Today, things went wrong. I spent much of the day trying to write, and failing. I went to see my best friend; he was in a bad mood. I don’t know how to cheer him up. I’m very, very bad at comforting people. I left wishing I could have my life fall apart instead of him being unhappy. Then I called my sister and came to the realization that my life has already fallen apart. She told me I was just another hustler, and might as well be selling weed, when I started telling her about the business I’ve been trying to work on. We had a conversation about college and chosen majors, and then I told her I had to go before I broke down and started crying and screaming in public, because I was really close to that point. I got home, cried, and then decided that I didn’t care what she thought about the business. I got out my list of contacts, for the first time in a long time, and contacted three people. One hasn’t gotten back to me, one seemed interested so far, and one has been forgetting to give me her information but is probably interested. Then, because I want to do this right, I made myself sit down and watch the informational videos about the product so I can prove what I believe to be the truth about it.
Halfway through, I had a vivid hallucination that I was eating a spider. Eating. A spider. I thought I was eating a spider.

I’ve been on medication for about a month. It’s worked for about a year, prior to this month. It keeps me from hallucinating. It doesn’t make my life happy, but it makes me sane enough to function in life, most of the time. Right now, I am seeing things that are not there, in everyday life. I am seeing stacks of things through doorways when the doorways are empty. I am seeing flashes and darkness when I glance in certain directions. I am hearing things on the edge of perception that don’t make sense. I am having strange dreams that almost aren’t even nightmares, they’re so weird. And then they are again, when they suddenly come pounding down on me halfway through the next day. Morbid, self-destructive thoughts are pounding their way into my mind, relentlessly and constantly and painfully. And I am trying, very, very hard to maintain a positive outlook right now. I swear I am. I don’t want to be an unhappy person, I don’t want to make my friends miserable. But. But, but, this isn’t right. This medication isn’t working anymore. I’m hallucinating, visually and audibly, I’m having nightmares, I’m paranoid as hell, I cannot rely on my own perception and judgment. I’m taking medication. It’s not working. I can’t afford to get another prescription when this one runs out anyway, so… yeah. The main question right now is whether the medicine is keeping things at bay, and they’ll get hugely worse when I run out, or if the medicine is completely ineffectual. I’m terrified of the answer.

This blog was supposed to be about growth and personal… something, I don’t even fucking know. I don’t want to be this person. I’m tired of being crazy. Can I be something else now? Can I be normal? Can I be happy? Okay, fine. I don’t want to be happy anyway. Can my friends be happy? Can you make it so I never existed? I don’t want this. I don’t want this life, I don’t fucking want this life anymore and I can’t stop. I don’t want to live anymore. I was so happy for a few days, even though everything went wrong I was happy, it was like a high. I knew something would make it end. I didn’t know it would be this. I don’t want to be crazy anymore. Fuck. Fuck this. Fuck my mind, and what… I don’t even know. I wish writing this all out would make it okay, could get it out of my mind. I say that if I don’t write, I’ll go insane. Now I am insane, and still writing, and… uh, whatever. th

I don’t want to put this up, where people will see it. Especially not you, being the only person who reads this, and also, by some strange coincidence, the person who I least want to be worrying about me. Don’t. I’m still going to put it up, but don’t worry about it, please. I’ll get past this. I generally do. I’ve been off meds before, and I didn’t die or kill anyone or anything horribly crazy. Not that I remember, anyway, though you might think differently. Anyway.

Because I am tired of masks.

Because I grow tired of addressing different parts of my soul when I find myself with a new set of people; because I wish to be who I am, and no other; because, as I have said in other places, the inner wordsmith, the writer in me, is the most honest part of my soul. For all these reasons, and others which I cannot name even to myself, in conscious thought, I will try now to say what I feel to be the truth. Would that I had the conviction of C. S. Lewis, the wit of Terry Pratchett, the lyrical flow of Guy Kay—but that is another point altogether.

I do not, cannot, and will never be able to believe that religion, Christianity, human belief in God, is predictable, or even convenient. Again, I wish very much that I had the skill of Lewis to explain myself, but it is not given to me to speak and debate eloquently on subjects which I hold so close to my heart. My point is simply, this: how can love, belief in perfect love, in forgiveness, in redemption, be an easy thing, a convenient thing—a predictable thing? I remember, ages ago, in a long and very, very drawn-out debate, someone claiming to believe in Christianity, but not being able to accept someone else paying her debts for her. In my self-centered, unsympathetic state, I scorned her, saying loftily that that was “the whole point” of Christianity, that there was no belief if you did not accept that sacrifice. In my defense, I was only saying what I had been taught. It is so easy to put down weakness in others—so much easier when you’re trying to hide the same weakness in yourself.

It was—and is—so, so hard for me to accept the very idea of unconditional love, let alone forgiveness, redemption. For a very, very long time I went through phases of horrible, horrible guilt that would not go away. Guilt for stupid, tiny things, things I didn’t always even have control over. Friends would tell me endlessly that repentance, true repentance, was final, ended it, should end the guilt and the self-blame. What was my answer? Obviously, I had not repented fully enough. (Hah. I was about to write about how this little phase ended when I found out that one of my best friends went through the same thing, but that would be a lie. It made things a bit easier, but end? Hah.) My point is that believing in eternal forgiveness, unconditional love, is most definitely not the first leap of human consciousness.

Even leaving out that which may be an oddity in me and many I have known, that lingering guilt and self-blame, even leaving that—what human would willingly say to their enemy, “Kill me now, and you are damned, but if you repent, thirty days hence, you will be forgiven and absolved”? What woman, what man, would so easily accept the concept of eternal forgiveness, seventy times seven, towards their brother, their killer, their enemy? I cannot speak for all religion—I would never claim that responsibility, or that right. But deny me that. Tell me that unconditional forgiveness, unconditional love—the preaching of this as extended to all fellows, to be more Christlike—is predictable of humanity. Tell me that it is convenient to forgive a brother each and every betrayal he levels against you—or a sister. That is the core of Christianity—love. That is what all the Church is built on, believe it or not.

We are human, we are corruptible and predictable and prone to every conceivable weakness at some point in our lives. But the spirit within us is not. No one in this world could ever make me believe that any part of that is wrong. Perhaps it makes more scientific sense to say that enough evil could damn anyone, in the end. But a repentance of that evil? Would that balance it out—the will, the will inside to balance out any evil done? I could not say; I do not claim to understand metaphysics. But never say to me that unconditional love and forgiveness is a predictable, convenient excuse for human evils. Can it be used for such? Of course. Anything can be used and twisted for evil; someone determined enough to hurt and harm will use any excuse and reason in their power to do so. But it taints them, in the end, not the good that they have ill used. A fire cannot be evil, even if it is used to burn down a house. That’s a poor example, but the point stands, I think.

It’s been a long time since I made such an argument as this. My original intent was to tie it back to my original point about masks, and anarchism, or whatever other facets of my heart which I had at some point taken up and hence found false, but continued to follow. To any belief I have held, any philosophy I have fallen from, I say this. When a belief, a philosophy tells me that all are equal and free, I will agree, whole-heartedly. When it tells me that truth to an inner self should come before law, I will rejoice. When I am told to be angry, to hate, to betray my conscience, I will refuse. When I am told that God is dead, that religion is useful insofar as it aids that philosophy, that morality or ethics are an excuse or a weakness, that conscience is a hindrance, I will take my leave.

Why did I write this? In part, to answer a discussion and debate with a friend. In part because, as I said, I am tired of masks. I am tired of putting on my carefree anarchist face when I go to Food Not Bombs, my detatched philosopher face when someone challenges something I believe in, my selfless Christian face when I'm talking to certain friends, or on certain subjects, and God only knows how many others. I'm sick of it. This is who I am. I'm a Christian. I'm not an Anarchist, or a Republican, or a Democrat, or a Liberal, or a Conservative, or whatever other political label it's possible to wear. It is not given me to be a philosopher, or a singer, or an orator, or a philanthropist, or whatever else. I am a Christian; I believe in charity, not in the common definition of giving money to those you feel deserve and need it, but in the old definition of feeling-- or believing in-- love for all humankind, Just Because; I believe in conscience over law, but I do not believe in lawlessness; I believe in order over chaos, but that order should be just. What more shall I say? I am tired of masks. I no longer believe that I need any worldly label or face or party to hide behind. I need no excuse to be who I am.

Talkin' to my Generation

Right now, I am wondering why Mr. Kanye West – why anyone, actually – has felt the need to go on record calling themselves “the voice of a generation.” Why does this generation need a voice to speak for us? We all have minds, hearts, and voices, do we not? Why, then, are we so silent? How is it that we have opinions on fashion, on pop culture, even on petty national politics at times, yet we remain oblivious to the world outside of our lifestyles? We should not be depending on Kanye West, Barack Obama, or Rush Limbaugh to voice opinions for us. We have minds. We have hearts, we have voices. Why are we allowing ourselves to be led by the nose, like so many idle sheep? Educate yourselves! Listen to your conscience and speak out! There is slavery in Africa, upheld by the mainstream chocolate industry. There is genocide in the Sudan, upheld by the Chinese government. Peaceful protesters are being brutally put down in Iran. Aung San Suu Kyi has spent the greater part of the last twenty years under house arrest in Burma for speaking out. Here in America, there are entire families homeless and without food or shelter. In countries all over the globe, there are young children working endless hours in deplorable conditions without even enough money to live on. What are we doing about it? We depend on politicians to get things done; we elect them for their elegant promises, and then consider our duties to the world done. I am not targeting any one politician; they have all betrayed us the same. We cannot simply cast a vote on election day, and then walk home to go back to our lives as though the world had been changed. We cannot ignore the condition of this world.

You have a mind. You have a voice. You have the right to be free, to live and breathe and eat and drink and laugh; do you not have the responsibility to fight, to give that freedom to every other living person on this planet? We are born into our circumstances; we do not inherently deserve what we are given at birth any more than any other human born to any other parents in any other place. There is no reason why being born in America should give you more of a right to be free, just as being born in a village in Darfur does not mean you deserve to be raped and killed. But we’ve inherited this world, our generation has. We’ve inherited this world full of smooth-tongued, power-hungry politicians, and we’ve inherited some kind of system that tells us that on one side there are good guys, and the other side is not to be trusted. I tell you now that this is a lie. There is good and bad on both sides; both sides are labels. Stop listening to the fanatics on both sides of the system! Read the facts, from as many trustworthy places as you can, and then follow your own conscience. Stop letting others speak for you! You have a mind! You have a voice! Your voice is important, what is behind it is important; your mind, your conscience, your freedom is your birthright, as it is with every other human on this planet. Do not let it be taken from you!

Please. We’ve lain silent long enough—too long. It’s time to stop letting people speak for us, decide for us; we’re adults, or we soon will be. It’s time to start thinking about the world we’ve been born into, it’s time to step up. We’ve been born to this Earth, for better or worse—how will we leave it?

LAUGHTER, laughter is the best medicine! :D

I guess the long and short of it, or at least somewhere between those two varying points, is that I envy The Comedian. In some of my more lucid moments, when things really do make sense, I can retreat into dark humor, somewhere between Kurt Vonnegut and Edward Blake, getting the joke and somehow it’s beyond horror. When you look at this entire fucking world, what can you do but laugh? It’s all a joke. Somehow, when I try to explain that to most people, most decent, thoughtful, right-minded people, they are horrified. They really should be. It’s a horrible joke. And yet, honestly, what else can you do but laugh? I laugh because it’s easier than crying and harder than jumping off a cliff, which is the only other solution to this world, when you start thinking about it. Just thinking about this country is a joke. I listen to Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, for that matter Larry King or whatever their liberal counterparts are, and I laugh. What else can you do? Everything they say sounds absurd to me. Politics, the study of how fucked up humanity really is. Either you laugh, or you cry. I wrote a poem starting with that once, but I didn’t even understand, back then. I only started to understand this my junior, and senior year, when I’d walk out of third period, with our control-freak math teacher having just tried to attack me again, unable to do anything but laugh. That was when my emotions started to shut down, and I started laughing instead of crying.

My saving grace, I guess, is that as much as I laugh, as hard, as wide as my smile is, it still hurts, underneath. It’s gotten to the point where laughter itself hurts, most of the time, there’s this squeezing pain around my chest when I laugh, often. The Comedian, I think, became so hard to the world that laughing was all he knew how to do, that suffering and pain never even touched his mind anymore, except as part of the joke. I still want to change things. I still hurt when I see others hurt, and I still hurt when I laugh. I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop laughing, and I’m not sure I want to. Like I said, laugh or cry in this world, and say what you will about the healing of tears, etc, but laughter, laughter doesn’t produce mucus in your body either.

Get it?

Maybe I should join the Army and go to Iraq so I can be the next Kurt Vonnegut if I don’t get killed.

Unabashed Human Crying

I need a hug, so bad. And that sounds wicked corny and also kind of melodramatic, but right now I need someone Older And Wiser^TM to give me a hug and tell me that I’m not a horrible person, even if I don’t believe them. I need something, someone, solid and reassuring and trustworthy, and no such person exists in my life. My best friends are 1) as crazy, emotional, and unbalanced as I am, for the most part, and have their own hug and emotion needs, 2) miles and miles and miles away, almost to a one, or 3) not psychic and therefore unable to determine when I am torn up and hurt and lonely inside and really in need of a hug.

Gah. For all my wild and rampaging monster insides, I’m still part human girl, and I still need to curl up in a little ball and hide from the world sometimes. Maybe that’s part of the wild rampaging thing.

Oh Noes!

what if my mother was right and i am, in fact, a demon? or a doppleganger inhabited by a demon? somehow led to believe that i am or was a real person, just waiting for the right moment to snap and become a bloodthirsty monster? oh, wait, i already am a bloodthirsty monster. right.

what if it IS all a conspiracy?

:O

Poking fun at my own delusional self, or actually quite worried? YOU decide. : D [with black buttons for eyes.]