Rollercoasters

I don’t feel safe.

It’s frustrating and annoying to admit that because generally, when a person says that they don’t feel safe, it’s usually from their environment or another person. 96% of the time, I’m in my own apartment when this uneasiness leaks into my head. It doesn’t necessarily have to happen after a bad day. It just creeps into my head like some sort of silent, poisonous cloud, and all I want to do is get in bed, put on rain sounds, and hug myself.

I’m not afraid of being invaded or attacked. Strangely enough, bubbly and girly Lacey is the one obsessed with serial killer podcasts, not me. I like reading about Jonestown, Manson, and Columbine, but they don’t keep me up at night. They’re interesting because of the massive amount of nerve that Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Eric Harris, and Dylan Klebold had. They all had incredible belief in themselves and their credos and when you’re reading about them you keep thinking, ”How did people not see through them? How could they believe all this crazy shit?”

And then I think about all the crazy shit I think about myself. All the miniature paranoias that feed on themselves and multiply into this grotesque ball of terror, and I think, oh, that’s how. While I‘m disturbed at how some people can’t see through me and how I believe all the wackadoo shit I do, I’m not like them in the sense that they weren’t afraid of much, if anything at all. Manson had too many bats in his belfry, Jim Jones was all coked up on painkillers, and Eric and Dylan were too enmeshed in their own overly dramatic sense of adolescent rage. But I am afraid.

I’m afraid of failure.

You’d think that would be an easy one to combat-just don’t fuck up. It’s not so much about fucking up as it is about everything else that life throws in your way. I’m terrified I’ll lose my apartment, scared that I‘m about to hit 35 and I‘m going to somehow end up back with my parents, nauseous at what might happen if the rent goes up, if I get kicked out because my fucking dog won’t stop barking. I do everything I can to ensure that these things won’t come to pass-pay my rent early, buying muzzles and vibrate collars and sonic barking devices, but if these things fail or if I lose my job, what am I going to fucking do?

And on and on it goes until I’m convinced that I’m getting fired the next day, or I’m gonna come home to a notice that I’m getting kicked out because my dog is barking, or if I’ll have to give Jack up, which would destroy me. Before I know it I’m shaking and shivering in the tub for the fifth time. I try to use the logic tree, but these things could happen, and in my weird little mind I’m convinced that if I take my eye off the ball (i.e my worries) I’ll get beaned right in the face.

There are researchers from Yale University who say that people who take a lot of baths are trying to ward off feelings of loneliness or fear. No. Shit. Sherlock. Once I took nine in one day. I couldn’t pin what the fuck was freaking me out so badly, but I guess I do now. I know I’m afraid of failure but I didn’t realize how bad it was until Scott said I read too much disturbing shit, which does disturb me but not to the point where I lie awake and worry about being shanghaied into a cult, or being mowed down in a public place by two self important little fucks. I do think about that (side effect of dating a cop) but mostly I just lie in a bath or in bed, hugging myself, or reading my story, which calms me down. I sometimes reach out when I’m having this feeling because I need to feel like at least one part of me is pressing a toe to the surface of sanity, but it’s hard to feel comforted because the failure I fear is my own, and nobody’s failures feel the same. Yes, anger and embarrassment and shame, that’s par for the course, but how people bring about their failures is always personal, even if the surface reason seems normal. For example, I’m afraid of failing and having to move in with my parents because I fucked around in school too much and if I fail at 35 I’ll just be everything that I fear my parents thought I would be. I may have fucked up school and not gone to college but I’m damn sure not begging my parents for money and I’m sure as hell going to do whatever I have to make sure I don’t prove them right.

I enjoyed the Manson book and really liked the Jonestown story, but Columbine has always fascinated me. I don’t really remember much about it except that it cost me the freedom of wearing what I liked to school, since I began HHS in 2000, the year of zero tolerance. I wasn’t much interested in it back then, but a lot of people gave me the side eye for wearing a trenchcoat, and Tee always told me they were afraid I’d blow up the damn school. Shit, back then I wanted to, but I would have never. Dylan Klebold probably wouldn‘t have done it either if he wouldn’t have had Eric fueling him. Now when I read back on them, I’m disgusted and pissed off at how fucking ridiculous it was. I feel like going back in time, driving to Denver, finding those two fucksticks and administering two very enthusiastic dick-kicks. So some cop hooked your dumb asses for stealing shit out of a van and that got you all hungry for blood? People are stupid and annoying? Buck up buttercup, you didn't even live in the Karen age, haven’t even seen what social media can do.

Cold and calculating Eric Harris, who masterminded the whole thing, wrote “GODDAMMIT, BECAUSE DEAD PEOPLE DON’T ARGUE!” in the journal he left behind. I don’t believe for a second that what they did was right, but sometimes when I’ve had enough of humanity, that quote runs through my head. Usually I just pull a Dwight and wish for another plague, but I’d rather not, since this one has been quite enough. I used to rant like that and it embarrasses me to read that stuff. All that shit was so fucking trivial. I may have been a dark little chick but I would have never killed people for it. What’s fucked up is that they didn’t even kill the people they hated! And they got bored halfway through! They spent a year planning it only to give up when their bombs didn’t work, and killed random people. Fucking waste of humans.

But they believed that what they thought was real. They believed in natural selection, that their silly little beefs were true. Columbine isn’t the point of this entry-believing your own bullshit is. Jim Jones believed his own so much that he killed 900 people. Manson organized a string of terrifying murders and had people eating out of the palm of his hand because he thought that Helter Skelter was looming upon them.

I believe that if I don’t worry about things, they’ll happen. I also know that to worry about these things so relentlessly could bring about a self fulfilling prophecy, but I can’t stop. It’s like when the doctor hits your knee with the hammer to check your reflexes, and you kick. From the outside it looks like my fears are normal-who isn’t afraid of failure? Many people have much more to fear. I understand that, which is why it’s so frustrating to be so immobilized by it. I get so goddamn mad at myself.

But I know that one day I’ll read this and wonder why the hell I worried so much, hopefully because I’ve reached a point in my life where I will not fear the future. There are some days when I get so upset and worked up that I would do anything, and I mean anything, to stop it. It’s stupid and it’s annoying and all I want to do is to find the gummy little corner of my brain that sends out these SOS messages and silence it. Harshly.

That was not a suicidal statement. I’m too fucking old to be dicking around with all that deadjournal angst. But seriously, why the hell didn‘t God give our brains a fucking off switch?

As I said, I’m afraid that I’m creating my own self fulfilling prophecy. I’m afraid that one day the hugging myself and the bath taking and the compulsive reading of my story won’t help, and it’ll pull me down.

I need sleep.