#me. KLONOPIN HELP ME. my neck and my arms and my chest feel like someone is literaly binding me in piano wire and it’s NOT cool. I hate hate

[clawsextended]

juuuuuuuuuuust casually having a panic attack at work.

[chloetcommathecreator-blog]

I wake up at 3PM every day

3/13/14

I wake up at 3PM every day. The alarm on my phone goes off at ten and eleven and I shut it off in a dream-state. What is there to wake up for at that time anyway?

I wish I had more klonopin so my jaw would unclench. My teeth seem wired shut when my mouth is closed. I have to consciously breathe and focus on it to relax, but once the focus is gone, my teeth are clenched again.

I am going out to dinner with Allie tonight and probably Bret. We - or at least Allie and I - are probably just going to get as drunk as possible. She gave three options and all were walking distance. Latin, here we go.

Sasha is barking downstairs. I don’t think I will walk her today. Yesterday, she went up every driveway and chased every moving creature in people’s yards and it drove me crazy. The leash we have does not lock, so I need to keep my thumb on the plastic button and after crossing several streets and steering her around cars, my hand was almost numb from aching. She is a good dog though. She loves me so much. She’s beautiful.

Dan told me through text the other day that he is going to therapy. He has been upset at his externship at Lumiere and spends his time trying not to cry. I’m not sure how I feel about him telling me these things. Sharing. Am I the only one he can talk to, or wants to talk to about it? Sometimes I feel that if Dan wasn’t in my life, I wouldn’t really be upset about it. I probably wouldn’t see him much when I got back to the Culinary because my suspension puts me in a different class, and I’d be living off campus. I can’t imagine going back. I don’t like to think about it.

I do miss Dan sometimes though. I miss the time we spent at school where we would nap together every day. To me, that was everything I needed.

He is a soft kisser. Like Billy. I like hard, wet, rough kisses where you’re not thinking about anything but your lips and his and you couldn’t think of anything else if you tried. Kissing Dan, I sit there thinking, pressed against him. He doesn’t make me come. A few times he has moaned at me that he wants to make me cum as he fucks me. I hope I didn’t laugh externally but I did in my head. I’m maybe mean. He asked me to be more vocal in bed. I told him I would work on it.

Marla once told me she liked me more when I was drunk. That upset me and made me really sad. I think I’m the same way with sex, though. Sober, I am awkward and self-conscious but drunk or high I am giddy and excited.

I’ve never come during sex. I’ve gotten the sheets soaking wet, leaving puddles under us after sex, and my thighs get slick as I get aroused and everything is wet wet wet. But I’ve never come during sex.

The next guy I sleep with, I want to have tattoos and a big dick. I remember the feeling when Billy and I were having sex on the floor of my brother’s room and his dick was long enough that it stimulated this new place and if he had lasted longer (he lasted a good amount of time, no complaints), or if I had relaxed a bit more, I would have come. It was the closest I’ve every gotten and Billy was the guy I liked least out of everyone I’ve slept with. As Firas told me when he tried to figure out why I chose to sleep with Billy, “He’s a simple guy”. And he was. Really not much going on in his head, from what I could tell, and from what came out of his mouth. But I found him attractive and he was so tall and had a large dick and we had good sexual chemistry-- or maybe just teenage desire-- so I slept with him a few times during the summer after freshman year at Tulane. I usually tried to get him a bit high or drunk before we had sex because I was awkward and he would talk and I really did not give a shit about anything he had to say. He did not like me to see him naked and walking about. I didn’t like that.

Is sober sex part of adulthood? If so, I don’t want it.

Even if my memory is choppy, on New Years, after Mariel, Dan, and I tried to smoke all my weed (my idea-- I decided to stop smoking everyday and this was my last hurrah. I would be drug tested four days later and didn’t think about this. Idiot). But Mariel went home and Dan and I settled into the couch and got undressed again. I was barely dressed after the bath we had taken before Mariel came over. Dan was on top of me and kissing me hard and I liked it and gripped him hard. He told me he liked it when I pulled him towards me or something like that. I told him to bring condoms but I am a dumbass and we didn’t use them. As usual I was wet as fuck, and bringing my hand back up from between my legs, grabbed Dan’s arm and left a print of wet wet wettttt. I like when he rubs his dick between my legs. I especially like when he does it from behind and he is between my locked thighs and I don’t have to worry about the expressions I make. But he was on top of me and I wanted him in me so badly. At some point, I put my hand up against his stomach, holding him up a few inches so that only the tip of him was able to go in me and I’m sure I was smiling. Every time I opened my eyes he was smiling at me. I ended up on top of him and slipped him out when he groaned that he was going to come and semen spilled onto his chest. He wiped it off with his briefs and then wore them, which I told him was gross as hell, but there wasn’t anything else to use in the empty, cold house and we were cold and tired and lazy. If we continue to have sex, we’ll be using condoms. I don’t need the stress in my life of having to worry if I’m pregnant. Though I know the chances are slim, it makes me so anxious that I feel like my hair might start to fall out, and I become so angry at him. Also if we wore condoms he would last longer, which would be nice because without a condom it is maybe too much stimulation or something and he comes so quickly… I like when he helps me clean myself off though. Helps wipe the cum off of my torso with a towel or napkin. I like how it isn’t shameful or awkward and we-- or he-- is comfortable being just naked and there. And he doesn’t mind when I am on top and he comes onto his stomach. I never thought I’d be that girl who was stupid enough to use the pull-out method. I’m not on birth control to control birth, but to control my mood swings around my period and my acne. I ran out at the start of this month, but I take it for me, not for anyone else to take advantage of.

I liked when he wraps his arms around me, hugging me from behind. He is tall enough that it completely envelops me. Kissing him doesn’t make me burn, but when he kisses my neck after we’ve woken up from a nap and I am facing away from him, his touch leaves a mark and he can’t see it, but I’m smiling. I don’t like when he sucks on my breasts or goes down on me. I don’t know why. It feels good but I don’t really like it when he does it… maybe because he goes cross-eyed when he goes down on me or it doesn’t really stimulate me that much when he sucks on my breast. His hair is everywhere in my bed. Short, black hairs, shed like from a dog, and it makes me crazy but it doesn’t gross me out. I think he will continue talking to me. I’ll keep responding. Long distance things are not for the uncommitted. I am too young and too sad and too lonely and too blasée to not want to sleep with someone here. Luckily, I don’t leave the house or interact with people my age. There isn’t really any point anyway. I just confuse people and complicate their lives. And it makes me even more anxious.

3/15/14 “Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need to take rather frequent holidays” Brave New World Foreword

“And what has humankind been searching for since the dawn of time but to levitate, to escape from the force of gravity, to escape from these lead-soled shoes.” Absinthe Documentary

I haven’t seen Wolf of Wall Street, or whatever movie with Leo DiCaprio in which, as he puts it, “consumes enough drugs to sedate Manhattan” on a daily basis. I want this. Is that wrong? I want to be in a stable job or in a business where I don’t have to worry about being drug tested and can do what I want with my free time and private life. I want to hit my bowl every night before bed, relax all the muscles in my body, clear my head of all the bad by clouding it up, and be able to close my eyes and focus on a good memory until I am thickly asleep. Do they test for oxycontin or xanax in drug tests? These are my alternatives. I have only gotten enough a few times, less than I can count on one hand, to be able to get the full effects-- my body numb in a pleasant way and my head running smoothly and undisturbed as I lay spread out on the couch, completely unmoving. It feels good. Calm. Like being underwater, I am alert and aware of the surroundings but held down by stronger gravity, a greater pressure, soothing like being swaddled like a baby. Marijuana makes me move. I can put on my soundproof headphones and lay out on my floor and do yoga, feeling every muscle in my body, absolutely focused on each feeling, the strain as I contort on the ground. I feel beautiful when I look at myself in the mirror high. I don’t know why that is. I see myself differently. I like to rub moisturizing lotion on myself… and then put it in the basket… because I like the feeling of touching my own body, the contours of my clavicle against my skin, the slopes of my legs, the nape of my neck. While barbiturates weigh down the lead-soled shoes even more, dragging me farther into the depths, marijuana lifts me above, and I am floating like Aries, wings exchanged for lead, coasting and content.

The ‘War on Drugs’ will undoubtedly fail. It is intrinsically opposed to human nature, and we are paying the price in jail space, money, livelihoods… justice. I am prescribed 40mg of Prozac   .5mg of Klonopin & 3mg of Wellbutrin a day.

And it is not enough. The drug companies are able to buy politicians as lobbyists to maintain an unreasonably high price on medication and continue to be maliciously successful. Ground up, unrecognizable, processed chalky substances in colored pill form or the bud of a plant.

Cigarettes are legal. You can feel the damage as it is being done with each inhalation-- the burn in your throat and the sick, toxic smell eroding eroding. Smoker’s cough- listening to a person hack up a lung. Unable to go through the day without taking a break to assault their lungs, leave cigarette butts littered on the ground, thrown out car windows. Fuck the environment. When you treat your body like an ashtray, the world is one too. Why is that okay, when I JUST WANT TO HIT UNPROCESSED, NON-HARMFUL, NON-CANCEROUS BUD TO SLEEP. Not smoke to get through the day, but to put me to sleep. Zzzquil gives me strange, upsetting dreams or maybe makes me remember them and leaves me feeling sluggish and groggy and tastes terrible. But it is readily available. My parents told me I shouldn’t take too much Zzzquil because it’s unhealthy for my sleep pattern. Then they gave me advil PM to get me to sleep. Fuck you. Fuck all of it. I understand what it feels like to be gay, to be different, ostracized. I understand what it means to be persecuted for who you know you are and what you know you want by blind, fumbling hypocrites whose minds have been closed so long they have rusted shut.

We forget history.

Many in my Vietnamese family became Republicans after fleeing to America. Do they not remember being raised on food stamps in order to survive, being given that aid and an extra push to a family of seven children, fled and penniless from their war-torn country? Do they realize that this aid which embarrassed them so much, allowed them ALL to be successful, thriving adults in comfortably large houses, happy with their careers, putting their children through college?

We forget the absurdity of a society once unaccepting of interracial marriage as we argue against love between people we do not know, will never meet, whose lives will not affect ours. We talk about the sanctity of marriage being destroyed by people getting pleasure in their private lives whilst we have mistresses on the side, fuck prostitutes, keep horrifying pornography. “God” is great, God is good, because he is everything we want him to be. God is us, each of us individually, and to find God, as we call it, is to find oneself. There is a difference between pondering the greater meanings of life and travelling or reading or getting an education to find meaning in yourself, in your life. YOU. Versus reading a book written thousands of years ago. I don’t even know the date of the second world war. I don’t know the age of the Earth. People STILL BELIEVE that theories are NOT fact. People still do not believe in evolution. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. It is beyond comprehension to me. If your God is trapped in an irrelevant book, trapped in the walls of a church if you sleep through the sermons on the hard wooden pews, then you are trapped. My cousin became religious after his teammate was seriously injured playing a sport and the religious group reached out to him and showed not only the injured boy, but my cousin, compassion and unexpected unconditional love. God, to him, is love in other people. He is a happy person, social and well loved by his family and friends. He loves others and brings them happiness. These beliefs adhered to his inner self, planted the seed and watered it and helped him to blossom into a being made of light and love.

God, to me, is every bit of matter in existence. God is in the fractals naturally occurring in plants and nature, so intricate that it takes immense work for our minds to understand it in the slightest. God is standing at the top of a mountain and climbing out of the cave we live in and accepting all that has been made without our help, without our knowledge. Thriving. God is the dead bird outside of the dormitory at the CIA, legs stuck out into the air, feathers lightly shimmering blue. God is the bird rotting in the bushes. God is the recycled atoms and iotas of LIFE that create and recreate and recreate. Explain birth to me. Explain how two cells become a functioning, unique individual. Explain how we know more about the surface of Mars than of our own ocean. God, to me, is everything, and it is impossible to ever know. God is the birth of everything, the two cells becoming a GALAXY of incomprehensible size, the creation of MAN, our thoughts, and our massless souls and everything else possible. Maybe this is why I can’t get out of bed. The news hurts me because other people are destroying my God. Processed foods, ignorance, a stunted quest for knowledge, an obsession with THINGS and Kim Kardashian and MONEY, whilst we walk on and are MADE of the same matter as dinosaurs, people, STARS. We are all God and it is in our nature to suffer. I can’t get out of bed sometimes. I want to accelerate the process. I want to disintegrate into structures of other forms of life. I don’t want to dress myself in a way that is acceptable to others. I don’t want to deal with the stupidity of people’s conceptions of the matter of my being. Asian, female, American, short… as if we do not contain fragments of each other… as if we were made of different matter, different RACES categorizing matter by what does NOT matter - how we look and talk and dress, where we are from, how we speak… I can’t even… Can God be a cancer? Eventually everything must succomb to death, yes? Are humans part of the process of Earth’s death? The consumption of all resources in a cell until necrosis. Black holes? I tried to read A Brief History of Time but could not FATHOM it. I imagine that having the mind of Stephen Hawking is almost unbearable. The closest of most to understand or infer the cause of all being, the vast universe, while trapped in a body of matter that will not function for him. Black holes he understands. Matter expanding into something from nothing, but what do we do with that knowledge? We don’t understand the matter that kills us, there is no “cure” for death. Let it be. Let everything be. Let God…

I don’t know what I am saying. I am a hypocrite and a vain fool and premolded a certain way. I barely know how much I do not know. But it is a lot.

Sometimes I wonder if I am a bad driver because of my matter, or because of people’s conceptions of my matter, which is constantly jokingly told to me. I wonder if I am a bad driver at all.

What does it mean to be me? How is it that my sister has her own personality, innately existing within her. A God in her head of her own. Every one of us.

Speed up the process. I am watching my God die.

Love and sex and sexuality, Plato and Aristotle, the defect(?) in my mental matter, blood cells, valves, chocolate, the skin cells shedded constantly from our bodies, the bugs in my sister’s room that were attracted to the sugary trash she didn’t throw away. The personality of ANIMALS. I can’t see it all and will never know it all but I can be a part of it all, molecules freed from this shell… Spilled out into the earth and strewn around and around like the precipitation and rain cycle we learned about in third grade. Around and around like the planets and stars to central points, around and around and dying and giving birth.

I want to die.

I can’t stand people as a whole. All of us, even myself. We forget our history. We can barely remember our own memories accurately, but we get older and stop questioning, asking WHY am I doing this? WHAT is the purpose? I believe that if you asked this question with everything you did, you would be able to avoid the mindless lull of routine and find reason in life. Why am I stopping at this stop sign? To avoid hurting anyone. If it is the middle of the night and there are no cars, is it moral to go against the law and ignore the stop sign? No. If you are sure no one will get hurt, there is no reason to stop. The cameras that automatically take pictures of your car when you stop too far past the line infuriate me. Let real people decide what is right, what is safe, instead of a machine fixed for one purpose, focused on one line. People learn to avoid the camera spots. It does not make them better drivers, it just conditions them to act a certain way at a certain place. Are we safer? And the county gets a large part of their income from these camera traps, I’m sure. Traps. Another example- in baking, some a obsessed with wearing gloves. I was told to wear gloves while piping dense, pre-made muffin mix into molds. “Always wear gloves in case the chef comes by!”, I was told. WHY do we wear gloves? To protect people from spreading diseases through touch. Does this help with the muffins that are going to be baked in a 375 degree oven for nearly half an hour? No. It is a waste of plastic. Waste waste waste. I want to be in France. I want to have been born in France, raised in France. Solidly French. I want to speak like making words into song, draw out my vowels, deepen my inflections. I read an article that said that people have different personalities associated with different languages they speak. I believe it. I am a different person when I speak French. If I spoke it fluently, I could exist in Europe as an entirely different person, I believe, unrecognizable to the lazy, unhealthy, isolated, antisocial, unromantic, anxious, drug seeking person that I am.

I am not high right now. This is me.

Me, who gets lost for hours when walking the dog. Me, who is terrible at remembering names. Me, content to lock myself away in my own ivory tower, hardly scalable by even my closest family members. Me, who can feel the Prozac lodged in my throat, dry and uncomfortable. Me, still infatuated with a boy I haven’t seen or spoken to in years. Me, who regularly cries while driving for reasons I don’t even know. Me, who can’t sleep normally. Passed out at eleven tonight and woke up at two AM, wide awake and didn’t nap at all today. Passed out at eleven exhausted, and still, up two hours later. Me, whose most calming activities are doing useless art projects. Hot glue gun messes, torn fabric and unusable, unneeded items. Me, who does not believe in people-- does not believe in God-- but has faith in both. Me, in THIS skin, with THESE teeth and nails and bad vision and pores and sweat and hair. Me me ME I am a vain fool.

3/16/14

In high school, we used to smoke K2 when we couldn’t get a hold of weed. It was a different high. I scarier, messier, muddier high. The type of high people stereotype as a usual high-- too much giggling over nothing, unable to carry a conversation or finish a thought, eyes wide open but everything blurry, indistinguishable. Once Mariel and I were at Zoe’s house and smoked a bowl of K2 in her basement. Usually she partook, but this time Zoe didn’t… she wanted a clear head for something she had to do later. Mariel and I did our usual ‘smoke until you feel it’ routine and were absolutely fucked up in the head after a bit. I remember we were looking at pictures and laughing hysterically and it scared Zoe. I don’t want to imagine what we were like, seeing us from outside the haze. It would have scared me too.

We smoked salvia a few times too. Once in Mariel’s backyard  when we went ‘camping’... an excuse to get fucked up out of sight from her parents. I took a hit, then sat glued to my collapsable chair as I voiced my concern about the tree above me warping like a mirage. It only lasted maybe two minutes but it paralyzed me and made me feel like I was going insane. I was doing my best to keep control of my brain and barely succeeding.

Another time, at Zoe’s house, we were around a bonfire and packed a bubbler full of salvia. Griffin took two hits, Mariel, I, and maybe some others took a hit, and then all was chaos. Griffin tried to rip his beard off and panicked and flipped over the fire pit, as I was told later, though I watched the entire thing. I felt like the embers crashed close to me and I thought that maybe I should move but I couldn’t stop laughing and Mariel was laughing uncontrollably next to me, both of us laughing so hard we had to sit down in the wet grass. I remember that I couldn’t control my body and peed my pants, soaking my black leggings and seeping into the ground. I continued to laugh. Lucy put me and Mariel in ‘Time Out’, by making our cackling duo sit in a corner of the lawn while the boys restrained Griffin and calmed him down.

Are these things people normally do in high school?

Ari II: The first time I talked to him was in the computer lab at the CIA. The ancient school is terrible with technology and I couldn’t remember the domain name for my email or find the link for it anywhere so I swore a bit at the computer and then leaned around the wooden divider to my right to ask the person next to me what the email domain was. He had thick glasses and jet black hair and answered my question.

One day, in Baking Fundy’s, he was in my class to learn about baking for a job he was taking. I remember seeing Chef stand in the corner and watch him judgmentally as the culinarian bent with his knee on the ground to hastily and messily fill his bowl with flour. He piped out profiteroles like he was piping out mashed potatoes and just looking at them I knew that they weren’t going to rise correctly. He looked up at me when I came up to Chef and asked him if we could eat some of the goodies another Bakeshop had brought in. I complained when he told us ‘No’, but mainly I asked just to get the boy to notice me. Miranda told me she liked him… She liked every male she saw… and just to mess with her I told her I wanted to sit on his face and she took that as a challenge to talk to him and make him like her.

He was friends with Erica so I asked about him and later on apparently he asked about me so she tried to set that up. One day, in the hall, he asked for my number to hang out sometime, as he said, and I gave it to him, surprised.

He texted me that night and ended up smoking with us by the river and drinking in the dorms. He lived off campus. I think he was my age. He had never spent time on campus. It was strange having him around my friends… a new guy when they all knew I was sleeping with Dan too, but they were not the type to judge. David hit on him and we laughed. Ari made strange conversation and I kind of sat back on the rug and watched the scene. Later, he drove me to his apartment right across the road from the school and we smoked a joint on the swings of the playground at his housing complex. I had to go back to campus at one point to give David his keycard that I had accidentally kept, but after sitting on my room trying to decide if I should go back with Ari, knowing that I wanted to but at the same time didn’t… He texted me wondering what was going on and if I was coming back with him. I probably left him idling in front of my dorm for half an hour. I got back in his white car. He told me he had a pool in the complex, up the hill from the playground, and we scaled the fence and I stripped off my clothes and jumped in. He told me he wasn’t wearing any underwear and I thought that was hilarious for some reason, but he stripped naked and jumped in the pool too. I was wearing my UGLIEST bra… nude and falling apart at the seams and stained on one side with bleach… but didn’t care. Maybe was too drunk to care. I swam in the deep end, enjoying the silence under water. No need to talk then. He stayed in the shallow end and was so skinny that he was shivering cold in the warm water. I think he still had his glasses on. While he had waded in, I had dived straight in, slicing through the chlorinated water and holding my breath as I sunk for as long as I could. I joined him in the shallow end after a bit, figuring I should probably talk to him. He kissed me and ended up pushing me onto the side of the pool, sitting, legs wrapped around his torso as he stood there shivering and naked in the water. I wondered if there were any children who lived in the complex. I wondered if anyone could see us from the windows or if there were cameras. I liked kissing him. He kissed me hard and tasted like cigarettes… not smokey, but spit stained with nicotine in the best way. Totally culinary dude. He worked all of the time, was what I heard from him, and his parents didn’t help financially at all. He was from Cali and had never seen snow. When he asked to go back, shivering, I put my shorts back on and my riding boots, but my see-through shirt clung to my skin and was too difficult to put on wet so I just held it. He tried to help me as I went over the fence, but I didn’t like that. I sat shirtless in his house and met his two roommates. One had built a jungle gym for his cat, Alice. She was still a kitten and beautiful. I told them that the cat was prettier than me and she was, beautiful white and gray coat and large, shining eyes. Ari shared a room with one of the guys, which I made fun of him for because there was a spare room that was empty. I don’t remember his explanation. I think he played guitar? Maybe that was his roommate. I don’t remember. Usual, awkward me, kept talking at him, sitting on his bed, until he kissed me, and the he was taking his clothes back off. He took off his glasses and set them somewhere and I wish my vision or memory was good enough that I remembered what he looked like without the thick coke-bottle glasses that made him almost look like a bug. Completely naked, I asked if he had any condoms. Didn’t really do much of any foreplay. I remember his dick being pretty big, but then again he was such a skinny guy that maybe it just looked big. I don’t remember the sex but I remember laying back afterwards and facing the wall and he climbed back into bed behind me, having thrown away the condom. “I needed that”, I remember him saying. I asked him why but don’t remember the answer. Probably because he was so busy all of the time. He told me that he would just walk around naked sometimes, even in front of his roomates. He didn’t care. I asked him if he also didn’t wear underwear a lot of the time. I don’t remember the answer. But when I turned away and closed my eyes he told me he couldn’t sleep like that and I flipped onto my other side, facing him. And I decided to leave. He watched as I put my bra back on, looking at my chest as if noticing my breasts for the first time, and I hoped that I didn’t look fat as I pulled on my high waisted black shorts and zipped them up to the birthmark at the center of my torso. He asked me if I wanted him to drive me back but I wasn’t up for any extra conversation and he was just being polite so I told him I would walk the five minutes back to campus. I ran past his roommates as he walked me to the door and outside he hugged me, which made me uncomfortable, and said he’d see me around. Classic. I walked back to campus and only spoke to him briefly a few times after that. I texted him when Dani had just moved into the room with me and we had gone roller blading. I had been thinking about him for days and texted asking how he was. He didn’t respond, but told me later when he saw me in the library that he didn’t see the text until morning and said by then it was too late to respond. I told him not to worry, that same morning I had dropped my phone in a puddle and it was broken. I wasn’t able to fix it because the nearest Apple store was three hours away, which I only found out after going to three malls near me. My parents sent me a new phone after a week, but he never texted. Erica asked my in the dining hall one time, for him, what my deal was… in his words, “We kicked it one time and then didn’t talk after that”. That made me angry, and I raised my voice more than necessary, cup in hand next the soda dispensers, saying that he had never texted me. I was confused about why he was asking her questions when he could ask me and hadn’t made any attempt to contact me since, and been somewhat dismissive when we did see each other, usually in the library. She shushed me when I got to shouting about how it was just sex, like ‘thanks for the sex, but byeee’, and that was the last she said of that. ‘Don’t shoot the messanger!’, she told me. I like seeing him in the dining hall, liked seeing him through the window of his kitchen and tried to follow which kitchen he moved to after every three weeks. Miranda told me one day during IPP in the pot room that someone in his class had said that he was an asshole. He had been sleeping with one of the guy’s friends and then suddenly stopped talking to her, and she was upset about it. ‘So don’t obsess about him’, she told me. “He’s an asshole”. I wondered if he had stopped seeing the girl because of me… but that didn’t make sense because he wasn’t talking to me either. Eh

The next night Dan was kissing me in my mega-bed and I stopped him and told him I felt weird sleeping with him right then, so soon after sleeping with someone else. “I slept with someone else last night”, I told him, and he lay back and didn’t say anything, but was obviously upset. Then we had to talk about it. Finally, I told him that I felt bad about upsetting him, and he said he was glad that I felt bad about it. I don’t think we were on the same page. I didn’t regret sleeping with Ari, just hurting Dan’s feelings. I was also angry that he was upset because we weren’t dating, never would, and if the roles had been reversed I wouldn’t have said shit about it. I told him to leave�� we would go out later that night… and was happy to be alone. We got absolutely trashed at the bar that night, ending up at Darby’s with Erica, her friend Ginger, Miranda, and Alex and probably being the sloppiest drunks there (nothing out of the ordinary). Two pairs of lesbians were kissing up against the windows and I dragged Dan over to join them. He hoisted me up against the wall and we made out until the lesbians noticed and laughed, leaving. The bouncers next to us enjoyed the show, I’m sure. That night we went back to my room and had the roughest, drunkest sex we’d had yet. I think both of us were avoiding thinking. I don’t think it came up again between us. Erica once asked me in front of Dan if the night we had been talking about was the “night with Ari”, and if Dan heard it and understood, he didn’t say anything.

I think I liked Ari more than Dan, maybe just because I didn’t have him. Just saw him from afar. Maybe that’s why I think I like all these boys… because I’m not with them.

I was annoyed when I found out his name was Ari. Any other name, please. Of course he was Jewish. He cheered, knocking his shot against ours in my room, and said, “Lechaim”, or whatever Jewish word means “to life” or something like that. Of course his name was Ari.

3/18/13

I was watching Beethoven with my sister today - one of those kids movies where the dog, a Saint Bernard in this case, is the focal point. There’s a scene where the daughter asks her father where babies come from in order to distract him while her brother sneaks four puppies into the house. The father hesitated and started with a roundabout explanation and Kate laughingly said that it was funny that he didn’t even know where babies come from. Children amaze me. It’s amazing how, like listening to a different language, we only retain what we understand. We make assumptions with the facts we already have, to later discover how wrong we were… Like how watching children’s movies as an adult and catching all the innuendoes is so bizarre. I told her that the dad knew where babies came from he just didn’t want to say. I asked her if she knew where babies came from and she said no. I was completely prepared to inform her, but then I thought that my parents wouldn’t be happy with me doing that… the corrupt older daughter negatively influencing her sister so early. I didn’t tell her. We continued to watch the movie. If she asks again, I will tell her. I’m not sure how I will phrase it, but it will be mostly anatomical - no vague “when a woman and man love each other” + stork = baby.

A letter to an older Kate -

As we grow up, we find that the truth about adulthood is not as glamorous or as deep as we thought it would be. People will ask you what you want to be when you’re in the “real world”, as if you step into a new universe when you go to college. As if your choice of work will define you entirely as a person. As if the only thing that matters in planning out each day and month and year until you have enough money saved to retire.

I turned 21 two months ago and you turned 8 last month. I feel like I haven’t matured past eighteen.

But this is what I do know; the only thing you have control over in your life is yourself. Your body, your thoughts, your voice, and your actions. High school is a time when you try to find yourself through other people… When everything you are is held up to a standard and compared with everybody else. Your high school environment will determine when you think the proper age is to first kiss someone, to first drink, to first smoke, shoplift, let a boy touch your breasts, own your first car, go to parties, have sex. High school is spent trying to find the right mold to fit yourself into.

When I was sixteen, I was upset that I had never kissed a boy, so I kissed my friend Nick at a school dance. I didn’t like him and he was a bad kisser. It took a while for me to finally tell him I didn’t like him and to finally cut loose from the expectations that I had and he had and everyone seemed to have that we should be together and admit to myself that I did not like him and did not want to kiss him anymore. When he got a new girlfriend, strangely I was upset. Just kissing him, I felt like he belonged to me. He really liked me and though I did not like him back, it hurt to lose that adoration.

Girls get pregnant at the age that I first kissed a boy. Even before that. And it is terrifying to me.

People will say this so often that it will become a cliché. You’ll hear it so much that you won’t even think about what it means, but it is everything. Be yourself. Do what feels right to you ALWAYS.

I think that is what it means to be an adult. Being yourself, acting as you want to and you think you should, and therefore finding your place in the world.

I hope you figure this out before I do.

My first kiss was terrible and so was the first time I had sex. Again, I thought that there was a certain age limit for these ‘milestones’ in our lives and made a mistake.

Sometimes I think that the only way to really learn a lesson is the hard way. I could never have told 18 year old me that in college - in the world - NO ONE CARED about how old you were when you first had sex. That didn’t define you as a person. All that mattered was that you were you.

Freshman year at Tulane, I found out that this beautiful, cool girl on my floor was still a virgin and when I heard that, I wished that I was too. I wished that I hadn’t put myself through so much pain and shame and hurt because I thought it was what everyone was supposed to do. I hadn’t found the right person and I hadn’t accepted that so I forced myself into a mold and a mask that did not fit and did not make me happy.

On the other hand, though my relationships with boys (or lack thereof) seemed to always be a problem, I really liked to drink and get high. By being able to do this in a safe environment with friends whom I trusted, I was able to find my drunk, partying self and control her. A lot of my friends in high school who had avoided all drinking and parties ended up going crazy their freshman year and having unfortunate sexual encounters. Some were raped. Some ended up in bad places with people they thought they could trust but didn’t know at all. I’m not telling you to drink or smoke or party, but if you are going to experiment with ANYTHING, do so with a person or people who you really, really trust, and everything will be okay.

The people that think that their journey is more ‘normal’ or cooler than yours do not understand that every single person on this earth goes through a different journey. They do not understand that there is no standard. There is no mold that you need to fit yourself into in order to be successful or popular. Find strength in yourself. That is all you have. Find confidence and come to term with what you consider to be flaws.

Don’t expect there to be a path paved out for you to follow. Don’t follow paths that others have paved for you.

Going through life is like trying to cross a creek by stepping on stones. The stones are scattered everywhere and you always have choices, but it is up to you how you cross - whether you backtrack and loop around, make a beeline towards a certain rock or let someone tell you where to step. (That was the first analogy that came to mind).

People spend their lives wondering what happiness is and how to achieve it. I may be clinically depressed and medicated and miserable, but I know the key to happiness is to be yourself and do what is right to you.

In Beethoven, there is a scene where a boy one of the main characters has kissed locks the door of the bedroom and won’t let her out. I hope you are not the girl who feels as if she owes him or she should do something. I hope you are like Beethoven and rip the walls down. I hope you tell him to go fuck himself and break his nose. I hope you understand that you never owe anyone anything. Especially not your body. You don’t owe anyone your time or breath or presence.

This is your life. Your universe. Your reality.

Tell the people you love that you love them and tell the people who you don’t care about to scram.

Tell the boy who tries to get away with not wearing a condom that he should find someone else to get pregnant. Even if you really, really like him. There’s a French saying that goes, “Love makes the time pass and time makes the love pass”. It’s true. The first boy who told me he loved me I hope to never see again and am content to ignore his existence.

Tell the student or the teacher who bullies another kid to take a look at themselves. Sometimes it is enough to just show that you don’t approve. Sometimes you don’t have to say a word. In eighth grade, after my mom kicked me out of the house, I went to live in New Hampshire and went to a new middle school and was so depressed and angry that I wouldn’t talk to anyone. I ate lunch in the bathroom. I felt like I was going to vomit every time I got on the bus and had to find an empty seat. Two teachers made fun of me a few times, saying things like, ‘Chloe do you have an answer? Oh wait, you don’t talk’ and laughing. I cry about it sometimes still. I hope that you are the kid who talks to a person like me and treats me like I am a normal person so that I can feel and act like a normal person. I hope you are the girls who invite me to hang out with them at their lunch table or in the playground. I hope you are a student who would think that something was wrong with what the teacher was saying. I hope you know that no matter your age, a person can tell what is right and what is wrong. I think that children even have a better sense of morality than adults, but are afraid to be heard or wrong.

I read about in experiment in Psychology at Tulane in which volunteers were recruited to ask people questions and electrocute them when they were wrong. With each wrong answer, the voltage would be raised a little until finally the volunteers were told to use the highest voltage to zap the person they were questioning despite their screams in protest and pain and despite their moral values. Every one of the volunteers went to the highest level, as directed by the director of the experiment. Every one of them followed orders. From this study, it is easy to understand how the Holocaust happened… how people are disposed to be like sheep - obediently going along with the current, concerned only with their own well-being. Maybe some people are destined to die for what they believe in. If that is the cost of living a just life, I fully accept it. The people who were being zapped in the experiment were actors. Do what you think is right. Leaders are the ones who stand up and tell another person they need to stop what they are doing. Leaders determine whether people will get hurt or helped. Please be a leader, even if only in the smallest ways. You love to tell the story of when Julien was little and he had his face painted for Halloween and he cried because another boy smudged his make-up on purpose. Be the kid who comforts him. Be the kid who tells the perpetrator to apologize. Be the tattle tale if that is what you think is right.

Tell your parents the truth. You are so lucky to have the parents that you do who are there to listen to you fully and calmly help you through every trouble you will have. I’m so happy that you had a normal, happy childhood and got to see what a happy, beautiful marriage looks like.

Tell the people who ask you if you get good grades because you’re asian to SCRAM.

Tell the people who joke about how you are a bad driver to SCRAM.

Tell the people who say you should lose weight or need to wear makeup or shave your legs or smile and be pretty that they have no sway in anything you do. I spent nine years of my life dealing with bulimia and sometimes anorexia, bent over a toilet, feeling like shit all of the time, starving myself or eating until I thought I had ruptured my stomach. If you want to eat only ice cream for dinner, eat ice cream for dinner and nothing else. If you don’t want to wear makeup, don’t. It is fucking hard being a woman in our society. It is hard to deal with double standards, trying not to be perceived as a slut or a prude, trying to be treated equally and to stand on a level playing field. If you want to kiss someone or have sex with someone on the first date, do it. If they don’t call back, they’re not the type of person you should waste any time on. Thanks for the sex. If you don’t want to have sex, don’t. Even if you’re dating the guy and he says he really horny and you’re already in bed together. Too bad. Even if you owe him money or he drove you somewhere and he is your ride back. Too bad. Tell them to masturbate or something. You never ever owe anyone anything that you don’t want to give.

Tell the people who say your clothes are too slutty or not sexy enough that it’s not their problem. If you want to wear a see-through shirt, do it. If you want to wear footsie pajamas in public, do it.

Don’t read the magazines that tell you how to dress or what men like. The only good parts of magazines geared towards teen girls are the articles about people’s most embarrassing moments or the stories about how someone handled or dealt with a situation in their life. Read a good book every once in a while, for real.

Tell the friends who try to pay you back to keep the money and don’t ever bring it up again or use it as leverage against them. Put extra money in the meter, tip your server 20%, buy the shirt you really want but is so expensive, because that is what money is for - to be spent on what you want. It is not something that should tie you down or stress you out. It is paper and it comes and it goes. Maybe you will never wear that expensive shirt or maybe you will wear it every day. I would rather have an empty bank account than regret for not going out with my friends because I wanted to save my money for no particular reason other than stressing about not having any money. You’re young and should have fun (especially while your parents are still the ones funding it). On the other hand, don’t keep material things for sentimental reasons. Write it down and donate your clothes that you haven’t worn for years or the shoes you never wore but love to look at. Get rid of everything that you possess that possesses you. Going to college, you shouldn’t be weighed down by half a dozen stuffed bags. Be free. It is almost physically sickening to constantly live with guilt or regret. Watching Netflix while your friends go out to a karaoke bar which you only did not go to because you wanted to save money SUCKS. All we have is memories and interactions. Don’t hold money above that. But if your friends try to get you to go out and you just want to stay in a sleep, stay in and sleep. We pay for everything in either money, time, or experience. You have to pick which one is most important for each situation. You can take the nonstop flight home for several hundred dollars or you can swap your ticket at the gate for a reimbursement and wait for the next flight - if you have the time.

Tell the people who compliment you, “Thank you”.

Tell the spoiled girl who is complaining about something superficial like it is the worst thing in the world that she is lucky to have what she has and she should shut the hell up. My best friend, Allie, can be one of the most superficial people I’ve ever met but I am always honest with her, even with things as small as saying I need to go home because I can’t handle watching another episode of Island Hunters or Keeping up with the Kardashians. When she complains about Elle Wood’s hair in Legally Blonde, I tell her to shut up because Elle is perfect as she is.

For real though, Kate. Do you. Be you. Everyone will try to make you fit into the mold they have in their mind for their world. Even Daddy will sometimes hear only what he wants to when you talk to him. Be yourself and don’t apologize for it ever. I spend too much of my time apologizing for what I do and trying to go unnoticed. I start too many of my sentences with, “I’m sorry, but…” and apologize too often for talking too much even if the other party seems interested. Be you and you will be surrounded with people who you want to be around and you will be in the place where you want to be.

It’s hard to take words and make them into action. I have been writing suicide notes since I was thirteen. I am 21 and live at home with my parents after being suspended from school for failing a drug test because I smoke too much weed. It’s hard for me to be all that I tell you to be. It scares me that I am a role model for you. It scares me that you’re going to grow up and have to make mistakes and get hurt and feel alone and sometimes hate yourself. Sometimes I think that the only way to be a good person is to go through hell, but I hope that’s not true. Listen to people and look at the world around you and be aware of reality. I think opening up your eyes makes you a good person. Read the news, travel, volunteer and put yourself in places where you are uncomfortable and you will understand.

When I think of people I have encountered in my life that I respect and want to be more like, I can only think of people who were unforgivingly themselves. Being yourself is like finding enlightenment - people flock to you and you seem to have an aura of happiness about you… or maybe it is just the glow of a strong sense of self.

3/25/14

I had a dream last night or maybe today… I’ve been sleeping non-stop…. where I went to visit Allie at PSU. It was a campus I had never been on before, but I knew it was PSU. I was walking through the campus to find Allie and crossed a bridge where students were sitting, facing the water, on what seemed like a long bench. I saw Ari sitting there and then noticed that Allie was right next to him. I sat beside Allie, but was excited and nervous to talk to Ari. In the dream it went well. Ari went inside to take a shower and I talked to Allie for a while until she decided that she also needed to take a shower and yelled at Ari until he got out. I apologized to him for her being rude but he wasn’t upset. We talked some more and then when he got up to leave, he ran into this girl who obviously knew him and they hugged. He introduced me to her, who was also named Chloe, and said that they had travelled around Quebec together. I told them I had gone in high school in March and it was so cold we spent our whole trip buying more winter clothes. They laughed.

I woke up today and felt like shit. I woke up and looked out the window and it was dark and snowing and there was enough that the trees and ground were all white. It is the end of March. I looked at the snow and went back to sleep.

My dad texted me today asking how it was going with externships.

I do not give a fuck about finding an externship. It is not even in the periphery of the periphery of importance to me. I do not care about anything. I still want to die in the quickest way. I want to NOT be in this earth. Especially not mentally. A coma would be fine.

I don’t give a fuck about finding an externship and slaving over fucking stupid desserts for ridiculous hours for five months before going back to the hell hole that is the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park.

I want to melt into my bed and disappear, especially to myself. I do not have any type of ambition. I do not care at all and this is me at my best, feeling less depressed than normal and functioning… Not that I do anything.

I want to scream so loud that the blood vessels rupture in my brain and I collapse. I will never be able to tell anyone how much I DON’T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING. Fuck.

3/29/14

My father is frustrated that I’m not ‘getting better’. I came home from seeing Maura and it was obvious that I had been crying. I always cry on the way home from talking to the therapist. Sometimes the psychiatrist too. Just this time he noticed.

My stepmother knows.

I think that my father sees this as a tumor that can be removed or a collapsed blood vessel causing a stroke. Severe damage to the surrounding tissues. Heart failure. But you only need to put in a stent. Fixed.

My father sees this as something that is not a part of me… Something that I will heal from. But this has nothing to do with my immune system. Nothing to do with my blood and bones. Everything to do with the web of neurons in my brain and the invisible signals that they send or don’t send. Everything to do with neural interpretation of the world. As I see it. My life and my reality and my misery and my headache.

I will not ‘heal’. I will deal with this for my entire life, constantly sewing back the ripped portions of my soul and continuing on. I will not get better. The unfounded hurt that weighs heavy in my chest will not lighten. Will not lighten with medication or talk or kisses. There will always be a weight but I must learn how to carry it.

The things you don’t see:

Me at the table, eating breakfast or lunch alone, crying silently for no reason. Wiping the tears away, putting the plate in the sink, and going on to the next activity.

Me driving in my black two door VW, sobbing. Loudly. Driving on the highway and screaming because this is one place no one can hear me. Waiting at a stop sign and watching the pedestrians cross as I try to make it look like I’m not crying. The tear stains on my shirt and the mascara stains in droplets that won’t come out.

Me on the floor of my room, in child’s pose, crying into the floor… into my knees. Crying silently into something to muffle the noise and gasping for air.

The words circling my head as I listen to people tell me what to do… I don’t care I don’t care I could not possibly ever care less.

Me huffing sprayed vapors out of a sock because I can’t stand to be in my own head and there is no weed available. The last time I took your hydrocodone it didn’t make me feel a thing. I just want to lay there, comfortably numb, content to be where I am, what I am, doing what I am doing.

Me imagining every possible way to kill myself. Googling ‘ways to commit suicide’. Looking at anatomical figures of bodies online to find where the femoral artery is. How to cut it. Where to bleed out. How not to leave a mess for anyone to clean up. Imagining killing myself in the parking lot of a hospital or police station so you won’t have to deal with the trauma of taking me there or seeing what I’ve done. Holding my breath long enough to feel what it would be like to suffocate. It hurts in a way I can’t explain. Imagining if I could get a hold of heroin and ‘accidentally’ overdose. Imagine falling off of a bridge and the last sound I hear is the crunch of my breaking body and the splash. Imagining a gun pressed against my head and my body in the woods at peace and free free free.

Me, almost constantly focused on when I can next be alone or get into bed.

Me in public or in forced conversation, so nervous at times that I stutter, even with people I know well and like… Trying to hide me always. Trying to find someone with whom I do not writhe in the silence. Me, happy and laughing and in a group of friends, distracted. Drinking. Exhausted so easily by words..contact.. connections.

Me trying to relax every part of my body at night in order to fall asleep, but failing as soon as my mind wanders and my muscles tense… their default position.

Me replaying memories over and over in my head but trying not to. Wanting to tear my brain from my skull to not think of that… Not think of what they said or what I did or what I wish had been.

Feeling, always, like I do not belong in this world. Feeling always tired. Peeling the skin from my lips until it burns. Repositioning myself in the bed non-stop for hours hours hours in the dark wishing I could flip a switch and shut it all down. Wishing I could sleep and sleep and… sleep.

I had a good day today. Got my driver’s license. Sitting in the MVA, alone, in my off-white Gap jacket and high boots, feeling, for the first time, like an adult. Playing with Kate and listening to her laugh and listening to her eight year old self explaining to both me and herself why the characters in The Karate Kid acted and spoke the way they did. Today you turned forty nine.

I had a good day but it is almost 7am and I haven’t slept.

This has been the first warm night but I miss the cold. I miss the chill of the pillow that I pull from the open window, putting another pillow in its place to get cold too. With the humid air slick against my skin, I wish for the freezing breeze the smell of cold… in a warm blanket.

I took a nap before dinner because I was so heavy with sleep that my lights went out the minute I buried my head in the pillow. So tired that it was as if I couldn’t get up, was magnetized to the bed… The kind of tired where your head is cloudy. I understand the name ‘Sandman’. The heaviness enclosing you like bags of sand, the way it would feel to fall into a sinkhole, where anything you try to grab onto disintegrates in your hands and you slip slip down down heavy and away. The best kind of falling asleep. And all I did today was go to the DMV.