This was my life, as I remember it:
Sometimes, I couldn't get up in the morning.
I'll just lying there, and staring at the ceiling, and I just lacked the energy to get up. I simply couldn't face another day of being me. I would think about being other people... James Dean, say, or John F. Kennedy. They had energy. They could do it. They could do more great things before breakfast then I could do in a century. But then I remembered that they're all dead. And I still couldn't get up.
And I'm laying there, thinking that I don't really want to go on, and then I eventually do. I'd reach over to the bed stand toward the bottle full of prescription medicine and take a small handful of caffeine pills, knocked back with a whiskey chaser, and when they hit it'll be enough to get me into the shower and on with my day. With any luck, I'd make it, but sometimes I would crash so hard, I would find myself holding onto the side of a toilet bowl in the back of some unnamed diner in a forgotten town in the center of the good ole US of A, throwing up my lunch and everything that I've put down there with it for the last week or so. And then I'd go home, or whatever was home, and I'd do some downers and go to bed again.
The next day, of course, it just happened all over again.
When I was high, I was damn funny. I was high all the time. When I crashed, I crashed hard.
The despair is different now. The depression is different. It's changed. I've changed. It's better in ways. It's much worse in others.
I've started flipping through books. I have this horrible habit of self diagnosis. I'm like a first year medical student with too much time on his hands. The next thing I know I've decided I have everything from my normal pack of neurosis to a budding case of acute hebeprenia, and any moment I'm going to start spewing utter schizophrenic nonsense. It's clearly the onset of a fugue state, and I'll wake up any moment in another state after living my life without realizing as another person for a year. My analyst back in California told me I should give it a rest, and let the professionals do the work they're paid to do, but they're not doing anything I'm not, they just happen to be a bit more objective. Or maybe they are. Anyway, it's not so much that I can't live with myself. That was yesterday. That's over. I can live with myself. Finally.
What I feel like, deep down inside, is that the people I cared for and trusted and believed in have emotionally and psychologially raped me for years and years on end, torturing and using as they saw fit for their own pleasure and amusement. I feel like I'm waking up from this awful dream, and finding out that it was real. I feel used. I feel dirty. I feel sick. I feel embarrassed. I feel like there are big slimy fingerprints all over my soul. I feel like some nasty old man with his gnarly hands and his leering grin has shoved his first two fingers up inside me and twisted and laughed as I cried. I feel sick and nauseous deep down inside, and I want to go throw it up and heave and heave until it all comes out, and then heave some more. I want to heave forever. I want to heave all the memories and all the guilt out of my system. The problem is, it's not ever going to come out. It's stuck, trapped down inside, and I can't get rid of it.
I feel guilty. I feel traumatized. I feel like a victim.
I've been physically raped before. I mean, hell, the fact that I happen to be more interested in women then in men is only part of the reason why I go around looking like I do. But this... at least then I could clean up. At least then I could hide the bruises and go on. At least then I could get out of bed the next morning.
What I want to do is curl up in a ball and cry and cry and cry until I can't do it anymore and I lay there exhausted. I want to scream, I want to yell, I want to pound the walls with my fists, I want to do something other then get more and more angry. Because I'm just getting more angry as the moments tick by.
I'm not entirely sure what to do, except to try and swallow it and go on with life. I've never exactly felt like... this, except those few times when coworkers decided to get a freebie.
I think this is why they take the newly Redeemed, and they lock them up somewhere comfortable and safe and warm and let them work it out for a decade or two, with nice drugs and flannel jammies and brownies and people who tell them how much they care. Because this is awful. This is redemption. This is the point when you realize, not that you've lost your friends and your family and your life, but what it's done to you all these years. You realize what a monster it made of you, and you realize that you've done this very same thing to others. You realize that your entire life has been nothing but using and abusing and taking and now you have to own up for it. You realize that your entire life has been a waste of time, and you've done nothing at all except hurt people for your own selfish gains.
It's hurting me so badly. I want to scream.
The problem is that I don't have a decade or two to get over it and work my problems out. I have until dawn. And then I have to get up and face the world and work. I don't know if I can. I'm sure going to try.
So, not knowing anything else because in reality I'm just a stupid little creature, I turn to God. I say to Him, "God, I'm so sorry for what I have done. Please, tell me what to do to make it better. Tell me what to do to make the pain go away. Please."
And God does not answer me.
But that's okay, I know He hears. I know what Needs to be done. I always have. I've merely refused to listen.
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