Journal Entry #1
Sometimes I feel so big, in a metaphorical sense. As if everything within my life is so magnified, the walls closing in on me. The pressure is almost too much. The feeling is so overwhelming, anxiety starts to swallow me whole. When I feel as though I’m this big, as if everything I do is under scrutiny, I take a step back and think about how I am merely a minuscule piece of the population. I am simply coexisting among millions of other people with lives as big as mine. There are millions of people feeling all different types of emotions, yet all just as intense as mine. Somehow, that feeling is so comforting. That even though there may be things happening in my life that feel detrimental, and are tearing me apart, there are others feeling the same as I do. More importantly, there are people who have felt this before and now live lives that are completely evolved. They too felt like they had reached the end, that they had reached the brink, and now have moved on. They’ve freed themselves from that feeling of impending doom. It forces me to realize there is so much I’ve put behind me and even more that is ahead of me. I can feel myself shrink and the pressure become alleviated. I’m like another car on a busy highway. Driving on my own among others, with people behind me and people in front of me. People by my side and people passing me. Simply coexisting.
Relapse
The deep dark trenches of my past welcome me with open arms
I know this familiar comfort is anything but a safe haven,
Yet I want to feel the hollow emptiness;
All I seem to crave, is to run and let the familiarity comfort me;
Secure me in its ominous embrace
The bony grip clenching onto my wrists; piercing my skin and leaving behind bruises Bruises as deep of a violet as my fingertips during my temporary winter
Such a cold and bitter winter, but once the throbbing agony subsides, what's left is numbness;
Like children making snowballs; compressing the glistening white powder together the way I compress my feelings and deepest thoughts into the pit of my empty stomach;
Grabbing fistfuls of snow that burn and tingle momentarily, until a warmth prevails and the sensation of biting rawness is ineffectual
These feelings and thoughts lying at the bottom of my hollow core cause a constant excruciating pain,
The desolation desperately trying to escape; attempting to climb through my protruding ribs like a ladder rung by rung
Memories flash before my eyes like blinding lightning, images of a figure nearly as emaciated as this skeleton in my closet, sending chills up my spine
Food is no longer food as it is now numbers;
I gaze upon a plate, and see all that my intellect is capable of contriving:
An indisputably exact calculation and a quantity; either allotted or forbidden
All quantities much too large; numbers much too high
Calories in the triple digits stirred up intense self loathing the way I used to compulsively stir my green tea I hated the taste of just to speed up my metabolism and the way my stomach would stir trying to work after all of the damage,
My malnourished self would pray for forgiveness for letting myself eat knowing full-well I would never forgive myself,
I would clasp my hands so tightly together while kneeling on my bony knees, just praying to God to help me not be so worthless
There is nothing like the satisfaction of seeing a digit on the scale decrease,
Like the feeling of drinking cold water on an empty stomach,
Like the feeling of reaching down my throat expunging all of my mistakes and emotions as if emptying myself of negativity,
Like lightly skimming over your own corners and edges; and being able to feel the hard solid prominence of your own skeletal structure,
Like the weightless sensation, feeling as if you're a piece of paper drifting through the wind freely,
When this is the only way to fulfill your biggest craving
The only way to be anything but empty without guilt;
How do you resist satisfying this particular hunger?
How do you resist striving to win?
Racing to the finish line as if there is a trophy for the the most famished waiting there,
As metallic as the pennies I flipped into wishing wells, wishing with all my might to take up less space than anyone around me
To simply be small, not just small, but the smallest
When you are losing, you are winning
And when you are winning in that sense you're on your way to being one of the ultimate losers
I'm fully aware of this fact yet in the deepest parts of my mind,
crammed with thoughts I do not disclose; being the ultimate loser is also the biggest achievement for there is no farther to go
Rather than weighing 6 pounds less,
You are simply 6 feet under;
You've reached the end, meaning the game is over and you have won because after all,
Losing is winning, and this is a battle I would love to win, and I desperately miss being so close to that finish line
Nails In The Fence
There is a short story I've read, one that has become engrained in my mind
The little boy in the story struggles to control his temper so his father gives him a bag of nails and a hammer
He tells the boy to hammer a nail into the fence each time the boy failed to contain his anger.
As the story continues, the boy hammers in less nails each day, until one day the boy doesn't need to hammer in any
When he proudly informs his father of this, his father says to pull a nail out each day he goes without losing his temper
When all of the nails are removed, his father tells him to look at the holes left in the fence He explains to the boy how the fence will never be the same
He says that it's the same when you say things out of anger, they leave a scar, just like the nails left a scar in the fence
So I sit here now, pondering this story, and the concept of it
I'm asking myself whether you would learn anything from this story
I'm asking myself, if you were to grasp the concept, would you think to look at the scars you left on my heart?
Would you even notice?
Eternally blemished, scars upon scars litter my tarnished heart, burning and tearing it apart
It seems as though this is a lesson you were never taught
But even if you were, would it have made a difference?
Dissociation
You wave your hand in front of my face trying to snap me out of my daze
You say that I seemed hypnotized
When I laugh and nonchalantly say I had spaced out; you don't understand what I truly mean
How would you?
When I used the term spaced out, I meant it in a completely literal way; it was as if my soul and inner self were off in space somewhere
Another little spec of light floating around within the endless universe,
And the shell of me was the one sitting there in a trance
In actuality the real me was off in a whole other world; like I've been separated from my own body
What you don't understand is that you didn't snap me out of my daze
This trance is never ending
I'm a ghost watching my life unfold from the sidelines
I don't even know what team I'm cheering for
I'm constantly looking down at my hands
Moving them, observing them, wiggling my fingers as if they are foreign objects
That's exactly what they feel like
As I sit there, my entire being torn in two,
Part of me on the sidelines watching
The other part empty and going through the motions
I'm left wondering,
What is reality? Is this a dream?
Funhouse Mirrors
The captivating instantaneous thrills of funhouses come to an end fairly quickly
After twists and turns
Dead ends, rolling floors
The short lived journey is always finished off by the funhouse mirrors
The younger me, clad in little braided pigtails, was smiling ear to ear looking into the mirror
Through little toothless gaps of baby teeth Came bubbly giggles
Giggles that filled the funhouse
A bright melody carried into the radiant heat of summer
The younger me skipped away from those funhouse mirrors to the cotton candy stand without a care in the world
She savored the sugary pink clouds with her sticky little fingers; not an ounce of guilt
After a while though, the funhouse mirrors didn't stay in the funhouse
They followed me
Every mirror I look into is a funhouse mirror
I stand here now looking into the warped reflection
This distorted image staring back at me
Giggles do not fill this room and I won't skip happily away
I'm staring at this false perception, picturing the cotton candy; those pink clouds of sugar
Imagining I can feel the warmth dissolve on my tongue
Taste the sweetness without the guilt
I stare at the mirror and feel nostalgia wash over me
It's a sad reminder of golden days that have turned to gray, and of bubbly giggles turned to sobs
The kind of sobs where your throat is strained and you've run out of tears to cry
The kind where you're left gasping for air, struggling to fill your lungs
I feel that little vein right above my right eyebrow throb from the pressure of clenching my eyes shut so tight
Desperately trying to protect myself from that warped image in front of me
If only funhouse mirrors would stay in funhouses
Anxiety’s Perspective: The enthralling exploits of shapeshifting
I am a clock; constantly ticking
I dwell in "what ifs"
I am fascinated by the splendor of hypothetical situations
Velocious heartbeats
Fists clenched so tight that knuckles turn white
I'm like a held breath that never gets released
I'm the butterflies fluttering in stomachs
The electric feeling surging through bodies
All the way to the tips of fingers from the tickling core of chests
I am a clock; my ticking is constant
You will grow accustomed to my shape shifting
I am here to stay
Your Fists Of Words
You played with my emotions like a little rag doll
You grabbed right onto the red braids not even caring enough to see that its little pink cheeks were wet with tears
You made me feel as though I was not good enough
As though I did nothing for you
You made me feel like I was so lucky to have someone like you who loves me
You continuously told me that I was lucky you even want me
You told me that no other guy would ever want someone like me
I believed you; I let every single word you said run through my mind.
I gripped onto each word like a leech
You drained me of my worth and beat me down to nothing with your fists of words
If only emotional abuse scarred my skin the way physical abuse did
Maybe then you'd see that your words and your demeanor are the reason why I was so broken
Maybe if your patronizing statements bludgeoned my skin
The way a punch would leave spots of purple and blue on my tender flesh, you'd notice how much you hurt me
You watched me burn like a cigarette to ash You picked up my heart made of glass and threw it against the concrete
You told me that it was my fault you threw it
Redundant apologies; you told me you were sorry
You glued all of the little glass pieces together and promised things would be different
With hesitation I handed you my mangled heart
The way your eyes flickered with malevolence when you looked at me while gripping my fragile heart was a punch to the gut; the impact so forceful I felt the wind knocked out of me
In that moment the feeling of regret was suffocating
You threw it down so hard the sound of breaking glass was ear piercing
You stomped on it until all that was left were shattered pieces
This time I picked up those pieces and put them together on my own
I've built walls of steal around my healing heart that are impenetrable
You took a piece of me with you when you broke me but now I am making myself whole without you
I am immune to the touch of your manipulation and I've learned how to block those punches
I am now the ruler of my own land;
Valleys of skin, mountains of bone, rivers of blood, and waterfalls of tears
Clouds of thoughts, and blooming flowers of emotions
This is my land and never again will I accept for someone to take that away from me