I'm not so much embarrassed by my issues as just tired of them. I don't feel energised to talk about them, I don't feel like explaining or thinking about it. This is probably why so many issues weigh on me so heavily: I can't muster the simple strength to lay them down and have a good stretch.
And I DO make excuses, I try to explain things away, I try to make everything more eloquent and structured. I hate it. I want to tell things as messy and truthful as they are, but then it seems like I leave my true meanings out and people either villify myself or people in my recounted memories.
It makes sense. It's messy and chaotic and human. If I don't specify the moral of the story, people will make their own.
My life was pretty awesome until I was about six. My parents were in college: dad studying greek mythology, mom studying fine arts, and they were lovely liberal forward-thinking hippies who treated me with the respect of an adult. They told me about everything, from faith to fellatio, with very hippie-ish values on all: treat people well, be careful and considerate, wait until you're ready for things and learn from your mistakes.
They did use corporal punishment, but only between full explanations and advice, which I took a lot more seriously than the spankings themselves.
Unfortunately, their marriage wasn't happy, and they both had a touch of stupid to them. Mom started binge drinking and cheating when I was a baby; dad accepted it as best he could, and turned to heroin for solace.
He used to tell me things. "I can just picture them," he'd say, "greasy cocks going in and out of her. Other men fucking your mom. She had an abortion once, you know."
I knew what it meant, though I had some misunderstandings about the mechanics of sex, (don't you roll around on the ground, like characters fighting in old cartoons, only naked and happy about it?), and all I could wonder is why I'd want to KNOW that. I loved hearing the next day that THEY had slept together -- I knew it was a sign of a healthy adult relationship. But when your dad is drunk and belligerent enough to tell his seven year old daughter about his wife's questionable affairs?
Kids know when something's wrong.
So I developed my own forms of meditation, fantasy escapism. I'm not from here, I'm from a distant land based on dreams and hopes and unicorns. I came here on a Quest to help the pained and disillusioned people of the world, I was stationed here temporarily, and when I finished the quest, I could go back to a small, wooded village left in the renaissance ages of fancy, with an esteemed University that taught only Important things, a beautiful romantic willow tree beside a lake, a husband who loved me, and a daughter who was all ease and laughs.
By the time I was 8, all I wanted to do was go back there. My best friends didn't want to be as close and clingy as I was, they wanted to go play over there, with someone else, for a while. I'd cry and throw things and bite my teachers. I'd act like a dog when I had the chance, desiring to be anything but what I was. I went between being docile and sweet, and being a raging child-harpie.
I was often more eloquent than adults, even then, and they FEARED me, because I would directly challenge them about everything wrong with society.
I was put into a Special class from 5th grade through to high school, told that I had Behavioural Difficulties, that I was a brat, just like my asshole father. Then I'd be sent home to watch him twitch and mumble in corners of our small council apartment, to find blood in our toilets and syringes on our counters. I'd rub his back when he vomited and get yelled at if I took a bath instead of a shower, depending on what his orders had been.
I always told him I believed in him; he could recover this time, he was a good father, no matter what anybody said. I loved him, whatever mommy did. I was there for him, no matter how bad he'd get, and he'd go between telling me I was a genius and that I was always a difficult, spoiled child, and that it was too bad I didn't become an over-achieving prodigy who aced school despite family difficulties.
I knew he was being unreasonable. Didn't hurt me any less.
This all drove me into the ground until I constantly threatened to kill myself, from the ages of 8 when I tried to hang myself with the string on the classroom blinds (it just pulled the blinds down) to high school when I was all talk and Mansonite grunginess.
They finally sent me to a hospital. It offered a modicum of recovery for me, regardless of certain family chaos that continues until this day, and was really only the start of a lifelong process. I still don't know how to BE happy, however much a medication or a vent to psychiatrists and friends alike might stabilize my moods.
I'm mostly complacent, sardonic, morbid, and burnt-out. But I still sort of believe in unicorns and don't want people to know about it in case they clumsily crush my faith.
--A
I'm saving this and starting my damn autobiography.
And I DO make excuses, I try to explain things away, I try to make everything more eloquent and structured. I hate it. I want to tell things as messy and truthful as they are, but then it seems like I leave my true meanings out and people either villify myself or people in my recounted memories.
It makes sense. It's messy and chaotic and human. If I don't specify the moral of the story, people will make their own.
My life was pretty awesome until I was about six. My parents were in college: dad studying greek mythology, mom studying fine arts, and they were lovely liberal forward-thinking hippies who treated me with the respect of an adult. They told me about everything, from faith to fellatio, with very hippie-ish values on all: treat people well, be careful and considerate, wait until you're ready for things and learn from your mistakes.
They did use corporal punishment, but only between full explanations and advice, which I took a lot more seriously than the spankings themselves.
Unfortunately, their marriage wasn't happy, and they both had a touch of stupid to them. Mom started binge drinking and cheating when I was a baby; dad accepted it as best he could, and turned to heroin for solace.
He used to tell me things. "I can just picture them," he'd say, "greasy cocks going in and out of her. Other men fucking your mom. She had an abortion once, you know."
I knew what it meant, though I had some misunderstandings about the mechanics of sex, (don't you roll around on the ground, like characters fighting in old cartoons, only naked and happy about it?), and all I could wonder is why I'd want to KNOW that. I loved hearing the next day that THEY had slept together -- I knew it was a sign of a healthy adult relationship. But when your dad is drunk and belligerent enough to tell his seven year old daughter about his wife's questionable affairs?
Kids know when something's wrong.
So I developed my own forms of meditation, fantasy escapism. I'm not from here, I'm from a distant land based on dreams and hopes and unicorns. I came here on a Quest to help the pained and disillusioned people of the world, I was stationed here temporarily, and when I finished the quest, I could go back to a small, wooded village left in the renaissance ages of fancy, with an esteemed University that taught only Important things, a beautiful romantic willow tree beside a lake, a husband who loved me, and a daughter who was all ease and laughs.
By the time I was 8, all I wanted to do was go back there. My best friends didn't want to be as close and clingy as I was, they wanted to go play over there, with someone else, for a while. I'd cry and throw things and bite my teachers. I'd act like a dog when I had the chance, desiring to be anything but what I was. I went between being docile and sweet, and being a raging child-harpie.
I was often more eloquent than adults, even then, and they FEARED me, because I would directly challenge them about everything wrong with society.
I was put into a Special class from 5th grade through to high school, told that I had Behavioural Difficulties, that I was a brat, just like my asshole father. Then I'd be sent home to watch him twitch and mumble in corners of our small council apartment, to find blood in our toilets and syringes on our counters. I'd rub his back when he vomited and get yelled at if I took a bath instead of a shower, depending on what his orders had been.
I always told him I believed in him; he could recover this time, he was a good father, no matter what anybody said. I loved him, whatever mommy did. I was there for him, no matter how bad he'd get, and he'd go between telling me I was a genius and that I was always a difficult, spoiled child, and that it was too bad I didn't become an over-achieving prodigy who aced school despite family difficulties.
I knew he was being unreasonable. Didn't hurt me any less.
This all drove me into the ground until I constantly threatened to kill myself, from the ages of 8 when I tried to hang myself with the string on the classroom blinds (it just pulled the blinds down) to high school when I was all talk and Mansonite grunginess.
They finally sent me to a hospital. It offered a modicum of recovery for me, regardless of certain family chaos that continues until this day, and was really only the start of a lifelong process. I still don't know how to BE happy, however much a medication or a vent to psychiatrists and friends alike might stabilize my moods.
I'm mostly complacent, sardonic, morbid, and burnt-out. But I still sort of believe in unicorns and don't want people to know about it in case they clumsily crush my faith.
--A
I'm saving this and starting my damn autobiography.
