It’s the end of the world as we know it…

…and I feel fine.

Don’t get me wrong, life is as dreadful as ever from an economic perspective (worse, if that’s even possible) but at least I’m not dealing with a ton of post-traumatic bullshit lately.

Inevitably, though, it will surface again and I’ll need to have a space to write about it again. I’m glad this space is here for me when that day comes, but until then there’s not really much point in trying to regularly update it.

I was never here to make a name for myself, like some bloggers. I’m okay with the concept of it happening, but I’m also perfectly content with the idea of being just another face in the crowd. It doesn’t much matter to me that the world sees my story, only that it is available to be seen should someone need to hear it and know they are not alone, and assuming I feel like sharing.

That said, don’t expect me to update anytime approaching frequently. There’s so much more to say, but it will come out when it needs to and not a moment before.

Side note, I’m writing fiction again. It’s nothing particularly original, but damn it, it’s something. And that’s more than I’ve managed for years.

Guess who still doesn’t have a fucking job.

Yyyeeeep.

So I’m still under dire financial stress and haven’t posted anything in months. Yay me.

Here, have a cross-post from a forum I lurk and occasionally post in.

/appeases non-existent readers, and I suppose any existent ones that are likely a grand fluke of the cosmos (the fact that they read this, not the fact that they exist) as well

TW: anything you see in the listed tags/categories, as usual.

I always go kind of psychotic in the fall/winter. Seven years ago as of Nov. 14th I was forced into a mental hospital for a week, and my PTSD-like symptoms always get much worse around this time of year, some years persisting frequently as early as September and as late as February. (Now that I mention it, I wonder if Seasonal Affectiveness Disorder might have something to do with it too, but then I lived in the wacky daylight times of Alaska from June to December one year and didn’t have any problems that weren’t perfectly explainable by other things, so probably not.)

Funnily enough, the actual week itself wasn’t that bad. I had a few related problems back in September, was fine through most of October, and was antsy throughout the first two weeks of November. The 14th and 15th were really bad (the fifteenth was my father’s birthday, which has always compounded things, and I couldn’t bring myself to call him until the day after), but I made it through the 16th – 21st with relatively few problems.

Dec 1st was my half birthday (I’m one of those weird people who always celebrates it, or at the very least privately notes it) and it was then or maybe the day before that my brain randomly started unravelling again, probably assisted by extra hormones from my then-impending doom — I mean, period. <.<

I keep seeing flashes in my mind of that place. Very, very brief flashes, usually, triggered by anything or nothing at all, usually consisting of sterile white/off-white walls, light blue hallways, dark green doors, tarred-shut windows, a decapitated basketball pole (it’s a long story) and/or an overwhelming sense of being trapped/claustrophobia. I have a nagging sense of everyone else around me being slightly (or blatantly) off-kilter, suggesting that maybe I never actually left and I’ve simply lost my marbles to the point that I’m either in a coma/very successfully deluding myself into thinking I’m not still trapped in there. It pretty much goes without saying at this point that I’ve been having panic/anxiety attacks multiple times a day.

And then to top it all off, there’s the nightmare I had last night. The context isn’t important, only that this guy was in it. Stark naked and staring at me with a disgusting lustful smirk. Sporting his erect man-part, the exact look of which I had successfully managed to block from my mind until now. All these years of safety from that particular memory, no more. And then he was speaking to me, and then climbing on top of me while I was trapped in the cabin space of a very small truck, and –

I woke up to my fiancé cheerfully talking to our cat, and he didn’t immediately understand why I freaked the hardcore FUCK out and curled up against the wall when he tried to hug me and tell me how beautiful I was after I woke up with a theatrical you’d-think-this-only-happens-in-b-list-horror-movies-with-d-list-actors-but-some-people-actually-do-wake-up-from-nightmares-like-this gasp. <_<

So, uh, yeah. That about covers it. All in all, I am having a rather miserable time of it lately. >.<

Thought of the Day

Arguing with Christians over Facebook is really difficult when you’re trying to walk a line in between “not lying and saying I’m a Christian” and “not admitting I’m not a Christian, having my family stumble upon it, and getting the financial help I so desperately need right now pulled out from under me.” Augh.

I haven’t written anything lately because, frankly, I’ve got bigger shit to worry about. I am poor as fuck right now due the the fiancé lacking a job and having difficulty getting another one in this economy. I’m spending most of my time hovering on a tightrope above the pit of depression, desperately trying to keep myself thinking happy thoughts.

Obviously exploring my past does not bring up happy thoughts.

So, don’t expect anything until he gets a fucking job. (Not that much of anyone was dutifully reading this and expecting more anyway. You are not popular yet, self, and that is probably a good thing.)

Charade

Best to keep things in the shallow end,

‘Cause I never quite learned how to swim.

- “Blue”, A Perfect Circle

I haven’t posted anything in a while. Sometimes, I just need to ignore the fact that I have Issues with a capital I to work out, y’know? (And then there was the fact that there was a period of a few days where WordPress just wasn’t working for me for some strange reason and I kind of stopped checking to see if it was fixed after a while. Still don’t know what the problem was, but it is apparently fixed now, so I’m inclined to think it doesn’t matter at this point.)

I’d like to say I’ve at least been doing a lot of thinking in my absence, but the truth of the matter is that I have spent most of my time away from this blog ignoring my problems, both my chronic and short-term ones.

But there is one thing that’s been floating underneath the surface lately. I have this terrible tendency to make friends with people, and then ditch them the moment I feel like I’ve let them see too much of my vulnerabilities. This has happened countless times before, but I’ve never quite been able to make the leap from self-awareness to self-understanding on that particular front. That is to say, I am aware that I have this problem, but fuck if I know why I do it or what I need to do or learn to change it.

All too often, it is easier for me to simply… go somewhere else, start anew, with new people with whom I can create myself in whatever image I choose. Everything begins fine and dandy, and perhaps on some level I’ve convinced myself that I am that new person, that person I might aspire to be who either isn’t a total headcase or who has incorporated her headcase issues into her persona in such a way that it becomes a strength rather than a liability. Inevitably the real, vulnerable, unsure, stuttering me starts leaking out after a while of this charade, and I flee somewhere else to start the process all over again.

For some reason it is incredibly difficult for me to be genuine with people other than my fiancé. (Which isn’t to say that I’m a compulsive liar, because I’m not.) In my head I imagine how I’d like to respond to a given situation. But I never do it, because when it comes time to respond I am either incredibly meek or incredibly callous, depending on how high my mental walls are that day. Or, I am the strong super-survivor who dispenses good advice that I tend to not actually follow. Maybe I need to find a way of interacting with people that incorporates all of these aspects of myself, and not make myself into a one-dimensional caricature of myself and run away when that caricature fleshes out more and more closely resembles an actual human being.

And that’s where I hit that colossal brick wall, because I don’t know how. I’m too used to running, literally or metaphorically. And it’s probably why I haunt the internet so much, because it’s so goddamn easy to just drop everything and run somewhere else. And nobody cares enough to follow you.

Maybe this has something to do with why I took a hiatus from here. I was getting too vulnerable in one spot. Time to move somewhere else. Which doesn’t even make sense, because pfft, who has any sense of dedication to keeping up with this particular corner of the internet? One, two, maaaaaaaybe three other people? That instinct to flee somewhere else directly contradicts my desire for this to be a place for me to grow enough that I can handle helping other people grow, too. I’d like to be a therapist someday, and the idea I’ve been toying with in my head is this fantasy of helping other people who have been hurt like I have, and seeing them grow, and shaping their experiences into a tool that helps them be stronger, kinder, wiser people than they were before. But I recognize that before I can really, truly help anyone else, I need to fully come to terms with my own baggage. And I can’t do that just yet. Many of the things I’ve written here so far are things I have never mentioned anywhere else, aloud or otherwise. Many more things exist in my head, stories that I want to, need to share before I stand a chance of ridding myself of their negative impacts. It doesn’t help that I have the kind of flashbacks that discourage actively working through my issues. Thinking about my past exacerbates my post-traumatic symptoms, but burying my past doesn’t let me grow as a person, and doesn’t help me understand why I’m suddenly shaking and dizzy because of something that someone did that should be a perfectly normal fucking occurence, why I avoid certain things that normal fucking people don’t have problems doing, why I see flashes of situations, people, places that make me feel ill in the deepest, soul-shattering sense of the word, why sometimes I wonder if maybe I’m in a coma in the mental hospital I was forced into, and everything and everyone around me is so broken and crazy because it’s all been manufactured by my broken and crazy brain, and if that’s the case, how do I wake up? Do I even want to wake up? Am I still in that living nightmare?

People get exposed to certain thoughts of mine like that, and it’s no wonder I shut them out. People have a tendency toward pity, toward giving unwanted advice, toward doling out fucking “inspirational” religious quotes (completely trampling over my desire to not deal with religious bullshit, because hello, guess what, I’ve been pretty brutally browbeaten by people who would use their religion as an excuse to control me, who used their religion to justify abusive behaviour, etc. And I will have none of it. Ever.) So few people simply sit back and listen, without judging, without attempting to give advice, without giving me that bullcrap “I’m sure things will get better” optimism.

Maybe I’ve set the friendship bar too high, expecting non-broken people to understand people who come from a broken background, who have broken thoughts. Maybe that superficial shit of acquaintanceship is all I’ll ever be able to achieve with the privileged “normal” people with privileged “normal” ranges of experience.

Maybe the only reason I haven’t run from my fiancé just yet is because he, too, comes from a broken background and carries the baggage of  fucked-up experiences and the resulting PTSD.

…I didn’t mean to ramble on like this. Once again, I don’t really have a pretty little bow to tie on this post, to knot all my jumbled thoughts together, because from the very beginning I had no idea where this post was going to go. I’ve let it become this lovely little patched-together Frankenstein monster, and no, I don’t really care if it makes sense or has an understandable flow. It is what it is, and I’m posting it now before I succumb to the urge to self-censor and edit and make it all make sense. <_<

The Quintessential Hick – In Which Hick Makes a Phone Call

So, recently I remembered that, hey, I have a blog elsewhere that dates back to approximately three and a half years ago. I was still living with my parents when a large portion of my posts were written. Almost none of it is happy or optimistic. I’ve been reading it in bits and pieces over the last week or so, and it is… extraordinarily painful to read. A lot of it is very vague, though — rarely did I describe in detail things that happened, only clues here and there that I can still pick up on. Mostly, I detailed how I felt, or mentioned waking up from nightmares about things in my past that I beat around the bush on.

And then, here and there, I find things that cut me to the quick — a detailed account of a specific altercation in all its gruesome glory. Now that I’m out of those situations, I wish I’d written more of these kinds of entries, because I still feel the mental blockades over my mind. There’s so much that I’ve had to just plain ignore in order to survive to this point. There’s so much in my head that I don’t know what was real and what was something I told myself to keep myself sane. For frell’s sake, I was only able to admit to myself in no uncertain terms that I had been raped about eight weeks or so ago, when I stumbled upon Fugitivus.

 

One of the most striking things to me is how often I was having panic attacks. That’s not what I was calling them then, but that’s what I recognize they were now. And they were more often, more out-of-nowhere, and more fierce than I have them now. There were times where I would completely black out for hours because I was just in that frakked-up a mind state.

One of the more well-described instances was of something I only remember very vaguely aside from what was written in the blog post: After I had been not dating Hick for about four months, he called me and tried to guilt trip me into getting back together again. The post is a testament to the fact that I did on some level realize that everything he’d done to me was not right, but I still didn’t really “get it” completely.

What the flying fuck just happened? Come to think of it, why did I pick up the phone in the first place? I’m alone in the house, after all — no parents to ask questions. I suppose I was feeling in a unusually nice mood at the time, or something. o_O

At any rate, I’m thoroughly regretting it now. The first time Hick called was pleasant enough — as close to pleasant as phone calls with him can get, anyway. He hinted that he wanted to see me, I hinted that I had plans (I’m going to be very, very busy being an internet junkie all weekend. <_<;; ). He asked what kind of plans I had, I hinted that I was spending time with ‘the same guy as before’. >.>; (Well, I am; I just didn’t mention that it wasn’t time spent in-person.) At which point he went all melancholy and we said goodbye.

So, I thought I’d thrown him off for another, oh, say, two hours before Mr. More-annoyingly-clingy-at-inconvenient-times-than-Saran-wrap tried to call and chat, mainly about himself of course, again.

Try two minutes.

So. Yeah. He calls again, and rather, eh, blurts out something along the lines of “I’m still in love with you [No you aren't, you're too young and immature to understand what love is - you, my friend, aren't in infatuation, even -- you're in lust. With me, no less; I'm not sure if I find that more disgusting, or more amusingly childish.] and I’ve been seriously depressed for the last four months [When have you ever not been 'depressed' when you want something from me you're not getting? Besides, four months? You counted? o_O] and I’ve tried to kill myself, like, four times already. [And you failed, all four times? A shame you're not quite dumb enough to completely lack the -instinct- of survival that tends to be what screws up most suicide attempts. Close, but not quite.] And every time I call you, it’s to stop me from killing myself. And I know you’ve moved on, but I just had to tell you anyway.” [First of all, Hick, that's just pathetic. Second of all, I don't care. I gave you far too many chances for my own good, and look where you took things. For fuck's sake, look where the fuck you took things, Hick. Take a fucking good, hard look back. How much did you whine and guilt-trip me into things before I started getting the self-confidence to deny you? Yeah. Yeah, you, you fucking asshole. That was all you.]

What I ended up saying aloud was something along the lines of, “Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Hick.”

Him: *whine* *moan* *guilt-trip* *emo* *lust*

Me: “Again, I’m sorry to hear that. I suppose it’s understandable after going out for, what was it, two and a half years or something like that? [Yeah, that self-confidence took a hell of a long time to kick in.] It’s almost to be expected, Hick. And of course things would be easier for me; you know how I don’t easily get attached to people or things.” [Especially when they're total lust-filled assholes who couldn't control the hormones and shit of their fifth limb to save their life.]

Him: *moans* *complains* *guilt-trips*

Me: “It’s fine, Hick. Don’t worry about it.”

This went on in a repeating cycle for a while until finally finally finally:

Him: “Well, I guess I’ll call you later tonight, then.”

Me: [You'd sure as hell better not!] “Bye, then.” *click*

*shudder* What the fuck… I… just…. gah. It’s not even worth my time thinking over any longer. But goddamn bloody hell, he needs to get the fuck over himself. And perhaps more importantly, me. o_O

The Quintessential Hick – In Which Hick Fakes a Disability for Attention

You’re not a prince
You’re not a friend
You’re just a child
And in the end
You’re one more selfish lover

- “Misery Loves Company”, Emilie Autumn

In this post I mentioned a little about my old high school boyfriend/abuser, Hick. Hick was the epitome of an attention seeker. He would say or do the most ridiculous things to try to suck more affection and adoration out of his friends, or out of me. He also had a thing for stalking me.

When I was eighteen, I got a text from the number of someone who was at the time a mutual friend (I’ll call him Derik), who knew that I was no longer speaking to Hick. He wanted to know where I was living these days, so we could catch up on things.

I shouldn’t have told him, and on some level I knew that, but depression and loneliness can go a long way toward making someone make bad decisions just to feel like they have a companion again.

Early the next morning, I got another text, something along the lines of, “Hey, I’m here, and I brought someone who wanted to see you!”

Oh boy.

I’m not sure what part of my frakked-up mind thought it would be a good idea to leave my dorm room, sit in the common area with them, and try to play nice. Truth be told, I was never even particularly fond of Derik, probably because he was almost as creepy as Hick. I do know I hadn’t even admitted to myself that Hick had raped me yet — that realization wouldn’t come until years after I was serially raped and abused by a second guy. All I knew on a conscious level was that he was a super creepy stalker who was probably going to try to pressure and guilt trip me into getting back together with him and/or having sex, and I hated his guts beyond all reason and was probably going to have to restrain myself from kicking him in the nuts as a greeting instead of saying hello like a normal person.

I’m not going to bother embellishing this with much dialogue, since it was so long ago and I don’t remember a lot of what was said. I do remember there being a lot of awkward silence while we stared at each other from our respective overstuffed chairs. When there wasn’t awkward silence, there was awkward small talk. By this time it was blatantly obvious that Derik texting me to “catch up” was entirely Hick’s idea, and Derik was meant to be Hick’s wingman.

Time to back up a little further for a second: My relationship with Hick was an off-and-on thing spanning three or four years. Every single time, I was the one to break things off with him, and every single time, he wheedled me and guilt tripped me and begged and cried and threatened to commit suicide and told everyone how utterly depressed he was without me and how he’d never get over me until I finally got back with him. I didn’t have the self confidence to think I could find someone better than him, and with my home life as rocky and miserable as it was, I think having some sense of stability was something I desperately needed, even if that meant I was trading my right to not be coerced into sexual acts or flat-out ignored when I said “no” for the stability of a long term relationship.

At the time of this unwanted reunion with him, I had staved him off successfully for about a year and had watched him get ridiculously desperate during that time. He would come to my window in the middle of the night while I was still with my parents and throw his shoe at it until I opened it, just to say he loved me and was sorry for whatever it was he did wrong and would I please be his girlfriend again, or else life wasn’t worth living and he might as well just kill himself right now. I watched him briefly acquire a new girlfriend, just to constantly compare her to me and put her down for not being me. I watched him kiss his girlfriend in front of me in a hilariously staged fashion, all in an effort to make me jealous and realize that I needed him. (The girl in question obviously didn’t enjoy any of this. Luckily for her, she broke up with him for good after a few months of his behaviour instead of taking a few years.) In every blog he ever wrote, no matter the subject, he would throw in a mention of me and how sad he was that I wasn’t talking to him, and that I would always be his [pet name].

So when Derik told me while Hick was off getting a soda that Hick had been recently diagnosed with schizophrenia, I had ample reason to believe I was being lied to. True, most schizophrenics are diagnosed in their late teens/early 20′s, but something just seemed awfully fishy about the timing. (I later confirmed via the friend I mentioned in my previous post who briefly dated Hick that no, he had never actually been diagnosed with schizophrenia, just depression. The lying bastards.) Hick returned with his soda and started pressuring me to relocate to my dorm room, or somewhere more “private”. I resisted. He pressured me to allow Derik to leave and pick him up later, so we could “catch up on things alone”. I resisted. Derik tried to leave anyway, and I informed him in no uncertain terms that I would be going back to my room and locking Hick outside if he did so.

About this time, Hick started hosting a pity party, with Derik and I as the honoured guests. He asked me why I was so hostile to him, asked what he had done wrong, and what had he ever done to deserve my treatment of him? Why was I so cold to him when he loved me, always had and always would, whether I liked it or not? (!! Big honkin’ red flag, right there.) And with every heartstring he tried to pull, I grew more and more non-responsive, until he started what Derik theatrically referred to with, “Oh great, now he’s going schizo.”

Hick’s interpretation of how a schizophrenic person should act was more or less pulled from the more obvious symptoms of Gollum. That is to say, he sat in a chair and had a conversation with himself about how anguished he was that he wanted me back (occasionally glancing over at me to see how I was reacting). At one point, he got up and walked around. At another point he threw his soda bottle. It resembled a child throwing a temper tantrum more than anything. It was plain as day — this was another one of his bids for attention, nothing more. And as someone who has a few mostly invisible disabilities of my own, it was downright insulting. He was bullshitting, and I knew it, and he knew it, and Derik knew it, and even with everything else he’d done, I couldn’t believe he would sink this low.

“You should take him home if he’s like this,” was all I said to Derik, in my typical non-confrontational manner. I think they both realized I wasn’t buying it, as this was when Hick abruptly stopped talking to himself.

“Maybe we can come back tomorrow, if he’s feeling better?”

“No, I have class tomorrow.”

Somehow, they let it end at that, and left. I got a text the next day from Derik apologizing and asking if we could maybe try meeting up again sometime, which I never responded to. It was the last time I heard from Hick or anyone in cahoots for almost a year, thankfully, but it was far from the last.

There isn’t a neat way for me to wrap this tale up. Life doesn’t have 90′s sitcom endings, where everything is wrapped up in a pretty little bow and everything goes back to being okay except for some HILARIOUS thing that goes wrong that starts the next episode. There was absolutely no excuse for his behaviour, and that’s about all there is to say on the matter. It was an ableist, emotionally manipulative, terribly asshatted way to get attention/affection/sex, and that’s why this story pretty much wraps Hick up perfectly.

Ethical Dilemma

So, turns out I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who is dating Hick. (As in, my high school abuser/rapist/”boyfriend”.) I have in my possession her full name and perhaps her phone number, thanks to a little bit of Facebook sleuthing. Also, her twitter account that hasn’t been updated in over a year but that she might still access to read other people’s shit.

I would really like to inform her that she’s dating a terrible excuse for a human being, because I feel like it’s the right thing to do, and if she already has a vague suspicion that he’s a terrible excuse for a human being, hearing someone else say it might just give her the push she needs to get out of that situation.

However, if I do that, I run the risk of her being delusional and thinking that he is not even remotely abusive (which I assume he still is, because a friend of mine dated him briefly eight months or so ago and broke up with him after he continually tried to guilt trip her into sex. People like him really never change, I don’t think). If she thinks he’s completely normal and is totally in love with him for whatever fucked up reason, I fully expect the fact that I tried to contact her to get to him, and then… he’ll have my contact info. Major fucking problem.

So, I could set up a new twitter account, access it through a proxy, and contact her via it. But considering she hasn’t posted on it in over a year, I’m probably not going to get through to her that way. And even if I could, and even if I’m safe from having my personal info revealed that way, he’s probably going to know who told her that her beloved is evilspawn and she should gtfo while she still can, because he really doesn’t have all that extensive of a dating history. And… he knows where my family lives. And I have a younger sister who still lives there. And… you probably see where I’m going with that particular train of thought.

She… seems happy from what very little I can dig up on her, but god, so did I when I was dating Hick, at least where my relationship was concerned. Frankly, I had bigger fish to fry with my crappy home life and I didn’t have the energy left over to consciously realize that I was in deep shit in other ways, too.

I’d like to contact her if I could somehow know she’d be receptive, but it’s not worth risking my safety or that of my sister. So… what the fuck do I do?