i’ve been keeping a journal since i could form words. a written account of my life…and an inadvertant account of the progression of my disease. it’s incredible, even to me….and its my life. these are excerpts pretty much verbatim from my journals from freshman year in high school.
i couldn’t make this shit up if i tried:
november 13, 1996 (age 14)
surreality is a good, beautiful thing. perhaps even a dimension all its own. it envelops you and holds you, smothering you with its serenity. this morning i took 10mg of ritalin a few glasses of wine, and the rest of mom’s khaluah. it was nice, and kept me nice all day. yesterday i took a handful of super strong muscle relaxers and passed out in the bathtub. i guess i could’ve drowned, but oh well. escape at any cost. perfect, empty happiness. i’m calm and cool. i’m in a good mood, and i never want to let it go. class…..the first stages of addiction begin……
march 15 1997 (age 15)
manic depression is one fucked up way of life. it’s like there are two people in me instead of just one. there’s suicidal kaia, and all she wants to do is lie around and cry, and, of course, kill herself. but then there is okay kaia, and that’s what she is…okay. she thinks things might work out, and maybe someday she’ll even be happy. but i’m never one or the other for too long.
june 1 1997
if you ask god to die and he doesn’t take you, does that mean he doesn’t love you? i was on the floor alone in the dark and i told god i was ready and i wanted him to take me, so i could watch over the ones i love, because i can’t protect them as i am now. then they couldn’t use me and make me cry. all there would be was love and me watching over them. i want to take care of them and love them, but they make it so hard. if i were dead they could love me, but not hurt me, and i wouldn’t be able to ruin them anymore. like i ruined matt, and todd….everyone. i hurt janet, and hannah, i lied to everyone, i just suck so much. i hate every single part of me. stupid lying whore. and if anyone does love me, they are stupid because i don’t even love me. i don’t understand why it has to hurt so much. i just keep taking pills. kill this pain, take away these thoughts, knock me out. subdue me, cure me….kill me. please. i can’t explain, you would not understand, this is not how i am. ah, floyd…i just want to sleep forever.
october 28
love endures….
love endures, no matter what. even sad, ignored love survives. always. love thrives in hot, murkey places where things like innocence dies. it’s a pure, sweet emotion that feeds off the blood of lost virginity and the sweat of pubescent sex. love endures through icy pain and boiling hate. love festers in your heart, holds you captive there, a muscle in spasm. sometimes all you want is for that love to shrivel up and die, tucked away in some dark chasm of your soul. but it will never do that, because your heart still pumps that blood through your veins…that blood that is tainted with undying affection for him. it flows through you, in and out of every cell, infecting all the way to the end of each nerve, naive ecstacy and adoration. and it feels like the only way to cleanse yourself (if you can ever be clean again) is to open up your veins and bleed yourself of his flawless beauty, toxic perfection. to drain your veins of the virus that is….eduring love.
october 30
i see movies and read articles about buliemics and i just don’t see myself. i’m not obsessive like that. and i’m certainly not thin like that. the girls on this show are so pretty, so thin. i am neither. it’s different with me. they have a problem because they can’t stop, even when they got thin. i am fat and ugly, i have a good reason to make myself puke. if i gorge myself on garbage food, i should get rid of it. if i could control my eating in the first place i wouldn’t have to worry about it. i know how fat i am. i don’t let anyone else know how much it bothersme. i am very good at letting people see only what i want them to. i do it because i have to live with myself, and i can’t stand it the way i am now. sean thinks i’m stupid, and i’m hurting myself, but he doesn’t understand the pain of looking at myself and feeling nauseated is worse than any pain i feel in my body. knowing people look at me and see what i do fills me with shame. so when i shoved the toothbrush down my throat, and the hot acid comes up from inside, it’s alot of pain. but its not nearly as bad as how i feel when i think i may never be happy with myself, that noone else will ever want me. so vomitting is a small price to pay if it means maybe someday not feeling this way. so i’m not your typical buliemic. i’m just not satisfied with myself. i’m not obsessed, i’m determined. i’m not buliemic, i’m desperate. everythings okay.
november 6
i don’t beling anywhere. i don’t belong. ever since i can remember, i have had this all-consuming feeling of being a burdon. constantly in the way. the things i want to do, the people i want to see, none of it was ever meant for me. drama club, chorus, the band, yearbook, it’s all been some stupid joke. i don’t fit in with any of it. and it hurts. you sit there with this fake smile plastered to your face and you know they are all staring at you. wondering what the hell you think you’re doing here anyway. you feel their eyes burning into the back of you head, and you just want to scream. because no matter what you do or where you go, you are always the one on the outside looking in. the one with no purpose.
but anyway….changing the subjet is often an intergral part of being manic depressive. to keep some semblance of sainity you have to be able to bury your feelings and focus on something entirely seperate. push that pain further and further down until you can feel it pulsating in your feet, and then you leave it there. don’t tell anyone how you feel, keep it all. because they’ll never understand, and blind pity is disgusting, disgraceful. so you keep that fear in this little box (because all these feeling come from the mother of it all…fear) of your heart. the bloodsoaked parasite that fear is, feeding on your insecurites and shortcomings. the worse you feel the bigger fear grows, and grows, unless you can change the subject…….
but anyways.
january 1, 1997
there is an emptiness inside me right now. its hard to explain because i am not sure i’ve ever felt it before. i miss god. it hurts more than i ever let anyone know to be an athiest. to know for a fact that there is no god. and that when you die, that’s it, nothing, forever. i envy the ignorent. i envy the faithful. i want to have something to believe in, someone who will love me and take care of me no matter how bad i fuck up. i want to love something so much that i live that faith. but i don’t, and i can’t, because my life has been proof that god is man made. why would god let us suffer like this? so it hurts. and i wish i could believe. but i can’t just do it. if life were that simple, i never would’ve given up in the first place.
january 12
beauty. i wonder who was the person that defined that concept. if they were standing here in front of me right now i’d be torn between smothering them with kisses, or shooting them execution style. because beauty is anything but in the eye of the beholder. at least if you are a 15 year old kid. we are force fed generic one size fits noone ideals for beauty. it is all defined very plainly, what is attractive, what is not attractive, wheather or not we fit the mold. which side of the fence we land on is at the nucleus of exsistance. (for girls anyway) all thanks to the crushing pressure that is put on appearance. if i think something is beautiful, and the rest of the world disagrees, does that make me a freak?? i find beauty in the female form, so i’m a dyke, a pervert. what would truely be beautiful to me, would be each person deciding for themselves what they are attracted to, what they find beauty in, regardless of what society says. so when that person stopped and said “that is beauty” and set that first standard, did he curse us to conformity? or did he create an evolving idea of what is beauty. i don’t know. but as usual, we as people have taken one pure idea, simple beauty, however defined…and raped it. leaving behind offspring of plastic surgery, eating disorders, and all those feelings of inadiquacy.
june 2 (somewhere around 1130 am)
i’m sitting in the cemetary by the lake. its very calm and soothing here, all these souls at rest. there is noone here to bother me, and i can be okay. i went to school at 11, but i couldn’t bring myself to stay. i sat there, at lunch, watching everyone eating and talking, laughing. and i knew i didn’t belong there. i felt so gross, so distant, like my whole life was just a movie i am watching. so i started to cry and get all upset, feeling all alone, just shitty. so i left. it was so easy, i wonder now why i don’t do it more often. just walked out the door into the woods, and now i’m free. calm. i’m going to take a few more pills in a minute, just to keep the pain away. and then i’ll feel even closer to god. i wonder sometimes why he pushes me away so much. just like everyone else. i think i’m going to lose my friends. because i’m starting to go crazy again. i feel all weird and dead inside. they’re going to see it and leave me for someone better. because they’re scared of me, the way i’ve been acting. well guess what, it scares me too. i can’t control myself anymore. i hate kaia so much. i hope she dies, and i hope it hurts. she deserves it.
