Posts Tagged ‘guilt’
At this point, anything I say just seems like repetition. I’ve been here before. It gets so that I can’t believe I’ve ever not been here.
Becoming a bad person
Posted on: February 21, 2013
As time goes by, I get worse. I’ve become the kind of person I hate, and I can only see it getting worse. I feel like there’s just a scooped-out hollow where my heart used to be.
Today, I made my mother cry. I made her cry by saying something cold and heartless and bitchy and true. (She asked, “don’t you like me?” and I looked her straight in the eye and, with a small smile, replied “not much”.) Now she’s downstairs sobbing and all I can think is that I hope she quietens down; the noise is disturbing my peace and quiet.
Making plans
Posted on: April 2, 2012
There’s a part of me, a tiny little part, that thinks I have some sort of future. There’s a person inside of me that believes I can stay alive, not just on a short-term, make-it-to-next-week basis, but for decades, for an entire natural life.
That person, she makes plans. She wants to find a house, get a mortgage, live alone. She wants to push on and succeed at work, do some volunteering, join a gym. She wants to create a little haven of calm, a home in which she’s not always watching the door, waiting for someone to barge in. She wants to learn to cook properly and paint some walls and organise her life. She wants something to organise, expenses to budget for, a diary to arrange and a life to keep in order. She dreams, vaguely, of writing something. Not for publication (even the dreamer in me is slightly realistic), but just an exercise in creativity, something to uncover her childhood enthusiasms which have been buried for so long.
But a dream is all it is. I fantasise about being a functioning adult human the way a child fantasises about being a film star or an astronaut or a Barbie doll. Having an actual life is about as realistic an aim for me as growing an extra arm. Read the rest of this entry »
My mum’s friend’s husband might be dying, and it is my fault.
The reasoning that led her to that conclusion is so convoluted that the tiny slice of my brain that still operates in reality (the bit that does maths and solves problems and knows when people are talking bollocks) is laughing. It’s that fucking stupid. But that tiny slice…it’s nothing. The rest of me is consumed with panic and guilt and an overwhelming urge to self-destruct.
I cannot live under the weight of all this shame. Not just for this, but for every thing, large or small, that ever goes wrong. It all comes back to me. If you think no other person could be as cruel as the voice inside your head, that’s because you’ve never met my mother. She manages to find guilt it’d never even occurred to me to feel.
I want to jump off bridges and drown in ponds. I want to tear my flesh apart. I want to burn and crush and obliterate. I want to walk as fast as my legs will carry me to the train station, get on the first train and just stay there, watching the world fly past, just keep moving until the restless agitation stops.
I want to get drunk, so paralytic I can’t feel my legs. I want to pass out and forget.
There’s a part of me that’s been considering asking my friend if I can stay with her for a few days. She lives in a different city, and I could get time off work, and she knows, at least a little. But we haven’t spoken in months, and I’ve managed to crush the urge for self-preservation so thoroughly that I simply can’t think of a way to ask her that doesn’t make me want to lie down on the motorway. Besides, it’s not even really her that I want. What I really want is a small room, empty and quiet, where I can lie down and curl up and pretend not to exist. I can’t interrupt someone else’s life (with her house and her job and her boyfriend, all shiny and happy), just so I can do that.
It’s probably not a good idea anyway. Work is still helpful. I feel vaguely normal there. I laugh with my colleagues and my manager praises me, and there’s enough of a challenge to keep me going, but very little pressure (I can’t handle pressure anymore. Not at all. Place responsibility on my shoulders and I crumple like a house of cards).
I’ve become exactly the kind of person I hate, which doesn’t help. I’ve pretty much completed my life’s work: becoming a person that doesn’t ever express emotions. I suppose it helps that I’ve been practising for as long as I can remember. I’m practically robotic, now. And I don’t have any sympathy. I don’t want to hurt people, but when they’re hurting nonetheless, I get impatient. Have to keep biting back “pull yourself together”s, and I feel like shit for it. But I don’t let me cry or complain or express discontent in anyway, so why should I encourage other people to do so? I find myself vaguely resenting people, as if it’s them stopping me from one day just sitting down and saying “you know what? I feel like shit.”
But it’s me who places the restrictions on myself. I don’t even really know why anymore, it’s just that emotion is weakness and I can’t allow that. I can’t allow anyone to know me. It’s always been the way, but it’s more evident now. Sometimes I wonder if I’m missing out on something, but defence is what’s important.
I worry that, when I die, people will be confused. That they’ll say, but she was always cheerful. I mean, that’s what they say to me now. Always asking how I stay so happy. How do I even begin to answer that?
What is there that’s worth living for, now? Everything has turned to ashes.
I keep thinking of things to write, but I can’t find the words. I don’t want to be melodramatic, or whiny, or pathetic.
But the truth is, I’m getting closer and closer to hurting myself.
I just feel so powerless. My life and my family are falling apart, and I don’t know how to stop it. Everything I do is wrong, everything I say is ignored, people are hurting and I can’t escape the thought that it’s all because of me.
I don’t have any control over anything. All I do is watch everyone get upset and angry and fall out, and I dig my nails into my flesh as hard as I can, wanting to do damage, wanting to rip and tear my skin and just destroy something, as if that would be apology enough for all my inadequacies, but I’m too scared to hurt myself, too scared that someone will see and know and ask questions.
Everything’s whirling around inside me and I can’t stop it, I can’t keep it still and I can’t stop the rising fear and shame and nausea, the ever-growing desire to have never existed, because people suffer and it’s my fault and I can’t stop it.
All over the place.
Posted on: June 3, 2010
Flashes of hideousness
Posted on: May 19, 2010
Mostly, at the moment, I am okay.
It’s difficult to know how long I mean when I talk about “at the moment”. Everything feels like forever. If I’m okay now then I feel like I’ve always been okay, and any memories of things being bad are vague and hazy and obviously a case of me exaggerating at the time.
But lately, however long that is, most of the time things aren’t too bad. I’m finding it hard to get to sleep, and then I’m finding it hard to wake up (I think perhaps I’m just resistant to change) but for a good deal of the time I am – if not particularly happy – fine. Bored. Tired. But laughing at things that are funny and feeling reasonably clear-headed.
And then, sometimes – every couple of days, maybe – for an hour, or a few hours, or a day, I just…fall apart. Uncontrollable weeping. Curling up in the dark. Scraping at my arms with fingernails, trying to stave off the mounting urge to do serious damage to myself. Fantasising, all the time, about death, death, dying. Just drowning in fear and shame and guilt and regret. Seeing my death, in horrific detail, every time I close my eyes or let my mind wonder. Crying because, live or die, I’m a disappointment, I’m letting people down. Wording suicide notes and letters of apology in my head. Looking on the websites of airlines and thinking where could I fly to? How much would it cost to go somewhere where everything would be okay, and I wouldn’t have to be me? Somewhere where I could lose myself. There’s no such place, of course, and that’s upsetting in itself.
And then after a while everything’s back to sort-of-okay again, and I’ve wasted all that time being ridiculous and frightened and an absolute wreck, and I’m okay again for hours or days and then bang, I’m right back in that horrible place again, and I can’t stop returning to it.
I’m so tired.
I don’t think I can face the inevitable embarrassment of the rest of my life. I’ve fucked it up and I can’t face anyone, can’t face their judgement and disappointment.
And I know it’s completely irrational, but I just keep thinking, what have I done to deserve this? Am I really such a bad person that this is no coincidence but a direct result of me and my actions? And I’m scared of yes, and scared of no – because at least if this is some sort of punishment or whatever then at least I know I could have done something differently. At least then I have some sort of power over it, even if it’s only retrospective and no use to me now.
A change of scenery.
Posted on: November 14, 2009
I’ve come home for the weekend, mainly in the desperate, misguided hope that being somewhere else equates to being someone else, or at least feeling something else.
It never works like that, though, does it? It seems ridiculously trite to say that wherever you go, you can’t escape yourself, but still, it’s true. And perhaps it’s something I forget, or at least ignore, fleeing from one place to another in the hope that I can tie my thoughts and feelings to one place and then just leave them behind.
I didn’t tell anyone at uni that I was coming home for the weekend. Of course, I didn’t need to. Who would notice? Who would care? Perhaps there’s a freedom in being able to come and go as I please without raising a ripple of interest, but mostly it feels like loneliness, inadequacy, invisibility.
I’ve been back at uni for nearly 2 months. Everybody I’ve ever known, had they been in my position, would have made friends by now. They would have met people, they’d have made a connection, they’d be enjoying themselves. Not drifting, aimless, through a sea of forgetting faces.
I don’t believe I’ll ever make a friend again. I don’t believe that the people I’ve been calling my friends feel anything for me other than a vague sense of companionship that is already fading, and will soon be completely extinguished. I don’t believe that there is anyone in the world who does or would willingly spend time in my company, or who would miss me if I disappeared from their life entirely.
I know that I am dispensable. I know that I am nothing, no-one. But knowing it doesn’t make it changeable.
I don’t have a future. For starters, what is a person without other people? But it’s not just that – even if I pass my degree (and what’s the likelihood of that? I’ve been going to things, but of course that’s not enough), there are no jobs. Certainly none for someone like me, with no skills, no experience, no direction. And there’ll be thousands of pounds of debt from student loans and no way to pay it back, because really, would you employ me? And I hate always having to depend on my parents for money, especially now that my mum has left her job due to illness. I won’t ever be able to pay them back for all they’ve given me, and I won’t ever stop needing their help. I’m such a fucking parasite. Every day I live is just one more piece of proof that I am useless, that I am a drain on other people, and I hate it so much.
I don’t want to let people down, but I will. I’ve been doing it all my life.
I am a waste of space, time, money. There is no hope. And there’s no way out, either. No solution, no steps to take to become a different, better person.
I’m so full of guilt, shame, fear, sadness.
And no matter where I go, or how many times I go there, those feelings can’t be escaped.
Suicidal thoughts.
Posted on: October 5, 2009
Sometimes, I like thinking about suicide. I like making plans, setting dates, focussing really hard on it. It makes me happy, briefly. Not real happiness, admittedly, but a kind of determined anticipation, a kind of relief: just a few more days, just another week, and then…nothing. I won’t exist anymore. Read the rest of this entry »
A blog of two halves.
Posted on: September 27, 2009
I have, I suppose, two main things to write about tonight. And it seems pointless to write about them as two separate posts. So I’m shoving them together, whether they belong together or not.
Loopy, Lonely and Lost 
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