Thinking Back

I've been thinking a lot lately. About events that happened to me around five years ago and how fucked up they were. I wonder why I only just started realizing it now.

When I was 15, I was going out with a woman who was 21. And I know that isn't really horrible. I know a ton of people who dated men in their 30s when they were only fifteen. But it wasn't so much the age as it was the WOMAN...

I had just turned 15. I met her online in an IRC chatroom and even though she knew I was a minor, she flirted with me hardcore. I will admit right now that I didn't really like her, rather I was flattered by the fact that another woman was interested in me. She had told me many times that she liked me and stated she wanted to date me. But I was mostly curious about what this whole "love" thing was and how it worked. So I convinced myself I was in love with her and told her so.

My first sexual experiences were cybering with her. I was no longer shy around her, but it was the shyness that she adored so I pretended to be innocent... pretended to be this good little girl who didn't know how anything worked. I was passive, submissive, sweet. Everything she wanted in another person she could control. She stopped being sweet after a few months, if she was sweet at all to begin with. She always had a temper but I let it pass, keeping up my kind demeanor. But when she started insulting my friends, I couldn't pretend anymore, and that's when the name calling started.

I was a horrible person. This horrible person who was prude, raised by fundies, a whore, a little bitch, a slut. And I was still naive, only now I was naive and a whore. She told me I needed to grow up. And when I told her she was verbally abusive, she told me I was emotionally abusive and that shut me up real good.

She'd go for months not really talking to me sometimes. She'd play Sims for hours throughout the day and when I told her I was being treated like a toy to be taken out and played with when she was bored, she told me she needed space. And yet, she wouldn't just break up with me.

Note: She went for two months not saying anything more than "hey" to me per day.

And then came Greg. Now Greg is the turning point that REALLY makes me see how much fucked up shit I just let slide back then. I don't remember if Greg fully raped me. I can't remember anything passed a certain point in the incident.

When I told my girlfriend this, her words of comfort to me were "So, I guess I won't get your first kiss anymore, will I." And my reply, not even seeing how horrible her reaction was: "No, I saved that for you. He could take from me anything he wanted, but my first kiss was for you."

She didn't tell me until a year later that what happened with Greg wasn't my fault. To this very day, I STILL blame myself, somehow. For some reason. Like I COULD have stopped it from even beginning if I wanted to. "If I wasn't such a whore."

My best friend at the time was friends with Greg. I told her about it because I worried for her. Her response was "Oh my god, that's horrible!" and then "But like... I'm still friends with him." I mean, it's bad what he did to you but I don't let stupid things like that intervene between my friendships! Really.

When she stopped talking to me because I finally got upset with her over a small thing, I again blamed myself. I had pined over our lost friendship for years until today.

I wonder why I always tried to sacrifice myself for people who only ever tried to hurt me. I wonder why those are the people I trusted more than anyone else.

Today, I'm still trying my hardest to not be immature or naive. I'm a bitch because I don't want to be taken advantage of. But for some reason, I still fight the urge to blame myself for every little thing. There are days when I try to wash myself clean, but it's as though my entire skin is made of dirt.

I once heard that people who were abused as children are more likely to be raped. Rape. Statutory Rape. I feel like I'm just another statistic.

"It doesn't seem fair." She said.
As if through one sentence all my thoughts from the time I was just a child could be spoken,
and she said them so freely
while signing a yellow sheet that would end my time
in a place I deserve to be.

I sat quiet
in the silence we created,
in a mute shared hope of return.

"She whispers words of World Domination in his ear each time they meet. But they are words of love none-the-less."

Paradox

Last year, my Lit professor called me a paradox. That was the last time I ever had communication with her before the attempt. Because well, she was right. I am a paradox. My life is spent in a wheel and all I do is spin and spin and spin...

I always have psych outs. It's how I live. I think "Finally, finally it's over. Finally I can be happy and productive and do what I've always wanted with my life." But I'm wrong. Always, always long. Such thoughts used to last for only a few hours. One time, it lasted for 3 days. This time, it lasted for months. Months, I tell you, months.

The wheel always spins back around.

Ah yes, the classic case of bipolar disorder. Fucking beautiful, isn't it? Each pole is as deadly as the other - mania which convinces you that you're on top of the world and nothing can stop you and the depression which is your reality check that reminds you that you. Are. Just. Human.

I'm in a terrible down.

It's almost the third week of college and I've already begun contemplating suicide. I thought I was stronger than that. Thought that all you needed to do was just dream and go but the truth is that I'm just flesh and blood and chemical imbalances. When I was a child, I thought I was a faerie. With all my heart, I thought I was a faerie that became mortal just so I could sing. I never fit in my own skin. This body is too small, it doesn't change fast enough. It's stringed up incorrectly and move funny. It doesn't listen to my nerves and impulses.

When I was five... I thought that if I just died, I'd be free and I'd finally fit. I'm claustrophobic in my own flesh. I STILL feel that if I die, I'll finally fit. That not even gravity will hold me back, the universe has no boundaries. If there is a universe. If I'm not just... that word.

I thought I was until I turned 18.

All throughout today, I've been crying. Not a few tears, but actual bawling. I try and hide it from my roommate (who just left to meet her boyfriend) and swallow back giant lumps that I don't remember feeling since I moved out of my mom's house.

My stepmom blames herself for my bipolar disorder. If she really cared, she wouldn't have abandoned me, would she have. Or she'd actually be there for me instead of swimming in her bottles of Merlot. Insects. That's the name of the poem I've been working on since I turned 15 and it STILL isn't finished. I never can write about her.

See, the thing is that you can succeed at whatever you want... if you've got the skills. For me, it's too late. My voice is already fucked up because of the different style of vocal training they have below the Mason Dixon line that they've been trying to beat into me. They're trying to make me into a mezzo. I can't go high anymore. As a child, I once swore that if I ever lost my voice, I'd kill myself.

I guess I thought about death a lot as a child.

See, there's something inside of me. And its been inside of me for all my life. The Scientologists would call it a thetus, the psychologists call it bipolar psychotics but I always called it Emily and she and I have been friends and scheming since the first time I caught my dad and mom fighting. She convinced me that we were more than normal, that magick was real, that we had powers and that we could do anything. I was always alone. But Emily, Emily was always there talking to me at night, egging me on whenever something was troubling me. Today, I can no longer hear her, but I feel her and she has brought with her other voices that remind me just how useless I can be.

Sometimes, I don't know what is Emily and what is myself. We've merged part way. I feel that if I died and both our spirits were freed of this body, we'd wind up traveling together, stuck at the side like conjoined sisters for all of eternity. Out of all the voices in my head, they can be sorted into two categories. The voice that tells me why bother when we are just going to fail anyway and the other one that yells "GET UP SOLDIER. STRAIGHTEN YOUR BACK, ONE FOOT BEFORE THE OTHER. THIS IS NO TIME TO BE LAYING AROUND WHEN THERE IS WORK TO BE DONE. DO YOU HONESTLY BELIEVE TIME WILL WAIT FOR YOUR SORRY ASS AND PATHETIC TEARS? GET UP. YOU WILL NEVER EARN THE RESPECT OF ANYONE BY BEING THIS WAY. CRYING IS WEAK - ARE YOU WEAK? DO WE JUST WASTE OUR TIME EXISTING? GET UP, SOLDIER! HOLD YOUR HEAD HIGH, NO ONE HAS TO KNOW THAT YOU AREN'T PROUD OF LIVING BUT THEY BETTER AS ALL FUCK BELIEVE IT. GET UP, SOLDIER. GET UP."

I can't differentiate which is worse.

I honestly thought this would be over. I thought I had finally saved myself.

I thought wrong. I am not meant for happy endings.

Hir

I hate the phrase Gender Queer. Hate hate hate hate HATE it. Honestly, who would want to identify with "Gender Queer" unless they were proud? To me, that's like me identifying as a "Homosexual" or a "Queer". I don't identify as any of those things. Just as "me".

I like my breasts. I will admit, they are one of my favourite features on my body. They aren't large, but they aren't small either and when wearing the right bras, I have the (in my opinion) perfect amount of cleavage to go with my figure.

It was hard enough admitting that I was a lesbian. I'm still having trouble accepting it. More so now than ever.

I was that kid who looked in the mirror at age four and thought there was something wrong with me. I'd strip myself of a shirt and go off and play with the boys - I didn't start wearing shirts at all when I was home until my father told me that 12 was much to old to be going around topless when there are men in the house.

To clear this up before hand, no, I am not a transgender. I am not a man. And I have no desire to be one.

I've never fit in my own skin. All my life, I wondered that if I just died, would I be free? I felt like a spirit trapped in a flesh body, punished to be mortal - If I just died, would I finally be happy?

I stopped this thinking a few months ago. It only led me into depression.

When I was younger... I remember believing with all my soul that we were all just spirits and these were the bodies we were given. People weren't genders... they were just people. There was no such thing as gender, only sex.

I started dressing more femininely when I was 15, my clothing was from the girl's isle and I decided to make use of my body and to learn how to be pretty. After joining the VKA, I learned makeup tricks, started researching glamour. When I want to be, I can be the hottest shit around. Isn't that what learning about your body is all about when you're female?

Female.

Yes, I am female. I love my body. It's beautiful and it can preform tricks I don't know if I'll ever be able to comprehend. I am not ashamed of my body.

But being a girl.

I learned a new term last night. I'm on the LLC (Living Learning Community) floor of my campus called the Gender and Sexuality floor. Every monday night, we sit and talk for an hour or so about a topic someone brings up that has to deal with Gender and Sexuality. Last night, it was gender identity.

People would always tell me "It's alright to be comfortable with who you are, Kiska. I don't think of myself and immediately think "girl" either. But don't go thinking too hard." Don't go thinking too hard.

A girl in our discussion group named M brought up the fact that she was Gender Fluid. As soon as she said it, I knew what she meant. To be gender fluid is to feel like identifying with one gender, or any gender at all, is stupid. You're fluid. You flow through things like that.

I feel like the bisexual of genders. You know. You're bisexual, gays hate you, straight people think you'll get over it soon enough and that you're over thinking things.

Over thinking things.

I feel like that's what I must be doing. As if being a lesbian wasn't drastic enough, now I think I'm something that falls under the category of "Gender Queer" as well?

I'm "me", can't I just be content with that?

Why must I always think so hard?

How would people react if they found out?

The one person I told was my best friend, back in HS. I told him that I always felt trapped. Told him that I used to look in the mirror and know something was wrong with me, but never know what it was. This boy was in love with me and I suppose didn't know how to react. He said he would always love me. I know he was slightly put off.

I thought I was the only one who felt this way and chances are, most people don't know that people like me even exist. I am afraid of being judged. I am afraid of even accepting this; I feel so gross and disgusting and strange and queer.

I never wanted to be this way.

K once told me that gender doesn't exist. She told me that gender and sexuality were all myths. I'm not sure I quite believe that.

M is bisexual. She is Gender Fluid. By all means, since I don't believe I am a gender, shouldn't I be Pansexual? But I'm only attracted to women. Always have been, probably always will be. I wonder if I'm a hypocrite.

I wonder if gender is real at all, or if there is even a gender known as Gender Fluid.

I feel like I'm thinking too much. Just letting all the dreams where people ask me if I'm really a man get to me.

I once had a dream that I woke up male. I started to cry. The doctors said "What's wrong? Isn't this what you wanted?" No, this isn't what I want. This isn't what I want at all.

Am I just a person who puts too much thought in anything, anything at all?

We read an article last night about a lesbian who came out to her lover as being Gender Fluid. Her girlfriend paused and asked "Are you going to become a man?" The woman replied "No, I'm not." Her girlfriend paused for another minute and said "Uh, no. I am a lesbian, I sleep with women, therefore you are a woman." And ended the conversation.

I put too much thought into anything.

I shouldn't be this way.

Magick

So, I've been thinking a lot recently about random things that I pushed off out of my mind a while ago, deciding that topics I will puzzle over and will never find the answers to are pointless.

However, one of those topics is magick and when you're unofficially dating a Gypsy, it's kinda hard NOT to think about it. And so:

Magick. I used to believe in it with all my heart as a child. I was that one girl who believed she was a witch, that one special child born with abilities many others didn't posses or didn't know how to hone. I'd take out books from the library on palm reading (yes, my elementary school library had an entire section on witch craft. Wow.) and I actually performed love spells that would bind me and the boy I liked together. Forever. I'm very happy those failed. I'm guessing it was because I put more thought into peeling the apple I was using for the spell than concentrating on the ACTUAL spell itself. Did I know the rules of wicca back then? Hell no! Our school just had spell books for kids (yes, I'm serious) with pretty pictures and instructions. Yeahhhh.

There was a lot more to it too. I remember going to the beach and singing. Seagulls would flock around me as if listening. They formed a perfect circle with me in the middle. My sister wondered what it was I was doing, but really couldn't care less because for once, I wasn't hanging off of her. Sometimes, I'd dip my feet in the ocean and sing there. I felt as if the ocean could hear me...was answering me. The last time I sang in the ocean, it was the fourth of July, this year. I was still buzzed from VKAM and Ameara told me to sing Mama Ocean for her, since she's landlocked. I did. And I blinked for a second and all of a sudden, there was a beautiful shell at my feet. Blue/gray with gorgeous brown snakelike patterns that look amber when wet. Something passed through my mind telling me that the ocean heard me, that it was responding to my voice, that it was thanking me for the few pieces of garbage I picked out of her a few days prior.

I didn't tell my dad or my friend about the shell. I just took it, thanked the ocean quietly, and left.

When I was four, I met my stepmom. I thought she was beautiful... she was tall, her cheekbones were predominant and high and while she could be childlike and fun, she was also wise and strong. Ambitious. She WAS the embodiment of Sagittarius.

My stepmom was the first person to tell me that magick was real. She told me stories of how her mom was a witch who used to do horrible spells in order to get her way, but stopped when she tried to hex another witch who sent it reeling back and caused her tongue to swell up in the back of her throat. She, apparently, learned her lesson.

My stepmother, B her name was, told me that she could feel things. When she was younger, she used an Ouija board with her sister and it amplified their senses. She told me she would wake up sometimes and see her sister, seemingly possessed, sit up in bed and begin talking to things that weren't there. She told me she had seen demons wait at the foot of her bed for her, holding her down with glares.

She gave me my first deck of tarot cards - a vintage deck from the 1930s (she had forgotten later on that she gave them to me. She still has them) and I fingered them as if they were the most beautiful things in the entire world. I did her reading. It was accurate. I felt as though I had found a new extension of myself. That all feelings I had prior finally had something I could channel them with to make sense out of all the mush. Then came the dreams.

I wasn't me in my dreams. I was someone else. And as someone else I didn't know WHO I was, but I had a different personality and it was just another day in life. Until I fell off a banister, or until a car hit me or until I got so drunk that I died of alcohol poisoning. I wondered why I always died in my dreams until I saw flowers by the sides of roads where I died in dreams from the previous nights. I must have been about 12... needless to say, I was freeked out.

I told this to my stepmother. She had told me that sometimes, before puberty, this happens to girls. I didn't understand what menstruating had to do with having visions of future deaths in your sleep, but no matter. A bit after I got my period, it stopped. The last thing I remember is that one night, I was an older version of a girl I knew and I had died from falling off the side of a fire escape in a city area. I am hoping that this, all of this... was just a child's imagination run rampant.

I'd feel things in my bedroom when I slept. I'd hear the pitter patter of feet running up and down the stairs. Once I woke up and saw a great black cat standing on my ceiling and looking down at me. He seemed started that I could see him (we made eye contact. His eyes were a beautiful gold - almost foxlike) and he quickly vanished. But again, I can cancel this out saying that it's because I am bipolar and again, my mind runs rampant.

Cats. I always see them. When I moved to New Jersey, my stepmother had already left. I hated it here. I still hate it here.

My first night in the house, I woke up and couldn't move. I felt as though there was something heavy on my chest, pushing the air out of my lungs. I thought I was going to die. I began panicking. It seemed like an eternity until I could finally sit up and breathe. This happened often and then one night, I looked forward and saw a cat curled up on my chest, watching me. I tried to scoot away but it was too heavy and I couldn't move. Finally, somehow, I managed and fell backwards off the bed. The last thing I saw before I blacked out was that cat peering at me from over the mattress. Staring at me.

I woke up in bed with the sun up as if nothing had happened. I had never seen that cat before. I doubt I will ever see it again. But sometimes... when I dance around my house and I am neither here nor there, I see many of them, cats I mean. All around the house, diving behind closet doors, sitting on sofas. I double take and then they are gone.

I have had more instances of sleep paralysis here. One time, I couldn't feel my body at all. I looked and there were.... creatures dancing in my living room. I got up and joined them, they welcomed me but I felt more like a stranger and a tricked victim than a guest. I rationalized that I was asleep and tried to wake up, but I couldn't feel anything. When I did wake up, I switched my location for napping and took the floor. Again, I couldn't feel my body. All of a sudden, I had a sensation of flight like I was getting higher and higher and higher and it felt so good, so right! But then I thought "I'm dying. I'm leaving my body - I'm not ready." and I woke myself up. I wonder what would have happened if I just let it be.

I don't feel things anymore.

I don't know when it started, but perhaps it was when my brother started asking me if magick was real. Our mother would always give me looks when he asked, and I will look him square in the eyes and say "Anything is real if you believe in it." He believed in faeries. It drove my mom mad.

I think I lost faith because I didn't have any answers for him. Yes, I felt things. Yes, I believed in faeries, I believed in mermaids, I STILL believe in mermaids... but where's the proof? How didn't I know that these feelings weren't just a fantasy to escape to in my head to get away from all of the bullshit? I began to put my faith into science.

I ignored everything I felt around me. Told it to go away, told it to shut up. Locked myself indoors, only came out to go for a drive with friends and stay at their houses. At one point, I forgot how to call upon that tingly sensation I'd sometimes get that would surround my body. I'm not sure but, I think that's magick.

But at the same time, it could just be a self awareness.

See, I can't tell my brother that something is real, because I feel like I'm lying. Where is the proof? I try my hardest to be an honest person. I dislike lying. I feel like the scum of the earth whenever I do because I do it so WELL.

The last time I felt magick, I had just finished saving up for a second hand keyboard at a thrift shop. I put all my soul into saving up for it, you have no idea. I was numb to magick at that point and just moved on. But when I got to the counter, they told me it was already sold.

The pain I felt... I had gotten my hopes up that I could FINALLY record, FINALLY write on a keyboard that WASN'T broken, that I could FINALLY reach my dreams, that all the struggling had paid off. But it wasn't true. It was another lie. And I should feel stupid because I fell for it again.

I felt a power inside of me, a burning. An anger, a hatred. And so, I went home and locked myself in my room. My mind was a tirade of chaos, calling upon all the magicks I ever did and did not believe in and told them that if they were real, they would not have let this happen to me.

I told them that they could not exist.

I haven't felt anything since then. Nothing. I feel... human now. Different, less magical then I did as a child. Mundane. A lesser being. Worthless.

But...

Whenever I am in a forest, I feel somehow connected with the earth. I cry whenever I see a tree cut down. I dive at bugs and save them whenever they are going to be stepped upon. I protect sprouts as if it's my life's mission. I never was this passionate when I still believed.

I feel as though I have a bigger connection with plants than I do with humans. Plants and animals. As if that didn't make me sound like a hippie.

I cry when trees die, I cry when I see roadkill. But I never cry when something horrible happens to the people I love. I didn't even cry when my friend Gabbi died.

Yesterday, I tried to astral project, but I got lost. It was pitch black and all I could hear was music. I think instead of going up, I accidentally went down into the deepest part of my mind. Neat, but not what I intended to do. I later scolded myself saying that astral projection hasn't even been proven and I was stupid for trying.

I miss the feel of being connected.

I'm stuck in the middle right now. I don't know what to believe. I do know though that I am scared and I fear the existence of magick. I got lost in it last time I believed in it. It took over my life. I was careless with my day to day living and started failing classes because I was too busy day dreaming about open fields and partially cloudy skies. Spells I would do when I got home. Soils I would ground myself on. No, I was never trained. I know next to nothing about wicca. But I could feel it. Or rather, I could feel SOMETHING.

Perhaps magick doesn't exist. But I do believe that there is something... alive about the earth. That we are all somehow connected with her. With the earth, with the stars (even scientists can not deny that we are all made of star dust).

The two things I still believe in are Mermaids and Astrology. I wonder why I can't be black and white on this subject. Why I can't rationalize anything here.

And this is what I've been musing about. I've been tossing and turning about it for the past nights. You see, I've been speaking to and hanging out with people who live magical lives as of late and they seem so happy...

I can summon that tingly feeling to my hands and it's stronger than ever. I just don't know what to do with it.

I've been having a lot of dreams lately in which I am raped or molested by older men.

At first, I didn't see the connection. I just had my third one in a row this morning and to be honest, I'm a bit hesitant to fall back asleep. But I realized as I was brushing my teeth that these dreams started when I picked back up writing my song about the time my 'friend' tried to rape me. Funny, when I think back on it I don't feel anything (probably because I try not to think back on it), but in my sleep, am I really that terrified?

It sickens me that something that happened four years ago can render me as weak as having problems just sleeping.

The only other connection between my dreams is that when I try and reach out for help, I can never receive it. One time, there WAS no help, another time the cops didn't believe me and this time, I was either too ashamed to call for help or 911 and 0 were down.

I wonder what my dreams are trying to tell me. They aren't vague dreams either - while they happen, I feel as though I am truly awake, which is strange because I am generally a lucid dreamer. But are they telling me I am ashamed? That I could have done more if I wanted to?

What happens in the attic... stays in the attic.