December 10, 2008

I can't remember ever looking forward to January. D reminded me. Haven't met anyone who felt the same way about such a shitty month. I'm trying to remember past Januaries and it's almost hard to conjure up the way I felt, because of how dead I've been.

January, 2004 I was 17 I think. I had dropped out of high school the first time. I don't think I had a job. I probably laid in bed for most of the day not giving a shit about anything. Maybe that's why I don't remember much of it. Not that I particularly want to. I had gone to The New School for a little more than a month and dropped out, wasting all of my college fund that had been re-directed at my failed attempt to salvage my education, or my failed attempt to fulfill others' expectations for me to graduate. I don't remember if I was going to cons at the time. I think I was. There might have been one. I think it was March when I found a job at Starbucks. I decided to look back and find my old blogs. Two entries:

• Wednesday January 21st, 2004

  • 6:58p - failure 
    all i have is the potential not to fulfill my potential

• Wednesday January 22nd, 2004

  • 8:09p - failure 
    I'm fucking pathetic, i dont even try to do my work anymore. I sit around sometimes in front of the computer trying to get started but usually I just dont even attempt it. I dont even bother anymore. I dont put myself through the torture of doing it. I have no inhibitions to not doing my work anymore so everytime i try it's as hard as it will ever be. I just dont care. I'll probably end up a hobo. which is infintely better than living with my parents. They finally decided to give up on me, well no, my mom did spend 12,000 dollars on an education for me. And if I dont do this exhibition that was due today i could get kicked out. After one quarter. I'm a fucking waste of potential. Maybe my potential was to not fulfill itself in the first place. I dont know. Fuck it.

January, 2005 I was 18. I had dropped out of school again. I was enrolled in Oakton, but I had stopped going there in November I think. December had me staying home sleeping and crying at whatever I could find worth crying over. Davi is probably the most important character who influenced me from 16 years old until the end of our road trip to the west coast, where he lived on his own for the first time and our paths split ways. The reason I say this is that my troubles in the public education system were the same ones he had experienced. He knew better than anyone what I was going through and had been talking to me about the problems with the machine I was stuck in for quite some time. In the beginning of December, as I was about to turn 18, he got in a fight with my Dad (an elementary school teacher at the time) about my education. That's how much my brother cares about me. As they were arguing, I left and sat on the step in front of my house. I started crying. Davi came out and held me while I cried. He told me that I could move in with him at Chrystalis when I turned 18. I moved in January 1st of 2005. Living in Arlington, I at least had friends to help me get through things, but nothing could fix the chemical imbalances I now know I had. The experience of living away from home for the first time was somewhat stimulating, but I was still sleeping the majority of the days. I was supposed to be working for my keep, and I stayed up to date to the best of my abilities. This was when my brother first realized that there was something wrong with me that was not psychosomatic when he couldn't ever wake me up. I was living in a basement with no sunlight and I just couldn't stay awake to face life at all.

Davi left on Inauguration day, and I've never felt more abandoned. He left to travel and find his place in the world, but all I felt was isolation, loneliness and crippling depression. Somewhere in this apartment is a paper journal I was keeping at the time. I can see some of the pages in my mind, with alternating blue and black ink. All of the entries were self-deprecating, dark, and illustrative of my lack of will to live, though I wasn't ready to think about ending it. I have a two journal entries from my old blog.

• Friday January 28, 2008

  • 1:37p 
    I'm bitter angry and fucking hurt.

• Sunday January 30, 2008

  • 6:23p 
    i'm miserable and i dont like my life.

     

January 2006 I was 19. I'm struggling to remember this one. I see from my NoVA transcript that I was enrolled in my first semester. I was taking an honors college composition course at the Annandale campus for which I received an F. I remember talking about this in my application to Prescott as a follow up note, remarking that I had been emotionally unstable and too depressed to even drop the course after I stopped going, probably during the first month. I had come home from disaster relief in New Orleans to what I thought was the start of a new productive life. Was I working? I'm thinking... I got nothing. I do know that this was my first year at home with my friends off at college. I may have been going to cons. I really can't remember anything from this month right now. Two journal entries.

• January 12, 2006 9:00 pm

  • I swear to god, January has it out for me, EVERY FUCKING YEAR!

• January 25, 2006 12:59 pm

  • Well FUCK ME for not being good enough.

The summer of 2006 I met Sarah and my life changed. It was the best summer I ever had. It was also the summer where my career as a drug addict took off full force. By December I had overdosed on pain killers once, and fantasized about suicide in a poem I wrote two days later.

One time.

As I lay on the concrete doorstep in front of my house,
I closed my eyes and imagined
a kitchen knife
sliding
across my throat
a red river behind it.

And I thought to myself,
"Wouldn't it be wonderful if I never had to get up?"

This leads to my final good bye letter to her written on December 30th, 2006, in which I told her I was cutting her off for good. On New Year's eve I drove towards her apartment to drop it off with a cd that reminded me of her. I got so... I don't know what the word for the emotion is on the way that I threw it out the window on West Ox Road. I gave her the CDs a couple weeks later, but I never delivered the letter. She found the letter on my live journal three months later and left a comment, wondering why I never gave her the letter.

So we get to January of 2007. I'm 20 years old. This was the first January I remember having where I was absolutely manic. I had been diagnosed by this point and I was on Lamictal but not on Seroquel yet, so I was still awake for days on end. I got very little sleep and had numerous near psychotic episodes, delusional about events around me and disconnected from people in general. There's a weird fog surrounding this part of my life. I remember being at school and at work, but I was in my head all the time. I couldn't relate to other people very well, because the world was just generally drowned out. I remember sitting in my Precalculus class one time not being able to think about anything but death and self mutilation. I started writing on a piece of paper. The note talked about things like impaling myself and shooting myself in the stomach with a shotgun. I gave it to my shrink and asked why I couldn't stop thinking about this shit. I ended up dropping the class because I was unable to pay attention. I would have much rather been thinking about Precalculus than what was going on in my head.

January of 2008. I spent my birthday in Prescott alone with two bottles of beer and cigarettes that I lit off the stove. I decided to quit drinking now that I was 21. I seriously intended to not do too many drugs on winter break and had talked to Joe about it. I don't think he believed me. I shouldn't have believed me. On New Year's Eve I did more drugs in one sitting I had ever done. Jason and I started the night out in the guest bedroom of my Dad's house rolling six joints and eating a eighth of shrooms each. We waited a half hour or so and stepped outside of my house to drop some ecstasy and smoke a joint and then drove over to Jason's house where we were now tripping and rolling at the same time. We smoked another joint and continued hippie flipping. I felt a fleeting mood lift that went away soon enough. Jason gave me a soboxin and an ativan and I passed out in his guest bedroom. This was the first time in my life that the drugs didn't work. I don't remember any tripping other than some distinct colors. The only thing the ecstasy did was make me feel close to suicidal the next few days. I guess the ativan and soboxin did their job of making me numb and then knocking me out. I felt guilt and shame the next day.

Almost one year ago now, I got my first prescription for Ritalin and a new prescription for Klonapin. I had already failed miserably my vow to stop doing drugs once I got to college, but I hadn't found speed yet. I started with a bottle of ten 10mg pills. Now, I have never in my life finished a prescription of any drug that can be abused, and this was no exception. I finished 10 pills in 9 days. Probably the closest I've ever gotten. I got a bottle of 30 after that. It was working at first when I was taking it as prescribed. I could concentrate better, keep a schedule and complete assignments on time. As the block ended and finals came stress started overcoming me. I started staying up late to finish assignments. I started pulling all nighters. I started snorting the shit. I got my dosage increased so I could finish off the bottle quicker. I dated a girl for two weeks who I could have cared about, but was beginning to care about nothing more than speed. It got much much worse from there, but that took a few months. That was last January.

So what about this January? I'm sober and on medication, but I can feel my moods start to change. I feel okay right now after a cup of green tea, but the past few days I've felt... depressed is too general. I've felt a lack of motivation and a slight feeling of despair. I think I'll be better tomorrow. I hope this January goes better than last. Right now if I just stay sober I can guarantee myself a better January than last. Right now is I think a critical point in my life. I think this month will be challenging. I see no reason for the trend to change this year, but I think I'm better equipped now to weather the storm.

~Diam0nds