Welcome to the first entry in what I hope to make an expansive journal. Of course, this could go the same way all of my journals have. A few entries here and there, before puttering out, whether they be digital or physical. I think this is the 5th time I've tried? I have real hopes for this, though. I don't know why.
There are so many thoughts that I have where I think "I should write that down." Not for any particular reason. I just want to have a permanent record of them, for whatever reason. But now that I've started this thing, and written the entirety of the main page, I genuinely don't know where to start. I mean, I remember my original thought. I just don't know if it's the right place.
It's late, but not that late. I still have a fuck ton of homework to do. I'm listening to laura les, of course. The little energy I had is seeping out of me, the impulse that led to the creation of this site slowly dying down and replacing itself with the realization of how horrible this will go, no matter what. Not that I believe this will go horribly, but I can't help the thoughts from coming. I still have to do all of my homework, so I'm probably not gonna get any sleep tonight, much like the past month? two months? I don't remember the last time I had a full night's sleep. I don't remember the last time I woke up well rested and ready for the day. Maybe last year. Doubt it, though.
I've been thinking about my future. Maybe that's not the right way to put it. I've been thinking about the concept of a future for me. As a high school junior, it's a subject that is crossing my mind with increasing frequency. It's time for me to start looking at colleges. Time to start looking at careers. Time to start looking at internships. So, what do I want for myself? What am I good at? What do I think would make a good skill to take with me into the capitalist hellscape that is adulthood? What do I want for myself? For my future?
I always have a hard time envisioning myself in the future. I can envision the things I want---maybe I'll live in a small but well decorated apartment, or maybe a bus or van living in the Rockies and travelling, or maybe some sort of famous person, who the fuck knows. But I can't envision myself. It's probably because I'm queer. Probably because I'm trans, because I'm living as the wrong gender, because I don't even know what my gender is and if I can't envision myself post-transition how am I supposed to envision myself post-college post-job post-career post-everything???
Also, I don't know what I'm good at. I mean, I do know. I'm good at programming. I'm okay at music---that is, creating music. I'm good at learning, I guess? I get good grades in school, but I don't really enjoy school, just like, in general. But I wanna go to school, because maybe I will enjoy it if it's not high school, not my high school. Who knows.
I left out all of the stuff about being trans, obviously. I wouldn't be very good at living in the closet if I didn't. But the sentiment was there, of having such an uncertain future, of not knowing where to go.
My English teacher loves leaving vague and generally unhelpful comments. Sometimes they can be funny, sometimes they can be useless, occasionally infuriating. This one comment, though, was just disheartening. At the end of my essay, summing all of my frustrations about the ever-approaching future and my inability to set it straight, I wrote that I just turned seventeen. Obviously, from his perspective, that would be a silly thing to say. It's not like I'm an undecided college major, or a 40-something-year-old stuck in a dead-end job having a midlife crisis, or an old person looking back at their life, dissapointed at their inability to achieve what they wanted to achieve. So he commented, "This is inadvertently funny," right on the sentence in which I stated my age.
I get it, but just let me have this. Let me have this moment in which I am terrified about what comes to me. Try to see it from my perspective, try to understand how hard this is for me. Or, if you can't, don't be fucking rude about it.
I know objectively that everything is going to be "okay." My problem isn't that it's not going to be "okay." My problem is that I don't know how "okay" is going to look like, and that is scary. I want so many things, but at the same time, I don't really know what it is that I want. Then again, I don't even know that it's going to be okay. I don't know whether or not, in 20 years, I'll still be desparately trying to pay off student loans, or struggling to make rent. There is struggle all around me and there is no guarantee that I won't have to face it. And there's so much pressure on me to choose something now, the feeling that I need to make a final decision that will be impossible or extremely hard to go back on.
I guess I should say it again. I know objectively that everything is going to be okay. And even as I type it, I do not feel it. I don't know that I will ever come out, that I will ever be able to rid myself of dysphoria and other mental health issues that plague me. I don't know that I will ever feel safe in my own skin, if I ever come out. I don't know that everything is going to be okay.
I guess I should get to the point with which I started writing this site eventually. This thought came to me as many others do. It started a simple, one-off thought, but my brain decided to hang onto it. Decided to keep it, mull over it like hands slowly shaping a ball of clay. That wasn't a very good metaphor. I'm not very good at metaphors.
The thought was this: Maybe I don't want to escape. Mabye I don't want to come out, maybe I don't want to make a decision no matter how good for me it might be. As much as I suffer right now, maybe my fear of change is what is keeping me trapped, not any of the other crap I've probably already shoveled onto you.
I've become very comfortable in my depression. I hate it, but it's familiar. It's the waking up tired, the constant hungriness and fatigue, the constant wishing for greater and invisioning myself in positions that mentally stable and happy people are in. It's the constant masturbation to increasingly degenerate shit to try and replace the lack of happy chemicals in the brain. It's so many things that have become familiar to me as I have been living through them for the last months, years, whatever. Maybe I enjoy being in this state just because it's what I know
This would be the point at which, if I were writing something for class, or for other people to genuinely read and enjoy, I might tack on a message about how I will persevere, resist the urge of slowly destroying myself and staying stagnant, break through onto greater things, keep hope.
The truth is, I don't know. It's 11:24 and I still have to do my homework. Still have to wake up tomorrow. Still have to attend school, extra-curriculars. Still have to go to school on Friday, still have to do my homework, still... you get the point. There is so much left to say but so little time to say it. Hopefully these clay balls my brain has been collecting will keep their place on the shelf just a little longer, so I can truly release them like I have above instead of letting them rot. Not that writing this has hepled clean any of those clay balls out. I don't know what the point of this was. But I better keep going, just because.
Anyway, there's no happy ending. I'm not going to push through right now, I'm not going to stick the pedal to the medal, work through the grind, whatever idiom I can't think of right now. Obviously, I am hoping for better things in the future, but they aren't coming to me. I'm probably just going to end this abruptly and do some work, maybe I'll skip the work and go straight to sleep, where sleep is laying in bed on my phone until the urge to sleep overwhelms the urge to grab a knife from the kitchen and kill myself for whatever reason I'm sad today. For the shit I've outlined above, perhaps. Maybe I'm just being dramatic, I don't know. I don't know. Bye.