Don’t read this if you’re sick of my repetitive miserableness. I’m not trying to be. I’m trying to talk things out so it doesn’t keep cycling through my head. Once I reach this level I don’t outlet very well so this is it.

I was recovering from the last freakout. Then something else happened and it got bad again. I don’t think I can live in this house anymore. Everything here is hard. It feels like I want to hold my breath until I’m hit by a bus. I don’t understand wanting to die or wanting to injure yourself … But I understand the need for something to level with and to parallel the violence in your head. 

I don’t think I can live in this house anymore. I haven’t done something about it because whatever I do or don’t is going to hurt someone. If I didn’t care I’d already be gone.

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The following is going to sound incredibly self-absorbed but bear with me here. [KitKat], [Mint] and I were reminiscing about high school recently, and KitKat said to me, “You had so many guys crushing on you Alex.” And I really did, which is a wonder because I’m not especially pretty. All I was was nice to people, which makes me wonder how other the high school girls treated the boys.

And even though I was heartbroken over Lime for all my high school years, I really appreciated having people keeping me company when I needed it, talking to me like all they wanted was my attention, keeping my mind away from self-pity.

High school was good to me. I was popular, I fit in every social circle, everybody liked me. I couldn’t go anywhere in town without bumping into a friend. I was always happy and optimistic – the kind of person who didn’t get why sad people don’t understand that when life gets you down, you just gotta wait for the better days. Lime and Digi both told me they liked me for my smile and because I was always cheerful. I always cheered them up. I didn’t have any of this depressing social justice crap weighing me down either. I have good memories of high school.

Cosmo constantly asks me why I look so sad. Apparently I look terrible. At home, on skype, on the bus, the phone, all the time – I can’t help but provoke his concern and I feel really bad about it. I try really hard not to. I don’t want to use him as an outlet – I don’t want to make that our relationship.

I tell him sometimes how nice it would’ve been if we had gone to high school together. I wish I could give him that – the other Alex. I miss being that girl. But now I just want to stay home and not see anybody and sleep until it’s time to sleep again. 

I’m seeing Cosmo tomorrow. He makes me less crazy.

Christmas was good to me. I woke up next to Cosmo and we took our morning slowly. Little sips, little sips. The kind of morning where hands and hands touch and you take the time to smile at and tease one another. Where the whole world is yours because you aren’t anticipating any sudden knocks on the door. Where, instead of holding and holding on and waiting for the screaming to be over, you remember what it’s like to be present, at peace, in control.

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I have very precise needs from the sports that I’ve chosen. I don’t much care if my team wins or loses in ultimate or dragonboat. I’m not like some of the other players who break out in tears after a loss (mostly back when I played in more hardcore leagues). After a cubicle life of deskwork and racing-rushing to the next and then the next deadline, what I need is to be under a big sky, either flying on my own two legs and making small work of the grass field, or forgetting friction as I glide over the water. After shouldering heavily textbooked backpacks and the other kinds of weights that you can’t see, I like to get into a hot yoga room where I can force my body to obey, where I can stretch my muscles to beyond their capacity. And only when it hurts do I know that I’ve conquered my limits, that I’ve resisted my constraints and won. 

It’s probably a really bad approach to exercise, however. My glory high school days are past and I’m not as fit as I used to be. Sometimes I can still push myself to perform but I don’t recover like how I used to. I was so P.O. when I realized because, hello, I’m still pretty young here. Shouldn’t I get a bit more time on the free ride? I used to play 8 hour tournaments and then do the same again the next day. I would be sore but the consequences were never dire. I was a kind of limitlessness. I probably need to be more careful from now on and do things more gradually until I’m in shape again.

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Thanks everyone for being here over the last couple freakout posts. I’m really a stiff-lips kind of person IRL so it helps to write and to know that there are eyeballs on my story.

You have to understand: I don’t get so violently upset because I lack self-discipline. This isn’t like when Trumon got mad because his teacher took away his cell phone in class. And it isn’t because I lack empathy for and perspective on those who are suffering (vastly) more. I’m no impoverished third-world child but that doesn’t diminish my experiences.

It’s because I can see all the things I can become and I know I can be limitless. I know I was meant to be without limits. I know I can be the person with the enviable work-life balance, the friends and the one-after-another socials, the superstar job, the almost 4.0, the we-argue-sometimes-but-he’s-still-perfect boyfriend. I can see all these things in front of me. I have the determination and the ambition and it’s so cruel to weigh me down, to hold me back because of sexist traditions, irrational fears, a poverty of respect, and a lack of education on interpersonal communications.

It’s so petty. I have to be more than that. It’s what we all want. To be limitless.

And I know I’ll get there eventually. Sometimes I forget that, or it’s difficult, working hard and always waiting.

But I remember who I am when I’m with Cosmo.

Okay I don’t think I said that last bit very well. What I was trying to explain is that entire plot of season 5 Buffy was to show how she was eventually driven to committing suicide. She really, really wanted it. And then when she’s brought back to life in season 6, all she wants is to be dead again.

What a horrible thing to put on TV! It shouldn’t be allowed!

But it really makes sense to me to watch all this fictional despair, to work it through my gut and my system, because then I can get through it without actually having to live in my own life, without the things that I’m actually angry at and afraid of. I’m feeling it but not really. It’s a simultaneous acknowledgement and denial.

And you know what? I whine on here a lot but I’ve honestly dealt with much, much more than this. I’ve come out on top on much bigger battlefields (or at least stayed in the game). So why has this driven me down so hard, when in comparison it wasn’t really very much at all? Nothing actually happened. 

It’s because I’m drained. I’m tired of having to deal. So many years. I don’t want to anymore. I know I can, I’ve done it before. But a part of me is refusing to listen to reason. It’s saying – iamnotiamNOTgoingbackthere. Anything but that. I quit. No more. I want to be safe. I’ve found safety, here with Cosmo. And if I can’t be safe then I’d rather hide. I can hide and it’ll be okay.

But I can’t. I can be asleep. I can watch TV (hooray for really tame coping measures?). But anything beyond that and I keep remembering, I keep recycling it through in my head.

I’m safe here, I’m at Cosmo’s, but eventually I have to go back.

… so I might as well be here?

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So I wonder how much watching Buffy at a young age was healthy for me. What with the whole “do the right thing even if it kills you” theme, and the other “keep a stiff upper lip especially if it kills you” theme. Oh, and there’s the “let things stew in your head for as long as possible because you don’t want your loved ones to know you’re unhappy because that would make them unhappy” theme.

I mean I had other stuff going on too. Having to be the eldest, most responsible one at home. Having to mentor a child so that he turns out right despite astronomical parental failures. Being forced to keep a stiff upper lip by parents who don’t give a shit and tell you so.

Ok so there were lots of other things. But still. Maybe Buffy wasn’t the healthiest thing for me to consume as a kid.

It’s actually really difficult to watch the show starting from season 5 because that’s when the show stops becoming a soap opera and starts becoming a bit too real. Buffy’s mom dies and her father was never around to begin with, her boyfriend bails, and the Big Bad is going to kill her sister and it’s just a matter of time. And Buffy might as well end herself right there – at this point she looks like a walking dead already – but she keeps going. And then that goes on for another 3 seasons. I don’t think Buffy even smiles in the last three seasons. It’s like the thesis of the last few seasons is “All you are is alone.” Isn’t that terrible? You can’t put stuff like that on national television!

It was like after reading Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and being sad for a week. Except Buffy is too much like real life – a young adult woman who’s in over her head and trying so hard to make it even though there’s barely anything left of her. She’s just going through the motions. It’s a little too close to the heart. I think at some point it got brainwashy. Telling me again and again that this is how it has to be, that everything is difficult because it just has to be. That’s just how it is.

It might’ve taught me a bit about taking the old one-two to the mental endurance, but nothing about how to build it back up again after teardown. And it probably wasn’t good in terms of optimism training for young minds.

Okay I’m not always scary emo person. I’m not when I’m stable, but that isn’t tonight. And at those kinds of times (or at other times just for kicks), I still watch Buffy because it gets me. Why do we keep going? Why do we bother trying to do the right thing? Nobody knows. It doesn’t matter.

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I don’t mean to be so emo and to alienate and scare people – but then I do. I need to recognize that something’s not right and I need to recognize it hard before it gets worse. I’ve been worse and I don’t want to go back. I need to keep saying it really loudly so I don’t keep leaving it on the to-do list, so I don’t grow content with stiff lips, until I make it stop.

I’m back at home. I didn’t know how much I need Cosmo next to me to sleep. This is not a safe space. I don’t know how to make my mind be quiet. I’m afraid to close my eyes.

[FZ] and I graduated in the same year at the same high school. How is it that she – she who looks like she’s always been happy, loved and cared for – actually comes from a happy family who loves and cares for her and supports her in everything that she does? 

Shouldn’t that just make sense? But then why do I give the same impression? Why am I able to walk out of my house and function like every other normal person? Why did [paperblanks] say to me, “I always thought of you as such a free spirit and just assumed that you must have very supportive parents to have cultivated such a personality”?

I could’ve ended up like [Lime]. Why didn’t I? He, too, came from a broken, struggling family. Lime dealt with it by frequently trying to kill himself. And he had other coping methods. But I don’t feel inclined towards that at all, that doesn’t make any sense to me.

And of course there’s [Digi], who is extremely popular and he has the most loving family that always supports him and listens to him. They are never mean to him and still he was always sad and unhappy for no reason.