All I Do Is Push You Far Away From Me

I hated myself. I really did. My heart carried around a self-loathing that was constantly on the verge of overflowing and I was shoving it in people's faces. I hated myself, everyone around me should hate themselves too.

I pushed everyone away and sat in my room of loneliness.

I hated myself for being lonely, hated that I was the reason I was alone. We accept the love with think we deserve and I didn't think I deserved any. But I wanted it. I wanted it so badly.

I was plagued by the fear of never being able to do anything right. I hated myself for that; for being afraid and for not doing anything right.

I remember it started really young. I remember learning to retreat from reality; when things were going badly I would quietly slip into the folds of my mind and hide and outside I would be a ghost. I wrote stories in my head, stories all the time, and I acted them out, I created characters with feelings that were tied to whatever was happening in my real life as a way of relief. But the stories were never an autobiography. Why write an autobiography when I could invent something so much better, some place more fulfilling, some place where I was happy?

Therein lies the problem, and the solution. The problem was my self-destructive childhood, my need to escape from my own life all the time. My stories became real to me. I made myself a character and I dictated what other characters did, and said, and felt, and it felt good to have some kind of world where I could control things. I made up background stories for them like they were real people who had real lives before I invented them. And I played it out like a movie and when it was over I wrote another one.

In the end, the fiction held more truth than my real life. It showed me the person I wanted to be, the life I wanted to have. My made up stories told me the truth about myself, allowed me to see my deepest thoughts, feelings, desires. Telling stories to myself became a solution. It gave me something to hope for; a way out.

The anger still hasn't dissipated. But it seems easier to shrug it off when I'm walking towards something like I've got a purpose. I like to kid myself that I'm going somewhere, that there really is a destination, a finishing line far off in the distance.

It seems lame to quote myself but what can I say. Sometimes I'm many different people.

"I’m hoping that there’s a bed for me at home, someone warm to curl up next to, stairs to walk down in the morning and a lot of sunlight outside, a bus that comes on time, and then places, I hope there are places I can go. I hope I have some place to go, some place to return to, a space in time in the crowded world that is just for me."

Polaroid.

"Life just is this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else." - Miranda July "No One Belongs Here More Than You"