KangaRhew's Journal

I feel like I'm not quite as angry today, but I know that it's been simple avoidance of the things that are aggravating me that seems to lighten the load. I've been keeping interactions with my mother short and brief, as polite as possible; humor her more than anything. Of course, she (typical bipolar nervous wreck - though the more I'm considering it, the more I'm feeling that she, like me, might be BPD: years in a loveless relationship, fear of being alone and fending for herself, major anger problems, sporadic highs and lows, overall occasional "crazy" outbursts - behaviours and thought patterns) attempts to reciprocate. We generally get along well enough (when I'm not on edge like I am right now, and I can generally tune out the annoyances - right now I can't), and I'm the only one out of immediate family that can stand to spend any time with her - daughterly obligation, and I really do feel sorry for her because I'm really all she has most times, almost all of her friends are users (another thing that supports my BPD theory - her friends use her, she knows it, she hates it, she bitches about it endlessly, says she's not going to put up with it, doesn't call them for a couple weeks...then they call her, they need her help throwing something together, and she's at their doorstep the next morning - note: then she comes home and bitches about how rude they are, and how they only call her when they need something, and I'm stuck listening to it; "don't do it, tell them to fuck themselves" but she never can). 

Anyways, I had a point, I guess. So, polite, tiptoeing around my mother today, trying to be in a better mood (despite the fact that I got a little snotty with my father this afternoon because the asshole likes to joke around and I had been studying for four hours at that point, scrambling, and just didn't want to take it at the time - at which point, he's telling me that I can't be so cranky, especially not with my mother; "are you going to tell her in return that she's not allowed to be cranky either?," of course not, but I digress - ) and, for the most part, succeeded ("YOU CAN FEEL BETTER! ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS SMILE!" - my father's very wise advice, repeated to me throughout high school - yep, that'll surely balance out my seratonin levels, but I digress - ), but surely, she drives me to class tonight, and what does she want to talk about? Money. Without fail, any time spent alone with her is going to be discussion of how frustrated she is with the family financial situation - hell, they cut off our cable today, because the bill wasn't paid, she alloted it for this Friday. And my brother and mine, our cellphones are disconnected again - and they're going to charge us $50 to turn them back on again ("I may not be a mathematician or anything...but how is charging someone who is struggling to pay her bills as it is an extra $50 because she was a month behind anything but counter-productive?" I have some more wars to wage). Money is...really...not good. I feel like crawling under a fucking rock when money talk comes up. Or grabbing the shotgun, burning out rather than fading away.  (Don't worry, I don't have any actual plans for doing this - that would presume that I had the balls to do it, which I don't - and never have.)

I guess I've just been really stressed out lately; I don't really know what over, since I haven't been feeling that stressed, but I guess it's one of those subconscious things. I've been planning for two weeks now to get my ass in gear, get on a slightly better schedule (though I'm finding that trying to sleep anytime before at least 2 or 3 am results in broken, disjointed, and generally miserable sleep - bed at midnight, up at 3, awake till 4, up at 7, might as well give up), start walking at least an hour a day four days a week (the procrastination comes to play in the fact that I don't like walking around the streets around here, too many troublemakers around, and I get sick of young-inbred-boys leaning out their shitbox car windows yelling "ROADBLOCK!" - fat fat fat omg - so I want to go to the park to walk the track thinger, and I haven't had the car for a while, easy to say "well, I'll start next week"), start eating healthier (doesn't help when NOBODY else in the house shares my motivation, and there's a serious lack of "healthy" stuff around here and I don't have money for "personal grocery shopping"), even give myself more devoted time for study (I'm soooo easily distracted, and a terrible procrastinator - I'm doing really, really well with class, but I could be doing 96-100% instead of 90-95%). I mean, I got a good start on the road to a healthier life: I quit smoking, I quit drinking, I generally got off the computer a little more...

This is the hard part, though. Healthy food, healthy exercise. But then, think about it. I smoked and I drank for probably 8 years? Maybe 9? Food has been a lifelong need - this is not a want, this is a need. You (unfortunately) need to eat to survive. And to top it all off, food and exercise has additionally been an -issue- with me for the last 15 years. The pendulum swings for me, it doesn't stop in the middle. Eat nothing, eat everything, eat nothing, eat everything. I've never had a good grasp on nutrition, what it is to eat normally. I come from a heavy household. My mother and my father have been obese as far back as I can remember. My brother and myself were pretty normal all the way through until late adolescence. My brother, since high school ended, has damn near eaten his way into a "heart-attack-at-28" situation - very sedentary lifestyle, he's literally either sleeping, eating, or on the computer and sitting at a steady probably 300-350 pounds. I always had body issues, since I started high school, I suppose (around 14). I would sit in the cafeteria and not eat ("I had a big breakfast this morning, I really couldn't eat another bite" - short of family outings for such a purpose, I never and have never eaten breakfast as a regular occurance). Later years of high school, I avoided the cafeteria; we had a couple hiding spots, the freaks and degenerates, the weird kids - favoring the out of the way corners where the hallways would end and where nobody would wander. I still would seldom eat. I still felt too fat.

After high school, I lost it. Stuff happened. I ate. I ended up 200 pounds and miserable; I had started to drink. I was a good kid all the way through high school, short of skipping classes. I never drank, I never smoked, I didn't lose my virginity until I was 23, I never did drugs of any kind (pot, etc). I lost myself. It became a coping mechanism. I started playing online games, met my first serious boyfriend there, and out of fear of my body...the starvation returned. Arms slipped into the old coat, and it was still warm; it still fit perfectly even if nothing else did anymore, and everything was right with the world again.  Over a period of four months I had dropped 60 pounds and developed gallstones (I was literally living on T3s - the stones did dissolve eventually, thank god). 

A lot of stuff happened over the next five years. I ended up absolutely miserable, in any case. I moved across country, coast to coast, and took up residence with my (then) fiance. He was six years younger than me, and it was very apparent (17 when we started our relationship). He was a high school dropout. He had some major depression issues (still does), self-injured, is now extremely suicidal, and is also transgender (which was absolutely bewildering, coming seemingly out of the blue five years into a serious relationship). Needless to say, he had issues as well. We were both toxic for one another, but we were so close that it was very difficult to let it go. We lived in his parent's basement for probably close to two years. I became very shut off - I didn't have any friends, and I'm generally very shy, and didn't particularly like his friends. I lost myself online for much of that time (over the whole span) and drank like a fish. It was a really bad time. My behaviour makes much more sense to me today, looking back on it; it's all very clear, as I was exceptionally jealous - I don't consider myself "crazy" and I don't like feeling like I am...but I was crazy. I was absolutely fucking nuts. I can see that now. But what he had offered as fuel to that fire, it is not surprising: he was a compulsive liar, he was patronizing, he played games like a pro, and he had this amazing way of making me feel bad about myself, or wrong, or generally just like I was the only one being bat-shit crazy (every fight was absolutely irrational, and it wasn't all coming from my corner). Anyways, I'm not going to go too much further into it, suffice to say that it was all very terrible and finally I...well, I let him break it off. I think that a lot of the perpetuation was simply because I wasn't ready to let it go - he wasn't wholly ready either, but he was closer to it than I was.  Fear of abandonment was strong enough to override the obvious knowledge that I wasn't happy. My bed wasn't empty...and I guess that's primarily what I was holding on to. It can't be love - what love there was left was so strained. It can't be time spent laughing - most of our time we were drunk, fighting, or sitting on our computers; this also lends to the fact that it can't be time spent conversing pleasantly. It can't be even something as rudimentary as sex - it had become such a sporadic encounter over the years, and really wasn't enjoyable for me over the last two years. So what was it? I was horrified of being alone.

Anyways, so I had taken to overeating again over the years, and it only continued after we had called it off. Fortunately enough, he took a rather offensive approach to the split, which ultimately ended up hurting me quite deeply, words that were said...so it made the concept reasonably simplistic for me. It sucked for a while, but not to the point where I was miserable and crying. I was actually...kinda happy. It was kind of a relief. As if I thought that the trauma of the abandonment, of the break up, would cause my heart to break and I would die - then to survive it physically...

I had my family, though. And the various friends of my brother's that come and go, that I enjoy talking to but am not connected well enough to to worry about not seeing for weeks at a time. These are the relationships I favor. Even the couple friends that I have, I maintain the same distance; I'll visit, I'll tell them everything that's going on in my life, talk about everything that's going on in their's, laugh and have a good time, but I hold them at arm's length. It feels fake...and it probably is. To make my parents stop worrying about all the time I spend alone.  It feels good, sure, going out and interacting with people. I enjoy it. But I don't ever let them in; avoid the loss. All the people I went to high school with are getting married and making babies...except for me. Because I'm afraid to get close to people. The people I've known forever, who love me despite my weight and my skin, while I love them, it's superficial love - I could move away tomorrow, maybe think about them time to time, send them a message on facebook, and be content with it. The possibility of boyfriends...it's horrifying to me. If not for the weight and the skin, if they get past theses impenetrable barriers...what about the crazy lady that lurks beneath the surface waiting to suffocate them, to make them feel terrible because they have a friend of the opposite sex, to guilt them into staying home with me when their buddy invited them out for a beer, to generally be a crazy bitch, push them away, and otherwise ruin their lives. I've seen the crazy girl inside me. While my ex-fiance fueled my fire, I have no doubt that there would be excuses for the insanity no matter the circumstances. Crazy though I may be, I'm also a realist...

I'm okay with being alone. People - there's too many problems in those waters. Too much hassle. Too much room for disappointment. And to think I'm going in to be an LPN - don't get me wrong, I know that's a good place for me. Firstly, because it WILL get me used to interaction. Secondly, I don't mind casual interaction. I feed on casual interaction, I crave it, I love it...I just don't like getting close.

Anyways, this has turned into a shockingly long rant when I thought I didn't really have much to say. I'm reflective tonight, and a little melancholy, admittedly. I think it's a good night to curl up in bed with some movies. So maybe that's what I'm gonna go do.

Stay strong.