Broken

I’m broken.

That’s the only explanation.  There’s something inside of me that doesn’t work.  Substandard parts.  Shoddy workmanship.  Poor maintenance and upkeep.  Sand in the gears.  I don’t know.  I just know I don’t work…

[Stares blankly at the screen not knowing where to go next]

I already started this post once.  It didn’t work either.  I scrapped it.

There is nothing good about my existence.  Nothing to make me want to get out of bed in the morning.  The few things that used to give me joy, they don’t.  Not anymore.

~

I’ve had conversations with Deb, lately, about the idea of me coming in to see her more often.  Right now I go every other week and I honestly can’t afford to go more often than that, but she wants me to.

She talks about me needing to “be with” my feelings but I feel like I’ve done that.

I know who I am.  I know what I’ve been through and how it’s affected me.  I thought about making a list and then I happened across this post from last July.  My parents, my brother, my sister, the people I went to school with; it’s all there.

I know what’s been done to me.  I think about it all the time.  What’s the point in rehashing it any more?

When I started therapy I was clueless.  I didn’t understand what these experiences did to me.  I didn’t get how they shaped my personality, my existence.  I didn’t get how the experiences of my childhood affected the adult I am today.  Seven years of therapy later, I know those things now.  I know just enough to be dangerous.  I know how the abuse and the lack I endured as a child molded me into the crap adult I am now.  I know enough to recognize behaviors and attitudes in others and have an idea where those things are coming from.  Seven years of therapy later, I still don’t know how to affect a change.  I still don’t know how to deal with assholes.  I still don’t know how to not be miserable myself.  I can act a part, to an extent, but I don’t know how to be different

~

When I was a kid, I used to go to bed at night and pray for a “miracle”.  I would beg God to make me someone else.  I would beg and plead to wake up the next morning in a different bed, in a different family, with a different face and a different body and a different name and a different life.  I wanted to retain some sense of who I had been so I would know that this miracle had been performed and I would know how much better off I was.  I wanted to be happy and feel loved and wanted.  I wanted to feel love; to be able to love myself.

Every morning I woke up in the same bed, in the same body, in the same family with the same shitty life.  I got up, got dressed, got in the way, got yelled at, got pushed around, bullied and abused…  And then I went to school.  It only got worse from there.

When I was a teenager, I prayed everyday that somehow, someway, God would work a “miracle” and I would become something more, something better than what I was.  I wanted there to be a reason why I had to, why I was enduring all the pain and torment that I experienced.  I had no choice but to believe that it was all serving a purpose and when I was an adult and on my own, out in the real world, I would somehow transcend and no longer would I be this awkward, unloved, unloving, miserably unhappy person.  I would be something more.  Something better.  I would be happy, just to be.

I am an adult, on my own, out in the real world.  These days, when I lay my head down at night, I utter one simple prayer.  I don’t pray that I’ll wake up and be someone else.  I don’t pray that I’ll wake up and be someTHING else.

I pray that I won’t wake up.

I can’t continue this fight.  The struggle is more than I can bear.

I don’t want to be someone else.

I don’t want to be something else.

I just don’t want to be.