2/16/06

I have changed. It’s true, that recently, I have been changing. Overall though, I haven’t. I’m still the person I was at 12: scared of growing up yet more knowledgeable about life after childhood. Not so innocent yet painfully naive. Surrounded by people yet alone. At 11 I started cutting, at 12 I started dieting, at 13 I inhaled solvents, at 14 I started binge drinking and at 15 I started smoking weed. I don’t know what will come next, but surely this will not be an easy habit to break out of?

People seem to assume that this is something I can just "snap out" of. I don’t know if I can. I have always been extremely anxious and a perfectionist, even as a child. Like when I first learnt about "silent e’s" at primary school; any word I wasn’t entirely sure about the spelling of, I would get up and ask the teacher to make sure I wouldn’t get it wrong. For a while I started adding E on to the end of almost every word, just in case. Eventually my teacher got so pissed off that she taught me the full rule – if the second to last letter of a word (minus the E) is a vowel that is not e, and the next one is a consonant, then chances are there will be a silent e on the end. Something likes that, anyway. Might have something to do with accents too, but I don’t remember how in-depth her explanation was. It satisfied my need to follow her around the classroom for the spelling of every other word, at least.

I think it was in year 3, when I was talking to someone next to me in class while the teacher was talking, I got shouted at. That’s it. I remember the first time I was shouted at school, I remember the fear sweeping through my body that something awful was going to happen. I remember not talking while the teacher was again for several years. No kidding. Even at the beginning of secondary school, I was awfully careful about not getting caught at doing something "wrong", though this habit died very quickly as I fell into a cycle of crash dieting and self harm.

My memories scare me. Not so much what is in them, I have never suffered any sort of awful trauma, more the fact that I don’t remember things from my own point of view, more from the point of view of someone watching my life through a TV screen, except with my thoughts, feelings and emotions attached to the images of the back of my head. I don’t know if that’s normal. Surely your own memories should be viewed through your own eyes, rather then the eyes of someone very tall standing behind you.

Does my need to get things right interfere with productivity? Yes, yes it does.

Is that a problem? Yes, I suppose it is.