Forget my name

I struggle, fight, fall, rise again and keep going..
but for what reason when I destroy everything good that ever comes near me?
the safest way to ensure somebody else's happiness for me is to stay away

I only wear you down.. you burn in my chaos... so just let me be

"if you see me, please just walk on by
forget my name and I'll forget it too"

"Suffering from something we're not sure of in a world there is no cure for"

As my former expectations are finally colliding with this weird concept called reality, I must admit that I'm still struggling to adjust to this new chapter of my life. I never wanted a job to become my life but rather a job that enables me to live the life I want - filled with friends, exciting journeys, new experiences and adventures. Yet I find myself in a job that - despite being quite fun most of the time - turns me into a person who hates Mondays and counts the days until the weekend only to totally waste that time too. I just cannot believe that already five months have gone by since I've moved to Hamburg. Any attempt to meet new people and engage in some activity aside from work were doomed to fail due to an almost constant lack of time. Plus my colleagues think of me as some weird creature from outer space and I almost expect them to actually check whether my skin is green and just covered with camouflage xD

For quite a few weeks, my private life - as limited as it already is - has been consumed by a single friend who was going through some rough times. Despite the fact that there's nothing more important to me than my close friends and thus their well-being, he quickly became way too attached, calling a couple times a day at any time of the day, demanding my attention whenever it suited him without realising that he was literally draining me. Once again I had to learn the hard way that there are very very few people in my life I can care for 24/7 without losing myself.

Me giving in to my parents begging me to come to visit doesn't really help to make me feel better either. To top it all off I was diagnosed with a currently untreatable level of an autoimmune disease that causes - among all kinds of fucked up stuff - mood swings. Yay^^

It was only at F's place some weeks ago that I found rest for the first time in weeks. After a movie night over at a friend's place I just watched him play LoL and fell asleep eventually. It just feels like home whenever I'm with him. Even though we have our rough times, it's still only him I feel fully at peace with. 

After being enabled to see a bit clearer again I started to turn things around again, tried not to work as much overtime, changed back to a healthier diet, didn't drink, exercised more and at least tried to get more sleep than usual. But in the end it was all a charade to cover up the loneliness that has taken over my heart during those past months. Eventually, I collapsed last Friday night when what was planed as a girls' night out ended with me drinking about three quarters of a bottle of scotch on my own and losing myself completely. I never blacked out before in my life.. and it seriously freaked me out. Let alone the gastric spasms and attacks of shivering that followed on the next day. 

It still freaks me out that this time, I didn't even care where my limit was but all I was in for was forgetting... forgetting about the fact that I had been on flu meds that don't go well with alcohol for days, forgetting all the shit that was going on, forgetting this disturbing feeling of absolute uselessness, forgetting my loneliness, forgetting the piteousness of my mere existence. I scared myself and I do not want to lose myself like this ever again. Change is what I need right now.. though I'm neither sure in what form nor where it's supposed to lead me. Right now, I even consider resuming a straight edge lifestyle... we'll see.

What bothers me most is that by losing myself like this, I didn't realise the true dimension of what my closest friend is currently going through... which is just about the most horrible thing for me to realise about myself. I feel like shit for having him taking care of me while I wasn't strong enough to be there for him the way he would have needed me.. :(

However, we'll get this all fixed just a we always do, I'm certain of it..
"let's take this one day at a time, I'll hold your hand if you hold mine" <3

How do you do it?

Being such a horrifying, annoying and repellent mess once again tonight, I can't even start to grasp how you could possibly stick with me. 

How do you do what seems so absolutely unbearable? 

Why would you do this to yourself? 

You would be so much better off without me!

If I only could, I'd probably run too.

At least tonight.

May the morning bring clarity, sanity.. anything.. something different from this.

As if it was your own

"When you're able to feel someone else's pain
as if it was your own & are willing to give your
happiness away, so you don't see a tear on their eyes...
That's the moment you know
what LOVE means."

-unknown author-

Because sometimes goodbye is the only way

Despite all I went through and most of all despite my trust issues, people still perceive me as outgoing, open minded and friendly which is partly true and partly the mask I wear to fit in. I get along with almost everybody on a rather superficial level and only have very few people who know who I truly am. It's not that I refrain myself from saying what I mean because I care oh so much about what people think of me but rather because I don't want to hurt anyone. Knowing that words can hurt more than any physical wound, I try not to speak my mind too freely with those around me because trust me, neither my black humour nor my sarcasm are anywhere near being socially acceptable.

My random amicability, however, hurts people too. In the long run, that is. And I can only imagine that it must hurt that much more finding out how I truly feel after time passed by and they took me for a granted part of their lives. Time and again, I find myself in a friendship with someone who's taking the best of me and/or whom I on the other hand am selfishly using... A while back I wrote about how I used to hang out with people I never saw a basis for true friendship with just to avoid being on my own. I also wrote how this - among many other things - has changed. What I didn't write about so far is the process this change has brought with it... With some it was easy to 'break up', with others it wasn't but in the end, goodbye is the only way when there's no common path forward.

Let me put it like this.. if I was a computer game, most people would pass the first few levels, some would be satisfied with this and keep coming back from time to time; others wouldn't be into the game design, dislike the control features or whatsoever and give up without even giving the first level a real chance. A few would invest time and get to a higher level and get to enjoy some extra features; and barely anyone would bring the right tools, skills, endurance and commitment to get to the last level which consists of a lifetime of other little challenges. This works for everyone but those who get to play the first few levels and already think they got to the last one...

I hate having to make someone see that while he/she thought of me as such a close friend, I was quite comfortable with staying superficial. But once I realise this, it's usually already too late. I'm trying hard not to hurt anyone anymore but I generally reach a point where I feel like I need to explain myself. I promised myself to be very careful in the future but there's only a small discrepancy between being careful and isolating myself... so I've got to be extra careful in that respect I guess^^ It's just that I'm incapable of letting just anyone that close, I'm not everybody's best friend and my mind is a place just about everyone would most certainly be afraid of anyway...

Longing for the shore...

Fuuuuu... really wished I had more time to spend on writing these days..

Today, nonetheless, this is about those bloody moments none of us is proud of, moments we struggle, fall and are quite unable to get back on our feet by ourselves. Actually, I've been doing great lately - work is exhausting at times but my boss appreciates just about everything I do and I learned whom to trust and whom to avoid in the office. I get to spend more time with my bestie than I had expected and had a wonderful 25th birthday. And still - I barely slept for the past week, I've been crying myself to sleep just about every night and only managed to pull myself together shortly before I had to leave for work anyway.

First I blamed my pms but oh well, this gets a little old a week after I'm supposed to be perfectly fine again I guess. And then all I was left with was confusion. Starting to see a little clearer now though, I have to admit that those past months have quite literally drained me. Almost everything has changed and I had to revoke the high expectations I had about this new chapter of my life - reality is a bitter medicine. I'm neither a robot, nor what you'd call a normal girl... Above all, I have to learn to cope with the fact that I'll never be the strong one 24/7 and I'll keep reminding myself that there's no shame in having F helping me to figure things out...

Frankly, I often still struggle to show my weaknesses - I even had to force myself to tell F about me being a mess. Although I'm perfectly aware that I always can be myself with him, I refuse to give in, let myself be overwhelmed by what I truly feel.. probably because I want to assure him that I'm there for him, that I'm strong enough to lean on. What can I say.. I'm a work in progress. And pretty aware of how weird I'm acting when it comes to this.. which leads me into a further vicious circle of blaming myself for being that silly, arguing with myself about whether to contact him or not, whether I'm doing the right thing burdening him with my mind going blaaaaah and on and on it goes.

None of this, however, really matters in the end because whenever I'm not myself he's the one capable of putting the pieces back together as he prevents me from lying to myself and reminds me of who I truly am. And he couldn't be further from allowing me to put any blame on me for bringing this on him.. It's with him that I see the stars clearly. Even hearing his voice today on the phone made me calm down, brought a little sanity back into me. I know now, I'll be ok again. It's just... he's the only constant left in a life otherwise pretty dumpy...
Or to say it with Tim McIlrath's words I'm "...longing for the shore where I can lay my head down inside these arms of yours".
I love you, F.

Lift me up, let me go...

Hi there...

I just realised how awfully long it's been since I last took time to write... Those past seven weeks have been so amazingly eventful, it feels like months have gone by. For starters, I finished school taking a total of 25 final exams and left my parents' house for good moving a little south to one of my all time favourite cities Hamburg where I'll start in my new job on Monday. Feeling very much excited for this new chapter of my life to start, I become increasingly aware of how urgently I need to cut the last chains that are holding me back, namely not being affected by the way my parents treat me or the ones I love anymore

Retrospectively, I'm astonished and relieved at the same time that my parents haven't succeeded in their constant try to destroy me. The moment I developed my own thoughts, started to form my own mind, make my own decisions, gained my own experience and drew my own conclusions, a war broke loose back at my parents' place. My father, being incapable of standing up against me in an argument, had always had a temper and raised his hands, belt, wet towel or whatever came to hand against me about every time he was at a loss to impose his opinion on me. My mother, not being that much different from him, usually sent him 'to teach me a lesson' and blamed me later on for driving both of them so mad that they felt obliged to cane me. This continued until the day I had enough, fought back and thereby accidently hit my father in the balls. Thereafter, there was no more physical violence towards me. A tongue, however, has no bone but can hurt you more than being actually slapped. Monster was just one of many nicknames my mother used in order to show her affection for me. She put me in the middle of arguments with my dad more times than I can count, told him to leave just to make me stand in the middle of the driveway hoping that seeing his little fucked up daughter would make him stay nevertheless.

Only later on realised I that at on point I took a decision. Easily, I could have let them destroy me, I could have let them keep using me as their fucking punching bag but instead I decided to shut them out, build walls as high as I possibly could and step by step I learned not to give a damn about whatever they'd throw at me. Still, I didn't allow myself to talk about all that happened, I shut up and thought to myself that there was nothing I could possibly complain about because, after all, they provided for me and there are much worse parents out there. A former friend of mine was the first to expose this illusion and thereby helped me processing it all. There's no scale emotional pain can be measured on, there's no guideline describing how much a kid can actually endure and sadly, as close as parents are to us, they are capable of hurting us in unimaginable ways.

I do not blame them but neither do I forget. I do, however, know that my parents probably never meant any of this to go the way it did. I can’t imagine they used me for their fucked up psycho games on purpose. Now I know that it was never my fault, that I am not an error, no monster, not unlovable or any of what they said. They are human beings who never really reflected on themselves, who always looked for somebody else to blame for everything that's going wrong, who are matter of factly lonely and only have each other - driving each other nuts. I was thrown in the middle of all this and luckily, came out alive, yet broken. But what is broken can be fixed even if it takes years.

Nowadays, the problem with my parents, especially my mother, is that she believes she still knows me and is in a position to give advice on matters I never ever asked to be advised on - at least not by her. She never realised I shut her out of my life a long time ago. Of course, I shared a few things with her - the kind of information exchange that is hardly avoidable when you're living under the same roof that is. She also tends to judge everyone and everything in my life without actually first allowing her the chance to get a real impression. I don't mind anymore when she's bragging on about how messed up I am, how I always make the wrong choices and blah blah blah but when it comes to those I love, she’s still able to drive me nuts. Every time I believe to be secure, I believe there's nothing left they could possibly hurt me with, they almost magically find something and crush me anew. Yet, the pain usually faded away quickly as I used it to reinforce my walls but recently they both have taken one step too far ensuring that we'll never be on the same page again. After spending a weekend with my bestie and me at their place in Sweden, they apparently thought it was a smart thing to go all bitchy on him, calling him unspeakable names and blaming him for just about everything that is allegedly wrong with me. I'll spare you the ugly details. However hard I tried, their words eventually reached and hurt me badly. You cannot possibly talk shit about the best thing in my damn life and expect me to just sit there and take it. Taking it out on me I'm used to but this was my damn heart they were playing a match of Canadian ice hockey with. He's my cryptonite...

For me, family is a choice and not necessarily predetermined by blood. He's more family to me than they ever were and I'm most certainly not willing to have people who barely know me determining my life. The friendship we share is forever, the love unconditional and our lives connected till the end of our days. This is what family really means to me.