leaves a bad taste in your mouth…

its 1:47am. I can’t sleep. I know that its partly due to messing up my sleeping schedule by staying up til 4am (two nights in a row!) and then sleeping in. Tomorrow and the day after will not be pretty.

For some reason, I’ve been doing a lot of revisiting my past by rereading a lot of this diary… I guess I wanted to see what my journey has been like. One of the main purposes of this diary was to write down my emotions and what happened, so I don’t have to store it in my long-term memory… I honestly could not recall more than half of what has been written down in the first year or so of this diary. But that’s ok – that’s why I wrote it down.

But I’ve encountered something I didn’t want while revisiting my past. All the emotions have been…. revived, you could say. All the feelings of confusion, resentment, anger, bitterness, regret, depression, angst, anxiety, sense of loss… all of this just came pouring back into me.

And I hate it. It took me forever to get over those feelings… and now to have them just dumped back into my soul is awful. I feel like I’m 16 all over again. Being 16 was probably one of the worst and best years of my life. I learned a lot about people, myself…

I also came across the entries where the infamous “anonymous notes” were left… and then that old feeling of betrayal set back in. I don’t remember if I told any of my readers, but those notes were left by my mother, who had somehow figured out what cookies were and started investigating what I looked at on the internet. Isn’t that just sweet? My mother wrote these anonymous, judgemental, awful notes. It makes my whole body go tense and my mind gets hot with anger.

She had no right. NO right to do that to me. She took away the sacredness of this whole diary experience.

I couldn’t let her interference prevent me from writing, from doing what i needed to do. from expressing myself, from letting it out, from preventing me from going crazy by keeping it all inside. I don’t know what I would have done if my readers and friends hadn’t posted argument after argument against her “friendly” and “well-meant” notes. GRRR.

My parents always had this ‘thing’ when I was in high school where they would said to my face, “Why are you keeping secrets from us? I know you have secrets.” Well, doesn’t everyone? Why would they need to confront me with that? Did they think that would magically unlock the door to “me” and let them in? Sure, mom and dad, I’ll share it ALL with you.

No, I could never do that. They would scoff, brush it aside. Its not as serious as I describe.

One of the most haunting memories for me is when, right after moving to Houston (which is when I began to spiral out of control emotionally), my mom, out of the blue, said, “I think I’m depressed. I just looked it up online and I have all of the symptoms.” And then she waited… actually waited for a reaction. I remember going blank with shock, just being blindsided by this information and realizing how incredibly selfish it was of her to just say that… and know that if she had actually thought about it, she should have noticed that I was clinically depressed and in need of professional help. But no, all she recognized was herself… and I didn’t see it at all in her. Granted, my judgement was more than likely clouded by my own emotions. I remember sputtering something like, “Maybe… I don’t know…” and not knowing what else to do.

Why would you just announce that to your teenage daughter who is obviously struggling?

I don’t know. I certainly can’t think of a reason. And you know what? Not once did she ever recognize that I actually was having a “really hard time” until a couple of years had passed. Not once did she ever realize that I was lost emotionally. I honestly do not know how I made it through those 2 miserable years. I hated my life and clung to the past… I stayed in the ‘denial’ stage of my grief for so long, sometimes i wonder if I ever came out of it.

I think I may always resent my mother a little for never recognizing how much danger I was in during that whole time period. She tried to get me to make friends, restricted me from the computer, and nagged me constantly about a social life and getting a life. The screaming arguments are still somewhat fresh in my mind. She never saw the part of me that was almost dying from sadness every date in those awful, terrible years.

And you know, when I browse OD and look at the diaries of the teenage girls of today who hate their bodies, hate their lives, hate everything that is happening to them… I’m really not that surprised. For a moment I may think, “Gosh, get a grip… its not that bad!” or, “C’mon, you’re only 15, what do you know about love or true relationships?” And yet, that’s exactly where I was… and I understand, a little. Part of me just cannot look at that… I’ve been there and I just can’t go back and look at it. Even those memories are too haunting to take all at one time.

It’s now 2:38am. I’ll go browse the recent’s and try to go to bed again….