I'm feeling a bit better these days. My birthday/Mother's
Day has passed and I am much less anxious and nauseous. On that day I was
really sick - just incredibly nauseous - and I didn't really get out of bed
much at all. I just slept a lot and got waited on hand and foot, which helped
to make up for feeling so bad.
I figured out that I definitely have a honey issue. I've
really amped up the honey use since I found out I was allergic to pretty much
everything, and it turns out I have an allergy (and/or intolerance) to honey,
too. It feels kind of the same way eating anything with eggs or wheat - it kind
of sucks out my energy, and I get nauseous for awhile. It also eventually gave
me heartburn, which I hardly ever have at all anymore, and it made me think
about how I used to eat antacids all day long, every day, and how much physical
pain I was in every day and did not really find it unusual. I didn't realize
how shitty I felt until I didn't feel that way anymore.
I don't know if I felt so sick on my birthday because of the
honey, or the anniversary of an exceptionally heinous experience; I think maybe
both. My stomach HURT! But the pain and all the sleeping and being waited on
helped me to hardly think about what happened on my 8th birthday, which was the
exceptionally heinous experience.
My dad is such a fucking asshole. I find myself being a bit
wistful that he's already dead, because I still want to kill him sometimes. Doing
all the shit he did to me and let other people do to me and made me watch him
doing to other people is, I feel, sufficient to melt my brain and make me
afraid of everything and not know what was real. Why did he have to actually
plan the exceptionally heinous experience on my fucking birthday? And tell me
it was my birthday present? And that he went through a lot of trouble to set it
all up for me?
I hate that I actually felt bad for not appreciating his
"gift," but that was the power he had over me until I was in my
twenties. It is one of the reasons I want to kill him.
Another big reason I want to kill him is how he incorporated
me into the awful, twisted things he did to other people. He enjoyed doing that
- hurting people; I guess he thought it was part of his divinity or something. He
wanted me to enjoy it, too. I don't know why - so I could be his protégé? So I would
always feel like a horrific person? So I would feel responsible for it all,
giving him fantastic leverage against me telling anyone what happened? For
shits and giggles?
Probably all of those things.
But I mean, all of that ON MY BIRTHDAY? Its just another of
those really shitty ways he poured salt in my wounds, which he also loved
doing. He loved to injure me and then mutilate the hell out of the wound - I really
think he liked the mutilating a lot more than the initial injuring.
There are so many of those shitty things, things that just
tip the scales from wretched pain to pure, white, searing soul-crushing. He loved
crushing souls.
Anyway, I used to love my birthday. It was a celebration of
my birth - of ME. I always felt good about myself on my birthday without
feeling ashamed about it. That's what that day was for me - just the one day,
and I loved that day.
Now I get so sick and anxious on my birthday I can't even
remain conscious, let alone get out of bed and be happy about it. What a
fucking DICK.
I am much more comfortable talking about wanting to kill him
now than I was before he was already dead. I have thought about that a lot,
like "what's the process there? Was I too afraid of him to actually
believe I would go through with it? Was I still, deep down, the eternally-devoted
daughter? Did I just fundamentally not want to hurt him?"
It didn't take me long to figure out the answers to those
questions: no. The reason I was uncomfortable talking about wanting to kill him
before he was dead was because I didn't want to get sent to the mental hospital
again. The reason I didn't kill him is because I didn't want to go to prison. That's
it. It is really that simple.
I've often fantasized about shooting him in the middle of
his forehead. For some reason, it makes me feel very calm, even to the point
where I have considered how steady my hand would be holding the gun despite
being a shaky person the rest of the time. Sometimes I start to react to that
thought like a regular person, and begin to feel sick and scared about wanting
to kill someone - truly, sincerely wanting to kill someone.
But then I remember again what he did to me and to those
other people, and what he let other people do to me. I remember that I don't
want to kill a person, I want to kill my dad, and then I feel calm again. It
had not even crossed my mind that I would find a reason to want him to be alive
still - before he died, it was incomprehensible to me that I would want
anything other than him being dead, even if I killed him myself.
Now I long for him to be alive again so I can kill him.
I don't regret not killing him. I logically know that
killing him would have caused so much more pain than just waiting for him to
die (which fortunately happened sooner than later). Hurting people has
consequences - it chews at your soul whether the person deserved it or not. I'm
tired of getting my soul chewed, and so I do not regret not killing him.
But my birthday was pretty difficult this year, especially
since it was on Mother's Day, and when I turned 8, that was also on Mother's Day.
Two things made me feel soooo much better, though. These two
things made it bearable:
The first one is that Jonny took me to a reading and
book-signing by Augusten Burroughs. I got to meet him and give him a hug and he
signed my copy of his new book with "Happy Birthday!" I also signed a
copy of my own book (the one that I wrote) and gave it to him. It was exciting,
I guess because he is famous. But the reason I feel the need to be exposed to
him - by reading his books or physically meeting him or whatever - is because
there are not so many people in the world who know that kind of pain and are
still coherent enough to talk about it.
During the Q&A, he said "sometimes the pain is just
so big…" I don't remember what the question was, or whether or not he said
anything before or after that phrase, but it seemed like everyone just zeroed
in and everything got quiet and he said that about the pain that is just so
big. There is no way to describe pain that big. Most people will never know
pain that big. It is pain that is just so purely PAINFUL, that there aren't
really any words that could follow that statement. Because it is a statement. It
started out sounding like an explanation, "sometimes the pain is just so
big…because such and such and whatnot."
But it's really just a statement: "Sometimes the pain
is just so big."
It meant a lot to me to be able to be there.
The second thing that made my birthday more bearable was
that I started that blog I spoke about in my last post (or the post before
that, I don't remember), the one about having a shitty mom. It's called "I
have a shitty mom," and you can read it at ihaveashittymom.blogspot.com. I
sent out an evite on facebook telling everyone about my new blog that I was
launching, and I did it on Mother's Day, in honor of my shitty mom.
The shitty mom blog is really more gossip and judging people
who make spectacles of themselves, and not so much about pain, so it has been
really fun to work on. And I LOVED announcing the publication on Mother's Day.
Which was also my birthday.
It meant a lot to me to publically and definitively state
just how shitty my mom is.
Now that my birthday has passed (and I am one year farther
away from being 15), I really am feeling better.
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