where it all started [bear with me on this one]

[Glides]

trigger warning: trauma things

hello, folks, it's introspection time.

the morning has been spent trying to get in contact with career services at my former college to find things. have an appointment for next week, will spend the rest of the week firing off applications wherever the hell i feel like.

yesterday, my best friend from middle school randomly pulled up next to me while i was out on a walk. i think for the first time in my life, i got that "once over" look, which felt good, strangely enough. there was a time when we had gone on chatroulette together as kids and a couple of girls our age appeared and they offered to make out on camera if we did. he seemed very enthusiastic about the notion. i was not. he called me a slur.

seems as though i'm not the only one hiding something. he's doing a much better job than me. the whole thirty seconds of interaction made me realize that i'd find him attractive if he hadn't turned into the person he turned into. i realized a lot of the complicated feelings are from redirection and projection, and i'm still ashamed that i feel them. i think there was a time when we were kids and if we hadn't been raised by religious families, when he was a much kinder person, not molded into someone cruel (military, it takes em all out), well maybe something would've come from it.

he's a very good-looking person, don't get me wrong. but the body is all that's left, if you catch my drift. still liked that he seemed to notice the weight loss and gave me a once-over, though. did i have a crush on his older sister because it was her, or because...i don't want to think about it.

don't think it's a sexual attraction per se, i'm still not sure if i've ever truly felt that way about someone. i just feel myself drawn to them in a very vague sense and then other people tried to decide how that magnetism should be defined. i don't even know what an ideal relationship would look like and what that ideal person would be like. i know nothing. is this life? knowing nothing and then dying?

i'm going over my old stuff and thinking "jesus, what if i'd spent all this time trying to write something i'm getting paid for?" i'm seriously considering making a go of it. i'm nineteen pages into something already. during a really bad depressive episode, i sort of obsessively wrote however many pages that 179,000 words would be. did that in like two months. have never done something like that before. posted it off somewhere (i'm not saying) and i got like 5,000 people to read it. the most amount of people that have interacted with something i've done. imagine if i'd gotten 5,000 people to buy it.

it was a crock of shit, but i did do it. so now i'm 10,000 words and nineteen pages into whatever this will be. it's weird. i have a vague outline of what i'm planning it to be. planning on cannibalizing the older crappy one for it. there were some individual sequences i really liked. marked improvement over liking nothing. won't win the pulitzer, but still. i enjoy the pure distillation of words. i've really grown to love them lately, and how they can be arranged for an effect. i had tried reading the stephen king book "on writing" as a kid, and only read the autobiography and ignored all the writing advice. years later, i've cracked it open again. taking out adverbs in my words, trying to give each character a different diction so they can be identified without even having to look for names. it's sort of like a small fragment of something that feels right in a world gone very wrong.

i've got the e.b. white book "the elements of style" next to me, which i need to read after stephen king. my dad had it on his shelf for ages and stopped using it. he's got syd field too, but he's a hack fraud. but i liked "charlotte's web" as a kid, named my plant after it, because that's also my grandmother's first name. had the plant since i was eleven years old. used to be her plant. it was in her hospital room. it was likely the last thing she ever saw while she was alive.

i identified in therapy (partially) why i used to be so obsessive over my virginity. often the strings don't come together until they do. i had talked previously about the friend i had until last year. we met when i was fifteen and she was nineteen (i know i was fifteen because it was 2010). long story short, we met because she had just started college and i was taking dual enrollment classes because i had no friends and my parents insisted. i was short and jewish and curly-haired, she was aryan and blonde-haired and blue-eyed. match made in heaven to my self-loathing self. i'm still jewish, her hair is slightly less blonde.

she's the source. not the only one. but a big one. i hadn't really processed just how often she'd mock me for both the jewishness and the virgin thing, quite frequently. a lot. fifteen year old me, as socially awkward as i was, in love. not really, of course. most fifteen year olds don't know what love is, neither do most fifty year olds. my parents are prime examples of people who are physically incapable of that. that's a big thing too, the way they turn on and off like light switches and how warped that made my view of things.

but yeah, it was her. she probably meant no harm by it. i think she was really flattered by the attention. it was innocent enough. she was a very pretty girl who had been homeschooled her whole life. especially as a good christian gal, my jewishness was exotic to her. she said as much way later on down the line. there's a line from her entering my life to leaving it. we were very close for a long time. even as i made all those godawful posts, it was her words ringing in my ears. and since she was the only woman i knew back then that i wasn't related to, gravity did the rest.

but this was a christian gal influencing a jewish boy, though that does not make me blameless. i was manipulated by an individual for a very long time. i served as a perpetual source of validation. a lot of behavior, in retrospect, was a little unethical for an older woman to do to a younger person. nothing ever happened between us until last year, when we were both fully grown. there were lots of moments i should've read better, and there were definitely things that were flirtatious in nature that she should not have engaged in with an underage kid. but nothing explicit, if that makes sense. but i really do need to explore that more in therapy. in fact, i hadn't really processed how these otherwise casual things (as i perceived it) were in fact much worse things, when i think about multiple people in that regard.

but yeah, i was made fun of a lot for that, and then mocked further if i got defensive, and the relationship really was pretty bullying. since she was such an influential person in my life, she influenced the way i treated relationships, and the people who would go on to treat me worse.

she's gone now, as she probably should be. she's off working for some pyramid scheme somewhere or other. she did a lot of unethical shit outside of her interactions with me and now her life is toast. a lot started with her. she hurt me much worse than i thought. not everything is her fault, but some of it is. i have been hurt by men, i have been hurt by women. the people who hurt me turned me into this. now there's just me.

there's a lot. so much. i wonder if i'll ever be capable of relationships. or careers. or anything approaching humanity.