I'm sitting and thinking, how did I ever end up here? This madness that has become my life is so present that I find myself forgetting what life was like before today. However, when I really think about it, I realize nothing is much different now than it has always been.
I am wanting more than anything to be older, which is really nothing new. I never lived in my childhood. Even when I played with my toys, I was not a child. I pretended that I was the mother of my baby dolls, that I was going shopping for my family as an adult, that somehow I was much older. It's hard to look back on those times because I am painfully aware of how different I have always been. I fully understood what sex was by age 7. I understood health insurance, jobs, marriage, divorce, death, life, by the time I was 6. Maybe I was just intellectual, curious, smart, aware. Still, somewhere in the back of my warped mind, I feel that no child that young should feel that old.
I sit at my window, taking long drags from a menthol cigarette at midnight, ignoring the pain I feel inside. I watch the smoke float out of the window, and think, 'things just aren't right. ' I try to divert my mind from calories and weight, which I always find to be nearly impossible. I try to remember a time when I thought about other things, and suddenly realize that those things weren't any more pleasant. I recall a memory from age 7, sitting in a corner crying. My mom and I had an argument, and I was devastated. It wasn't over anything all-too-important, not on the surface. I used to have terrible temper tantrums. I would scream and yell and kick and bite over the silliest things, seemingly. I remember as I sat trembling and sobbing in the corner, my mom told me something I have not since forgotten, "Stop acting like you are some wounded child, like you are terrified or something. There is nothing wrong with you, no reason for you to be acting so selfish and immature." I remember exclaiming through my shaking voice, "You don't know me! You don't understand! You don't even care, so whydon'tyoujustleavemealonebecauseitdoesn'tmatteranyways!!" I wrote on a piece of paper that my mom didn't love or care about me, and that she probably wishes I was never born.
I still sometimes find myself thinking that what I wrote on that paper was true. Logically I know it isn't. She was wrong, though. I WAS wounded, in ways that I feel like she is unable to comprehend. I WAS afraid. I DID feel like there was something terribly wrong with me. And, the last thing I wanted to be was selfish and immature. I realize she said those things to make me think, to keep me from rationalizing that the way I was acting was acceptable. I also realize that she didn't know how personally I would take that remark. She didn't, and may still be unable to, see that a huge part of me wanted to believe every word she said. I constantly told her that I hated her, and didn't care what she thought of me. This was one of the biggest lies I told as a child. The problem was, I cared too much. I hung on every word she said, and tried as much as possible to make her happy. Eventually I began to feel like nothing I did would ever make her happy. At that point, I decided to give up. As I said before, the littlest things would set me off: something out of place in my room, a change in schedule, dirt on my pant leg, losing something, my sock feeling weird in my shoe; any of those things would send my little body into a fit of rage, usually ending in my mom holding me down on the floor to prevent me from hurting myself, trying to stay calm as I screamed, "I wish you would die!" Did I really want her to die? No. I had already lost my dad, and deep down in my small mind I understood that she was all I had. Maybe that was the catalyst to all of my frustration. Maybe it was the fact that I felt like my insides didn't match my outsides. Maybe it was because I thought she loved my brother more than me. Maybe it was because I wanted to hurt her with my words, just like she had done to me. It was most likely all of the above.
I couldn't make sense of the things going on inside of my head and I wanted more than anything for her to understand. Yet, somehow I knew she never would.
Things never really changed inside, although my outwardly, self-destructive behaviors often would. Eventually I learned that it was better to take out all of my painful emotions on myself rather than those around me. That's when, at 10 years old, I purged for the first time. Which is how I got to where I am today.
I take the last drag of my 2nd cigarette in a row, and put out the but on my inner arm. Forever a reminder that things haven't changed a bit...
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