One year

It's officially been a year since I started this blog. In my first post I wrote about vulnerability. I think I do allow myself to be more vulnerable now than I did then, but I'm still scared that no matter how honest I think I'm being, I'm still not telling the truth.

I used to run out of things to blog about, forgetting to write until the Wednesday after, backdating my posts so that later it would look like I'd posted them on time. Now I'm sifting through the kaleidoscope of rubble that is my mind, plucking ideas, discarding the overripe ones. Despite all of the new content waiting to be organized, I still copy and paste ideas, sentences, paragraphs from drafts that are 5 weeks old. The world is quiet here, and I'm beginning to think it's possible for my world to be too quiet. I stand on one foot, not meditative, not teetering, just here, and I stand above rapids that twist and churn and I wonder how it would feel to be a banana peel dropped into a trash compactor.

Sometimes I read through my past blog posts, because I want to know if I've changed. Apparently, my life moves in cycles; "Stop" from last July and "Mistake" from last week are about similar responses to similar occurrences.

I'm 22 and I feel like a teenager. Whose idea was it to give me responsibility? I can take care of myself, I think, but my apartment remains unvacuumed and my body smells strange even after showering and I leave my laundry in the basement dryer for 24 hours because I can't find the energy to go down the stairs and get it. I can take care of myself, I think, because I'm so very good at managing my PTSD in the winter months between the anniversary of my sexual assault and the last time someone left me.

How do I heal from someone who isn't even an ex, someone for whom I was too much? I am healing. I am building new structures in Minecraft, taping over the memories of what we built together, what was destroyed on a Friday night with two messages and a click of the "block" button. When they unblocked me, I didn't let them back in. No. You left, and you hurt me. You don't get a second chance. Yes. I loved you. Past tense. Actions have consequences.

Everyone has someone else who's more important to them than I am, and I get it, because I also have someone else who's more important to me than I am. I get it, because family and childhood friends and weird 3am conversations at summer camp and high school string quartets and sleepovers. I get it, because I'm fun for a good time but not for a long time, because if you look closely, you'll see the rust corroding the veneer of self control, the rotting carcasses of good intentions, and the shadow of a universe in which I stop making excuses for myself.

I don't want to believe this about myself. I don't believe this about myself; maybe typing it will make it true. Honesty and masochism are not the same. I don't think being horribly mean to myself is self-awareness, but neither is allowing my subconscious to lead me into actions that it knows will hurt others. Balance. When my world is quiet, my mind is too loud. Balance. Maybe my honesty needs to come from a place of listening, of hearing what others need and reconciling that with what I need. Balance. Steady. Breathe. Let go.