#(also: personally I take anything Gaga did or said at that time with a grain of salt)

[queerbauten]

Speaking of Gaga, something I've found really strange is that, to the best of my knowledge, she hasn't said anything about Palestine or Israeli since... 2014? I know she's been a lot less active on social media recently, but she didn't even post a generic "that's sad :(" when Israel declared they were going to commit genocide openly war on Hamas? Like, she has not spoken about the situation at all. It seems to have bypassed her radar completely

[grandmaster-flashraf]

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This is just me trying to get all of my emotions out of my person so I can focus on studying for my last 2 exams this semester so if you read this and feel any sort of emotion at all whatsoever then yay I did a thing. I'm literally just venting but I don't want to just write it down and I know writing some fkn tumblr post about it is corny as fuck but oh well I don't want to write it on paper only to throw it in the trash. So basically on February 4th 2017 I tried to overdose on Tylenol because I just couldn't deal with my life anymore and frankly I'm feeling the same way now as I did on that day but maybe getting these feelings out will somehow get rid of it. When I was younger I thought I was just above relationships, that they weren't for me at all and I couldn't see any future version of me being in a relationship with a girl. I thought kissing and the idea of sex was nasty unlike people around me who in grade 6 were already turning into little horny animals. I was so high and mighty in my own mind thinking hah I won't be distracted by girls I don't like them at all screw relationships. Then I realized; oops, I like boys, not girls. But being in a middle eastern Muslim family didn't exactly make that easy and so I kinda bottled up that feeling. Apparently I wasn't very good at it though because supposedly it showed in the way I walked and talked and carried myself as a person. My dad had his suspicions and for some reason thought my brother had sexually harassed me which is genuinely disgusting to me especially considering that this is my only brother now that upon hearing about this part of me didn't try to make me change it. So anyways he asks me about this and if I'm gay and I deny both because the first is outright disgusting and the other I'm not ready to share. He basically pushes me further into the closet when he tells me that if I'm gay he can just take me back to Egypt and I can marry a girl there and have a family. Oh I forgot to mention this was when I was like 12 or 13, so needless to say I didn't take it very well. So there's me just trying to get good grades in elementary school because, you guessed it, I was (and frankly still am) an overweight socially awkward child. All I had was a slight predisposition to be intelligent. So life goes on and I do make friends and form bonds with people, but never get into any relationships. Then high school was a thing and I went to a high school where I knew like 5 people going into grade 9. That was probably the most uneventful year of my life until I fall in love with theatre at the end of the year and decide to start doing improv in grade 10 and throughout high school I find joy in it. I make more friends and become closer with the people around me, but still not really impressing anybody at home with anything I do. My love of performing was pushed down by my doctor dad, and when I came home from an actual scripted show I performed and won the competition that night, all I get is the remark that I can focus on school again because all this stupid theatre stuff is over. It's funny how I became so interested in something so looked down upon by my parents, and honestly a huge part of me loved performing and I definitely liked that something I loved to do also pissed off my dad. I also perform at a coffee house event and when my parents find out that the funds were going to support LGBT homeless youth my mom tells me they deserve to be homeless because they might as well have killed somebody and my dad just outright gets mad. So then I'm deciding to go to university to study math, and I was pretty good at it coming to the end of high school. I get accepted to an actuarial science program and I tell my parents I want to accept my offer, but to no avail. They make me take another offer to a science program. I enjoy science, but I had just put in so much effort into researching actuarial science programs and learning about future career opportunities that having my dream thrown under the bus was gut wrenching. They also make me move into an apartment in the same building as my grandma, a 30 minute bus ride from campus. But I'm excited because at least in this city I can just be myself. Even though I had uncles and aunts also living in that city, I was going to take the opportunity to just be myself and not hide my sexuality. I came out to a handful of my close friends in high school, and honestly with the way I was acting I was overcompensating for the fact that I hadn't actually just come out by liking stereotypical gay guy things like Beyoncé and lady gaga and that's a part of why I did theatre too. But regardless, my dad must've predicted that I wanted to be myself when moving to this city because he told me one of his doctor friends said that I'd been fucking guys all throughout high school, keep in mind that I literally never went to a single party because I was barely ever allowed out of the house after dark. He told me that if I was gay I should just wait until he's dead because this would kill him anyways. That he'd never be able to look any other family member in the eye when he has a gay son. That I should watch out in this city because I have other family members in the city who know people and if word gets out everybody is going to know. I don't know to this day what he expected to come of that conversation. He wanted me to change the way I walked, talked, and moved my hands around while I talked, but that person was the one that got accepted to the every university he applied to. I had adhered to every single rule put on me my entire life, and still being me just fucking wasn't enough. We had this conversation while my mom was visiting my sister and her newborn kid, and this was also the day before I was going to drive to this new city and move the rest of my things into this apartment. I had sushi the next day with a close friend of mine who knew I was gay but didn't tell her about what my dad told me. I don't go home from university until one of my other siblings is getting married. I'm the youngest of 7, and when my parents got married they each had 3 kids of their own and they together just had me, so there's a pretty big age gap between my siblings and I. So this brother of mine is getting married over thanksgiving weekend in October and I'm stuck with my family in a hotel trying to study for midterms but being forced to do a bunch of wedding stuff because the wedding planner just disappears as usual. That whole weekend just stressed me out, but I still did okay on my midterms. It wasn't until around the end of October where I went home for 2 days because we had a study break from school Thursday/Friday followed by the weekend. My dad asks me that weekend if I can promise him that he'll see me get married to a girl and have a child before he dies and I just agree and brush it off but I know what his intentions were with that comment. So I leave home early and head back to my apartment because I'm not putting up with that kind of bullshit anymore. But it had to manifest into something so I started self harming. Wow cutting yourself in 2016 so edgy. But anyways I literally just couldn't function anymore so I went to a 24 hour crisis centre in my city and just spill all of this information on to one of the counsellors there. I forget her name, but she was an older white woman who was very aware of the fact that she couldn't understand the cultural implications of my situation, but I still wanted to just try and talk it out. I have it in my head that I just need to become a doctor or successful whatever and then tell my family I'm gay and at that point when I'm financially independent they can't touch me. I confide this is one of my friends from high school and he tells me that he cares about me but can't help me from where he is and that I need real help. He also tells 2 of my other best friends from high school about my situation. All of them knew I was gay but they were so genuinely worried about me that I just carried myself on. So the end of my first academic term comes around and one of my best friends calls me telling me she'd overdosed. I was in the library studying for my calculus final so I panic and call somebody else close to her to go get her asap. I don't know how I managed to stay calm and get her help while simultaneously getting the highest mark I've ever gotten on an exam the next day while thinking about one of my friends being in a hospital without me there. I just finish my exams and I don't actually end up seeing her over the winter break. I say break with a grain of salt because it definitely wasn't a break for me. I left my car at my apartment because there wasn't space for it with all my siblings visiting, so I couldn't leave the house for basically 3 weeks. On top of that I didn't have a room to stay in, just a mattress in the basement next to some gym equipment nobody used. My dad tried to make me use it, and came down multiple times a day to tell me I should use it instead of laying around all day. I'm pretty sure that this lack of a break is what really pushed me over, but it was still only December heading into 2017. I was exhausted from finals and wanted to relax, but life didn't award me such luxury. I headed into the second academic term mentally exhausted, still didn't go home at all. I had a chem midterm Friday February 3rd and then a bio and physics midterm Saturday the 11th. Oh, and another one of my close friends tries to overdose in January, once again I'm the first to know about it and I freak out and call her roommate. She gets the help she needs and because she told me so early they flushed her system fast and she was out of hospital a day later. I feel bad that I don't remember exactly what day it was. So after my chemistry midterm that I studied for the entire week, I tell myself that February 4th is going to be a productive day of more studying for my next two midterms. I did absolutely nothing all day and at around 6 or 7 pm I decide I want to die. But I know I'm too much of a bitch to just take the pills, so I drink some vodka and 30 Tylenol 500mg each. I found something online that said how much Tylenol was lethal, and calculated it based on my body weight how many I needed to take. By the time I was taking the pills I'd sobered up and didn't take enough of them for my weight. I bitched out. Thought I'd be fine and I just went to sleep. I woke up the next morning vomiting bile. One of my high school friends snapchats me something funny, but I ignore it and respond to him telling him what I did. We go to the same university, so he's just a bus ride away. Still, his response is just "wtf why did u do that." And when I respond telling him why, he never opens it. So a few more hours go by and I'm going back and forth between my bed and my bathroom every 20'minutes or so until I message one of my friends I've made here at my university. I tell him what I've done and he does the responsible thing of telling his parents who also live in the city and they call an ambulance. At this point I'm so defeated I give them my address and the ambulance shows up. Nobody sees me get taken out of the building. I forgot a phone charger though, and that was just another mistake I made that day. So I get to the nearest hospital and they ask me if I want my emergency contact to be called. It's my mom, and because I'm 18 I decline. I don't want any family to know I'm there. I have blood work done and they put me on an IV. I'm falling behind on schoolwork by the second but I have my phone so I ask my nurse if she has a phone charger. They don't have any laying around the hospital, but she says I should call a friend and have them come see me. I really regret putting my friends through all that stress. They don't deserve it. I call one of my friends who I've known since elementary school. He lives on campus. I tell him I tried overdosing and I can hear him tear up. I feel bad because I hear people around him so I know that must've been embarrassing. He's one of the three friends who in November knew how I was feeling. I guess he tells my other friend from another school who told him about it, and then this friend calls me, also tearing up. I still remember exactly how he sounded on the phone. He calls the last friend from November who knew how I was feeling, and she's also the one who overdosed back in January. She calls me, and as we're talking my phone dies. She didn't cry at all; she was stronger than me. As my phone dies my friend on campus that I called shows up with my other friend that I Snapchatted that morning. I just feel embarrassed at this point. I'm in a stupid hospital robe and I'm just over exposed while laying on a hospital bed in emerg. They're shocked when they walk in. They start of by just acting normal but eventually the conversation just takes a turn and they're concerned for why I didn't talk to them. I always just felt like a burden on people, I always wanted to be self sufficient. That's where my plan of waiting until I'm financially stable came from. I didn't say that to them. I just say I don't know, and at the time I couldn't formulate any reason why so basically I really didn't know. What I knew is that I had friends to cared about me. After they left, my friend who tried to overdose in December took a bus from her different city to come visit me at 1am. I told her not to come but I'm so glad she did. She sat with me and talked to me like a normal human being, and stayed up all night. I fell asleep in my bed but she stayed up all night doing her psychology work, and I woke up in the morning with a note from her that I still keep on my phone case behind my phone to this day. She had to catch her bus back at 7:30 am because she had class that day, but still she came to visit. I see more and more people that day to ask me questions but it took me until Tuesday to see the psychiatry team. I was feeling better emotionally, but physically just gross. I hadn't showered or changed since Friday or Saturday. My facial hair was nasty too. The first person from the team who sees me is an Indian guy. We connect immediately, and he understands my perspective and the significance of my situation. He was only a student doing his residency though. The other three team members were old white women who basically gave me the decision to stay in the hospital for 2 more weeks or call my family for support and to come out to them officially. One of them even had the audacity to even ask me "do you really think they don't know you're gay." That struck a cord, and to this day I still hate that bitch. But Wednesday I called my brother, the one who my dad thinks made me gay, and I tell him what happened. He calls my parents and starts to drive to where I am but he's farther away than they are, so they get to me first. The first thing my dad says to me is that he knew I was at a high risk for this kind of thing. I thought at the time he meant to OD, but soon after I realized it was still the gay thing. I let him talk and tell me all this bullshit, but he just goes on and on about how put all the gays on an island and we'll die off, how it's not in our genes to be gay, and that this was my choice. He also said that I'm the one who chose the program I went into and chose to live off campus. He said all of this was on me. He and my mom came to this hospital to tell me that everything was in my head. I couldn't believe it. Then my parents asked me who else from my hometown knew so they could "deal with it" whatever that means. They asked me who I was having sex with, and that if my guy friends were really just people I was having sex with. It was the most demeaning experience I've ever had in my life. But my brother showed up and shut it down. I don't know how, but he did. We were speaking in Arabic the whole time, and disagreed entirely on just about everything we talked about in that hospital except for the fact that I needed to leave asap. The next day my parents and brother spoke to the psychiatry team and by some stroke of luck got them to lift my form and let me leave. My mom stays with me for the next 3 weeks and psychiatry sets me up an appointment with a professional at the university to talk to for some follow up. In the meantime I've missed a week of class and have to get my midterms moved from the 11th because I left the hospital Thursday afternoon and no way I could write them in less than two days. Walking on to campus the next day with a doctors note saying I was in the hospital was the most embarrassing moment of my life. I was so out of touch with how to interact with people. I walked up to an academic counsellor to ask her what I needed to do to get my exam moved and missed assignments taken care of and she told me to go fill out a form. While I was filling it out she said "maybe you should ask somebody else next time how this works or just look it up online ahead of time." I had almost burst into tears right there in the academic counselling office but I got everything moved to the next week and tried to make things go back to normal but everybody treated me differently. Only one of my new friends I had made new what happened because he's the one who called the ambulance and I had 5 high school friends who knew. My family was still all over the religion thing and how being gay was just wrong and it not even being a religion thing. My sister called me while I was waiting in the hospital for my parents and brother to come but I was still balling my eyes out to the nurse on duty about it so my sister found out and told me that I shouldn't act on it because we all have to do our best to be good Muslims. I just told the new friends I had made in university that I was sick in the hospital, not that I had actually put myself there. I think I might be more open with them after exams are over because I can't put that burden on them while we're stressed about exams and school. I just feel like utter trash. I'm 3/5 of the way done exams and gotten marks back for 2 courses already, and my marks have dropped another 10% from first semester on top of the 10% I dropped between high school and first semester. I need an 80% average to keep my scholarship for next year and I'm pulling it way too close. I'm a part of the orientation program for first year students over the summer and in the fall, as a way to try and do some good for new students and put an emphasis on letting people know about the importance of getting help when you need it. There's so many on campus resources, but I just didn't go to them. I went through a 2 week period where I just felt like trash and missed my second appointment with the specialist on campus, and I got fined 160 bucks for it, and they treated me like absolute trash for it when I went to pay. "You shouldn't skip these appointments," "playing hookie doesn't get you anywhere." I had barely made it out of my bed to class on day that week because I had a presentation to do which I physically and very visibly shook through but I guess the TA felt bad for me because she gave my group 95% on it. So here I am trying to pull myself together at the end of the semester trying to spill my feelings on to my Tumblr blog that I've had for 6 years that nobody reads from. I might add some screenshots of what I vented to my friends just to make sure those never get lost either. If you read this (which I genuinely know is nobody) then I'm sorry I put you through that. To my best friends in this world I love you so much. My last final exam is this Friday night and finishes at 10pm. Hoping to go home to at least see my mom because my dad is visiting family overseas. I wanted to drive home to see him before he left but he just facetimed me for 2 minutes asking me how I'm doing socially. Socially. As in am I fucking anyone behind his back. The answer is definitely no. I get hit on by 60 year old me. On Grindr and anyone I match on tinder either doesn't message me or if I message them we just have a short conversation before they just ignore me entirely. I needed to get this out of my system though. Out into the world somehow. Oh well. Guess it's time to see how my life goes from here. April 24th 2017