Starting a new blog is always awkward. Who's going to read this? Who's going to care? Is anyone from my personal life going to be reading, and if so, how much and what should be censored?

Often when I write, which I do daily on the intertubes, I end up either editing or deleting the entry hours after its posted. I get anxious that whatever I've written will sound stupid, or that my opinions will be wrong or somehow enabling of negative societal standards. I feel like the internet is judging me, which is entirely true, though maybe not as negatively as I perceive.

Did I mention I'm deeply paranoid?

Self consciousness should be added into that mix too, with a dash of lack of confidence on the side.

Anyway. I found my way to this website last night because I was feeling suicidal. This is not unusual; it comes in waves and has since I was a young kid. I have attempted suicide twice. The first time I was thirteen and it was over a bad report card. I was afraid of my father. The second time I was 19 and involved in a really abusive relationship involving lots of codependency issues and drugs. I hated myself *so hard* during those years, and it is only looking back that I can truly say, "Wow. That was a really messed up time right there."

So it left me feeling like I was not meant to die, which strikes me now as a silly thought because all of us are meant to die. Its just a matter of timing.

For years, I had a cutting problem. This led me to identify with other people who had this problem. My first boyfriend had bipolar disorder. He would burn himself with cigarettes on his arms, and I would cut myself with razor blades. We were together because we could relate to one another, which only led to being in a really negative relationship. We fed off of each others negativity, and after a while, the emotional strain was too much that I had to end it. This was while I was still in high school. I was a very overweight girl in high school and had very little self esteem. After he and I broke up, I stopped eating. I stopped going to classes. I lost fifty pounds in three short months. It was drastic and no one took any notice. Or if they did notice, it was in the positive, "Oh, you've lost weight! You look so good," which did little more than to offer negative reinforcement, which enabled me to eat less and less. I started passing out in public. My mother had me tested for diabetes, but the doctor couldn't find anything wrong. I don't know how much she knew or how much she was in denial.

As I got older, I became more secretive and very reclusive. I would hide in my room for days doing nothing but staring at the ceiling. My grades were poor, my relationship with my family was shoddy, I was sinking. Really, I wanted help and didn't know how to ask for it. I still don't. Its a pride thing, or an embarassment thing, or something to that effect. But its the difference between knowing in the heart that there's a problem and admitting to that problem and seeking resolution. I do not seek resolution, because the part of me that denies the seriousness is the part that says, "I don't have a problem and it wouldn't warrant attention if I did."

I'm going to get a head of myself here and skip a couple of chapters. I left home at seventeen, right before my eighteenth birthday. My parents and I had a particularly nasty fight. We said deeply hurtful things to one another. At that point, it had been years since my father had laid a hand on me, but my mother was not so reluctant. I left and went to a friends house. His mother let me stay in the spare bedroom. I was secretly seeing a man long distance who was eight years older than me. So I called him and he said I should come stay with him. So I did.

And then things inevitably went from bad to worse, as things are wont to do when your a dumb teenager. I was not happy with him, but I thought I was. He had a best friend. This best friend was a cutter, too. The night we met, he had come to our apartment in a blizzard, dazed out of his mind. He had cut himself very badly, across the chest. My then-boyfriend and our roommates pleaded with him to go to the hospital, but he didn't want to end up in the mental ward yet again. So I went to the 24hour grocery across the street and got butterfly bandages and medical tape. I spent the next three hours cleaning him, bandaging him and talking him out of some pretty serious emotions. From that point on, we were fast friends.

Well, fast friends is great and all, as long as you don't cross the boundaries that define friendships and relationships. I did that. We did that. We ended up sleeping together one night, and things went from bad to worse yet again. This went on for some time, about six months, before I finally broke up with my then-boyfriend to be with my Ex. Before we broke up, I had moved out and into an apartment with Ex. It was all so stupid, looking back. We didn't tell him we were together until long after we'd broken up. The fucked up part is that he tried to stay friends with me, but completely severed his friendship with Ex. He would tell me that Ex would really fuck up my head, and that it wasn't healthy for me to be with him. Looking back, that was probably the most sound advice I could have taken, and ignored. He didn't want to be with me, and didn't pressure me to that end; he sincerely cared about my well being, and thinking about that makes me realize what a piece of shit I really was at that time.

So I ended up with Ex for about two years. Two long, painful years. Prior to getting with him, I was straightedge. Well, I smoked cigarettes, but didn't do drugs or drink alcohol. All in all, I was a pretty respectable teenager; worked and volunteered at a nursing home, hung out in Bible club and was generally really nice to puppies and small children. Then things drastically changed when I left home, and moreso when I started dating Ex.

Dating isn't even the word; we fucked behind my boyfriend/his best friends back. We moved in together two months after we'd met and started fucking, and then continued this behavoir in secret.

The bad times continued. I didn't really know how bad any of it was going to be before diving in head first. He did drugs, a lot of drugs. Although he also preached harm reduction, which enabled me to look at my own drug use as a spiritual thing and blah de blah de justifications. We did a lot of psychedelics together, anything that would make us hallucinate. He introduced me to every single drug I'd put into my body, saying that I could only do the ones he said were okay, threatening me if I decided to try something new if he wasn't there, threatening me if I did drugs without him, or if I tried something that wasn't "approved" beforehand. So I listened, thinking that since he was older and had so much more experience than I did that he knew what he was talking about. Because of that, I fucked myself up in the head something fierce.

The first time we did anything other than pot was Halloween 04. I was 18. It was the first time I tripped, and from that point on, my mind was like a big ball of clay for him to play with. And play with it he did.

I mentioned he was a cutter, too, right? And because I was also a cutter, we fed off of that negativity like it was the goddamn last supper. I can remember being so high off of adderal (which he was prescribed, which he fed me like candy one night) locking myself in our bathroom with a bunch of razor blades. I tore my legs up in the bathtub, sobbing uncontrolably, just cutting myself more and more deeper and deeper, seemingly without end.Then, I shaved my head.

This happened shortly after he slept with someone else.

And oh the drugs! All the fun little anecdotal "hey, if we take enough dramamine, we can close our eyes and still be able to see everything"; the going to Walgreens at one in the morning, pretending to have a terrible cough, while the cashier eyed us funny, ringing out three bottles of Robitussin, knowing but not saying anything, we thinking we were slick; the eating a bunch of acid, assuming it was bunk until two hours later we didn't know our own names. 

And then, as you can imagine, the tried and true got boring, so we sought out other drugs. Cocaine. Opium. Morphine. What have you. Heh. I remember once some guy gave me a couple of Thorazine pills, telling me that they would be fun. I didn't have the faintest idea about what he gave me, but assumed that they would be fun. I slept for three days straight, not knowing where I was, or who I was, waking in intervals in a drug hazed state, only to go right back to sleep again.

Then, something really terrible happened. I still flash back to it and feel more disgusting than that stuff around the toilet rim. I went to our pot dealers house one night, and he was cutting up a bunch of ecstasy pills. My Ex and I had had a blow out fight, kicking, screaming...he'd pushed me down the stairs and I had to leave. I had no where else to go, so I went to our drug dealer. I cried uncontrolably and he gave me ecstasy, telling me that it would make me feel better. He gave me line after line while he and his roommate feigned sympathy as I cried about the Ex. And then, out of nowhere, he was behind me, touching me. I can't go into detail here. Its a little too much and it makes me feel gross. But we had sex. Unprotected sex at that, while I was so high on drugs, I didn't know what was what.

And anyone who has ever done ecstasy before will tell you that the three days of oh-my-god-kill-me depression that happens after a roll is probably the most intense thing for an already depressed person to go through. So I freaked out, naturally, and went back to my Ex. Apologies, hugs hugs, and we were back together, back to the same old crappy abusive bullshit.

To Be Cont...