Hubris.co.nz

I wrote this four years ago, on March 16 2003, and I’m reprinting it now because it is a reminder of how far I’ve come, and how even when I’m having a crappy day, at least it’s not like that. And because I feel really disconnected from the girl who wrote this, and that is a good thing.

Thank you two, I love you.

And so in the past couple of sessions, I mentioned to Kalpana that I’ve been having more down spells lately than I feel are right, given that I’m supposed to be on the mend, I’m swallowing my 20mg of cipramil every day, I’m getting my expensive therapy and I have a job that meets all the criteria that I realised through my sessions with her that I was looking for. I mention to her that maybe I should think about upping my meds, but then come up with a thousand reasons why I’ve been getting the down spells, and she defaults to my feelings, saying “well, we should keep an eye on it, definately”.

I ache. I ache all over, hollow and empty and just so fucking lonely, and it feels like nothing anyone should ever have to feel, but it’s very familiar to me, and it always keeps coming back, and I want to call out for help, but what can anyone do to plug the gap? Nothing. Nothing at all. And so I let myself sink lower and lower. I forget to fill my cipramil prescription and then it’s the weekend and my chemist with thelovely old chinese man who gets it faxed in for me is closed. I find myself on Saturday night sitting in the kitchen crying on Bopha and Allison’s shoulders, because even if this is PMS, I cannot go on feeling like this for a couple of days every month, and Allison agrees with me that I need to get my meds adjusted. I thought cipramil was great because it stopped me from feeling suicidal while still letting me have SOME feelings, unlike Fluoxtine, but then it came back. I could feel myself shutting down again as basic functions fell by the wayside. And each time I have one of these episodes, it comes on much much faster than the last.

Cue me today trapped in my room, crying my eyes out, unable to leave even to get tissues because that’s the form and shape that depression takes for me, trapping me, leaving me imobilised. I hate being fucked up I hate not being able to sleep I hate that when I do sleep all I have is nightmares I hate the whole body ache, I hate being the girl who always seems fucked up I hate relying on my friends I hate not trusting my friends I hate being unable to ask for help I hate having to ask for help I hate that most of the time it seems like no one is able to help me. And I hate that all I could think about was the codeine in my drawer. So I texted Tom, and told him I was scared. He called my landline immediately, and we talked for ages, me crying and blowing my nose intermittantly into a towel. He calmed me down some but at the same time, while i was making jokes about expired condoms, I was combing through my medicine drawer, making a tally.

The codeine would be enough to make me sleep almost instantly. The brufen and the voltarin would probably rip my stomach to shreds. Worse case scenario, I would down them all, and then wake up, crippled from damage to my internal organs. I just want to sleep, I just want it to stop, I don’t want to kill myself, but I want to be somewhere else, anywhere else. Maybe I want that cry for attention, the suicide attempt, I want the bed in the hospital for a few days, people by my side mending bridges and all that crap. I just want to not be me anymore, to not have to battle this goddam fucking disease which seems so totally incurable.

The afternoon stretches on and on and on and I desperately try to get ahold of Nikki. Of course, I have her cellphone and her new flat doesn’t have a phone. I call her mother because that’s where she said she was going to be. Her mother calls me back to ask for Nikki’s number. I call her friend Gina, whose number I find in Nikki’s phone. She tells me Nicola’s number. Nicola’s voicemail says her name is Hayley. I am trapped on the floor in the corner of my room by my door. I can hear Bopha walking around outside and I can’t call out to her, which is fucking pathetic. And then I hear her on the phone, dealing with her sister’s crisis. I definately can’t call out now. When she knocks on my door to ask if I want dinner I say I’m fine.

I have a sore throat coming on, and it’s dry from crying so I don’t know how I’m going to swallow the pills if I take them. Maybe if I wash them down with a bottle of something, they’ll be effective enough that I won’t wake up. But the only liquor in the house that I can think of is half a bottle of kristov. I might as well swallow a box of panadol. I don’t want to try and fail. I don’t want to leave my friends and family behind, I don’t want to hurt them in any way, I know that they love me, and if I could just reach out, they’d turn heaven and earth over to help me. But I don’t see how they can help, because I’m just too far gone, I don’t see any light at the tunnel,and I am so tired and so fucking weary of having to fight this all the time, I just want to live and be okay and not have to worry every fucking day if I’m going to go psycho again. I’m tired of inflicting that worry on the ones I love as well, I’m just so fucking tired. I don’t want to be fucked up, it’s not cool,it’s not glamourous, it’s just flat out fucking exhausting. I don’t see how I’ve been an awful enough person to deserve this. And I know that there are squillions of people out there who suffer a fuck load more than me.

There’s no razors in my room, and that doesn’t work anyway. If I was to try the hot knife on my leg again, that’d mean getting up, going into the kitchen, facing the world, and besides, there’s only so much relief that that amount of physical pain can give you. My new idea is to take the codeine. Six tablets won’t kill me, but it will knock me out. Then maybe I can wake up feeling better. But what if someone walks in, freaks out. That’s not fair to do to flatmates, it’s what has stopped me before. Two pills then. But if I take two, I’m going to take more. I can’t stop my teeth from shaking, I can’t fucking handle this, and I need Nikki to come and save me NOW. I am always waiting for the knight on a white horse, and it never shows up, and we can trace that back to being 14 again, and I am so tired of therapy and talking and crying and wondering what’s the root of what and I am so tired of thinking and I am so tired of trying to keep myself alive so maybe it’s the turn of someone else and I just want the pain to stop, and surely that’s what painkillers are for and I’m tipping the codeine out into my palm and putting them back in the bottle and tipping them out again and I’m terrified so I super selfishly call Tom.

He’s in Christchurch asking if I want him to fly up, because he’ll do that on a moment’s notice for me, but I can’t get him to do that. He says he’ll call me back on the landline and I say no, I can’t go out into the lounge to get it. What I can get him to do, and what I force myself to do is admit that I really need to see someone, maybe KateH, and I tell him that I can’t call her, because it’s too fucking hard to ask for help, and so he tells me that he’ll call her, and we get off the line and I sit here and shake and my teeth bang against each other and I try to keep my breathing at an okay rate and he texts me to say that KateH is on her way and I cry some more and rub my nose raw on the towel.

And 20 minutes later she comes in, and I’m still sitting on my bed in the dark, doors and windows open wide, shaking in cold and fear and sickness styles, and she’s brought me flowers and chocolate and throaties and so I cry some more, weird animal noises onto her shoulder and have a semi panic attack before I manage to breathe and blow my nose and hand her my box of pills and ask her to take them away and we talk about pill dosages and i reiterate everything I’ve written above, and it’s the first time that I have ever told anyone in so much detail – with the possible exception of Kalpana – about how suicidal I have been/am whatever tense you want to use, and so that’s fucking terrifying as well, even if I end up listing stupid reasons why I can’t kill myself (ie – we wouldn’t win at Quiz Night anymore and she’d have to give the QM one of her specialty letters saying “no Jo didn’t kill herself cos you have a g/f you pompous git” etc) and just when I’m starting to come down, Ammy comes in and I so don’t want to talk to her at that time, and so when I try to explain that basically, I need to have my meds upped, she says “well everyone has down patches”. Yes, everyone has down patches, true. I have good patches, sometimes. That’s the difference. That and bad patches should never ever feel this way. Luckily Ammy leaves pretty soon, and KateH says “she has good intentions” adn I know that, but I just can’t deal. KateH is wonderful and nice and calms me down, and we even get in a little gossiping before she has to go off to work, taking my pills with her – promising to return them to me at a later date, because really, codeine in one-pill-at-a-time is lovely, and she drops me off at the shops so I can buy dinner and avoid my flat.

And here I am now, having eaten, and read half of Metro, and having had big long lovely cuddles with Sebastian. My eyes and nose are still stinging and my throat is still sore, but I’m a fuck load calmer, and have been rendered incapable of doing myself any harm tonight, even if I wanted to, which I don’t think I do. I’m seeing Kalpana on Tuesday, and I will try to see Dr White ASAP to get a new med script. Why did I write this up here? Attention seeking, some of you are saying. Sure, why not. Maybe. Maybe because I needed to write it. Maybe because I’d like you to know that if you’ve ever felt this way, you’re not alone. Joanna the altruist, yeah, that’s me. And yeah, I still ache, and I guess I always will.

My letter to the Editor of the New Zealand Herald about this story

“The day before Parliament is set to hold a conscience vote on the Prostitution Reform Bill, the Herald runs a front-page story about a convicted rapist visiting a brothel. This isn’t news. The story isn’t about police catching Michael John Carroll red handed committing another crime (remember that under the double-standard current law, prostitution isn’t actually illegal, just solicitation). This isn’t a serious debate about whether or not he should have been paroled. The story is just an absolutely sickening editorial attempt to sway the vote away from law reform. By linking sex work with rapists, the story intends to imply that sex workers are entirely responsible for the moral decline of society. The front-page placement of the article, despite its lack of newsworthiness (it happened “some time”, not yesterday), clearly demonstrates the editorial position the Herald has taken on attempts at law reform. If prostitution remains illegal, the Herald will have more opportunities to publish those “12 year olds sell themselves for a can of corned beef” moral panic stories that it so dearly loves. Heaven forbid that such a conservative paper should actually support a bill that would improve people’s lives instead of scare mongering to raise sales.” 200 words only

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So it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Well, when did you last hear from me and what did I say then? Ahh June 12, the night before my birthday party. That was a jolly good night, with people dressed in bear costumes (!), much gossip and scandel and me lusting after not one but two gentlemen. I had so many friends there, I wasn’t able to talk to anyone really. That was a shame. Oh well, a good time was had by all, except for Kara, but really, why is that such a suprise? It’s not. The following Tuesday (the 17th) I had my dinner at Canton, and that was lovely dovely, except for losing my wallet and feeling like no one cared about that fact. It was found later, and of course people cared, as I am constantly reminded.Yes, people care about me, I get that. I just feel really isolated a lot lately, and have discovered that it’s far more convinient and possibly a little more mature to push bottle caps into your arm so that they leave marks for a couple of days rather than scarring up with hot knives in hidden places. I’ve been questioning my current meds a little bit too because I feel sometimes like I’m at the stage where I can’t be bothered with people at all (re: Clayton being upset at Kara’s storming off at my party), while at the same time I’m feeling lonely and scared and freaked out. I guess it’s just generally weird when you hear Live on the radio or get books about monkeys and it brings to mind “You took advantage of me. I don’t know why I bother with you”.

It’s not all that though, there’s also gigglestyles at boys in bands who I saw play on Saturday at the Kings Arms for the ‘Here Come The Bulletholes’ release party who I have crushes on and I get to email them and say that they look sexy on stage. And then there’s that I got to talk to Tom McRae last week (thank you soooooo much darling!) and he was absolutely lovely. English people should be banned from saying “erm” instead of “um” because it’s just SO DAMN CUTE. I sounded like a fawning sycophant in the interview, but oh well. How could I help but be anything but?

I’d like to think that Iva has settled well into our flat although I’m sure she finds my disappearing chequebook a little annoying. Our computers are intemittently networked, so I can access her huge amounts of TV and movies. Oh how in love with Bernard Black I am! In other flat gossip, I’m incredibly pissed off with Johnny for buggering off to Queenstown without paying his rent, leaving me almost literally penniless and unable to purchase tampons or painkillers. GRRRRRRRRRRR. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. Daniel is coming out of his shell more and more, and although Lance’s fetish for bringing home white picket fence pailings is more than a little disturbing, I adore him, he’s very fun.

Other things going on in my life right now? I think my Masterplan is never going to come to fruition. I’m annoyed with my failing lack of ambition, and the fact that I just churn out shit at work – when I’m doing anything at all, that is. It’s more than a little disconcerting to think of all the people I told about my brilliant idea, and how supportive they all are, to know that that’s going to be swept away in a tide of self pity and bleakness. I think that it’s probably quite likely that I should be going back into counselling (so.much.anger), but the prospect of starting all over again is more than a little daunting.

I miss having people love me. Even if I don’t deserve the love – but surely everyone deserves love? I know this entry is more than a little pukefest, but just like Bobby Brown, that’s my prerogative. There were so many more narratives that I meant to include but have forgotten. Probalby something to do with vidoes. I watched ‘S.F.W’ which I fucking worshiped when I was 15 (people fucking to “Teenage Whore”, Stephen Dorff walking in slow motion through a mall to “Creep” – what’s not to like? Oh, and Amber Benson is in it! I adore Tara. Oh Buffy, how can you be coming to an end so soon?), and it made me feel very nostalgic for a time when I thought I had the right to be “angry at the system, maaaan”. I have no idea what the hell I thought was oppressing me back then, but I want it back. I wanna jump up and down and scream “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” in the mud again. But instead, I will just watch more videos and cry in joy at the end of “It’s a wonderful life”. Is this growing old? I guess so. Shit, I’m 23 now. Time to call out the knackers.

I’m wearing new Napolean mascara Karen sent me (although it’s weird – mascara? rather than eye shadow or lipgloss what I asked for? Surprises are cool.) and I feel like it’s making me open my eyes extra extra wide. That’s no bad thing.

Today I went to go read the thing I’d sent to my mailing list about the scratches on my arm, but then it turns out I didn’t actually send anything to my mailing list at all. I did write about some bushes on Swinney.org though, and I guess that’s like the same thing, kinda. Last night I was sitting around crying after the season finale of Shortland Street, so I rang up Penny and asked her if she wanted to come around and get drunk. Of course she did. Jeremy came to the bottle store with us too, so we decided to have a cocktail night.

Sparing you all the details, we drank and laughed a lot. Penny and I reminisced a great deal. We gossiped. We danced on the front terrace. I rang Kini&Olivia and was terribly hurt that neither of them want to live with me. We took a series of dumbass photos which you can view here. We rang random people from Penny’s cellphone list that she wasn’t sure she knew, and had very amusing conversations. One guy had just been fined $13,000 for reckless driving. Jeremy gave us random numbers to call too, and then his friend kept calling him back. I bit Penny but didn’t leave any bruise marks, to our deepest regret. Around 2am we decided we’d go be larrikans out in the streets. I refused to go the park around the corner, so we walked up to Shell instead, then walked back playing Pringle Soccer. I had my camera so we took a succession of fantastic supermodel pose shots. We poll danced. Jeremy climbed a tree. I found myself unable to balance walk along a wall without holding onto Penny on one side, which made me mad cos I was really really good at the Beam in Primary school. Penny jumped into a bush which looked like fun, so I did the same, except it wasn’t all boingy like I was thinking it would be, in fact it was sharp and ouchy and I have deep gashes from it.

Today I woke up to say bye bye to Penny (also cos her phone with a goddam novelty ring kept going off in my room) but then went back to sleep, which is always fun to do cos the heat makes me have dirty dreams. I got up much much later then, and spent an hour reading the herald and stuff. My saturdays are so so cruisy. In the evening we did a tremendously huge heap’o dishes and cleaned up the kitchen proper, which was good. I did laundry. Stuff like that. At night, Jeremy and I were watching “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (I LOVE TV3 for deciding to screen 80s teen flicks every Saturday) but Kara kept ringing for Clay who’d gone to bed with an infected foot. She was going to bus over, but I told her I’d go pick her up from work, cos she’s much too nice to take a bus home at 11.30 at night. It’s just as well I did pick her up actually, cos there were literally hundreds of people waiting for buses in Newmarket cos of Christmas in the Park. Ick. “Order! Order!”

Is it ironic at all that I lay in bed reading about Victim Feminisim while Fiona Apple wailed away on my stereo?

Because of vomitting and long late night long distance phone calls and that sort of thing, I didn’t go into tech today. I did, however, get out of bed to give Clayton the converter plug, without which I can’t plug my modem into the phone lines. He hasn’t given it back to me yet, but that’s probably a good thing. I just don’t know when I’ll get to upload this entry. But that doesn’t matter all that much anyways.

I’ve done 1/3 of my intercom work, which is a good thing, I think. Yes. It’s astonishing how quickly I can actually do it, if I didn’t get distracted all the time. But I do get distracted, by Freecell and newspapers and thoughts and stuff that should all just be erased. Stuff. Ha.

Showers are where I spend an hour scrubbing the tiles because I don’t want to leave pounding hot water. The laundry floor is where I curled up last night after vomiting and we’ll just blame that on the gin at Shirley’s, because that’s easier.

And this is fucking victimism. I’m fucking suffering – pity me. Excuse me. And all that shit. No, I can’t write this. Or I can write this, but I can’t share this. Because I hate myself and I wanted to throw up. It’s like Bulemia chic or something. I wanted to eradicate him from my system. Why does that make me want to hurt myself? Do I want to make him guilty? Make him feel responsible? The hot hot shower was better than thinking about scalding myself, submerging myself in boiling water. I’d never reach for knives – I just want to burn. Burn his touch out of me. Burn his fucking memory out of me. I was lied to. I was just his fucking dalliance. His fucking whore. And I don’t know what’s worse - that he really did think that he loved me, or that he was just using me all along. So I feel total hate now, and yet I still love him, and I’d probably take him back, even if he was just going to be thinking of ’her’ the whole time.

And more scary, there’s Tony resurfacing when I was on the laundry floor last night. It’s not the memory of the night, it’s the memories of the subsequent nights where I’ve cried and I’ve screamed – of the motel kitchen, Abby’s lawn, Charlotte’s kitchen, my bedroom. And I can’t get over it. Not when the only guy that made me safe turns out not to care about me. And there are the bruises he left on me – and I enjoyed them. What kind of sick fucked up bitch does that make me? Is that my legacy? And when he pinned my wrists down to the bed, and his kiss was too deep, too much, and I couldn’t move, and it was just like Tony. I hate being damaged. I hate my jealousy issues. I hate how I can’t stand up for myself. I hate that I hate myself. It’s all so self pitying and pathetic. I want it to stop. I need it to stop. I don’t have an eating disorder but maybe I should develop one. And that’s just fucked up, but all I want to do is cram full of that icecream and then throw it up again, but I can’t even vomit properly. I need for this to end.

I’ve got to go to Australia. And there, what’s going to happen? Am I going to throw myself at every possible guy? Turn myself into a whore the way he treated me? Maybe I want to be fucked while I cry, because it can’t be special. It can’t be like the way it was with him, because it turns out that I was nothing, I was a time filler. So maybe if I suck the cocks of everyone else, if I swallow them too, they’ll eradicate him from my system. Other hands touching me – sure, it makes my stomach churn to think about ti now, but maybe if I just let them do it enough, it’ll be okay. They can muffle me, and I won’t say no. Because how can I respect myself if he couldn’t?

I can’t hardly even read what I’m writing. I’m so sick of this self loathing, but I guess it’s better to purge this way than head over a toilet bowl. I must get clean. I need help. Or maybe I just need to drop the amatuer dramatics. I need I need I need to get a grip. Like he said. And I need to grow up. Because pretending like my problems are more serious than they actually are does not make me cool.
It does not make me glamourous. It only serves to fuck me up more, and that’s not something I really need right now.

My self esteem had been so good lately, and now it’s getting knocked back and I just sit there and let it. This is fucked. I swear, I’ve got problems. I argue with myself so much. Is this right? Is it normal to have such a nasty person at the back of my head, telling me how pathetic I am?

I don’t deserve this. I’m a good person.I try and suppress all the bad things I could do. I could say so much about him, expose him, attack him. I think I know him well enough to see where his vunerabilities are. He could probably do the same to me. I have to hope that he won’t because I’d just crumple. I’m so afraid of his scorn. I don’t want to have to hate him, but I can’t do it any other way. he
won’t let me. Why did it have to turn so bitter and nasty? For brief instances, I had paradise. but there’s always her in the background, her that he lied to me about. He said he loved me, and he was wrong. I just have to cling to thinking that he believed it when he said it, that he wasn’t intentionally taking me for such a ride. Surely all his concern for me couldn’t have just been a cover? No one could be that cruel, surely?

But then again, how could anyone love me? He wasn’t loving me for my face or body – no matter how many times he called me sexy. So I could make him come, that doesn’t make me jesus. That just makes me easy. And my personality? Insecure to the point of
neurosis, jealous, self centred, over dramatic, fucked up, pretending to be fucked up. There’s nothing there. I think that maybe he loved that I could love him. And that’s why he tried, for a while, to keep me. he needed me to feed his own ego.

Sounds like Morphine Matt. I really love my victim role, don’t I? Why the fuck can’t I trust my natural instincts? I’m like this fucking hopeless romantic, and maybe I love the abuse. That’s it. I feel like I deserve it. I need REAL trauma because the other traumas
I’ve had I made up or exagerated out of control. Give me life, give me pain, give me myself again and all that shit.

I’ve got to stop this.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with this entry. There’s the part of me that wants to put it up for the whole world to see. I want them to suffer along side of me. I want their false pity and their “awww”. And maybe I want more anger from him, so that I can hate him some more, so that I can sting. And then I’m so scared of what he could do to me. I’m not some stupid fucking suicidal twelve year old anymore, but I don’t want to risk it. I don’t want to be pushed to the edge by him hating me anymore than he already does. And I don’t want to be laughed at. Maybe I’m fucking terrified of that. I don’t want to be dismissed as melodramatic and pathetic, although I’ll do that to myself. I don’t want people to worry about me. Well, I want some people to worry, and others not to. And I don’t want to expose myself further, while I want to expose everything.

I will think for a while on these things. But oh god – I wish I could just turn off my mind. Six days till I go to Australia. I’ve got to hold on.