#FAR worse stuff going on in my catholic women's groups

[paula-of-christ]

You know how I said a few days ago that protestant women can be more insane online than Catholic women?

I take it back.

[thistangledbrain]

Day 19 & 20!

Day 19 - “I hate it when...”

As you’ve gleaned from prior posts, I hate it when you forget autism is a developmental disorder and not an intellectual one. We are so. Fucking. Tired. Of being treated as lesser, or like we don’t understand what you’re saying to us.

Outside of the reactions to others’ behavior, though, I have some personal “I hate it when”...I’ve let you into my mind and told you what I appreciate about how my brain works, but there are things I don’t like, for sure.

I hate that personal stressor things trigger a toddler-like need to SHUT DOWN. Like writing this blog, for example...the vulnerability I feel usually leads to a need to go to sleep for a long time, once I’m finished. Or after a long day socializing. I don’t want to talk to anyone, I don’t want to engage my brain anymore, I just need to shut all systems down and sleep. Especially if there’s been a meltdown (meltdown—->shutdown)...and oh boy do I hate meltdowns. They’re really rare, thank dog.

I hate that my executive function is an absolute bag of ass. This is probably the biggest thing I would change. It got infinitely worse when my disability got bad (EDS), for some reason. And it drives me up the damn wall.

I hate my low function days/moments. It’s like my brain just won’t kick into gear, or the gears and wheels are rusty and grinding, & it’s rather anxiety inducing. I usually “hide” on my low days, sometimes in my darkened bedroom, and watch favorite shows or movies, or get lost in a good book - if I can. On low days I find myself re-reading crap constantly because it’s not making any sense, so I’ll even avoid complicated recipes...I have no idea why these days/moments happen, but boy do they piss me off/make me anxious (that’s kind of the same thing for me. My anxiety nearly always manifests as anger). On my low days, you’ll see (if you were a fly on the wall, because I suppress this even around my own family), me walking in tight, anxious figure 8’s and flapping my hands in a distressed way, as I anxiously try to mentally kick my brain into gear. (It doesn’t work, but it IS a little soothing. And my dogs are SO sweet...they gather around me tightly and just seem to know I need them.)

🤷🏻‍♀️ There’s probably more I could expound on that I don’t like, but writing this one has been pretty distasteful. I try not to dwell on things I hate anymore, so I’ve put this entry down multiple times and come back to it when I’m in a decent frame of mind. I think I’m tired of talking about it now, so I’m gonna just stop talking.....

Which is a good segue into Day 20 -

————————————-

“Communication”

Ahh communication. This entry will be long, because I have a lot to communicate LOL....

Personally, I write far more coherently and eloquently than I speak. My brain goes too fast...I often trip over words; my brain’s three steps ahead of what’s coming out of my mouth and I get scrambled sometimes. I can also take the time to think about what I want to say/HOW I want to say it. Like many autistics, I’m a blurter. LOL...I am constantly trying to remind myself, just because I think it, doesn’t mean I have to say it. This gets a LOT of us in trouble...one of my most memorable examples is, I *loudly* blurted “that’s BULLSHIT!!” in a church one time. (I was speaking on how my devout Methodist grandmother, who regularly takes communion at her church, was not permitted to receive communion in a Catholic church, merely because she isn’t Catholic, despite the fact that this woman is all about some Jesus & a devoted churchgoer - not just on Easter and Christmas.) In my defense, it WAS (IS) bullshit. I just didn’t need to practically yell that in church. As you can imagine, it was like a needle scratching across a record & everyone turned to stare. (My poor husband rescued me.) 🤦🏻‍♀️ Sigh. It’s a good idea to keep me out of most church services.

I am rather famous (infamous?) for calling bullshit straight to someone’s face, BLUNTLY. It’s out of my mouth before my brain’s “tact gatekeeper” I’ve spent over a decade trying to train is even half awake at his post (it’s a him because my husband is the one who taught me how to use tact in the first place. And it’s a him because said “gatekeeper” is lazy and falls asleep on the job all the time 😆). Have you ever just blurted your honest thoughts and heard shocked gasps or someone just busts out laughing? Yeah. That happens to me regularly. Or uncomfortable chuckles and someone will blink a few times and say, “oohhhkay, well, you could said that a different way.” (My old response to that was, I’m not responsible for what your reaction is to what I say...you’re in charge of your own feelings. I *understand* now how irresponsible and unfeeling that is, and I try to keep that in the front of my mind, even when I’m frustrated and nearly burning up with the desire to speak my thoughts in their raw form, but this is routinely an area I struggle to adapt to...and I am very sorry when I hurt someone I care about.)

On the other side of this same coin though, this is a trait my friends respect deeply, because I’m not cruel hearted or anything. You always know where you stand with me, and I’m the last person to try and lie to you. I SUUUUUCK at lying. And on the rare times when I do, I usually end up eventually telling on myself (this drove my older stepsister NUTS when we were kids, because she liked to do lots of sneaky things, and I don’t have an inherently sneaky nature LOL...so “DO NOT tell momma” was a *serious* risk for her, if she let me tag along 😂). Lying to someone just feels disgusting. Oily. Shameful. I hate lying. Plus, my short term memory is a grabasstic bag of CRAP, so there’s a good chance I won’t remember the lie and get caught anyway. 🤷🏻‍♀️ My boys also suck at lying or hiding stuff, and generally prefer not to...but I also give them a safe forum to be honest. (I’m sure there’s LOTS of crap I don’t know, but you’d be surprised how much they DO tell me.)

Another thing with me personally is that I go mute sometimes. I’m not being deliberately obstinate. I’m not REFUSING to speak in those moments...sometimes I literally can’t, and the effort of doing so will make me gag, or even projectile vomit. Sounds very dramatic, doesn’t it? It is. (And it annoys the SHIT out of me.) There’s not a fucking thing i can do about it. The movement of my tongue in my mouth will literally begin to trigger my gag reflex, and if I try to power through it, I’m rewarded with my lunch returning to the surface anyway, regardless of my desires, and sometimes rather unexpectedly & violently. USUALLY this happens when I’m uber stressed, but sometimes it seems kind of out of the blue & catches even me off guard. If this happens but I still have something to say, I start texting instead, and explain. Most people - especially my hubby - are very kind when this happens. (I don’t want your pity, I just want you to switch to written communication for a minute until I can figuratively kick the fuck out of the engine in my “speaking center” and get it to work again.) Other times, I will literally get tired of talking. Like my mouth and tongue - and somehow, the “word forming” part of my brain feels physically exhausted (weird, I know, but I also spend the vast majority of my life silent - I am home alone all day, hate talking on the phone, and simply don’t speak much, by choice. So maybe it is actual “mouth fatigue” 😂😂😂 - I’ve stopped eating before because I just got tired of chewing, too, even though I’m still somewhat hungry. 🙄) I am usually *perfectly* happy to keep listening! And I’ll stay engaged in the conversation usually. I am just...done audibly talking. I’ll literally say “my mouth is tired of making the sounds now, but please keep going”...but I think my husband is the only one who doesn’t find this unusual, and rolls with it. It usually happens after a long, animated conversation...instead of winding down, though, it just..stops. If I try to keep going, cue the gagging. I can stay engaged in the conversation if you let me start writing/typing instead of speaking, for my responses. So that’s a “fun” little trait of mine that many neurotypicals find unsettling. Please don’t take it personally. My mouth just doesn’t want to make the words anymore - and I’m probably mostly done adding what I needed to add to the conversation anyway. I’m a great listener when this happens, though. 😆

Communication is a really interesting thing with all of us, because it’s a struggle on one level or another. I will tell you, it’s a frequent topic in my groups. “WHY CAN’T NEUROTYPICALS JUST SAY WHAT THE FUCK THEY MEAN?!?! 😩😩😩” I’m dead serious - you might think, because we’re sensitive (generally), we can’t “handle” it? You’d be so very wrong. What we can’t handle is when you dance around a subject or we have to try and translate what you just said to us (which most of us are not that good at). Just fucking say it! Nine times out of ten, you’ll just get a look of dawning realization and a “oh, shit, okay” response. We can handle it. Just. Say. It. We’ll respect you a lot more in the morning, LOL 😆

I think every autistic has some sort of beef with neurotypicals when it comes to communication (as I’m sure you have yours with us, obviously).

You guys operate under some weird ass rules that we simply don’t understand - especially if you don’t tell us those rules & just expect us to know. Like, if my husband hadn’t patiently taken years to show/teach me how the way I said certain things were hurtful, I would still be in the “yeah she’s cool but she’s kind of an asshole” territory. (I still struggle to grasp this, or at least it still frustrates me....truth is truth, whether it’s an ironclad general fact or your own personal truth - and yes sometimes the truth hurts, but like...I don’t pin any responsibly for that on the truth teller, if that makes sense?)

Working in rescue also helped hone my ability to speak “neurotypically” to others - I work with a LOT of women, and boy do a lot of them NOT appreciate when you bluntly tell them what you think. Men on the other hand....

I know *lots* of autistic women who prefer friendships with men, largely centering around this communication thing. We hurt men’s feelings a little less regularly than other women’s. I know I was like that, until I got a little more used to how I have to modify my communication with most women (but that annoys me, I’m gonna be honest - it annoys my Autie friends, too). The only time I am as starkly blunt as I used to be, is when speaking to my female Autie friends (because they can handle it), or most of the dudes I’m friends with. But if my message is getting “lost in the sauce” and you’re not getting my point, I usually give a frustrated sigh, WARN you that I’m about to tell you flatly what I need to say, because we aren’t getting anywhere, and just say it.

Yes I am the friend who, when you gush on and on about your new back yard bred puppy, talking all about how you’re gonna breed him when he grows up, is gonna flatly say “he’s not breeding quality”, if they’re not. Then I’m gonna ask you why you want to do such a thing, given that you’re aware of the massive load of rescue dogs (PARTICULARLY Great Danes and Cane Corsos) - and probably beat your argument down every step of the way. That doesn’t always go badly though - one of my closest friends was considering breeding their dog, and while it was a beautiful dog, it was not one that should reproduce (from an “improve the breed” perspective). We barely knew each other, but I gained a reputation for being kind but starkly honest...and I knew what I was talking about...and now I have this person’s deep respect, and they have mine (because they listened and did the research I asked them to - and did not add to the breed population). So it’s not *always* a trainwreck, because the people who end up respecting how I communicate, usually end up VERY close friends. AND I WANT THAT IN RETURN, which is refreshing for a LOT of people. I want your dead honesty in return - PLEASE. It’s so much easier for me to process and accept. For example, my house is almost constantly in some sort of disarray. I have one friend who will come in and go, “girl. I almost can’t breathe in here - this clutter is too much”(and then she offers to help me tackle it!!).

Or, fairly recently, “oh my god those curtains are so horrible, I hope you’re getting rid of those when you redo this room.”

“But I MADE those curtains! I love that print!”

“Ugh. No. They’re terrible. Get rid of them.”

My feelings were not hurt in the LEAST (I of course had a flash of “you bitch, I was so excited to find that print and I MADE THOSE, ya jerk” 😂). At first I said, “well you’re just gonna have to suck it up and deal with my shitty curtains, because I like them” 😂, but then as I was redoing the room, I took them down...and it DID look a lot better, so I left them down 😂😂😂....

So I guess my point with all this is: every autie I know deeply wishes you’d just fucking spit it out. We WILL often miss or misinterpret the point if you “fluff” it too much (around my neck of the woods, we call it putting too much gild on the lily, though I’ve never understood that one. Idk if a “gilded lily” is/was ever a thing, why anyone would gild a lily in the first place...LOTS of us struggle with colloquialisms that don’t make literal sense. 😆 Recently a friend was baffled over “shit in one hand and wish in the other and see which fills up faster”, and fully half of the respondents to her post were people baffled by why anyone would shit in their hand - I and a couple others had to explain, and it just ended with them going “well that’s a fucking stupid saying anyway, and wishes aren’t things you can put in your hands, either” 😂😂😂...but I’m from the south, and these things are just part of our vocab. MOST of them are easy to grasp for me, like “nervous as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs”, because I immediately picture it and can grasp the meaning. But others I don’t get - the gilded lily is one LOL)...

We are LITERAL AS FUCK. It’s why we ruin lots of jokes, too. My poor husband is the dad joke king - and I ruin fully 1/3 or more of his jokes by being too literal (which he also finds amusing, so that’s good). Sometimes we realize we’re ruining the joke but we don’t care, because it’s dumb, or we just .... can’t....HELP IT. 😩😂

Jeez, I could almost write all day about autistics and communication LOL!!

But to summarize (and not succinctly, sorry), I guess, for me and many many others...we are often blunt, direct, almost painfully honest, and very, very literal. Your unspoken rules of communication absolutely go over our heads, unless you - yannow - *communicate* and explain them. We’ll probably tell you those rules are stupid and exhausting, but we will TRY and stick to it as best we can. But see, we literally have to think about every single word that comes out of our mouths, because we communicate far more directly than you weird fuckers do. And it is literally actually exhausting. It’s not an easily natural thing for us to adapt to, your weird way of saying things but not saying what you really mean. You’re wasting a LOT of words there, sir, and we are now getting obsessively confused over why you would do such a thing. 😂 It’s also why I keep getting banned from Facebook. My recent one was because I said - in one of my Autie “safe” groups, where I should be able to just say what I mean - that I tend to punch or want to punch people who deliberately startle the shit out of me. We were talking about how stupid April Fool’s Day was, and how we hate pranks. Three of us got banned for 30 days for just...well. Facebook called it “incitement of violence”. 🙄🥺🖕🏼🖕🏼🖕🏼🖕🏼🖕🏼🖕🏼🖕🏼🖕🏼

But I haven’t met - yet, maybe? - an autistic person who is cruel natured - not one of us gets any joy from being a bully type. WE feel everything on a higher level, so we kind of assume you do, too...you might think, “then why are you such an asshole?!”, but it’s simply that we - or every Autie I know, anyway - struggle to grasp how directly communicating your feelings is so fuckin hard or hurtful for y’all. I think anyone struggles to grasp something they themselves don’t experience. All you have to do is explain, though, and keep guiding us towards communicating in ways that we both find acceptable. I mean we’re champs at accepting all manner of different human - regardless of race, sexuality, and so on - but the communication is one area that frustrates the ever loving SHIT out of most of us, because it makes so little logical sense why anyone would say a bunch of useless words that muddy up their intent.

My closing advice? Help Your Pet Autie ™️ (this is absolutely a tongue in cheek term btw) understand how you’d like to be communicated with, and guide us. BE SPECIFIC for fucks sake - we suck at guessing what you might want, and it’s so frustrating that we’ll often just stop communicating at all. Instead of saying “it hurts me when you say this”, try saying “the WAY you said this hurt my feelings because of ____. Maybe you could put it like this instead” (or, “you know, you should really just keep shit like that to yourself”) and *give examples*. Don’t expect us to come up with different ways of saying shit, because we don’t understand what it is specifically you want, and it’s not very logical, therefore it’s not “natural” for us. Plus, everyone is different. I can’t talk to one of my sons the same way I can talk to the other, without certain negative reactions. Give us a chance to know your needs - we DO CARE!!! - but be CLEAR. I know in your world, tact is a big deal, but MOST of us will miss the fucking point if you’re too tactful (and when we misinterpret, we always err on the side of worst case scenario, and make the issue wayyyyy bigger than it should be. Being clear is soooo important).

And hey. Maybe it’ll help clear up some communication in other areas of your life. Being clear isn’t a license to be a fucking asshole; nobody’s giving you a license to unleash on everyone about how much you can’t stand humans...if WE hafta be quiet about that, so do you lmao...fair’s fair. 😆 But quit hedging and hinting and hoping we will pick up on the whatever your grievance is - because we won’t. We’ll just know you’re unhappy, and start panicking over guessing what we did wrong, and just shut down, because we have no idea.

Just. Fucking. Say it. 😘

[melodiouswhite]

Live forever - Ch. 02

(A/N: Yep. This thing still exists. :3)

It was 1550 and just like so many times before, he could never run fast enough.

Those blasted witch persecutions were getting out of control!

Yes, he was used to being persecuted.

For almost his entire life, he had been both revered and abhorred by people, who either were frightened of him and his powers or were simply malevolent.

He remembered a particularly nasty incident in 1507 (shortly after his 41st birthday), when he had been schoolmaster of a cram school in Sickingen. Someone had come and accused him of indulging in sodomy with some of the male students! Yes, he had lain with both men and women, but never had he touched his own pupils! Not to mention they had been mere children! This was wrong in so many ways! How had someone even got that idea?! Needless to say, he would have been severely punished, had he not escaped in time.

Never had he been so hurt in his entire life. Just the memory went down to his substance.

All the other times it blasphemy or outright heresy, witchcraft and similar fun stuff.

Nothing surprising in these days, in this war between the Catholics and the newly formed Protestant Church. The fact that he had real magic powers didn't exactly help matters, even though he had learned by now to keep his mouth shut (most of the time).

He was used to it.

But this was the 3rd time in five years that he had to flee from a bloodthirsty mob or a narrow-minded inquisition that wanted to see him burn! Some of them even had chased after him with firearms!

This was too much!

Having enough of this, he decided to migrate to France. He had heard that persecution wasn't as extreme there and he still remembered the time, before the Protestant Church had been a thing. Acting like a good Catholic, no one would notice him – he hoped.

Problem was just … he wasn't a good Catholic – or even a good Christian.

Never had been.

It had always been too suffocating for him to bear.

But he couldn't always go against the stream and hope that he wouldn't be hunted down with pitchforks and such for at least a week.

Well, I guess I have no other choice. Perhaps I will be lucky and find an area that isn't wrecked by war and where the people are more relaxed than here.

Shortly before his 100th birthday, a French couple walked into his life to change it forever.

He had got into a bar fight and had to run from a group of thugs that obviously wanted to beat him to death.

Why trouble just flung itself around his neck was beyond him, but now was no time to ponder on that – he had to avoid getting lynched!

As he ran around a corner, he spied a chubby, friendly-looking woman sitting in front of a bookshop and embroidering a handkerchief, singing a gay tune.

He didn't think twice.

He ran over to her, fell onto his knees and begged: “Madame! Please, help me!”

For a second she seemed bewildered, but then she caught on instantly. She grabbed his wrist, pulled him up and pushed him inside the bookshop.

“Stay there”, she ordered.

He pressed himself against the inside wall beside the door and tried to catch his breath.

Then he noticed the man standing behind the counter of the shop.

It was a tall, thin man with platinum blond hair and friendly, silvery eyes that looked at him curiously through big glasses. Probably the shop-owner and husband of the lady outside.

“Can I help you?”, he asked in French.

“Hide me, please!”, the other pleaded, “If you don't, I will die!”

The blond Frenchman rolled his eyes and told him to come behind the counter, which he did.

He curled together to fit under the counter.

Just as he had hidden, the door burst open and he heard the footsteps of several people.

“Have you seen this guy?”, one of them asked gruffly.

“What guy?”, the bookseller queried coolly, “Be more specific.”

“Some ugly ginger! About as big as me, with a fancy green cloak, black hat and white shirt! Looks like the Devil incarnate!”

Under the counter he felt his blood boil.

Ugly ginger?! Devil incarnate?!

Alright, he knew that he wasn't exactly handsome, but this was just incredibly insulting!

The rudeness seemed to agitate the blond bookseller as well, as he could see him tense up. But the man kept his cool.

“First of all, I didn't see an ugly ginger or anyone for that matter, for I was in here the entire time. Ask my wife, if she has seen anyone. She's the one who was sitting outside. Secondly, that's incredibly rude. Learn some manners. And thirdly, what do you want in the first place? Beat the unfortunate man up and rob him?”

Awkward silence.

“I suspected as much”, the bookseller remarked scornfully. “Anyway, you won't find him here. Now get out of my bookshop.”

The blond radiated such calm authority that the thugs hurried to obey his request.

After they were gone, the bookseller and his refugee waited for a bit to make sure that the mob wasn't still lurking outside.

Then the latter could hear the door open and tensed up again.

But it was just the lady from earlier.

“They're gone”, she sighed, “Such ruffians. People really have no manners these days.”

“Really”, her husband agreed, before bending down to inform their refugee that he could come out.

“Thank you so much”, he groaned in relief. “I thought I was going to die!”

Well, not exactly that, but he definitely would have been worse for wear.

“You're welcome”, the Frenchman responded, “You're not the first one we've had to save from a bloodthirsty mob. What was their problem anyway? Are you a Jew or an huguenot?”

“No”, the German snarled. He was something far worse, but knew better than to say that out loud. “Just a stupid bar fight.”

Their thoughts told him that they didn't buy it, but they didn't say that out loud.

He on the other hand was curious, who his saviours were and decided to dive into their minds.

A quick scan made his eyes widen in shock.

“By the way”, the other man spoke up, “We haven't introduced ourselves yet. My name is-”

“Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel!”, the redhead whispered. “No way!”

Their eyes widened in return.

“How do you know?”, Perenelle Flamel demanded to know. “Who are you?”

He swallowed and stretched out a hand.

“I'm Dr. Johann Georg Faust. It's a pleasure to meet you.”

He was pleasantly surprised, when they invited him to stay with them for the time being.

“We have heard of you”, Nicolas Flamel stated, as they were having dinner.

“The German merchants who come here speak of you. They tell wondrous tales, one more fantastic or ludicrous than the other.”

“And some very blasphemous things”, Perenelle told him. “That you boasted of being able to perform the miracles of Christ.”

He frowned. “I can't remember ever saying that. In fact, I'm quite sure that I never said that. I admit that I'm not a humble man, but this is defamation. What other things did they say about me?”

“That you were a worshipper of Satan, a son of the Devil, a witch or a warlock, a fraud … charming things like that”, Nicolas answered ironically.

“Charming indeed”, the ginger-haired alchemist grumbled sourly.

Perenelle quickly amended: “But they also said you were a great doctor, astrologer and healer. An encyclopedist, they say.”

Their guest smiled. “Thank you. I have studied and practised long and hard to become exactly that.”

“Out of curiosity though”, Nicolas spoke up again, “How much of the unflattering things is true? I mean, you're obviously like us. But how did you know who we are?”

He wasn't sure, if he should entrust that secret to the Flamels.

“What ever it is, you can tell us”, the blond assured him, “We're three immortal alchemists, who discovered the Philosophers' Stone. It doesn't get much more unhallowed than that.”

He took a deep breath, before telling them this: “I can read minds and see the future. And … I'm a black mage. But I have never hurt anyone, I swear!”, he added hurriedly. “I just use these abilities to get by!”

“We believe you”, Perenelle assured him and took his hand. “Two centuries have told us to know when someone lies.”

She and her husband exchanged a look.

“Well, since you obviously have nowhere else to go, Dr. Faust, why don't you stay with us?”, she offered, “Alchemists should stick together, especially immortals like us.”

Her husband nodded. “It would be refreshing to have a comrade on our journeys through the world. We could always use help around the household and we could generally support each other.”

The German alchemist and necromancer thought for a bit.

Now that he thought about it, his life had been pretty lonely so far. He couldn't remember ever having friends, nor had he ever been in love.

“Sure. As long as you don't mind wandering around with a mad alchemist who practises witchcraft, is way too showy and magically attracts trouble wherever he goes.”

The Flamels exchanged another glance.

Then they smiled and shook hands with him.

[the-queer-look]

The bonds that tie

No one is ever late to finding out their sexuality. No one is ever late with coming out. Everything takes time, and for some people that takes longer than others. Cultural and social circumstances can have a huge effect on how and when we begin to understand and accept ourselves, and in some parts of the world, that can have a deeply negative impact on our sense of self worth. Nevertheless, being true to ones self leads to deeper, more positive connections with those around you.

- K

Name: Jacob

age: 32

occupation: Refugee Assistance

Location: Liverpool

Gender: Male

sexuality: Gay

My name is Jacob, Im 32 years old, Australian, from an Iraqi background, with Assyrian nationality, and I am a gay man. I like to think of myself as a very easy going guy, although a lot of people seem to misunderstand my personality and think of me as a snob, or make a point of saying how I am very quite. I think that is because I am generally a shy person, largely because of being self conscious about my accent, I’m worried about saying something wrong, or not speaking fast enough. I always need to translate what I want to say into english in my head before actually saying it. I’ve always had a love of helping people, which is why I work for a government program designed to assist refugees secure housing and establish their first initial accomodation in Australia, which I’ve been working in for the past five years. My initial degree was in IT, which I gained back in Iraq, but once I finished my degree I realised that I wasnt very passionate about coding and working with computers, I just did the degree to satisfy my parents, so I worked with a newspaper and became a journalist until I left Iraq in 2010. I lived in Istanbul for a couple of years before moving to Australia as a part of my journey as an asylum seeker. I’ve been in Australia for about 6 years.

Upon moving to Australia it was very challenging to find work as a journalist, with English being my fifth language, and the competition for journalism jobs in Australia being so high, so I began assisting people who’d gone through my own journey, first as an interpreter, and then moving into community services and case management, and I’ve now done a diploma in social housing as well, and currently completing studies in social work with the University of Western Sydney, hopefully next year.

I think I realised that I was attracted to men when I was about 14 or 15 years of age, but because back then in Iraq there wasnt any access to the internet, nor anyone that you could really come out to and talk with about it, I felt extremely abnormal. I thought that it was just me, and that I was different to everyone else, it was at a time when all of my peers had girlfriends, and thinking about getting married and stuff. I met my first girlfriend when I was 17, and fell in love for the first time when I was 21 back in ui with one of my classmates, but of course that didnt last. I always felt like I was going down the wrong path, because even though I was dating women like I “should”, I still felt attracted to guys. Eventually I got the chance to speak to people through the internet, and found out what being gay was, and realised that I wasn’t an aberration. It gave me the tools to discover who I truly am. I dated my first guy when I was 24, which was when I was able to accept it, and I’ve identified as gay since then.

I did feel very strongly that I didnt belong in the society over there, with LGBTQIA+ people not being talked about at all, and such a religious culture which openly hated gay people… Growing up in a muslim society was very challenging, as the only Catholic guy in primary and middle school, with a western name as well, it didnt make it any easier to come to terms with my sexual orientation. I was bullied quite a lot for the way I dressed and acted, for not having a girlfriend etc. And that challenge moved to my home, the struggle about how to let my family accept me, the isolation that you feel as you build up to coming out to your family… Being gay, and the youngest in the family, in a very religious, Catholic family was not the easiest.

Eventually, even after moving out with friends after graduation, I was still very close with my family and dreaded the idea of coming out to them, and the possible disconnect from those family ties. Because I couldnt think of anything worse than not being able to see my nephews and nieces, of spending time with my parents. But eventually I had to be selfish for once, and I came out to them in August 2018. It was really hard for them in the beginning, they were really shocked, but we had a serious chat a few days later. I just realised, they always knew but they kind of denied within themselves, because of them… I looked different to any other gay guy that they knew of… I didnt fit those stereotypes that they thought of. I just did my best to educate them and make them believe it. At the beginning they were saying “You’re only saying that because you dont want to get married” and all this kind of stuff. I had to give them examples of people that I’d introduced them to and tell them that they were actually past boyfriends for them to accept the fact that I’m actually a gay guy.

They were expecting, even though we live in Australia now, that coming out to everyone would get me fired, or beaten up at work. They had no idea about the anti-discrimination laws in Australia, they even asked me about whether there was any sort of gay community in Sydney. Obviously it was a bit much for them, they offered me church conversion therapies, they offered me medications, they asked me to go on a blind date with a girl that might change my mind, but obviously none of those were options. I’ve asked them to accept who I am, and if not then they can continue their lives without me in it. But it didnt actually take any longer than two weeks before they started inviting me to family gatherings again, and our relationship now is even closer than what it was before. I’m so much more comfortable being myself around them, I dont feel like I have to hide myself, and pretend to be straight anymore that I used to do before. My whole family is so much closer now and I’m very grateful.

For my fmily I’ve always been the rebel. I was the first to move out of home, even though I’m the youngest. All of my brothers were getting engaged and married and still living with my parents. I moved out when I finished my studies, and everyone was against it. There’s this stigma in middle eastern culture that a young man should not move out of his family home before he gets married, because that will ruin his reputation and morals, and will have temptation to do bad things. There’ve always been comments about the way I dress, because my fashion choices were not very accepted, I followed the western singers on TV and stuff. And when I had my first piercing, an eyebrow piercing when I was 24, my family didnt talk to me for about two weeks because they thought it was too gay… surprise! It got even worse when I got my first tattoo, my friends would say to me “you look like a homeless person” “you look like you have no morals” etc, etc. When I got my ears pierced, they started saying that “you look like a faggot” which was really harsh. But I’ve always wanted to do what represents me, not to follow a group f people or act like someone else. I want to present myself in a way that represents myself, and I have always felt free to change my looks or the way I dress.

Things have definitely changed about the way I dress and act since I came out. I feel like I’m out of my shell, especially at work, I no longer feel the need to try to blend in anymore. Luckily the diversity at my work is very broad, so looking different isn’t a big deal. So far out of nearly 50 staff, I’m the only that is openly gay, which means of course I was picked by the inclusion co-ordinator to become the LGBTQIA+ champion fo the office, so staff could approach me to ask for resources and assistance when they have clients in the LGBTQIA+ community. And now I have the pride flag on my desk and people get shocked when they see it, and I can almost see the question marks appearing over their head as they stand there. But yes, I am definitely more comfortable being myself at work, that comfort in being who I am has helped my relationship with my managers because it’s like being a bird, and you finally learn how to fly, that’s how it feels for me to be out.

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[tommyomalley]

Overstated Harm

I have been thinking lately about harm—when it’s real, and when it’s exaggerated for political reasons. And as harm escalates, at what point does it require us to intervene on behalf of ourselves or others?

Yesterday, I recorded a conversation for my podcast Theater Fag with playwright Isaac Gomez. We met in the offices of Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, where his new play “La Ruta” is currently finishing a sold-out run. “La Ruta” is about the women of Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican border city that suffers one of the highest crime rates in North America, if not the world. Disproportionately impacted by the violence in Juárez are women, who regularly go missing without any hope of being found.

Obviously the situation in Juárez is an example of real harm. Like gay men with AIDS in the 1980s—like trans women of color in the United States today—the women of Juárez are dying preventable deaths at an insane rate, and nobody in the dominant culture gives enough of a shit to make it stop. Isaac’s play, “La Ruta,” is a tortured cry for mercy, one belonging to a theatrical tradition that includes plays like Larry Kramer’s seminal AIDS polemic “The Normal Heart” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” Anna Deveare Smith’s verbatim account of the Los Angeles riots (in which Congresswoman Maxine Waters is a character, by the way).

In our conversation, Isaac and I discussed the roots of violence in Juárez, which Isaac attributed to toxic masculinity and failed US policy. Of the former, Isaac elaborated that he can draw a straight line from small acts of gendered insensitivity—microaggressions such as a man interrupting a woman to explain a point she was in the middle of making—to more grandiose expressions of violence, such as rape or murder. My impulse in the moment was to disagree and question the equivalence I thought Isaac was making. But after a night’s sleep on the matter, I think agree with Isaac’s general point—unchecked privilege corrupts, and if we don’t intervene when violence presents itself, it will escalate.

The women of Juárez are in a daily fight for their lives. The stakes for them could not be higher. That’s why, when people start to talk about feeling “safe” and the stakes fall somewhere short of life or death, it’s important to pause before offering our support and validation. Unfortunately, not all claims of victimhood are intellectually honest, and sometimes, folks who identify as victims are actually perpetrators. These situations require a different kind of intervention.

This week, the boys from Covington Catholic high school in a Kentucky have been all over the news, after a viral video clip in which one boy wearing a MAGA hat—Nick Sandmann—stared down an indigenous veteran named Nathan Phillips, who was seemingly just banging his drum. Since the release of that initial video, dozens more clips have surfaced, some of which show that Mr. Phillips intentionally walked into the Covington Catholic group, and others of which show an unrelated group of Black Israelites screaming nasty shit at every person who passed them, including the Covington Catholic boys and Nathan Phillips.

Some people claim these videos exonerate the Covington Catholic boys. Others say they implicate Nathan Phillips as a provocateur. What’s compelling to me is the immediacy with which reactions split along party lines. Lefties are Team Phillips, righties are Team CovCath. I have way too much trauma surrounding Catholic schoolboys of my youth to be impartial, but what I will argue is that the Covington Catholic boys are not victims here. I don’t want them destroyed, but I want to see some accountability. And when I see a lot of white adults minimizing their actions, I feel compelled to intervene.

The fact remains that Nick Sandmann stood aggressively close to Nathan Phillips, his posture and smirk fixed with a rigidity familiar to anyone who, like me, has been physically threatened or assaulted by a Catholic school meathead. Regardless of the aftermath, this was not a boy who was standing by innocently. He was full of the all the bravado an underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex allows, and that—to my eye—is undeniable in any of the videos I’ve seen so far. It’s an expression of the toxic masculinity Isaac mentioned in our discussion of “La Ruta.”

Part of the PR campaign the Covington Catholic community is waging involves blaming the Black Hebrew Israelites, a group of absolutely wild bigots that stand in public spaces and say naaaaaaaasty stuff about gays, women, etc. The reason for this PR move, I believe, is that Covington Catholic knows on some level that truth seekers will look at Nick Sandmann in those videos and see a young man eager for conflict, not peace. To avoid this murky discussion, they instead point to the Black Israelites as the instigators. “Look, these folks said faggot, that’s way worse.” Unfortunately, these two unrelated wrongs don’t change the interaction between Sandmann and Phillips on that video.

I was once a teenage boy, and I remember what a brutal period of self-discovery those years were for me. I made so many mistakes and treated folks around me with tremendous disrespect. To say the least, I’ve spent a lot of my adulthood making right the wrongs of my youth, and I am so lucky that every single fucking person wasn’t armed with a recording device when I was 16. I share this because I truly wish the best for the Covington Catholic boys—that they may overcome this moment, emerging on the other end with renewed faith and commitment to peace. I don’t see that happening, however, because as Nick Sandmann told the Today Show’s Savannah Guthrie, his only regret is that he didn’t walk away from Nathan Phillips (a subtle suggestion that Phillips was the aggressor), and he does not feel that he has anything for which to be sorry. If the only offense the Covington Catholic boys committed that day was Nick Sandmann glaring disrespectfully at an elder, then that would be enough to warrant an apology. Unfortunately, Nick Sandmann and whatever crisis PR firm is handling his case do not agree. (If you do not think Nick Sandmann’s glare was disrespectful, then let me ask you this: how would you feel if you saw him standing that way before your mother, father, grandparent?)

The problem is not so much the Covington Catholic boys as it is the adults who thrust victimhood on them. (And unrelatedly, I can’t help but imagine, if society cared this much about gay boys as it does about these Catholics then Bryan Singer would’ve been dealt with decades ago. But that’s another story.) The community that has built around Covington Catholic is absolute—the boys were not wrong, and any assertion otherwise is an attempt to ruin children's lives. Their supporters are misrepresenting the stakes in order to argue that MAGA folks are under attack. An attack on these boys gives MAGA supporters a chance to transfer their own feelings of victimhood, and so the amplification of their stories has created a deafening “poor me” echo chamber.

Speaking of poor me, in December I got into a Twitter fight with a playwright named Jeremy O. Harris, whose “Slave Play” was a controversial hit for the New York Theatre Workshop. The controversy wasn’t so much about the play as the playwright himself. I haven’t read or seen Slave Play, so I can’t speak to the piece’s merits, but I can speak to the way Jeremy behaves on social media, which seems to be carefully cultivated.

The initial buzz around “Slave Play” was huuuuge. As Jeremy himself said, the play went viral. The reviews from white NYC theater critics were overwhelmingly positive, with a few notable exceptions. On Twitter, however, criticism began to mount from a surprising corner: other black theater makers took serious issue with the way black women in particular are treated in the play. Some folks went as far as to say that Jeremy’s play was its own sort of violent act against black women, and they used things he’s said and tweeted publicly to support this. I won’t quote any of them, but it’s all there for you to find, if you want to.

All I can honestly say about Jeremy Harris is that I do not believe his social media persona is authentic. While “Slave Play” was enjoying an often sold-out run, he began tweeting about all the death threats he and his cast were receiving. For sure, horrific shit got hurled at Jeremy and his collaborators. At the same time this was happening, producers were looking seriously to bring the show to Broadway. Jeremy took to Twitter and called attention to the tweets and emails, claiming the threats he and others received numbered in the hundreds. I called bullshit on that number, and I wondered whether every mean tweet he received was actually a ���death threat.” I suggested Jeremy was performing victimhood to engender sympathy that would distract from his critics and/or help facilitate a transfer, and perhaps that’s a leap too far. But I tweeted what I tweeted: I do not believe Jeremy Harris received “hundreds” of credible death threats over a play at an off-Broadway house. (For the record I never @ mentioned Jeremy on Twitter, he found my tweets on his own.)

In my back-and-forth with Jeremy, I made the mistake of roping critic Elizabeth Vincentelli into the discussion. Wasn’t really fair of me, because I don’t know her. But she was one of the only mainstream dissenting voices in her assessment of “Slave Play,” which she said ripped off better plays like “An Octaroon” and “Underground Railroad Game.” Elizabeth responded on Twitter to tell me that her problem was with the play, not the playwright, and she sort of scolded me for making inferences about Jeremy’s personality based on his tweets. Jeremy, who loves to herd critics on social media, jumped back in after EV’s capitulation, letting her (and me) know that “we stan critics.” The “we” referred only to him. Lol.

The funnier thing is that, two weeks later, on her podcast “Three on the Aisle,” Elizabeth did exactly what she admonished me for doing on Twitter—drawing conclusions about Jeremy the person—and she used much harsher language than anything I tweeted. She doubled down on the derivative nature of “Slave Play,” describing it as “a play that is embarrassing in its self-satisfaction and the way it revels in this empty provocation that is not really provoking, because people are just expecting it.” She elaborated:

“It’s is also written in an incoherent, smug manner that I found really, really annoying. Just the ineptitude of the writing was confounding, I felt. This play should’ve stayed in the oven, it was not ready to be pulled out… Reading the script afterwards, it annoyed me even more. The script is a window into the way this playwright’s mind works that is not really all that interesting.”

She later described anyone who was shocked by an event that happens in Jeremy’s play as “a target sitting still.” Harsh words for an artist and his audience. I wondered why she would be so brazen on a podcast yet conciliatory on Twitter. It made me wonder if she was afraid to bring the full weight of her position to Twitter, in writing, before Jeremy. And if that’s the case, then what positional power does she perceive that he has over her? Could be generational. Jeremy and his social media followers are presumably savvier to the medium than EV, which I imagine she would understand, so perhaps that’s part of the reason. Regardless, my question now, in light of everything, is: do we still stan critics like Elizabeth? (FWIW, I do. EV is one of the greats among NY’s theater critics.)

My beef with Jeremy truly isn’t so personal, although his personality seems challenging based on our Twitter interactions. That’s not real life, though, I know that. Jeremy and I have never met, only battled from our phones. Theater is the art I care most about, and I’m interested in who holds the power to create it.

Jeremy is a power-holder, despite repeatedly trying to position himself as an outsider. As far as I can smell, Jeremy is disingenuous in these claims, as he was when he overstated the number of actual threats he and others received. I believe that doing so helped bring attention to his play. Of course I have absolutely no concept of what it’s like to be a queer black person in America, but I do know that Yale Drama School—where Jeremy is finishing up his MFA—is the nerve center of NYC’s theater establishment. You cannot graduate from Yale Drama School and call yourself a theater outsider. Sorry. It’s just not honest. And when we allow dishonesty, for whatever reason, we allow injustice to escalate. And we stan only what’s just.

[awed-frog]

that comment about what you think about soldiers' motivation is, in my opinion and despite your intention for it not to be, pretty offensive and shows a harmful stereotypical perception. even without immediate threat to their countries, people often sign up for military service just because they want to protect and make a contribution to a safer world. let's say UN blue helmets. would you say most police officers are just hungry for authority and do the job to beat up people?

Hi there - thank you for coming to talk to me about this instead of just assuming I’m a dick or sending me abuse or whatever - I appreciated it a lot. I understand that you’re upset - to be fair, this is a sensitive and complex issue, very close and personal for some people, and where we live and how we grew up is likely to have a huge impact on what we think about it. So, yeah - it was perhaps unkind of me to bring it up in two lines in the middle of an SPN meta. It’s definitely an important debate, though, and an issue which deserves to be discussed, so let’s see if I can make my opinion a little clearer.

First of all, I should say that I’m privileged enough to live in a ‘normal’ country. I’ve never been afraid of the police - quite the opposite - and I recognize both policemen and soldiers do an important job which is necessary to a democratic society. I also know their working conditions are often difficult, if not downright awful, and I appreciate their work as I do that of all civil servants. In fact, that’s why I distanced myself from far left groups years and years ago: their hatred and contempt for cops was starting to grate on my nerves, and the fact some of my ‘friends’ would make plans to isolate policemen during demonstrations in order to beat them up made me nauseous. As Italian artist Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote back in the day, policemen are first and foremost working people who often come from an underprivileged background, so a class war against them makes no sense at all (you can find the poem here in the original Italian and more about the historical context, in English, here).

That said, it’s an open secret that the police tends to attract, and recruit, mostly a specific type of person. In many countries there is an endemic problem because policemen are inevitably revealed to be far right sympathizers, or are otherwise prejudiced against minorities. 

(One part of the world which is very close to my heart is Northern Ireland, and today, April 5th, 2017, the region has again vowed to do better and recruit more Catholics into the force. Their numbers are now up to 31%, but it’s still not good enough, and it’s a situation likely to foment or create problems down the line, as all parties are well aware.)

Italy saw one of its biggest scandal almost twenty years ago, when during the demonstrations against the G8 summit taking place in Genoa, about a hundred students were illegally detained, humiliated, beaten and threatened with rape and torture (61 of them had to be treated for mild to serious injuries). More than a hundred policemen were indicted and had to withstand trial, but despite the abundance of incriminating material, none of them was ever punished (English Wikipedia account of the facts). That was by no means an isolated incident. Only one month ago, what should have been a successful example of international cooperation (the neutralization of Anis Amri, the man who’d carried out the deadly Christmas market attack in Berlin) was marred by the revelation that both Italian policemen who’d stopped and killed Anis Amri had a Facebook profile choke-full of Nazi and fascist imagery (English article). There was much embarrassed mumbling on the part of both governments, and some clamour further down - even Breitbart did a piece about it - but ultimately Germany decided against an award for the two policemen, because their political affiliations were perceived to trump their work and efforts to counter terrorism.

(Being on the force, like many other jobs, is usually something that runs in the family, and this is problematic for all those European countries which were still, until few decades ago, military dictatorships. Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, not to mention the Balkans and Eastern Europe - there is where you see the biggest problems in regard to who, exactly, chooses to be a policeman and why. In Greece, for instance, the cop who shot a 15-year-old student and unwittingly started the 2008 riots was the direct descendant of a family who’d enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis in WW2; and the Greek far right movement Golden Dawn has deep links with both the police and the army.) 

And if we’re talking about soldiers, all these problems are magnified times a million. Again, I’m lucky enough not to see soldiers all that often, but I’m always wary of them (and I give them a very wide berth whenever I’m abroad) because it’s inevitably groups of loud young men with big weapons, and that’s rarely a safe combination. Here is where you see it again: in theory, being a soldier can be a noble calling (and let’s not mention, because this is not what we’re talking about, those who have no choice but to serve, either because of draconian conscription laws or because they’re too poor and uneducated to have any other choice), but be around career soldiers long enough and a pattern begins to emerge. I was never in the army myself, but I have friends from several countries who served, both in regular armies and in peace-keeping missions, or even combat, and the picture they paint is pretty bleak. According to them, even in the most mundane settings (such as basic training), a Lord of the Flies escalation can occur at any moment, because this is what happens when you stuff twenty young men together and force them to obey pointless orders all day long and punish the whole unit whenever something’s wrong. Hazing is common, and victims never speak up (when they do, they are generally mocked by their superiors and told to man up). Women in uniform are routinely excluded, made fun of, humiliated or (far) worse. The same goes for gay people and minorities. And, again, this is the situation in relaxed, normal circumstances - in peace time, and in your own country. These are simply things that happen out of boredom and a vague desire to establish your alpha status over someone else. When it comes to war, well, I havent yet heard of any army that hasn’t committed horrific crimes against civilians - but, again, this is not what we’re discussing now. Let’s just say that when it comes to the US army, the only force to have training bases in the entire world (and maybe the time has finally come to reconsider that), freak accidents and crimes are pretty common - and normally go unpunished. And I’m not talking about what happens in combat - that would be a whole other discussion - I’m talking about stupid, mindless, violent things some men do when they’re left to their own devices in a military setting. In Okinawa, local people are fed up by the problems caused by American soldiers - stuff including low-level crime, but also rapes and murder. And up in the Italian mountains, the memories of what happened in 1998 are still fresh - it took years to even understand how the events had unfolded, but as far as we know, the pilots of a military plane which had taken off from a nearby American base had simply ignored regulations to have fun - they’d been flying way too low, and, as a result, their plane cut the cable supporting a gondola from an aerial tramway, causing it to crash to the ground. Twenty people were killed, and yet every single soldier involved was acquitted.

So, well, I’m not saying that all soldiers are idiots, Nazi sympathizers or psychos (I never understood this new tumblr thing, by the way - the ‘not all men’ meme, because no, not all men: 90% of the men in my life, for instance, are decent, normal persons, and not part of the problem in any way). Not at all. What I’m saying is, we tend to gravitate towards specific jobs according to our likes, dislikes and general personality - and, in my experience, people who wish to be soldiers are people I don’t have much in common with; and, yes, very often they’re testosteronic young men who just want to dick around with weapons and tanks and, if at all possible, have some ‘fun’, possibly by beating each other up. After all, if you truly want to serve your country, there are many (less exciting and assault rifles-related) ways to do so. Teachers and nurses and garbage collectors and cleaning personnel, just off the top of my head, do far more for their countries than some kid in uniform will ever do (again - I’m thinking about my country here, which is not at war with anyone) and yet you never hear anyone thanking them for their service, or whatever. On the contrary - these professions are often lowly paid and not recognized by society at all. Maybe the world would change for the better if we stopped having so much respect for soldiers and we started thinking that other careers - such as taking care of the elderly, for instance - were a far more honourable choice for young men.

(On how our personalities lead us to specific jobs and how those jobs in turn shape our personalities, I can highly recommend these articles about the link between engineering and terrorism - fascinating stuff, and also scary af. You can read about it here and here.)

[delightfulranchdeputypanda-blog]

Extra #2:  My thoughts on Rules for Men/ Religion ( WARNING: This is a compilation of like two unedited entries from my person “diary” so please ignore the emojis and typos)

Okay so revisited the notes about suicide and this philosopher named Durkheim from like whatever many years ago in Paris who studied patterns in suicide. So he discovered ☝🏼 rates in suicide.                👇🏼rates in suicide       Single.                                     Married       Men.                                        Women       Wealthy.                                  Poor       Protestants.                            Catholics So if you analyze this you realize single rich men that don’t really have religious guidance or anything to set a moral compass for them are more likely to commit suicide. And obviously there are always exceptions but it makes a lot of sense. 1) So then our professor (literally love him! May Allah fill his heart with Iman ameen) had us think about American society and we as a class came to the conclusion (I didn’t really participate much so I cannot take credit for most of these ideas) that American men only rely on their wives and girlfriends for emotional support like they have beer buddies and hunting buddies and blah blah blah but their only emotional support system is their significant other. Whereas, women are more like to call up their girls and mom or close mother figure or even guy friends every now and then and spill all the teas. Okay so that one I didn’t relate much to religion but while they were discussing it I was thinking about the dynamic between friends and how desi people, well men in particular are ride or die for their “brothers” you know like yeah you have the groups that are guarded and don’t talk about feelings but as far as I know most of the desi men in my life have shared emotions with their friends as much as women, if not more. Also, they are not afraid to cry. I’ve seen all my uncles cry and even my dad. I have seen my grandpa cry. I have seen random babas on the street cry too. Based off of my experience men in Pakistan or even here (before they get influenced) show a lot of emotion and that is how it should be! 2) Then we talked about wealthy neighborhoods and how there’s usually one family in a large house and parents usually work a lot and only see their kids for short periods of time. Whereas, in poorer families, a lot more people live together which means you’re more likely to interact with more people throughout your day. Okay, then we talked about how neighborhood atmosphere right so in rich neighborhoods your walls and fences are taller and more gates and less interaction with people around you. However, in poorer neighborhoods, fences tend to be shorter fewer gates and neighbors converse with one another and on weekends especially like holidays and stuff people have bbq and block parties and share and connect with each other. Then I thought well what about golfing buddies and country club events and things. But then I realized the nature of those events is different (I used to volunteer to serve at events held for charity and got a chance to observe the difference in class systems). The way people carry themselves and the way they speak is very like like .. hm like not authentic it’s like robotic almost like even the jokes and laughs sound rehearsed. Then I thought about back home and what I had learned about my religion about how Islam promotes neighborly-ness. And how we are reminded to share and be inclusive. [side note: this got me thinking about race and how it doesn’t exist inshallah I’ll write about that another day and why I think it was created but as far my limited knowledge about my religion goes I’ve never heard color mentioned the lectures I’ve been to only talked about people of other religions and believers v. Nonbelievers but nothing about race]. 3) then we talked about religious guidance that catholicism forbids suicide and Protestants had various beliefs and each group was different and different branches and stuff so no one was on the same place. Then our professor said okay let's say you don't like people and you don't talk to neighbors or friends but you like working on you and you come to church because you’re obligated to do so then what? is that enough? People said no because yk you’re not getting the proper interaction you need to exist. And I started drifting and thinking about how even with prayer it’s better to do it as a group like unison amplifies prayer. But I disagree with the class a little I think both are necessary a balance between individualism and the responsibilities that come with that like working on being a better you, knowing yourself, your goals, strengths, weaknesses, etc. And at the same time working in a group and helping others grow and reach their goals and stuff. And it makes sense for me to think that way because when I was little I had one teacher tell me to not think of myself and to do for others before I do for myself and then another told me to do for myself before everyone else. [mini story time: So I came home confused (I was like 7 and opposing views were hard to understand) and I asked an Imam that used to live in our house if I was really really hungry and had only one small piece of Roti and I saw a baba with no food what should I do and he asked me what I thought so I remember saying that I would like to say that I would just give him the whole piece because he needed it more but I don’t really know what I would do and if I was a baba too and we were two babas that were both hungry with no other food for who knows how long then I think I wouldn’t want to give him the whole piece and then I think I would just break it in half and he didn’t say anything back to me he patted me on the head and then left for namaz lol ] so idk what to make of that but I think that moment in time signifies how important balance is to me. And inshallah I plan on educating myself more so I can know the answers to my questions but the more I explore my thoughts and the more I think about positive actions, I end up back at the same influence, my religion. I’ve always just done stuff because someone else wanted me to but I never prayed when I didn’t feel like it [which sucks I know but is the truth because I felt like it was worse lying about reading namaz(I felt like I wasn’t really reading if I was daydreaming in some parts and speeding through others) than not reading it at all] but the more I explore my thoughts and my goals for myself I make these little connections and they remind me of a very particular dua that I remember making as kind of a kid [mini story time: it was dark and raining and I was sitting in the veranda looking at the rain (I was like still 7 almost 8) and I remember thinking I should say Subhanallah right now because obviously Allah created this but I didn’t. then at the age of whatever age I was when I went to Pulliam after my grandpa died it rained again and I asked Allah to help me love everything as much as I love the rain] and I don’t remember the intentions of my words or what I meant by that but the more I take the time to think the more I remember and the more I try to grow I realize that dua has been answered. I love life, I grew to love people and school, and now I’m growing to love my religion. And I want to hold to this for as long as I possibly can I keep writing because I’m trying to bottle this love and appreciation because I’m scared it’ll go away or something. But yeah The point of all this is that humans need integration to be able to exist and I’m grateful to be created by a god that gave me a guideline to overcome challenges and every task that I’m asked to perform in the end only befits me and creates the happiness that we all seem to be chasing.

[codysstruggleforgeorgia-blog]

The start of the story.

My name is Cody. I am a 23 year old male, currently living at home with my parents. Her name is Georgia, a 22 year old female in the same situation. We have known each other for going on ten years, and in that time we have hated each other, we have liked each other and we have loved each other. I know almost everything about her. I know how she reacts to things, I know when she is happy, when she is sad, when she is distant, when she is hurting, when she is scared, when she doesn’t care.. I can read her like a book. While I can not speak for her, I imagine for her it’s much the same with me. Very rarely do either of us surprise each other in regards to what we are thinking - unless a surprise is intended, of course, because we are not entirely dull and transparent. Nevertheless, it’s very rare for us to surprise each other.

Here’s the story of our history, and how a surprise has both formed and broken our relationship. I write this to give context to the daily issues I intend to post so that my every day thoughts and moments of depression can be recorded. Georgia and I met on a video game, online, with no knowledge of what human being was behind the other monitor. We were just complete strangers - both of us young, not even fifteen yet. In my eyes, she was this over the top ball of energy, she tried to be friends with everybody, and I found her annoying and eventually hated her.

The reason that I found her annoying was because I couldn’t believe in my young heart that she wasn’t a manipulative girl. I had the typical rough childhood, but as cliche and ‘other’s have had worse’ as it is, mine still affected me.

My father left when I was seven or eight and would never return to the every  day family life. I knew that he had been violent and unfaithful towards my mother because kids see and hear things even when their parents try to hide it. This departure from the family was kind of the icing on the cake for me, because even as a young boy, he was never really there. He always worked long shifts into the night doing manual labour work - although it turns out he used to come home so late mainly because of his post work activities, drinking and women. I didn’t know this as a kid though, so I used to stay up as long as my young mind would allow me to hoping to catch him as he returned home so he could fulfill his promise of playing Mortal Kombat with me on the Playstation. Even though I actually managed to stay awake long enough some times, it never did happen. So in reality I didn’t actually know my Dad very well to begin with, only the things I saw, the disappointments, and finally him leaving.

So I told myself that I hated him. I would not treat women the way he did. I would never cheat. I wouldn’t be a martial arts freak or be obsessive about fitness, as he was anal about health fitness and fighting and that was the violence I saw towards my mother and my family. I shut my young mind off from him and threw the idea of my dad being my dad from my life and taught myself to hate.

With him gone, we couldn’t afford to stay in Sydney with just Mum, myself and my sister - 1, and brother, a newborn. We didn’t have the money - well really, my mother didn’t have the money. I was in grade 2. So we moved back to a small town out in the middle of nowhere.

The first thing I did was move from one grade to a grade higher because of the interstate educational changes that came with the move. I went from grade two to grade three and studied at a catholic school. It was a very small school. It had one two story building a shed, a small sand playground and the toilet facilities. I was never christian, I never believed, so the catholic side of things didn’t really appeal to me, and on top of that I never really made any friends.

The friends I did try to make tended to be older than me by a few or many years, as they were the ones that would always play in the handball court, and all I ever wanted to do was be included, but they didn’t play regular handball, they played it with small plastic rackets, sort of like tennis rackets, and every time I tried to participate someone would pelt the ball at me as hard as they could, rather than play the game. So I never really had friends here. I played up here and there, but for the most part my school life there was much the same and only lasted two years.

Come time for grade 5, I was given the option to swap to the State School across the road, as it went until grade 12 and my current school did not. I guess my mother saw I was unhappy, or somebody convinced her - I wouldn’t know. I said yes though, wanting a change and swapped to that school. My first day of school there I got asked if I liked our country’s most popular sport and I said no. I got picked up by the throat and choked by one of the kids from the cool club and thrown back to the ground. Then later in the week the same group of kids decided to bully me again and dared me to ring the firebell, saying I was scared and wouldn’t do it. I didn’t know what it was, but I rang it anyway, just to get back at them in my own way, to show them I wasn’t scared and they were wrong.

I got my first in-school suspension because of that, which was essentially suspension from the classroom itself - so my bullying became everyone walking out of the classroom at the two separate lunch times laughing at me and throwing shit at me while I spent the entire day seated in the one corner of the school, unable to even join the kids for lunch because of my punishment. Much of my schooling for the rest of that year is a blur as far as specifics go but it was much the same as before, never really changing. The in school suspensions kept coming and eventually I had grown so sick of the students, and then in turn the staff because of the suspensions and the way everybody looked at me, that I didn’t want to be at the school anymore. It was no fun being suspended inside of the school just to be chased by kids on bikes throwing knives and other things at you.

Back then we had dial up internet. I used to attempt to play Pokemon Crater, an old flash pokemon game on the internet. I would sit there for an age waiting for one frame to change just to see if I had encountered an imaginary pokemon. I had been given a gameboy and pokemon silver as a kid and played it to completion so this was my new fix.

Eventually I would stop going to school during the time of my in school suspensions and as I had hoped they changed my suspensions to proper, removed from the school suspensions. By this stage I was in grade six, and I started playing a new online game. I leave the name out in case people stumble upon this because my girlfriend is paranoid - and sometimes, rightly so, so even though I believe nobody from our lives will read this, I leave out the specifics out of love for her.

As I was saying, I began to play a new game. It allowed me to interact with all kinds of kids my age from all over the country and it was phenomenal. There were groups for everything everywhere and one of the first ones I participated in was a wrestling roleplay, where we would type words at each other and imitate wrestling moves and try to outsmart, or outsell the opponent to show we were uh.. knowledgeable about wrestling, I suppose. This specific ‘roleplay’ didn’t operate quite the same as others, it was more about selling the fight, making it believable, giving the other person their chance to do their stuff, whereas others were more about speed, tactics, outsmarting the other person by being the faster typer and better strategist.

I didn’t spend very long, maybe just a year in this wrestling group - we were the first group of the server to do it and we ended up as ‘hall of fame’ members for years to come, much like they induct real wrestlers into the hall of fame. It was a cool little thing for us and some of us still talked when it ended - in fact, one in particular will be mentioned later on in this story. His name was Chris, and I met him here.

The focus of the story now swaps to the game, with my life as the background details, the inbetween information, because to me that was much the reality I lived - my actual life took a backseat to my pretend life.

There was a brief period of time inbetween my time with the wrestling roleplayers and my next roleplaying group where I lied about my age, and tried to e-date girls for fun because I was lonely and I enjoyed the company. There’s really not much to talk about here, it’s pretty much as I’ve just summarized it.

It was around this time that, in real life during the school holidays I would go to Brisbane to visit my father. They were not phenomenal life experiences. He would take us to his latest girlfriends place and leave us watching movies beyond our years while he had sex and did drugs, he would drink, he would sit us in a room without food while he did his martial art training, he would make me personally go without food because as a result of the bullying and staying home all of the time I had grown chubby. I developed an incorrect understanding of my own body - I was just a chubby little kid, but I thought I was disgustingly obese or something. Him treating me like this just made me want to embrace the fat life more though - and I did. 

That was essentially my school holidays over the course of the next few years - and the only moments of importance besides meeting my best friend, Tyson. However my story with Georgia continued despite the meeting of my now best friend and everything else is irrelevant, so I mention it now and only briefly so the rest can go uninterrupted.

Picking up where we left off in the game, I eventually moved out of my ‘social’ phase (lol) and joined a new roleplay group, this time for Naruto, a universe based around what was basically magic ninjas. This was the first time in my life I had been passionate about something. I studied the universe inside and out. I took notes - I recited them, I passed fake exams to move up ranks, I outsmarted everybody that I fought and I beat them, and eventually I became friends with the top dog, the leader of the whole roleplay who had made the rooms using his own stuff and built the system that governed all ranks and power. I got him banned by reporting him jokingly and we became friends by me apologizing and having a laugh about it. Through him I met Mitch, who would be another good friend in time but not yet. Eventually I made it to the top of the rank ladder - I was leader of my own village in the roleplay. I was the best in that village and one of the top 3 roleplayers in the entire scene. I had sincerely worked so hard for this and for one of the first times in my life I had felt incredibly happy. I had built this thing for myself through my own effort and dedication. The other people around me liked and respected me for it. I had my home away from home. I had my escape from reality.

Then the devil came.

Georgia, if you are reading this - you’re going to have to excuse my language, you know how I felt about you at the time.

This little cuntball of energy rolled into my escape from reality uninvited, unannounced, with an internet boyfriend at her side, 20 guys lined up waiting to lick the pixelated dust trail behind her footsteps, a parade of attention and affection and affirmation, and almost the entire roleplay being ready to bend their rules and change the ways we had to work and invest ourselves to get where we wanted to be - because of the power of the pussy. I fucking hated this creature more than anything else and to top it off, she spoke like you would expect an energetic teenage girl to talk when pretending to be a ninja: hehe LOL XD SHURIKEN JUTSU She drove me up the fucking wall. I genuinely hated this person. She had done nothing but pull apart the escape from reality I knew. The environment I had enjoyed began to turn to shit and eventually she got everything she wanted in one tenth the effort I had invested. Then to make things worse, a new founder of a new variation of the roleplay - so one removed from ours, joined and took her under his wing, automatically drawing like 50 cucks who must have believed if they sniffed hard enough they would smell the pussy through the net. 

The devil was Georgia.

Although she did not personally destroy everything that made my escape from reality what it was, she set everything in motion and I hated her for it. So I left, I joined a new roleplay for Star Wars, and I repeated the same investment of my self for a year and I used that as my new escape from reality. In the mean time, Brandon, the previous founder, and Mitch, had become friends with Georgia. I had no connection with anybody but them from NRP so I didn’t really care. I remembered nothing but hate for her.

Here’s where my real life finally began to interfere again. I met a girl named Maddie. She was dating Nikita, an old friend, who had tried out for the band Tyson, Tyler [another friend] and I had formed. I was the singer, Tyson and Tyler the guitarists, and she was meant to be the drummer. She brought Maddie, her girlfriend along and the two became regulars at our music sessions. Eventually Nikita gave up on drumming as she wasn’t very good at it but Maddie seemed to hang around, or want to, too often.  She had mental health issues and was dating an abusive girlfriend who cut herself and threatened her and blamed her for so many different things and I felt bad for her. And she fell for Tyson, my best friend. I told her to do right by Nikita despite their differences and break up with her properly before doing anything with Tyson. She didn’t listen. We lost Nikita as a friend as a result and Maddie dated Tyson for a few months, living with him, before her family eventually arranged for her to move to the coast with them. However, in the time where she lived with Tyson - his house being my #1 spot outside of on my game, I grew way too close with her and fell in baby love with her. One night after she was gone she was talking to me and asked me why I seemed so sad and In my sad moment of weakness I confessed that I had feelings for her and I was sad that she was gone. However rather than crucify me she confessed she had developed feelings for me too. At first it was nothing but given time it turned to something real. I told her to break everything off with Tyson properly before we took it any further - she promised. I moved to live close, in a new town 4 hours away and went to school there. On the school holidays, she came to visit me and I saw the girl I thought I loved for the first time since she had left town and it seemed perfect. That night I lost my virginity to her - and then right after our 2 hour session (I state the number proudly but it was more of an anxiousness and fear of not performing that kept me going so well), the first thing she says to me is that she just cheated on Tyson - that she had not broken up with him properly - and that the month before, when she visited him halfway between her new house and my old town, instead of get the clothes and belongings she had left behind and tell him it was over, she got it all and kissed him. She hadn’t even ended it with my best friend. So now I’ve lost my virginity to what I realize is a habitual cheater / generally unfaithful person and betrayed the trust of my best friend much worse than I thought I already had all in one night. And my life got flipped. However, I did make a new friend shortly after. Chris, from wrestling on my game, spoke to me on msn one day and I found out he actually lived where Maddie now lived - and went to the same school, so I asked him to take her into their friend group and look after her and he said yes. Eventually I would meet Chris when visiting Maddie, and many other friends I will mention through this.

I broke up with her a month later because she joined the slutty emo group at her new school, got into drugs and talked about one guy too much - and I just knew the type of person she was. I knew she had cheated. So I left her. I went back to my original town and eventually for Christmas I visited my dad on the coast. I had stopped playing my escape from reality game for the most part and rarely logged on at this stage - I was in the final two years of my schooling life after all. I visited my father for Christmas this year, and his new accountant happened to live on the coast that Maddie lived on. I thought nothing of it - then, by chance, she messaged me while I was there, completely unaware that I was and three hours later we were in her apartment blocks local pool having sex. And then relationship 2.0 started, I met some of the guys she had slept with in our time apart, she promised to change, I said I would work harder. I did, she didn’t. She didn’t make an effort to remove the other guys from her life - she flirted and let them flirt, and just generally made me uncomfortable. Then I met Sarah, new best friend, and Rhiannon, her other best friend [and also the chick thats like ay i heard u got a nice cok l0l but says it like one of the boys so u dont feel threatened like she’s gonna try to fuck u anyway random tangent back to the story]. Sarah was beautiful, she was funny, she was super nerdy, she was super nice and humble and was just kind of a follower at this stage of her life. She kind of just followed the other two. I pretty much connected with her instantly and we became awesome friends. It was as innocent as that to begin with. Then the unfaithfulness from Maddie continued, the abuse got worse, the lies got worse, and eventually on one of my school holiday visits to Maddie I found myself spending my very last night there at Sarah’s house, in her lounge room talking about how sad I was, talking about video games, just talking. I had told her that I was coming over to play games because I couldn’t sleep and she said no don’t do it you’ll get stabbed this late at night or something so to make her feel comfortable I literally ran the entire way there, nearly died having an asthma attack when I arrived and the cutie wrapped me in a blanket and gave me a warm drink like some sort of spiritual grandmother. Once we had played games and chatted shit about Maddie for long enough I said I had to go back, and she offered to walk with me part of the way back. We did nothing but talk and I explained to her that she was beautiful inside and out and that she should be stronger and not let people push her around and that she’s awesome and a rare breed of human being and she should be happy and proud of herself and only let herself get treated right and it was basically that same night I realized I had fallen out of love with Maddie and into love with Sarah. So I broke up with Maddie, I told Sarah how I felt (Maddie started shit talking Sarah and it made the decision to dump her easier) but Sarah took Maddie’s side thinking she was doing the right thing by her friend because she didn’t know or believe the nasty things Maddie said about her behind her back when I told her. So I dropped a toxic relationship and lost an amazing girl in one hit. But was that the last time I dated Maddie? Nope, ya boy’s fucking autistic.  I ended up back on the coast at some stage and Sarah and I had began talking again as friends - we never moved past being friends after all, but I still had feelings for her and the spiteful hateful part of me wanted to show her how shit Maddie was. Sarah wanted to make it up to Maddie by getting me back with her. because Sarah was a knob and didn’t believe Maddie was a cunt. I went to the party as Sarah’s invite, Maddie brought her ex/my friend to this day [guy is cool and also got used] Jackson. Jackson wanted in with Maddie. I was the man to make it happen. Maddie wanted in with me. Sarah was the girl to make it happen. Maddie wanted me however and I wanted Sarah. It was fucked up. Long story short, after ignoring Maddie’s emotional breakdown in attempts to manipulate me into feeling bad and being with her, Sarah flipped at me, I realized there was no winning situation. I told Maddie to be with Jackson. She didn’t listen. I got shit faced then smoked a bunch of weed, got far too fucked up and ended up banging Maddie in the public toilets while of my face. Apparently banging in the toilets while off our faces means we’re dating again so yeah, enter relationship attempt #3. This one didn’t last long, I had graduated Grade 12 by now, I moved to the coast, attempted to work and do uni, had struggles where family members intentionally sabotaged my ability to get real payments, worked 9 hour shifts with 30 minute breaks with no music or food I could keep on location and 10 mins to and from home as a trolley pusher every day. I couldn’t keep up with my studies. My mother was helping me by paying my rent - but my food money and personal money got sucked up by the succubus herself Maddie and my entire life ended up being shaped to how she wanted me to be - and given that she was unfaithful she anted me to be a lot of different types of guys so my life was miserable as fuck. Eventually Tyson and Tyler visited, I got high, crashed Tyler’s car, had to move home because it literally ran me broke and I had to rely on my mother to help me pay off the rest of the fixes, repaired his car, drove home with a big bag of weed and just Tyler and myself (Tyson flew home, he lived elsewhere now), and we smoked up for the full 1500km drive. I had apologized and I thought him and I would remain friends, but we didn’t, he got involved with people who did harder drugs and I had no interest. So I had lost my girlfriend [good riddance], lost my home and the only place I had made real life friends who loved me as I loved them, lost my uni attempt, my job. Everything I had worked for was gone. I was the most miserable 18 year old you will ever see. That’s when I became close with Brandon and Mitch again, and through extension Georgia.

Brandon would tell me that the nudes her ex claimed to have leaked were real - that he had them, and wouldn’t show me, because he had to keep it secret since he believed she would ‘fuck him in a heartbeat’ and he wanted to cheat on his girlfriend by getting her to fly to visit him and putting moves on her. There was a lot of talk like this in the past and I only mention it now because as I grew to know this girl I realized how disgusting he had been all those years and it played a part later on.

So this was the first time Georgia really became a part of my life. I mean she had rolled in like a wrecking ball before, but I knew only hatred for her. Even at the beginning I simply tolerated her being there in our chats and I saw her as the little slut Brandon would manipulate and get his own ego rise by having around, like a trophy side chick or something. I didn’t care for her.

Then I got really drunk one night and out of sheer boredom, not interest, as I had nobody else to talk to - I sent Georgia a message. She was in another country with a boyfriend at the time, living there, so timezones allowed my drunk ass to be awake at 3am and be talking to her at primetime for her.

At first we talked about very little. I had decided she wasn’t horrible enough to ignore and decided to talk to her as a friend on the regular because it was so convenient for the way I handled myself at the time - drunk as fuck at 3am in the morning.

Now at this point in my life I had nothing going for me. I was miserable, I stayed at home all day.. I played video games, I watched anime, I was fat. You know the drill. But I began to change who I was as a person through talking to this girl. You see, she was in another country, young like me, a year younger in fact, scared and sad because her boyfriend had been unfaithful to her and she was living in a foreign land with him having to see him and his family every day. She too had a less than amazing, in fact horrible experience in her younger years that had left some trauma with her and I resonated with this girl so much. I remembered all of the years hating her and I suddenly felt so silly. This girl was me but with a vagina, basically. 

But I didn’t love her yet - I just found purpose through her. I wanted to be there for her. So I was. Even when I wasn’t drunk I maintained my awful sleeping pattern intentionally so she would never have to feel too alone - I would sleep through the busiest parts of her days when I needed rest - and I would wake when the day became lonely, so she didn’t have to be too alone with her thoughts. My life slowly began to revolve around this girl.

Eventually I started to change things about myself in more extreme ways. I had begun to understand that I had feelings for this girl, that she would need time (if she ever wanted to be with me), and I would need to be better for her. I changed my diet, I walked every night, losing anywhere from 5-10kg a month for months on end, I worked and saved up some money. I got in shape to impress her, I got healthy to impress her, I quit smoking and drinking for a while to impress her [I’d cave on them both eventually for various reasons that in hindsight were never worth the damage I could have done to myself].

And eventually the time came. By this stage she knew how I felt about her. And when she knew, she became more involved with me than before, more supportive, happier at times.. and then she finally came back from across the ocean, back to the same country as me and all I could think was when the time is right I can finally meet this girl.

It was around Christmas time when this happened, because it was this same Christmas that I had decided to spend with Brandon and Mitch. For the week leading up to the trip, she had dropped out of my life almost completely. She told me she felt jet lagged and had so many people to catch up with. All she talked about was McDonalds coworkers who flirted with her on her facebook or in messages. It was a part of her life she had never revealed and I felt pretty second place to every guy she spoke about because she spoke so passionately about them. I felt sad for the first time in a long time but I also remembered all of the amazing things i’d achieved personally in pursuit of this girl that I had never driven myself to do before and I put the negative thoughts away. I loved her. That’s what I realized that Christmas. That I loved Georgia.

So I accepted that she’s settling back into normal life - it was reasonable and at the end of the day we were still officially just friends. It wasn’t my place, although I wanted it. So I went to Brandon’s for Christmas and met Mitch there. She talked to me more while I was there, and things started to seem normal again, she even said ‘no don’t worry about me, you go spend christmas with your friends’ on christmas - you know those moments where you stop and you think, did she just do a girlfriend thing? is there something there between us? like it just sounded so heartfelt and compassionate and sincere and I just thought wow I love this girl

And then she disappeared, for the better part of a month.

I can’t put into words how gut wrenching this was. This was the first time in my life I ever had a true breakdown due to my depression. Well, it was the first time that burned itself into my memory. I had done so much - changed, so much about myself just to maybe impress this girl - knowing we might not end up as more than friends, but loving her nontheless and having what I thought was the most amazing beautiful friendship with her.. and then she was just gone.

And when I finally heard back from her the girl I had fallen in love with was dead. 

You see, during my christmas trip, I had spoken to Brandon about things that we regretted, sensitive topics we wanted to get off our chest - and understandably, one of mine was Sarah. I had no love for the girl, but she had confused me by coming back into my life and talking to me not long before the christmas trip. She just wanted her friend back. We had never been more, or attempted to. And we never have since.. so it wasn’t anything I thought weirdly of, but it did bring back the memories, and I thought I was confiding in a close friend when I vented my regrets about that period of time in my life - I did regret some moments. Why wouldn’t I? But that didn’t mean I had desire for the girl anymore. They had been long dead. All I knew in my heart was Georgia but Brandon knew that and he was jealous because Georgia had been his little pocket bitch for so long and he didn’t want anybody from his group of friends to be closer to her - especially not me, because he knew how I respected and cared for her, and he knew I knew the nasty things he had said about her in private to me. Things I had almost completely forgotten and would have never mentioned.

Instead of being a good friend, he acted on his own sadness and jealousy and pitifulness and lied to Georgia and told him I had Sarah as my back up girl.

And this was the first time what I believe was Georgia’s anxiety and fear tore us apart and damaged her. Because rather than confront me about it, me, the guy who had done nothing but work on himself in hopes  that one day he might do well enough to simply impress her in the slightest, she believed Brandon, her ‘big brother figure’, and rather than address the issue with me, cast me out of her life.

And somehow in the month that I was gone she had forgotten all about our friendship and any feelings and came back a cold hearted, mean woman who wanted to only tell me how shit I was, that she had relationship interests and that Brandon had told her everything.

Naturally, I defended myself. Very passionately. I have never been angrier in my life bar the time my uncle tried to fight me and take his sadness out on me the night of my Grandfather’s passing. I blasted her for not having the stones to talk to me about it, for blindly believing everything he said, then laughed at her while telling her all of the cruel nasty things he had said about her and done behind her back all those years and told her I hoped she was happy with the shit decision she made. And that was the end of us. Not for good, but for that moment in my life the girl I knew and had began to fall for had died and your average, mean and hateful girl who would rather you know she’s getting new dick than let you try to be happy. Not that she ever specifically acted like that, I guess I just felt so hard done by that when she told me she had love interests that’s all I heard her say.

Anyway, the month leading up to this talk with her - the talk where I finally found out what went wrong, I had messaged her almost daily, basically begging her to tell me what was wrong, and she had the nerve to actually treat me like I’m stupid enough to believe the 180 in her behaviour and attitude towards me meant nothing was wrong and that she was ‘just so busy’. Georgia is good at many things but lying to me has never been one of them though she never ceases to try, always assuming I’m stupid enough to believe her. Nevertheless, I was relatively fine in this month, although sad and somewhat desperate. After the talk finally happened however I was broken. Everything I had done and in the end I walked away with no girl I love, nor the friends I originally had, who by chance happened to be all I had left in my life to begin with. I drank myself into the gutter, I used my last bit of money to pack my bags and catch a bus to the coast, where all of my friends I had met through my ex were, and I lived there, homeless, for the longest time.

I lived on park benches, in public toilets, broke, always hungry, always thirsty, always sore, always tired. I put myself through all of this because it meant more to me to be in the company of those friends than it did to be stuck in that miserable little town. I would occasionally crash at a friends place on the floor or on their couch, but I tried to do this as little as possible. A month or so in my friend Adam spoke to his mother about me and after some convincing [see, when I previously lived on the coast, I was also homeless for a short duration, then lived with Jackson and his family while trolley pushing before getting my own place, and during this time Jackson’s mother had innocently enough mistaken something on her credit card and assumed I had taken it and used her money - mind you I had never used one to pay for something before, I wouldn’t have known how for the life of me - but that gave me a bad rep as the families knew each other.] she had worked it out with her friend who needed somebody paying rent to help her cover costs that I could live there since I had just got a new job at McDonalds. She demanded I help her cover her phone bill, internet, and all matter of personal costs that no person renting a room should ever have to pay for, but I cared so little for myself short of wanting a room that I agreed. A week or so in, I sat in the loungeroom talking to her - she told me that she used to smoke weed with Adam’s older brothers, Hayden and Nathan, and I said oh yeah I’ve smoked with Adam, sometimes when our dealer doesn’t work out we call Nathan and he gets some for us through his dealer, and she went and told Adam’s mother that I had called Nathan my ‘dealer’ and the family just happened to have an uncle going to prison over dealing drugs at the time and it was an awful time for that fucked cunt to spin my words to try to get me in trouble [for god knows what reason, the help I offered would have saved her from her situation lol], the cunt was just fucked in the head I guess.

Anyway, that put me out of a home again pretty quickly. Then shortly after, while I was with my friend Josiah visiting his house [he occasionally gave me lifts to and from work], his mother found out I was homeless. It wasn’t an intentional thing, she asked me where I lived and I kind of just nonchalantly replied nowhere and then she said what do you mean nowhere and then I was just stuck in one of those odd situations where it was like ah man I shouldn’t have said shit, and I explained how I was technically homeless but it was ok that I had a job and I was sure I would manage to fix everything soon enough and there was no need to worry, but as it turns out Josiah’s mother is a beautiful soul and her response was pretty much ‘Is this true son?” - “Yes mum” - “Well no friend of my son is homeless if I can help it!” and bam I had a place to live. A normal place to live, with a normal family, that asked me for fucking nothing - $50 a week, it was crazy. I told them I could do more and they said nope don’t worry about it. So I had a place and a job and was living with a friend that became like a brother to me. Life suddenly wasn’t so bad. Josiah wanted to go to the Navy and was struggling with the motivation to get fit and pursue his goals so in my respect and appreciation for all he had done for me I pushed him and I helped him and I even resolved to go myself. I was genuinely going to go to the Navy because I had reached the conclusion that everything in my life so far was over and maybe I would find myself there.

And then Georgia came back. Now I don’t mean back in the full sense of the word. Georgia has been back once - briefly - at the start of our relationship for two months, in the entire time since then. I mean back in the true sense of what her and I were, and can be. But regardless of just how there she really was, she was there.

This time was different. She told me that she had realized that I was right about Brandon. She tried to laugh it off like it hadn’t hurt me so bad. I could tell she just wanted to talk again and despite how much I wanted to hate her all I saw was the chance that maybe that beautiful girl I fell in love with would come back. She asked me what I had been doing and I told her, although not in specifics, or why my life had turned out like this, because I didn’t want her to know I had gone downhill since she took Brandon’s side over mine, because the actions were still my own, as influenced by my sadness as I was. And that wasn’t ultimately her fault. I told her that I was planning to go to the Navy.

This is where she gave me one of the biggest slaps in the face she’s ever given me. She told me no, don’t go. Now we were both young and stupid in our own ways but as a woman with history with a man, you don’t beg him not to leave for the navy unless it means something. I felt that tug on my heart strings right away. That spark of belief that maybe there’s something here that her and I both want to bring back to life. I said I’d think about it. She pleaded with me not to go, that she wanted me here, that she wanted to meet me.  I did the only reasonable thing a guy in my situation would do. I met the girl I had loved so badly. We only knew each other online, so we both had to bring a +1. Well, I didn’t, she did to feel safe. I could have taken both u bitches don’t forget that if you’re reading this Georgia. I’m just messing around of course.  Uh.. yeah. anyway. I met her. I met the girl that had turned my life in so many directions. And I wasn’t wildly blown away by how perfectly beautiful she was or anything. Not that she isn’t beautiful - she is, incredibly so, but it wasn’t 100% this beautiful cliche meeting. I couldn’t stare the girl in the eyes. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do, what to say, I didn’t eat the city food she ate, I made a fool of myself, I wasn’t even sure who I was eating with, if she still thought about me the same way, and it didn’t feel like she was all that interested if I’m perfectly honest. But I was so happy to have finally met this amazing beautiful woman that I actually didn’t hang onto those negative thoughts for once. I was so happy. I told her I wouldn’t go to the navy. I missed my appointment, which black listed my name and made me unavailable to attend again for a big period of time because I was ‘unreliable’. I gave up what I was working towards. She seemed happy. Then I asked her when I could see her again. When I could do our date over and not be so weird this time. It never happened. And she disappeared again. Just like before. The girl I loved had never really come back and after destroying my life when she left, to fixing it again.. I had ruined my chance at a career based off her desire that was never real to begin with and she was gone again. So again I was broken. But this time I was.. almost hateful. I didn’t know who the girl was anymore. I let it go. I hated her. She never cared about me, I told myself. She just wanted to fuck around with my life. She probably only met me to see if I was worth sleeping with. I told myself all kinds of things. And then I did something I’d never done in my life.  I quit my job, I told my Dad to come and pick me up and for the first time since I was a young child I lived with the father I had hated all of my life and I tried to become as much like him as I could to forget the memory of her. You see, my dad was a womanizer and a man whore but he had a natural talent for it. He was such a manipulative person that he had developed like a subconscious art for getting laid. I wanted that. I trained with him, I worked the same job as him, I lived through the abuse of his own depression and sex addiction, having my head pinned to the floor while he choked me and told me I was weak, being insulted every day of my life because he saw my mother in me and he resented it, I lived through it all just so I could forget about Georgia, and everything else in my life. All I wanted was women and money. And before I had the chance to get either, months, maybe half a year into living with Dad, after I had quit smoking and been training and studied for the job he set up for me, Georgia comes back again.

This time I throw my money at her. I tell her to come visit me. I don’t want the fake bullshit game with her anymore. If she’s interested she needs to be interested. I’ll treat her like a princess if she treats me like a human being. I tried to mix all the things my dad did with my own self, and my new found positivity and energetic outlook on life being so much healthier and fit than I was before. I thought maybe if I can be so appealing that we don’t have to play the same games as before, if she just comes and spends time with me, real time, not like the time in the city, maybe then this girl will love me.

And I spent stupid amounts of money on her. She even said to me “You’ve spent more on me than any real boyfriend ever has” and all I could think was cool well do I get to be your boyfriend. She stayed the night on one of her two visits to me during this time. She took my bed, and messaged me to come close the blinds for her. Every part of me told me that she wanted sex and to go for it, but I told myself no, you have loved this girl so many times, for so long. All of those years were not spent just so you can get a pitiful one night stand. Ask her out. So I went in to close the blinds, and when I looked at her.. she seemed so genuinely disinterested. I realized in that moment that to her I was literally a slave closing the blinds. I wrote her a letter, on the bench outside of my room for her to read in the morning, asking her to go out with me. She said no. Well, she said maybe, but anything short of yes with Georgia had always meant no. There was no real maybe in her heart, not to me. My dad asked me if I got any. I got mad, because that’s not what I wanted, but also mad because in my head I thought no I didn’t, not that I wanted it to happen that way, but now I’m certain it never will anyway. All he did was make me feel shit. He must have noticed and in his own jaded way tried to make me feel better by saying she was probably a gold digger since I said she comes from a well off family and her dad spoils her. I never told him these things in an attempt to paint her a certain way. It was more my innocent ramblings as I thought about her and I, and our history and all I knew about her. I told him she wasn’t like that. I told her what she said, and she basically disappeared. Then my grandfather, the closest man I had ever had to a real father figure and my favourite family member passed away and her and I lost contact all together.

I wouldn’t talk to Georgia for most of the next year and a half. Right after she disappeared this time, I quit my job, packed up my bags and asked my father for the money I had earned and put into a joint savings account with him. Enraged that I wasn’t following his every order and doing everything the way he thought I should, he told me I had no savings, and so I was homeless again. This time I lived at an internet cafe, paying $50 a week for access with my job as a marketer in a small business on the second floor above a series of restaurants - a little, quiet job tucked away out of existence. I mattered to nobody. I wanted no help. I wanted to die. I did drugs and I drank a lot. I met Jack, Steven and Corey during this part of my life, friends I still have now, my stoner buddies. Eventually it became too much and I had to go back to home.

I got a job at the BP with my friend Peter who I had met in the small town near the coast when dating Maddie, who I had then hooked up with my older cousin who he now had a kid with. A lot to take in. I became friends Nik  again  (previously nikita from my childhood/maddies ex, now sex changed). and his girlfriend of like four years Leah. Soon after Peter hung himself and I drove past his house to see the ambulance there as I went to cover his shift, just to find out what had happened mid shift. Work there was never really the same. Not for me. I hated everybody. A new guy named Kevin started working there, him and I moved into a new place together so we both had our own place and we smoked weed in all of our spare time. Nik and Leah broke up and I let Leah manipulate me like an idiot. She told me Nik had always been paranoid that I’d take her like I took Maddie (literally not what happened) and that behind my back he hated me and he only used our friendship as a way to keep tabs on me and look like he didn’t care anymore and when I tried to talk to him about it, since she had been doing nothing but hanging around my house (hanging around kevin more than me, pretty sure she fucked him at some stage), he didn’t talk to me. And that was it. I believed her shit. I told her I would help her sort her life. She quit her job that was giving her like 8 hours a week so she could find a new one. I covered her expenses - her fuel, her food, her smokes, her bills, her new tyres on the car - then she began flirting and I honestly didn’t are about Nik by this stage because I had been convinced she was not lying about it by his actions and I fell for the trap and kept catering to her, talking to her about how she wanted to move and stuff and how I was gonna help her do it- just to find out she had been planning on leaving town literally the moment her car was fixed [which I was paying for] and cutting me from her life. So I got a tattoo on my right shoulder, a lilypad with ‘Upendi’ written on it. I got the tattoo for my sister, because Leah her and I watched the movie The Lion King 2 together and in the love scene they ride lilypads and sing the Upendi song [which means love]. But Leah’s nickname was also lily. See she didn’t know that I knew about her bullshit yet. So I told her I got it because ‘she liked the movie’ and because ‘I wouldn’t love again’ to make her feel bad and I told my sister it was just because she told me it was her favourite movie and I have love for my siblings. Although the ‘I don’t want to love again’ part did resonate with me, I literally inked my skin to spite that bitch. And I don’t regret it because the real meaning of the tattoo is beautiful and now I’m inspired to get one for all family members. Anyway, that was the end of that. I called my Dad [going back for round 3, or 4, or some shit] and said hey I want to come live with you, organized it, quit my job, and left. I spent a few months with him working odd jobs I could find, swapping here and there trying to find something better, getting high all of the time with my mates Jack, Corey and Steven and attempting to study a diploma in website development which by the way was fucking boring as shit I hated it lol. And enter Georgia, again. This time was different. The moment I saw her name pop up in my inbox, I didn’t open the message. I went to a brothel. I fucked some girl. I literally tried to push her out of my mind by being with another woman paid or not. But eventually I replied and we started talking again. But this time there was no spark. There was no life to it. She just messaged me because she was in a toxic relationship and I guess all males she had in her life were gone in one way or the other - or maybe she genuinely thought of me when she needed help, maybe because of when she was overseas and I supported her then.. I don’t know, she’s never told me, all I have is my own speculation as to why she chose to message me. But she did. And for the better part of the first month, I actually managed to crush feelings for her. They didn’t exist. I got high every day, I worked my job, I did my own thing, and I occasionally messaged my damaged female friend who needed relationship advice. And I didn’t really care about it that much, I just told her my honest take and left it at that.

I can’t remember what the trigger was, but one night she snapped. Maybe she hated how in control of myself I was being. Maybe she had been playing games with me all along and she hated not being the game master now. But she snapped and said ‘You know you love me. Admit it. Say you love me. Tell me you love me.’

And even though in my head I thought I’ll bet my life she’s playing some sick twisted game on me right now, after like two hours of her flirting with me and asking me to admit it, I caved, all the memories of the good times where she had made me happy, not miserable, came back, and I said I love you to her. In the end I had helped her get out of her toxic relationship with that guy, which I spent the next month doing, even after I found out she had cheated, something which almost made me delete her from my life on the spot, on a guy since I had been out of her life, because I had been so badly burned by crazy and unfaithful women, I still couldn’t make myself fall out of love with her. I wanted her. She hated my life with my dad. She knew he mistreated me again and that I was never happy. So for her sake, not for mine, I moved back home. But I hadn’t finished being caught up in my terrible memories from home yet. She gave up on me for a little while yet again.

Then she came back and I told her, I would move to a new place, where Tyson my best friend was. There I would get back in shape, be happy, work. She seemed happy about this - involved again but then basically the moment I made the move, she wasn’t there again, when I needed her. And I didn’t hate her for it. I was numb. I worked one day at the job I got, realized I was too physically unfit to work the ten hour shifts at a meat factory, that I should have taken the dominos job, was forced to leave my friends house because without that job I had no more time to use up living there freely. So I left without saying a word to them, early in the morning, I drove until I ran out of fuel and I cried myself to sleep. I didn’t answer calls from my mother for most of the following day, eventually answering to tell her that I didn’t care, that I wanted to sit in my car and I wanted to starve to death, that I had no more fuel, not to send me money, that I was over it all. And I meant every word of it. But she sent me the money anyway. And as much as I wanted to fill the car up and drive off a bridge, I was raised by this mother all on her own, and I love her too much to do that to her, or to my friend, who I had left without a word to, or my siblings who I loved.

So I made the drive home across state. At first I pretended to try, I signed up for uni, I failed my semesters, and wasted most of my year doing that. Fighting with my step dad. Letting my mother down. Setting a bad example for my brother. I stopped caring. I contemplated suicide again. I googled how to do it in the ways my scaredy cat ass could find painless. Overdose, easy for me because I like to indulge. Bullet, easy for me because we have guns in the house. Those were basically the two options I found and I contemplated them every day.

My lack of action - complete stillness in my bed, over indulging in food, feeling like I had given up on life, not having any goals, or desires left in my heart.. it turned me into a fat sad guy who sat at home doing nothing but playing games.. using memes and the friends I’ve made on voice comms as my new escape from reality. Doing the dishes made my legs ache from standing still. Not because I was morbidly obese, but because my body had grown so weak as well as getting bigger.

Then, one day, once again.. Georgia returned. And this was the first time Georgia ever surprised me. You see, when she returned this time, I said the most selfish, yet honest thing I have ever said to her. I said Georgia, I do not care about myself, I do not care about anything, I am a shell of the person I used to be, and I do not care. I do not want a fake friendship with you, I do not want the same thing we have had over and over again through these long painful years, I do not want it. The only thing that I have ever known I have truly wanted - and the only thing I can still tell you honestly that I want, is you, but not the you that you’ve given me for so long, the real Georgia, the girl I know and love. I want to love you and be loved. I will not be in your life any longer, short of being your partner. I said this because I sincerely believed she would leave as a result, but also because it was sincerely how I felt in my heart. I’m sure if she had said no that day I could have easily killed myself and finally got it over with because it would have been the most succinct ending to our story and I would have been ok with that.

..

But Georgia said yes to me. She said yes. She said let’s try. She said let’s be together. It sent me into shock. I didn’t believe her for at least a week. I was sure she was going to destroy my life any moment and break my heart into a thousand pieces but she didn’t. Even though I kept my defenses up for the entire first week. And to make things better, it was the girl I knew and loved again. She was back. She spoke to me, she communicated with me, she was excited to have me in her daily life, to let me know what was happening, to spend time playing games with me. 

And for the first time in years I felt love and happiness more real than ever before. All along I had wanted this girl back, now she was back - and she was mine. She was my partner, my love, and she was beautiful, and energetic, and happy, and intimate, and compassionate, and understanding. It was like we had gone back in time and undone Brandon’s lies before they could take effect. Like everything was back to normal after all this time.

I played games with her every day. I spoke to her every day. I encouraged and supported her. Financially when she had no work, and even when she first got new work so she could spoil herself without setting herself immediately behind. I tried to understand her anxiety, what set her off, what made her happy and unhappy - it was a learning experience for me, she even threatened to leave a few times and I quickly learned what to do and what not to do. However I did not yet work. I still do not as I write this. I did not stick to a healthy routine. I did not exercise routinely. I made her promises and I wasn’t yet sticking to them. Although this was born out of laziness it was also born from pure happiness. I lived every day in a daze of love, catching up on love and happiness I felt I had been missing my entire adult life. I’m sure she noticed I wasn’t hitting my goals but she didn’t mention it. I was still me, and I was so supportive and helpful and just there for her to love her and never let her hurt. And she knew that.

But then I had a bad fight with my step father. He threatened to kick me out, said I was going to have to leave, and I was convinced. Georgia was stressed out and angry about how they treated me, but also angry at me, however she would not tell me that, instead she would internalize it and let it ruin us slowly, because that is what her anxiety does to her and she is as scared and as damaged as I am. I sent her the last of my money, and I asked her to buy my an internet dongle - so we would not lose the ability to communication, I promised to turn my car into a home and use my payment to get to a new town, keep data on the dongle, charge my phone through my car and never lose touch with her, so she would never have to worry. I had it all planned out. The only thing I did not account for in my costs was my antidepressants. The medication I had begun taking at her request so I could make bigger strides in getting back on my feet and out of my rut. They did help, I just failed to consider them in the big picture, as without a home, without my prescription from this town, without the stability, how would I afford life plus the medication weekly? I didn’t see how I could so I didn’t think to factor it in.

A week passed since the threat, I had gone a week without my medication. Georgia had grown somewhat distant at the beginning of the week, before my mood had begun to turn. She spoke to me less. She didn’t want to play our game with me anymore. She had found somebody else to play with. She needed the friend to help her because she felt she could not confide in me because of my situation. So she left me in the dark again when I needed her the most. But this time I lashed out in jealousy and anger. I accused her of not loving me. I told her she was running away from me again. That she was giving him my place. That she wanted nothing to do with me, that she was getting rid of me. I felt it in my heart too because I know exactly how she acts when she begins to, or has already left me. And I was in the wrong for lashing out the way I did, and it made me feel terrible. But she had started to go when I needed her the most - and after that, she was gone again, the way she usually was.

She assured me that we were still together. But she never spoke to me. And I saw her online, with him, and with other friends every day. I saw her see my messages, but never read or reply to them. I saw her gone. I messaged her frantically daily. She asked for space. I tried, and could last no longer than 2 days at a time without messaging her. She scoffed at this as if it was a weak effort. As if it was normal for her to want me to be able to not talk to her for so long. As if I wasn’t meant to miss and love her. As if I wasn’t meant to feel like she has abandoned me when I needed her and when I had trusted her. I had hurt her by lashing out but she had hurt me back in return and while my cruelty and rage was brief, her neglect and vagueness was never ending and it hurt me more than I had hurt in years because in my heart I believed she knew my situation, that she would not be like this solely because I had hit a low point because I had a rough few days without my medication, that surely she had always thought more of me during all of this and that it was less likely she would leave so easily and more likely that she no longer loved me..

So after a month of waiting, of begging, of staying distant, of caving and trying to connect, I made the decision to go. I removed her from my online contacts, on social media, on my phone, on the game we played.. I deleted her number, the photos, the conversations.. I blocked her on everything and I told her goodbye for good. Moments after I had finished doing this, my friend, Hayden, also friends with her on the game told me that her in game message was ‘Happy Girl’ and I cried because all I could wonder was how someone who claimed to be my partner, who claimed to love me, could be a happy girl in the company of this other man for a month while I suffer and cry out for her every day. And that’s when I decided I was going to hurt myself, bit by bit until I was ready to end it all. So that night I lined up as many of my antidepressants as my mind would let me take and I downed them all, quickly fell sick and passed out. I woke up the next day, more miserable than ever. I sat there. The day flew by me. At the end of the day, I lined up two weeks worth of anti depressants and a drink. And I sat there and began to google how much of it you needed to take before it became lethal. Because I wanted it to be lethal. Georgia and I were over. She had run away and disappeared like she always had and acted as if I was dumb enough to not see it. Especially when she had so easily given my spot to another person, when she had made me stare at her spending all hours of her day with him, every day, for a month when she knew how hard it was for me to trust, when she knew how depressed I was without her. The girl I loved knew me too well to do that and think it was innocent in my eyes. The girl I loved knew that I knew her too. So the only reasonable answer was: She doesn’t love me, she hasn’t this entire month, and her anxiety and fear of me killing myself is the only thing stopping her from leaving and being happy. So if I leave and kill myself where she will never see or know, then everything will be fine and she won’t get hurt.

And then Hayden, the same guy who broke my heart by telling me her league message was ‘Happy Girl’ after all my suffering, told me it had changed to ‘girl’ after the final message I sent. It shattered me. It broke my resolve. It gave me some faint hope that maybe she loved me. So I undid it all and I messaged her. And I told her the thing about the message. How it had given me hope. How I was so incredibly sad and desperate. How I needed her to tell me what she felt. That I needed her to come back if she loved me. That I was sorry. So much was said. Most of it my rambling, because I over think and I ramble when I’m depressed and she ignores it and hides when she’s anxious and depressed.

But she said she was here. That she would come back. Like she was admitting she had been gone after all this time, without actually saying ‘sorry for telling you that I wasn’t.’. But that didn’t matter and I just wanted her back. 

That is the story so far.

Georgia has said she loves me, and she knows I love her. She said that she will come back. I don’t understand why it is so hard for her. Why she still leaves me in the dark, why she spends no time with me, why it feels like she’s hardly back at all. I try to be strong but every day I spend without the loving relationship we had breaks me down again and again. I do not know what to do anymore. I do not know how to get her to come back. To understand my pain. To understand her worth to me. To understand why I keep begging, even when it seems selfish. She is still not back. Not truly. I know it in my heart and she knows I do. And I need her back so desperately. I cannot fight my snappiness and disappointment and sadness when I am so painfully aware of how little she is trying to come back nor can I understand why she does not try like she did. It hurts me so much.

So I write this now. This explanation of the story of Georgia and Cody, intended only for my eyes and hers, unless some strange soul stumbles upon this post and invests the time to read. I keep most important details short of our names hidden for obvious reasons. I intend to use the rest of this page for daily entries. I want to record my depression. I want to record every emotional reaction I have to her, to what she says, to what she does, and I want to write it here. I no longer want to be vocal about it to her over the course of the day. I just want to tell her I love her. I cannot fight her on it anymore. So instead I record my pain here on the daily, so that I can show her, at the end of the day, or the end of the week.. whenever it may be, I want her to be able to come here and read the raw emotion poured onto this page. I want her to know I love her and I am trying to process this. I want her back. I just want her back so fucking badly. If there is a god I pray you guide my girls heart back to me. So yeah.. this was the story so far.. daily entries come next..