September 26, 2020

I’m not sure why, but I find myself not being able to look directly outside through the window. It’s blue and grey, and quite gorgeous as the world wakes up. I’ve been awake since 5:12 a.m. myself. I’m reading a book I don’t remember the name of, but it inspires me to type out my feelings as I find my eyes blurring and my chest get tight. My throat has been dry and caught the entire time I read it.

It’s a story of a 17-year-old girl who has had a bad run in with someone named Fucking Frank, coping with the loss of her friend, Ellis, who attempted suicide and didn’t die, but lost enough oxygen to her brain to essentially be a vegetable. She was homeless, her father and dog dead at some point and her mother physically abusive, and she was raped. She tries to escape everything by cutting so deeply with broken mason jar glass in an attempt to end the buzzing and pain but ends up in a hospital and is later transferred to an all-girl nut house. Now, she’s staying at a friend’s studio home, which is really a done-up garage, and struggles to find a sense of normal.

I found myself relating to it a little too much all at once. It reminds me of my time at Heritage Oaks off Auburn Boulevard in Citrus Heights. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I think I was living in Orangevale in Stella’s studio-home at the time. I think Chance and I weren’t technically together at the time because I remember a guy in the loony bin taking an interest in me, which now that I think of it, might have been the first and only time in my life a person took interest in me first. I often forget about it, though, because everyone was crazy in that place. He gave me his number before I was discharged at the end of my two weeks and told me the day he was going to be released. I waited in the parking lot for him that day, but never saw him walk out. I haven’t heard from or seen him again.

A couple months later, the crazy festered more and I tried to find him since he wasn’t answering calls or texts, no acknowledgment of the voicemail I had left. I found his name on the Internet associated with a pizza place in Chico. I remember calling them, the woman who answered sound very skeptical and confused, but promising to pass on the message that Jess was calling for him. I don’t even remember his name. It’s stalkerish and creepy to do that, now that I look back on it. But I didn’t know this at the time and had no ill-intent. I just wanted to connect to someone who seemed to like me and see me, even when I was at my lowest point. I figured if someone could like me in there, then they could like me for who I really was.

But I was wrong once again.

I’m tearing up as I write this, but it’s not sadness. I don’t know what it is exactly. Something deeper, more like grief and depression and hopelessness. A loss of some kind. Innocence, maybe?

Everything hurts in me right now and feels dark. The void is opening back up for some reason. I was getting so good at bottling my emotions – I envision a mason jar – and sucking it back into some hidden away part of me, but that fucking book opened it all back up.

I’m relating to that 17-year-old girl somehow, but she was worse off than me. Sure, I attempted suicide that landed me in the nuthouse years ago. I don’t remember how old I was at the time. I think old enough to drink, maybe. Maybe it was 2015.

I would’ve been 21 at the time, turning 22 July of that year, but I had been drinking and doing drugs long before then.

I started smoking pot heavily after I started working at KFC when I was 16. I was vehemently against alcohol until I met Chance. I was against it because of my mom.

I don’t know why I clung to that relationship like I did. I don’t even remember who he was anymore. But that happens with all of my exes. At some point, I think I’m so enshrouded in a cloud of dissociation, I never really see them for who they are. They become an extension of myself that I project onto. And I don’t really know who’s fault that is. I’ve been told I’ve gaslit others and had it done to me in return by soon-to-be ex-husband. But I don’t really know if I believe the latter.

I think I paint myself in a better light so someone will pity me at the very least. Making myself the victim and manipulating others to feel bad can be easy. But I really try not to. I’ve just heard that I do that. I don’t consciously do it, I just talk about how I’ve felt and what has happened to me in the past, and I talk about it casually because I know that despite how fucked up it sounds, I brought it all onto myself. Therefore: do not feel bad for me. Shit sucks wall-to-wall, but I know it was of my own curation and I’m at fault.

I think about how alone my dad is. He has his friends and has always been very charismatic, but he has also been very manipulative emotionally. I never could get a full read on him. Sometimes, he seems quite jovial and polite and nice, like he’s really turning a corner and opening up. Then the more time I spent with him, the real him came out incrementally. If it happened all at once, he’d scare people away. But to normalize it slowly over time traps a person and they don’t realize it until years later what has been done. I think that’s why Marie left him without any warning and won’t go back.

I’m like him in my own eyes. I don’t have an identity; if someone were to ask me who I am, I wouldn’t know how to answer. I’m a person, but I struggle with assigning even a gender to myself. I’m a biological woman, but I don’t feel like one. It’s not gender dysphoria because I don’t feel like a man, either. But something a little further down the road. I don’t feel like a woman because I don’t feel like a person at all. At best, I can describe my experience up to this point as watching the world through a lens, like a movie that I’m witnessing.

I dissociate so often that I can’t remember most of my past and don’t even know when it’s happening. Others around me can’t pin-point when it occurs either. I’m really good at switching on auto-pilot. I’m existing at this point, not thriving or living. I’m usually okay with this.

Occasionally, the cracks deepen and the emotions seep out a little. Like this morning. I think it’s been about a decade since I’ve written my emotions down like this. As a kid, I had tons of journals and treated them as the friend I never had: something to keep all my secrets.

I still don’t have friends. The closest I have to this is Jerry. Everyone else is an acquaintance. But I don’t even view Jerry as a friend, or really a person. But I don’t say this out of spite or hatred, or anything malevolent. I think it’s just due to my morphing him as part of my weird way of viewing life through a gaussian blur filter. I know he’s a living, breathing individual and yet somehow, I see him as just another extension of myself. I’m still not sure how to explain it, but he’s not real to me anymore.

Once upon a time, he was. Something happened to me between now and then, though. I fought hard for him from mid-2018 through about September of 2019. He really drew me to him, someone who could understand how bleak life really is for some of us and all the depth of pain a person can experience without being able to fully comprehend. Broken to broken, blind leading the blind.

It was a mistake I now see. But not a regretful mistake. Just a natural one, like with everyone else in my past. Tim was a mistake. Chance was a mistake. And every other man and boy before him depending on what age I was.

It’s been a really long time since I’ve come apart like I am this morning. I guess I needed to at some point or I’d lash out again. It was cyclical for a couple years, my emotions. Despite how fucking terrible I felt every waking moment and wanted to end the pain, I could count on it. But I’ve been empty since maybe February of this year. Jerry screamed at me and something inside me snapped. It’s not his fault, I incite anger in others and goad them. But something in breaking him broke me, I think. I’ve been an empty vessel ever since. It’s pleasant not feeling most of the time, but when I do, it’s like I’m crying over the deceased and I don’t know why.

I’ve been hurting a lot lately. I’m upset I can’t remember the good times from exes. Not for any reason in particular other than taking personal inventory of how my brain works. I remember some times from Tom, like us going to the San Francisco zoo for his birthday in 2016 so he could see the bears since they’re his favorite. I remember having a good day and I even have photos saved from that day, but I don’t remember emotionally. It doesn’t feel like that day even existed. I often daydream about being saved by someone and that memory holds the same sensation.

Now he’s divorcing me. I don’t exactly remember where things went wrong, but I know it’s because of me. It was before 2018 when I started to get frustrated with us. He was calm and very nice, but also very cold. I know I got to see a part of him he didn’t allow anyone else to see, something reserved for significant others, and yet we couldn’t speak each other’s love language. His was touch, mine was thinking. He picked the wrong damaged person. My ability to love through touch has been skewed through rape, molestation, and sexual assault before him. Then, the same things happened while I was with him. Once from a man posing as a Lyft driver in 2018 when we had a fight at Pre-Flite on Kati’s birthday. Once in early 2019 when a “friend” from Bakersfield came all the way up to see me under the guise of missing me from high school and as an opportunity to catch up; he instead sodomized me in his hotel then left right after, but not before I offered to buy him dinner. He was antsy the whole time and during dinner, he took a pretend call saying his girls got hurt and he had to drive all the way back home. I tried to make it work logically in my mind, saying that this happens, it’s okay, he didn’t do what I think he just did. But I never heard from him again. Then Tom did it. I don’t think he meant to do it, but I can’t answer that honestly anymore. He had pent up sexual frustration and unfortunately, my experience with the men in my life included that in the form of rape. I know not all men are bad, and I know it’s my fault for picking people like this. But it still hurts. Right after I moved out, summer of 2019 when we separated, we got drunk at Burning Barrell. I was too much to drive, so he took me back to his place where I promptly blacked out. A few hours later I woke up undressed but not remembering how that happened. I was disoriented because I didn’t remember the drive home and it terrified me for a moment as I didn’t recognize his room already, though it was maybe only a month after I moved out. I panicked and put two-and-two together, feeling violated by my own husband and his sad confusion as he apologized. I know he didn’t mean it. I think. But I wailed and sobbed and felt robbed all the same.

I’m the most stable I’ve ever been as of this year. I lost almost 50 pounds, cleared my skin, and stopped drinking and doing drugs, which were primarily weed and cocaine. And yet, I feel the emptiest I’ve ever felt. I think I’m technically in a relationship with Jerry and I say so because I think he believes that, but we’re not in my mind. I don’t know who he is and I’ve closed away most of who I am because he would scream at it. I hide behind dark humor and anger towards outside sources that don’t matter, like the anti-maskers and the Black Lives Matter protesters, and I live in a world where I’m white but I’m also not entirely, but I’m afraid to feel the way I do because to not support something that I can’t make the emotional space for makes me the evil one.

I can’t help it. I don’t care about police brutality. I don’t care about the conservative agenda and how Trump is admitting to dictatorship if he loses the election. I don’t even care about myself, so how can one expect me to support things outside of what affects me directly?

I have to go back to feeling nothing shortly. Today is Steph’s birthday. I have to collect my innards and mush them back into place and paint my face into something acceptable because to be anything else but cheerful would be selfish. This is not a day for me; that day comes once a year and passes as quickly as it arrives because I don’t emotionally celebrate it. Sometimes, people around me do, but I surely don’t. Every year I get closer to 30, I feel more and more disillusioned and like a failure.

I told myself if I were alive by 30, I’m ending it. I think I still hold that promise to myself. Except I’ve attempted suicide several times now and it hasn’t worked out yet. I’m not afraid of eternal death and don’t believe in any sort of afterlife, but I’m afraid of the pain, then fucking it up, then ending up worse off than I was before – paralyzed, a brainless zombie with no consciousness like those who experience hypoxia, and being unable to finish the job.