Make Sure Your Hands are Clean

He says I'm selfish.
And for a second I was at the precipice of self loathing and another downward spiral, when I stepped back and thought, "wait a minute, no I'm not."
I looked into who I am.
I am the type of girl who even though I've know this girlfriend for a couple weeks, during a random house party I will hide and put a candle on a cheesecake I've conveniently hidden and get the whole crowd to shut the hell up and sing "Happy Birthday" because even if they are strangers, she still deserves to be special. To be celebrated.
I am the type of girl who even after a guy I really liked and was dating went behind my back and hooked up with my best friend, the first thing I ask when I bump into his best friend, is to ask how he's doing.
I am the type of girl who cheerleads for anyone's dreams, even no matter how small or delicate they are, always putting the spotlight on where it needs it most because I'm more comfortable and natural at being the one backstage.

I think if anything I haven't been selfish enough. Or self loving anyways. Every mistake, every intentional hurt from another, every chance I don't take,  its always another reason to mentally flagellate myself. If I had physical proof of the rape and massacre of my mental thoughts, my body would have already peeled back from itself, inside out.

The only way I have ever been selfish is wanting someone who loved me. Unconditionally. That's the catch, the second part. Whenever I stop becoming useful, or entertaining, or people are buoyed enough by my stepping up my back to the next rung on the ladder, they leave. I cannot count or even put a statistic to this but it is a problem that is a running rampant virus that I see not only in my life but even through heartbreaking stories of strangers, when they are just tipsy enough to let out the pains they keep so tightly confined in Monday morning suits.

And I say fuck it. So be it. Be alone then Tina. Own it. Until you find those people who really love and encourage and inspire you, and just plain stick by who you are as much as you can for them...
Don't bother.
And for that man who called me selfish, you know who you are, as Bob Marley once wisely said,

Who are you to judge the life I live?
I know I'm not perfect
-and I don't live to be-
but before you start pointing fingers...
make sure you hands are clean!”

Why is it that alot of parents should really never have been parents?
I saw a quote today that made me laugh and wince at the same time
"My only goal as a mother- raise children that don't have to recover from their childhood."
Isn't that such a interesting concept- yet holds so true for so many of us?

Both my father and mother were pretty much completely absent from my life. My mother is bi polar. Which means she never had enough energy, or had too much. Meals were skipped, raids in our rooms were common, and her mood swings were like wreaking balls, coming with full force and from a different direction each time. I don't know if the moods were worse or the withdrawals. Times where I didn't know where she was even I when I was sitting right next to her. I learned from a very young age not expect a meal, let alone a shoulder to cry on from the first person who is supposed to provide security for you. Needless to say, I signed all my school permission forms, I learned to vary toast as much as could ( as in with cheese, with sugar and cinnamon, with ketchup ((seriously)) ) and I spend most of my days couch surfing on friends homes and switching it up enough that their parents wouldn't get suspicious. From a very young age I had to lie and pretend. I wanted to die inside every night I saw my girlfriends get kissed or the cheek or asked about school from their moms. It was like a special club everyone was in on but me.

It pains me that I had to pretend, because I think now maybe if I had just given up the jig, told somebody, or went to a counselor...I might have gotten help. It terrified me then to think of being placed in a boarder home...but now that I think about it, it would have been more consistent and secure than what I had been doing.

My father. Lord my father. A conundrum. In some ways he did alot and in others he fails me still. He did step in when I was 16 and took me to live alone with him. And I am thankful for that. But from 9-16 he left. Too tired, too weary, and just too frustrated with life with my mom, he left our home. Gone to California. Such a fucking cliche when I think about it, except the casualty of this cliche happens to be my life. By that time my two older siblings had graduated and were out of the house, my sister was in her senior year, and I was at most impressionable age. Seriously it's scientific. By 9 years old you identify your world and get your most defining outlooks or view on life. What I knew for sure was two things. I'm not worthy of attention. And that people never stay.

Once my sister graduated I had 3 long years of being alone with my mother. I was ignored, berrated, and often interrogated. It was like I was living with 3 evil step sisters all embodied in this short squat little woman. I will never forget with such clarity that I reluctantly came home one day and saw my moms friend Sam's car in the driveway. Sam was another like my mother. Bi polar and scary when she was unleashed. I walked in the door and saw them talking in the kitchen and at the sound of the door Sam looked at me with daggar eyes. Like I had done something wrong. I didn't want provoke anything so I went into the living room and switched on the computer. I waited as the stupid fucking dial up loaded like the piece of shit it is and heard them walk into the room. Taping my foot anxiously I tried to ignore them.
It started off easy
"So have you heard from your father?" Sam's voice dripped like acid. It was a laid out trap and I knew I could never walk out of sharp edges.
It became a bash session. Sam at the front whipping me on both sides, and what I remember most is my mother just sitting there. Just sitting there. No expression. Watching. Watching as this outsider, this violently loud woman spit things like "your father made your mother have kids, she didn't want any!" or "your father should've had a vasectomy!" Things you just never want to hear as a child, as a person, or as a spirit. I don't think I've ever been more scared or more hurt in my whole life watching my mother sit by and let me be torn to shreds. And I will never forget that feeling that I witnessed evil at such a young age.

Why am I saying all this? Because I'm 23 and unemployed and working dead end jobs my whole life. And I know they say don't blame your parents, but is it really blame to say I am so broken from not having any? I cry myself to sleep in one way or another every night. Whether because I am so terrified every day, or because I feel like a complete failure, or that I can't impress the very people who will never give me that satisfaction of recognition anyways...I dunno.
Bad night tonight. Can't do this anymore.

I hope he's right

What is it about love that makes the heart so profoundly ecstatic and yet can make you so profoundly sick in heart at the same time?

Another great man has left my life. After 3 months where we spent almost everyday together, where we shared our hopes and dreams, our problems with family dynamics, the harsh hurts we learn as children and cover from the world...and yes made love too many times to count. Well sex mostly for the first couple months. You know..the exciting part about falling in love, getting to be ravenous and flirty and staying up till 5 am each night because the intimacy of perfect nights of soft music playing in the background with the tiny glow of a single candle bathing your beloved in soft golden shadows. You start thinking the world does not exist outside of this place, with this person.

But he had to leave. He told me. Too late, but he told me.
"Going back to Toronto this summer. My contracts up," had seemed like a little bummer of a note only two nights into knowing him and hanging out with him only with a group of friends.
Little did I know I would be falling in love with him...

And of course like a dick I had to pick a fight with him over the phone a week after he left. Testing whether he loved me, or whether he still did. But he saw through it and it actually all ended up blowing in my face instead. A self made landmine. I'm getting pretty good at those.

I went to the community outdoor pool today, and it was one of those perfect days. The ones with the sun so hot it air drys your wet skin, cloudless skies, children shrieking and laughing, the shhhhh sound of the trees in the wind.  I should have been rejoicing; not silently crying hot tears that leaked down into my mouth, and which I did not brush away.

The beauty of it, is I am seeing a pattern. I love so fiercely and openly and devotionally when I love. It's like I want the force of my love to be so strong they have to love me back. But it's thats not real love then. It's my insecurity of not feeling...enough, not being enough, not be worthy of love. That why would anyone love me? I can't even love me....

God it hurts though. You invest yourself into someone and they walk. There is no feeling worse. It's just further proof that all those feelings of worthlessness are true. Why else would he not stay?

I know it's irrational. His work, family, and life is back in Toronto. I was a 3 month blip in yearly plan he had.
But I can't help it. Thinking maybe it should have been like the movies...where he shows up at the door and tells me he's going to stay. Maybe not even that dramatic or cheesy. I'd settle for a "I love you too" text. So much hope and sadness is tied into wishing, almost makes it terrifying to dream for something ever again.

"I do not regret the things I've done, but the things I did not do- " the wise man Rory Cochrane once said. God I hope he's right.

I shouldn't have to hurt this much

I a weird homework assignment today. But considering it's for my shrink, i think it's expected to be weird. And by weird I mean so damn personal and slamming into your heart like a slab of meat weird. On this daily chart I had to write down simple situations, things I encountered over the day, things like "I had a rough day at work after a few impatient customers," or "a good friend left the country today" very objective just simple overview of what happened to me. Then on the bar beside it, I had to write "The depressive thoughts" or the things I felt or associated or attached to these simple situations. Seems simple enough right?
Wrong.
I got a glimpse into my mind in the most violated way.
I saw just how scary it was. In black and white.
A bad day at work changed to- My life is going to be a series of dead end jobs. I will die miserable and bitter. I am worth nothing.
Another friend who I cared about leaving became- I am alone. I am never enough. I am a stepping stone for other people's successes. I don't want this particular life.

Each one she looked, her voice reading them aloud.  So monotone and objective, those dramatic feelings came out like someone reading a bad play. It was like someone reading your diary aloud, in every way it felt humiliating. But more than that. The way she really looked at them, and would tut or say, "Oh Christina...." and her eyes would look at me. Like she was a mother, giving me the space to feel them, not commenting, but her eyes allowing me to hurt.
I cried.
Thickly.
"It doesn't have to be this hard. I mean this-", she held the papers up, -"this is too much pain darling. I mean I'm glad you only wrote down one a day. My god each one is a whole story on its own."

I don't know my next step. She says I have to get over my fears and take some prescriptions. That they can help. Everything inside me screams no, is adverse to drugs and how the pharmaceutical system with all its fucked up antibiotics and side affects killed part of my health in the first place.

But I don't know. Maybe she's right.
I shouldn't have to hurt this much....

Low Lull

I am a graveyard site. That is how I feel these days. Barren and dry and decaying. Where are the fertile valleys of my dreams? Where did they go? I'm so sick of being tired, and doing things because I have to instead of I want to. Is it so wrong or grand for me to long for fearless, happy, maybe doing something I like and still being able to eat something for dinner kind of life? Most of the time the answer is yes, that's too much to ask for. You pay your bills, you're quiet after 11pm so as not wake the neighbours, and you wake in the morning groaning to go to work which barely pays for this place thats not my home. God help me get through this phase. Another low lull, just ride it out. Please don't give up.

Too Small for my Spirit

I don't know why I can't sleep nights.
And I do.
Every day my spirit it curtailed by the "duties" of this world, I die a little bit more.
It's a slow death. Every slow workday, where I end up coming home after the sun has already gone down, it's a still birth to my dreams. It becomes harder and harder to feel like satisfaction is possible in this life. That is is only a luxery for the rich, or smart, or beautiful, which God decided I wasn't worthy of. Instead I am this feeler which feels everyday more and more like a curse. A self timed ticking bomb in which I will self destruct and I have to watch the mind numbing process of watching the glorious trailers of other peoples lives while fantasizing from a dark room in the late hours of the night. I know I shouldn't complain, there are those without roofs over their heads, or food in the bellies, or the luxery to even worry about their futures because they need to survive the present. But sometimes...I don't know. I feel cursed. A sadness which is has wrapped around my heart so deeply, it now has roots, and grows stronger with each proof of dissapointments which come in forms of friendships or relationships or just my personalship of titanic emotions.
I don't think anyone really knows me. And after so many days of asking others how they're doing, you begin to shrivel inside. A plant with no sun, I have been in a long, long, winter.
I'm tired of being false. I am with so many. I lie so easy it becomes habit. After a lifetime of trying to preserve the image of self sufficiency from such a young age...it becomes sort of necessary to not relax into the reality of complete dissaster. It's not even disaster. It's the mundaness of it all. I work, sleep occasionally, and then do it all over again. Mostly I think about if dying is really the easiest solution. It is selfish and cowardly, but sometime I hear a song, or a see an old picture, or read something so heart breaking, and it makes me feel like this body is too small for the size of my spirit. I want to be ripped open and let free. And this 9-5 bullshit allows no room for freedom in any way.

Little Bit Less of that Loneliness

When I got the text from him, which basically said "me and your best friend have been really digging eachother for awhile and think we have something. We've been together for awhile and now we'd like to make it official. Thanks."
This coming from a guy who I'd slept in his arms and talked into the night less than a month before.
I don't know what I felt first. Anger sure as fuck. But something I can't quite identify. Dissapointment?
I like to believe that people are generally good, that they are all looking for love and acceptance just as I do, so how bad can they be?
Me and this guy both came from same backgrounds too. With serious troubled health, mental ups and downs, and well this "persona" we both talked about. They one we tried on and suited up each time we got in a crowd or even just with others. A clown costume. The loud, funny, jokester, the very brash and outgoing prankster that no one could imagine could actually be very shy. Very lonely.
We talked about this at 4am after a dance party where the rest of the group were sprawled in drunken disarray around his apartment from the corner of curtains in the living room, the bathtub (yes I'm serious) and in the hallway to the kitchen. Everyone there. But we were alone. The door closed. A world within a world. We shut off the world and let our own take over. Curled into his shoulder with his arms around me I felt safe. Trusting, and trusted. He was opening up to me like a dying man. Telling me how hard it was to be crippled literally at such a young age from his broken knees and how it kept him from a lot of things he loved. He was being so blatantly honest and true, speaking from a place of innocence and fragility. Things that men aren't allowed to show with their "bros" round. And I sympathized. Or more empathized. I may have not had broken bones, but if you've read me blog you know I've collected enough health issues to be just as crippled.
Either way I guess what I'm saying is I felt like we had both seen each other. Both acknowledged each other in a way no one else could. It felt sacred.

Days later in another 2 hours funny banter over facebook chat where we send eachother funny youtube clips, traded all our best song numbers (which was hard since we overlapped alot) and made plans for the next weekend, it came up. I knew it was kind inevitable. He asked me out.

And I don't know why but I knew I had to say no. But I was straight up about it. I told him, not because I didn't think he was awesome, or cute as hell, but I had to decline. I wasn't nor am I healthy enough to handle my own life, let alone take on someone else's needs. I didn't want to try because if I fucked it up I'd fuck up one of the best things in my life (or so I thought). And because I was so rawly honest about it, so vulnerable about my shortcomings, he understood. He said he understood and that it was okay. And so I believed him.

A weekend or so later, somehow the sleeping arrangements after another group dance night, I was again in his arms. And I had to ask, whether from a place of pride, or just need to know since I still adored him, I asked whether he was really "okay" that I said no. That I had to say no.
"I get it. I do. I was bummed for a few days. But I'm fine now."
And I snuggled deeper into his neck and squeezed him, showing him that if I could love him I would.
I don't know now. I might have been falling in love. Or maybe I just adored another sensitive soul. Or maybe I just really longed for the recognition we both found in each other. Who knows at this point.

Anyways, from that point on, things just well...deteriorated. We went from talking everyday to me trying to make conversation via text. He'd text back at his leisure of course. Usually a one liner which would frustrate the fuck out of me. On movie nights I noticed he's sit away from me, or find someone else to lounge on. One particular night it was particularly obvious things were not good. I was a bit high and on edge and he was horizontal across my good friend Patricia. And I hadn't seen patty for awhile, and I wanted to cuddle with her. Or maybe him. I dunno even. But I tried to get in the middle and he just played zombie. Heavy limbed and playing dead I tried to pry him off to Patty's amusement, giggling while I tried to squeeze me teensy self in between this lug. I did manage, but his entire weight, back and all was pressing into my midriff as I cuddled with Patty. Eventually I gave in, "All right, all right you win," I said jokingly and roughly pulled myself out of the mess of limbs.

I went across to the other couch where the guys were sitting, and although it was only about a foot away from him, it may as well have been a 1000 yards. I felt myself being sucked by a tide, and a black hole was forming in between us now.

Even with friends over, we'd bicker. And it wasn't unnoticed. It was embarrassing hearing him tell me off.
"God I don't want to talk about it!"
 he said when I kept pestering him about what was happening with this dream job that he was forming with his friends. I heard through the vine that it had gotten pulled and that there were "issues" within the group. This info gathered all from everyone but him. I wanted to know so badly after I heard. Felt like something this important, then as a friend I should know. I had to. If I didn't then the void really was real and I was really only becoming an acquaintance.  I was losing him and I clung like hell. I did the hellish mistake of being a woman and I pestered him about it. And off course he told me off.
Even in front of his friends and roommate. Like I was some fucking animal, something he could tell to go piss outside cause he wasn't in the mood to "walk me through the details".
So I got back the only way I knew how. I straight up said I wouldn't be crashing with him that night. S'not like we were a couple, but saying I was going to be crashing with Patrick was odd enough to make a statement. Over months of sleepovers I had never crossed that 2 food gap of carpet to sleep in that other room.

Me and Patrick were on good terms. Friends, playful. But strictly platonic. So it wasn't weird when I stayed with him that night. We settled down, having a smoke, a tickle war, maybe a few extra lion cub wrestle matches because I loved hearing him giggle like a school boy. I've always been pleased when I can make a big guy curl and titter like a litte lamb. Mostly it was just a nice burn off steam and it was hella fun, but it didn't mean I didn't hoot and jaunt extra loud or make Pat laugh extra hard, making sure the fun was heard through the walls. Yes bitch move. I know.

Anyways the move was pointless, the slice had no sting, because in reality, he was already making moves with Patricia weeks before. Of course I knew nothing. So the next morning I apologized. Like a fucking chump. A ignorant, albeit partly guilty, but still yearning for the good old days chump. I was genuinely trying to get my friend back and I had no idea how.

"I think I really have something with Patty. I know you told her you have fears about changing the group dynamics, but I think the group's going to change no matter what."

That was the first time he'd texted me longer than a one liner, and it was to tell me he fell for someone else.

I think I cried for about four days, had kind of vicious emailing between him, and exhausting confusing and heart slamming like a piece of meat phone calls with Patricia for 3 straight days. Owing to her kind nature, she did say she cared for me, didn't realize how much I liked him, said she'd back out if it meant losing me. But it was all half hearted and empty promises. They were already and had already been together. Maybe not sex (as far as I know), but together enough to know they spent some nights together. Her in his arms. In my crook. She would have already learned the smell of his skin, the stubble on his cheek, the heat in the wind of his breath.
Knowing that I was just a replaceable piece in a world I felt I constructed with him, felt like the worst feeling I could ever feel. I felt like nothing, absolute nothing.
But the part that devastates me the most, is I felt like I knew these people. Especially him. Felt like I was understood and we understood each other. Like we had something between all of us. A invisible rubber band that held us together and kept anyone who wished to harm us away. Like we could never be the ones on the other side.
I guess I wanted so much to trust.

Anyways. Now I'm blabbering. I guess my point is, I feel like a recovering shotgun patient every time I reach out to trust, and it turns out sour. I spend the first while is shock, absolute mind numbing can't even feel anything or feel like eating shock. Then the pain, the overwhelming pain of the anesthia wears off and it floods my heart like an fucking heart attack. Months of this, crying, listening to sad music, eating again (at least) but this time in ferocious scary way. Binge eating like maybe enough of this will fill the fucking gaping ass hole which is now me. Then I slowly recover. But I don't. It's one of those soft to touch wounds. And its so damn visible every time I walk outside I purposely walk farther away from people so they wont brush up against the swollen parts. And even if they do come close enough, I pull down the sleeve. I'm fine. I'm fine. My answer for everything.

I never really recover from those hurts. And the worst part is I blame only myself.  Because even after this and all the others, with each bullet to the chest, I still unfalteringly, stupidly, but with a loving innocence miss and love them. The ones who the riffles. Because even for one night, in the quiet of the stars and the hum of mingled breaths, two people can feel a bit less of that loneliness.