The Iron Wicket

FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKYOUSTUPIDFUCKINGMORONWHYAREYOUSUCHANUNRELENTINGBLAMESHIFTINGASSHOLEJESUSFUCKINGCHRIST

I fear the phone.

When I talk about it with people, I tell them I don't know how it started, but that's a lie. I have a fairly good idea of how it started, but I don't really know how it developed into an actual fear.

I used to love being on the phone. Especially with my friend Shayne. We'd talk about this or that for hours, even if we just saw each other that day. When I'd get off the phone with her, sometimes I'd still be in such a phone mood that I'd call someone else since the phone was still in my hand.

The demise of Phone Dominique started with Zach. My obsessive feelings for him made me very anxious to hear from him. I waited for e-mails, IM's, and phone calls. When I was expecting to hear from him and the phone rang, if it wasn't him I would feel a profound sense of disappointment. That escalated to not wanting to be on the phone if it wasn't Zach. I started being on the phone with Shayne less and less, started initiating calls less and less, except with Zach. That sort of distaste with the phones wasn't that big of a deal, aside from apprehension about calling for pizza delivery.

But at some point in the last year or so, along with another series of mental problems that escalated very suddenly and very rapidly, that distaste for phone calls started growing into a fear. I began to hate the sound of the phone ringing. I had a phone in my room, but I kept the ringer off, because the idea of whatever I was doing being interrupted by the sound of a phone ringing was very discomforting. It was annoying for my mom and brother, because they were the ones that had to alert me every time someone called for me. I could still hear their phones ringing, but the sound wasn't in the room with me, so it wasn't as bad. But I started anticipating the sound of my mom coming out of her room after the phone rang, meaning she was bringing the phone to either me or my brother. I'd feel a surge of relief and maybe some disappointment when I heard her walk past my room and keep going to my brother's. Of course if no one else was home, I'd still feel the need to answer the phone.

Once Justin and I were together, it was easier to avoid making some phone calls, because I could ask him to do it for me. Once he left to Canada, there really was no one I wanted to hear from. I knew he was going to e-mail me instead of calling me, because...well he's kind of awkward on the phone. So when I moved in with my mom there was no reason for me to answer the phone really when it rang. However the phone is only a few feet away from my "room" here in the living room, so it's always a nasty jolt when I hear it. I was in a really bad place at that point, and really didn't want to talk to anyone other than my mom, so if anything other than her work number showed up on the caller ID, I wouldn't answer. That has continued to now. On good days or bad days, I still don't want to answer the phone.

I still have a strong dislike for making phone calls as well. I have to call my doctor for this or that, I have to call the pharmacy...and I hate having to do that. If I get my doctor's voicemail, I'll hang up because I can't handle the idea of waiting for a call back.

I hadn't been thinking about it much until I realized my seasonal job starts next month. My job which I take orders for a catalog company. On the phone. With all my anxiety, I could barely handle coming in last year... I kept having to call in sick or leave halfway through my shift. ...and the phone phobia wasn't an issue then. It's certainly going to be an issue now.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but I do have about a month to decide, so that's good.

I wish I could say every day for me is about progress, and analyzing where I've been, and where I'm going... but some days, alot of days, it's just about holding on and waiting to see what tomorrow brings.

But I do have a path in mind for myself. Things I want to do, and the things I have to do before I can do them. It's definitely not a timeline, but it'll do.


Learn to relax > Learn to exercise > Learn to stand/sit for long periods of time > Get part-time job > Get full-time job > Get dinky place to live and have lots of cats :)

When I give it some logical thought, that night I took six ambien wasn't a suicide attempt. It was just a cry for help. It was a cry to get help from my friends, or Justin. I think it was a cry to get help from my mom. I don't know why though. That's as far as I get. Of course I know now, that taking six ambien wouldn't have killed me, and that if there is a lethal dose of ambien, it's very, very, very high, but at the time I didn't. I didn't really expect to die though. It was more like the thought that if I happened to die, that would be ok. But it wouldn't have been. Maybe for me, but not for those few left in my life that I'd leave behind. I try to keep that in mind now when I feel like there's no way out.

My mom keeps some of my pills with her and gives me them as needed. I don't really need her to do that, and really I could call in for a refill and not tell her and keep them for myself, but I think having this bit of control over the situation means alot to her, and helps her worry less about me, so for now I'll leave that situation as it is.

I've been increasingly depressed this past week. I have that weird cry lump feeling in my throat alot. I'm frustrated with that. Every time I get depressed I feel like I'm failing. That if Justin's getting on with his life, then I should be too, and the fact that I'm just sad instead means I'm doing something wrong.

I'm trying some of the techniques I've learned to curb those feelings...such as deep breathing and nurturing self-talk, but so far I'm not very good at those things. So far they're only helpful in the moments I'm doing them, they don't really change my mood.

I still think about Justin all the time. Everything reminds me of him. I wonder if he's ok, if he's thinking of me, if I'll see him again. I hate that I don't hear from him anymore. It takes alot to not e-mail him.... but I've done well in the past few weeks. I can assume if he wanted to hear from me, he'd e-mail me.

It makes me so sad that he doesn't. It makes me so sad that I might never see him again, that this may very well be how things end with him and I, after knowing him for about 8 years. I want to try again. I want to get things right. I want that life with him that I've wanted for a long time now. I can't blame him if he never talks to me again, or if he doesn't want to be with me. I know I can't blame him, but I wish things were different.

There is so much I would do differently if we got back together. I hope I get a chance to show him that.

I hope I get a chance to show myself.

Buuu. I was supposed to go shopping with my mom today...(Lane Bryant, woo!) but I couldn't sleep. My ambien didn't kick in at all, and after that e-mail I sent to Justin a few weeks ago I've been afraid to take two in one night. So I couldn't fall asleep, and suddenly it was 6am and I had to get up in 3 hours, and I finally told my mom I couldn't go, and I got really upset and started crying :( ... She said she still had to go into town today, but that we could go tomorrow, and that made me feel even worse. She hates going in to town both days of her weekend, and she's going to be busy the next two weekends and I felt like I was robbing her of something. ...But not wanting to wait 3 weeks to get some new clothes won apparently.

...So I might taken 2 ambien tonight to make sure I get to sleep. Maybe I'll just stick my laptop under my mom's bed or something.

Ugh a 25 year old woman girl crying to her mom in the middle of the night.

I am not religious. I don't like religion.

But last night, I clasped my hands together, and I closed my eyes, and I prayed to god. I prayed for to be free of all these feelings. I betrayed my own beliefs for a chance at freedom, and nothing happened. Of course nothing happened.

I want to believe in myself, I do, but it feels like no one else does, so how can I? My mom and my brother are scared for me, maybe of me. My father probably has no idea about what I've gone through in the last months. Justin doesn't believe in me. That's the one that echoes in my mind the most of course. He said it barely one week ago. He said I'm not getting better. He said nothing is going to change. The person I love the most, the person I need to believe in me the most, doesn't.

It's my fault of course. All he can say is that it's my fault. How he can't have a life because of me, how I'm not trying to change for the right reasons, how he lied to me because of how I'd react.

I'm unlovable. The only people that love me now are the ones who are bound to me by blood.

I don't know how to handle this thought. If I'm never going to change, like Justin says, and I'm too much for anyone to handle, why am I still here?

I can't stop thinking about the last night I spent with Justin. I somewhat invited myself to dinner with him and his parents, and the whole time he and his father were so quiet. So quiet. I was very uncomfortable, and I asked Justin what was wrong, and he lied. He said he was just tired. But he already knew he was leaving me the next day. They all knew. I sat there jabbering like an idiot when they all knew they were leaving and that Justin was going with them. It makes me sick. It makes me so angry. I'm told that was my fault too. That he couldn't tell me. That he had to spring it on me because I would get sad, and I would talk him out of it.

I understand. I understand that it is my fault, and he has the right to blame me. It just hurts so much.

Maybe if I keep writing every day, keep pouring over those same events and feelings over and over again, they'll just wear themselves out.

Today was hard. As soon as I got on the bus this morning, my mind started wandering to the inevitable. My failed relationship with Justin. Everything I did wrong. Everything HE did wrong. What it will be like to some day find out he has a girlfriend, a wife, children. Or hell, if he finally makes that leap to gay-town. I thought about wanting to find someone, anyone to get me out of this loneliness. But I don't even know how to meet guys, and even if I did, do I really want to damage myself further by rebounding while I'm still in love with someone else? I'm frustrated with how one-sided this failure is. I wish him breaking up with me magically killed my feelings for him. If he's done having feelings for me, why can't I be done too? It isn't fair, and I hate it so much.

Those thoughts plagued me all day, like some annoying fly that keeps coming back no matter how much I try to swat it away with my hands. I pushed them down as much as I could, tried to ignore them, tried to reason and analyze my way out of them, but nothing really worked.

At the end of the day, as I took the bus home with my mom, I started talking about this or that. My day, her day, etc. We saw the bus driver she's dating, and she was all giddy. I asked her if Amy(the bus driver) had a cellphone, and she looked at me and told me to hush. It made me feel small, and annoying, and embarrassed. The dam burst. Tears were flowing out of me, and I couldn't stop them. I was trapped on a near full bus crying. I tried staring out the window to hide my face, but eventually I just buried my face in my hoodie. My mom passed me a note after a few moments. It said that she was sorry, and that she didn't mean to be harsh, but that she just didn't like talking about more personal stuff on the bus. It was very nice of her to give me the note, but I still couldn't stop crying, and all I could do was retreat into my iPod until the tears stopped.

Once I was home, I checked my e-mail, to see if I heard anything from a couple people I'd e-mailed over the weekend, and instead there was a reply from Justin to the e-mail I'd sent a week ago. It was kind of him to give me a response, but it just made me cry again. He said he knew I didn't mean to hurt him, but I did. He said he needs to take time to get better, and that he can't promise me that he'll want to be with me when he does. I understand. I wouldn't want to be with me either. Especially if I was doing better. That's what's going to happen, of course. He'll get better and better, and come to associate me with a dark past that he does not want to revisit, and that will be the end of it. I saw this coming the moment he left two months ago, but I tried to believe it wouldn't end this way. I tried to believe he would come back, but I knew he wouldn't. Even when he said he planned to. Even when he said I just had to trust in us. Even when he promised to eat a gallon of ice cream every day for a week and suffer the fate of the lactose intolerant. I knew, and that made me grab tighter and tighter, and it made things that much worse.

As for me, I don't know how to get better. Therapy isn't for me. It makes me uncomfortable, and aside from the books I was given, I've learned nothing that I didn't already know about myself. The medications I'm trying aren't for me so far, and even if they do start to work, I'm not really better, just suppressed. My only hope is to try to train my mind to think differently about myself, and if I can do that, it will influence all other parts of my life.

I wish I could just let it melt away. The fear and the jealousy, the need to control, and the depression that comes from that fear. I wish I could have my power back. But I've given it all away. To the friends I used to have, to Zach, to Justin, to my mother. I've given all my power away and now I don't know how to exist if they don't love me. And as one by one those people have stopped loving me and faded from my life, I too have faded and become a shell of what I could have been.

I did pretty well most of the day, but that feeling, that grief is starting to take hold. I'm trying to fight it off. I have the tv on and I'm reading a book, so that I might distract my thoughts as much as possible. I wish I felt more tired. I can't try to sleep until I'm actually tired, otherwise I'm doomed to spend an hour trying to fall asleep with nothing but my tortured thoughts to keep me company... and I need a break. I wish I could take a vacation from my thoughts. Or erase them altogether.

I check my e-mail constantly still, that there might be word from Justin, but of course there isn't. I look forward to the days when it becomes just an old habit waiting to be broken, but for now I'm stuck in the cycle of what I did wrong and how I wish I could change everything.

I am terrified of the future.

Oh my god.

I just drank an medium-sized glass of water.
When I finished, I looked in the cup and there was a dead fruit fly in it.

...I drank an entire glass of water with a fruit fly in the cup.

then I spent about a minute trying not to throw up on myself.
... Seriously, it really freaked me out.

...I guess I should be glad I didn't find it stuck to my teeth.

I just found out Death Cab for Cutie is coming to my city next month. >_< and I totally missed my chance to get a ticket because they're sold out.

A quasi-relevant band that I actually like is coming to my city and I missed my chance to get a ticket!

:( BOOO.

Oh well ... I still have Henry Rollins this month...

In other "news" I started to wonder what my other quasi-emo quasi-acoustic favorite "Dashboard Confessional" was up to... so I wiki'd them.. and they just announced yesterday that they were making a new album.

I just think it's weird because if I'd looked 2 days ago that information wouldn't have been there.

...Is this interesting enough to be posting about?

Ummm this is somewhat disturbing.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/03/10/pharma.water1/index.html

LOL. Boondock Saints is on Spike TV right now... but of course they have to censor all the "fuck"s out... which is like...half the movie's dialog.

I'll have to remember to watch it on the 17th. w00t.

Something from the ironic (and tragic) news department
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/01/24/poland.crash/index.html

Arrrgh I did it again! After reading all that mydeathspace stuff I googled suicide notes...which led to an article on Wikipedia about a politician who shot himself on camera, which led to me viewing the wikipedia list of filmed deaths, which led me to some website with horrifyingly gross photos in the style of Ogrish... so now I have all these horrible images in my head of people who were hung, and murdered bloody people, and the barely recognizable bodies of tsunami victims in my head!! >.>' so now I'm looking at photos of kittens on deviant art.

This isnt even the first time I've had to look at photos of kittens to try and erase some sort of binge-internetting involving horrific photos.

On the plus side... reading all those suicide notes had made me a little depressed and suicide-minded.... but the photos made me much less inclined to die any time soon. (although I guess if I was going to commit suicide I wouldnt somehow beat myself to death or drown horribly, but still. dead bad. kittens good.)

The amazing part is, I was looking at all that on a full stomach and having little reaction, but earlier I tried to plunge the clogged toilet on an empty stomach and almost made a barfy.

God I hope I dont have nightmares tonight about kittens murdering prostitutes and then drowning in a tsunami and being found many decayfilled days later.

Someone console me.

Glah. I have got to stop flittering over to mydeathspace.com... or whatever it used to be called on livejournal... I'll randomly go to the site like...once or twice a year and spend a couple hours reading about all these people that recently died, and seeing if they posted any ironic last thoughts, or intentional last thoughts in the case of suicide... One was awful.... a man who had battled depression gave in and commited suicide, leaving a final blog post on his myspace... and people who didnt know him were responding to the post days after his death saying all manner of thoughtless things... even knowing that the man's family routinely checked the page.

People are so disgusting. Especially people on the internet. I think our generation will utterly go down as the the most unkind in history. That's right. Some of them sicken me more than Nazis.
Think about that next time you want to be an asshole, people. Think "wait, do I want to be worse than a Nazi?"

Ok maybe that's a stretch :P

Ok... so two rival news helicopters crashed while filming a car chase.
Police are saying the suspect will likely be held responsible.
WTF?
How is pilot negligence the fault of the suspect!?


CNN Article

This is just the most disgusting thing I've read in a while...

http://www.kansas.com/201/story/112757.html

....Wtf is wrong with people!?