Jyvur Entropy's Blog, page 12

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You should all give up on me.

Really, I’m not ever going to be any better. And the sad-posting on this blog is just a part of the [redacted] ideation. I like to think that one day when I do it, and people really know, yes, it was that bad, her feelings were bad, then people will come back and read this stuff.

Except that we all know I’ll never really do anything. This is for attention. It’s always for attention.

And it always works, you know. Maybe everyone should start ignoring me.

Another concerned citizen came to me today and said, “There are a lot of evil people in the world. You have such a bleak worldview. How do you not know that? How are you surprised? It doesn’t mean anything about you. Don’t internalize that. Don’t think you deserved it. Hey, why don’t you do something to make you feel better? You always bring food out to the homeless guys in your city. You should volunteer for a food bank. Also therapy wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

Why not? Sure. I’ll see if the food bank needs help. I’ll see if the homeless shelter needs help.

I don’t know what to do with myself, so maybe I’ll do that.

I tried to be more positive. i really did. It was a lot of pretending and a lot of trying to exert control over my brain, a lot of shutting thoughts down.

It was a lot of work for a lot of eh.

I wish I could write something very deep and meaningful. Something evocative. Something heart-rendering. Something honest and awful and true. But I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I never will.

Or if I did, I wouldn’t even believe I’d done it, because people always say nice things about ‘Combustion’ and I never believe them.

I try to shut my brain off most days. I think about the future, even the next five minutes or so, and I make a plan of what I’ll do and then my brain goes “Why? What’s the point?” and I try to shut that off and just say “Don’t worry about the point, just keep going. If you’re going to prolong yourself out of weakness, you might as well shut up and not whine about it. Don’t make it any worse than it has to be.”

Well, don’t worry about me. I’m a dramatic fuck, but I’m also not a very brave fuck.

The worst I ever did was the time with the pills and they made me eat this tube of charcoal. It was really gross. I kept puking and they kept making me eat it because I’d taken so many pills. They threatened to pump my stomach and I yelled “Fuck you! Do it then!”

I was always like that with doctors, which is probably why the whole experience was so unpleasant.

I try not to think about it or plan it, because it’s stupid because I’ll never do it.

But I do think about it. A lot.

I think of how they say women don’t like it to be messy. I bet that isn’t right. I’d want it to be as messy as possible.

Like a Jackson Pollock painting. Although, I guess the flecks are kind of more evenly spread out in a Jackson Pollock painting and it would end up more concentrated in one spot, the slight Pollock effect expanding upwards in a halo that faded the further from the splat you went.

I think about that a lot. What it’d look like.

Don’t be ghoulish, Jen. don’t be morbid. Stop it.

You know i only know who Jackson Pollock is because when I was in college I wrote for the newspaper and we went to a journalism conference in New York City and the girls who shared a room with me were pretentious nasty fucks who mentioned Jackson Pollock and then laughed at me when I asked who that was. It was really embarrassing.

I made it a point to go and learn who Jackson Pollock was. Not that I’ve ever really needed to know and if you don’t know don’t feel bad. Shitty modern art a toddler could paint. Everyone puts it in the MOMA and makes a big fucking deal out of it, but it’s nonsense. I think most things people make a big stinking fuck about are nonsense. And then, you can’t be the one person like ‘Hey, this is bullshit, right? It isn’t just me?’

I try to think about what would make me stop feeling this way and I can’t think of a single thing.

When i’m right in the thick of writing a book, I feel a little less this way. It’s so brief though.

But I guess it is something. So I guess I should start working on another book.

Sylvia Plath’s Search For Happiness — The Let’s Play Ball Blog

My weird fascination with Sylvia Plath continues. I’m still re-reading her letters, her journals, her poetry and her novel. I have also read numerous biographies, some of which focus on specific times or incidents in her life. These studies keep coming out, including some fictional takes on her life story. Clearly, I’m not the only…

Sylvia Plath’s Search For Happiness — The Let’s Play Ball Blog

78-33=45

It seems to me like everything bad in life is so so bad and all of the good things are just…eh. They’re just fine.

I feel like I made it through all of this really horrible stuff, just to sit in this waiting room. And things are okay in the waiting room. There’s this lighthearted and pleasant sort of elevator music playing and everyone is vaguely cheerful.

And they talk about weddings and they talk about babies and they talk about ‘maybe I’ll sell the condo. we’d make a killing. real-estate bubble’ and they talk about television shows.

I hate sitting in this waiting room and every day I just think how damn stupid it is that all of the horrible things were so so horrible and the good things in life make me want to pull my hair out and scream. And I can’t do that, because that would make me crazy. Everything I feel makes me crazy. I wish I was just allowed to feel whatever the fuck I do.

How is it that the bad part of life was so so bad and the good part is so tedious and…eh. It’s just fine. Is there something bigger than fine?

The average life expectancy of an American female is 78 years. 78-33=45.

God.

I can’t.

And both sets of my great-grandparents lived into their 90s. Even though they smoked.

I really couldn’t do another 45 years. I really couldn’t. No thanks.

This is all terrible. But I guess it’s only really terrible because it’s so boring and everyone smiles so much.

I smile so much.

I don’t know why.

Well, okay, yeah maybe I do.

People like me when I act like that.

I want people to like me. I want people to like me so so much, okay? There there it is.

You know when people didn’t like me?

When I kept on trying to kill myself.

And the awful thing about failed suicide attempts is this: If you fail, people act like you couldn’t have been all that sad then. People act like what you’re feeling isn’t real, and it just solidifies this feeling that maybe YOU aren’t real. Failed suicide attempts just make you want to do it more.

So I did. I upped the ante. I escalated to things I thought would work.

The closest that I ever got was the time I took all the pills. But then I started to get dizzy and tired. It felt like my head was floating off my body. I told on myself.

She’s doing this for attention. She does it all for attention. What the fuck is the matter with you?

If I could do it. If I wasn’t afraid. If I could do it.

If I could do it, then people would know how I feel is real.

If I could do it, then people would know that this really hurt. That everyday it hurt. Even when I put a big stupid smile on, because that seems to make people like me and I really want people to like me.

If I could do it, then I’d get out of this awful waiting room, where I feel like I’m sitting with my heart racing, trying not to think about the horrible things, while everyone else smiles placidly and talks to me about everything monotonous. There are weddings and there are babies and there are holidays and there are television shows and I talk about these things too, because why not? What else is there to do, except maybe stare at the wall and pull my hair out and wish I was brave enough to find the exit.

Everything feels like a nightmare, but everyone is smiling, including me.

And if I say ‘this is a nightmare’ everyone says ‘no it isn’t calm down.’

They say, ‘you’re not working hard enough to get better.’

And I feel like, why should I?

I’ve been better. I feel craziest when I’m happy and content, because all I do all day is not let myself think. It’s so much stuffing down of thoughts and feelings and if I can’t just let myself think what I think and feel how I feel, then I’m not even really me when I’m happy. Happy is terrifying. You have to hold onto tight and think all the right things and control yourself so well.

And happy barely feels good anyway.

It’s like this waiting room. It’s boring. It’s..eh.

So it’s a LOT of work just for something that feels…eh.

When I lived in New Hampshire, there was a cliff near my house and I went to it and stood on the edge once. I tried to work up the nerve. I thought, ‘Jumping would be scary, falling would be even scarier, but it would only take a second, just one second, just let go, all you have to do is lean out over the edge and let go. It will be the easiest thing you’ve ever done.’

Except it wasn’t. I couldn’t do it. The idea of letting go was terrifying.

I sat down. I thought maybe if I scoot myself off the edge.

I couldn’t do that either though.

Maybe I did do it all for attention. Maybe I do everything for attention. I don’t know.

I wish I knew how to feel better. I wish all the horrible things in life weren’t so horrible and all of the good things so shallow and muted and anti-climactic and…eh.

Redacted

What am I supposed to think about to keep from thinking about [redacted]?

I used to redact things out of stories on wattpad. Until somebody asked me “Why do you redact things?” and then I guess it just wasn’t as funny to me anymore.

It wasn’t really funny to begin with, I guess.

I could tell you why I did it, but that would ruin the joke for myself. You’re not missing out on much. It’s not a good joke. I don’t have a good sense of humor.

And who ruins the flow of a story just to make a joke for themselves, anyway? Me, I guess.

It’s stupid.

I do a lot of stupid things. I think a lot of stupid things. Sometimes I listen to the Columbine 911 calls and think especially stupid things like, “I wish I was caught in a mass shooting and died. Then I could die without having to do anything.” And yes, I know that’s in really poor taste to say. I know it’s ghoulish and I know it’s disrespectful of all the people who have died in mass shootings.

It’s a thing that I think though, because I’m not brave enough to [redacted].

So since I’m not, what am I supposed to think about to keep from thinking about it?

Should I think about baking?

Should I think about Jordan Peterson?

Should I think about romance novels?

Should I think about stupid internet drama?

Or lolcow?

Or reddit?

No no no no no.

The internet makes me

BAM

Abstraction doesn’t make this any deeper than it actually is. It’s just a [redacted] [redacted] who doesn’t even want to be [redacted].

Sometimes I wish somebody would figure out the joke, but since it’s dumb and not funny, nobody ever will. It’s not worth figuring out.

And neither am [redacted].

You.

There is more than one “you” that needs to be addressed. Not one of you will read this and that’s fine. That’s not what it’s for.

I wouldn’t want you to read it. I wouldn’t want your response. You, all of you, your response would be to tell me why I’m wrong, why my feelings don’t matter, why you are the real victim, why your feelings matter and mine don’t.

Mine don’t.

My feelings don’t matter.

What I want doesn’t matter.

There’s no point in telling you how bad you made me feel. There’s no point in telling you how you made me feel like I’m not real. Like you could unzip me like a costume and there wouldn’t be anything inside. How sometimes I feel like I’m melting while everyone else acts like I’m solid and static and I can’t say ‘help, I’m melting’ because that would be crazy crazy crazy crazy.

But it’s because I’m crazy, because I’m dramatic, because I feel too much, that it’s okay to never ever say sorry. Never ever say sorry. You don’t have to be sorry, because who knows if I’m even real?

Nice real girls are quiet and never yell or break things or get angry angry angry.

Nice real girls aren’t me, so it’s okay that you hurt me. It’s okay. I guess. I guess.

It must be.

So, why explain anything?

Nothing matters. everything is okay. Everything is fine. everything is okay.

Be quiet. Be quiet. Everything is fine. everything is okay. Shhhhhh…..

Close the door.

It wasn’t a big deal.

I’m not a big deal.

I’m not real.

It doesn’t matter how you treat crazy people. Everyone knows that.

And I feel like I’m smiling while the whole world burns. The world isn’t burning, but I can’t stop smelling smoke.

I Have Never Been So Disappointed By a Book

Paul Tremblay is my absolute favorite author of all time.

Or…he was. I’m not sure after this. I’m re-evaluting.

His book Head Full of Ghosts is the most brilliant work of fiction I’ve ever read.

I guess I connected with Head Full of Ghosts because the parents perform an exorcism and believe their teenage daughter is possessed.

My mom believed something similar about me. An attachment haunting. She was abusive before she got that idea into her head, but the way she weilded this demon this “icky” this nefarious spirit over me, just always blaming me for being haunted. I wish I could fully explain to everyone what that felt like.

So this book is about parents who believe in the supernatural and it is a book for adults with a child protagonist. I was so blown away by it. I was so inspired by it. I wrote my own horror novel for adults with a child protagonist. It is not an accurate nitty gritty portrayal of my childhood. But I tried so hard to capture how those years felt. I believe I succeeded. And I owe so much of my writing style and the risks I take to the inspiration I got from Paul Tremblay’s book.

His books always move me and strike at something deep inside of me. I’ve never taken more then 3 days to read a Paul Tremblay novel, because they are impossible to put down. Even this one.

This book really was impossible to put down. The characters were great. The tension had me literally gasping out loud.

So why a two star rating?

It’s really because this book made me feel bad. Maybe that was the point. Maybe the point is to make conservatives feel bad.

And with me having admitted I’m a conservative, I am now a bad evil fascist person in the eyes of many left-leaning people reading this. It doesn’t matter which specific conservative views I hold, or WHY I hold them, or what values or reasoning led me to those views. Even if the logic or facts that I based my views on were flawed or incorrect, wouldn’t that just make me dumb and uninformed? Not a bad person? I’m not saying I am. I’m just saying, I’m so tired of being called an evil fascist villain. Instead, maybe tell me why I’m wrong and if what you say makes sense, maybe I’ll change my opinion.

I have drastically changed my views before. I used to be incredibly liberal.

Well, let me talk about the book before I get into that:

There are conservative characters in this book that are absolute stereotypes.

This book is meant to be allegory for the Covid virus.

And Tremblay makes sure to include a right-wing militia.

Where are the left-wing rioters?

I did not identify as a conservative, even privately, even just in my own head, until the riots of 2020.

I am in favor of protesting. It’s in the first amendment. I am not in favor of property destruction or violence.

There was rioting in my city and I was scared.

Okay? There it is. I was scared. I was so so fucking scared.

Maybe I was dumb to be scared. I was still really really scared and it felt horrible.

There was so much violence in my house when I was a kid. And it’s not so much the violence itself. Because you can always sort of pull your brain out of your body and wait for it to stop. Making it through a prolonged act of violence is simple. Violence is simple. It’s passive. You just wait. And you tell yourself, this will be over at some point because it’s always over at some point. And you don’t let yourself think anything like ‘it will end, but then more awful stuff will come after and is that all life is? Waiting for the next horrible thing?’ No, you don’t start to think stuff like that until you’re actually safe. You realize you’re safe and then things get really hard. Surviving violence is easier than trying to put your brain back together afterwards. When my mom burned my sister’s arm and the skin kept peeling and kept peeling and when she nearly beat our dog to death with a chain, my brain felt like it was going to come apart. And every day, decades later, it is so much work to take all the pieces rattling around in there and try to shove them into some kind of placement where they don’t jangle and get in the way too much.

I don’t want any more broken pieces banging around. I was so so scared of feeling the way I felt when I saw my mom hurt my younger sister like that, when I saw her hurt our dog and he kept screaming like I never heard anything scream.

I was scared.

And then on twitter, liberals-other liberals like me, because while I had started to become disillusioned with feminism (for constantly trying to make me a victim when all I want is to figure out how to be tough and I want to figure out how to NOT blame the world for my problems), I still identified as liberal.

Liberals on twitter, as I was so so scared, they said, “If you’re worried about property damage, then YOU have your priorities messed up.” Even though 30 people died across the country in those riots, people like David Dorne.

Those same liberals said, “There is no violence. It’s propoganda.”

Those same liberals said, “silence is violence.”

Those same liberals said, “Change always requires violence.”

Those same liberals, the ones who defended violence in the name of social change, they eventually said, “All the violence is being caused by right-wingers.”

And I detested them for it. For implying I was racist for being afraid. For defending the lockdowns that sent me spiraling into depression and obsession and I felt my brain coming apart again and couldn’t do anything about it, and manically obsessively posted weird comments all over reddit and incel forums, at the height of my depression-induced crazy, wanting nothing but to get back out in the world so that I could feel a little less weird. And anyone who didn’t want the lockdowns was a fascist and a horrible evil person who didn’t care about other people.

I tried so hard to keep my head on during lockdown, and it wasn’t on all that tight to begin with, okay?

Wanting life to stay normal was fascist. Evil. Bad. I was a bad person for not wanting a quarantine.

But the protesters and rioters swarming together by the hundreds were fine.

The lack of logic made me so angry. The way my fear and depression and stir-crazy anxiety were minimized and I was labeled a bad person for even having those feelings…

And so, I found Ben Shapiro and Tim Poole and they made me feel better.

I’m still calling myself a conservative because I am still so angry at the vast majority of liberals, many of whom I’ve known or followed online for years, for making me feel so unsafe and then making me feel like such a bad person for feeling unsafe.

This is a political book review because Paul Tremblay made his book political.

Conservatives are a cardboard flat stereotype.

Criticism of Trump is in the ext. Criticism of conservatives and militias is in the text.

Criticism of anything left-leaning in the slightest? Of course not. Criticism of the rioters who burned down buildings and killed over 30 people? This is supposed to be allegory of the 2020 virus after all. Where is the chaos of last spring? Not in here.

This is not a nuanced work of fiction. This is a political viewpoint hidden in a story. It’s a well-written, breathtaking story, but the agenda ruins it for me.

I’m not a bad person for my political beliefs. I don’t want anything to do with a side of the political spectrum where the mainstream defends and minimizes violence.

Maybe you don’t agree with my reasoning. But if you look at the emotions and thoughts that brought me to my conclusion, you can see that I’m not a bad person, right? Even if my reasoning is flawed and my facts are wrong, did a moral failing bring me to my conclusions?

Maybe so. But again, you have to do more than call me a fascist to get me to reconsider.

Paul Tremblay refers to conservative characters who believe conspiracy theories on reddit as “fascists.” Aren’t they just gullible? Aren’t they just uninformed?

I was so so disappointed to see a writer I always viewed as so nuanced and so able to look into issues that are so complexly, deeply human, so disappointed to see him write stereotypes of conservatives, straw men to take pot shots at.

This book made me feel bad. I guess maybe that was the point of it.

I’m not sure why though. Liberals making me feel bad is why I left the left in the first place.

…

I can do this thing. I call it putting on my “game face.”

I feel like I’m stepping into somebody else.

I don’t know how to really explain it. Game face me is all smiles and she knows just what to say. She’s quick on her feet. She knows all the stupid little small-talk quips that aren’t really anything. She can throw a funny barb right back at a customer and then laugh along and smile and joke. She bobs in and out of conversation threads, winding this way and that.

And I feel like I’m watching her. You know?

Like it isn’t really me.

Which is fucking ridiculous. I know.

I know i know i know i know

But it’s how I feel, even though it’s stupid. Feelings are usually stupid, I guess.

Look, I know the weird persona I step into, the one that’s confident and charming and great with customers and can mingle at parties…I know that’s me. I know it isn’t a costume. I know it’s me. It doesn’t feel like me though.

I feel like I’m watching someone else, standing behind her, and eventually people will notice I’m there and be very disappointed.

Also, I know that I’m real. I just don’t feel real. And I don’t exactly know what that means, but I’ll try to explain it.

I can see that I have a body, obviously. I know I have a past. I know I’m in the present. I say things and other people hear me and respond to me. I must be be real.

But I look at myself in the mirror and have this sensation like, “Well, look at you with your body and face and hair. You almost look real. You’re in a person costume” and I know that whatever intangible sort of innards other people have that make them real, I don’t have them. Whatever other people have inside of them that make them real, I don’t have it.

I know that and also I know that doesn’t make sense and it’s bullshit. So since it’s bullshit, maybe I shouldn’t even say it.

Sometimes I’m surprised by how real everyone else seems to think I am.

I guess I am real. I guess I am really here. I must be.

I am here. I am alive. I am. I guess.

I must be.

Camp

In 5th grade, right before the end of the school year, we watched a movie in class where the kids went to a sleepaway summer camp. It looked like so much fun and I immediately became obsessed with the idea of going to summer camp.

I begged my grandmother to go to summer camp and surprisingly, she agreed. She signed me and my younger sister Carly up for a day camp program.

On day one, I was put into a group of other 10-12 year olds. The camp split all the kids up into little groups of about ten kids, and each group of ten had a counselor. Our counselor was a skinny blonde woman named Sabrina, and she wasn’t a grown up but a teenager. She was just about to go into her Senior year, she told us.

Her hair was like silky moonlight. She always wore a one-piece bathing suit, while the other girls her age wore bikinis. She had a serious and quiet sort of energy. She didn’t talk very much. When she did talk she said that she wanted to try to be a lifeguard next summer and that she was nervous about getting into college.

I was smitten by her. Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that I had a crush on her. It was platonic. Almost every single one of my WHAM!-I LOVE-THIS-PERSON moments has been platonic. But I wanted her to love me and think I was good so so much.

I was incredibly inappropriate with this poor woman. Well…girl. She was a girl. And looking back on it, I wish some of the actual adults had intervened to help her deal with me.

I was ten years old, about to turn eleven in August. I was way too old to act the way that I did with her. I hugged her and clung her on arm constantly. I climbed onto her lap. I played with her hair. I told her she looked like Dawn from the Babysitter’s Club.

She was very uncomfortable with my sudden, intense, grossly inappropriate attachment to her.

I followed her around the beach, instead of talking to the other kids. I always set my towel up right next to hers and begged her to let me see what was in her backpack.

She asked me not to touch her and climb on her.

I thought it was really cute that she was so uncomfortable with my exuberance. I thought everything she did was cute and amazing and incredible.

I thought it was cute that she was quiet and serious and I was neither and I loved her for being everything that I wasn’t.

I wish I’d understood back then how wrong it was to keep on touching her and clinging on her when she was so clearly not okay with it. I wish I’d known and I wish that poor teenager hadn’t spent the entire summer before her senior year fighting off the inappropriate affections of a soon-to-be-6th-grader who thought she looked like Dawn from The Babysitter’s Club.

The last field trip our camp took that summer was to a water park. I am afraid of big rides.

Sabrina was very excited to go to the water park. As excited as a quiet, serious girl like her got anyway. She told our group that it was her favorite field trip of the summer and made out a plan for what order we’d go on the rides.

I was so nervous, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to go on any of these big water slides. Back then, my stepdad Jose bought season tickets to Six Flags every year. Every year, he’d yell at me all day to go on the big coasters with him and Carly. They went on every single roller coaster that she was tall enough for. I was taller than her. I should be able to go on even bigger coasters with him. The biggest that I could work up the nerve for were the water flume and Skull Mountain. Jose wanted me to go on Batman with him and the thought made me dizzy with fear. Every year, when I failed to work up the nerve to go on a big roller coaster, he’d berate me and tell me he shouldn’t have bothered bringing me. I was no fun. I was a fucking chicken. The day would end with him making loud chicken noises at me while I sat in the backseat hating myself.

I didn’t want Sabrina to hate me like Jose did. I wanted to be brave and go on a big water slide.

But the idea of going on a water slide terrified me even more than going on Batman. There wasn’t even anything to hold onto on a water slide. No seatbelt. No seat. I couldn’t do it.

I asked my grandparents if I could stay home the day of the field trip and they said no, because they’d pre-paid for all the field trips at the start of the summer. My ticket had already been paid for. I had to go.

I was very nervous on the bus to the park. I found a quiet girl that wasn’t in my group. I sat next to her, instead of squishing myself up against Sabrina like I did on every other field trip. I spent the bus trip talking that girl’s ear off. I told her about all my favorite books. I talked about a million miles an hour to try and work off some of the awful nerves fizzing and popping inside of me. One of my favorite books, the girl was a little interested in. She asked me a few questions about ‘The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle.’ I told her I loved any book on a ship and that ships were incredibly neat, and sometimes my stepdad took me and my sisters out on his friend’s boat and let us jump off and swim in the bay. I talked and talked and talked and then we were there.

And there were the water slides.

Massive, like twisty, terrible skyscrapers that I was supposed to just fly down without a seatbelt.

I was going to let Sabrina down and she would hate me and she was so pretty and so cool and every time I saw her my heart sped up and because I was a chicken I was going to make her hate me.

I tried very hard to work up the nerve to go on a water slide. Sabrina was in a great mood. She brought all of us over to a tunnel water slide. We waited on line on these big staircases that went up to the top of the slide. I’d never been to a water park before, and standing on those steps made my heart race. I couldn’t believe how high in the air we were.

We got all the way to the top. I was going to do it…I would do it even though I was afraid…

But I couldn’t. I looked at how far down it was, burst into tears and told Sabrina I couldn’t do it.

Her eyes were very big. I threw my arms around her waist and begged her not to be mad at me.

I think she was embarrassed. She patted my hair and said, “It’s fine. You don’t have to go down.” But she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking around at all the people staring at us. She told the rest of the kids in our group that she’d meet them at the bottom.

Then we walked back down the steps. I cried the whole way down as we pushed through other kids and counselors waiting in line.

Sabrina comforted me for a little bit.

Then she tried to talk me into trying another slide.

“A smaller one. We’ll go on a smaller one. How about the one with the floaties you sit on? We could get a double floatie. I’ll sit on it with you. We’ll go down together and you can hold my hand. Come on. We only get to come here once all summer.”

I wanted to say yes. I wanted to do what I knew would make her happy. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t work up the nerve.

I could see how disappointed Sabrina was in me. I wished so much that I was a different person, one who could just do what I was supposed to do.

Sabrina ended up asking another counselor to take her group on rides, so she could sit with me. He said okay, “But only if you take the baby of my group.”

The baby of his group turned out to be a boy about my age. Sabrina took us to the lazy river and then to a regular pool in the center of the park. I hit it off with this boy, for whatever reason. He didn’t like books. He liked video games and pokemon. But he was funny and sort of hyper, and I liked talking to him.

We ended up playing and rough-housing in the pool, since it was mostly empty. He splashed me and I shrieked and pretended to be more offended than I was. He play wrestled with me and I jumped on his back and he gave me a swimming piggy-back ride through the pool.

It was almost lunchtime, so the other counselor came over to the pool to drop off the rest of our group with Sabrina.

I said goodbye to the boy because he had to go back with his group. He said, “Don’t feel bad about being scared of the rides. I am too. I had fun with you anyway, so who cares?”

I got out of the pool and three of the girls from my group were glaring at me.

Tanya, a black girl with braids piled on top of her head, marched over to me.

“Really?” she snapped. “You ruined Sabrina’s day and you’re over there flirting like it’s nothing.”

“Flirting?”

My face grew very hot. I suddenly felt very conspicuous.

“Yeah. Sabrina’s whole summer is ruined and you don’t even care. Splashing it up and flirting with some boy you just met. What’s wrong with you?”

I looked over at Sabrina. She did look very sad.

Guilt came crashing down on me.

“I’ll tell her I’m sorry,” I muttered.

“Don’t bother,” Tanya snapped. “You should leave her alone.”

I did leave her alone.

The summer was almost over by then, but I didn’t bother her anymore after that.

I felt like she’d really seen me, like everybody had, and they’d seen behind the bubbly talkative mask. They’d seen who I really was and they didn’t like it. I didn’t blame them.

I barely talked to Sabrina for the final 2 weeks of camp.

And the next summer, she wasn’t a counselor. She was a lifeguard. She avoided looking at me. I didn’t talk to her even once that summer. I knew I should be ashamed of how I’d acted and that I shouldn’t make her have to deal with me again. Nobody should have to deal with me.

A Bad Moment

I used to clean a lot when I was a kid, because the cleaner the house was, the calmer my mom would be.

It was impossible to ever get it really clean though.

The house looked different depending on what year we’re talking about. So let’s talk about the year I was nine, just to have a year to focus on.

My stepdad still lived us with us then. That was the last year he lived with us. Before my mom started sleeping with the guy who owned the sex toy shop she managed, the store that other people remember as the place with the manic panic and the Doc Martins, but I remember as the place with the candy machine where the gummies always came out dusty-looking and they tasted funny, and whenever I’d ask, Mom would insist the strange long cylinders I was counting were “back massagers” and the owner once let me pick out a nightie to put on a blow up doll with a round O of a mouth and set it up between the coffin-shaped dressing rooms.

When I was 9, Jose still lived with us and he and Carly still spent lots of time playing the Super Nintendo. He had a lot of friends that would come over to drink beer and sit outside with him. Some of them were very rowdy and would crack jokes at me in a funny uncle sort of way, but they always made me nervous and I’d hide in my room when they came over. I didn’t like a lot of attention on me back then. I was a little different than I am now, I guess.

Jose and Mom ran a ceramics company. The kiln was in the kitchen. The name of their company was Necroworks and their tagline was “Home of the shit your mother will hate.” They made a lot of skulls. Some glazed. Some intricately painted. They also made many gargoyles. For those they had this special textured stone paint that made them look all bumpy, like they were really made of stone. Dragons. Lots and lots of dragons. The biggest one Mom ever painted (because for all of the very detailed painting-she did that part. She was the artist-paintings of unicorns and dragons and Egyptian queens all of the house) was almost as tall as me. It had to be around four feet. The dragon was positioned on a huge rocky cliff, resting, with its tail hanging over the side. She painted the dragon two different colors of purple.

She’d look at a finished piece of bisque (a fired ceramic ready for painting is called bisque)and know exactly which of the hundreds of paint colors she wanted to use.

“Jen, get me the mint green with the Lynn’s label.” “Jen, I need mocha mayhem. It’s a glittery brown. Big bottle.”

And I’d open the door of the closet, the one that Carly had stuck Lisa Frank panda stickers all over and they never came off and Mom dragged her across the house by the hair and slammed her into every wall when she did it, I’d open that door, get on my knees and sort through the piles of plastic bottles.

She painted with the TV on, usually watching John Wayne movies or Spaghetti Westerns.

Life was best when she was sitting still, with her eyes glued to the screen.

Bad things happened when she got up and moved around. It was impossible to tell what would set her off.

Once out of nowhere (I think I was 8 or 9), she brought up how in Kindergarten, the school had been concerned I was being molested, because I kept masterbaiting in class. A lot of things happened to me as a kid, but I wasn’t molested. I was just always really horny I guess.

I think she screamed at me for what must have been hours. She got my younger sister involved in making fun of me. And I don’t blame Carly for going along with it, because she had to, I know she did.

Mom didn’t hit me that time.

I just stared at her, so angry and red-faced, wondering what I was supposed to do to make it better. I couldn’t change what five-year-old me had done. I didn’t know what she wanted from me.

Something else she’d do a lot was decide she needed a specific item right that moment. With as messy as our house was, it wasn’t an easy task to go into her cluttered bedroom and find the exact necklace, perfume, or knick-knack she wanted. Then she’d become violent.

I became interested in Christianity around the time I was 9. I think, only because it was so different than the spiritual stuff in our house (Wicca).

There were a lot of times, I scrambled around on the floor of her room, throwing around shoes, purses, stuffed animals, boas, desperately trying to find some item or other. She’d start screaming that awful scream of hers from the other side of the house, telling me to hurry up.

I’d panic and cry and pray. Every time that I prayed and DID find whatever item it was, it strengthened my belief that God was up there helping me.

Every time that I prayed and didn’t find the item, I believed that God had stopped loving me. Because I was awful and there was no reason for him to help me.

I don’t know, readers of mine, if you’ve ever been dragged by your hair. That’s what she did to us the most.

I have more memories of being dragged across the house by my hair than any other singular event in my childhood.

First of all, it hurts a lot.

She’d grab a fistful of hair and yank me down to the floor from wherever I was standing. The floor would shoot up to hit me, BAM!

My entire scalp would scream in pain as she pulled me over the rug. It was a thin, gray scratchy rug. Many times it gave me such bad rugburns from being dragged over it, that tiny little pinpricks of blood would rise to the surface of the rashy red patches on my arms or knees. While she dragged me, she threw me into things along the way, flinging me into her record cabinet, her weight bench, the massive 1980s TV.

Our house was filthy. Bugs, mold, animal feces everywhere. Mom never had enough room for her junk, but she kept on getting more.

Dust from all the greenware (unfired clay) and the finished ceramics coated every surface. The linoleum in the kitchen was covered with a layer of caked on gray dust that I’d sometimes sit and carve into the top layer with my fingernails. I wrote myself messages or little prayers to God, and then I’d watch them as they faded and vanished over the course of the following days.

Cleaning was my own boulder up a neverending mountain, but it made me feel safer. If I was cleaning, I stood the best chance of keeping her calm.

So I cleaned a lot. She would tell me to clean a lot, but I cleaned even when she didn’t ask me.

I really liked cleaning to be honest. I was invisible when I was doing it. It gave me something to focus on. It was…sort of soothing.

When I was nine, I spent an entire Saturday cleaning. It was raining. Who the fuck knows why I remember that.

I had cleaned the entire kitchen up so nicely. Usually I never even managed to make a dent in the filth. As much as I tried, Mom, Jose, and all of their freinds who were always over, were just too good at making a mess. It was a miracle if I ever made it through the dishes, which perpetually spilled out from the loaded sick and covered the entire four feet of counter space, sticky and coagulating as ants coated them in swarms.

That day though, I made a dent.

The kitchen was beautiful. All the dishes done, the counter wiped clean. Inside of the fridge and cabinets wiped out. Table wiped free of gray dest. Shelves of greenware and ceramics organized. Stove cleaned inside and out. I was so proud of myself. The kitchen looked so nice. Mom would tell me she was so happy with how the kitchen looked.

Except.

I tripped. I tripped over the metal transition separating the linoleum from the carpet. There was a shelving unit in that space between the kitchen and living room, right next to the place I tripped. On the floor next to the shelf, there was a large ceramic troll..or gnome. Some kind of fantasy creature. When I tripped, I fell into him, and he teetered over to the linoleum side of the transition and smashed.

Her screaming was awful.

Horrible.

I can still hear it.

Both hands in my hair. Screaming. Shaking. The fuck is wrong with you. I hate you. You idiot. You dumb little bitch. You fucking moron.

Rug scraping like a cheesegrater over bare arms. Firey little needles of pain in my scalp.

And her screaming. Hysterical and ear-splitting.

She dragged me to my room. She threw me on the bed.

She looked down at me with such disgust. So much hate in her face, with her thin lip quivering, and it made me hate myself too. I felt for a moment like I was watching someone else and I hated her too.

“Stay there,” she said in a very scary, very low voice.

She went to my closet and started looking through it. I didn’t know what she was looking for, but I knew it would be bad.

It was. It was the worst act of violence I ever lived through.

I looked at the ceiling and there were thin wisps of spiderwebs up there. A moth fluttered around the dome light fixture.

I said to myself: This is a bad moment. It’s okay though, because you made it through other bad moments. This bad moment will end, because bad moments always end. they always do.

I kept on thinking that even after I was bleeding.

She told me she wouldn’t stop if I couldn’t lay still. It was so so hard to lay still. My body fought against me, trying to curl in on itself, trying to flinch, to jerk away, to escape.

I finally managed it. I tried to get my brain out of my body, so that I could be still and stop making her angry, because then, maybe, it would stop.

I thought things like: Bad moments always end. Then there are good moments. Good moments like dance class, like getting frozen yogurt like Nan, like practicing with Miss Drall for chorus solos, like playing Detective with Alex, like getting a new Babysitter’s Club book. I thought about every single thing in life that I liked, that brought me joy, that might happen again in the near future, because they happened with regularity.

The pain didn’t stop, but it became like a background noise.

She stopped eventually.

She left me on the bed.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with myself, because I’d never been injured like that before.

The majority of the wounds were on my arms, where I still have faint white scars in clusters of criss-crosses to this day.

My arms felt very hot. Like heat radiating off them in pulsating little throbs.

I took a book and went into my closet. I sat behind all the coats and capes that my mom stored in there and I read The Babysitter’s Club #100. Kristy’s Worst Idea.

I couldn’t focus on the book. Instead I thought about how pretty the silver cover was and wondered if people would think I was horrible and gross when they saw the cuts on my arms.

If I was a Real Person

My mom once apologized to me for everything that she did to me as a kid.

I can’t tell you what that felt like. It made me feel like I was a real person.

It was right after her brother died, so I don’t know if she was just in a low place or reevaluating or what. She was very close to her brother. He died very unexpectedly when he was hit by an 18-wheeler truck. He wasn’t even 40 yet.

I lived with my grandparents then and my grandparents had driven down to New Jersey to be with my uncle’s widow and help make arrangements. I went to stay with my mom, because my grandparents asked me to.

I’d gotten into an argument with one of my sisters. I went outside. There was a bit of an emotional blowout as my sister accused me of always making everything about me, even with Uncle Rick having just died.

“Everything always has to be about you, Jen. You can’t stand to not have attention you for two seconds. We’re all sick of giving you attention. There are other people in the world.”

She’s not entirely wrong. Maybe she’s a lot right, actually.

I was upset that weekend, because the guy I’d been hooking up with (who I was dumb enough to think was my boyfriend) had told me he didn’t want to see me anymore.

It went something like this:

He texted me, asking me if I wanted to come over. Texted me at 11:30 at night.

Yes, yes, I know.

I just didn’t know back then. Or I didn’t really want to know.

I had nothing in common with the man and didn’t really enjoy talking to him.

Sex with him was boring and I never orgasmed with him even once. Look, I cum super easily. But whenever a guy made me feel like I could be any human with a vagina and he’d be acting the same, well, I could never enjoy it that much.

We worked together in the deli at Wal-Mart. He talked shit about me when I wasn’t at work. Told the other guys what an idiot I was and how he could get girls a lot hotter than me, but I was sort of stupid and easy to talk into anything.

“She’s ugly, but I don’t have to fucking take her out to dinner or anything.”

I knew he said those sorts of things about me. I kept sucking his dick anyway.

That was really the tagline of my late teens and early 20s: Dude treated me like shit and I sucked his dick anyway.

Anyway, that night that we “broke up” he had texted me only hours after my family had found out my uncle had been hit by a truck and died. Everyone had been sobbing all day. I was drained. I’d had no idea how to comfort my grandfather. I’d never seen him cry before.

“Want to come over?” he texted.

“I can’t tonight,” I texted back. “Can you call me actually?”

And he did.

I told him my uncle had just died and everything was so weird at my house right now. I started to tell him that my uncle had always played Barbies with me as a kid, but we hadn’t been close in years.

He cut me off.

“You know, Jen, I’ve been thinking, we should break up.”

He used the words “break up.” It’s not like I got the idea he was my boyfriend on my own.

I was floored. Back then, I used to let people treat me any kind of way, but even then, I knew that interrupting someone talking about how their family member died that day (after a booty call text btw) to say “Let’s break up”-I knew that was a whole different level of fucked up.

And I felt a flicker of anger, of derision for him. For this man whose entire personality was smoking weed and buying overpriced hats at Lids. For this man who used rap slang and had rims on his car and let his pants sag so low you always knew what color his underwear was. For this man who berated me the one time I didn’t shave my vagina completely bare and made me feel so disgusting. I did have a flash of anger at him. I did start to think ‘What the FUCK is wrong with you?’

It was gone very quickly though, replaced by this sense of something like, ‘Oh…this is because of me. If I was a real person, he would treat me like a real person.’

I said to him, ‘Oh, okay. Bye then.’

Before I could hang up, he said, ‘Wait. You could still come over, if you want.’

And I’m happy to report that I wasn’t quite that pathetic.

With forced politeness, I replied, ‘No, I don’t want to do that. Good night.’

And I hung up the phone.

That was the first time I turned down a booty call invitation from him and the fallout was like nothing I’d imagined.

He called my house several times and each time I picked up and said, ‘It’s late and my grandparents are grieving. Please don’t call again.’

He had another girl call the house twice. She said really rude things to me, made fun of me. I listened in shock and hung up without replying.

This was what had happened on Friday. On Saturday, I went to my mom’s house and my grandparents went to New Jersey to help make arrangements. I think having something concrete to do made them feel better.

By Sunday, I’d mentioned the situation with this man a few times, and understandably, it made my sister Carly really angry and we ended up in a massive fight.

After the fight, my mom and I sat out in her car in the dark surrounded by the pitch black of the New Hampshire woods.

“Maybe I wouldn’t be like this if you hadn’t been so awful to me,” I snapped at her. “You have no idea what it’s like to live in constant fear, never knowing when you were gonna start screaming or when you’d hurt me or Carly or Marie. The time with her arm-“

And we’d never talked about the time with Marie’s arm before. I think she’d hoped everyone had forgotten. She looked so afraid then. She looked terrified that I’d say the words out loud and I wanted t grab her shoulders and scream her face, “You DID that! How is me saying the words of what you did any scarier than you DOING that? If you’re scared of anything, it should be what you are capable of!”

But I didn’t. Because anytime I got too upset with my family, they called me crazy and acted like everything I was saying was nonsensical.

I stopped talking and waited.

She cried. Tears ran down her freckled face and she looked really small then, scared and pale with the light of the moon glinting off her tears.

She cried and she said, “I’m so so sorry. I’m so sorry I did that to you. To all of you. I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know.”

It was so authentic. It was so real.

It made me feel real.

And for a period of about a year and a few months, my mom and I got along. We went to a No Doubt concert together. We talked on the phone. I went to visit her regularly. I slept over. I told her I loved her. I meant it.

I felt connected to her.

And then.

My younger sisters told me about all the awful stuff she was saying about me behind my back.

My oldest is the crazy one.

My oldest has emotional issues.

My oldest probably won’t ever make anything of herself. I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up on welfare.

She’s dramatic. She’s emotional. She’s bipolar.

Mom…we were close for the first time ever. All of my anger was gone, because you’d apologized. Why did it all have to be pretend?

A lot of this happened when I was trying to move in with my then-boyfriend (now husband) and I was moving to Massachusetts. Her house was much closer to the Massachusetts border, so I’d asked if I could move in with her for a few months while I job-searched and found an apartment. She said yes to my face.

Behind my back, she said everything she really thought.

I stopped responding to her texts and phone calls. I finally let go of her in my mind. So many years of thinking one day we’d be okay, everybody should be close to their mom. So mine was a teenager when I was born and she fucked up a lot. I could forgive her. I wanted to forgive her.

I could forgive her for the trauma. But she couldn’t forgive me for being traumatized.

I miss her and I think my issues with her are the root of a lot of my issues. I mean, it wasn’t until I cut her off thay overnight I seemed to lose the ability to connect with people at all. I do a wonderful job of faking it. But I don’t really care about anybody. Even if I wanted to, I don’t know how to. I feel so panicked when I start to feel close to someone that I do everything I can to make that connected/I-care-about-you feeling go away.

There have been a few exceptions. Those exceptions were people who were hit with a massively inappropriate amount of affection from me. People who, for whatever reason, my brain decided were safe to let all the barriers down and throw all my need for human connection at.

There was a girl I worked with. This was when I was 24. Almost 2 years after I went no-contact with my mom.

I definitely cringe looking back, thinking how creepy it must have been for her that I went out of my way to dress like her. I packed lunches to match hers. When she said she hated McDonald’s, I stopped eating there. She was on the heavier side. I tried to gain weight to look more like her. She went out to lunch with me a few times and she’d become irritated with me for how much I’d eat and how “you can eat like a pig and stay 100 pounds.” What I didn’t tell her was that I didn’t want to be a 100 pounds, because I wanted to be like her. I wanted to look like her and sound like her and be as close to her as possible. I wanted to be her best best friend.

I’d become so nervous around her that I had nervous ticks I’d never had before in my life. I twisted my arms up into knots, because my heart was pounding so hard and I didn’t know how to make it stop. I tugged on the end of my ponytail and a couple of times she winced and said, “Stop, doesn’t that hurt?”

We went out drinking one day and I sloppily, falling all over myself drunk, yelled about how much I adored and admired her and wanted to be best best friends with her.

“I think you’re so amazing, Nicole. You’re so cool. I wish I was cool like you. I know I’m weird, but I wish we were best best friends. I think about you all the time and always want to be around you.”

Our friendship, if it even could be called that-I think to her I was just an acquaintance, cooled off after that.

So, I think a lot of my problems go back to my relationship with my mom. And whenever other people talk about their moms, I always wish I could be close to mine.

And here is, what I think is, the worst part.

I wouldn’t matter if she apologized to me all over again. It wouldn’t matter if she told me she wanted to be close to me. It wouldn’t matter if she swore up and down and up and down to never talk badly about me or hurt me again.

I know that I’d never feel okay around her. I’d always wonder if she was showing real affection or the fake affection she showed me the last time I let my guard down with her, the smiling “My Jen!” hair tousling affection to my face while telling everyone else what a complete fuck-up I am.

I’ll never ever have what I had with her that one year after she cried in the moonlight and said with what seemed like such authenticity, “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did it” and I believed her.

I’ll never believe her again. I’ll never feel okay with her again.

And then there’s the real rub, I am worried I’ll never feel really okay with anyone again.