Rough Morning.

          As an introverted former substance-abuser and spirit-crushing perfectionist, doing life alone for 3.5 months is not an ideal situation. I had a plan when I came to New York - be better in every possible way: work out and get strong, eat well and get healthy, spend time with God every day and share the gospel, read all the books on screenwriting, make huge strides on my screenplay, get A's on every assignment, impress my bosses with my hard work and creativity. Be ye therefore perfect. With a list of requirements like this, maybe I shouldn't be surprised when I feel like a failure, but I still won't let go of the list. I beat my body into submission. Paul said that, right? So I can do it too. Except that I can't. But I know I'm capable of it, so the fact that I'm not meeting my requirements hangs a 50lb weight around my neck and tells me to fly.

          I turn on worship music, take a shower and cry and make myself finish my shower. I look at myself. "god you're ugly." I throw on some powder and look a little better. Then I sit on the bed and lay my head down. Lots and lots of tears. I contemplate calling my mom or sister, but I don't want to. I text Nigel and ask him to pray for me, I tell him what I feel.

"I'm not a ..." tears. A few more verses of a song.
"I'm not a failure." tears and tears.
"I'm not a failure."

          It lifts a little. I lay down and let the music sing to me and close my eyes. I feel Nigel's prayers. I feel the peace of God come over me and inside me. The evil goes away. I know I'll be okay today.

I need a place to do this

wednesday - finish the trend report, put my ideas together. have a headache most of the day and feel overwhelmed by a variety of emotions clouding my mind. when i spend too long without authentic human interaction, my mind starts collapsing in on itself. I've been keeping myself sane by spending time with God every day and talking to my boyfriend most days. today i didn't spend time with God. too much weight on me to open the Bible and let the words help me. i feel like crying at random times all throughout the day. it feels like i'm climbing a mountain and it gets really steep and i want to give up and cry and go home. but there is no mountain, i'm just sitting here in the office, in this chair. i feel dizzy for a second, like i'm losing it. it - the control i maintain over my mind.
people say let go. they don't know what that means for someone like me. i've let go before. but not fully. if i let go fully, i would be in a mental hospital right now, my consciousness ripped away from me, my only reality, the mesh of blood and thought inside my head. floating in bloody cloudy sky. no beginning or end. only the terrifying unrelenting taste of being lost and scratching at the cloudy prison to find reality.
there's a real place in my mind. my mind is a real place. others don't spend much time inside their own brain places, but they're real. maybe these pockets only exist in some people. maybe not all have brain pockets in which to hide or be lost, depending on the weather.

i wish i could paint. spinning, boiling red thought and emotion sit in the stomach of my mind. it searches for ways to get out. through the ear, no it sucks at music. through the hands, no it sucks at art. through the mouth, no it sucks at language. through the eyes, no it sucks at seeing. through the heart, through the mind, stuck in skin. these hands won't work. dead drooping chunks slam against beautiful machines and make noise. and scratch against my face wondering why they're dead branches and hard leaves. these eyes won't think. they see a puzzle and 

but these hands and this mind. my body knows a rhythm that sings the world to peace. with broken hands and stupid eyes, it can't this song release.

Lost

          I don't remember my life, any substantial part of it, no matter how distant or how near to the present. I only remember random scenes of my life. Sometimes a scene is called to mind and I play it over and over and over and over again in my head, all day or all week, sometimes for months at a time. The scene today is my mom standing at the staircase with a suitcase. I walk in and she tells me she packed my stuff. I take the suitcase and walk upstairs my heart aching and my body wanting to collapse on the floor and cry. I don't let her see that. I go into my room and shut the door.
          If I asked my mom what happened in this scene, she would probably tell a different story. What details I can't remember, I fill in - like her standing there and my taking the bag and going upstairs. I didn't even remember this scene until a year or so ago. She reminded me of it.
          When I feel the call to write, I have a point and an end goal in the writing. Tonight, I don't. I'm only writing to ease my mind and "confess" something I may not tell anyone in real life. The other night, I drove around for over an hour looking for a liquor store that I wasn't terrified to enter. Going to HEB or a gas station is one thing - if I see someone I know, I grab some peanuts and a soda. But a liquor store... no hiding my intentions with that. Even so, I concocted a lie just in case: my friend needed me to grab some Malibu for her birthday party, she doesn't have a car, so I told her I could. Not a bad lie. I didn't have to use it. I found a shop where I knew I wouldn't see anyone.
          Saturday night: me, a bottle of whiskey and Netflix. I guess I lost.
          I usually write about how I was strong amidst the torrents of heart ache and unrelenting cravings for ungodly substances! I FUCKED UP. And guess what, I'M NOT DONE fucking up. I KEPT that bottle. It's in my closet right now. And when my sister goes to bed, I'm going to take two or three shots and go to sleep. I'll wake up and feel bad about it, but I'll do it again because I can't escape the loneliness. I can't escape the scenes that play over and over and over. Scenes that are bad enough because they happened to me, but worse because I CAN'T REMEMBER them fully. I carry with me the pain, the fear, the humiliation, the guilt, the longing of every tiny thing of my life. I carry it in feelings that I can't express because people need proof of a broken heart. It's not enough to say my heart aches - I must prove it. I CAN'T.
          Truth weaves in and out of my head while the scenes play, but it's like a flaw in an otherwise flawlessly tragic movie. I'm not sure if I should pull the truth out and make it more than an interruption from the main event. Is this self-pity? No, it's self-hatred. If I pitied myself, I would be kind to myself. I would listen to myself, be patient with myself, give myself room to grow.
          I don't have a happy ending right now. I'm just waiting to stop typing so I can go chug-a-lug.

Papa, please help me. I do want happiness. I want to love myself.

I need Love

          Every day this past week I've wrestled with cravings for alcohol and cigarettes. Every day I thought through how, when, and where I could get alcohol and cigarettes. Some days I decided cigarettes alone would do. Other days I thought I could grab a beer from CVS and that would work. Every day I thought about the consequences, the smell, who would find out, what people would think of me if they caught me or if I told them the truth. For 3 days straight, I went to school and planned to go by a gas station after for cigarettes. I went a different way home to come across a gas station where I wouldn't see anyone I knew. The turn came and I passed it by. With a well of pain throbbing inside me, I decided to go home.
          On Friday, I thought the cravings had passed. I figured I had struggled enough... surely it was time for a break. No. Afternoon came and I wanted alcohol and cigarettes and I planned. All night I sat at home and thought about where I could go, what I could drink, what I would wear. Finally I ended the night with Netflix, a little reading, and browsing Craigslist.
          Saturday I spent the day at Six Flags. I wandered around the park and saw signs for beer and signs for designated smoking areas. I enjoyed the rides, but all day I wanted more. I went home and resolved to watch a show and read my book.
          Today, Sunday... Easter, I slept late. I woke up and tried to journal and talk to God. I used to audibly talk to him all the time. Now, whenever I thought about actually speaking, I couldn't. I realized I'm angry with him, but I don't know why. I closed the journal and opened my book - a fantasy novel, the last one in the series. I finished it and felt like trash afterward. The book is full of demons, evil, corruption, lies, death. It did not have a happy ending. I threw some clothes on and decided to go to Starbucks and work on my screenplay.
          My mom calls right as I'm leaving. She asks what's wrong. I don't know what to tell her. She calls back when I'm in the SB's parking lot. I still don't have anything to tell her, then I find out that she called to tell me something cool she learned at church. I start crying while she talks about a revelation she had, not because the revelation is so cool, but because my mom knows I'm struggling, but called me back because she needs to share something that happened to her with me.
          When the phone call is over, I'm crying more. I don't know why. All I know is it hurts. Everything inside me hurts. I drive around and cry. I talk aloud some - how I can't do this anymore, I can't, I can't, I can't. It hurts too much. I sense God say to turn on worship music and just sit there - don't try to make anything happen. I turn it on and mostly ignore it. He wants it to wash over me, not me try to self-medicate, self-soothe, or learn anything. Halfway through the journey, I sense him say that all I have to do is tell him what's wrong - it's his job to fix it.
          I go back to SB and work on my screenplay a little. I write a sweet scene with an abused teenager being loved on by her young cousins. She sits in bed with them and they hug her and tell her it'll be okay. It ends in laughter. I know I will have to write the scene where she leaves her cousins and enters into a scary world with no one she can trust, no one who can comfort her, but I wasn't ready to write that scene yet.
          I go to my sister's house and hang out for a while. I get up to leave and finally share what's been going on with my sisters. After saying a lot that probably didn't make sense and I felt really stupid sharing, I say how I've never felt like God gives me anything to help me through cravings. It's sheer willpower. And I have no way of knowing if it will ever stop. I go through every day with every part of my body longing for something it can't have. It's exhausting. I tell them how I love feeling thirsty because I know a simple glass of water will make me feel satisfied. It's the only time I feel satisfied.
          Annabeth looks up at me and says "It's chemical." I feel something loosen inside me and all I want to do is cry. She says how their adopted daughters are the same way - that's why they act so crazy. It's a chemical imbalance that happens in the womb. I can't remember everything she said, but eventually I can't hold back tears or choose not to. I start pouring tears and my sisters come to hug me. They both pray over me for healing and for satisfaction, for everything in my brain to work right. Annabeth says it's nurture. I need nurture and for whatever reason, God wants to be the one to nurture me. He doesn't want other people to, he wants to.
          Driving home I think about why that made me break down. IT'S NOT MY FAULT. I felt so relieved to hear that there's just something wrong with me, not because of anything I did. And furthermore, I haven't failed. It's not that I haven't done enough, haven't opened up enough, haven't said no enough, haven't pursued God, church, whatever enough.
          Ever since I can remember I felt like something was wrong with me. I felt an emotional or mental cancer inside me that people couldn't see. People encountered me, tried to befriend me, and eventually got hurt by me and assumed I just didn't like them, even hated them. All I ever wanted was to be loved by people and all I've ever done my WHOLE LIFE is push people away.
          Tonight I learned that it's not my fault. I just need help. I need love. I still want cigarettes. A whiskey sounds like fucking heaven. But I'm going to sit at home and work on my screenplay and probably watch more Warehouse 13, and even though it may not look like it, that's what belief looks like for me. Belief that the cravings will stop and I will be 100% free and 100% satisfied. Wow. That's a hard thing to write down. I don't feel it, but I choose it.