Just a story that doesn’t matter

You know, I haven’t had a bad life. Really, in perspective, retrospect, looking back… other people have worse problems than me. What I’m going through.. It’s bearable. You know, you bear it because you have to? But at the same time, it feels like you are going down an endless road of shite and it just keeps going and going like a frikken Duracell battery.

I have a pretty decent set of parents, I love them and I wouldn’t change them for the world – well, besides the fact that they are overweight and I don’t want to lose them before I have children, or even before I get out of school. And my mum, well, she’s one of the strongest people I know but, she had this rare deformity at birth where she didn’t have any bones in one of her legs, so she had to get some put in, have her foot constructed. She has one leg longer than the other and when she was a teen she used to walk lopsided so her legs looked even – but it’s fucked up her back so much now, she’s on so many pain meds and she’s always in so much pain. I hate seeing her that way, I hate seeing her take the pills and even then it just dulls it. I’ve seen her cry so much because of it and it just… really hurts that I can’t do anything to help. Being around someone in pain so much just… kinda rubs off on you. When you love someone you feel their pain as your own sometimes, y’know? I just want it to stop for her, I don’t want her to hurt anymore because she is my role model, she’s my mum and yeah she’s annoying and nosy sometimes but she’s always promised to be there for me and she’s never broken that. But all these hospital appointments, all these pills, the pain, the crying… I don’t want to lose her. I don’t think I could cope if I did, not now.

I mean, I’ve kinda lost my cousin to anorexia. Yeah… A few years back, I got told she had it and I went to visit her a few times in hospital. It was a weird place… it didn’t look too grim on the outside and inside was… well, sterile clean. Plates of untouched biscuits in too bright rooms and too white corridors… The smell of sickly lemon disinfectant and… well… sweet-ish sort of sickness. Not the putrid rotting stench of infection but… if depression had a smell, if sadness had an odour, it would kind of smell like that. It would kinda come in waves too, like it would blur out sometimes and then if you weren’t busy you’d notice it right away.
Anyway… when I say I lost my cousin, she isn’t dead. She’s tried… too many times. I’ve seen the scars, I’ve seen her pulling down the bandages on her wrists. She would kinda space out sometimes when I visited her and just stare at things with big glassy brown eyes. The last day I saw her… Oh god, I don’t know why or how but she just… curled up on the too bright sofa in the too bright room and silently cried – something had set her off and she just wouldn’t talk to me. It was like she couldn’t hear me, I couldn’t get through. So I kissed her on the head, I told her I loved her, and then I had to go. She was like a sister to me, and I haven’t seen her in so long. See… she started throwing round accusations about my family, and her mother, and I couldn’t see her anymore. She got my brother into a lot of trouble. And I still don’t understand why… I don’t know why she had to go and say those things… I can’t believe them. I can’t. And I want to forgive her, I really already have but my parents ‘closed ranks’ and I can’t see her. She was sick… doctors said her had schizophrenia on top of her anorexia nervosa… I just… How can I hate her if she’s sick? Maybe not in her right mind? Did she do it consciously or was the disease in control? I love her. I want to know why. I want it to be like it was. I want everything to be okay.

The worst thing though, I always knew she didn’t eat quite right. She didn’t eat, or when she did it was a snack. I know she wasn’t happy at home and her mum was a little overbearing… and well, I don’t trust my uncle at all (weird vibes) – but… I just… I knew there was something wrong and I never said anything. Would things of been different if I would of just said something? If I had acted on my feelings of wrongness, would we be somewhere else? I feel like… I’m partly responsible for not trying hard enough, it was my duty to look after her because she is my family, you look out for your own first really – but I loved her not because I was obligated to because she was my cousin, I loved her because I knew her inside out and she knew me. But I don’t know her anymore.

It just.. along with my grandad having leukaemia and my grandma suffering from diabetes… I don’t have much family left. I really don’t, we’ve always been a close knit, small family – sure I have plenty of uncles and aunties around the world but I’ve never seen them, they are strangers in all but blood and marriage. I’m just so scared I’ll be left on my own, because I seem to be the only one caring for my body, I’m the healthiest in my immediate family really.
I’m so sorry to anyone who is reading this, I know it’s a drag but sometimes it feels like I have nowhere else to go. I’ve told my friends and my parents about these problems… but no one else knows that I want to die. I just do. I’ve had this feeling of nothing inside for so long, I’ll be able to get on with my day just fine, do all the things other people do, I don’t struggle in the way of reading or writing… but I’m losing interest in everything. I don’t feel that bubbly happiness like I used to, all I feel is sick to the stomach, like there’s a disease eating away in my chest – and an empty ice cold just fills the space where my heart it supposed to be. I won’t cry for weeks on end and then there will be that one thing that will set me off for days and it just won’t stop. I’ll just find a place to be alone and huddle into a ball and just.. cry. No one really knows I do that – my mum only caught me a few times after I broke up with my first boyfriend (year and a half we were together… I was devastated, and there is a lot of story behind it) – but after a while she did expect me to get my act together and stop crying. God… I wish it were so easy, I wish I could control it but I can’t so I hide it from her.

Like I hid my own version of self harm. They did out about that though. Few years back, I ended up getting into the habit of plucking out my hair, everywhere, because I was sick of shaving and wax strips were so expensive (growing back in 2 weeks my arse, try 4 days). I started doing it for purely cosmetic reasons but… fuck, I ended up realising that I went into a sort of trance when doing it – it doesn’t really hurt too much – sometimes it’s a little more painful than an elastic band… literally like picking thin, tiny hot needles out your skin. I didn’t do it for the pain, I guess, I’m really not big on pain. I’m shite at coping with it in any form. But I’d do it for hours a day, until my skin scarred from where the hair had ingrown and I would spend ages just pinching and clawing at it to get the hair out.. it always took so long to heal and the more I did it the worse it looked – I had to pass it off as a rash on my legs. It had gotten to the point where I could happily hack into my own skin and not feel a thing, pain wise. I’d feel so ashamed though… I still do now, even though I’m trying to stop. It’s just so addictive – I do it because when I’m doing it, it takes up all my concentration so nothing else really matters.. except getting caught.

They found out because I went to the doctors to see if the damage to my skin was irreparable, and I left my appointment card in my room and they found it. They first thought that I was going for birth control – which I did end up getting even though I didn’t have a boyfriend at that point (though my periods have stopped which just takes a whole load of cramps out of the equation, it’s nice) – but.. I admitted what I was doing to them. I knew they would find it weird. I felt like a freak. I still feel like a freak. I hate my body, but at the same time I know it’s not so bad. I just.. I hate the hair, and my nose, and my fat. I’m about under 9 and a half stone because I weighed myself recently, I’m a healthy weight but… I just look at myself sometimes and feel disgusted.

Then my mum asked if I was suicidal. If I’ve ever had suicidal thoughts. My honesty streak ended and I lied. I had, but… It’s nothing like now. Now it’s all the time, every single day. Like… I’ll just think about different ways to die, all the time. The other day I laid in bed just making up various letters I would send to people before I went and did it. I literally made up huge letters for everyone, my parents, my ex boyfriend, my friends… I’ll never forget what my ex said to me when I was trying to comfort a old suicidal friend ‘if they’ve really made up their mind there is nothing you can do. If they want to die they will do it no matter how hard you try to help them. They are beyond saving.’ What a horrible outlook to have on suicide.. and I just can’t get over it. I want to believe that the thoughts I have will stop but they just go on and on. I want to believe that I can get through this but the truth is… I don’t want to. I don’t want to exist anymore. I just want to fade away into nothing like I never existed in the first place, that someone else can take this soul, if we have souls, and make it their own.

But at the same time I feel like there is so much I want to do to make this world better. I still have hopes and dreams, but they are dull and far away, and they feel unreachable. I want to make the world a better place but… I know right now all I am is a drain on resources and I don’t mean anything. I want to be the best I can be but it’s been so long since I’ve felt any true lasting goodness that I don’t know what the best is anymore. I can smile, I can laugh, and maybe for the briefest moment I’ll feel normal again but then it comes back and I wonder was it real at all? The pain in my chest is back, like a vice or a vine coated in liquid ******** just wrapping itself around my organs, making it hard to breathe… It feels like my own body is trying to kill me too, sometimes. Like it’s not just my mind that wants me dead, my own body agrees and makes me have to concentrate so I don’t fall apart.

And I still don’t understand why I feel this way. I don’t… I’ve moved house, into a place that really feels like hell, too much work to be done on it, and I’ve never moved before, my childhood home is all I knew, and I miss it so much. I find myself wanting to go home but just coming back here. I keep getting told that ‘it will be so lovely when it’s done’ and I do believe that, but I’ll be leaving home for probably more shitty accommodation so I don’t get the reward of living through the crap to the niceness. I don’t know if I can make it that far, the house is going to take two years to do completely, we bought it in January and the extension has only just got a roof on, no plaster or floor – and everywhere else is falling to bits. I don’t like to think of myself as materialistic but I am, I wish I wasn’t but I am. Where I live and my conditions of living do matter, it does affect my mood. I’m comfortable in the sense that I can shower and eat and sleep but I look at these four walls and I just… I just miss home. I think I need to grow up and get a grip but… god I just miss home and I miss being happy.

I guess another reason why I feel so shoddy lately, and this has bugged me for years – well, I feel like I don’t fit in anywhere. You know, you always have that one group of people you hang around with and they are your besties, and you belong there. I don’t.. have that. I have friends, but they all come from different friend groups – I sort of drift, from group to group, getting along with them all or maybe just a select few but never… never belonging there. Maybe it’s because there are always a few differences between me and the groups I hang around with – one group is just… too ‘hardcore’, drinking and being kinda thuggish, another is too ‘good’, listening to crap I’m not interested in and being appalled by the fact that sex does happen, and another who are so close knit that really you had to be there from the beginning to fit in. I get along with people from all walks of life, from pretty much all backgrouds, races, genders, I don’t have many religious friends but if I did I’d accept that too – but I can never fit in any group because I don’t feel like an insider, just someone who is looking in, and it seems like… the people in these groups never go outside the group to talk – my friends are so different that they would never talk to each other, and that by belonging in a group I’m restricting myself to who I can talk to, because that group has expectation of how much time I spend with them. I don’t want to choose, I just… wish everyone would mingle a little more, because drifting has its perks but I feel… alone. Do other people feel like this? I don’t want to be bigheaded but I’ve never met someone like myself – and maybe that’s a good thing but… I just don’t fit in. It feels like I’m always the one to put effort in because I’m not part of the ‘in’ group anywhere so I never automatically get invited out, or included. It just hurts really.

I guess that’s it for now really, I have that pain whilst I’m writing and I just want it to go away. Should I sleep? I don’t sleep too good – I get a couple of hours before I wake up at like 3 in the morning then I just drift in shallow un-fulfilling slumber until morning. Apparently I’ve started sleep talking too – something my brother and mother only do when they are stressed out – but it’s got to be really bad because I’ve never been one to do it, it’s only recently that it’s started. Anyway… I’m done for today. I gotta keep on going, right?
TheStranger17