January 30th

Class is awful. It’s not really, but it is. We give introductions in Great Works of Literature, and when the guy before me is giving his introductory spiel, I bolt from the room, running to the bathroom to hold my hands under cold water in order to calm my definitely-not-normal heart rate. When I return to class, they’ve finished with introductions. I dodged a bullet. God forbid I have to say my name and major out loud, that’s nightmare fuel. That’s enough to give me a panic attack (it did). Later in class we work in groups, and present the part of the syllabus that we’ve been assigned to. I speak aloud with minor anxiety. My brain doesn’t make a single shred of sense to me. In the library Liz and I talk about the pleasure of lying, and how even in our journals we’re just saying shit to say shit. It’s the joy of writing. I tell her about what Lucy told me the other day, how I could completely make something up in my pieces and I’d be allowed to; it’s my blog, my essay. Mine mine mine. We sit at our computers, scrolling through our old writing docs trying to find something to fix and elaborate on. Every few seconds we groan, gesturing at our computers. Why would we write something that abysmal and think it’s good. I have only one poem from high school that I deem worthy. I wrote it after cheerleading ended, and the mom of one of my teammates started bad mouthing me on Facebook. It made me think about how much I dislike being a teenage girl, because teenage girls get ridiculed for doing anything well. They get ridiculed for having it right, for doing something brave. Shut up and twirl your hair, that’s allowed. Pull down your skirt and quit acting like a stripper on the basketball court (says the emails we get about our hip hop routines every year). If I had a gun this would all be easy. I would have written that poem, the one from high school I wrote with a pink pen in my pink journal with pink nails and bloody fingerprinted pages, and I would have shot myself afterwards. There, take that. My final act of revenge. An already bloody page covered in my guts. Romantic. Tara, you can go fuck yourself, and fuck your daughter too. The poem was about being a girl, and it was somewhat ironic. I was pretty proud of myself at the time for coming up with something like that. I remember my hair being in a ponytail; I was wearing my red tank top that showed too much cleavage. I was drinking pink wine in my room, using the wine glass Lindsey had left there a few nights prior. I was girling it up.

February 8th

Jared comes to the city this weekend and stays in our apartment. To prepare, I do a terrible job at cleaning, doing the bare minimum–the bathroom, the dishes, the floor, barely. My room gets tidied, but I push a bunch of trash and random bullshit under my dresser. Whatever I can’t see, I don’t care about. He comes with weed and gives me a hug, calling me bunny and dancing with me around my living room floor. We smoke immediately, and I get horrifically high. Recently, I haven’t been drinking a lot or really doing any substances, because I spent the last few months getting electromagnetic shock therapy, therefore I wasn’t allowed to. At the time it was just about the worst thing they could have told me, but I was surprisingly fine at the whole abstinence thing. It was easier than I’d ever thought it to be. Plus, I figured I’d eat less and become skinnier and that won me over more than anything else, honestly. We’re both high, curled up on one of my small couches together listening to Jared and Dan’s joint playlist inspired by “Delete Forever” by Grimes which is one of my all time favorite songs that I listened to religiously when I was sixteen. I think music must be just about the greatest thing of all time. I don’t have any epiphanies or come to any realizations or write something profound. All I do is sit on the couch laying my head on the windowsill thinking about how much I love music. We order Chinese and I eat wonton soup and crackers, still feeling hungry afterwards and hating myself for it. I am so insatiable and unable to be pleased. Later Jared and I lay on my bed as the playlist drones on from the other room on the TV. He flips through my sketch pad and asks me for a pencil so he can draw me. After I find one and hand it to him, I try to lay as nonchalantly as possible, scrolling on my phone looking at nothing. He sketches me with all of my stuffed animals and pillows, laying on my pink bed looking like a bitch with no responsibilities. We go to this AI DJ set that night that normally is the kind of thing I’d hate, because fuck AI, if not for the open bar and free coat check. I could flaunt my body that I hate, drinking free cocktails that tasted horrible, and be really utterly miserable about it. At one point Steph looks at me and comments that “Annabel is having so much fun”. I was thinking about how dinner made me bloated and I’m wearing a tank top that’s too tight because I didn’t know what to wear. My hair’s unwashed and I’m not wearing makeup and my face is covered in acne because I ran out of my topical meds and I feel weird because I’m still half high and wanting to listen to music that isn’t so electronic. I want to relearn guitar and be good at it. I want to have a nice singing voice, so I can write songs about boys and sing them and get a hundred thousand likes on TikTok.

March 18th

It’s probably a result of me staying out until 6am this morning, but everything feels horrific. At work I tell Claire that I feel so paranormal that it’s scaring me, that I don’t really even have words to describe how I feel. I took a ten a few hours into my shift and sat in the back and sobbed, angry at myself for doing these things to myself. For saying too much every time alcohol enters my system and continuously letting alcohol enter my system. Last night before we went out, I laid in Madison’s bed with her and told her about a bunch of awful things that happened to me, because I’ve been feeling really lonely lately and needed someone to confirm to me that these events were in fact really traumatic. It wasn’t really a fair arrangement, but I was too sad to really even care. We get free drinks all night and talk to a bunch of ugly men who keep asking us out in really pathetic ways. Des DMs me and calls me pretty around 4am, which I don’t see until later that morning. I drunkenly respond and tell him that I miss him, and ride that high for a while until he likes the message and doesn’t respond. I tell Claire that I’m going through a divorce and that nobody should bother me. My hangover makes me feel really maternal towards things like hard security tags. Claire says the store is experiencing paranormal activity and I laugh really hard.

On the train home I cry a little, holding back vomit with my head in my hands listening to a bunch of fucked up unreleased Ethel Cain that’s only making me feel worse. Ramen for dinner makes me nauseous. I take a nap and wake up defeated, just fucking crumpled. It makes me wish I still had weed just so that I could exit this headspace for even just an hour. I feel very suicidal, and I know that it’s a result of going out two nights in a row, but I just feel very frustrated at the fact that I can’t function like a normal person. I’m considering dropping my second class just so that I can lay in bed more and not do anything. I almost wish that I wasn’t clean anymore, just so that I could have an excuse to run back to Pennsylvania, bloody and crying. But there’s no excuse, I’m just extremely lazy and extremely self indulgent. Zack invites me to see his new apartment on Friday, which I tell him looks very Patrick Bateman like, which probably satisfies him. He makes me a bunch of drinks that I swallow very quickly, trying to numb my anxiety that I’m experiencing. We walk down to the nearest deli so that I can buy him a case of Stella for his housewarming gift. I had considered buying him a bottle of wine, because that seemed like the nice thing to do, but I was too tired to go to the liquor store after work and he wouldn’t have drank it anyway. His roof is my favorite part of the apartment, and when we’re up there I consider jumping off but decide against it. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about suicide. It’s all passive, but it’s there I guess. Not that it ever really goes away. Being twenty one has been really disappointing so far, I feel very worthless and exhausted. Re-reading Normal People was a bad idea, but I really like Marianne and her inner thoughts. Marianne in Sweden feels very familiar to how I’m feeling now, as if I’m just dragging my feet everywhere and nobody can actually see me and decipher if I’m alive and real or not. I throw up a lot in Zack’s bathroom and then uber home and feel really guilty about it, wishing I was dead.

April 3rd

Yesterday was my ninety days clean. I’m indifferent about it; everyone keeps saying they’re proud of me and I guess I must really need to hear that because I keep telling people just to garner a reaction. In reality, it might as well be my first day clean because I almost relapsed the other night. With a razor blade gripped in my wet hand, I paced around my bedroom sobbing like a wild animal, trying to convince myself to do something–anything at all. In recent days, I’ve been spending a lot of time either working or laying in bed. Writing has not been coming easily to me at all the way I wish that it would, and it’s driving me crazy. My suitcase sits sprawled out onto the middle of my bedroom floor, half packed, because I’m leaving for Pennsylvania this weekend. I’m going to be there for a while, probably over a month, because I’m doing my evil electromagnetic shock therapy again because I decided to go crazy and drop all of my classes. My idiotic excuse was that I couldn’t handle it, but really it was just because I was lazy and didn’t feel like doing anything. I really like when I have nothing to do in a day, because then I can put on an inappropriate looking outfit and show off my body to the mirror and the camera. I love looking beautiful for the camera, and then showing those pictures to nobody. I am dragging my feet, one day into another, with no aim or purpose or really any will to live at all. Eating is a nightmare. I wish I could survive solely on caffeine, but that concept bit me in the ass when I passed out in front of Starbucks yesterday morning. Nobody stopped to help me, and I’ve been cursing the population of Bushwick ever since. In a seven dollar three second uber ride home, I thought about dying, and what would change for everyone if I was dead. It was rather unproductive, and led to me feeling more depressed, so I got out of the uber and legitimately crawled up my stairs because I was too light headed to walk. Dan brought me mango and midol and I felt better, even though everyone kept telling me to go to the doctor. I found the very idea of having to get up and walk to urgent care immensely exhausting, so I abstained. Instead, I rewatched The Hunger Games for probably the 200th time and fell asleep. I wished that I had weed, but figured that was probably a terrible idea anyway. There have been a lot of terrible ideas showing up in my head lately. I really wish that they’d stop. I want to be normal, I want to be a girl without a rotten brain and a rotten mouth. I want to see Sam one more time, just to scream at him for something he’s probably forgotten that he’s done, and make his guilt rise up again. I think I just want to make somebody angry, and that desire manifested the other night when I snapped at Lindsey for something that I didn’t even care that deeply about. My anger was just at the surface, waiting for a reason to expel itself. After hanging up with Lindsey, I cried a little and felt super guilty for yelling at her when she didn’t deserve to be yelled at.

May 28th

Ultimately it’s my year of rest and relaxation. I wake up just to stay in bed all day, reading on and off but mostly and most notably, I am sleeping. Sleeping off weed hangovers and taking hydroxyzine to escape my night time anxiety. Everything about myself renders me so speechless in disappointment. What a fucking disaster, jeeesus christ. How did it get to be like this? Am I a bad person for what I did to you? I am one hundred and twenty five days clean.

Four months of treating my sobriety like it’s a gun to my head. Nothing’s worse than that first month. Absolutely nothing worse. What a sore reminder to a girl who is trying and failing to quit vaping for the second time this year. Sobriety is a marathon that I am still running.

On the brink of ninety days clean I let my mom cut a bunch of my hair off. She cuts herself over a dozen times with the hair scissors and I bite my tongue.

Tms feels like a woodpecker pecking my skull. It hurts but not in an overly painful way. It’s more so irritating. Every 10 seconds it pulses, and then starts. Dana says I can read and write during TMS but I feel too anxious most of the time to do anything but sit quietly with my wet hands in my lap wiggling my toes and watching my stomach get smaller and bigger with every ragged breath I intake. I’m swallowing too hard, I’m moving my head, my heart rate is too high and I am going to have a panic attack that leads to a seizure. Ever since going off of gabapentin, I’ve been having these panic attacks that are seriously starting to scare me. The panic attacks started while I was on gabapentin, and I had a feeling that since I was now hard wired to have a panic attack in every single social fucking situation, going off of the gabapentin was not going to fix me. And what do you know, it doesn’t. I am on the verge of a panic attack and there is some machine drilling at my head like a bird and it’s uncomfortable and I’m uncomfortable. The room is dimly lit and smells like Dana’s candle warmer. She’s playing her music, and I almost want to ask if she can play mine but I’m too nervous and I feel like opening my mouth will give me a seizure or a panic attack. I just moved my fucking head. Now it’s probably drilling into a different part of my brain that will lead to a seizure and then I will probably die because I’ve spent years manifesting my own death. Worrying about the same things every day. Something’s got to give, that’s what I keep telling people. Dana tells me to stay far away from my evil ex situationship who unblocked me. Dana doesn’t know shit about what’s good for me. I drank peppermint coffee for breakfast this morning, sipping it while my dad asked me what pills I have that might be good for his recent Shingles diagnosis. He says he didn’t even know that he had chickenpox as a kid. I had a lot of weird illnesses as a kid, one morning I woke up and I couldn’t walk, he tells me. This seems like something more than trivial, but he tells it as such. I go down the list of pills in my possession, he settles on Gabapentin and Hydroxyzine. I feel like a pharmacy. It’s raining, and I convince him to make chicken soup that I’ll spend the next week drinking out of mugs in my awful bedroom. Dana says that Pennsylvania is a poor reminder of me doing badly, and I tell her honestly that the worst reminder is my ex situationship. How pathetic. She thinks that I’m pathetic. Sometimes I truly believe that I’m only capable of writing about Sam and mental illness. But then I remember that I’m only twenty one and I still have a lot of living to do. It doesn’t matter that he unblocked my Finsta and not my main–it doesn’t matter at all, because he’s engaged and I’m a hopeless train-wreck.

June 10th

Drinking a raspberry white claw by myself in my room on my last night sleeping in my Pennsylvania bedroom. Earlier today Dani took me out to lunch and paid for my two strawberry margaritas and caesar salad. We sat outside in the wet heat, the kind that attracts flies. We wear sunglasses to bat them away. I’m happily tipsy by the time our food comes out, so I sort of eat it, sort of pick at it, listening to Dani dissect another one of my friendships for the millionth time. It’s one of our favorite things to do, perform non consensual emotional surgery on somebody that’s close to me. Our topics and subjects diverge a hundred times, but what’s nice about Dani is that we have no boundaries whatsoever, which makes it effortless to keep up with her. Even though the other night I said something awful to her, she forgives me and I only let my guilt bother me for a day before deciding that I can’t not speak to her, not when another person in my life is doing something fucked up that warrants a text to Dani.

I said a bunch of awful things to Lindsey this weekend, awful enough to bring her to tears. A few months ago I wrote this piece about Lindsey, how I can vividly remember the last time that she cried because of how infrequently she lets tears fall. So stoic, so admirable. Crying for me is always the catalyst to my enormous feeling of patheticism. I never cry about the right things. I cry over emails and boys I never dated and dinner plans and having too much to drink. I cry over hangovers and headaches. It’s really pathetic how much I cry. But I was awful enough to make Lindsey, the best friend that I have ever had, cry. That’s a different kind of humiliation, and I wanted so badly to take it back, more than I’ve ever wanted to redact something in my life. The other day I told Nikki that I just wish I had never met him (horrible ex situationship), that I wish that I’d never done anything at all in regards to him, but this is worse. Much worse. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so embarrassed by my behavior than I did that night. Stupidly, I grab some hideous man in a baseball cap by the arm and throw my arms around my neck, telling him some bullshit that makes him touch me all obsessively, I don’t even remember what I said. I remember stupidly kissing him a bunch of times and letting his hands wander and doing nothing about it. Lindsey says she couldn’t even watch. And then of course we stumble back into her apartment and I start my rambling. My evil, sadistic, fucked up rambling. I don’t know why I said such awful things to her. I really don’t know why. Lindsey is one of the few people that I never have a bad word to say about. Constantly I find myself gushing over her to everyone I meet, bringing her up every chance that I get. There was no rationale behind why I would ever say something to upset her purposefully. It made me wish that I was dead. It made me want to tell her to tell me to pack it up and get a ride home, because there was no reason for her to be around me for a second longer. Lindsey does not deserve my evil self. It’s sick how I treat her. It really is. Sometimes I really wish that she’d just tell me that she doesn’t want to be friends anymore. It would probably be the worst thing to ever happen to me, and I would probably break things and scream and sob until I’m red in the face and sweating, but at least then she wouldn’t have to put up with me any longer. She’d probably call up my horrible ex-situationship and bond with him over my awfulness. She’d go to his wedding and applaud him. She’d say I’m glad you got out just like how one of my coworkers told him that after he broke my heart. Annabel, she’s just so fucking evil, he’d say. She’d nod and agree. She should, at least. That’s what I would do if I had to put up with me for almost 12 years. Jesus Christ, the poor girl. In the car on the way back from Pittsburgh, I was even more awful. Screaming and sobbing about meaningless bullshit and threatening a relapse right to her face. I am such a gaslighting freak show. Such a sick, manipulative bitch of a friend. Everyone is always telling me that I need to be nicer to myself, but I don’t really deserve that when people are so wonderful to me all the time, while I’m just constantly a burden. No fun. Sucks the life out of a room. Horrible. Just so horrible.

In retaliation to my twisted behavior, I treat myself to a white claw and a panic attack when I get home. My anxiety burns a hole in my stomach and crawls around and spits all throughout my body. I feel so disgusting I want to die. All that I can do is suck on my vape and douse my body in alcohol. I’m not an alcoholic, but I really should go sober. All of my friends are going to read this and then talk amongst themselves, tell each other that they’re worried about me and that I’m being self destructive and that not even fucking shock therapy can fix the rot growing inside of me. I really should just end it all, but I’m too lazy and too tired of hurting people against their will. It really would be the nail in the coffin to kill my self. Idiot Annabel, so awful that she had to kill herself and make herself even more awful. I’m selfish. I’m sorry. I’m sad. Guilt really is the best punishment for evil people. It’s the perfect prize for the ones who are done wrong. Now I’m crying, great. So pathetic. And to make matters worse, as if they can’t get worse, this is some truly terrible writing. No effort. No care. Whatever. It doesn’t even matter. I’m so ashamed of how I talked to Lindsey. I’m so sorry for being so evil. It rains the entire drive home, washing everything clean but me. Being soaked to the bone wouldn’t wash away my sins. It’s so bad I’ve considered praying. What’s another bruise on the knee? What’s another desperate cry for help?

June 11th

Abusing my prescription drugs and yelling at my mom for doing nothing wrong. It was my fault too, our missing my bus. But instead I scream at her face that she fucked everything up for me and it’ll be her fault when I have a seizure tomorrow during TMS because of the stress I am under from missing my bus. Dramatic. Shakily I pour a few hydroxyzine in my palm and swallow them dry, immediately regretting it. I already took two this morning. That puts me at about roughly 300 mg of Hydroxyzine in the span of 2 hours. Not my best decision, but I was so loose lipped and rabid that I figured the best course of action for both my mom and I would be to knock myself out. We’re on I95 heading towards Baltimore and I’m curled up in the passenger seat choking back tears and feeling dizzy. My head is pounding the way it always does when I send myself into a tailspin where I start screaming and crying and blaming people. If I had something sharp on me I probably would have cut myself in front of my mom, and then we’d have to turn the car around and head back towards Towson, so that she could drop me off at the psych ward—have at it doctors, she’ll surely be ridiculously misbehaved this time around. And I’d sooner cut myself in front of my mom than whip my vape out and start sucking on it, which frustrates me immensely. I wish she could just be normal about her kids growing up and doing things they shouldn’t be doing. For God’s sake, I went selectively mute in the fall and landed myself in inpatient, but I can’t hit my vape in front of my mom. It’s truly so disturbing. She’s driving sort of recklessly now, probably to scare me because I hate being on the highway—famously.

Being alive is so embarrassing. It’s all bullshit. It’s all meaningless and a never ending humiliation ritual. Bushwick smells like piss but I’ve missed it like a mother misses her baby. Bushwick is my baby. I am kind and gentle with her. Even if she’s insufferably annoying. I love my apartment with its big blue rug and small blue couch (and pink couch). I love my piles of unwashed clothes that I sift through periodically, trying to find at least ten things to get rid of every time I find my hands digging through it. I love my broken bed (my fault) and the blood stains on the mattress (also my fault). I love everything! Everything sucks and I’m dripping in love! It has soaked me to the bone, it has washed me clean, the love. The love, love, love. I hate my life! I love everything! Banana bread for dinner. Leftover Thai for breakfast. Coffee in the morning, shock therapy in the afternoon. Girl, Interrupted is on the shelf of my doctor’s office and I think about asking her why she would have that book here. I guess it makes sense, but it seems sort of on the nose.

July 5th

I am just about as brave as it gets. Turning to mush in my hometown with the bedroom door shut. Today is a nightmare, I can’t tear the vape from my mouth; this habit is infantile. I like re:stacks and Fuck Me Eyes. I like lots of alcohol and lots of weed. Turning to mush in my hometown living room, someone calls out bingo because on our made up board for this trip is Annabel has a nonverbal episode and I can’t even be offended by it because I’m so predictable it’s comedic. Annabel is smoking too much and not smiling enough.

My hands do the stupidest things, they touch only to hit, only to scratch. They can’t make contact with my skin without digging in. Annabel does not like eyes on her because they all can see my pores and bumps and cuts. Annabel wants all eyes on her because then they will jut out their lips, they will say glad you’re doing better and I am really sincere when I say thank you. Thank you for pretending to care for just a few seconds, thank you for placing a hand on my wrist as if in an effort to stop me from grabbing something sharp. Once you learn to love a sharp object it loves you back. It loves you like I love my friends. Annabel—who is luckier than a lot of people—is predictably sad over the Fourth of July. My skin makes her gag. Retaliating by burning it. Somewhere along the way I decided to love the Fourth of July like it’ll disappear if I take my eyes off of it. The Fourth of July is my favorite day of the year. I like an outfit change, an excruciating amount of hard seltzers. All of the love and all of the friends.

Turning to mush in the third row of the rental car. One foot on Dan’s big speaker, another curled underneath myself. Viciously carsick but trying not to be. Writing about it to distract myself from potentially vomiting and ruining everyone’s day. My own day was ruined on the third, because I don’t know how to process emotion. I’m so angry and brave all at the same time. Bravery shines through my anger. My anger cuts through my bravery. This combination turns me to mush while I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth while I focus on not throwing up. So fucking angry. I’m tired of writing about what I do to be able to breathe. What makes me shake, catch air in my throat and trap it, is just about everything outside of my bedroom. I love the Fourth of July so much.

When I get overwhelmed I get cruel. When I get angry I get mean. When I relapse I get bitter. Nobody to blame but myself, but I’m pinning it elsewhere for a few minutes a day to give it air. Self inflicted resentment will kill me one day, if God doesn’t get to me first. Gibson says I’m getting better because it’s been six months either way, and I’m not doing it everyday. I know I’m getting better because the thought of it makes me wince. Turning to mush on my bed, my right leg extended. Slow breathing and a rag to my leg. I’ve made such a mess of things, everyone was right to keep me away from the drugs this weekend. I stick to weed and alcohol. Jared says to act like I’m pregnant, I tell him my brain doesn’t work that way. I wish I was pregnant, then I’d have to stop drinking and smoking and cutting and sucking on my vape. Then I’d have a real thing inside of my body, sucking on me. I’d have a baby, a soft one. A smooth one with no scars and no cuts. She’d be perfect, and she’d be a girl. I’d have a good feeling about it and I’d be right. A real baby would fix me, probably. A real baby would throw out all of my razor blades and kiss me goodnight. A real baby would love me like no one else would. If I had a baby I’d love her so much. I’d never cut again. I would be soft and I would be strong. I’d smile for days. Anyways, I’m trying out optimism. My summer is not ruined. I am not evil. God loves me more than anyone else does. But everyone loves me a lot. I’m a writer. I’m a mother. I’m a perfect daughter. Optimism feels sour coming out but I’m optimistic towards optimism. Everything will be okay and I know how to write like I know how to breathe. I never turn to mush or forget how to feel things.

August 12th

Last Friday I spent nine hours getting my hair dyed blonde. I’m a natural brunette. I’ve got brunette thoughts and brunette feelings. I’ve got the face to be brunette. It’s natural. So naturally I went blonde, because what else is there to do during the death of summer and what feels like the apocalypse. My life is a wasteland. There’s always too much to do and never enough stamina to get it done. Everything was easier when I was seventeen, briefly blonde, and a drunk. So I’ve never gotten over being seventeen–who has? Who’s surpassed that feeling, and how do you get rid of its hold over everything that follows?

But now I’ve got blonde thoughts. I am twenty one and on top of the world. Today my psychiatrist approved me for accutane and told me I was in a better spot than a year ago. I almost cried. He didn’t mention my blonde hair. Blonde thoughts are fun. They’re all about what I like. I like wired headphones and vaping. I like wet bathing suits and summer. I like the heat. I like dog eared pages. I like light pink lipstick. I like blonde hair. I like taking pictures of myself and I like myself. I like when it’s over and I like goodbyes. I like my hairbrush and my room. I like my pink bed. I like my bunnies. I like my mom. I like pink things and small things. I like toast. I like mango seltzer. I like cursing. I like swimming. I like my fake Miu Miu sunglasses. I like my white ballet flats. I like my red ballet flats. I like the nonsensical. I like the mundane. I like getting high. I like hair clips. I like earrings. I like 7pm. I like horror. I like postcards. I like being tan. I like bringing wine. I like white claws. I like matches. I like water. I like punctuation use and pessimism. I like letters and numbers. I like nose rings. I like horses. I like stacked things. I like things that are in piles. I like duvets. I like mirrors. I like medicine. I like dresses and I like jeans. I like my hair dryer. I like a lot of things.

Sept 28th

Stoned and sitting on the little blue couch trying to decide on if I’ve gotten significantly dumber in the last year. Unfortunately, it’s most likely the truth. I figure some part of my brain had to pay for all the shocks and treatments and therapies and medications. I think I have never been so vulnerable on the internet than I have been this year, and that’s also probably making me dumber. Intellectually, I guess. Finally I got my promotion at my retail job, which although a seemingly small win, is a win nonetheless. All of my positive energy lately has been channeled into this job, because I don’t know how to work a job I’m not obsessed with–literally. I don’t know how to contain my obsessive personality. It manifests in the weirdest ways. My work. People. The past. Dates and numbers and time. Lindsey pointed out this last one the other day on the phone. She thinks it’s probably some form of autism. I think we tend to throw that word around a lot. Either way, this one I find profoundly intriguing because it makes absolutely zero sense in regards to the rest of my personality. I am criminally type B, or whatever the messy lazy one is, to an extreme fault. Yet I give an absurd amount of fucks about what the date was when some random event occurred. And even worse–at what time it happened. It’s truly so strange. To me, at least.

The other day I was telling somebody, I forget who at this point, that I have trouble writing with the present because I don’t want the people in my life reading this to know how I feel about present situations. Sometimes I wish I had just made my Substack without telling anyone. But I do like that my friends read my things. Most of the time. Once enough time has passed, I truly could not give less of a fuck about who will read pieces I’ve posted about them and a specific event or situation. I also just find it very therapeutic to dissect things after they’ve happened. And if I don’t get my thoughts and feelings out of me they’ll haunt me forever. It’s a purging.

I’ve been working on this essay for months, coming back to it every so often and working on it until I get so upset that I have to abandon it for a while. It kind of reminds me of the process of writing my grocery store essay, which I truly never believed I’d ever finish. Somehow this one is worse. Substantially worse, actually. It would be a terrible idea to post it, but I’m so impulsive and self destructive that I know the second I finish it I’d probably post it. So I’ve come back to it again the last week or so, and as expected, I feel awfully depressed. The topic is a very scary thing to me. I’m being very intentionally vague. Who knows, maybe the more I write about this the more will spill out of me. A sour slew of confession will splatter all over my life. I can not stand to think of the fallout. It makes me sick. And more on this topic, how am I supposed to reconcile with something I’m not sure even happened? I feel so angry about it sometimes that I could burst. Everybody saw it for what it was except for me, and everybody let it happen. I just feel so guilty, and so upset. I never thought it’d turn into this despairing realization that I have come to. That I was always going to come to, one way or another. Fuck.

Oct 8th

Three months clean–again. It feels as if all of my attempts at staying clean are futile and fruitless. I will inevitably cut again. That’s how I feel, at least. But then again, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll never cut again. Ever. I’m so tired lately. Tired of the same boring, lifeless and trivial topics I circle around and around, writing them in different ways because I’m too lazy to think of something new. This morning I swore that I would never write about you again. You will never have my full attention ever again. I swear it.

I’ll break that promise in three days. Absolutely. No doubt about it. I also must stop writing about being seventeen, because there is nothing spectacular about it, nor was there ever. It was all just heavy romanticization and nostalgia for the last time I had no real problems to worry about. Really, all that I cared about when I was seventeen was cheerleading. Nothing of note there. All I know is now that I should have cared less about cheerleading.

It’s all almost silly to think about now, and then dead serious when I investigate it further. Once again, I am being intentionally vague because every other attempt I’ve had of writing this down has been extremely conscious minded, and I don’t do well analyzing that situation with a fully conscious mind. There’s more to it, of course, but the further I dig, the more I uncover, and the more upset I become. What do I have to gain in getting upset about it? What about it would change if I were to face it head on? Nothing. Nothing will change, because what happened, happened. No going back.

November 17th

I need to be more anonymous, I’ve been realizing. The past year has been one really long streak of self destructive patterns and behaviors. In reality this streak probably started back in 2020, and has been developing and growing worse over the past five years. So I have been doing a lot of self reflection, and come to the realization that I need to get re-screened, because whatever is wrong with me goes deeper than just being morbidly depressed and anxious. Something much more sinister is at play here, digging its nails into my brain and whatnot. My first step in the right direction, apparently, is deleting everything I have ever posted on Substack, because I have convinced myself that not only am I a terrible writer, but I am also probably a narcissistic and deeply manipulative lunatic. Everything I write, or have written, in the past year, has either been a thirst trap, or a desperate attempt at a confusing and lack of context confessional. It was all so horrifically dramatic and monotone. I sounded like a broken record after a while, and I am wondering why nobody ever commented on the fact that I was clearly off the rails and needed to do some inner work on myself and spend less time trauma dumping on the internet. While the internet has a tendency to be malicious and cruel, the internet also could not give less of a fuck about a 21 year old girl who believes herself to be quite literally, the saddest girl ever to exist. And I’ll give myself a shred of credit here, and that’s the fact that every 21 year old girl believes herself to be the saddest girl to exist. That’s just part of being alone in your early twenties. There is nothing particularly special about my sadness versus everyone else’s.

The only writing that I’ve been doing lately, ever since my realization of the fact that I am not a very good writer, is my end of day email at my job. This, as you can imagine, is not a very good outlet for my supposed creativity. I stopped working on all of my fiction pieces months ago, because I was getting too wrapped up in the characters’ lives and too displeased with my own life. Writing, as much of everything else that I love, was becoming deeply depressing. If I am to continue posting on Substack, I figure I may need to make it less unhealthy for both myself and the people in my life. The concept of anonymizing any part of my work never occurred to me before, but then I began writing about the people in my life in a somewhat negative and unfair way. Because honestly, my viewpoint in the moment consisted of a complete lack of care for the other person in which I was absently name dropping and ridiculing. And if the person were to read it, I really would not have been bothered by it. After all, I was a part of that situation too–wasn’t I entitled to speaking about my own experience? It was an extremely selfish mindset. This is not an apology letter. It is really coming off that way, I fear. No, this is more like a journal entry but with no malicious and evil vendetta. Today is Monday, and my day off. It is almost seven pm and I am drinking wine out of a disposable Dunkin cup that I rinsed out from earlier today in order to avoid doing a single dish.

December 10th

I do feel that age old nostalgia for high school, but not the way that I used to. In my opinion, you either miss high school or you don’t. Two types of people. And most agree that the ones who miss high school are the ones who peaked in high school. And God, maybe I did. At least back then I wasn’t so uncaring and useless. No, back then I had the kind of drive for success that not everyone has. I knew what I wanted, that was always evidently clear. What I wanted was to move to New York and to be a writer. I was not a very good writer in high school. At least not in the way that I wanted to be. An academic essay was easy for me, but what I wanted was to be so talented that it spilled out of me. I wanted jaws to drop and skin to crawl. I wanted to be so on point with what I was trying to say that it was terrifying. I wanted people to read what I had written and come to an epiphany or leave with their life altered. And I wanted that so badly, so badly. With it, I wanted everyone to know it. Everyone would say, oh Annabel, she’s that incredible writer. Or, conversely, have you read that essay Annabel wrote? Of course nobody was saying that, because nobody gave a fuck what I was doing, let alone writing. So I searched for praise in teachers and adults that found me wildly untalented and more so a kiss-ass. Dark, too. My attempts at being brutally honest in my work came off depressing and uncomfortable—and not in a good way. I’ve read discomfort done beautifully, and I was not doing that. No, my writing was a 2012 Tumblr rip off. It was trigger warning central, fourteen year old angst ridden. What I was writing at seventeen was so pathetically embarrassing that even though I used to swear against deleting anything I’d ever written, I wanted it wiped off of the face of earth. With how embarrassingly bad it all was. I still don’t find myself to be talented, or very much of a good writer, but I still want the same thing. I’m still trying to be what I always wanted to be. Because things like this never come naturally to me. All of my life, I’ve lacked natural ability. But before the last couple years of my life, I had such drive and passion, that it didn’t matter. I’d work harder to make up for my lack of talent. I’d prove everyone wrong. So yeah, I miss high school. I miss my shitty notes app entries and notebooks filled with stories, because at least I was fucking writing, and at least I was fucking trying. Whatever. It’s been a hard year. I wish I was less self deprecating and awful. I’m going to try really hard to be better next year. I really am. I swear it.