Everything is closing in on me

I am so phenomenally depressed it amazes me.

I have not been online at all lately because I am so emotionally fragile that I cannot stand to wrestle with the damn machine at my mother's. However, having no Net access causes me to dreadfully miss the people I only ever talk to online.

At the moment, I am grounded indefinitely for coming home an hour and a half later than I said I would on Halloween, because Ella, whom I was supposed to get a ride from, left without me (I had no idea she'd gone until later), and I generally miscalculated absolutely everything after that. I am quite upset that I am grounded because I generally feel like my home is an unhealthy environment for me at the moment; I do not get along well with my family in the least, and I'm trying to detach myself from my bedroom, the only bit of my house I can stand, before we move so that I'm not completely traumatized. I generally feel much more comfortable and accepted and at home at the Jacoby's, and I fear that being denied access to that friendly environment might push me completely over the edge. Not to mention that there are people there who do not constantly critique me and make a big deal out of little tiny things that are no one's business but my own, such as whether or not I take my coat off when I walk in (although I am much more likely to there than at home) or whether or not I eat.

Ella is concerned that I will kill myself or start cutting myself or somesuch. Sigh. There is no chance of either--I steadfastly refuse to die a high school student, as then I will be nothing but a statistic. If, when I get out of high school, things do not get radically better, then I will kill myself. And neither my fingernails nor mechanical pencils nor my Swiss Army knife are sharp enough to cut skin with. Mother is worried that I will develop an eating disorder, since I have discovered over the past few weeks that I really dislike food and would rather feel hungry than feel full,as eating makes me nauseous. I do not appreciate her concern.

I am still extremely pissed off at the fact that neither of my foreign languages classes can be weighted as honors, that the school does not offer German 1 and 2 classes, and that my parents will be extremely reluctant to let me take German at Drew this summer if I do not do well in frigging Honors Biochemistry, for that honestly is what it is... they say, Why should you take college classes if you can't handle high school ones? I merely think it idiotic that German 1 is a college class but German 3 a high school one, and that therefore I must go to college should I wish to take German in high school. I also fail to see how doing well in Bio connects to doing well in foreign language, considering I am GOOD AT LANGUAGES and BAD AT SCIENCE. Honestly. It's QUITE SIMPLE.

I am entirely fed up with the world, as it seems to operate off of a principle of "You can do anything except what you want to". This is driving me mad.

I have cried so much in the past two days that my tear ducts are sore. This is not something I have encountered before, and it does not make me feel confident in myself. In fact, I have cried quite a phenomenal amount in the past week; last Saturday my family annoyed me and on Sunday they annoyed me even more and I started to cry, then I went online and talked to Ben and he was supportive and that made me cry, and I have just continued crying.

By Friday I was so mentally and emotionally drained that I started operating purely physically, which is odd for me since I have an extreme distaste for the physical world in general, but I dressed in a manner that made me happy, went to the graveyard because it seemed an appropriate setting, sat in the Jacoby's computer rpom and finished reading The Shunned House by the light of one computer monitor, went back to the graveyard and read more Lovecraft, then came back and was cold and my feet hurt, so I really only desired to lie down and be warm. Unfortunately, as I was busy not-standing-up and being warm and talking to Matt (or, rather, listening to him talk to me), Ella left without informing me and... well, we've already gone over that chain of events.

Sunday I woke up, took a shower, got yelled at, went to show band practice, sat under the bleachers and cried, went home, sat in my room reading The Call of Cthulhu, went back to show band, was generally miserable but did not cry, went out to dinner where my family attempted to get me to talk about why I was depressed and why I feel my life is mediocre, sharply informed me that if I cried in public I would be in even greater trouble, relented with bad grace when I told them that I could not talk about why life sucks without getting emotional, went home and lay on my bed listening to music. Took coat off and actually went to bed after being sternly ordered to do by mother, as apparently lying down in fetal position is extremely bad for coat. Sigh.

Today, stayed in bed as late as I could, listened to music, read The Colour out of Space, did a bit of work, came down here to my dad's to do the work that requires use of a working computer, and had another session in which I try to explain what's wrong in my life to my parents and start crying again. Dad says he does not want me to limit myself. I say I do not have to; the limits to the paths I want to take are already there. I did not say I do actually know how to deal with all of them except the ones put in place by my parents. He wants to know if there is any way he can help that is not leaving me alone. The answer is no. To be alone, to be myself, to just Be instead of being pushed around and molded and held to standards is all I want. I want peace. I want my priorities to not have to clash so phenomenally with everyone and everything else's. I want someone, somewhere, to accept that science is not a priority for me and language is. That writing is a higher priority than math. That being myself is a higher priority than pleasing others. That being warm is a higher priority than fitting into the accepted pattern of what I should and should not wear at certain temperatures.

And will someone please get me Ben's telephone number?

-Claudia

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down...

There's an emotional Black Death going around. I believe that myself and most of my friends are normally rarely if ever happy, but it really seems especially phenomenally bad lately.

Part of it is probably just my perspective getting darker, my mind is ever more full of death and blood and despair and generally everything morbid, it seems like joy to me for if something is truly grotesque and horrifying then it is not mediocre.

I know I've been rather worrying Leah. I haven't even been telling her everything that goes on in my twisted little mind, but she sees the red marks on my wrists and hands, and that worries her enough. I suppose it probably does point to something wrong with me that I scratch myself and don't want to eat and have drawn up a rather elaborate system of circumstances under which I would and would not kill myself, but I think some of that is probably actually to scare her, because I'm depressed enough that I can't stand it when she's happy and want to ensure that she will not be happy whilst talking to me. For I am still firmly of the belief that if you are happy, it is because you are forgetting something.

Which brings me to something Packy has said repeatedly, that I am forced to disagree with. I do not wish to return to feeling as I did as a child. When I was a child, if I was happy, it was because I was oblivious. I don't like being oblivious. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm really capable of being truly happy, because for me the happiest feeling is being soothed; the process of being calmed, not the state of being calm. For this to happen, something has to be upsetting me in the first place. I truly hate to say this, but I don't believe in pure happiness. I just don't think it can happen. People say true love is pure happiness, but I don't believe in true love either. I am a bitter, jaded cynic.

Happiness in the external is possible if you choose what you look at very, very carefully. You can find beauty in things, but you cannot find beauty in all-things, in the world as a whole. You can see beauty in the world, but if you see the world as beautiful, you are seriously lying to yourself. And, more importantly, if you see the world as it is as beautiful, then you do not strive to make it better. I feel that I must see all that is wrong in the world so that I know what I must make better. Filtering one's perception should only be used to ensure that one's brain is intact enough to do so, for if one percieves too much hideousness and despair, if one were to see all the loathesomeness and misery of the world at once, one would go mad, completely and utterly stark raving mad. If one were to see the spectrum of the world, how it ranges from what would be, in ones own perception, unbearably hideous at worst, to mediocre at best, one's mind would cave in. The human brain cannot handle realizing all the flaws in every society, and unfortunately, that is what keeps us from erasing those flaws and building a society that is truly great. We are small-minded and twisted creatures who are incapable of true happiness, only of oblivion, or of true comprehension of misery. And this is why our society is so damn MEDIOCRE!!

Bah, am starting to babble. But yes, emotional plague. Poisoning. Things are uncannily wrong at the moment. It's upsetting everyone and making me crazy, very very crazy, crazy so I'm probably adding to everyone else's problems, because we're all making things worse for ourselves and each other at the moment, and I'd like to take a moment to apologize for my part in fucking things up further, whatever, I've done, I can't tell anymore, before I retreat back into my own little world, where all that exists is myself and my black coat and Tales of H.P. Lovecraft in a little tiny sphere of comfort as the incomprehensibly twisted Outer World rages on like a hurricane and tries to rain on me, tries to drown me in its towering black waves of stress.

If I ignore it, if I mock it, if I just keep reading, I'll be fine until the storm subsides enough for me to get out. If I look up, I'll capsize. But I can't forget it's there, or it'll keep on raging, getting worse, until I have to notice it.

...

You know it's time to stop writing when you start personifying extended metaphors. Damn, am I twisted today...

( Conversation with Matt in which he tries to get me to cease the self-destructive behavior that I haven't quite started yet )

One more random topic:

Things have been radically up and down over the past week, and as far as I can tell, only one thing has been completely constant: I miss Ben. Everything else has been all over the place, with some very high (completely superficial) highs and some very low (mostly hormonal) lows, extremely high emotions and complete lack thereof, but for some strange reason, ever since about one o'clock last Sunday afternoon when he made me cry by being too nice, I have missed him considerably more than I usually bother to miss people. It has been causing me considerable distress that I do not have his phone number and that I cannot use AIM at home, which is my usual method of staying in contact with people I do not see IRL. I have no clear idea why I want to talk to him so badly--may have something to do with the fact that I cannot recall a single time when he's gotten on my nerves--but the fact stands. It's driving me mad. I am continually forgetting that I have no telepathic skills whatsoever and trying to communicate that way. Needless to say, it has not been working.

Whee, I need to regain my stability... managing to finally start my history essay that I hadn't been able to start for, oh, two weeks or so has improved my mood quite a bit... as has getting all these wierd ramblings out of my head.

Tuesday, have first meeting for GSA-type-thingy. The one useful thing I can do in school, and I hope to hell it actually ends up being useful. I don't think I truly believe it will, nor will I until it happens.

I am unhealthily used to everything being empty. Empty promises, empty victories, empty decisions, empty deeds, nothing really mattering, everything only seeming to be good or important or even bad. I am used to nothing being fulfilling. It's really not good for me. Sigh.

I wonder if that has any link with my distaste for food.

Hm...

Probably not.

I'm going to actually sign off now as I've stopped making any sense whatsoever.

I love the lot of you even when I'm purposely trying to piss you off, and apologize for those moments.

*hugs*

-Claudia