i wanna kill you—i can do it with integrity, i can do it with disgrace

It's tedious, this repetitive reorganization of internal data based on startlingly obvious conclusions—epiphanies, I would call them, if it wasn't that actually, this shit is completely obvious and no one else seemed to look close enough—or maybe they just didn't care enough to tell me.

(I've been watching too much Sherlock because I just had to stifle the urge to call everyone I've ever cared about an idiot.)

So. Do I go after older men because I desperately want someone to protect me, to stand with me, to be on my side? And then do I ask them to hurt me—beg them to in bed, desperately provoke them into doing it outside of sex—because I believe that's inevitable? Because I believe that it will happen, I know/feel it will, so the only thing I can control is timing?

Do I encourage the pain because it was outside for so long that in some sort of perverted Stockholm Syndrome I've made a home for it inside me?

I think this is all true. It feels true.

I try, I do try, no one can say that I don't. But I understand myself better every day, and it doesn't make a difference.

I want to re-write that sentence, turn it into "it doesn't seem to make a difference"—so maybe that sentence isn't true, because that's an impulse I recognize from therapy, that's something different, that's something I allowed to be input & not something that was forced into me.

We are all the sum of our experiences, my ex-boyfriend Joe told me yesterday. We ended up talking about our relationship; there are still, ten years after we started dating and 8 years after we broke up, somehow there are still loose ends.

I had told him during that conversation a recurrent thought I've had. If I met an alternate universe version of myself, one who was happy, one who had never been abused—would I recognize her? Would I know her? Would any of the thoughts in her head be identical to the ones in mine?

I don't know. I don't think so.

How to change myself into a survivor, rather than a victim—I don't know. How to be happy after all of this, with my disabilities dragging me down like lead weights—I don't know.

I don't think I can.

But——I don't know.

i can do it any time or place
i can do it like an angel
to quiet down your rage