossible. my mom's nails dig into my neck from thousands of miles away. it goes on for a few minutes, or just a minute, or maybe only seconds while i try to calm myself down without conjuring up images of what's going to happen if i don't shut up.

i get so terrified of what'll happen if i don't stop shaking and heaving that i do stop, just like that. she calls me an hour later to ask if i've calmed down, to talk about her lunch and the gossip with her friends she doesn't like. she tells me what plane ticket to buy and i do it. i hate myself for not being able to say what she was right about: that i don't ever want to see her again.

she's putting my dog down this friday.

every so often i try to arrive at some truth about myself — i lack the experience and the words to describe who i am and instead focus to try to arrive at some contextless truth. no such thing exists. representation relies on interpretation, interpretation relies on contextual understanding, contextual understanding requires an audience and the truth is made subjective -- nonsense. if i wanted to be less verbose i could just say that my goal dies at “interpretation” by necessitation of an interpreter, but i never do. want to be less verbose, that is. i don’t even want to try and impress people anymore; i just overexplain everything i do because of that damned thing, interpretation. i don’t want to be misunderstood.

on some level i want to understand myself but i know there’s nothing to understand. my consciousness is a microcosm of spatiotemporal existence that matters to no one but me. i don’t know what i am; i don’t know how to be. i don’t know how to be with people. i don’t know how to accept people. i don't believe much in them but without hope you have nothing; so you have to have hope. i feel like i live a contextless existence but can feel and sense the context all around me, unlike the rest of my peers who do think they live a contextless existence and believe they exercise almost complete control over comfortable surroundings. my world feels ephemeral. i don't think i "know too much," i think my points of reference are just different than most. but i'm just a human with human limitations, the same as anyone. i'm not exceptional.

i can’t believe in religion or hallucination. nothing is so meaningful. there can be no revelation that will collapse my over-complicated existence into two dimensions. there is no simplicity and no purpose to anything i do. i move about across time and space in pursuit of my continued existence with no higher mechanism behind it than what might be said to guide an ant to sugar. i’m controlled by forces not alien to me but not under my complete control because i cannot force my subconscious to yield to my conscious directives.

i don’t even know what i’d do if i could. i don’t know what my goals are. i don’t know who i am outside of my morals. what do i represent? what represents me? how would i ever know when representation demands interpretation? i’ve tried for years and cannot interpret myself (sliding between attempting, shunning the idea as an inherently selfish pursuit, and then re-indulging like a man possessed despite guilt, and back to shunning). preventing misinterpretation is a farce; when it comes to interpretation of a self, of a person, the delineation between truth and misconception is nonexistent. that’s what it means to be a complex existence in a greater complex existence, i suppose, the surrendering of personal conception as the paramount manifestation of truth. but it’s a power i hate to give. it’s a whip i hand the viewer who has the incalculable power to misinterpret me into nonexistence, to perversion. interpretation and misinterpretation alike invite violence. the violence of being hated for what i am and what i am not.

all i can even contend for the truth of are my morals. i couldn’t say whether someone interpreted or misinterpreted what i am. i don’t know myself. i don’t completely recognize how unseen, infinite historical and cultural context touches my actions although i feel its weight. i certainly don’t know how i compare to “other people.”

other autistics compare themselves quite frequently to robots, aliens, animals, angels, fairies, and the like. how? how do you define your connection to the world in such a way? how do you root yourself so firmly in the context of our time and planet? how is an amorphous swath of memories from your life enough to tether you to an abstract collection of iconographic metaphors? does not each label root you into some potentially incongruous interpretation by people? do you feel such a communal culture with them that their symbology represents you so meaningfully? how do you append yourself to something that requires cultural context to be understood properly? is it not uncomfortable for your observers or even yourself to require specific cultural knowledge to be understood? though the same is true for people who exist without metaphors.

aren’t we all scared to be unable to exist without an audience? is there not some wordless terror in language being communal and identity being unnavigable without a background to derive itself from?

let me explain. you have to learn to speak from someone. you had to be raised by someone. you have something to compare yourself against and grow from from then on. you develop identity as you depart from the other. even a child who develops away from other humans recognizes themself to be separate from their natural environment. you cannot exist without context. there is no ontological truth of self, and for those like me who lack egoistic integrity, i can recognize no demarcation between interpretation of myself and misinterpretation of myself.

i can’t speak the same language as people because i don't know how to live with it. i can’t let my meaning fall through the gaps between our understanding. i can’t leave myself vulnerable to the violence of misinterpretation. at the same time i lack a full and clear view of the preconceptions i and the viewer are operating from, invisible to the viewer and possibly to me. failure is inevitable. misinterpretation at any degree of severity becomes as valid as truth; another blind man’s hand on the elephant next to mine. am i making sense?

A Cathy comic strip edited to read kathy acker's 'don quixote.' panel one shows cathy standing by a closet holding a dress and a phone. her speech bubble has been edited to read 'I'll no longer speak because you are not hearing and will never hear me no matter how I speak.' panel two shows a close-up of her by the phone, her bubble reading 'I wanted to find a meaning or muth or language that was mine, rather than those which try to control me; but language is communal and here is no community.' Panel three shows her sweating, and most of the panel is taken up by a speech bubble reading 'I speak within my own self in some messed-up language which isn't quite language. I don't know which of my memories to trust I don't know what memories to believe. Is there any history? Is there anything here but boredom?' Panel four shows Cathy standing next to her closet, clothes strewn at the floor, and the phone by her hip. Her thought bubble reads 'All singing must now be howling.' End transcription.

every meal i eat today is one that won’t be there tomorrow. if i eat when i’m not starving, then it feels like i’m just wasting food and money; mine or others'. if i don’t strictly need it, it feels like just a disgusting waste on my part. like, how dare i spend this food on myself so needlessly? i wouldn’t have died if i saved this, and now when i run out i know it’ll be my fault for being so greedy.

people who have suffered so much more than me need and deserve this food, but they don’t receive it because of our horrible world. i googled my symptoms for advice and i kept seeing little additions like, “it’s unusual to avoid spending money on food if it’s within your budget” or “a symptom of this is anxiety about spending on necessities when your budget allows for it.” like poor people can’t actually have any problem here. a rich person with spending anxiety has “money dysmorphia.” a poor person with spending anxiety is right.

sickening. it’s sickening. i can’t get out of here because it’s true. every slice of white bread i eat is a slice i won’t have when i’m hungry in the future. every noodle or cookie or whatever that i eat is one that i’m wasting because i don’t need it. every meal i eat is hospital bills, utilities, rent, emergency funds for a hotel. all the food i eat in my new home is food that someone else, who works harder, or needs it more, doesn’t get. i’m so selfish it makes me sick.

and i’m such a piece of shit for whining about this as a member of the imperial core. i could go find something to eat for free at a dumpster if i really looked. lots of people don’t have that kind of luxury. but i’m not even doing that because i’m too lazy and would rather type away about my stupid stomach instead of looking for alternatives to eating food i can’t afford and don’t deserve.

or maybe i should leave it for actual homeless people. damn it. but i can’t keep just eating my roommates’ food. every piece of food of theirs i eat is like a strike or something. you know that post that’s like, you can rely on people until there’s just a certain point they can’t handle you? all the food i eat is like another bit of patience i’ve consumed until i imagine the new person in my life is passively resentful. maybe i’m being unfair to her but there’s only so much someone can take; and i’d rather be too cautious than too abusive of her patience. i feel like such a parasite on this house and in general and it’s nobody’s fault but mine.

and i can’t buy it. i hate doing it. before i only ate whatever unwanted things my mom gave me (off-flavor chips, old candy, stale crackers) and bulk rice, bulk ramen, white bread, and chicken and peanut butter for protein. coffee was often her treat but now i think i should stop drinking it since it’s a luxury. i remember buying .99 bread and budgeting out how many meals i could make from it by slice, maybe if i eat one peanut butter sandwich a day halfway between morning coffee and bedtime. it usually ended up being two so that i could focus on my homework in the evening. i can’t imagine how i’m going to be able to swing eating so much when i’ve lost two thousand dollars of my savings. i saved so much while in uni to be able to handle this emergency and it’s just not enough. i feel like such a hole. all i do is thanklessly consume food and time and energy and patience and money. i feel like such a siphon on my bank account and my food supply and everyone around me.

anyone who has faced actual homelessness or near-homelessness, and the slew of people who live at or below the QOL and at or above the level of precariousness considered typical of a usamerican homeless person -- including unhoused people -- is living under a state of duress whose flimsy, imagined approximation fills my nightmares. i can't even begin to conceptualize what kind of gripping terror the actual experience wages against the chemicals in peoples' brains. i'm staying at a hotel watching my bank account dwindle and i'm not sure how much long i can afford to keep living like this. i'd rather sleep outside under a car than be left with nothing. i can't be left with nothing. i can't let myself depend on the patience of other people; even though i am fortunate enough to have that, i cannot do that to them. my partner would never turn me away, i know that to be true, but i can't stop myself from being petrified of the day patience could run out.

and i have a house i can return to -- two, five hundred miles apart from me. so i'm only larping a very, very privileged and affluent version of my worst nightmare.

it's one of my worst fears for no reason that i can particularly single out. it's weird to me, how threat of homelessness is one of the greatest motivators for people to labor for wages when at the same time we treat them like shit. maybe seeing how people act towards homeless people is the thing that's traumatizing, i don't know. "third party" traumatizing. it doesn't traumatize ME directly, i just get terrified seeing how other people treat them. like, ignoring them on the street, not pitying them, shaming them for drug use or not being able to get a job in a world that criminalizes homelessness and bars criminals from getting jobs. it can happen to any one of us, at any time. maybe your landlord evicts you to sell before the market bursts and everything around you is out of your price range. maybe your sibling gets in a costly, life-shattering car accident at the whim of the ancient, invisible hands of the auto lobby guiding how we build our communities based on hundred-thousand dollar death machines. maybe you're just unlucky.

i've never felt community before. never in my life. i have never felt safe at a church, at a little league game, at a gender and sexuality alliance club, at a student council, in a research group, in a tumblr tag, in a fandom, at a job. maybe i'm too disabled or autistic depending on the context. but nonetheless, that...that floating feeling you have to have when you truly have nobody who cares if your corpse washes up in a storm drain because of what life, what other people did to you, is a level of all-encompassing fear that squeezes my stomach and makes my tearducts swell and sets my heart thundering.

the idea that people don't care, or can't afford to, or don't care to know why they should. it's in everything from their ignorance about international relations, to their ideas about critical race theory in schools, to their gender science book-burning, to their "well both sides have a point," to the season of the good place where the reason everyone is going to hell is because they just don't have the time to inspect if the tomatoes in their salad kit were grown by slaves. it kills me. it kills me because there's no rebuttal. whatever the reason, people don't care. they don't care about a person a hundred miles away, and they don't care about me, and they don't care about you. they care about people as an obligatory feel-good thing, but not when it comes down to it. not everybody. not everybody is considered to be deserving of that "love" because they're not good for whatever reason -- criminal record, drug use, lack of access to generational wealth to pad out their poverty.

our society feels like it's held together with plywood and bubblegum and just not looking at the indomitable proof that it's all slowly coming apart. when a room falls apart maybe we use hot glue to put it back together. or we hire someone else to and send them back outside to cook in the sun when they're done.

i'm rambling. i'm babbling completely here and i know that, but it's not my fault that the fear and anxiety i feel is tied to how people treat people in a situation far more vulnerable than mine, which is tied in great part to the way people feel about others who for one reason or another are less lucky than a middle-income imperial core dwelling white person. like oh, bad luck? been hurt incalculably bad and deprived of comfort, food, housing by someone who owns the means to that? have you tried wanting it to be different and nebulously "working hard," whatever the fuck that means, into better standards of living?

dammit. now i'm just angry and sad instead of scared. i guess this is better? probably better for my heart. did you know i have a heart murmur -- an extra heartbeat -- that i've never been able to get checked out by a cardiologist, the same as i haven't been able to get my arthritis evaluated since i was about ten? i just get to live with knowing i have a "somewhat concerning" heartbeat. OK well love you bye

what better day for my lemon of a prius to break down then halfway to wyoming from central texas, at 5pm, in a nowhere town. i'm glad just to have the soft bed of the hotel, but the price tag is making me tear my hair out. and so is my mom, offering to take me back to her nightmarehouse. and so is the mechanic, who didn't tow my car from its place at a gas station when it has 1/3 of my life in it. and my desktop. god, if that was stolen i'm gonna lose my mind.

lose my mind more, that is. i cried for like an hour trying to get ahold of some help, and in front of all the gas station workers. not my best. even though i have a lot of shame about crying, i still maintain that if you're in a dodgy situation like that (as an afab person at least, and it helps that i'm white), pity is better to garner than distrust or whatever. someone who's stranded and is completely chill with it doesn't really motivate you to help, and you might think they're bullshitting you, but if they're soaked in sweat and tears from having a panic attack in your damn store i guess you might feel a little less suspicious. i'm choosing to believe in the strategic power of a humiliating, wet panic attack at least.

as of writing i have one hour before i have to vacate the hotel room or renew my stay, more or less, and i still haven't heard from the mechanic. i guess it was stupid to expect them to tow my car within the first hour of opening, but i could have sworn they were going to take care of it as soon as possible. oh well. my problems aren't everyone's. it would be myopic to expect them to care about my stress or timetable when they're out here running a business. i guess i should feel more lucky that they're close by and that i have a roof over my head and free breakfast in me to keep me from losing my shit more.

i'd recount everything that happened between my car breaking down at a gas station and sitting in this room the next day, but i've already bitched about it enough and don't really care to dwell on it any more than i need to. for some reason thinking about overwhelming shit even when it's handled can make me start to panic again. i guess i shouldn't blame myself too hard for it; that's probably just some disorder-related shit, and also probably why i forget so much of the bad shit that's happened to me. whatever, i guess.

god, all i want is for my car to get fixed. please god. if you're reading this please say a prayer for me. i love you bye

note to self: do not comfort your mother. it will not bring you your safety or buy her love. do not respond to her visual cues, or her softened and depressed tone when she alludes to your absence. do not compliment her outfit to buy her good favor, and do not fight when she says that she's sure she looks fat, and ugly, and that she's too old to wear these clothes -- unless you think otherwise. do not put in more effort into her than you have gotten out in your lifetime. do not comfort her when she cues you for it like pavlov's hungry dog. you are not going to be fed.

do not reassure your mother. do not tell her that she still has many years left to find an obsession other than you, because it only deepens it. your words mean nothing to her, only your presence does. she says she loves you most and needs you in her life because you are the only person from whom she receives unconditional love, for whom she is not forced to act worthy -- or pleasant, decent, patient, kind.

do not love your mother unconditionally. don't even love her conditionally. tear your empathy out like a parasite if you have to. stop playing her game, stop losing on a technicality and taking the penalty of a sharp hit to the face because you didn't love her right, or loudly, or honestly enough.

do not pity your mother. do not allow yourself any emotional investment in the stories told every day of how her mother was unsupportive, or nurtured insecurity, or was too frigid to be a mother. will yourself to forget her favorite story of her stuffed animal being donated and remember the dozens she'd cut apart in front of you, thrown at your head, or strewn across the room. ignore your position as eternal therapist and remember the every half-hour in middle school you'd spend sobbing in wordless terror to the underpaid guidance counselor.

do not stop complaining about your mother. finally overturn the gag order of childhood, "don't tell anyone what i do or bad things will happen to you." soak in the comfort of a friend you've never seen the face of voicing the faceless resentment in you, "wow! what a bitch!" let yourself think these things without a twinge of guilt. stop accepting her artificial self-truth of eternal victimhood. eventually hire the therapist your mother made of you.

do not listen to your mother no matter how many times she speaks to you from inside your worm-addled brain. ignore the "i would never wear that!" because you aren't her. dismiss the "you're smarter than this," because you aren't always going to be, and that's fine. forget the "i'm not comfortable with this in my house," because YOU aren't comfortable in her house! burn every trace of her begging for comfort, decline to interact with any of the histrionic dry-eyed sobs about her guilt echoing around your memory.

remember. remember everything you can. do not let the decades of trauma be burned and purged from the record, clearing her name. she deserves all of the above and so do you. remember the locked rooms and the knives and the nails digging into your arms and the back of your neck. remember the sting of metal buckles on your skin. remember the feeling of sheetrock and plaster hitting the back of your head. remember the long-healed bruises on your knees and elbows from tumbling on the floor, remember the fistfuls of hairs ripped out of your head. remember cowering in the corner, remember trembling behind a door locked from your side and the thunderous shrieks of rage from the other side and the sound of an adult woman pounding the wood down with her fists because she couldn't get to you. note to self: do not let that bitch in! you never learned before! do it this time.

kind of a frankenstein post of the past week or so.

it's been a while! not for bad reasons. i've been sort of burnt-out after making and scrapping a couple of webpage ideas, is all, and my mom's been fairly even-tempered since the time i move out is coming up. i'm excited. it's not just that i get to move in with the love of my life, either! i feel good. i feel pretty good about my life's direction.

i'm scared about money problems, and dental problems, and medical issues, and i'm not excited to find full-time work, but it'll be good to finally start the next chapter of my life. going to college a couple of hours away from my mom was more of an intermission than anything, since it didn't actually make a huge difference in my mental or psychological wellbeing outside of the lowkey physical comfort of it all.

like this, though, i won't have to dress how she likes. i won't have to do all this housework as soon as possible. i won't burn energy i don't have. i can eat and wear what i want, i can rest how i like, do the chores i like, go where i like. i can talk in the evening. call my friends. talk about my politics.

i'll have to play the social game, but with other people it's nowhere near as complicated as with her. politeness keeps people from assaulting you if you make the wrong move or say something looks 'good' and not 'great' or if something sounds 'pretty good' and not 'perfect.' if i forget to put something away i doubt my new housemates are going to say i ruined their day and make them feel miserable.

it's amazing. my day can be ruined in just one comment and i don't know why i let it. it's been years since i've really been physically hurt by her, but i always brace and expect the worst. my adrenaline shoots up and my heart quickens, or i feel slack and dead.

i'm just so tired of it here. i'm tired of being around someone who does nothing but whine about her childhood, or her ideas about how she felt like a disappointment, or how her parents let her down. it's almost more grating to hear about her nonviolent but emotionally distant parents than it is to be chastised for dropping something with my stupid arthritic hands. being here just makes me feel bad, you know? in every way. it's covered in the thick mucuosy film of childhood. slime. i don't know. it's unappealing, overwhelming, clingy.

the number of unpleasant reminders of my experiences with my father have been growing. i think it's just because i'm getting more nervous and reflecting more on my childhood as i anticipate my leave. maybe the amount of true crime my mom insists i watch with her.

though it's also just...general bad memories. reflections on past things. indicators of problems that i didn't understand for what they were as a child. i asked my friends a lot if they were angry at me when they were just...doing something else. i was used to reading nonverbal cues from my mom for survival that when i was with my friends i was equally vigilant. i remember my friend -- we were maybe 5-6 -- shouting at me to stop asking, because she was "just bored." just bored! or busy. busy or bored. normal kid stuff. someone ignoring me or seeming uninterested in giving me positive attention/sharing a conversation freaked me out to the point of tears, and then i remember crying (quietly) out of embarrassment after it. i'm kind of glad it happened, though, to keep me from being too annoying in the future. learning experience.

in unrelated news, my dog, pookie, is aging. and it's given me a lot of perspective on things. you really can tell a lot about someone from how they treat animals -- at least, that's what my grandpa used to say. especially with regard to parenting.

some people adopt chihuahuas and dress them up and prod them for an amusing reaction. some people adopt certain types of dogs knowing that their home environment won't be suitable for the care the dog needs. some people adopt dogs just to have something to post on the internet. some people believe that a domineering dog "knows what it's doing" and "needs to be taught who's in charge" through beating. some people adopt a dog for the looks and keep it locked in a cage or outside chained to a stake.

and i don't think all these people do it because they're cruel -- it's something much worse. the possibility of cruelty blooms through misinformation on the internet or in a book, or simple refusal or forgetfulness to actually check their strategies, or a desire for the comfort of a dog without recognizing that it's a feeling animal because of cultural norms. it doesn't take a domineering machismo to pull the leash taut on a tottering animal with its pawpads burning on the sidewalk. it might just be someone who doesn't even think about their actions and the dog as an active participant in the moment. the dog is just a dog; just a simpler animal. they don't even think about it.

as my dog becomes increasingly helpless -- blind, incontinent -- my mom seems to grow more careless. as careless as she used to be when the dog was only a puppy. the dog has an accident? she "knows what she's doing." when i was a child and forgot to put a dish in the dishwasher, i "knew what i was doing." we both needed to be chased around the house and walloped. when the dog chewed on something she shouldn't have because of her anxiety, she "knows better than to do that." when i neglected to fold my clothes because my arthritis made the process painful, i "knew better than to do that." we both needed to be locked in a room to "think." and so it goes.

i can't explain the terror of being chased by someone much bigger and stronger than you who has no goal but making you suffer for accidentally inconveniencing you, who for all you know wouldn't care if you were brutalized because you have no security in the idea that they won't hurt you now that they're trying.

i'm not sure where i'm going with this. i guess in retrospect it definitely contextualizes why i felt so subhuman for so long and fell in with therianthropy, or at least tried. my dog, i felt, was one of the only entities who actually knew what i experienced and understood how i felt. at least the only person who knew without being complicit.

last night -- or, actually, two nights ago, hence the date on this entry -- i was thinking about something. about a year ago, my mom was in the hospital for very serious reasons. we have no one else, so i had to stay with her for the long hours before she was properly admitted. i don’t really remember much of that, but i do remember when she was put into an emergency room bed.

she cried out. i think it was due to pain related to her internal medical complications...in her little toe. god, it was loud. it was most certainly audible through the walls. she wailed, really. which she does do when she is “crying” or “sobbing” from another room. loudly, shrilly. it could really be called more of a scream than a cry. i had to sit by her side.

i felt nothing at the fact that we were there besides a sense of cold dread washing up in me, wondering if somehow she would die from this and i would be suddenly left alone in the world. the idea didn’t seem real, but neither did she. i wanted to go back to my apartment two hours away from home and move on with my free time.

and when she cried, i felt…disgust. irritation. i don’t remember what i did – it was short of shushing, i know, because my caution of her hurricane-like temperament and capacity for physical violence is done unthinkingly, but i have a feeling but not a memory of patting her and telling her she would be alright. maybe my tone was short of soothing.

she caught me out, a few moments later, and rightfully accused me of “not caring about her and wanting her to shut up.” it was interesting because her level of vitriol was completely disproportional. when she catches me out, truly, consequences are severe. when she wants to make me apologize, regret my actions, feel shame, or coddle her more attentively, she says something in a hurt or offended tone and leaves me to act based on it. this was the latter. it was one of the few times she really guessed right. i lied and assured her i didn’t, of course, and did coddle her, but privately my disdain gave way to the powerful sense of hate i end up feeling when she’s at her worst with me.

and it was because she was crying in pain. i felt ashamed, but i also have an awareness that a lack of empathy or sympathy towards an abusive parent is normal. i was a little afraid that i maybe didn’t have any empathy at all, or the emotional capacity to handle tears, but that’s since been proven false in other situations.

i remember feeling so irritated because i’m in physical pain all the time, and i had to learn not to cry. i had to learn not to complain about chronic pain, or the loss of mobility. i had to learn not to cry from being hit or thrown unless it was in the moment, when she wanted to see it before she’d ever stop. i still can’t complain about my arthritis today or else she punishes me by apologizing for giving me the condition and for being a failure.

i think she’s the reason i find people who apologize repeatedly to be annoying, even with the knowledge that it’s also a common trauma response, because in all my life in all my relationships it’s only been a manipulation tactic. no offense if you’re reading this and you do that, but i struggle not to take it personally, like you’re messaging me that i’ve fucked up and hurt you somehow and now i’ve gotta comfort you and chastise myself to legitimize your feelings. and that’s, uh, a “me” thing, but if you do that, we’ve both got shit to be working on.

anyway, i just…i hated seeing her wail for the orderlies’/my attention because she was in pain. there’s nothing i or the staff could legally do about it, and for the timeframe (because we’d been told the place was slammed), this would be the best that could be done. i couldn’t believe she’d be crying so loud except to get attention, because that’s just…what she’d always do with me! cry extremely loud from behind a closed door so someone would check on her. like a baby. so she could complain about her husband or whatever.

of course, my intuition could be wrong. maybe i’m wrong to presume all of her behavior is an act. maybe she was really crying in pain and for whatever reason has a looser grip on her emotions than i do when in a public space. maybe she’s a more honest person than me and even more piloted by her emotions than i conceived of. maybe my presumptions are more colored by anger than experience dealing with the way her brain works. who knows?

i had a bad day today and i went and made it worse. or, well, yesterday. it's 2:28 now. maybe tomorrow will be so bad i have two entries! i hope not. [looks above this tab sweatily]

i sent a letter to my paternal grandparents, who i’ve been avoiding since their son was arrested for crimes against me (and after they came to HIS aid and IGNORED me), saying that i appreciate their desire to be in my life but that i can’t handle it for some few reasons i didn’t actually name. mostly because thinking about them makes me want to kill myself out of shame and guilt and awkwardness and hatred of my stupid-ass first world problem white southerner-ass life. i told them what i’ve been up to, and that i’m moving out of state. accolades and a "by the way you're probably gonna die before you see me (the kid you used to OBSESS over because your son sucked).

today my grandfather left my mom a voicemail and i told her not to listen to it. i, however, did, after stealing her phone for a bit while she slept, and he said that he wanted to talk to me and that the letter was sweet, and that they're both so proud of me, and then he said he was sick of trying to get through her to talk to “his own daughter.” (lol?) that’s the funny thing; i always dread talking to them so i ghost them when they text me. they think she’s blocked them on my phone or something, while i’m 21 and too scared and uncomfortable with them to frankly say outright what i want. because i don’t know what i want.

i probably sound like a monster right now, but these people are bad people, trust me. it’s just that they’re old, and stupid, and don’t really know or care what’s right. that’s part of what i wrote in the letter; they and i are just too different and they probably wouldn’t like me if they actually knew me. and it’s true. one time my grandma told me to marry specifically a blue-eyed white man “so that [my] child would have blue eyes.” and they made my dad super racist. and they want to be in MY life?! eeueuuauaauauauwuaa.

but they also have money. and i need money. now, i don’t know if i’m in the will, but if i am in the will, i don’t want to be out of the will, and if i’m not in the will, i want to be. they’re not rich, but fuck, who is these days? my teeth are rotting out of my mouth here. i’m thinking it’d be cheaper to get fewer haircuts.

i don’t know what to do. anything they could have given me that was worth anything was love and time back when i was a kid. listening to me. showing they cared, knew about, and loved me beyond trying to make me either a girly girl doll-type (grandma) or a tomboy (grandpa). the funny thing is, my grandpa is super sexist, so i think he’d take me being a lesbian better than my grandma, but he also, like, would spank my ass at random when i was like 8, so that invites new problems.

do i text my grandma and endure the inevitable question of if i want to meet (i do NOT)? do i pretend i didn’t hear anything and continue my VERY GENEROUS offer of continuing to mail them from my new place several states away? these are the only two options. vote on your phones now and maybe consider hitting me in the head with a hammer while you’re taking requests

it’s stellar how impossible it is to function in this perfunctory society if you’re interested in, you know, the preservation of the planet and the human race. i’m tormented by the fact that we’re fast on track to “mass death for sure”, and i’m not even the one who’s going to be paying for it. i’m not one of the hundreds of thousands of people who are going to perish from heat exhaustion and malaria.

it’s hard to think anything can be okay, you know? no matter how exhausted or hungry or poor we are, we’re set in our ways. wages stagnate. abortion is banned. you can’t afford mcdonald’s on your wait-staffing paycheck anymore because a sandwich is four-dollars-and-something. but what is there to do but go and cast a blue vote that has been precision-minimized by seated republicans acting on behalf of their dark-moneyed corporate classmates who went to the same racist, anti-poor crony old boys clubs that they did? it’s hopeless. a steady diet of “martin luther king jr asked nicely and was patient and in the end he won” and “magneto was fighting for the right thing in that marvel movie, i think, but the way he went about it was just all wrong” and “everyone has a right to their opinion” is as effective a ward against torturous living situations as a sponge is to a bullet.

anyway, this is supposed to be a personal entry. but that’s sort of the problem. i feel bad, but i can’t think about feeling bad on an individual level and sit on it in some self-rumination because it feels wrong. it does. millions of people across the world are suffering and starving and dying of heat stroke, far and near, in agony because of the circumstances of their skin color and/or their nationality and the disgusting corporate greed on this earth, and i’m thinking, what, about my childhood?

i mean, no judgment. i’m not saying self-reflection is bad, far from it, we need it, but my god. the terror and guilt and worry, it seizes me. i feel nauseous thinking about all those people, mortified by the human brain’s ability to space out and ignore what it can’t see, its lust to accumulate more and more ends for pleasure no matter the long-term costs of failing to accede to morality, to good, sound, scientific judgment. i think we were so suited to be stewards of this planet and ourselves, but i don’t think we’re going to get there. not without something horrible and bloody that the global bourgeoisie has carefully ‘bred’ out of the psyches of their complacent cronies in the shrinking middle class.

we just sit there and let it happen. i’m as guilty of it as anyone. i don’t have the money to help anyone in any meaningful way. and i’m selfish; i want to live and play, too. i want to own a pet someday. i want to go abroad sometime. but what have i done to earn it? none of us white folk here in the global north can safely say we’ve “earned” shit. i didn’t earn air conditioning, i was just lucky to be able to afford it. i didn’t earn my car, i was just lucky my grandpa had enough money in his savings from his military stipend to buy one. i didn’t earn these comforts, but i’m a self-interested animal that wants to keep them for myself.

auuggh i keep going off-topic. my point is that i just feel bad for existing and it’s kind of not wrong for me to and i’m not doing anything right now to do my part to rebalance the scales.

did you know one of the criteria for c-ptsd is feeling like the world is on the whole bad? yeah. i was asked about it during a trauma study i’m in right now, and i thought it was bizarre then, but it’s for real listed as a common sign of c-ptsd. like, you’re not taken care of as a child so you learn that the world is pretty cruel and unforgiving, and it’s like, have you fucking looked around? the spanish-only kids sitting in an english-only school, failing their classes with no registered assistant to help them? saudi arabia existing basically because of usamerican interference, indonesian inflation and debt problems after the cia basically sucked suharto silly and the world bank hung them out to dry with predatory, colonialist loan terms? i was a single digit age when i made a science project about the pacific garbage patch and my teacher loved it. it’s way, way fucking bigger now. what the fuck are you talking about, ‘do i think the world is by and large dangerous, cruel, or bad?’

and it’s like i was saying, this…this nausea and hate and worry, it like, bloats and distends inside me. i feel it in my gut like a knot. fist-sized. i don’t know what to do with it. i’ve been trying to learn about the world more recently, since i’m on a bit of a break right now, and every bad thing about humanity i learn makes me sickened for the victims and every good thing i learn just makes me mourn the suffering of our species even harder. i struggle to read or pick up fictional anything because i feel bad for spending my time on ephemeral pleasure instead of educating myself on worldly things when i have the means to. and yes, not everyone has the energy reserves to do that, so that’s not a standard for everyone with my living situation, of course, but i’m bitching about myself and my shit ass brain here. just remember that.

i don’t think i’m going anywhere with this, and i’d like to post it before i decide this isn’t worth whinging about. god, i hope i figure out how to make myself have a net positive impact on this planet before i die. but how? i have no sizeable financial capital, and i’m so autistic i’m shit for social capital, and i’m too pained and weakened by my disability to like, perform labor for people. i just want to not be another leech on the global south and people of colors’ backsides.

there's been something weird happening with me lately. it's not new, but it's been a while since it's been noticeable, so it's uncomfortable. i have these moments where it's like everything conceptually seems to come apart at the seams. the integrity, the sincerity, the mundane truth of everything seems to fall away, and i feel like i can't trust what i'm experiencing to reflect "reality" in any meaningful sense of the term. it's not like i actively have the thought that i'm on a tv show or in a game or anything, it's almost a reflexive sort of awareness. it's like i'm living through one of those weirdness spikes in gravity falls where gravity stops working for a few moments. the membrane separating what i know to be true of my surroundings and the full existential meaninglessness imbued in some full truth of reality feels like sheet metal bending and warping and groaning before it snaps apart.

things just feel too predictable and too absurd. it doesn't help that i'm engaging in a lot of magical thinking lately. i keep thinking that if i do this chore or that favor; if i do her laundry and make her tea, my mom will be kind to me in the afternoon, or at least leave me alone. it never happens. it's not so bad to be doing the chores as much as it is the hope of being thanked or ignored dashed.

i told her about a deeply kind and personal compliment a professor gave me today in the hopes of her feeling glad enough that someone validated her by praising me that she would get off my back about how i folded her clothes, and she started talking about how it was in my blood and how i got it from her, that she gets complimented for it all the time, and that i should listen to her when she tells me (she never does unless someone else says it?). it was so stupidly to be expected that i had to repress the urge to laugh. just cartoonishly predictable.

it doesn't help that the world just feels so absurd. i have to sit in the living room with her when she's home, and the tv is always kept on. tv never helps my derealization problems either because i start feeling the ontological flimsiness of a fictional reality seep into mine, or because the sound reminds me of childhood, or because the reality of the world in nonfictional programs or broadcasting standards causes me to doubt the reality of the world. like why are there commercials between everything; why do we let ourselves be bombarded by things meant to psychologically manipulate? why are weight loss ads a thing when we know fat makesyou healthier, doctors just kill fat people through negligence? (i'm too lazy to link the shit i read in university on it, but here's a rundown of sorts). why does david muir have to say "america strong" all the fucking time and how do people not realize patriotism is a cult?

it's because i'm living with mom. i know it is. everything she says is a passive aggressive threat or a guilt trip; she admits her "short temper" makes itself obvious in everything she does aftera point but doesn't care to really fix it. it doesn't matter in how soft a voice she says it or if she adds a sob. i said i thought it was funny an item she got me from goodwill as a gift had two brands on it when i'm known not to be a very particular person and she said "sorry you don't like it." when i reassured her that i did and she said "no, it's fine. i'll just take it back..." i hate living here. she hates me but is obsessed with me and knows being explicitly violent will make me leave for sure. i'm so tired of getting caressed and kissed at night (nonsexually) and being scolded and chided and insulted by day. i think it does fucked-up things to your sense of reality or something.

i don’t feel very good right now. there’s nothing that happened to trigger it specifically; mom’s been as hair-trigger as always, so it’s not some new development.

i don’t know what i’m doing, man. i used to have it all figured out. i was wrong, and i was unhappy, but at least i could hope and pray that someday i’d be not nothing. “enough,” i guess. my latest ex asked who exactly i was hoping to seek approval from, who i wanted to hear say that i was smart or impressive or whatever. i didn't know then and i still don’t know. it used to be my parents; i did everything for them. i forsook a lot of the immature delights of childhood for them. i didn’t do anything i wouldn’t be good at. now i’m an adult. i’m finishing college early. i let myself rest instead of filling my hours with useless accolades and clubs.

it paid off, don’t get me wrong. i made the right choice in choosing not to grind myself to dust for someone else’s superyacht. i’m glad i’m alive for my partner and my friends. friend. i have one friend right now. i just say “friends” so it isn’t weird. but i just wonder if i happened to miss something along the way. maybe i didn’t do enough things or see enough of people. am i missing something? something that ties human brains to some font of inspiration, or each other? is there some way people learn to bond with each other and their world? i live for my couple of loved ones and to try and donate capital to people who need it. but what else? is that all the “human experience” i can do? no drawing, no cooking, no friends, no going outside, no poetry, no family, nothing? i can’t do these things. i couldn’t if i tried.

i’m not really that good at anything. creative writing is kicking my ass right now. i feel stupid. i feel like i’m just telling people what happened to me over and over again, and i can’t make anything that isn’t that. i can’t make anything normal or passively interesting or unique or entertaining because it’s just me, complaining unintelligibly, on a loop. it’s nothing interesting. it’s nothing new or unheard of or silenced. it’s not worth caring about in the first place. there are infinite agonies and woes across the world that are deeper and greater than anything i’ve experienced in my life and all i can do is keep babbling on about my meaningless life while learning about them from the internet.

is this really all i can do? it doesn’t surprise me, because it’s not as though i’ve ever actually contributed anything meaningful in my life, in any context, but it just doesn’t feel good, i will say that. it doesn’t feel good to have a body that can’t produce anything and a brain that can’t produce anything. and it’s not even in the capitalist sense where i will generate less capital because of physical limitations and mental resistance; i mean holistically. i can’t do anything that’s supposed to make a person want to live. i can’t write well, or meaningfully, or funnily. i can’t make art of any kind. i can’t cook or bake or mix drinks. i can’t socialize or make friends because i’m so fucking awkward and autistic and cynical. i can’t sing or dance or ever hope to play an instrument — (my mom is still disappointed my face is too deformed to play the flute like she and her mother did). i can’t raise plants or protect animals or handle children. i can’t nurture hobbies. i can’t sleep. i can’t get out of bed in the morning. I could maybe do some of these things, but it would be painful and i would be bad at it without generating joy for anyone, so what would the point be?

i’ve always felt inexplicably subhuman and bounced between silly justifications and theories for it, but as i get older, it just isn’t fading. it’s not necessarily “bad” in and of itself. it’s just sort of…nothing. disappointing. i guess that’s a good word for it. i don’t know. i’m publishing this just to keep it around. maybe i’ll add my graphics page and button tomorrow to make up for it.

the worst thing about living at home with my mother is that she starts shouting at me and i'm like, 'i'm gonna blog about this!' and i stop thinking about her and start thinking about ronaldo from steven universe.

anyway, she woke me up today and had a moment of trying vaguely to connect with me by complaining about, like, food industries or something, and i gave her a little information about how americans are detached from our food/hate hunting/consider meat immoral and how it's attached to racism. whatever.

then later since she's feigned interest in political topics today, i tell her about the content in this post, and midway through, she tearfully throws down the tv remote she's holding and says, "WELL, i guess you won't want to go see the BARBIE MOVIE WITH ME." and i'm so flabbergasted i'm like. this was about oppenheimer. (to be fair, she doesn't KNOW this, but i don't want to "go" see the barbie movie, i want to pirate it. sorry. mattel sucks.)

and she says "it doesn't MATTER, because you HATE what i like! you HATE me because apparently everything i love is IMMORAL, and you hate commercialization and commodification and EVERYTHING I GREW UP WITH! and I'M SORRY i'm just not as SMART AS YOU or as INFORMED AS YOU and that everything MY GENERATION likes is APPARENTLY NOT GOOD ENOUGH!"

she's crying, too, she's gotten up to make her bed. she tells me more about how i hate her and hate everything she likes, and that she's sorry that i hate everything that makes her happy and that she's "SORRY" i hate everything about her. after i explain to her that i don't understand what anything she's saying has do with oppenheimer, which she didn't want to see in the first place, she later laments that i don't like what she did as a child: dolls. she cries that i didn't like barbie "enough" and preferred reading american girl stories and playing with stuffed animals, and that even then i didn't play with my dolls "enough."

friends, it's here that i should mention my mom wears short dresses into her 50s and i wear combat boots and pants and baggy clothes and regularly get mistaken for a dude, much to her, uh, incredibly similar reaction as described above.

personal reflection aside -- that again, two days after my last entry, that my mom can't stand me being different from her -- what an american. what a white american. i realize how much "internet commie with a blog" that sounds, but it's true. and before you ask why i live with her, it's not that i can't afford to move out, it's because she's threatened to kill herself if i leave for my planned living arrangements any sooner than mid-september.

but i digress, christ. her nostalgia, her love of what makes her "her" (what she consumes), her apparent shame at not knowing about the world compounded by her lack of interest in learning on her own...american. she got angry with me for something i made the mistake of bringing up to her once -- how being in walmarts and such makes me feel overwhelmed and disturbed. it's because of the autism, but she said she LIKES shopping, and she's SORRY she's supposed to feel BAD about that, which is something i've never said. nobody should feel bad for shopping, they just should care about who was involved in producing their commodities and who's responsible for their low prices. ignorance, willing or not, hurts people!

it's insane that people will feel "guilty" about how their unwillingness to care about who's involved in constructing their world, but won't make a change to care. they'd rather lash out at you than change their ways. how fucked up do you have to be to hear about the irradiated, starved, forcibly-relocated, indigenous victims of bomb tests and get angry that your "daughter" is "making" you "feel bad" about the things "your generation" likes? she didn't even fucking want to see oppenheimer, but she related my giving a shit to being anti-oppenheimer to being anti-barbie to being anti-her.

it's a good thing i decided not to go into politics or policy advisory. they'd take one look at my short hair and decide that anything i have to say about good governance means i want them and their generation and their families dead. no wonder critical race theory is being tossed by whites.

god i finished posting this and she's still talking about how stupid she is. i have to say she isn't but if you have a phone in your damn hand at all times, use facebook and tik tok constantly and cry about how stupid i make you feel instead of googling shit or following indigenous news streams , you are stupid.

no greater torment than living at home exists on this earth. i'm kidding, but only a little. it's not even that my mom's conduct is worse than usual, but that after months of existing on my terms, my way, in private, the constant performance is grating.

i can tell she looks at me and sees nothing but her reflection. her interests, her insecurities, a means to her comfort or her anger. it's as though i'm not even a separate entity from her, and this has been the case for as long as i've been alive. she's admitted multiple times -- on the rare occasions she alludes to the fact that she physically/psychologically battered me -- that she did it "only" because she felt disappointed in herself for settling for a subpar, perverted husband. "i was so angry at myself, and you happened to sometimes be on the receiving end of that." like her hands were weather patterns over which she had no control.

even as i type this i find myself struggling to find the energy to really vent about it. they aren't just the episodic big events that stick out in my memory; it's a lifestyle.

i get out of bed before noon because i don't want her to see i didn't respond to her texts, i make the bed so that in case she comes home for lunch she won't think i'm lazy, i choose the breakfast or lunch food she likes the least if i eat before she comes home, i check the mail, the dishwasher, the washing machine, and the dryer before noon to ensure she doesn't think i'm being lazy and taking advantage of her, i make sure to send one text while she's at work so she doesn't cry to me that i don't love her anymore, i make sure the tv is on by the time she comes home because i don't want her to think i've only been staying in the living room because she guilts me into it (because that makes her guilty, which makes her angry), i end my calls as soon as i hear the garage door open so she doesn't feel insecure over her fear that i like my friends more than her, i ask her about her day and thank her for working as soon as she comes home so that she doesn't get angry from being tired and feeling unappreciated when she returns, i make sure to always look at her when she looks at me while i'm on my phone or laptop so she doesn't get jealous, i wait until she goes to shower at 9-10PM before i can leave the family room, and when i sleep i have to sleep in the other side of her king bed because she can't endure feeling lonely.

i'm just tired. i'm tired of living for her. i'm tired of doing everything she wants and says out of terror. i thought i was so wrong for not feeling comfortable with her after she stopped hitting me because she was "trying," but she only stopped one part of her behavior, and, frankly, i prefer the slapfests to being caressed in the dark while i pretend to sleep through this nightmarish encounter. is it any wonder at all i refuse to express discomfort around her when the first thing she does is demand a hug? leave me alone!!

i constructed my entire childhood persona around being ruthlessly efficient, intelligent, and highly capable of handling "adult issues" because she prized me for those qualities when it came to her personal life and providing an avenue for her to receive emotional care and psychological fulfillment, as well as physical release. she used to compliment me for always being so "resilient," and for always "bouncing back." she thought it was so impressive and so sweet that i helped her with "grown up problems." if i could tell my younger self almost anything, it would be that the few crumbs of affection and pride she fed me had been a trap; a leash. the only problem is that i think i may have already known that to some extent, but i just didn't care because i didn't value much anything else but those few, rare, beautiful moments where i felt as though i was being seen and appreciated; where for a moment my mother and father might both agree on something and muster up a few minutes of pride in the bubbling tar pit they called a household. i would have given anything for more of those, and looking back at my life choices, i think i did.

i'm different now -- i want to be different now, but i can't realistically do so until i move in with my partner this fall. it can't come soon enough.