Life and death are balanced on the edge of a razor

I'm so tired.

I am just so tired.

My body literally aches, and I can't tell whether it's exhaustion or just wear and tear.

Perhaps its both.

I've reached this point where I just don't know what I'm fighting for. A long, long, long time ago I was promised a light at the end of the tunnel. Years and years and years later, I don't see it. I just don't see it. It is so hard to force myself through each day knowing, yes knowing, that it won't get better. That I won't be healthy, that it will hurt to walk, that I will go to the doctors, that I won't ever be good enough, that I will never be happy.

So what am I fighting for?

Am I fighting to always be sick? To always be in pain? To never be good enough?

I don't understand why any of this is.

This is much more than battling with school, this is so much more. This is me unable to see the why in what I am doing, out of routine, each day.

I have run out of things to throw at life. I have run out of things to say.

There is no comfort for this.

- Sky

Staring at a wall of Memories does terrible things to one's self

Mum asked me today, rather out of the blue, if I'd been cutting lately. The answer was 'no', and it was the truth. It's been some time (the exact details of said time I cannot recount) since I last did that. It didn't bother me that she asked. The fact that she asked is particularly inconsequential, because I wouldn't have answered truthfully had I been going through a cycle, but it was more the ideas that stemmed from it. Specifically the circumstances in which I do get sucked into a cycle. It always struck me as odd, my reasons for it. Physical things, such as ongoing doctor appointments or knee pain, never drew such a reaction. It was the emotional distress that always inevitably threw me off. I couldn't deal with it when I first started cutting. And over time as I've better learnt to deal and compartmentalise, I've better been able to cope. And consequently, my desire to cut has backed off. Sometimes I think I'll be free of it forever, but I've learnt over time how ridiculous a hope that is. Addiction is not so easily shed. This one is here for the long haul. As long as I am suffering I will inevitably relapse.

I recently experienced two emotional events that, had they happened earlier in my life, would have all but killed me. I have definitely lost one friend and almost certainly lost another. Neither of which I am particularly vexed about. The first, who is definitively gone, was very dear to me and had been there for me for a long time. He then disappeared without warning. He literally cut me off, deleting my from every avenue we'd previously used to communicate. So I made a friendly attempt at conversation - which was ignored - and then sent a far less friendly note basically telling him he was a dick. And that was that. I'm not even really all that upset about this. I was angry for about two days (hence the angry letter), but that's it. I properly let go. Damn, I've got to properly let go of things more often. But the latter friend, that's weird. I pined for his friendship when he left me at first, a long time ago. I really pined. And then, after a ridiculously long time, I let go. Not even worried anymore. I'm even less worried now that he's all but declared his undying love for me. I still cringe and shudder when I reflect on that conversation we were having a week ago today, at this time. God. It was dramatic and awkward and just cannot be unseen. Ever. It's the teen drama I thought I'd escaped unscathed from.

I will not be disappointed if he fails to come back into my life. I won't miss him this time

Something I am missing terribly, today more than ever, is the horses. May doesn't seem all that long ago, but it's been two months since I quit my job. Two months since I had contact with the horses that I adored and who (mostly) adored me in return. It's fine to spend a few minutes greeting our horse at the races, or visiting the horses a friend works with briefly, but its another to work with them and know they know you. I was working a long time and I miss them. I miss that they don't judge. I miss the way the communicated. I miss the way they talked to me. I miss the contact. I just miss them. I've sat in my room for long afternoons facing, inadvertently, the wall filled with photos of the horses I've worked with and it kind of kills me inside to have had to let all that go. I want it back now more than ever. I spend much of my spare time looking for a horse of my own and I don't know. They're something I'm starting to really pine for. Worthy of tears now. And it takes something big to dissolve me into tears.

I just miss them so much.

One thing I haven't missed is school. I hate what school life does to me. The battle with sleep that I can't rectify by sleeping through the morning. The stress of trying to constantly achieve a level of unattainable perfection. Perfection that is not normally required only by yourself, but those around you. Those who don't understand the consequences of the chase. The way I'm pitted against my classmates only to see who is the best. The way I'm pressured in ways I will never be pressured in again. And for what? I don't understand what they set out to achieve, what they are trying to teach us. Are they trying to break me? Is that it? They want to break my spirit and send me out into the world completely unprepared for future struggles that require the spirit and resolve they so callously shattered? I find it hard to reconcile these things. School is three quarters of my grief at this time of my life. I'm am never so stressed as when I am at school. I am never so sullen, lost, agitated, aggravated, and many more things than when I am at school. Outside of school life never brought these things out in me. But school, school saps my strength. Makes me struggle. Forces me to do things I would not otherwise push myself to do. Causes me physical pain I do not feel in any other aspect of my life.

School is a bad place. I don't miss it when I'm not there. I don't miss the crush of people. The whisper of their judgements. I don't miss the work. The given deadlines I continuously ignore. I don't miss the expectations. The belief that I'm the next Einstein. The struggle to meet the expectations so carelessly placed upon me. School is rigid and tough. It doesn't care about who you are. You learn that as soon as your given you're number. A number. That's all you are. Not a person, a number. And in the end, at the end of all that torture that teaches you nothing in life skills; in the end you're merely a statistic.

As the holidays have erased my general school anxieties I have cared less about the medical afflictions. The right heart catheterisation spun me out dramatically. I could not get my head around it. I probably blew it out of proportion because it sounded so awful and traumatising and scary. It wasn't so bad when I averted my gaze. Repeated to myself that the tube up my arm did not in fact hurt. Of course my arm is still sore three, four days later. But really, that's okay. And now that I've passed that traumatic event, I don't care. There is no feeling left for what these doctors, all of them, have done to me. I am not angry, I am not upset. I wouldn't say I'm accepting though either. I am though, quite indifferent at this tranquil time. I've come to realise that not all that much hangs on Friday's appointment. I have been conditioned to accept the possibility of having this condition for well over a year now. Telling me I definitively have it is of little consequence to me now. It's annoying, sure. But I can't change that now. If they tell me I don't have it, then great. I'll be blasé, but pleased. And predictably, my life will go on, as it would have had I been sick.

It's a bit cruel really, how the world refuses to stop for you when you want a break. When I want to curl up in a ball and for everything to end I expect it to stop, but it does not. It doesn't allow for that. It expects you to man up and keep going. All I can ask is how?

It's fine to be nonchalant outwardly, but the raging internal monologue of doom doesn't cease. It numbs me to certain things while killing me with others. Nonchalance only covers the scent of destruction.

- Sky

Stop telling me blindly how strong I am

I want to hurt things. I want to break them. I want them to look the way I feel. I want to see the destruction that is constantly occurring within me. I want it to be physical. I want it to be tangible. I want to be able to touch it. I want it to be real in places other than my head. I want it to be there for people to see. I want them to get it. I want them to understand. I want them to understand so they'll stop telling me blindly how strong I am.

You can't judge my "strength" on the joke I turn my life into.

That is weakness. A sure sign that I can't deal with the things that are happening. My defence is to laugh. That's woeful, disgraceful. I'm not armed with anything. Just humour. What is that? That won't solve anything, not by a long shot. All that humour is doing is ensuring that I survive. All that humour does not give a shit either way how I come out of the things that insist upon happening to me. I just have to survive.

And that's not okay. I don't want to just survive. I want to live. Is that so much to ask, that I get a chance to really live? To be happy and feel joy. Not sit in my bed fearful of moving due to aching muscles and shot tendons. The strands of my hair stop coming out so excessively. I know this is your doing Roaccutane and you need to stop. I'll not be bullied by your medicinal rampage. The rash covering my limbs needs to leave. The exhaustion that depletes me and yet will not let me sleep needs to go and harass someone else.

For seventeen years I have been harassed constantly by things that are out of my control. And I am done. I am done having my life dictated by these things that are not me and yet are me. I can't find the lines between self and pain because it is so damn ingrained it might as well be me. How is that even fair? To be happy, and to be pain free. That is the real joke.

I don't know how to explain the things that are happening to me. They tumble out jumbled in factual description said with such sarcasm people listening can only laugh. I'm making the real unreal. How can that be? I insist that "if you don't laugh you cry" but I couldn't cry if I wanted to anyway. I only get mad. I get really mad. I get snappy and hurtful and the hate exudes from each movement. My other great state is "normality". The blissful pretence of control, of happiness, of a pain free existence. But it is only a pretence of things I dearly wish I was in possession of.

Things that continue to elude me, and I'm sure will continue to do so for the remainder of my life. That is how my script has been written after all. No simplicity, no joy, just trauma, one after the other until I don't know what to do, who to trust, how to explain, when to feel, why comfort does nothing.

I want it to end. It's madness this internal chaos. It's mad at me. I'm mad at everyone else. Everyone else gets mad at me because I'm mad at them for no good reason and suddenly I'm in the centre of this madness and I don't even know what I'm doing.

I'm getting panicky, that much is evident in my writing. Panic comes with helplessness. Helplessness is what I have. All I have is disjointed thoughts. Disjointed thoughts that have dictated this blog.

Yes, my hair is coming out excessively, I notice it more and more every day. Just over two months to go. Three if you count the month of grace Roaccutane requires to leave my body completely.

Yes, people don't understand. And how can they? Everything that happens to me should be in a soap opera or in a bad novel. Writers could not make better fiction if they tried. And how do you then explain to someone who doesn't understand what you don't understand yourself?

You don't.

That's the point. You just don't. You use as few words at possible, you shield the lack of knowledge in sarcasm and shit, the world is none the wiser and you look like Iron Man. Infallible. A genius. The way you should be.

- Sky