There must be something wrong with me; guess I don't fit in.
Some days are more difficult than others for no reason I can discern. I am not sure how best to explain these days. At the worst of them I am unable to even feign normalcy, and if I am to be found it is likely to be curled up in a ball in a closet, or at the foot of the bed, shaking and speaking only in a sort of poetry. I'm still myself, down there, somewhere, but it's so much effort to be coherent. No one has ever seen me like that, so I don't know what it looks like, only what it feels like, in my head, to be wrapped around in words that don't make sense but repeat themselves endlessly. When it gets particularly bad, I'll write them down to be rid of them and have trouble making them out later -- or, worse, when re-reading them will catch brief, pale glimpses of the thought behind it, thought that doesn't quite make sense except when it happens.
Some days I am unable to sit still. My skin itches for being inside of it and I want everything to change, to be different. I want to throw things just to throw them, to change their state. I am angry at the peaceful, uncomplicated existence of simple, solid objects. I have some balls that I throw at the wall, sometimes: throwing it or kicking it as hard as I can into the living room wall or the kitchen above the pantry, until I'm too tired to do it anymore. Then I'm just exhausted and frustrated and still wanting everything around me to be different, somehow. I've cut my hair, before, in a fit like that. Sometimes I'll draw on myself, covering skin with ink until all the skin is gone.
Yesterday I broke a glass. I was in a mood, yes, frustrated and wanting to throw things, but I hadn't really intended to break it, though I was being careless and light-handed putting away the dishes. It was inevitable, but not really with purpose. I cut the palm of my right hand cleaning it up -- and, really, the absolutely worst place to cut oneself. I can't bandage it in any way and every movement of my hand I feel it and it hurts. It, too, was an accidental-but-not-quite-accidental thing: I'd swept up the kitchen and the larger shards of glass were sitting on the counter, not yet thrown away. I tried to piece them back together, but, of course, they wouldn't fit. No small part of the glass was simply sharp, angry specks of dust (that I'll probably be picking up off the floor for the rest of the week). I'd given up on putting it back together and was simply examining each piece before dropping it in the trash: seeing the way it caught the light, following the edges with my eye, seeing how it felt against my palm.
That last, of course, was my mistake. And a mistake, certainly, that no sane person should make, because a sane person knows glass, especially broken glass, is sharp. Deceptively sharp in the way you won't know you've cut yourself until it's already happened. (I do know this, of course -- I've just written it out, haven't I? The difference is that I know and don't care, or perhaps that my curiosity overpowered any caring.) It's not a bad cut, really: a half an inch long at most, thin and shallow, like a paper-cut. It's a bright red line in the center of my hand and it hurts every time I move my hand -- and sometimes when I don't. It's the most extraordinary thing and I realize that is really, really not the conventional way of thinking about these things but it is how I'm thinking.
It is not different, then, from the other ways I seem to be different; ways I just can't understand people or the world around me, sometimes. None of it makes sense. But I don't make sense, either, so who's to complain?
The only thing I know to do when days like this come, string together in a row and leave me incapable of so many things and capable of so many things is to hold on; and sometimes it feels like trying to hold on to a fish in a stream. An impossibility. When will it end? I have been reading and watching about gay teens and suicides. The message is "It gets better." It's a good message, of course, a message of hope, because no one should ever be hopeless, nor driven to such despair simply by who they are. And though sexuality is one thing I've never taken any flack over (perhaps because I've hardly figured it out myself), I wonder, in my own head... does it get better? Does it really?
I have lived more of my life with this... well, whatever you wish to call it... but I've lived longer with it than I have without it. Does it get better?
Some days I am unable to sit still. My skin itches for being inside of it and I want everything to change, to be different. I want to throw things just to throw them, to change their state. I am angry at the peaceful, uncomplicated existence of simple, solid objects. I have some balls that I throw at the wall, sometimes: throwing it or kicking it as hard as I can into the living room wall or the kitchen above the pantry, until I'm too tired to do it anymore. Then I'm just exhausted and frustrated and still wanting everything around me to be different, somehow. I've cut my hair, before, in a fit like that. Sometimes I'll draw on myself, covering skin with ink until all the skin is gone.
Yesterday I broke a glass. I was in a mood, yes, frustrated and wanting to throw things, but I hadn't really intended to break it, though I was being careless and light-handed putting away the dishes. It was inevitable, but not really with purpose. I cut the palm of my right hand cleaning it up -- and, really, the absolutely worst place to cut oneself. I can't bandage it in any way and every movement of my hand I feel it and it hurts. It, too, was an accidental-but-not-quite-accidental thing: I'd swept up the kitchen and the larger shards of glass were sitting on the counter, not yet thrown away. I tried to piece them back together, but, of course, they wouldn't fit. No small part of the glass was simply sharp, angry specks of dust (that I'll probably be picking up off the floor for the rest of the week). I'd given up on putting it back together and was simply examining each piece before dropping it in the trash: seeing the way it caught the light, following the edges with my eye, seeing how it felt against my palm.
That last, of course, was my mistake. And a mistake, certainly, that no sane person should make, because a sane person knows glass, especially broken glass, is sharp. Deceptively sharp in the way you won't know you've cut yourself until it's already happened. (I do know this, of course -- I've just written it out, haven't I? The difference is that I know and don't care, or perhaps that my curiosity overpowered any caring.) It's not a bad cut, really: a half an inch long at most, thin and shallow, like a paper-cut. It's a bright red line in the center of my hand and it hurts every time I move my hand -- and sometimes when I don't. It's the most extraordinary thing and I realize that is really, really not the conventional way of thinking about these things but it is how I'm thinking.
It is not different, then, from the other ways I seem to be different; ways I just can't understand people or the world around me, sometimes. None of it makes sense. But I don't make sense, either, so who's to complain?
The only thing I know to do when days like this come, string together in a row and leave me incapable of so many things and capable of so many things is to hold on; and sometimes it feels like trying to hold on to a fish in a stream. An impossibility. When will it end? I have been reading and watching about gay teens and suicides. The message is "It gets better." It's a good message, of course, a message of hope, because no one should ever be hopeless, nor driven to such despair simply by who they are. And though sexuality is one thing I've never taken any flack over (perhaps because I've hardly figured it out myself), I wonder, in my own head... does it get better? Does it really?
I have lived more of my life with this... well, whatever you wish to call it... but I've lived longer with it than I have without it. Does it get better?