Changes

After awhile of not writing, I've come to the conclusion it is a good time to pick up. A lot has happened in my life these few months and I've realized how heartless some individuals can be. I've seen a true side of a person I felt I could trust, and she broke my heart. She revealed secrets that were not her business to reveal. She told my friends and co-workers things so they looked at me with disdain and mistrust. After ending the friendship with the toxic individual and informing my friends as such, they came clean and informed me of all the things she had told them. I only know of two definite cases, and my best friend even admitted she had tried to bring up conversations of what I had told her. Manipulative and calculating, but nonetheless transparent. They sided with me, knowing I wouldn't do anything to hurt anyone, or do something maliciously. Regardless, this sent me into a tail-spin and I was in denial for at least a month. I can now say, with a clear mind that I do not appreciate what she did, nor how it went about, but I wish her the best. Karma is a bitch and will catch up to her, but I understand that the reason she did it is because I had less to lose then she did. A family including a son and husband, she had already lost her job, friends (who no longer speak to her, jokes on her) among other things. Victims will forever play the victim, and will rarely stand out of the muck they make for themselves. Sometimes, you need to realize you have a choice to be a victim, the perpetrator or the one who changes for the better.

I admit, after this happened I was the victim, no ifs, ands or buts about it. My reputation tarnished, and my feelings genuinely hurt. But I moved past whatever she had told others. Today, I'm working to be a happier and better person. I owe a select few, many thanks and I cannot begin to explain how exponentially thankful I am to them. They helped me out of dark hole, that consumed me. I normally am fairly calm, not wrathful or vengeful but during that time I was inconsolable. But that is in the past, and I am trying not to be that person anymore.

Since I last have written, I have also gone on a path of self-discovery. I have realized that I am not nor will ever be like others my age. My mind adapts to ideas that I feel that normal individuals have no interest in. I want to be happy, so in order to achieve happiness I have gone with hobbies that most don't think I'd be interested in. I'm athletic, I'm a stoner, but I also enjoy nerdy things. I read comics and have recently started working at a Comic Stop and am having an absolute blast despite some sexist comments now and then, but other than that I adore the people I work with, I enjoy being around people who are like minded and share similar hobbies and interests. Also, the most liberating feeling one can feel is a complete freedom of care. The feeling of knowing a manager feels they have power over you by threatening you with a job and knowing you can walk away is the best feeling in the world. I now have a safety net, a secured position that I know if I was to walk away from one of my jobs right now, I'd have something to fall back on.

I've become close with so many, and those who love me, love me for me. Not some adaptation of what I should or shouldn't be, I'm a comic book nerd, who plays video games, plays volleyball, swears like a sailor, can't cook and can have intellectual conversations until the sun comes up; I like music that most do not, my family is the most important thing in the world to me with my friends bringing up the rear in close second, I role-play with characters we've developed with a friend across country who I've known for 9-10 years and have only met once, I write, partake of Pagan rituals, read socialist material, while researching secrets from history long since past. In short, I'm me. All angles, I'm not the average 23 year old, and I certainly might be a little odd, but I like me, and its been a long time since I've been able to say that.

Acknowledgement

A close friend of mine said in the midst of a difficult time, find what the root of the problem is and fix it. I have to acknowledge my shortcomings in order to move past them. Which involves one of the hardest things that a person can do, acknowledging you have a problem, and discovering a way to move past it. I'll say that I've had this problem for years; masking my true feelings and colors are one of the things that I excel at, unless someone truly knows me and even then it is difficult.

When I was younger, my childhood and early adolescence was difficult and extremely taxing on my emotional and mental stability, mostly my early adolescence. I have always been active, pushed and driven for nothing but the best by both my immediate and extended families, educated, articulate, athletic, talented, but something no one knew of was I suffered from depression and anxiety. In my seventh grade year, two of the people who knew the most about me and were my best friends, betrayed my kind-heartedness by twisting my emotions for their enjoyment, they insulted the person who kept our family afloat in difficult times, and claimed that I would be nothing more than the person they belittled and degraded to my face. Needless to say, I fought with everything I had emotionally and verbally. I regret some of the things I have said, but at the time it was how I felt. This fight between these two individuals weighed so heavily upon my shoulders (mind you, I had said nothing at all to my family, my mom had more than enough to worry about, my sister was too young, and dad had a lot of stress on his shoulders too) that I tried to take my life, twice. I resulted to scarring my body, changing my appearance, isolating myself, crying more frequently, skipping class and countless other things. Once the problem had 'been resolved' which resulted in a stern talking to by the assistant principal and making sure that none of us would have classes or even lunch together, all that activity seemed to be swept under the rug. I hadn't died, so therefore it wasn't a problem, because it only really matters when someone loses their life to suicide for it to be considered a tragedy.

Well, I still suffer from episodes of depression, I urge it to go away, but no one speaks of it and no one chooses to acknowledge it still, not even myself. Depression is a scary term that no one truly wants to admit exists, because if we don't talk about it it doesn't happen and we're protected from it. This also plays into another large problem I have, and that is with food. I overeat, and under-eat because I have the power to do so. No one can control my eating habits but me. I've always struggled with my weight, but in my early high school years, I changed everything I knew about my life. I worked out, ate right, lost weight, felt great....but one devastating moment at that time, threw me back into comfort eating, and I gained all the weight I had lost and then some back. But my friend's courage, strength, fearlessness, has made me want to go back to my healthy self. I write this as a farewell to my life before, I want to change, so therefore I will. My problems, that I have acknowledged is I suffer from depression, and I will not allow this to affect my life anymore. I have also acknowledged I have a sick obsession with eating and not eating, I need to eat right. I will change from this point forward, it might take awhile but I will go back to being the bright-eyed young woman I was before; I will go back to the passionate and curious person I was before. From this point forward, I will be me and no one else's variation of me.

Unfamiliar...

Picking this back up seems foreign and unfamiliar. Something that had given me such joy has fallen to the wayside, to be abandoned for years. The more I think about it I realize that I am not the person I was, nor am I the person I wanted to be so many years ago. I feel broken, unknown to even myself, and I don't know how I can change my outlook. I look at the path I imagined I was supposed to be on at this point and I am nowhere close. I have to reach into the deepest recesses of my soul to find what I want, and yet the fog that clouds my mind and heart stops me from realizing what I truly need. I look at myself, and I see darkness; something that resides in my soul that I cannot help. I realize that darkness is something that is a part of me, it always has. I've always believed that I will forever be the black sheep; I sabotage myself in my fears and what I want. I realize I cannot have everything I want, but in order to move forward from this slump of my life, I have to jump into the dark waters I've always been afraid of. My outlook, the way that I am seen will always weigh heavily upon my shoulders. My opinion, my expectations of myself were always set too high; I realize now that despite all that I was in my younger years it has no impact of who I am now. I dwell on my past achievements and it means nothing. I was an honor roll student, an athlete, a stoner, a nerd, a social outcast, the disappointment; but the only thing I see is a waste. All the things I was, have disappeared... I'm merely a shell of what I was; a fragment.

If asked what I wanted at this exact moment, I couldn't answer. I think that revealing my inner fears, might shed some light as to what I need to work on as a person. A few people know of these fears, but here...I'm just a faceless voice; able to speak my mind, free from judgment and ridicule, able to write down truly what scares me and how this messed up and crazy mind of mine works. So I will plunge head first into my deepest fears in hopes that one day I can work past them on my own: being alone, being unloved, that no one will miss me when I am gone, that my life means nothing and that all the pain and hurt I've felt is for nothing, I fear getting hurt by the people who are closest to me, I fear letting people get too close (the more they know the more they can use to hurt me), I fear being in a dead-end job doing something I hate and I fear disappointing those closest to me. I was told on the topic of strength, "You can be strong if you choose to be strong." At a point I was strong, a fire burned within my soul, it glowed with passion, strength, knowledge and fearlessness; but now its been extinguished, muted, silenced, and forgotten. One day I'll get that fire back, I'll gain the passion I once had, and perhaps one day will find the peace my heart so desperately deserves.